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Tuesday, October 22, 2019

DAVID CLOUD: C.S. LEWIS & EVANGELICALS TODAY

C.S. Lewis and Evangelicals Today
October 22, 2019 (first published July 1, 2000)
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:
 
This report is available at www.wayoflife.org as a free eBook. Here is adirect link to the pdf . Other formats, including a soft cover book edition,are found here .
T
he late British author C.S. (Clive Staples) Lewis (1898-1963), who was known as Jack, is extremely popular with evangelicals today. In fact, he could be said to be the “godfather of modern evangelicalism.”

In fact, Lewis is loved with an equal fervor by “conservative evangelicals,” hell-denying emergents, Roman Catholics, Mormons, and even some Atheists, a fact that speaks volumes to those who have ears to hear.

Most Christian bookstores feature the writings of Lewis without a word of warning. Though Lewis died in 1963, sales of his books had risen to two million a year by 1977 and had increased another 125% since 2001, with no end in sight.

The December 2005 edition of 
Christianity Today was devoted to “C.S. Lewis Superstar.” In an article commemorating the 100th anniversary of Lewis’s birth, J.I. Packer called him “our patron saint” and said that Lewis ”has come to be the Aquinas, the Augustine, and the Aesop of contemporary Evangelicalism” (“Still Surprised by Lewis,” Christianity Today, Sept. 7, 1998).

Christianity Today reader’s poll that year rated Lewis the most influential evangelical writer. In light of the wretched spiritual-doctrinal-moral condition of “evangelicalism” today, that is a very telling statistic.

In its April 23, 2001, issue, 
Christianity Today again praised C.S. Lewis in an article titled “Myth Matters.” Lewis, called “the 20th century’s greatest Christian apologist,” wrote several mythical works, such as The Chronicles of Narnia, which Christianity Today recommends in the most glowing terms, claiming that “Christ came not to put an end to myth but to take all that is most essential in the myth up into himself and make it real.” I don’t know what to say to this except that it is complete nonsense. In his Chronicles, Lewis depicts Jesus Christ as a lion named Aslan who is slain on a stone table. Christianity Today says, “In Aslan, Christ is made tangible, knowable, real.” As if we can know Jesus Christ best through a fable that is vaguely and inaccurately based on biblical themes and intermingled with paganism.

Lewis is praised on all spectrums of evangelicalism and beyond. He is credited by John Piper as a father of his doctrine of “Christian Hedonism,” and he is praised by Rob Bell in his hell-denying, universalistic book Love Wins. Under the Acknowledgements section Bell writes, “... to my parents, Rob and Helen, for suggesting when I was in high school that I read C.S. Lewis."
LEWIS WAS COMMITTED TO “DAMNABLE HERESIES”
Even Christianity Today admits. “Clive Staples Lewis was anything but a classic evangelical, socially or theologically. He smoked cigarettes and a pipe, and he regularly visited pubs to drink beer with friends. Though he shared basic Christian beliefs with evangelicals, he didn’t subscribe to biblical inerrancy or penal substitution. He believed in purgatory and baptismal regeneration” (“C.S. Lewis Superstar,” Christianity Today, Dec. 2005).
THE INERRANT INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE is a fundamental of the faith, but Lewis denied it. In a letter to the editor of Christianity Today, Feb. 28, 1964, Dr. W. Wesley Shrader, First Baptist Church, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, warned that “C.S. Lewis ... would never embrace the (literal-infallible) view of the Bible” (F.B.F. News Bulletin, Fundamental Baptist Fellowship, March 4, 1984).
THE HISTORICITY OF THE BIBLE is a fundamental of the faith, but Lewis denied it. He believed that Jonah and Job were not historical books. In his article “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism,” Lewis said: “... Jonah, a tale with as few even pretended historical attachments as Job, grotesque in incident and surely not without a distinct, though of course edifying, vein of typically Jewish humor” (“Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism,” Christian Reflections, edited by Walter Hooper, Eerdmans).
THE NECESSITY OF SUPERNATURAL CONVERSION THROUGH REPENTANCE AND FAITH IN CHRIST is a fundamental of the faith, but there is no evidence that Lewis experienced this. I have read several of his books, dozens of his articles, and several biographies about him, and I have never seen a clear teaching on the new birth or a clear biblical testimony that he was born again. EvenChristianity Today said that Lewis believed in “baptismal regeneration.”

This should be cause for the deepest concern. Lewis’ autobiography
Surprised by Joy presents a very confused testimony of salvation. Lewis definitely experienced a mystical conversion of some sort and he changed from Atheist to Christian, but that in itself is not biblical regeneration. This has happened to many others, including Malcolm Muggeridge, who at the end of the day were committed to a false sacramental gospel (Roman Catholicism), which Paul identified as cursed of God (Galatians 1).
In The Great Divorce, which is about salvation, heaven, and hell, Lewis does not mention the necessity of personal faith in Christ, the blood of Christ, or the new birth. It’s all about works and character. 
The 
“PENAL SUBSTITUTIONARY ATONEMENT” is a fundamental of the faith, but Lewis denied it. The Bible plainly states that that Christ shed His blood and died to satisfy the penalty of God’s holy Law. But Lewis claimed that it does not matter how one “defines” the atonement and said that it is not an essential part of Christianity. In Mere Christianity he made the following statement:
“You can say that Christ died for our sins. You may say that the Father has forgiven us because Christ has done for us what we ought to have done. You may say that we are washed in the blood of the Lamb. You may say that Christ has defeated death. They are all true. IF ANY OF THEM DO NOT APPEAL TO YOU, LEAVE IT ALONE AND GET ON WITH THE FORMULA THAT DOES. And, whatever you do, do not start quarreling with other people because they use a different formula from years” (
Mere Christianity, HarperSanFrancisco edition, 2001, p. 182).

This is rank heresy. Lewis wrongly claimed that it does not matter if a person believes that he is washed in Christ’s blood, that this is a mere “formula” that can be accepted or rejected at one’s pleasure. He said that it is just as well to believe that “the Father has forgiven us because Christ has done for us what we ought to have done.” That is a bloodless salvation through Christ’s life rather than through His Cross, which, according to the Bible is no salvation at all. The “blood” is mentioned more than 90 times in the New Testament, and that is no accident. “And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission” (Heb. 9:22). If Jesus had lived a perfect life in our place and died a bloodless death in our place, we would not be saved.

Lewis said, “The central Christian belief is that Christ’s death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did this are another matter. ... Any theories we build up as to how Christ’s death did all of this are, in my view, quite secondary...” (
Mere Christianity, HarperSanFrancisco edition, 2001, pp. 54, 55, 56).

This is unscriptural teaching. God has revealed exactly what Christ did and what the atonement means. It is not a matter of theorizing or believing one “formula” over against another. The Bible says our salvation is a matter of a propitiation, a ransom, whereby our sins were washed away by Christ’s bloody death, which was offered as a payment to satisfy God’s holy Law.

Lewis never mentions the doctrine of propitiation, but propitiation was a necessary part of our salvation and the propitiation was made by blood. “Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God” (Rom. 3:25). Propitiation means satisfaction; covering; the fulfillment of a demand. It refers to God’s estimation of Christ’s sacrifice. God is fully satisfied by what Jesus Christ did on the Cross. The penalty for His broken law by man’s sin has been fully satisfied (Rom. 3:24-25; 1 Jn. 2:2; Heb. 2:17; Isa. 5:11). The Greek word translated “propitiation” in Rom. 3:25 is also translated “mercy seat” in Heb. 9:5. The mercy seat perfectly covered the law which was contained in the Ark (Ex. 25:17, 21). This symbolizes propitiation--Christ covering the demands of God’s law. That it is the blood of Christ which satisfied this demand and put away our sins was depicted on the Day of Atonement when blood was sprinkled on the mercy seat by the high priest (Lev. 16:11-17).

Through Christ’s blood we have eternal redemption. “Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us” (Heb. 9:12).

