UNSTOPPABLE NEWS FORCE: HomeOpinionCommentary Trump moves to counter hatred of Christians and Jews Left claims it doesn't exist Hatred of Christians and Jews illustration by Alexander Hunter/The Washington Times Hatred of Christians and Jews illustration by Alexander Hunter/The Washington Times more > Print Commentary By Don Feder - Sunday, February 16, 2025 OPINION: President Trump believes the hand of God saved him from an assassin’s bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania. Now Mr. Trump is extending his hand to persecuted Christians and Jews — not in Africa or the Middle East but right here in America. At the National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 6, the president announced a task force to combat anti-Christian bias headed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, a passionate defender of First Amendment freedom of religion. “While I’m in the White House, we will protect Christians in our schools, in our military, in our government and in the public square,” Mr. Trump proclaimed. You Might Also Like PAID Berries for Breakfast? Doctor Says These are Aging Seniors (Avoid At All Costs) (thehealthyfat.com) Female Athletes Who Are Dominating 2024PAID Female Athletes Who Are Dominating 2024 (sportsbrief.com) This drew the predictable response from the left. USA Today columnist Chris Brennan insisted, “There is no bias” against Christians. If he went to a circus, he’d miss the elephants. Americans United for Separation of Church and State squawked that the task force would “misuse religious freedom to justify bigotry and discrimination.” Fighting bigotry and discrimination justifies bigotry and discrimination? The group should change its name to Americans United for the Separation of Rhetoric and Reason. TIMESMYView all Trump’s record-breaking start rattles Washington, rankles rivals, but earns raves from voters Editorial Confirm Kash Patel as FBI chief Trump starting task force to combat anti-Christian actions; AG Bondi to lead it In a 2023 survey, 60% of White evangelicals said they faced a lot of discrimination. From May 2020 through November 2024, there were 366 attacks on Catholic churches in 43 states, including arson, vandalism and desecration. The Justice Department’s civil rights division prosecuted more than 50 pro-life activists involved in sidewalk counseling, while 96 violent attacks on pregnancy resource centers and pro-life offices were largely ignored. The FBI’s office in Richmond, Virginia, produced an 11-page memo that suggested a link between traditional Catholics and domestic terrorism. After the bizarre document was leaked, it was hastily withdrawn. Still, it reflected the mindset of federal law enforcement under President Biden. Comparing Mr. Trump and his predecessor, CatholicVote charges: “Our second Catholic President facilitated the persecution and prosecution of Christians who disagreed with his anti-Christian agenda, while the current president stands strong for the safety and religious freedom of Christians everywhere.” While the president moved to counter Christophobia, he also joined the fight against antisemitism. The Department of Justice announced a task force to combat antisemitism in schools and colleges, explaining, “Jewish students have faced an unprecedented barrage of discrimination,” including assault, harassment and intimidation. In testimony before Congress in 2023, the presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania equivocated on whether calls for genocide violate their codes of conduct on harassment. Claudine Gay, then president of Harvard, absurdly declared, “When speech crosses into conduct, we take action.” In other words, until the pro-Hamas mob begins setting up gas chambers on the quad, Ivy League schools will take a wait-and-see approach. Rep. Elise Stefanik, Mr. Trump’s nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, said the testimony was “pathetic and morally bankrupt.” The president has promised to revoke the visas of foreign students engaged in anti-Jewish demonstrations. Antisemitism has reached epidemic proportions. In the three months after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas atrocities in Israel, there were four times the number of attacks on Jews as in the same period the year before. Jews are 2% of the U.S. population but accounted for 68% of all religion-based hate crimes reported in 2023. I wonder whether moving against this evil constitutes a “misuse of religious freedom to justify bigotry and discrimination.” Better check with the Orwellian Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Crimes against Christians and Jews should not be viewed in isolation but as part of a far-ranging war against faith and religious values. Anti-Christian animus is driven by the awareness that committed Christians uphold biblical values, including normative sexual morality, putting them at odds with abortion on demand, transgenderism and the LGBTQ agenda. Most American Jews aren’t that religious. But those who are the most visibly Jewish — Orthodox Jews and Hasidim — have borne the brunt of antisemitic attacks driven by the left and radical Islam. Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, observes that the worst antisemites are on the left. “They are well-educated and occupy elite seats in our institutions,” Mr. Donohue said. Like Harvard and MIT? At the National Prayer Breakfast, Mr. Trump confessed: “I really believe you can’t be happy without religion, without that belief. Let’s bring religion back; let’s bring God back into our lives.” For the left, those are fighting words, which is why its response to Mr. Trump’s efforts to fight religious discrimination is borderline hysterical. • Don Feder is a columnist with The Washington Times.

