Tales From Ancient Days

     I’m a dinosaur. My Gentle Readers know that already. Other visitors might not, which is why I’m saying so out front. Having said that, allow me to present two videos, both short:

     Love them or hate them, “Stardust” and “Deep Purple” were immensely popular love ballads when my parents were young. I, a child of the Fifties, didn’t hear either one until I was a teen. When I did, I couldn’t figure what all the fuss was about. But this screed isn’t about changes in popular tastes. It’s about communication between the generations.

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     One evening when I was about twelve, I was seated on the living room sofa with my father watching television, when a noteworthy exchange took place during the program he’d selected. It was one of the early Sixties comedies, the sort that starred a comedian well known from other venues. If memory serves, this one featured Joey Bishop. The exchange of which I speak concerns a singer that one of them had already heard but the other had not. It ran roughly as follows:

First Character: Is he any good?
Second Character: With his voice, he could destroy “Stardust.”

     Dad laughed uproariously. I was puzzled. I asked what made the line so funny. Dad proceeded to tell me that “Stardust” is one of the immortal ballads, so universally beloved that it couldn’t be ruined even if Phyllis Diller sang it through her nose to kazoo accompaniment. Being unacquainted with the song, I remained puzzled, but kept it to myself.

     That was fifty-five years ago. This morning I found myself wondering what shape such conversations take today…if they occur at all.

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     “Time Shards,” a story by the great Gregory Benford, grazes the same subject. It concerns the investigation of a curious phenomenon: the possibility that potters of the First Millennium might unintentionally have managed to record conversations in their fine detailing of their pots. A researcher succeeds in recovering one such conversation. I hope Professor Benford won’t mind if I post a long excerpt from this fine and somewhat sobering story:

