My Little Sister

Today is her birthday. She's sixty!

 

Happy Birthday, Andrea!

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Do GOP Voters Recognize How Trump Saved Them From Trans Barbarism?

 From Chronicles:

Two years after the Biden-Harris Administration hijacked Easter Sunday to push transgender ideology, President Donald J. Trump delivered a decisive blow against one of the most destructive social and political experiments in modern American history.

The Biden-Harris agenda wrought indescribable harm, but this Easter season, the nation witnessed not just policy reversals but also the forceful, unapologetic reclamation of sanity. Trump ended the Democrats’ “Transgender for Everybody” agenda that treated biological sex as optional, children as experiments, and women’s rights as collateral damage.

Trump banned federal funding, sponsorship, or promotion of the chemical and surgical mutilation of minors. He protected children from irreversible physical and psychological damage, ordering agencies to cut funds from institutions involved in these practices.

More than three dozen health systems, including Kaiser Permanente, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Children’s Minnesota, Denver Health, Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, Stanford Medicine, and NYU Langone, then announced they would stop or suspend child mutilation programs.

These concrete results followed directly from executive resolve. If returned to power, Democrats will undo every one of them. Their woke base demands it. Republicans cannot afford to forget this reality as the midterms approach.

Trump further dismantled indoctrination in schools.

His administration terminated federal support for transgender ideology and its attendant so-called equity curricula. States now face clear notice: remove such content or lose funding. Parents regained ground against an un-American, and arguably inhuman, assault on their rights and their children’s minds.

This action exposed the galling hypocrisy of Democrats who claimed to champion families while funding confusion and erasure of biological truth. (Read more.)

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Ray Bradbury, American Individualist

 From Modern Age:

Did this opposition to liberal attacks on free speech indicate that Bradbury had embraced conservatism or libertarianism? In fact, he may not have moved to the right politically so much as the ground beneath his feet had shifted. Bradbury had been voicing concerns about free speech since his 1950 novel The Martian Chronicles, which also features book-burning: “How could I expect you to know blessed Mr. Poe?” says the character William Stendhal. “He died a long while ago, before Lincoln. All of his books were burned in the Great Fire. . . . He and Lovecraft and Hawthorne and Ambrose Bierce and all the tales of terror and fantasy and horror and, for that matter, tales of the future were burned.” The politically correct censorship started small and then grew: “They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressures.” And it was based not on pure ideals but on fear: “There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.” 

Stendhal continues, “Every man, they said, must face reality. Must face the Here and Now! Everything that was not so must go. All the beautiful literary lies and flights of fancy must be shot in mid-air.” For Bradbury, censorship wasn’t just about proscribing certain kinds of speech but about hobbling the imagination. “So they lined them up against a library wall one Sunday morning thirty years ago, in 1975; they lined them up, St. Nicholas and the Headless Horseman and Snow White and Rumpelstiltskin and Mother Goose—oh, what a wailing!—and shot them down, and burned the paper castles and the fairy frogs and old kings and the people who lived happily ever after (for of course it was a fact that nobody lived happily ever after!), and Once Upon A Time became No More!” 

Bradbury continued to develop the theme of the violent effects of censorship in the name of lofty ideas in Fahrenheit 451. There, authors were seen as a threat to the leveling pressures of mass democracy. The novel’s Captain Beatty puts it like this: “The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters.” The death of literary culture “didn’t come from the Government down,” Beatty says. “There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.” (Read more.)

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The Daily Life of a Medieval King

 

The great Charles V of France. From Medievalists:

A medieval king’s day was carefully structured, balancing prayer, governance, and moments of rest. Thanks to Christine de Pizan, we can follow the daily routine of Charles V of France in remarkable detail, offering a rare glimpse into how a ruler lived and worked in the late Middle Ages.

Around the year 1404 Christine de Pizan finished her work, Livre des faits et bonnes mœurs du sage roy Charles V, which was both a biography of the French king who reigned from 1364 to 1380, and a guide to how an ideal monarch should live and rule. Christine had a good vantage point to tell this story, as her father, Tommaso di Pizano, was a personal physician and astrologer at Charles’ court, so one can assume that she was sometimes at the court herself. Moreover, in later years she was able to consult other men and women who served the king, including his chamberlain and valet.

Her section on the daily life of Charles V begins with him rising from bed in the morning, typically between six and seven o’clock. After saying a prayer, the king would chat and joke with his servants. Christine writes:

 When he had been combed, dressed, and outfitted according to the demands of the day’s program, his chaplain, a distinguished person and honourable priest, brought him his breviary and helped him to say his hours, according to the canonical day of the calendar. Around eight o’clock he would go to mass, which was celebrated each day with glorious, solemn singing.

