READ A GOOD, FREE BOOK LATELY? No, this is not a pitch from me for you to buy my latest new book. You won’t find my name as the author on any book these day because, while I can flip pages for hours in a good one, writing books has never been my passion.

But for others, like Josh McDowell, writing great books that are bought and read by millions is among his greatest of passions. This is nowhere so well-illustrated as by his classic of Christian Apologetics, “More Than A Carpenter.” More than 15 million copies of MTAC have been printed and sold since the first edition hit the bookstands in 1977,

Over at HillFaith, I have for several years had a standing offer of a free copy of MTAC to anybody willing to share their name, snail mail address and email address. More than 500 folks, including a bunch of Instapundit readers, have taken me up on the offer.

Periodically, I receive thoughts and/or thank yous from folks who have asked for and received a copy of MTAC. Tom Colson did so recently and I so appreciated his comments that I asked him for reprint permission, which he gladly granted. It’s a useful reminder of a great offer of a wonderful book. Check it out here.

AND GUESS WHAT THE ‘PALESTINIANS’ ARE DOING THIS WEEKEND IN DETROIT: A bunch of radical far-Left political activists are meeting, again, this Labor Day weekend in Detroit to plot new deceit and destruction about and of Israel in the U.S., according to award-winning journalist Richard Pollock.

One key to understanding where and why these folks are headed for the coming months is found in understanding the influence of Saul Alinksky, the mind-master of Barack Obama and thousands more New Left radicals in America. Pollock knows these plays backwards and forwards, having been among Alinksky’s American followers for years before his own ideological rebirth:

“This is the model for the pro-Palestinian protesters. It is to intimidate, instill public fear, and for the authorities, to be regarded as the enemy. At all of the previous pro-Palestinian college encampments, only radical students were permitted to enter and they exuded intimidation. They barred Jewish students from entering the encampments or engaging their fellow students in open dialogue who were inside the Palestinian strongholds.

“Across the country’s campuses, radical Palestinian activists disrupted classes, attacked students who wore Jewish symbols, hunted down Jewish students, occupied buildings, painted Swastikas in student dormitories, and in some cases, beat security guards who tried to help.

“The ‘fear factor’ was one of their best weapons. And I suspect, they intend to use it again this fall. I think we can expect that we’ll soon see the ‘next phase’ of Palestinian ‘resistance. Get ready.”

Cauz it ain’t gonna be pretty!

NO, THE PALESTINIANS ARE THE COLONIZERS: Among the many endlessly repeated lies from the Left about Israel, Gaza, Hamas and the Palestinians is the one that claims Israel is the illegitimate foreign conqueror and colonizer of lands the Palestinians historically own. The truth, as Rod Martin explains this morning on Substack, is the exact opposite. Once that fact is recognized, all the rest of the lies fall into place.

THOUSANDS OF DOUBLE-DIPPING BUREAUCRATS? Oh surely not! Oh surely yes, declares Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), chairman of the Senate DOGE Caucus, in a new report that points to multiple agencies where, cumulatively, literally thousands of federal workers are still drawing paychecks and Pandemic-related unemployment checks.

But wait! There’s more!! Thousands more federal workers, according to the report, are using their insider access to steal millions of tax dollars that are paid to fake contractors, suppliers, beneficiaries, etc. et.

“Why are government employee unions fighting so hard, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, to block [DOGE] from accessing the information necessary to stop fraud and abuse? The answer is obvious. The deep state doesn’t want those meddling whiz kids at DOGE exposing the Washington corruption that’s been hiding in plain sight for way too long. Unscrupulous bureaucrats have been ripping off public assistance programs intended to help the needy, disabled, hungry, out-of-work folks, veterans, small businesses, and even children who lost a parent,” the report contends.

Unfortunately, there is yet more to this expose, which you can read all about in The Washington Stand this morning.

TWO MODEST PROPOSALS FOR THE NATION’S CAPITAL: Can you imagine an end to the Traffic Hell that is commuting to and from the District of Columbia and thereabouts? How about a massive infusion of Real World America values into the federal bureaucracy? I’ve got just what you’re looking for in my latest Substack column.

WHAT NEWSOM HATES, LOVES: Issues & Insights surveys the man’s record and concludes that what California’s governor hates is Californians and absolutely, totally, completely worships is being in the spotlight.

ERIK HAS A QUESTION: How do you get non-material consciousness when all you have to work with is material? Regardless if you are an atheist or a theist, it’s the kind of question that will make you think hard about what you think and why you think it.

NOTE TO COMMENTERS: Folks, I really appreciate the civility and depth of analysis exhibited in so many of your comments to the post. Thank you!