     Hart pressed a switch and the turntable began to spin. He watched it for a moment, squinting with concentration. Then he reached down to the side of the turntable housing and swung up the stylus manifold. It came up smoothly and Hart locked it in just above the spinning red surface of the pot.
     “Not a particularly striking item, is it?” Brooks said conversationally.
     “No.”
     “Who made it?”
     “Near as I can determine, somebody in a co-operative of villages, barely Christian. Still used lots of pagan decorations. Got them scrambled up with the cross motif a lot.”
     “You’ve gotten . . . words?”
     “Oh, sure. In early English, even.”
     “I’m surprised crude craftsmen could do such delicate work.”
     “Luck, some of it. They probably used a pointed wire, a new technique that’d been imported around that time from Saxony.”
     The computer board hooted a readiness call. Hart walked over to it, thumbed in instructions, and turned to watch the stylus whir in a millimeter closer to the spinning jug. “Damn,” Hart said, glancing at the board. “Correlator’s giving hash again.”
     Hart stopped the stylus and worked at the board. Brooks turned nervously and paced, unsure of what his attitude should be toward Hart. Apparently the man had discovered something, but did that excuse his surliness? Brooks glanced out the window, where the last crowds were drifting away from the Vault dedication and strolling down the Mall. There was a reception for the Board of Regents in Georgetown in an hour. Brooks would have to be there early, to see that matters were in order—
     “If you’d given me enough money, I could’ve had a Hewlett-Packard. Wouldn’t have to fool with this piece of…” Hart’s voice trailed off.
     Brooks had to keep reminding himself that this foul-tempered, scrawny man was reputed to be a genius. If Hart had not come with the highest of recommendations, Brooks would never have risked valuable Vault funding. Apparently Hart’s new method for finding correlations in a noisy signal was a genuine achievement.
     The basic idea was quite old, of course. In the 1960s a scientist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York had applied a stylus to a rotating urn and played the signal through an audio pickup. Out came the wreeee sound of the original potter’s wheel where the urn was made. It had been a Roman urn, made in the era when hand-turned wheels were the best available. The Natural History “recording” was crude, but even that long ago they could pick out a moment when the potter’s hand slipped and the rhythm of the wreeee faltered.
     Hart had read about that urn and seen the possibilities. He developed his new multiple-correlation analysis—a feat of programming, if nothing else—and began searching for pottery that might have acoustic detail in its surface. The sgraffito technique was the natural choice. Potters sometimes used fine wires to incise their wares. Conceivably, anything that moved the incising wire—passing footfalls, even the tiny acoustic push of sound waves—could leave its trace on the surface of the finished pot. Buried among imperfections and noise, eroded by the random bruises of history . . .
     “Got it,” Hart said, fatigue creeping into his voice.
     “Good. Good.”
     “Yeah. Listen.”
     The stylus whirred forward. It gently nudged into the jug, near the lip. Hart flipped a switch and studied the rippling, dancing yellow lines on the board oscilloscope. Electronic archaeology. “There.”
     A high-pitched whining came from the speaker, punctuated by hollow, deep bass thumps.
     “Hear that? He’s using a foot pump.”
     “A kick wheel?”
     “Right.”
     “I thought they came later.”
     “No, the Arabs had them.”
     There came a clop clop clop, getting louder. It sounded oddly disembodied in the silence of the long room.
     “What…?”
     “Horse. I detected this two weeks ago. Checked it with the equestrian people. They say the horse is unshod, assuming we’re listening to it walk on dirt. Farm animal, probably. Plow puller.”
     “Ah.”
     The hoofbeats faded. The whine of the kick wheel sang on. “Here it comes,” Hart whispered.
     Brooks shuffled slightly. The ranks upon ranks of ancient pottery behind him made him nervous, as though a vast unmoving audience were in the room with them.
     Thin, distant: “Alf?”
     “Aye.” A gruff reply.
     “It slumps, sure.”
     “I be oct, man.” A rasping, impatient voice.
     “T’art—”
     “Busy—mark?”
     “Ah ha’ wearied o’ their laws,” the thin voice persisted.
     “Aye—so all. What mark it?” Restrained impatience.
     “Their Christ. He werkes vengement an the alt spirits.”
     “Hie yer tongue.”
     “They’ll ne hear.”
     “Wi’ ’er Christ ’er’re everywhere.”
     A pause. Then faintly, as though a whisper: “We ha’ lodged th’ alt spirits.”
     “Ah? You? Th’ rash gazer?”
     “I spy stormwrack. A hue an’ grie rises by this somer se’sun.”
     “Fer we?”
     “Aye, unless we spake th’ Ave maris stella ’a theirs.”
     “Elat. Lat fer that. Hie, I’ll do it. Me knees still buckle whon they must.”
     “I kenned that. So shall I.”
     “Aye. So shall we all. But wh’ of the spirits?”
     “They suffer pangs, dark werkes. They are lodged.”
     “Ah. Where?”
     “S’tart.”
     “‘Ere? In me clay?”
     “In yer vessels.”
     “Nay!”
     “I chanted ’em in ’fore sunbreak.”
     “Nay! I fain wad ye not.”
     whir whir whir
     The kick wheel thumps came rhythmically.
     “They sigh’d thruu in-t’wixt yer clay. ’S done.”
     “Fer what?”
     “These pots—they bear a fineness, aye?”
     “Aye.”
     A rumbling, “—will hie home ’er. Live in yer pots.”
     “An?”
     “Whon time werkes a’thwart ’e Christers, yon spirits of leaf an’ bough will, I say, hie an’ grie to yer sons, man. To yer sons sons, man.”
     “Me pots? Carry our kenne?”
     “Aye. I investe’ thy clay wi’ ern’st spirit, so when’s ye causes it ta dance, our law say . . .”
     whir
     A hollow rattle.
     “Even this ’ere, as I spin it?”
     “Aye. Th’ spirits innit. Speak as ye form. The dance, t’will carry yer schop word t’ yer sons, yer sons sons sons.”
     “While it’s spinnin’?”
     Brooks felt his pulse thumping in his throat.
     “Aye.”
     “Than’t—”
     “Speak inta it. To yer sons.”
     “Ah . . .” Suddenly the voice came louder. “Aye, aye! There! If ye hear me, sons! I be from yer past! The ancient dayes!”
     “Tell them wha’ ye must.”
     “Aye. Sons! Blood a’ mine! Mark ye! Hie not ta strags in th’ house of Lutes. They carry the red pox! An’…an’, beware th’ Kinseps—they bugger all they rule! An’, whilst pot-charrin’, mix th’ fair smelt wi’ greeno erst, ’ere ye’ll flux it fair speedy. Ne’er leave sheep near a lean-house, ne, ’ey’ll snuck down ’an it—”
     whir whir thump whir
     “What—what happened?” Brooks gasped.
     “He must have brushed the incising wire a bit. The cut continues, but the fine touch was lost. Vibrations as subtle as a voice couldn’t register.”
     Brooks looked around, dazed, for a place to sit. “In . . . incredible.”
     “I suppose.”

     The probability of that “recording” being comprehensible, much less useful, to generations two or more removed from the makers approaches zero. The significant elements in it – practices, persons, institutions, et cetera – would have vanished from their society. They, of course, couldn’t know that.