(Read more.)

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The Iranians Ask Us To Surrender

 From AND Magazine:

The Iranians have trotted out a new “peace” plan, which the United States says it is currently reviewing. The exact text of the proposal has not yet been seen publicly, but multiple press outlets, including those tied to the Iranian government, have made clear that the plan includes all of the following points:

• An end to all hostilities within 30 days. This includes Lebanon.

• The complete withdrawal of all U.S. military forces from the region. Understand what this means. This is a demand that the United States remove its military forces from the Middle East. This is a demand that we pull out of Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Israel, and anywhere else we have bases in that part of the world.

• A guarantee of non-aggression from both Israel and the United States. We are expected not only to end hostilities and withdraw from the region but to promise that we will never again attack Iran. Ever.

• An end to the naval blockade and all restrictions on Iranian ports and shipping.

• The lifting of all U.S. and international sanctions. Iran will be free to buy whatever it wants, including components for advanced weapons, and to sell whatever it wants to allies and surrogates around the globe.

• The release of all frozen Iranian assets. This means billions of dollars currently locked up in accounts all over the world will be handed over to the world’s number one sponsor of terrorism.

• Reparations. As we leave the Middle East with our tail between our legs, we will be expected to pay Iran for all the damage we have caused, not just in the bombing but by virtue of the sanctions we have imposed for many years.

• The creation of a new mechanism for control of the Straits of Hormuz. One must assume, from the overall tone of the demands, that this will boil down to a recognition that Iran controls this crucial waterway and will charge a fee to anyone who wants to pass through it.

(Read more.)

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How the Thirty Years’ War Ravaged Europe

 From The Collector:

The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) was one of the most destructive conflicts in European history. What began as a religious struggle in the Holy Roman Empire soon expanded into a continent-wide power struggle involving nearly every major state. Entire regions were depopulated, armies grew to unprecedented size, and the war changed how Europe understood sovereignty and statehood. By the time peace finally arrived in 1648, the war had not only shattered old medieval structures but helped lay the foundations of the modern nation-state.

The Holy Roman Empire in the early seventeenth century was a fragmented and decentralized political entity, composed of hundreds of independent kingdoms, principalities, bishoprics, free cities, and minor lordships. While these territories owed nominal loyalty to the Emperor, real power rested with local rulers, many of whom guarded their autonomy jealously.

This loose structure had endured for centuries, but it was placed under immense strain by the religious divisions unleashed by the Reformation. By 1600, the empire was split between Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist states. Although the Peace of Augsburg (1555) had attempted to stabilize relations by allowing rulers to choose between Catholicism and Lutheranism, it excluded Calvinists and failed to resolve underlying tensions.

Religious identity became closely tied to political authority, with rulers using confessional allegiance to assert independence from imperial control. The Habsburg emperors were staunch Catholics and increasingly sought to reverse Protestant gains and strengthen central authority within the empire.

These pressures erupted in Bohemia in 1618. Protestant nobles, alarmed by perceived Habsburg encroachments on their religious and political rights, threw imperial officials out of a castle window in Prague, in the Defenestration of Prague. The initial rebellion was against Habsburg rule rather than a purely religious uprising. Although framed in confessional terms, the conflict centred on resistance to imperial centralization. (Read more.)

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Raymond Ibrahim's Trilogy

Baucent of the Templars

 "Not to us, O Lord, not to us; but to thy name give glory." Psalm 113 (Vulgate), motto of the Templars

Once in a discussion with a fellow historical novelist I was informed that the crusades are the earliest examples of genocide. I was surprised that the novelist, being Jewish, seemed unaware of the various ancient persecutions against her own people, including that of the Greeks in the days of the Maccabees, that might be considered genocidal. I reminded her of that, as well as of the fact that there were twelve major crusades, taking place over nearly three hundred years. They were led by different people, with the principle goal of liberating the Holy Land from Muslim rule and thus delivering the Christian population from slavery and oppression. Some were more successful than others. Some, like the Fourth Crusade, were total disasters. In fact, the Fourth Crusade is the one which most people think of when they view the crusades as orgies of mass murder. In that case, those being killed were other Christians. Did other massacres of the innocent occur during the course of the various crusades? Yes. So, did the crusaders journey hundreds of miles to the Middle East, braving fatal diseases, pirates, brigands and an ocean of foes, just for the joy of killing people? That is one of the questions answered by Raymond Ibrahim in his brilliant trilogy about the centuries-long conflict between Christianity and Islam. Ibrahim's books are The Sword and the Scimitar, Defenders of the West, and The Two Swords of Christ. The books present a background to the crusades, containing detailed information of which most contemporary people are unaware, as well as the histories of heroes like El Cid and the rise of the two greatest military orders, the Templars and the Hospitallers.