Through Christ’s blood we can enter into the presence of God. “Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus” (Heb. 10:19).
That we have eternal redemption and boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Christ is not a “theory” or a “formula”; it is the Word of God; it is the very heart of the Gospel; and if one does not receive it he cannot be saved.
D. Martin Lloyd-Jones warned that Lewis had a defective view of salvation and was an opponent of the substitutionary and penal view of the atonement (Christianity Today, Dec. 20, 1963). 
SALVATION BY GRACE WITHOUT WORKS AND SACRAMENTS is a fundamental of the faith, but Lewis taught that the “Christ-life” is spread to men through baptism, belief, and the Mass. He wrote:

“There are three things that spread the Christ-life to us: baptism, belief, and that mysterious action which different Christians call by different names--Holy Communion, the Mass, the Lord’s Supper. ... I am not saying anything about which of these things is the most essential. My Methodist friend would like me to say more about belief and less (in proportion) about the other two. But I am not going into that” (
Mere Christianity, p. 61).

(Note that he includes the Catholic Mass in his list of the various names by which holy communion are known, failing to acknowledge to his readers that the Mass is an entirely different thing than the simple Lord’s Supper of the New Testament.)

It is not a Methodist we should listen to but the Bible itself, and the Bible says that salvation is by the grace of Christ alone through faith in Christ alone without works, that works are important but they follow after salvation and are the product of salvation rather than the means of it. The difference between saying that salvation is by faith without works and that works follow and saying that salvation is by faith with works or faith plus works is the difference between a true gospel and a false one. “Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt. But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness” (Rom. 4:3-4). “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:8-10).
THE SOLE MEDIATORSHIP OF CHRIST is a fundamental of the faith, but Lewis denied it. He believed in prayers for the dead. In Letters to Malcolm, he wrote, “Of course I pray for the dead. The action is so spontaneous, so all but inevitable, that only the most compulsive theological case against it would deter men. And I hardly know how the rest of my prayers would survive if those for the dead were forbidden” (p. 109). Lewis confessed his sins regularly to a priest and was given the sacrament of last rites on July 16, 1963 (Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C.S. Lewis: A Biography, 1974, pp. 198, 301).
THE EXISTENCE OF HEAVEN AND HELL AND THE ABSENCE OF AN INTERMEDIATE STAGE is a fundamental of the faith, but Lewis denied it. He believed in purgatory. In Letters to Malcolm, he wrote” “I believe in Purgatory. ... The right view returns magnificently in Newman’s Dream. There if I remember rightly, the saved soul, at the very foot of the throne, begs to be taken away and cleansed. It cannot bear for a moment longer ‘with its darkness to affront that light’. ... Our souls demand Purgatory, don’t they?” (pp. 110-111).
THE LITERAL SIX-DAY CREATION is a fundamental of the faith, taught from one end of the Bible to the other and placed at the very heart of the gospel (e.g., the literal fall of man), but Lewis denied it. He believed in theistic evolution, calling the Bible’s creation account a “Hebrew folk tale.” In The Problem of Pain Lewis said “man is physically descended from animals.” He claims that man “may have existed for ages in this state before it became man.” Then God “caused to descend upon this organism a new kind of consciousness.”
THE DOCTRINE OF AN ETERNAL, FIERY HELL is a fundamental of the faith, but Lewis denied it. He taught that hell is a state of mind:

“Hell is a state of mind--ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind--is, in the end, Hell” (Lewis, 
The Great Divorce, p. 65).

“If all Hell’s miseries together entered the consciousness of yon wee yellow bird on the bought there, they would be swallowed up without trace, as if one drop of ink had been dropped into that Great Ocean to which your terrestrial Pacific itself is only a molecule.”
THE DOCTRINE OF THE FINALITY OF ONE’S DESTINY AT DEATH is a fundamental of the faith, but Lewis taught a second chance and the possibility of repentance beyond this life. This is the theme of The Great Divorce. “Is judgment not final? Is there really a way out of Hell into Heaven? ‘It depends on the way you’re using the words. If they leave that grey town behind it will not have been Hell. To any that leaves it, it is Purgatory. And perhaps ye had better not call this country Heaven. Not Deep Heaven, ye understand’” (The Great Divorce).

In this book Lewis taught that questions such as the finality of men’s destiny and purgatory and eternal destinies cannot be understood in this present life and we should not fret about them.

“Ye can know nothing of the end of all things, or nothing expressible in those terms. It may be, as the Lord said to the Lady Julian, that all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. But it’s ill talking of such questions. ‘Because they are too terrible, Sir?’ ‘No. Because all answers deceive” (
The Great Divorce, Kindle location 140-150).

Many evangelicals have been influenced by Lewis’s heresy of universalism. For example, Clark Pinnock says, “When I was a young believer in the 1950s, C.S. Lewis helped me understand the relationship between Christianity and other religions in an inclusivist way. Because I trusted him as an orthodox thinker, I was open to hear him say that he could detect God's presence among other faiths and that he believed people could be saved in other religions because God was at work among them” (
More Than One Way, Zondervanp. 107).
THE DOCTRINE OF MORAL PURITY AND THE INVIABILITY OF MARRIAGE is a fundamental of the faith (e.g., 1 Timothy 6:3-5; Titus 2:11-12), but Lewis ignored it.

He lived for 30 years with Janie Moore, a woman 25 years his senior to whom he was not married. The relationship with the married woman began when Lewis was still a student at Oxford. Moore was separated from her husband. Lewis confessed to his brother Arthur that he was in love with Mrs. Moore, the mother of one of his friends who was killed in World War I. The relationship was definitely sexual in nature. See Alan Jacobs, 
The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis, pp. 82, 94.

At age 58, Lewis married Joy Gresham, an American woman who pursued a relationship with Lewis even while she was still married to another man. According to two of Lewis’s friends, Gresham’s husband divorced her on the grounds of desertion (Roger Lancelyn Green & Walter Hooper, 
Light on C.S. Lewis), and he, in turn, married Joy’s cousin. Trading husbands and wives is not Christian godliness.

In the book 
A Severe Mercy by Sheldon VanAuken, a personal letter is reproduced on page 191 in which Lewis suggests to VanAuken that upon his next visit to England that the two of them “must have some good, long talks together and perhaps we shall both get high.” We have no way to know exactly what this means, but we do know that Lewis drank beer, wine, and whiskey on a daily basis.
SALVATION EXCLUSIVELY THROUGH THE NAME OF CHRIST is a fundamental of the faith which Lewis denied.

Lewis never gave up his unholy fascination with paganism, and as the Bible warns (1 Corinthians 15:33) it had a corrupting influence. On a visit to Greece with his wife in 1960, Lewis made the following strange, heretical statement:

“I had some ado to prevent Joy (and myself) from lapsing into paganism in Attica! AT DAPHNI IT WAS HARD NOT TO PRAY TO APOLLO THE HEALER. BUT SOMEHOW ONE DIDN’T FEEL IT WOULD HAVE BEEN VERY WRONG--WOULD HAVE ONLY BEEN ADDRESSING CHRIST 
SUB SPECIE APOLLONIUS” (C.S. Lewis to Chad Walsh, May 23, 1960, cited from George Sayer, Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis, 1994, p. 378).

What a blasphemous statement! Christ is not worshipped under the image of pagan gods. And we must remember that this was written at the end of Lewis’ life, long after his “conversion” to Christ.

Lewis elsewhere claimed that followers of pagan religions can be saved without personal faith in Jesus Christ:

“But the truth is God has not told us what His arrangements about the other people are. ... There are people who do not accept the full Christian doctrine about Christ but who are so strongly attracted by Him that they are His in a much deeper sense than they themselves understand. There are people in other religions who are being led by God’s secret influence to concentrate on those parts of their religion which are in agreement with Christianity, and who thus belong to Christ without knowing it. For example a Buddhist of good will may be led to concentrate more and more on the Buddhist teaching about mercy and to leave in the background (though he might still say he believed) the Buddhist teaching on certain points. Many of the good Pagans long before Christ’s birth may have been in this position” (C.S. Lewis, 
Mere Christianity, HarperSanFrancisco edition, 2001, pp. 64, 208, 209).

As already noted, in 
The Great Divorce, which is about salvation, heaven, and hell, Lewis does not mention faith in Christ, the blood of Christ, or the new birth. It’s all about works and character.

In the popular 
Chronicles of Narnia series, which has influenced countless children, Lewis taught that those who sincerely serve the devil (called Tash) are actually serving Christ (Aslan) and will eventually be accepted by God.
Consider the following excerpt from The Last Battle, chapter 15, “Further Up and Further In.”