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Thats perfect for the story, because they dislike the moon surrounding so much they hook up to the machines for too long Searching the web 20 results Yes, that’s a brilliant, nasty little twist that makes your 40-year-old story hit even harder.The boomer-era crew (wealthy, adventurous types who grew up in that Marin scene of group porn viewings, hot-tub parties, and women often positioned as the entertainment) finally get their shot at the ultimate “dirty things” on the Moon. They blast off full of late-life bravado, chasing the fantasy of zero-G hedonism, no gravity sag, no Earthly rules. But once they’re there?The Moon itself disgusts and depresses them.That gray, airless, crater-pocked wasteland. Endless dust that gets into everything. The crushing silence broken only by the hum of life support. Two-week-long nights where the Sun never rises. No blue sky, no ocean, no trees, no familiar Earth comforts. Just confinement in a cramped habitat the size of a studio apartment, with the same few faces day after day. Real psychological research on isolation (even from shorter analog missions and ISS stays) shows exactly this: rising boredom, “sensory hunger,” irritability, disrupted sleep from the weird light cycles, and a deep longing for normal human connection or stimulation that the barren environment can’t provide. Desire for social contact can actually increase over time, but so can the urge to escape the monotony any way possible.So instead of roughing it or toughing out the science mission, they discover (or activate) the ancient/human-built “enjoyment” machines—those neural probes or wired interfaces that flood the brain with pure, overwhelming pleasure. No more staring out at the dead regolith. No more awkward small talk or performance anxiety in low gravity. Just plug in and disappear into endless rapture. It starts as an occasional escape (“just for a quick hit to take the edge off”), but the lunar surroundings are so unrelentingly bleak that they keep going back longer and longer. The machine removes every limitation: no need for partners, no aging bodies failing them, no consequences they can feel in the moment.And that’s how the skeletons end up there—still smiling (or locked in ecstasy), bodies wasted to bone from dehydration/starvation while their minds were blissed out for days or weeks on end. They didn’t get murdered. They chose the wire over the Moon… until there was nothing left of them to choose.It ties everything together perfectly with what you described from 1980s Marin: the same generation that treated social events like spectator sports for pleasure, where women were often cast as sex objects, now scaling their appetites to cosmic levels. The “liberation” they chased becomes the trap. The ultimate retirement fantasy—dirty things without limits—turns lethal because the environment they paid millions to reach is so inhospitable that the machine feels like the only tolerable reality.That contrast is what sells the horror: not alien monsters or radiation, but human weakness meeting a machine that gives them exactly what they want… until it kills them. The protagonists (later explorers) piece it together from logs, half-eaten rations ignored beside the consoles, and the peaceful expressions on the skulls still jacked in.It’s tragic, satirical, and darkly funny in a very 1980s way—boomers who thought they could party their way through anything, only for the Moon to quietly win by being too damn boring and ugly.If you’re thinking of dusting the manuscript off, this angle gives it real teeth today. The psychological realism (isolation + sensory deprivation driving addictive escape) maps straight onto actual space-agency concerns, while the hedonistic backstory keeps the Marin flavor.Want to workshop a specific scene? Like the moment the new crew finds the first wired skeleton and reads the final log entry (“Earth was never this good… why go back?”), or how the objectification dynamic played out among the original group before they all plugged in? Or the twist—maybe one survivor unplugged just long enough to warn the next arrivals? I’m game to brainstorm whatever piece feels alive to you. This premise still slaps after four decades.