FEDERAL JUDGE RECOMMENDS BUDDHISM TO TEXAS SOLONS OVER 10 COMMANDMENTS: U.S. District Court Judge Fred Biery issued a preliminary injunction preventing Texas officials from implementing a new law requiring the 10 Commandments to be displayed in public schools.

But don’t accuse Biery of being anti-religion! No, he won’t let the state display the laws God gave Moses on tablets of stone, but he’s just fine with three alternatives, including this one: “Multiple versions of lessons of behavior from many cultures melded into the American motto of ‘E pluribus unum,’ a concept currently in decline. For example, the Five Moral Precepts of Buddhism: Abstain from killing, stealing, engaging in sexual misconduct, lying and intoxicants …”

Biery’s other two alternatives are worth perusing as well, which you can do here, via The Washington Stand.

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN GETS THE MESSAGE: All it took for the fabled Madison-based center for left-wing campus activism to fold was a letter from the First Liberty Institute reminding University of Wisconsin officials that the First Amendment’s guarantees of religious freedom of practice and expression are not optional mandates. The letter is a superb presentation of both the law requiring religious accommodations and the rank hypocrisy of college administrators on the issue.

YOU UP FOR ‘GOBLINOID’ SHOES? The Washington Stand’s S.A. McCarthy clearly is not, nor is he for what he calls “hideous sneaker-dress shoe hybrids,” so you can imagine how he views Ukrainian chief Zelensky’s lack of sartorial elegance. It’s not merely that dressing like a slob has become acceptable; doing so, McCarthy argues, is evidence of how we’ve lost sight of order, justice and dignity.

NO WONDER NPR IS BEING DEFUNDED: Three key Hill Democrats are silent after their claim was discredited that DOGE appointees are “embedding” into the federal career civil service. Also silent are two NPR reporters whose artful use of language didn’t quite conceal a serious factual deficit.

VIOLENT DC CRIME IS THE SYMPTOM, NOT THE CAUSE: Even with the widely-ballyhooed reduction in crime in the District of Columbia since 2023, the violent crime rate remains so high that the nation’s capital is a seriously dangerous place for residents and tourists alike, according to Family Research Council (FRC) President Tony Perkins, himself a former police officer.

“Even after the recent drop, D.C. residents still face a one in 19 probability of being a crime victim each year. That’s 5.3 percent — double the 2.5 percent risk in Chicago. By any objective measure, our nation’s capital remains one of the riskiest cities in America.

“President Trump’s move was neither arbitrary nor unnecessary. But here’s the reality: taking control of a police department that city leaders have pressured to coddle criminals rather than enforce the law may address the symptoms — but it won’t cure the underlying disease,” Perkins writes in The Washington Stand.

The underlying disease is the destruction of the traditional, father-headed family. More than half of D.C.’s children grow up in single-parent households and it’s virtually always the father who isn’t there, at double the national average. Social Science research has for decades documented the terrible impact on children and American society of absent fathers.

HILL AIDES ON BOTH SIDES BACK FOOD REFORMS: Multiple recent surveys find strong bipartisan support among congressional aides for food reforms. RFK Jr. has certainly tapped into a previously unheralded vein of political support.

OPM INTRODUCES SEN. WARREN TO THE FACTS: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), joined by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), ripped the Trump administration for “embedding” legions of DOGE political appointees into the career civil service. Their complaints were carried in a 10-page, single-spaced letter to U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Scott Kupor.

There is a process for political appointees to “career-in,” but it can be time-consuming and laborious, so few are those who pursue it. But Warren, et. al. cite multiple media reports that make it sound as if legions of Elon Musk robots are burrowing into the bureaucracy, including an NPR story with two specific names.

But according to an OPM spokesman responding to The Washington Stand, neither of the two former DOGErs is on the career civil service payroll. And, according to Kupor, there simply aren’t any such embedders: “No DOGE-affiliated individuals have ‘unlawfully burrowed’ into career roles. We welcome oversight grounded in facts.”

88% OF COLLEGE STUDENTS SELF-CENSOR NON-LIBERAL VIEWS: A new survey of more than 1,400 students at Northwestern and University of Michigan finds a pervasive culture of self-censorship that silences non-progressive views and is “driven by fear of social ostracism and academic penalty.”

The Washington Stand’s Sarah Holliday dug deeper into the survey results and found not even a sliver of a silver lining:

“According to the research, 78 percent self-censor on gender identity, 77 percent on politics, and 68 percent on family values. Alarmingly, 80 percent admit to submitting classwork that misrepresents their beliefs to align with professors’ expectations — a practice so ingrained it’s become ‘second nature’ for many.

