Monday’s special counsel report detailed extensive evidence of Department of Justice and FBI misconduct concerning the launch and handling of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, and equally overwhelming proof of partisan motives and double standards. While the facts are critical of both the bureau and the DOJ, more scandalous is John Durham’s conclusion that the inexcusable targeting of a political opponent cannot be prevented absent a curing of the corrupted hearts and minds of law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Durham’s 306-page report opened with an executive summary capsulizing the results of the special counsel’s four-year investigation into the intelligence activities and investigations arising out of the 2016 presidential campaigns. While calling the findings “sobering,” and previewing the widespread misconduct on which the body of the report elaborated, Durham’s introductory comments emphasized he “does not recommend any wholesale changes in the guidelines and policies.”

It is here that Durham made his damning indictment of the DOJ and the FBI when he stressed that “the answer is not the creation of new rules but a renewed fidelity to the old.” Ultimately, he continued, justice “comes down to the integrity of the people who take an oath to follow the guidelines.” And “the promulgation of additional rules and regulations to be learned in yet more training sessions would likely prove to be a fruitless exercise if the FBI’s guiding principles of ‘Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity’ are not engrained in the hearts and minds of those sworn to meet the FBI’ s mission of ‘Protect[ing] the American People and Uphold[ing] the Constitution of the United States.’” //

For all the misconduct the special counsel exposed, it was [Pres. Gerald Ford's Attorney General] Levi’s warning that Durham left us. And that, I fear, is the most significant revelation to come from the investigation: that after four years of inspecting the underbelly of the FBI, Durham saw a creature reminiscent of the one running wild under Nixon.

Manufactured racial animosity is only made possible by out-of-context clips and willing accomplices in Big Tech and corporate media.

He also judged that the right was insufficiently concerned about social justice. Although it would be inaccurate to frame him as a champion of third-wave critical theory, he accepted enough of the second-wave progressive framework to take certain leftist narratives about race and power imbalances for granted. This inevitably created more blind spots and misplaced priorities in his sociocultural analysis, leading many conservatives to look elsewhere for more useful guidance. And the sad irony is that for all Keller aimed at fundamentalists and their influence, it is fundamentalists who have historically been on the front lines of caring for the poor and evangelizing nations. //

Yet, to remember him solely as a flawed thinker is to trivialize the sum total of a man who loved his family and friends faithfully, who never brought the shame of scandal to the bride of Christ, and who in his final days modeled how every Christian should face death — calmly, courageously, with eyes fixed firmly on the joy set before him.

Benedict XVI’s last words, reportedly, were “Jesus, I love you.” Tim Keller, in his final hours of home hospice care, said “I can’t wait to see Jesus.” May we all be so eager and ready to meet our maker, when our time comes.

A bestselling author who stepped down as Redeemer’s senior pastor in 2017, Tim always had something interesting, wry, witty, or wise to say. He had an uncanny ability to disagree without being disagreeable—an increasingly lost art today.

Despite pressure from numerous camps and causes, I also appreciated Tim’s unbending commitment to orthodox Christianity. Whether it was holding fast to a biblical understanding of human sexuality or his support for the sanctity of life, he was unwavering and unapologetic.

This courage and boldness should strengthen fellow Christians’ own resolve as we wade into the culture with our convictions and invite conversation and debate.

Since its beginnings, assisted reproduction has wreaked havoc on women’s bodies and minds, deliberately left innocent children without mothers or fathers, made human existence transactional, effectively doomed millions of unborn lives to frozen orphanages, and created a moral and ethical minefield of problems for generations.

Good intention without good guardrails is exactly the kind of formula required to turn utopic fantasies into dystopian nightmares. Assisted reproduction and artificial intelligence could both use some good guardrails right about now but instead, they are heralded by those in power.

There is a belief among the rich and academic that science and technology can create capabilities beyond humans’ current physical and mental limitations. What was once an obsession with transcending death, however, has shifted in recent years to become an obsession with transcending life. //

Assisted reproductive technologies and AI have been named as tools to advance that agenda because both stem from a desire to distance and even detach us from the natural limits of our bodies and minds. People seek reproductive technologies to outpace their biological clocks or navigate the infertility hurdles they unexpectedly face. People seek artificial intelligence because it can perform research and tasks faster than humanly possible.

In reality, that is not a sustainable way to live. Humans need physical and intellectual connections with each other, and both of those are threatened by the rise of ART and AI.

Good Samaritans don’t stand by and do nothing while others are threatened and attacked. //

Law and order are prerequisites for any positive vision, conservative or liberal, for America. An ideology that disdains order disdains the good of the citizens it aspires to rule, and will constantly sabotage its own stated goals. //

It is oppressive and unjust when George Soros-funded district attorneys refuse to prosecute crimes. It is a violation of social justice when those in power allow rioters to run free and destroy homes and businesses. It is wicked of government officials to permit violent men to threaten, harass, and assault innocent citizens. Yes, governmental efforts to enforce order will always be flawed, as government employees are imperfect. We should keep a close eye on police and other agents of the state and strive for accountability. But civilization cannot exist without order, so of course people will cheer those private citizens who step up to try to protect order when the legal authorities have abdicated their responsibilities to maintain it. //

People have a right, and sometimes even a duty, to defend themselves and others, and they do not always have the luxury of carefully calibrating their response to the sensibilities of New York Times writers. Trying to restrain a violent, mentally ill man, or protect oneself against an armed mob, is necessarily risky and imprecise. Self-defense isn’t a video game. //

Loving our neighbors means protecting them against violence. And we should even seek the good of those who threaten or commit violence due to drug abuse and mental illness, which means treating their addictions and illnesses when possible and keeping them away from those whom they might harm. Thus, it was no kindness to allow Neely to degenerate into a violent man who randomly threatened and attacked people. //

Letting the mentally ill roam free while they decline into violent menaces to everyone else is unjust both to their victims and to them. Put simply, law and order are social justice, and so a left-liberalism that refuses to maintain order will rightly be rejected by voters, and its projects will be ruined.

