NOW PORTRAITS OF WHITE JUDGES DENY BLACK DEFENDANTS’ FAIR TRIAL: No, you don’t need to re-read that headline, it said just what you read. Liberty Unyielding’s Hans Bader links the text of a Virginia judge’s preposterous ruling, and much more.

ARROGANT BLINDNESS IN ATTACKS ON WHITE EVANGELICALS: Writing for The Federalist, Nathaniel Blake points out that, as has become tiresomely typical in the holiday season, Christmas 2020 occasioned an outpouring of elitist attacks on the quarter of the American population who identify as evangelicals, especially those who are also white.

The only new element in these assaults this time around was inclusion of criticism of white evangelicals for being less than cooperative in the Covid lockdown madness since March.  But Blake, who has a PhD. in political theory (Strauss?), shines an especially illuminating light on former National Review staff writer David French.

French, like Nicolas Kristof at the New York Times and Michael Luo at the New Yorker, based his analysis, according to Blake, on two flawed assumptions. First, that denominational and other differences within evangelicalism are of no importance.

“Lumping Pentecostals, Presbyterians, and prosperity-gospel preachers together is sloppy, as is neglecting to distinguish between those who are committed churchgoers and those who are only nominally evangelical,” Blake writes.

Second is the common assumption among Never-Trumpers and the Left that voting for Orange Man Bad is evidence of an irretrievably immoral character.

“It is easy to pick out Trumpian words and deeds that are not compatible with the gospel. It is also easy to do the same with his Democratic opponents and their policies. Asserting that voting for Trump is a moral stain on evangelicals, without weighing the alternatives, presumes what is in question,” Blake contends.

How long before French’s name appears on a masthead somewhere in the progressive media?

CHRISTMAS RACE AROUND THE WORLD AT THE SOUTH POLE: Winner gets a 10-minute hot shower! That’s one of the eight Christmas traditions on seven continents described by the Christian Post, including the Peace Apples in China.

NO, CHRISTMAS ISN’T A WARMED OVER PAGAN HOLIDAY: If you’ve heard it once, you’ve likely heard it a thousand times – Christmas is nothing more than a pagan holiday taken over by the Catholic Church and turned into something completely different. As The Incarnate Investigation host Jimmy Wallace makes clear, there’s more to the story the critics never tell you.

But wait, there’s more! Philosophy Professor Travis Dickinson asks if Christmas is based on a wildly crazy claim (Hint: Yes, it is). And, as the ever-thoughtful Sarah Hoyt uniquely reminds us this morning: We Americans have put our own unique spin on the appropriate celebrations. It’s part of how we got to be the “land of the Free and the home of the Brave.”

A TRULY JOYOUS RENDITION OF IN EXCELSIS DEO: A beautiful and stirring performance by more than 1,000 participants. It was first performed in 2014 and is well-worth repeating in 2020:

EVERYBODY KNOWS ‘TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS:’ But there are lots of facts about the most widely celebrated holiday on the planet that many folks don’t know. It’s actually quite an interesting story about how Christmas became “Christmas” and this video from Prager U puts it all together. And speaking of Christmas, Merry Christmas to all here on Instapundit.

JOE BIDEN’S ‘A CHRISTMAS CAROL:’ Dickens was a bleeding heart liberal but I suspect even he would roar with laughter at this adaption of his Christmas classic. Somebody at Richard Viguerie’s Conservative Headquarters deserves a huge Christmas bonus!

SOME FOLKS JUST DON’T GET THE FIRST AMENDMENT: Among them is federal District Court Judge Jesus Bernal, who defied a direct order from the U.S. Supreme Court in order to protect Gov. Gavin Newsom’s assault on the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious worship and practice. It’s all in my latest piece for PJ Media Culture.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: Washington Free Beacon Sleuth-Extraordinaire Joe Schoffstall took a look at the Tides Center’s latest (2019) tax filing and discovered that the liberal activist group incubator received $16 million in federal grants.

If you aren’t familiar with the Tides Center, it’s a branch of the Tides Foundation, the California-based originator of Dark Money – that is, providing a tax-exempt place for liberal donors to give money anonymously to activist groups they would not otherwise want to be identified with publicly.

It’s all but impossible to name a significant Left-wing activist group of the past two, even three, decades that doesn’t in some way benefit from the Tides umbrella. These days, the most prominent such group would probably be the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. It’s not for nothing that Schoffstall describes Tides as the “Dark Money Behemoth.”

WHEN YOUR KID SAYS CAPITALISM IS GREED: Colson Center’s Brook McIntire offers three handy facts about free enterprise that will make the average college econ prof instantly turn apoplectic. Wouldn’t you love to be there to see it!

HOW MANY WAYS DOES SCHUMER BACK ANTI-SEMITES? Pretty much all of them according to The Lid’s Jeff Dunetz, who compiles a comprehensive list of examples of the Senate Minority Leader jumping in bed with the worst Anti-Semites. And the guy has a real shot at being the next Senate Majority Leader???

ANOTHER COVID PREDICTION TRUMP GOT RIGHT: He said it was possible to develop a deliverable vaccine by Christmas and he was right. Issues & Insights (I&I) points to something else Trump predicted earlier this year about the Covid crisis for which he was derided, namely, a rousing economic recovery in the second half of the year.