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     Communication, to be worthwhile, must be bilaterally comprehensible. That is: the hearer must understand what the speaker is saying as the speaker himself understands it. In pre-technological societies, when the number of elements an individual was presumed familiar with was small and travel over long distances was rare and difficult, a common language composed of stable terms and a simple grammar would have sufficed to meet that requirement. Things are different today.

     The old game “Twenty Questions” embedded an important assumption that’s seldom discussed: the person or item the questioner seeks to discover is within a “sociocultural space” that twenty yes-or-no questions can span. That’s only about a million elements. There are far more elements in our sociocultural space today.

     Today “a common language composed of stable terms and a simple grammar” isn’t enough to assure bilaterally comprehensible communication. The number of possible referents, many of them almost as important to John Q. Public as food, clothing, and shelter, is so great that the odds are poor that John and a randomly selected person who speaks the same language will both be familiar with a major subset of them. This has a constricting effect on the social space within which JQP’s communications will be reliable. As long as he stays within that space, he’ll understand and be understood by the others in it. Outside it, things will be a lot more challenging. The size and populations of such spaces can depend on our occupations, educations, pastimes, neighborhoods, tastes, opinions, and other matters. And there is essentially nothing to be done about it.

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     Not long ago there was a vogue for creating and burying “time capsules” whose contents were intended to represent our societies to their future discoverers. Pre-technological societies didn’t do such things; they couldn’t conceive of so much change that their present would need to be demonstrated to their future by word, sound, or artifact. Today’s society probably couldn’t agree on what should go into such a capsule. Add to this the rapid transformation of language – every human language of importance – and what are the odds that a communication to Americans a century hence would be comprehensible, meaningful, or useful?

     Even communication between parent and child is becoming strained. Yes, the distortion of the meanings of words is an important factor. But let’s not discount the explosion of the sociocultural space or our selectivity about it. Parents and children need not have largely overlapping subsets. A game of “Twenty Questions” involving different generations of the same family has a significant chance of inducing frustration. Throw in a few players from other parts of the English-speaking world, and what then?

     How conversant are you with Strine idioms or English rhyming slang?

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     The above are “Friday morning thoughts,” the sort I indulge on a Friday morning after a relatively strenuous week. Yes, they’re relevant, generally at least, to contemporary concerns. You already know how sensitive I am to the deliberate misuse of words. But Man does not communicate by words alone. The complexity of our societies and the speed with which they’re creating specialized domains of knowledge – some of them useful, some of them trivial – guarantee that facility in communication will be an ever more highly prized skill, requiring both mastery of language and breadth of sociocultural knowledge.

     Now go back and listen to “Stardust” and “Deep Purple,” and reflect. Must have been some atrocious voice if the singer spoken of could “destroy Stardust,” eh what?

Hit Bottom And Keep Digging Dept.

     If I were asked to concoct a program that would permanently extinguish all possibility that American Negroes would ever rise to the attainments of American Caucasians, I would set to work on destroying their ability to communicate with whites.

     If Smith cannot communicate intelligibly with Jones, the two will not be able to interact in any meaningful way. They won’t be able to buy from one another or sell to one another. They won’t be able to collaborate on any project of mutual interest. They won’t be able to resolve any disputes between them. Indeed, Smith will be incapable of telling others anything sensible about Jones, and vice versa.

     It would produce a permanent state of unease between them.

     Now imagine the problem in eight digits: the 40 million or so American blacks unable to communicate with the 270 million American whites. Given that trade in a large and varied market and the ability to get along peaceably with the majority of one’s neighbors are absolute requirements if one wants to prosper and be safe, what do you think would ensue?

     Facility of communication is the basis of a harmonious society.

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     Regard the following, which I found at Power Line this morning:

     Grading Ain’t Just Grading: Rethinking Writing Assessment—Ecologies Towards Antiracist Ends

     With
     Asao B. Inoue
     February 1st, 2019

     SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

     PLENARY SESSION: THE LANGUAGE STANDARDS THAT KILL OUR STUDENTS: GRADING AIN’T JUST GRADING

     9:45 AM -11:00 AM
     MGC 3-5

     Open to all faculty who preregister

     This plenary will argue against the use of conventional standards in college courses that grade student writing by single standards. Inoue will discuss the ways that White language supremacy is perpetuated in college classrooms despite the better intentions of faculty, particularly through the practices of grading writing.