“Then I fell at his feet and thought, Surely this is the hour of death, for the Lion (who is worthy of all honour) will know that I have served Tash all my days and not him. Nevertheless, it is better to see the Lion and die than to be Tisroc of the world and live and not to have seen him. But the Glorious One bent down his golden head and touched my forehead with his tongue and said, Son, thou art welcome. But I said, Alas, Lord, I am no son of thine but the servant of Tash. He answered, CHILD, ALL THE SERVICE THOU HAST DONE TO TASH, I ACCOUNT AS SERVICE DONE TO ME. Then by reason of my great desire for wisdom and understanding, I overcame my fear and questioned the Glorious One and said, Lord, is it then true, as the Ape said, that thou and Tash are one? The Lion growled so that the earth shook (but his wrath was not against me) and said, It is false. Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath's sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted. Dost thou understand, Child? I said, Lord, thou knowest how much I understand. But I said also (for the truth constrained me), Yet I have been seeking Tash all my days. Beloved, said the Glorious One, unless thy desire had been for me thou shouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.”

That is the heresy of universalism, and a growing number of “evangelicals” hold to this false doctrine, believing that God will somehow receive unbelievers and followers of false religions even though they do not bow to the Lordship and sole Saviourhood of Jesus Christ in any conscious manner.

When I interviewed the head of the New Testament department at Serampore University (founded by William Carey in India) in the early 1980s, he told me the same thing. I asked him whether the Hindus will be accepted by God if they are sincere in their religion, and he replied, “Certainly.” At the time this was the most premier theological institution in India, and it provided accreditation for other schools.

Well, the Bible says certainly not! Ephesians chapter two tells us the condition of every individual outside of regenerating faith in Jesus Christ. He is dead in trespasses and sins (v. 1), controlled by and living according to the working of the devil (v. 2), a child of disobedience (v. 2), dominated by the flesh (v. 3), by nature the child of wrath (v. 3), without Christ (v. 12), an alien and stranger from the covenant of God (v. 12), without hope (v. 12), WITHOUT GOD IN THE WORLD (v. 12), far off from God (v. 13).

The Bible gives absolutely no hope for those who die without personal faith in Christ.

The Lord Jesus Christ had already settled this matter before the penning of Ephesians. In His conversation with Nicodemus, Christ said categorically, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). Nicodemus was a very sincere and religious Jew, and if any category of person could have gone to heaven without being born again, it would have been people like him. Jesus Christ said that it will not happen. In that same conversation Jesus said, “He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not IS CONDEMNED ALREADY, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God” (John 3:18), and, “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him” (John 3:36).

C.S. Lewis was definitely some sort of universalist, and he has had a wide influence. Clark Pinnock, who denies eternal fiery hell, credits Lewis as a major influence.
"When I was a young believer in the 1950s, C.S. Lewis helped me understand the relationship between Christianity and other religions in an inclusivist way. Because I trusted him as an orthodox thinker, I was open to hear him say that he could detect God's presence among other faiths and that he believed people could be saved in other religions because God was at work among them. His view was wonderfully summed up for me in that incident in The Last Battle, the last volume of the Narnia cycle, where the pagan soldier Emeth learns to his surprise that Aslan [the lion which represents Jesus Christ] regards his worship of Tash as directed to himself. Anyone who appreciates that incident is on his or her way to inclusivist thinking” (Pinnock, More Than One Way?Zondervan, 1996, p. 107).

Elsewhere Pinnock says:

“Scripture encourages us to see the church not so much as the ark, outside of which there is no hope of salvation, but as the vanguard of those who have experienced the fullness of God's grace made available to all people in Jesus Christ. ... I welcome the Saiva Siddhanta literature of Hinduism, which celebrates a personal God of love, and the emphasis on grace that I see in the Japanese Shin-Shu Amida sect. I also respect the Buddha as a righteous man (Mat. 10:41) and Mohammed as a prophet figure in the style of the Old Testament" (
More Than One Way? pp. 110-111)
Emerging leader Rob Bell, who denies the eternal fiery hell and believes that atheists can be saved without faith in Christ, credits C.S. Lewis as a major influence in his book 
Love Wins. In the Acknowledgements Bell writes, “... to my parents, Rob and Helen, for suggesting when I was in high school that I read C.S. Lewis.”

This is very ungodly, very heretical fruit.
WHY IS LEWIS SO POPULAR WITH EVANGELICALS TODAY?
In light of his lack of clear scriptural salvation testimony, his heresies, his worldliness, and the massive pagan influences in his work, why are evangelicals today so enamored with C.S. Lewis? I believe the following are some of the chief reasons:
FIRST, NEW EVANGELICALS LOVE C.S. LEWIS BECAUSE THEY ARE CHARACTERIZED BY A PRIDE OF INTELLECT AND LEWIS WAS DEFINITELY AN INTELLECTUAL.

He had almost a photographic memory and had a triple first at Oxford in Philosophy, Classics, and English. He was one of the greatest experts of that day in English literature and occupied the first Chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University. Since New Evangelicals almost worship intellectualism (a spirit that the late David Otis Fuller called “scholarolatry”), it is no surprise that they would look upon the famous intellectual C.S. Lewis as a patron saint.
SECOND, NEW EVANGELICALS LOVE C.S. LEWIS BECAUSE OF HIS ECUMENICAL THINKING AND HIS REFUSAL TO PRACTICE SEPARATION.

This has been admitted by 
Christianity Today. “Lewis’s … concentration on the main doctrines of the church coincided with evangelicals’ concern to avoid ecclesiastical separatism” (Christianity Today, Oct. 25, 1993). CT therefore admits that C.S. Lewis is popular to Evangelicals today because, like them, he despised biblical separation.

C.S. Lewis was, in fact, very ecumenical. The following is an overview of his ecumenical philosophy and his influence on present-day ecumenical movement:

“Lewis was firmly ecumenical, though he distanced himself from outright liberalism. In his preface to 
Mere Christianity, Lewis states that his aim is to present ‘an agreed, or common, or central or mere Christianity.’ So he aims to concentrate on the doctrines that he believes are common to all forms of Christianity--including Roman Catholicism. It is no surprise that he submitted parts of the book to four clergymen for criticism--an Anglican, a Methodist, a Presbyterian, and a Roman Catholic! He hopes that the book will make it clear why all Christians ‘ought to be reunited,’ but warns that it should not be seen as an alternative to the creeds of existing denominations. He likens the ‘mere Christianity’ that he describes in the book to a hall from which various rooms lead off. These rooms are the various Christian traditions. And just as when you enter a house you do not stay in the hall but enter a room, so when you become a Christian you should join a particular Christian tradition. Lewis believes that it is not too important which room you enter. It will be right for some to enter the door marked ‘Roman Catholicism’ as it will for others to enter other doors. Whichever room you enter, says Lewis, the important thing is that you be convinced that it is the right one for you. And, he says, ‘When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors.’

“Mention should also be made of Lewis’ views of the sacraments. The sacraments ‘spread the Christ life to us’ (
Mere Christianity, book 2, chapter 5). In his Letters to Malcolm Lewis states that he does not want to ‘unsettle in the mind of any Christian, whatever his denomination, the concepts--for him traditional--by which he finds it profitable to represent to himself what is happening when he receives the bread and wine’ of the Lord’s Supper. What happens in the Lord’s Supper is a mystery, and so the Roman Catholic conception of the bread and wine becoming the actual body and blood of Christ might be just as valid as the Protestant view of the Lord’s Supper as a memorial (Letters to Malcolm, chapter 19). ...

“This enigma of C.S. Lewis was no more than a slight bemusement to me until recently three things changed my bemusement into bewilderment.

“In March 1994 the Evangelicals and Catholics Together movement produced its first document. This was a programatic document entitled
Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium. It was rightly said at the time that this document represented ‘a betrayal of the Reformation.’ I saw no connection between this and C.S. Lewis until a couple of years later when the symposiumEvangelicals and Catholics Together: Working Towards a Common Mission was published. In his contribution to the book, Charles Colson--the Evangelical ‘prime mover’ behind ECT--tells us that C.S. Lewis was a major influence which led him to form the movement (Billy Graham was another!). In fact Colson says that Evangelicals and Catholics Together seeks to continue the legacy of C.S. Lewis by focusing on the core beliefs of all true Christians (Common Mission, p. 36). The enigma took on a more foreboding aspect.

“The enigma darkened further when just last year (after becoming connected to the Internet at the end of 1996) I discovered, quite by accident, that C.S. Lewis is just as popular amongst Roman Catholics as he is amongst Evangelicals. Perhaps I should have known this already, but it had never struck me before.