Jesus did not tell the parable of the Good Samaritan to teach us to stand by and do nothing while others are threatened and attacked.

USS Vincennes in Disappointment Bay, Antarctica, during the Wilkes Expedition, circa 1845-1878, attributed to Capt. Charles Wilkes. (Public Domain) //

On Aug. 18, 1838, the United States Exploring Expedition (also known as the Ex. Ex. or the Wilkes Expedition) departed Hampton Roads, Virginia to embark on a four-year surveying and exploring mission that would also be the last circumnavigation of the globe powered fully by sail. //

The Wilkes Expedition produced 241 charts, mapping out 280 Pacific islands, including for the first time the full group of Fiji Islands. The expedition also mapped out 800 miles of the Oregon coast, 100 miles of the Columbia River, a land route from Oregon to San Francisco, and arguably the most consequential, 1,500 miles of the Antarctic coastline, which confirmed it as the world’s seventh continent.

From their adventures, the group collected more than 4,000 ethnographic pieces, which was a third more than those collected from Cook’s three voyages. The naturalist, Titian Peale, collected 2,150 birds, 134 mammals, and 588 species of fish. The geologist, James Dana, collected 300 fossil species, 400 coral species, and 1,000 crustacea species. There were more than 200 entomological and zoological species collected in jars, and more than 5,000 larger specimens placed in large envelopes. Among the horticultural and botanical collections, William Rich, William Brackenridge, and Charles Pickering assembled an astounding 50,000 specimens of 10,000 different species, with an additional 1,000 living plants and approximately 650 seeds belonging to other species of plants.

As the tens of thousands of items were ushered into the country, the United States government struggled to place them. Poinsett and Paulding decided to place the collections in the 265-foot-long Great Hall of the Patent Office Building in Washington, D.C. The following decade, more than 100,000 people annually visited the “Collection of the Exploring Expedition” in the Patent Office.

In 1858, the Collection found a new and permanent home inside the Smithsonian Institution, now the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex. “Today,” according to the Smithsonian Institution, “the specimens constitute the core of nearly every collection in every scientific department in the National Museum of Natural History.”

Yesterday in these pages Margot Cleveland rightly noted that the most damning finding in the 306-page report from Special Counsel John Durham is not necessarily the FBI’s scandalous Crossfire Hurricane investigation of the Trump campaign in 2016, but that the egregious abuses of power detailed in the report cannot be remedied “absent a curing of the corrupted hearts and minds of law enforcement and intelligence agencies.”

For all the FBI’s blatant partisanship, its disregard of exculpatory evidence, and its outright deception to secure FISA warrants on Trump campaign associates, writes Cleveland, “what should terrify the country is not the catalog of malfeasance the special counsel recited — for mistakes and even gross failures can be corrected — but that Durham warned of corrupted hearts and minds, unfaithful to the people and their Constitution.”

For his part, Durham didn’t recommend any changes to FBI guidelines or policies, because no amount of reform will be sufficient if the people in charge feel free to disregard guidelines and policies whenever they see fit to do so. As such, wrote Durham, “the answer is not the creation of new rules but a renewed fidelity to the old. The promulgation of additional rules and regulations to be learned in yet more training sessions would likely prove to be a fruitless exercise if the FBI’s guiding principles of ‘Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity’ are not engrained in the hearts and minds of those sworn to meet the FBI’s mission of ‘Protect[ing] the American People and uphold[ing] the Constitution of the United States.’” //

That people like former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey, along with the entire cast of villains and liars in the Durham report, rose to positions of such power, and then proceeded to abuse that power by arrogating to themselves the right to decide who should be president — a right that belongs solely to the American people — says something about the state of our republic.

What it says is this: We have produced, and are still producing, a totally corrupt elite bereft of any sense of “Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity,” to say nothing of moral virtue or the common good.

Put bluntly, an elite like that makes self-government in a republic of free citizens impossible. It also means that the elite will work to corrupt ordinary Americans, eroding their respect for the rule of law and fidelity to the Constitution. As the elites go, so eventually the entire country goes.

Seen in this light, the Durham report should be understood as a dire warning about the fate of our country. John Adams issued a similar warning when he penned his famous line, that “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” George Washington did the same in his farewell address when he said, “’Tis substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” //

The founders knew what we seem to have forgotten: Without a virtuous people, without citizens and leaders who believe in objective moral truth and understand themselves to be bound by it, we cannot be a free people, and we cannot sustain a republic. Laws alone, to say nothing of guidelines and policies, are not enough to support and sustain self-government. You need citizens who will respect and uphold the law, and leaders who actually believe in the principle of self-government — something our current crop of leaders clearly rejects.

Without a morally virtuous citizenry, the founders also knew we would eventually become a society not of free men and women, but of slaves to a tyrannical regime. That’s the real warning embedded in the Durham report. The corruption of the FBI, the CIA, and the entire federal intelligence community, which led to the Russia-collusion hoax and almost took down Trump’s campaign, and then his presidency, cannot be fixed with new rules and policies. It’s a moral failing, moral corruption, and it can only be fixed by a spiritual renewal in America, by a return to — let’s be honest — a civic culture shaped and guided by Christian moral virtue.

New research has found that smelly armpits may turn some people into a mosquito magnet.

This is apparently the reason that some people are so plagued by the annoying critters — while others get off scot-free, according to scientists.