The third quarter saw a 33 percent increase in GDP. Now it appears the fourth quarter will show an increase in the range of 11 percent. What a testament to the strength and fortitude of the American free enterprise system (or what’s left of it)! But there is a problem looming on the horizon, according to I&I:

“Unfortunately, Biden has no intention of leaving well enough alone. Having run on the most leftist agenda in American history, Biden intends to undo all the good things Trump has achieved and impose policies that will turn any hope of a roaring ‘20s repeat into a rerun of the ’30s Great Depression.”

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? So it all comes down to two Georgia Senate races.

LEFT’S NON-PROFIT FUNDING LEAD KEEPS GROWING: Michael Watson and Shane Devine of the Capital Research Center (CRC) update through the 2018 campaign the center’s ongoing study comparing charitable funding resources for the Left and Right and finds the former’s advantage continues to expand.

“In the 2017–2018 cycle, the 301 groups supported by the selected conservative grant-makers received a total of a little over $2.2 billion, a roughly 1.67 percent increase over 2014 levels,” according to Watson and Devine.

“The 907 left-of-center groups selected by liberal grant-makers received over $8.1 billion, about a 9.65 percent increase. In raw dollar amounts, liberal 501(c)(3) revenue outmatched conservative revenue by 3.7 to 1 — a significant increase over the 3.4 to 1 ratio for 2014.”

Question: Why do the enemies of capitalism keep getting richer? Alternative question: Why aren’t the biggest beneficiaries of capitalism investing more of their profits in the defense of the economic system that makes those profits possible?

COVID VACCINE ONE STEP AWAY FROM ABORTED BABIES: AstraZeneca denies that its Covid vaccine was developed using aborted baby tissue, but acknowledges it did involve the use of “immortalized cells” grown in culture from aborted baby tissue. Is that one step sufficiently separate from directly using a dead baby’s body parts to alleviate the obvious moral concerns?

BRUTAL, FACTUAL HONESTY ABOUT HOMELESSNESS: Discovery Institute Research Fellow Christopher Rufo takes a little more than 12 minutes in a compelling vidumentary to dissect why the homelessness problem keeps getting worse even as officials spend increasing billions of tax dollars on illusory solutions, then points to the actual causes and how to make measurable progress. Genuine compassion begins with facing reality.

OH, THE HUMANITY! America’s most prominent Native-American in the U.S. Senate has been snubbed by His Fraudulency for a cabinet post. Will Warren don warpaint?

WHY IS THE MSM SUPPRESSING FACTS ABOUT HCQ AND COVID? C. Boyden Gray rips apart the Mainstream Media’s coverup of the full facts about the effectiveness of Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) in treating Covid.

“The current accepted press narrative on hydroxychloroquine is that no evidence exists showing it is effective for treating COVID-19, and that it can, in fact, be harmful. Any person who suggests otherwise is accused of being ‘anti-science’ and a promoter of ‘conspiracy theories’ and ‘disinformation.’

“First, there is strong evidence that hydroxychloroquine is helpful in treating COVID-19 when administered early in the disease — notably, from studies by the Mount Sinai Health System in New York and the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit, which both showed that the drug cut the mortality rate for COVID-19 patients nearly in half. Large multi-hospital collaborations in Belgium and the Netherlands and numerous smaller studies have also demonstrated benefits,” Gray writes for American Greatness.

PROMOTED – RESEARCHERS GRAFT ABORTED BABY SCALP TISSUE ONTO RATS: This may come as a shock, but human skin and hair grafted onto a white rat will grow. Next question: Where does this go next … and where does it end, if at all?

HAWLEY HAS A KNACK FOR CLARITY: Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) succinctly explains why people who worry about voting fraud are not going to shut up any time soon.

SHE EXPECTS TO BE CALLED ‘DR’ FOR THAT? Hans Bader has examined Jill Biden’s dissertation and is not impressed.

NOW IT’S COVID CANCEL CHRISTIANS CULTURE: New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell will not abide the presence of Christian performing artist Lauren Daigle in the Dick Clark Productions’ New Years’ Eve show.

ANOTHER WIN FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM: This one comes in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which delivers a “strict scrutiny” lecture to the District Court that upheld Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak’s clearly discriminatory capacity limits on church attendance.

The Supremes strike again, too.

OUR ‘BIGGEST PROBLEM’ ISN’T REALLY: Glenn Stanton says apocalyptic environmental worries have become so widespread among the young that the medical community has come up with a “climate anxiety scale” to measure it.

Fears of over-population are an integral part of such worries, but Stanton, director of global family formation studies at Focus on the Family, points to an emerging new field of data-driven analyses that suggest what we really should be worried about is having too few people:

“The greatest threat to humanity’s future is certainly not too many people consuming too many limited natural resources, but rather too few people giving birth to the new humans who will continue the creative work of making the world a better, more hospitable place through technological innovation,” he writes for the latest edition of Quillette.

It’s a bit of a long piece but well-worth the reading time because it makes a persuasive case for the proposition that the world as we know it, isn’t.

SHOULD WE CARE THE DURHAM PROBE IS EXPANDING? The Lid’s Jeff Dunetz is skeptical. Why? Well, for one thing, once his or her work is completed, a Special Counsel submits a confidential report to the Attorney General.

“What if Trump is no longer President after January and there is a Democratic Party appointed Attorney General? Under that scenario, if the Durham Report concludes that Russiagate was all a Democratic Party hoax (which it was), do you really think America will find out what is in the report,” Dunetz asks.

FIVE REASONS NOT TO THROW MORE MONEY AT COVID STIMULUS: The Heritage Foundation’s Rachel Grezler and Adam Michel line’em up like ducks.