“The third shock came last autumn when I read that 
Christianity Today--reputed to be the leading evangelical magazine in the USA--had conducted a poll amongst its readers to discover whom they considered the most influential theological writers of the twentieth century. You will have already guessed that C.S. Lewis came out on top!

“After these three things it came as no surprise to me this year to find that C.S. Lewis has exerted a major influence on the 
Alpha course, and that it quotes or refers to him almost ad nauseum. Could not the Alphacourse be renamed the ‘Mere Christianity’ course? ...

“In conclusion, I offer the following reflection. If it is true to say that ‘you are what you eat,’ then it is also true to say that ‘a Christian is what he hears and reads’ since this is how he gets his spiritual food. Thus 
if Christians are brought up on a diet of C.S. Lewis, it should not surprise us to find they are seeking ‘to continue the legacy of C.S. Lewis.’ The apostle Paul said, ‘A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump’ (Gal. 5:9--the whole passage is relevant to the present context); thus IF EVANGELICALS READ AND APPLAUD SUCH BOOKS AS MERE CHRISTIANITY IT SHOULD COME AS NO SURPRISE IF WE FIND THEM ‘WORKING TOWARDS A COMMON MISSION’ WITH THE ENEMIES OF THE GOSPEL. THE YOUNG CHRISTIAN SHOULD BE VERY CAREFUL WHAT HE READS, AND THOSE IN POSITIONS OF AUTHORITY (PASTORS, TEACHERS, PARENTS) SHOULD BE VERY CAREFUL WHAT THEY RECOMMEND OTHERS TO READ” (Dr. Tony Baxter, “The Enigma of C.S. Lewis,” CRN Journal, Winter 1998, Christian Research Network, Colchester, United Kingdom, p. 30; Baxter works for the Protestant Truth Society as a Wycliffe Preacher).

In April 1998, Mormon professor Robert Millet spoke at Wheaton College on the topic of C.S. Lewis. In a recent issue of 
Christianity Today, Millet, dean of Brigham Young University, is quoted as saying that C.S. Lewis “is so well received by Latter-day Saints [Mormons] because of his broad and inclusive vision of Christianity” (John W. Kennedy, “Southern Baptists Take Up the Mormon Challenge,” Christianity Today, June 15, 1998, p. 30).
THIRD, NEW EVANGELICALS LOVE C.S. LEWIS BECAUSE OF THEIR SHARED FASCINATION FOR OR AND SYMPATHY WITH ROME.

Today’s evangelicals have given us “Evangelicals and Rome Together” and even those who do not go that far usually speak of Rome’s errors in soft, congenial terms rather than labeling it the blasphemous, antichrist institution that it is and that Protestants and Baptists of old plainly called it. As we have seen, C.S. Lewis considered the Roman Catholic Church one of the acceptable “rooms” in the house of Christianity and longed for unity between Protestantism and Romanism. Lewis believed in prayers to the dead and purgatory.

Some of Lewis’s closest friends were Roman Catholics. J.R. Tolkien of
Lord of the Rings fame is one example. Tolkien and Lewis were very close and spent countless hours together. Lewis even credited Tolkien with having a large role in his “conversion.” Lewis was also heavily influenced by the Roman Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton. When asked what Christian writers had helped him, Lewis remarked in 1963, six months before he died, “The contemporary book that has helped me the most is Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man” (God in the Dock, edited by Walter Hooper, 1970, p. 260).

Lewis carried on a warm correspondence in Latin with Catholic priest Don Giovanni Calabria of Italy over their shared “concern for the reunification of the Christian churches” (
The Narnian, Alan Jacobs, pp. 249, 250). Calabria was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1988.

In 1943, Lewis gave a talk on “Christian Apologetics” for a group of priests in Wales (
The Narnian, p. 229).

From the 1940s to the end of his life, Lewis’s spiritual advisor was a Catholic priest named Walter Adams (
The Narnian, p. 224). It was to this priest that Lewis confessed his sins.

Roman Catholics love C.S. Lewis as much as evangelicals. His books are typically found in Catholic bookstores. Michael Coren, a Roman Catholic, wrote a biography of Lewis entitled “C.S. Lewis: The Man Who Created Narnia.” The Catholic news agency Zenit asked Coren, “What do Catholics need to know about C.S. Lewis?” He replied: “They should know he wasn’t a Catholic, but that doesn't mean he wouldn’t have become one eventually. G. K. Chesterton became a Catholic in 1922 but had really been one for 20 years. ... Lewis was born in Belfast, in sectarian Northern Ireland, so he was raised anti-Catholic like most Protestant children there. He was a man of his background but HIS VIEWS WERE VERY CATHOLIC: HE BELIEVED IN PURGATORY, BELIEVED IN THE SACRAMENTS, WENT TO CONFESSION” (“The Subtle Magic of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia: Michael Coren’s Perspective as the New Movie Looms,” Zenit, Dec. 7, 2005).

Peter Kreeft, a convert to Rome from the Dutch Reformed denomination, says C.S. Lewis was one of the “many strands of the rope that hauled me aboard the ark”:

“Even C. S. Lewis, the darling of Protestant Evangelicals, ‘smelled’ Catholic most of the time. ... Lewis is the only author I ever have read whom I thought I could completely trust and completely understand. But he believed in Purgatory, the Real Presence in the Eucharist, and not Total Depravity. He was no Calvinist. In fact, he was a medieval” (“Hauled Aboard the Ark,” http://www.peterkreeft.com/topics/hauled-aboard.htm).

Kreeft is right. Evangelicalism’s love affair with C.S. Lewis is evidence of its deep spiritual compromise and lack of sound doctrinal discernment.

In fact, even Mormons love Lewis. In April 1998, Mormon Robert Millet spoke at Wheaton College on the topic of C.S. Lewis. In 
Christianity Today, Millet, dean of Brigham Young University, is quoted as saying that C.S. Lewis “is so well received by Latter-day Saints [Mormons] because of his broad and inclusive vision of Christianity” (John W. Kennedy, “Southern Baptists Take Up the Mormon Challenge,”Christianity Today, June 15, 1998, p. 30)

“Your glorying is not good. Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump?” (1 Cor. 5:6).

“Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners” (1 Cor. 15:33).

“Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away” (2 Tim. 3:5).

“Now I beseech you, brethren, mark them which cause divisions and offences contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned; and avoid them” (Rom. 16:17).
 