In the early Church the practice of Christians was, even in the era of persecution, to visit the places where Jesus Christ had been born, lived, died and risen. Pilgrimages were regarded as highly penitential, in which the pilgrim would not only risk life and health, but leave behind property, home, family, occupation and offices. The Romans built pagan shrines over the venerable spots like the stable at Bethlehem and the Holy Sepulcher but those temples only served to remind everyone where the sacred sites were hidden. When Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in the Fourth Century, his mother Empress St. Helena went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where she discovered not only the True Cross, but found and reopened many of the other places sacred to the memory of the Savior. This ignited centuries of pilgrimage to the Middle East. Rich and poor would go, often in parish-sponsored groups as now. Special costumes were worn when on pilgrimage, and one was often regarded as being temporarily in religious life when journeying to a holy site. For Jerusalem was not the only destination; there were shrines throughout Europe, including Rome and Compostela. But the pilgrimage to the Holy Land remained the ultimate of penitential practices, with many indulgences attached. People would go for themselves and for loved ones who were sick or who had died.

All this changed with the rise of Islam in the 7th century, meticulously described by Ibrahim in his book Sword and Scimitar. Founded by Mohammed, an Arabian who claimed to be a prophet of the One True God, Islam combined elements of Nestorian Christianity and Judaism with the prophet's own inspirations, many of which included teachings abhorrent to Judeo-Christian morality. One such teaching permits Muslim men to take a non-Muslim "infidel" woman by force. Mohammed commanded his followers to spread Islam by warfare. Within 200 years, the Christian lands in North Africa, Spain, Arabia, and the Middle East were conquered. Great Christian cities like Antioch and Alexandria, which had been Apostolic sees, fell to Islam, with the churches and basilicas becoming mosques. Christians, especially children, young men and young women, were made into sex slaves and concubines, including monks and nuns. Many boys were castrated to be eunuchs in the harems of the various Muslim elites. Hatred in the form of desecration was lavished upon Christian shrines, churches, monasteries, and cathedrals, with special contempt reserved for icons, church bells and crosses. The latter were dragged upside down through the streets, to be spat and urinated upon by the disciples of the prophet. Altars were sometimes desecrated by the gang-rape a Christian virgin. Those Christians and Jews who were not killed or sold were subject to oppressive laws and taxes in their own lands. This is documented in Muslim sources which repeatedly rejoice when describing the oppression of "infidels" and especially the defilement of Christian women.

A war-like, nomadic people called the Turks embraced Islam; they eventually overran the old Roman province of Anatolia so it became "Turkey." In the late 11th century, Jerusalem, which had fallen into Muslim hands before, was captured by the Seljuk Turks, who tortured, raped, and sold into slavery the Christians of the region. Those who were killed were regarded as lucky. The violence disrupted the flow of pilgrimages from Europe to the Holy Land. The Muslims made a point of harassing and robbing pilgrims, sometimes capturing them to be sold into slavery. Blond and red-haired girls and boys with blue, gray or green eyes were especially favored for the slave markets. Although one beautiful abbess from Germany, traveling with a group of pilgrims to Jerusalem, was waylaid by Muslim bandits and raped to death in front of her fellow Christians, who were also mistreated in various horrific ways. This led Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in 1095 to call for a crusade of Christian soldiers to deliver the Christians in the Holy Land. Thus began the era of the crusades. Defenders of the West describes some of the great heroes of Christendom who kept Islam out of Europe, including at least one from Albania whom I had never heard of before. My opinion of Richard I "Lionheart" had suffered in the past but in Defenders he is revealed as among the bravest of the brave. The Two Swords of Christ traces the history of the two great military orders in a deeply inspiring way. For when the weak and innocent are attacked, it is unquestionably the duty of Christians who are able to defend them.

From The Chivalry Guild:

If I had to pick the best way to describe the recent works of Raymond Ibrahim—Sword and Scimitar (2018) and Defenders of the West (2022)—I’d call them no-going-back books. The equally chilling and invigorating experience of his histories cannot be undone and you cannot see the world the same way afterwards—especially since it’s not just history, but a forgotten prelude to what we’re living with today. Reality looks different post-Ibrahim.

Sword and Scimitar takes the reader through fourteen centuries of warfare between Islam and the West, with emphasis on eight great battles within that conflict. Better than any book I know, it dynamites the old public school narrative about the Crusades as a brutal act of Christian aggression against those poor, peaceful, tolerant Muslims. Ibrahim tells a much darker story about our ancient adversaries, documenting the scale of their conquests and the horrors that followed pretty much everywhere the armies of the prophet went. What we call “the West,” he writes, is but “the last and most redoubtable bastion of Christendom not to be conquered by Islam. Simply put, the West is actually the westernmost remnant of what was a much more extensive civilizational block that Islam permanently severed.” Three-quarters of the formerly Christian world was conquered by these people. It is both chilling and invigorating, like I noted, to think about how much danger we were in—and what kind of virtue was required to meet that danger and triumph over it, at least for a time.