“And unfortunately, this ‘fragmentation doesn’t end at the classroom door.’ Seventy-three percent of respondents confessed they don’t even trust having ‘conversations about these values with close friends. Nearly half said they routinely conceal beliefs in intimate relationships for fear of ideological fallout.’ The authors described this as ‘identity regulation at scale, and it is being institutionalized.’”

MUST READ – HOW AID GROUPS FUND TERRORISTS: Richard Pollock digs into the latest report from the Special Inspector-General for Afghanistan Reconstruction — remember them? — who documents how Hamas in Gaza and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

This report provides the fact-based counterpoint to every left-wing objection to the DOGE-led fundamental re-evaluation and re-structuring of all U.S. foreign aid programs, especially those run by USAID.

“The report focused on the Taliban. But it also shows how Islamic terror groups and hostile governments throughout the Middle East and Africa have no intention of aiding their poor or their children. They use the aid system to finance their wars and repression,” Pollock writes.

AMERICANS SEPARATED: First Amendment Freedom of Speech is poised to gain a win if a federal issues a Consent Decree agreement among the IRS, the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) and a couple of Texas churches.

Under the UC, the tax agency would no longer enforce the Johnson Amendment against the churches. Not familiar with LBJ’s amendment? Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU) certainly is and AU is asking the federal district court in Tyler, Texas, to allow it to intervene against the CD. This one could get really interesting.

JESSICA TARLOV’S OKIE CITY FLUB: As President Ronald Reagan once said, the problem with liberals is they know so many things that just aren’t true. Check out my latest news analysis on The Washington Stand. PROMOTED FROM LAST NIGHT.

THE TIMES, THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’ INDEED: Odds are, the New York Times and Washington Post won’t tell you about this, but there is growing evidence of a significant spiritual upheaval among Gen Zers, as well as healthy changes regarding the nation’s divorce and illegitimate birth rates.

FACTS EXPOSE BLS INCOMPETENCE: Leave it to Issues & Insights (I&I) to dig deep into the historical data to compile an accurate long-term picture of the record of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). It turns out that BLS incompetence is no new thing.

“In the 199 months we examined, the BLS’s initial estimate of jobs gained or lost missed the mark by an average of 49.6 percent! Only 15 times did its initial estimate come within 3 percent of being right. (Given the huge sample size, you’d think its margin of error would consistently be tiny.)

“Some months, the miss was staggering. In August 2011, to cite one example, the BLS said no new jobs had been created. Zero. Turns out, 132,000 were created that month. In September 2017, it first said that the economy lost 33,000 jobs – which made big news because, as Politico put it at the time, it was ‘the first time in seven years’ that had happened.

“In fact, the economy had created 88,000 jobs that month. In January 2021 – the last month of Trump’s first term – the BLS initially reported that the economy had added a mere 49,000 jobs. The actual number was 365,000.”

President Donald Trump has named Heritage Foundation Chief Economist E.J. Antoni to be the new BLS Director. He’s going to be one very busy man.

PARROTS AND SPEECH: Wintery Knight loves birds, especially Parrots, so you can imagine his enthusiasm when he first encountered a hugely important article in the peer-reviewed journal Nature.  The article reports new research that identified the place in the Parrot’s brain that enables it to learn speech.

The implications of the findings are significant in the context of the Intelligent Design and Materialist Evolutionary theories. Regardless where you are on that question, this piece is a fascinating probe into the amazing working of the natural world.

CHINA ON THE ROMAN ROAD: Rod Martin hosts guest author Yi Fuxian who looks at the fertility rates and measures being implemented in China in the wake of the deadly One-Child Policy (1980-2020), and sees striking parallels with failed measures taken in Imperial Rome to address the same problems.

LBJ WOULD BE SHOCKED BY TODAY’S DEMS: A Senate floor speech by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) commemorating Medicare’s 60th anniversary prompts me in a Tapscott’s Copy Desk Substack column to check the record with LBJ’s 1964 State of the Union. Re-reading that long ago speech shows how Democrats like Van Hollen rewrite history to conform to their present-day rages.

DEMS HEADING TO THE WILDERNESS: Anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian views are becoming the Democratic mainstream and that reality almost certainly will put the increasingly radical Left party at a fundamental disadvantage for years to come, according to Richard Pollock.

WHAT THE LEFT DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW: About the back story to the screaming reaction on the Left to that American Eagle spot featuring actress Sydney Sweeney. Two words they keep forgetting — “Margaret Sanger.”