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Monday, October 21, 2019

MICHELLE MALKIN SPEAKS AT THE FREEDOM CENTER

MICHELLE MALKIN SPEAKS AT THE FREEDOM CENTER
 Who's really behind America's immigration crisis?
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:
Editor’s note: Below are the video and transcript of Michelle Malkin's talk in Beverly Hills for the David Horowitz Freedom Center on October 15th.  She discusses her latest book: Open Borders Inc.: Who's Funding America's Destruction. Don't miss it!
Michelle Malkin from DHFC on Vimeo.
Transcript:
Michelle Malkin: As many of you may know, I cut my teeth and started my newspaper journalism career in Southern California, in the Valley.  And I was just joking with a table mate of mine that I literally lived in a closet in Canoga Park in my early years.  I was an editorial writer and columnist for the Los Angeles Daily News.  And so much of what I observed, reported on, exposed in those early newbie years as a journalist, colored the career that I've laid out for myself over the last 25-plus years.
And as many of you who are longtime Californians, native Californians, know, everything that we're experiencing now with regard to open borders and Open Borders, Inc. started here.  This was ground zero.  And I had my journalistic antennae tuned to grassroots citizens in this state who were the early warning sentinels, who were exposing and decrying the fissures that were beginning to show in our civic culture -- the balkanization of the school system, the impact of the open borders infrastructures Cloward-Piven strategy, which David and the Center have for so long exposed, of completely overwhelming our health, education, welfare, public safety and national security systems.
I was here when Proposition 187 came into existence.  And that too was, I think, a prescient outbreak, revolt, of grassroots citizens against Open Borders, Inc.  And of course, over the last 25-plus years, anytime that citizens have actually had a direct vote and referendum on immigration matters, it is always in favor of sovereignty and against open borders and Open Borders, Inc.
So I've described this latest book, this seventh book of mine, "Open Borders, Inc.: Who's Funding America's Destruction?" as the third in my Star Wars trilogy of books on immigration.  And I was very humbled to be able to talk about my first book, "Invasion," in 2002 at one of David's early gatherings.  That book was fueled by my outrage in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  And I sought to document how every lapse in immigration enforcement had paved the path for the 19 hijackers who came in through the front door.
This is one of my biggest pet peeves, okay?  So I will see a lot of young people purporting to represent the Right and right-thinking people, declaim that they are against illegal immigration and for legal immigration.  Can we graduate beyond this kindergarten level of expressing our views and thoughts and analysis of immigration policy?  All 19 hijackers came through the front door, the vast majority of them through the Bush-created Visa Express program.  That is a legal immigration program.  That is a legal means of getting into the country.  I get it.  You are against people traipsing across the border illegally.  But are you for that?  Are you for the Diversity Visa lottery program, which has been the bane of our immigration system now for 20 years?  We've had Republicans promise over and over again to kill this program, which still is preserved to this day, of randomly giving out the privilege of entering this country.
How many of you are naturalized Americans yourself?  Raise your hands.  Yes.  Anyone come here through the Diversity Visa lottery program?  Handing out the privilege of coming into this country randomly, like the lotto, is probably the most insane thing that I've heard any sovereign country consider doing.
Many of you will remember that there was an attack at the El Al counter at LAX in 2002.  Hesham Hadayet.  How to get into this country randomly through the Diversity Visa lottery program.  There are countless examples of people who were not vetted properly, who did not offer some sort of special skill or special fealty to our Western principles, culture; who didn't have to demonstrate any type of willingness to assimilate to American values, who've come through that legal pipeline into the country.
So "Invasion" connected the dots between our blind tolerance for mass uncontrolled immigration to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  And there's a scene I'll never forget.  And I lived in the Beltway swamp.  This is the kind of refugee that I endorse, refugees from the Beltway swamp.  But when I was there, I would often have to do business and work around the Fairfax County area.  And after 9/11, I visited the same 7-Eleven and DMVs that the 9/11 hijackers did, where they hooked up with illegal alien day laborers who helped provide them with the state IDs that helped them get onto the planes and board the planes that they then drove into the Pentagon, the Twin Towers and Shanksville, Pennsylvania.  And you couldn't connect the dots any more clearly or efficiently than that, allowing a swamp of upwards of 30 million illegal aliens in the country, not just border trespassers and deportation evaders, but visa overstayers.  Forty percent of the people who are here illegally are visa overstayers.  And this is a lesson that 3,000 people sacrificed their lives for America to learn.  And we still refuse to learn it to this day.
So flash forward to the launch of "Open Borders, Inc." and my book tour.  I went back to the Beltway swamp, because it is an occasional hazard.  And I helped lead a rally to show support for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.  As part of my book tour, I've become a community organizer for America.  We need more of those.  Right?
(Applause)
And put out a call for patriots and citizens in one of my other former adopted home counties, Montgomery County, Maryland, which is ground zero in the battle against extremist radical sanctuary policies that are endangering America.  And nearly a thousand people came out on our side.  On our side.  This is a county where Soros organizations have held sway over an extremist county council for years now, paving the way for MS-13 to hijack the streets, hijack the schools.
And one of the lead organizations there, which you may be familiar with, is a group called Casa de Maryland, directly subsidized by George Soros -- tax exempt, nonprofit, previously led by the now chief of the Democratic National Committee, Thomas Perez, which was one of the forerunners in the amnesty movement, lobbying successfully for driver's licenses for illegal aliens, in-state tuition discounts for so-called "dreamers," doing everything that they can to obliterate the fundamental difference between legal and illegal aliens.
And this group had a political arm, Casa in Action, that had supported and given campaign donations to the Montgomery County Executive, Marc Elrich.  He showed up at the Stand With ICE rally on the other side, with the amnesty mob, with people who were wearing Antifa T-shirts.  And the people on the other side, who I call sanctuary anarchists, outlaws, tried to drown out an Angel Mom and an Angel Wife who talked about the bloody consequences of open borders and how they had been permanently separated from their family members because of this revolving door that benefits criminal aliens.
Well, that night, I debated one of the leaders of Casa de Maryland.  And I started out by talking about how I had bought my first house in Montgomery County, how my two children were raised in Montgomery County, and how we used to be able to go to a local mall and play land and local parks with our then baby and toddler and feel safe.
But in Germantown, where I had bought my house, multiple criminal aliens had preyed upon young girls and teenagers, one an 11-year-old who was gang raped by two criminals who had already been issued final orders of deportation, after multiple encounters with the law.  Another 16-year-old girl was the victim of a home invasion robbery in Germantown, not far from where I had raised my kids.  Her suspected rapist had also been apprehended multiple times at the border, issued an NTA, a notice to appear; which really should be called an NTD, a notice to disappear.  And the only reason why these incidents became news and then national news, because I'm sure -- raise your hand if you heard about this over the summer -- in the course of one month, 10 of these suspects had finally been caught after going through the revolving door.
Why do we know about them?  Not because of the county.  The county doesn't keep statistics like that.  They don't want to know.  No papers, no problems.  The only reason we know about it is because brave local police officers were so disgusted with sanctuary policies that tied their hands behind their backs and gagged their mouths, and prevented them from communicating and cooperating with federal immigration agents.
And so I laid this all out in this local debate on a DC TV station with this smirking Soros minion sitting next to me.  This was the week of the 18th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that we were debating.  And so I started talking about the nexus between mass uncontrolled immigration and national security.  And her response was to laugh.  To laugh out loud.  And then, the so-called moderator -- moderator -- immoderator -- said, "That's a different topic," and interrupted me, and prevented me from finishing the thought.  We just keep hitting the snooze button and indulging in this collective amnesia about what the fundamental lessons should've been, that we should've learned and acted upon.  Every September 11th, there are platitudes: never again, never forget.  And then amnesia sets in all over again.
The second in my Star Wars trilogy of immigration books shifted focus to the economic impact on American workers.  That book was called "Sold Out," and it was coauthored with an incredible patriot, a former American computer software programmer, who is now a lawyer who represents the best and brightest American IT workers who've been negatively affected by the H-1B visa program and other  pipelines that have been abused by big business, with its insatiable thirst for cheap foreign labor.
This book was initially prompted by my exasperation, on both sides of the camera, of watching TV news segments try to explain the phenomenon of these illegal alien caravans that have escalated under the Trump Administration.  So watching them, but also being on the other side of the camera, and being asked a question and only having two minutes to answer, who's funding this, who's behind it?  And by the time I start my answer, the segment is over.
So I sought to cram as much information in the middle of two covers to answer that question, and to provide people with intellectual ammunition -- uh-oh, I said ammunition, that's a trigger word.  I said trigger, that's a trigger word, too -- so that they have as much knowledge and data and facts to counter the daily onslaught of Open Borders, Inc. propaganda.
I have sought over the course of my career to highlight the work of so many independent investigators, think tanks, organizations like David's, that have done the yeoman's work in this regard.  A lot of the information will not be necessarily new to you all.  But I think what I did was take all of the puzzle pieces and piece them together to paint, I think, as vivid a picture as possible of how these hundreds of organizations and dozens of very powerful CEOs and open borders philanthropists work in concert to sabotage our borders and undermine our sovereignty.
People have asked me, "What was the most surprising thing that you learned in the course of writing the book?"  And I would have to say that, looking from 14,000 feet -- and that is almost literal, because I'm on my mountaintop in Colorado Springs -- what was most daunting was documenting the billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies that are underwriting our own destruction and, along with that, the billions of dollars that people may unwittingly and unknowingly be donating to charities and organizations that they think are doing good for those communities.
And I'll start with the Catholic Church.  I am a Catholic.  And I have long known about -- and I'm sure -- how many Catholics in the room here, yes -- we all know about the social justice hijacked wing of the Church.  We've got this nightmare of a Pope who has designated himself the global leader of the anti-Trump Resistance every single day.  We know about the radical ties between the bishops in Chicago and Saul Alinsky himself.  Much of the work that David's researchers have done has illuminated this, the funding mechanism created by Saul Alinsky and Bernard Sheil, the Chicago bishop, in the late '60s.  That was the permanent legacy of the community organizing wing of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Industrial Areas Foundation.
