Hello, greetings, and welcome. It’s Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2026.
1555: Reformer and Bible translator John Roger becomes the first protestant martyr under Mary I, when he is burned at the stake at Smithfield, London.
1789: First U.S. Electoral College chooses George Washington as president and John Adams as vice president.
1847: The first U.S. telegraph company is established in Maryland.
1854: Alvan Bovay proposes the name “Republican Party” in Ripon, Wis.
1887: The Interstate Commerce Act authorizes federal regulation of railroads.
1908: Star #46 was added to the U.S. flag for Oklahoma.
1922: WGY-AM in Schenectady, N.Y., begins radio transmissions.
1941: The United Service Organization (USO) is founded.
1945: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin meet at Yalta.
1949: Failed assassination attempt on Shah of Persia Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
1962: St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital opens.
1967: “Wild Thing” cover version by Senator Bobby hits #20 on the pop singles chart.
1969: John Madden is named head coach of the NFL’s Oakland Raiders.
1973: The comic strip Hagar The Horrible by Dik Browne debuts.
1977: Rumours, the 11th studio album by Fleetwood Mac, is released. As usual, the band nearly breaks up during production.
1988: Panamanian General Manuel Noriega is indicted by a U.S. federal grand jury for drug trafficking and racketeering.
2004: Mark Zuckerberg launches Facebook.
Birthdays today include Ferdinand Magellan, actor Nigel Bruce, Charles Lindbergh, Rosa Parks, Ida Lupino, Conrad Bain (Canadian actor; Maude, Diff’rent Strokes), David Brenner, Alice Cooper, and Clint Black.
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Mark Tapscott, over at Instapundit, this morning says:
North Korea tops the latest edition of World Watch’s Top 50 Most Dangerous Places for Christians, HillFaith’s Amanda Hughes reports. Sudan, Eritrea, Syria, Nigeria, Pakistan, Libya and Iran fill out the top 10. See a pattern here?
This is becoming such a trend that we’ve started seeing it here in the United States as well. There’s the recent case of Don Lemon, for example. Then, too, there’s the incident in Long Beach, Calif., documented so well by PJ Media’s Michael Cantrell. There’s also the Southern Poverty Law Center and its “Hate Map,” which targeted Roman Catholics. There is a long and continuing history of anti-Christian attacks in Europe, as well as reported by TCW:
You won’t know about it if you rely on the mainstream media, but Christians throughout Europe are experiencing anti-Christian hate crimes at an alarming rate. Print media has rightly been filled with pages on the Orwellian raid by police on journalist Allison Pearson for an unspecified ‘non-crime hate incident’. Meanwhile it goes unreported that throughout Europe Christians are being harassed, threatened and physically attacked in unprecedented numbers.
Widespread Attacks In its latest report released on 15 November, the Vienna-based Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in Europe (OIDAC) identified 2,444 hate crimes against Christians in 2023. These were crimes documented by police and civil society in 35 European countries, and included 232 personal attacks on Christians, such as harassment, threats and physical violence.
[…]
These are actual crimes, much more than a few ‘hurty words’ uttered in the heat of the moment or blurted out on social media. Eight per cent of the incidents recorded were threats of violence and 7 per cent involved actual violence. Amongst the incidents of physical violence in 2023 were some horrific attacks.
These included a machete attack by an Islamic jihadist who had illegally entered Spain from Morocco which resulted in the murder of a Catholic altar server and the serious wounding of a 74-year-old priest. More than 100 people, including around 60 children, were targeted in a car ramming attack on a Corpus Christi procession in Warsaw. A witness said: ‘The person drove through a street of kneeling children, around 60 of them, deliberately and slowly . . . From the look on his face, we believe he was doing this coldly and intentionally.’
Worldwide antisemitic attacks have been rising in recent years, too, and it’s my take that they’re part and parcel of the same problem.
I don’t suppose it’s accidental that what we saw in Minneapolis, in the case of the attack on a church service (in part led by the afore-mentioned Don Lemon), was ostensibly made in support of illegal aliens, many of whom, in the case of Minneapolis, are also adherents of Islam.
Then, of course, another connection is the choice of the Biden White House to declare Easter Sunday, the holiest day of the Christian religion, to instead be this year’s “Transgender Day of Visibility.” That particular outrage was made more insulting when Biden claimed the very next day that he’d not done that. (Which of course, furthered the questions about who was actually running the Biden White House, but let’s not dive down that particular rabbit hole just now).
All of these events seem curiously connected. The always worthwhile Bob Zimmerman over at Behind The Black suggests in a piece dated April of 2024:
…the blatant scorn of the Christian voting block illustrated by Biden’s proclamation as well as his bland denial of it the very next day suggests the Democrats no longer care what Christians and other devoutly religious groups think of them.
You may not recall Biden and company labeling Tea Party people “Terrorists.” Similar labels have since been applied to MAGA. In a broader view, what is behind this? Well, China, for one. Don Surber mentions this this morning:
I am not surprised to learn the CCP—Red China—is behind this effort to stop the U.S. government from kicking illegal aliens out. After all, Tim Walz was its Manchurian vice presidential candidate, chosen by the Democrat Party because of his ability to milk social justice programs to fund Democrats. Come on. Do you really believe the DNC (Obama) would let a goofball like Kamala pick her running mate? They wouldn’t trust her to pick her nose. So just who is this Singham dude?
Singham? I mentioned him last week. Our Scott Pinsker, more recently. I note that one of the foundational aspects of communism is the removal of all religion from the culture. So, yeah, the communists are at the root of this, along with, of course, Islam. Both are seeking to alter our culture to meet their needs, not ours.
There is a feature in all of these attacks around the world that few have noticed.
As a general rule, much as the hyenas only attack the lion that is old or otherwise incapacitated, criminals only commit their crimes when they feel they can get away with it. More succinctly, an attacker only attacks when he perceives sufficient weakness in those he is attacking. Zimmerman addresses this:
Biden can give Christians the finger because the moral tenets of Judeo-Christian culture no longer dominate the moral framework of our country.
[…]
Think about that. Enough Americans today might actually endorse the mutilation and castration of little children, the blacklisting and censoring of conservative and religious individuals, and the imprisonment of political opponents, to make vote tampering irrelevant. The Democrats apparently think they can win November on this platform, because they are no longer advocating it discreetly. Instead, they are pushing it down the throats of those who oppose it, in the most disdainful way.
The force of government has often been used around the world to attack Christians and Jews. The IRS, right here in the U.S., for example, as our own Tyler O’Neil spoke to back in 2021.
I caught some flak for my column of the other day, in which I suggested there was no short-term solution to the problems created by Islam. I also suggested in that column that we need to simply contain Islam, and sit back and wait it out.
I didn’t mention this in that column (which was already running rather long), but while we wait, we need also to be strong on supporting and defending the Judeo-Christian culture that — regardless of the left, Islamists, and ChiComs’ disfavor — is the basis, the very foundation, of Western life, even for the not-so-religious.
The efforts to import the third world into our country by Obama and Biden, and the mobs trying to prevent us from enforcing our laws, are nothing short of an attempt to shift the culture away from the Western, Judeo-Christian culture and values that have guided us for centuries. The anti-ICE movement, including that attack on the church, is part and parcel of the attempt to keep moving our culture away from its foundation. One way to project the needed strength is the arrest and conviction of the people involved in that invasion of the church, including Don Lemon, who was reported by parishioners as leading that mob.
Projecting cultural strength is the only answer to these attacks. More than one problematic group will be contained by simply showing some backbone in this regard.
Related: Enlightening Islam: Is It Even Possible?
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