Randy Yisroel Settenbrino is a writer and artist. He is a passionate advocate for Israel and Jewish-Christian solidarity, founder of the Historic Blue Moon Hotel, and founder of Ohr Chodosh L’Zion, a cultural and spiritual initiative dedicated to restoring Jewish identity, courage and creativity through art, history and living faith. His newest book, Between the Altar and the Sanctuary: The Life, Faith, and Fire of Rabbi Meir Kahane, is available on Amazon.
The shadow of Europe has spread over our voting map, carried on steady winds from across the Atlantic by a metaphysical force invisible to the average eye. In one fell swoop we have opened our shores, not to break away from the tyranny of Europe but to be engulfed by a foreign political trend and a violent ideology that masquerades as a religion.
In my younger years I spoke German and Italian fairly fluently and traveled back and forth on work trips. I would steal time from my schedule to visit the cultural sites, and in my day Europe was more than a museum. The mercati and street markets were filled with local people, and you could feel the color, the texture, and a bit of the history.
Eurocide: A Continent’s Self-Harm May Lead to Its Demise
Europe as we knew it is gone, lost in the most frivolous and indifferent way. Hardly a fight was put up. Not a single cultural institution demanded continuity with the ways of its ancestors. The indoctrination must have been intense, because I cannot fathom how one could learn contempt for one’s own heritage and people without being totally brainwashed.
The Germans say, “Geld regiert die Welt." Money rules the world.
Whose money is ruling our media and schools? Is it the irresistible oil-slick gold of Qatar? It grips with the force of Tolkien’s One Ring. Has the CCP bought its share? Are these the dark forces behind our willingness to turn against the very civilization that afforded us our freedom?
In a godless vacuum there is always room for moral equivalence. On the left, the language of the Bible becomes talking points, as if the state were their god and had come down from Sinai bearing the living word of their deity. Obsessions with self, money, drugs, and sex fill their void.
They are in such a moral stupor that they stand catatonically alongside the populations waiting to replace them, aiding and abetting their every turn. As they turn away from their Christianity, their jihadi neighbor wraps himself twice in the veil of the Qur’an, dreaming of the final day when he can slay the infidels and take their women.
Europe, what have you done with your cities?
What of Paris, of Berlin, of Malmö, of Brussels?
What will be your last stand: Warsaw and Vienna, Prague and Budapest?
Will you be safer if you do not say you are a Christian?
Will you submit? Where will you run again?
The Palestinian flag, the Jolly Roger of the movement
America, what have you done with your cities?
What of Minneapolis, of Portland, of Seattle, of Kenosha?
What will be your last stand: Fort Worth, Oklahoma City or Jacksonville?
Will you be safer if they do not know you are an infidel?
Will you submit? Where will you run?
In America we hear the resolutions and chants and remain undisturbed by the mobs of looters and Molotov marches. I hear the same whispers in different tongues. I see the same faces in Congress, at Columbia, in cafés and parliaments, applauding our destruction. In this election we have handed our power to the jealous god of the state.
There is no memory of the love, the loyalty, the gratitude. Gone is the wholesome childhood. Severed is the deep, heartfelt bond with our mamas and papas. Lost is our reverence for the Stars and Stripes, once flown so proudly.
Two generations have now been robbed of the sense that they belong to something much bigger than themselves. And it all happened somewhere between kindergarten and twelfth grade.
Our values are left behind like the eggs of fish that spawn in the cold sea and swim away. The young hatch alone, never knowing who gave them life. Our confused youth have lost the hard-earned lessons of our history and its memory is desecrated. Our Sabbaths are weekdays, our holidays are commercialized and our flag is trampled and burned.
Among the personal effects of the former tenement dwellers, I found a study pamphlet, circa 1923, titled “Are You a True American?" It was written to familiarize new immigrants with American basics, and I placed it in our Sweet Dreams Cafe at the Blue Moon. In those days newcomers were expected to learn the country’s ways and were proud to belong. Our fathers and grandfathers enlisted without waiting to be drafted. There was at least a rudimentary knowledge of the branches of government, the Constitution, and the Founding Fathers. There was a sense that we were all in it together.
My blue-collar parents worked hard and had little. We moved often, from one rough, interracial neighborhood to another in the inner city, yet they would always remind us how blessed we were to live in the home of the free and the brave. The flag meant so much to them. Two different religions, two different nationalities, two different cultures, and they were one in their belief in G-d and in America. And in a way, I’m relieved that they didn’t live to see the deterioration of our culture and of the American Dream.
Photo: My blue-collar parents would remind us how blessed we were to be Americans.
They would be unnerved to see us discard our loyalty to the republic for which so many went to war, bled and built and buried their children on American soil. To see our once-glorious cities become wastelands, dumping grounds for a woke ideology that rejects merit and embraces collective poverty, a dead end where they burn with the same hate as Paris.
Is the City of Light heading for a new bloody Bastille Day? Remember the worst of those days, when France fed its own revolutionaries to the guillotine and the Revolution, like Saturn, devoured its own children. In Russia in 1917, revolution toppled the czar and left Kerensky’s interim government in charge. Fearing a military coup, he released Bolshevik leaders from prison and armed their Red Guards, assuming they could be controlled. Instead, within weeks, they turned those rifles on his government. Once in power, the Bolsheviks hunted down the army’s officers and a bloodbath of civil war followed.
Will the radicals we empower today turn their rifles on our soldiers and our children?
Mao sent students to purge their teachers and elders, then banished millions of them to the countryside.
America’s darkest day was not 9/11, not Pearl Harbor, but November 3rd, 2026 when we empowered the red and green factions that want to abrogate the Constitution and rewrite our Declaration. Will it pledge allegiance to the state or to Allah? Certainly, it won’t be both. The Reds think they’ll have the last word. The Greens have other plans.
Eerily, November 4th carries an equally haunting memory for those who lived in what was once the pride of the Middle East. Iran’s communists and Marxist students marched alongside Khomeini’s followers to topple the Shah. On November 4, 1979, students loyal to Khomeini seized the American embassy. Once in power, the Ayatollah repaid the left with prisons and firing squads, and in 1988 he executed thousands of political prisoners in a matter of months.
This year his heirs mowed down thousands of their own citizens in the streets. They hunt down the wounded in their hospital beds and hang protesters in public squares. Sources inside Iran tell me the toll may reach 80,000. Every revolution arms its useful fools and then devours them.
Today the students and elites are the battering ram, waving the Palestinian flag, the Jolly Roger of the movement, its death’s head. In this election America has placed power in the hands of the very ideology that wants the old order to fall. If we let the pattern repeat, the Islamist hardliners will feast first on their leftist prey. Then they will come for the rest of us.
The last Mishnah in Sotah tells us that the generation preceding Messiah will have the face of a dog.- Sotah 9:15
As a dog-loving American, I instinctively find a contradiction between my feelings and this prophetic warning. But as I dig deeper and look around me, I see another face. The wild dog who snatches its prey and eats alone, far removed from the loving animal resting at the feet of its benevolent master. But he will not eat in peace. Other predators are already circling.
Much of America has fed its faith and its children to Moloch and now bows to the golden calf of politicized liberalism.
Dostoevsky warned that without G-d, everything is permitted. With no master, the wild dog devours until it is devoured.
May G-d bless and keep America.