And these groups have persisted decade after decade.  During the Bush years, they were at the forefront of organizing the illegal alien marches that we saw, where the American flag was flown upside-down and replaced with the Mexican flag.  And the sort of militant and most grievance mongering of the open borders protestors showed their faces before there was a PR makeover.  Right?  Because, remember that, after the defeat, they realized they needed to clean up, give everybody a little American flag and stop talking about La Raza, and the borders crossed us, we didn't cross the borders.  Right?  No more Reconquista talk for a little while.  But they can only hold it in for so long.  Right?
And there was an outbreak of that as I was finishing up the manuscript this summer for "Open Borders, Inc." in my adopted home state of Colorado.  At an ICE facility right outside of Denver, in Aurora, Colorado, these Antifa and Abolish ICE forces laid siege to the grounds of the facility.  The police had been ordered to stand down.  And the American flag at the facility was torn down and replaced with a Mexican flag and a defaced "Blue Lives Matter" flag.
Again, sort of looking at this from 14,000 feet, you can see the natural progression of the cop bashing that David and so many of his compatriots first exposed in the '60s and '70s.  The Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army.  They morphed into the MoveOn mob and the Answer Coalition, the Soros funded organizations; whether it was ACORN morphing into the Code Pink people.  Then it became the Occupy movement.  And these were the people that were defecating on police cars in New York City.  And now, under Trump, it's the same people.  You know, they even have some of the same signs, targeting immigration enforcement now, and physically intimidating and harassing 20,000-plus ICE agents across the country.
There was an op-ed piece in the New York Times earlier this year championing the doxing -- in other words, the revealing of the private information -- of ICE agents and their families.  And these are the people who call us inciters to violence and hatred.  In the book, I have a screenshot of a tweet that was allowed to stand on Twitter for many days, that was posted by Occupy Wall Street New York's chapter, graphically showing the murder of an ICE agent and what illegal aliens should do if they encounter them, basically garroting them.
This week, we had this hoo-hah about some meme video that was shown at a conference at the Trump Doral Hotel.  And yet, the same people who are decrying that as some incitement to violence have had nothing to say about the shots that have been fired at ICE facilities in San Antonio.  There was a protest at the house of the warden of the Aurora, Colorado facility, where the Antifa mobsters threatened not only the warden and his family but shouted at the "pigs" of the Aurora Police Department who were there to protect the house and the neighborhood and told them to "go home and swallow bullets."
Hardly a peep about what happened in Tacoma, Washington, at the ICE facility there, where the paid Soros-Lite minions included an Antifa thug who attempted to firebomb the building.  Did you hear about that?  Not a peep.
There's one other huge factor in perpetuating these gross caricatures of our ICE agents as somehow KKK or Nazis or SS guards; the most noxious rhetoric aimed at them.  And that is Hollywood itself.  Right?  And here we are, in the land of high walls and bulletproof windows and armed 24/7 guards.  Many of the social justice groups have infiltrated the Screenwriters' Guild.  And they're weaving their open borders ICE-bashing narratives into sitcoms and movies.  And they are allowed to advocate physical violence against ICE agents and then put a laugh track underneath.
Some of you may remember, before it died a necessary death, the revival of Murphy Brown in the past year.  And for Thanksgiving, they had an episode where there was an ICE raid that was going to target a family friend who had a food truck.  And Murphy Brown threatened to spatchcock the ICE agents if they did their job.  Any culinary folks here know what spatchcocking is?  Do you want to say what it means?
Unidentified Audience Member: [Inaudible]
Michelle Malkin: And crack it open.
Unidentified Audience Member: [Inaudible]
Michelle Malkin: Yes.  For roasting.  This is what they wanted to do to ICE agents.  And yet, this week, we've got this hue and cry, and there's going to be op-eds out the wazoo about a meme of Trump.  But that's allowed.
The underwriting of that agenda in Hollywood, unfortunately, doesn't just come from the Left.  And I document in the book about the Chrissy Teigens and John Legends of the world directing millions of dollars to illegal alien propaganda groups.  These are the same groups that are taking cases on behalf of illegal aliens all the way up to the Supreme Court.  So, you know, I've told people outside of the Hollywood zone that they should think twice about downloading another John Legend song.  Because you can defund Open Borders, Inc. in small ways in your own home.  It's easy not to give him money when you know where it's going.
And when people open up the newspapers every day and see that our President's plenary powers are once again being stymied by these rogue judicial sanctuary anarchists -- I mean, at least Antifa, they wear their black masks; we know that they're the enemy.  But it's the anarchists in black robes who are doing so much more damage and causing so much more peril to our country.
But it's not just the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.  All across this country, we have these judges who are issuing nationwide injunctions from their lower court benches affecting the entire country and throwing monkey wrenches into every aspect of immigration enforcement, whether it's slamming shut the revolving door of the deportation abyss, trying to get a handle on the asylum racket, stopping the "dreamer" scheme that issued 800,000 work permits.  That's what it's really about.  It's not about hopes and dreams; it's about work permits.
And the entire illegal alien lawyers lobby, of course, is subsidized by both Soros and Hollywood and, again, our own tax dollars.  Pretty much every law school, public and private, in this country runs clinics where they take their law school students down to the border to conduct Know Your Rights seminars, where they're -- I mean, you wonder where they're cooking up all of the fraudulent claims?  It's at the Know Your Rights seminars.
So the Catholic Church, the Hollywood elite, the legal infrastructure, and the deliberate overwhelming of every aspect of our system -- if that wasn't enough -- and this is something that so many patriots have faced over the years, but it's escalating now -- is that there's an intersection between the war on our borders, the war on our sovereignty and the war on free speech.
There is a chapter, that I think is especially important and especially relevant to David's group and all of you who support him, on the Southern Poverty Law Center.  And of course, the SPLC has now infiltrated the inner sanctums of Silicon Valley.  And that is what's most daunting.
And I'll tell you, just from a personal perspective as somebody who was an early adopter in the social media space, it seems so quaint now, this idea, when I first started out on the internet in 1999.  I mean, I started a blog before "blog" was even a word.  I used this clunky program called Microsoft FrontPage to construct a website that took all day to update, for just like a single paragraph.  And when I talk to young people, I say, "You don't understand what 2400 baud sounded like."  Remember that?  And then, when it would finally finish, "Yes! One new paragraph on the internet!"  But the idea that you could just plant your flag and never have to be concerned that the political or ideological nature of your content would get your website pulled, those days are over.
And as I was putting this manuscript to bed, one of the researchers that I most admire, a solo practitioner named Ann Corcoran -- and I'm saying it in the past tense -- had an incredible website called Refugee Resettlement Watch.  And this is an aspect of our failure to have a rational immigration system that is very discriminating -- and yes, we can say that word, discriminating -- this is one aspect that has been neglected until recently.  And she highlighted cases of fraud, cases of lack of community input, subversion of local control.
You wonder how the Twin Cities became the Twin Cities?  It was because of the United Nations, Soros NGOs, and religious contractors.  U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is a biggie.  But in Minnesota, it was the Lutheran Immigrant and Refugee Services.  And when I've talked about this, there are lot of conservative Lutherans who protest, they don't want to hear it.  Well, that's not our Senate; that's someone else's.  Both Senates, whether it's the conservative one or the more liberal ELCA, have supported the work of the Lutheran Immigrant and Refugee Services, which is one of the biggest profiteers in the refugee resettlement space.
And Ann Corcoran had been reporting on this for upwards of 10 years and woke up one morning earlier this summer to find that WordPress, which is the blogging software that she uses -- and that I use, by the way -- had determined that her work had violated some community guidelines or standards.  There's no appellate process, and she has spent the last several months trying to rebuild 10 years' worth of reporting on this racket.
So I finished this book with a special sense of urgency.  Because the tactics of the SPLC, which named Ann Corcoran one of its agents of hate, along with me and David, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ben Carson -- these are the groups that have labeled me a white supremacist.
(Laughter)
I'm not doing a very good job of it, am I?  They're the same groups that have attacked me since the launch of the book as -- yes, and I know many of you have also borne these slings and arrows and chuckled about it -- an anti-Semite.  I am married to the grandson of Ukrainian Jews.  Doesn't matter.  They have gotten away with slapping these defamatory labels on peaceful patriotic citizens for decades.  You would've thought, after the internal crumbling of the SPLC in the past year, whistleblowers coming out of the woodworks to talk about sexual harassment, racial harassment, Morris Dees finally slinking away -- even many left-wing publications and reporters talking about the fraud of the poverty palace.  And within weeks of that scandal finally blowing up, there was the New York Times and the Washington Post reverting back to form, quoting the SPLC as the absolute moral authority on who's a hater, who's a xenophobe, who's a racist.
When is this going to stop?  After the House Republicans, when they were in power, defunded ACORN, didn't you have a sense of hope?  All right! We're just getting started! What happened?  ACORN reconstituted itself into five different other community organizations that still do their work.  Many of these groups are going to be getting money to conduct the census.  We continue to subsidize our own destruction.  And these establishment Republicans in the swamp have allowed it to happen.  They've enabled it either by default, by neglect or, unfortunately -- and this has been a theme of so much of my work over the last 25-plus years, and it's a note I'll end on now -- too many of these Republicans themselves are charter members of Open Borders, Inc. who are lining their own pockets.
Some of you might've seen a speech that I did at CPAC earlier this year.  Anybody?  Thank you.  You can watch it on YouTube if you haven't seen it yet.  But I was disgusted by the fact that after two days into the conference, only 13 minutes total had been spent on the most important existential issue of our time.  And that is, it's not just immigration.  It is the right of self-determination of any country to decide who gets in, how many; and what we do when we detect people who don't belong here in the first place.
And the numbers are everything.  The numbers are everything.  It's not just the 30 million who may be here illegally, and that's probably a lowball figure.  It's the one million new green cards that we issue every year.  It's the overwhelming that I've talked about, the 700,000 visa overstayers, the half million deportation evaders; and then all of these legal pipelines which are being exploited to the detriment of American citizens, American families and American workers.
And I gave the speech.  And I pointed out that the organizers of CPAC itself had allowed people to come inside their tent who have targeted many of the patriots who've warned about our problems.  Van Jones got to cuddle up to Matt Schlapp onstage at CPAC.  Van Jones, who has been one of the most active hit men of the Soros-funded Left.  And yet, many nationalist patriots were banned from even entering the ballroom to listen to my speech.  There's something wrong with that kind of enterprise which has been converted into a pay-for-play system for Open Borders, Inc.