Defenders of the West is an even more important book. It’s personal and compelling, and it reverses a long trend of hiding Christian heroes from those of us who need to learn about them. Thanks to Enlightenment propagandists, a vague narrative persists that heroism basically died out after the assassination of Julius Caesar and wasn’t revived again until Napoleon and George Washington walked the earth. The intent is a broadside against the Faith, leaving you with the vague impression that the teachings of Christ and his Church effectively snuff out all martial virtue, as though heroics cannot co-exist with the Gospel. Ibrahim shows this to be absolute nonsense. With his chronicles of Godfrey of Bouillon, El Cid, Richard the Lionheart, Fernando III, Louis IX, John Hunyadi, Scanderbeg, and Vlad Dracula, he brings to life eight legends whose deeds rival or exceed those of any heroes of any age.

These works are, in my humble opinion, on the shortlist for books of the century. So it was with special interest that I anticipated his follow-up effort. The Two Swords of Christ (published November ’25) continues with his major theme but looks at a different aspect of the conflict: the crucial work done by the Templars and the Hospitallers, basically the special forces of Christendom.

Ibrahim’s title comes from Luke 22, in which Jesus tells his disciples to buy a sword. When they reply, “Look, there are two swords here,” Jesus says, “It is enough!” What’s fascinating is his use of the singular pronoun it rather than the plural they. It suggests not the swords, but a way of life that employs “a spiritual sword against spiritual enemies, and a physical sword against physical enemies.” If your religious education was anything like mine, your teachers blithely passed over this and similar passages in favor of all the nicer-sounding directives about loving everybody and just being nice, along with never fighting—because fighting is unchristian. For those looking for simplistic formulas for life, it’s far easier to reduce the character of the Lord to that of a harmless meditation instructor, rather than wrestling with the much more challenging and dynamic truth.

The two swords also work as a metonymy for the knightly orders, filled with men whose particular way of serving God and their neighbors was with weapons. (Read more.)

  All three books are so detailed in citing source material that one comes away with a refreshed world-view, for a deeper understanding of history leads to a more profound comprehension of the present. Plus Raymond Ibrahim is an engaging and descriptive writer so that I often felt I was watching a film of the events he has so richly described. I recommend this excellent trilogy for every home library and every college history class.

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The Iranians Are Recruiting Worldwide – But For What?

From AND Magazine:

The Iranians have launched a worldwide campaign to sign up Iranian citizens living abroad to be ready to sacrifice their lives and embrace martyrdom for the homeland. Iranian embassies have been directing people to log in to the Mikhak system using their national ID and click the Jan Fada option to sign up.

Analysts assess that the move is mostly a propaganda campaign designed to show that the regime in Tehran has broad support. The so-called Jan Fada campaign launched in March/April 2026.

Iranian state media and officials claim tens of millions have signed up (figures like 10–30+ million are reported but unverified independently). This includes officials, athletes, and public figures. Iranian Embassies are promoting the campaign online using language like “give our bodies to be slain” or “sacrifice life for Iran” to show solidarity and national will. There have been no reports of actual training, deployment, or transport of overseas registrants. (Read more.)

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Women Are Having Fewer Kids Because They Don’t Want Them

 From Chronicles:

Most conservatives are too afraid to admit what many feminists proudly own: The decline in fertility rates is the direct result of the feminist project and women prioritizing careers over childbearing. Since the 1970s, when the feminist movement transformed gender dynamics and women entered the workforce by the millions, the fertility rate has been below replacement, and there is no prospect of this changing. In 2025, the fertility rate hit another record low, according to CDC data.

Women in their early 30s now have the highest birth rate of any age cohort, a profound cultural shift without precedent in history. This pattern aligns with the feminists’ ideal timeline: Climb the corporate ladder early, have kids later, or not at all. Roughly 85 percent of women aged 20-24, and 63 percent of women aged 25-29, are now childless.

The high cost of housing, healthcare, and childcare are the usual culprits cited in the fertility discourse. There is something to this, of course, and sound policy initiatives to address it should be implemented. But it should also be remembered that having a family has never been easy or cheap. Moreover, fertility was already in sharp decline when housing was much more affordable, and the Boomers were buying their homes. So something more than that cost explains declining fertility. The extraordinary cost of childcare, though also real, is an entirely newfangled problem that seeks to rectify the severe, and vastly underreported, shortage of full-time mothers. (Read more.)

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