I tell a story in the preface of the book about how after I finished my speech, I had to go backstage to get out of the venue.  And I was stopped by a couple of people who thanked me for my speech.  Then there were people who sort of avoided me.  And then there were the clueless, three-piece-suited lobbyists who came up to me.  And remember what I said at the beginning about this platitude of "I'm against illegal, I'm for legal."  So a lobbyist comes up to me.  Says, "Oh, I really appreciated what you had to say."  Hadn't listened to me.  "I'm against illegal immigration, too.  But here's my business card.  We really ought to talk about how you can support expansion of the H-2 program for seasonal workers."  Low-wage foreign workers.  Did you not hear anything I just said?
This is the Beltway mentality.  This is what we face.  Because these people are inside the tent.  And I will say it again -- fragging from inside the tent is so much more dangerous than the bombs and grenades that are lobbied from outside.  And that is not a comfortable message.  It's definitely not one that I'm going on Fox News to talk about a lot, although I'm happy to, if anyone wants me to.
But going forward, I think, especially as we head into this deep plunge of an election cycle, it's easy to make fun of the clown car of the Democratic presidential candidates.  That's easy.  What's harder is to combat the people from inside the tent that are sabotaging the best opportunities we have to seize back control of our country.  We've got good people in the West Wing.  They're the ones who are revamping the Refugee Resettlement program who are doing everything they can do in their power to fight back against judicial anarchy and reclaim the powers of the President over immigration policy.
The last platitude that just gets on my nerves is that our laws are broken.  Our laws are not broken.  Our will to enforce them is.
(Applause)
I will stop here, because I think I am going to answer questions?
Unidentified Participant: Yes.
Michelle Malkin: And I appreciate your time.  Thank you.
(Applause)
Yes?
Unidentified Audience Member: [Inaudible]
Unidentified Participant: Wait.  We've got the mic.  I'll come to you next.  But we'll start here, and then I'll come over.
Michelle Malkin: Yes, ma'am?
Unidentified Audience Member: I'm going to assume that Trump takes back the House and the Senate.  What can we expect on immigration, assuming that?
Michelle Malkin: It depends on who we're sending to the House and the Senate.  And what I have seen over the last couple of years, unfortunately, are groups funded, for example, by the open borders Libertarians -- the Koch Foundation, for example -- to combat patriots that would be sent to Washington to help provide ground troops and support for President Trump.  There was a race up in Northern California where a longtime grassroots immigration enforcement hawk, Tim Donnelly, was going up against a Never Trumper moderate.  And for some reason, forces in the White House convinced Trump to endorse the guy who hated him instead of the guy who supported him.
And so when you have this open borders, Never Trump faction that does things like what 11 Republican senators did in the last couple of weeks -- two weeks ago, you might've seen the headlines -- 11 GOP senators voted against the emergency declaration at the border that was supported by President Trump.  If we keep sending people like that back to the House and Senate, what's the point?
Unidentified Audience Member: Yeah.  I know you didn't quite -- there's kind of an elephant in the living room that I don't know if you really talk about in your book or not, but it's human trafficking, like the sex trafficking.  I mean, that's what's really kind of behind this is the mass enslavement of these people that is even -- you know, because, like I said, they're being brought as a permanent basically slave class to vote in and destroy this country, like is being done throughout Europe.  I don't know how much you discuss that.  But that seems kind of the elephant in the living room I wanted to say.
Michelle Malkin: Yeah.  Chapter one, which is called, "Sin Fronteras: All Aboard The Caravan Cartel," talks about the misery that is enabled and induced by people who hide behind the compassion curtain.  And that includes many of the Catholic organizations that stand up all of these illegal alien shelters, from Central America all the way up through Mexico and into the interior of our country.  I mean, the inducements that they are creating, the pull factors, the magnets, of illegal alien family, parents, who are paying coyotes to drag their underage girls, who are then subjected to the worst kind of abuse.  And then, the coyotes, who pay the drug cartels derecho de piso to get across the finish line into the country.  And at some point, there needs to be some sort of journalistic and political and ideological jujitsu to turn the table of that narrative that we're the ones that don't care, that we don't care about human rights, that we don't care about women.
And I think the Montgomery County, Maryland example was a perfect opportunity to do that, to put that laser focus on the fact that most of the victims of these criminal aliens going through the revolving door are themselves members of these illegal alien communities.
Unidentified Participant: We'll go here.  And then, Carl, you're next.
Unidentified Audience Member: Yeah.  You're one of the good naturalized citizens in this country.  So the country needs people like you and other naturalized citizens that are contributing greatly to our economy and to our country.  How would you design an immigration policy that attracts those people that are going to benefit the country in a manner that gets our economy going forward, as opposed to just getting people who are here to undermine our country?
Michelle Malkin: So just to refresh a little bit about my own personal background -- my parents came here legally from the Philippines in 1970.  They had to know English fluently before they even stepped foot on American soil.  They had to pay all of their medical fees and undergo medical screening.  I was born here.  And my father was a neonatologist at a time when that specialty was really just coming into the fore.  And so he had to demonstrate an extreme benefit to the country, because there weren't many people who were involved in his specialty.  And he was at the Johns Hopkins University with one of the godfathers of neonatology and then ran the NICU unit at the Atlantic City Medical Center for almost 30 years.
My mom was a public schoolteacher and taught everything from so-called bilingual education -- and of course, those of you in California know why I say "so-called" bilingual education, right?  Because it's really native language maintenance that helps school districts collect a $2,000 per pupil fee.  That was a shock to my mom, a revelation.  She was outraged to learn that she was participating in that and stopped doing it.  Because she knew, even in her own life, of course, that English is the language of success.  Of course, that's a trigger, you're not allowed to say that, either.
And so both of my parents, by virtue of their own educational background and work skills, demonstrated that they were not going to be public charges in America.  And of course, we've got all of these left-wing groups suing over that reform by President Trump.
What does an ideal immigration system look like?  Well, we can't know until we have what I have advocated since I came out with "Invasion" in 2002, a complete immigration moratorium.  We need to take a breather.
(Applause)
Then we can systematically go through every single aspect, both physical control of our land, sea and air ports of entry.  We have to look at the consular offices overseas and what they're doing to vet people who are applying for short-term visas and green cards.  Every single program -- and I've documented this in my entire trilogy -- has been overwhelmed.  There is no control.  We have to reassert control.
And then, that of course includes thinking about the magnets that are drawing people here to break our laws.  That includes rethinking birthright citizenship.  And it means ditching chain migration.  And then, when it comes to elevating special skills, we have to be very vigilant and make sure that we are not shortchanging American workers.  Because the H-1B program is proof of concept that, even if you have special skills as your criteria, it is being abused and sabotaged by big business forces.
Unidentified Participant: We're going to do two more questions.  Carl, and then we'll see about the last one.
Unidentified Audience Member: Yeah.  Ms. Malkin, in your discussion, you mentioned the New York Times twice.  A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times came out with a publication that said the United States as a nation didn't start with the pilgrims in 1620 or with the Declaration of Independence in 1776; but in 1619, when 20 or 40 black slaves were imported into Jamestown.  Which means that the United States is fundamentally a racist, white supremacist nation that has no right to any sovereignty, has no right to make any borders.  Could you comment on that?
Michelle Malkin: Yes.
So that curriculum now will be spread in thousands of government-run school districts across the country.  And it is merely a supplement to all of the sovereignty undermining propaganda that has metastasized in the school system for the last 30 years.  Think about that.  And couple it with the fact -- and I report on this in the book -- that the SPLC has a curriculum called -- and they always have the most brilliant and anodyne sounding names -- Teaching Tolerance.  Teaching Tolerance.  This is in 10,000 school districts.  And what they're doing with that curriculum is obliterating the difference, again, between legal and illegal immigration.  They teach the children how to be junior lobbyist for the illegal alien dreamer agenda.  And they teach the kindergarteners how to draw signs that say, "migration is beautiful" and "no human being is illegal."  Everything starts in K through 12.
And that is my warning to -- I understand that we absolutely have to focus on all of the craziness and the orthodoxies that have infested higher education.  But I think the mistake is that we haven't paid nearly enough attention to what's going on in K through 12.
My friend, Brigitte Gabriel, who has an organization, Act for America, did an analysis of middle school textbooks and how they are whitewashing violent jihad in their propagandizing about radical Islam.  When you've got the teachers' unions, who put "Rules for Radicals" as the number-one book on their teachers' reaching list, we've ceded the game right there.
And again, I practice what I preach.  I homeschooled, with my husband, my youngest child for five years.  And I think that's probably the best immunization.  That's the one kind of vaccine I support these days is the vaccine against liberal virus, right?  But it goes to show you that we have to pay attention down-ballot as well.  And that's something that's not going to get on the Drudge Report or Fox News.  But I absolutely support more people, like the people in this room, running for school boards across the country.
Unidentified Participant: Okay.  Brent's going to get the last question.  But before that, Michelle is going to sign books at the table in the back of the room here.  And we still have books for sale out by the registration.
Unidentified Audience Member: Hello.  God bless you, Michelle.
(Applause)
Michelle Malkin: Thank you, appreciate that.
Unidentified Audience Member: You are what I call one of the modern American matriarchs and the authentic feminists.  With the situation with the viciousness of the Cloward-Piven invasion, euphemistically called immigration, what is it that women don't realize?  And how can they be spoken to to recognize they are the direct victims of this fraud?
Michelle Malkin: I need to think about how to answer that.  Because, you know, I've done this for a long time.  And I had the passion to expose radical open borders ideology early on in my career because I understood what a privilege it was for my parents to come here.  And they always inculcated that in me.  And, you know, you hear this word "privilege" bandied about now as if it's some sort of expletive.  And the problem isn't that we should apologize for privilege; it's that we should be grateful for it.
And then, when I had my own kids, the nature of my passion changed.  Because I thought about what my parents were able to bestow on my brother and me.  And the urgency of writing "Invasion," and the thousands of columns and blog posts that I've done over the years, was fueled by my desire to leave a better place for my own children.  And that's obviously what binds us all together as fellow American citizens is that we want to preserve and protect the American dream for ourselves and our posterity.
And for so many addled left-wing women not to see that they are cheating themselves and their futures, it alarms me to no end.  And again, I just want to come back to the fact that it's women who are paying the most attention to what goes on in the classroom.  And it's women who need to take more responsibility for inculcating in their children this sense of gratitude that I'm talking about.
When I look at the faces of the congressional brat pack, and Alexandria Open Borders --
(Laughter)
-- and how vile and ugly that hatred they have for the blessings that we enjoy every day, I know that I'm going to be in this fight for a long time.  And I know you will be, too.
Thank you.
(Applause)

DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE ARRESTS HUNDREDS IN TAKEDOWN OF DARKNET CHILD PORN EXPLOITATION SITE

DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE ARRESTS HUNDREDS IN TAKEDOWN OF DARKNET CHILD EXPLOITATION SITE
Hundreds of child predators were arrested this month as part of the Department of Justice’s take down of the largest known child porn website. One America's Salina Arredondo has the details.
SEE ALSO:
https://www.infowars.com/ivanka-trump-touts-justice-departments-largest-child-porn-bust-ever/
EXCERPT:
“Our message for those who produce, distribute and receive child pornography is clear: You may try to hide behind technology, but we will find you and we will arrest and prosecute you,” Ivanka wrote in a follow-up tweet, quoting the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Jessie Liu.

ALGERIA: POLICE KICK CHRISTIANS OUT OF CHURCHES DAYS AFTER PROTESTS OVER GOVERNMENT CRACKDOWN ON HOUSES OF WORSHIP

ALGERIA: POLICE KICK CHRISTIANS OUT OF CHURCHES DAYS AFTER PROTESTS OVER GOVERNMENT CRACKDOWN ON HOUSES OF WORSHIP
BY CHRISTINE DOUGLASS-WILLIAMS
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:
Persecution of Christians is intensifying in Algeria, with increasing church closures and backlash by Muslim families against Christians who are open about their faith. In a recent incident, “Christians in north-central Algeria were kicked out of their churches by police just days after many faithful protested the government’s crackdown on houses of worship.”
“The influence and activity of radical Islamic groups” also pose an additional danger to Christians, and it doesn’t stop there as persecution rises in the country. Authorities are also targeting Christians using Algeria’s blasphemy laws, which are similar to Pakistan’s. Christians have been accused of blasphemy just for being Christian.
In Algeria, it’s forbidden by law to “shake the faith” of a Muslim or to use “means of seduction” to convert a Muslim to another religion.
Black slaves are also being held in Algeria. Racism is so endemic that the New York Times published an article “Black in Algeria? Then You’d Better Be Muslim.” Why? Because then at least if you’re a black Muslim in Nigeria, you might appeal to the sympathies of the rest of the Muslim population.
The plight of Christians and blacks in Islamic Algeria is, as usual, being ignored by Western “human rights” groups and so-called anti-hate networks, because they’re too busy slamming critics of Islam and branding them “Islamophobic” to really care about human rights.
“Algeria shuts down 3 churches days after Christians hold sit-in protest,” by Samuel Smith, Christian Post, October 17, 2019:
Christians in north-central Algeria were kicked out of their churches by police just days after many faithful protested the government’s crackdown on houses of worship.
Christian Solidarity Worldwide, a U.K.-based nongovernmental organization that monitors persecution in 20 countries and has consultative status with the U.N., reports that three Algerian Christian churches have been shut down this month.
According to CSW, the number of churches that have been shut down in Algeria so far this year has risen to at least eight.
Since 2017, waves of church closures have been carried out by authorities in the Muslim-majority country on the basis of a 2006 law that requires all non-Islamic places of worship to be authorized by a national government agency.
Critics say that that agency, the National Commission for Non-Muslim Worship, does not actually meet and therefore, applications to build new churches are not considered.
On Wednesday, police shut down The Light Church in the city of Tizi Ouzou in north-central Algeria and evicted worshipers from the church.
The forced closure of The Light Church follows the closing of two other churches this week: Protestant Church of the Full Gospel in Tizi Ouzou and Source of Life Church in the Tizi Ouzou suburb of Makouda….
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SEE ALSO:
https://www.christianpersecution.com/algeria/algeria-shuts-down-3-churches-days-after-christians-hold-sit-in-protest/ 

TRUMP PRAISES ELIJAH CUMMINGS, BUT BALTIMORE IS STILL A RAT INFESTED CITY

TRUMP PRAISES ELIJAH CUMMINGS, 
BUT BALTIMORE IS STILL A RAT INFESTED CITY 

Trump's BRILLIANT 'Baltimore is a Rat Infested Mess' Comment