     Take a moment to ponder the utter, vicious psychopathy of the notion that the writing of college students of whatever race should not be graded according to a uniform standard. Aren’t the implications of such a policy as plain as mud? Isn’t the outcome of a state of affairs in which black Americans cannot communicate intelligible with white Americans easy to foresee?

     Now ask yourself what the motives of the persons who’ve proposed such a state of affairs must be. Take your time; I’ll wait right here.

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     Given Asao B. Inoue’s name, I expected him to be non-white. However, his official photo is ambiguous. So this...person, whose self-description runs thus:

     I do research that investigates racism in writing assessments (e.g. writing programs, writing placement, etc.), which includes classroom writing assessments. About half of my work is theoretical, while the other half is empirical in nature. I've published articles and chapters on validity, classroom writing assessment, grading contracts, assessment as rhetoric, reflection practices, failure in writing assessments, among other things. In the past, I've paid close attention to the Hmong racial formation and their writing and reflection practices.

     ...is promulgating a development in college writing assessment that would utterly cripple the communications capabilities, and therefore the futures, of American blacks, most of whom reach college with below-par language abilities because of the lack of attention to such things in the government-run schools. He has a doctorate in “Rhetoric and Composition.” He’s published articles and books. He’s holding seminars. He’s apparently getting respectful attention from his “colleagues.” And he’s proposing a change to higher-educational grading standards that would completely isolate American blacks from their white countrymen.

     You couldn’t do as much damage to the prospects of American blacks with tanks and artillery. If I were black, I’d regard him as my race’s worst enemy. I have to wonder: who’s backing him? Who is it who thinks his prescription is a good thing, socially?

     Whoever it is that’s propelling this man’s lunacies, I want him caught and hanged.

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     Perhaps you remember the promotion of Ebonics a couple of decades back. It was seriously proposed at some schools on the West Coast that Ebonics be recognized as valid language to be shown respect equal to standard American English in primary and secondary education. While the public foofaurauw died down after a while, as a de facto matter this has been the treatment of urban black street dialect for at least twenty years. It correlates strongly with the amplification of racial tensions in the United States.

     I’ll say it a second time: Facility of communication is the basis of a harmonious society. But our “educators,” the majority of whom deserve to be hung upside-down by their genitals and beaten with staves, have permitted the vulnerable children of American blacks to become isolated from their white coevals. The situation does not improve with age. Rather, it intensifies, because the young black has been confined socially to those with whom he can communicate.

     I’ve seen enough mindlessness in my sixty-six years to persuade me that unthinking stupidity in institutional policymaking is the rule rather than the exception. Recent developments have only strengthened that opinion. But I can distinguish between stupidity and unmitigated evil. The subject of this piece belongs in the latter category.

     Power Line’s Steve Hayward has this to say:

     [N]othing will marginalize a struggling student more than telling them they are exempt from academic canons of excellence and achievement. But this is the Orwellian world of higher education today, where the real racists parade under the banner of anti-racism.

     Indeed.

If You Thought They Were Kidding...

     ...you were mistaken. YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, has begun to obscure those videos it deems “offensive” or “inappropriate.” The first such video to be “sandboxed” is Jared Taylor’s Race Differences In Intelligence, in which he discusses the evidence for persistent, racially correlated, statistical differences in the distributions of various measures of human intellect. The video is available, but YouTube has made it difficult to share and impossible to comment on or embed.

     I’ve captured a copy of the video; apparently YouTube hasn’t managed to forbid that. At nearly 200 MBytes it’s too long to email, so those who want a personal copy will need to download it themselves. If there’s anyone who knows how to embed a playable video in a Web page without YouTube support, the information would be most valuable.

     How long do you think it will take for wildly popular lecturer Jordan Peterson’s videos to be treated this way? After all, Dr. Peterson has grievously sinned against the “trans” community by denying them their free choice of pronouns! Hasn’t Canada made that a criminal offense?

     The big push by the thoroughly SJW-colonized tech giants to prevent those of us with conservative, race or sex realist, or otherwise “dangerous” opinions from spreading them is under way. If you value the ability to communicate that the Web has brought us, the time to defend it is now.

Munications

     Do you municate? That is, do you shout your opinions, theses, and conclusions into the world but do your damnedest not to hear divergent views?

     A lot of people are like that, you know. It’s at the core of the “safe spaces” and “microaggressions” nonsense. Eric Hoffer would diagnose it without hesitation.

     I had a coworker, some years ago, who was full of political opinions he’s bestow upon you free of charge – indeed, whether you’d asked for them or not. But you differed with him at your peril. He’d reflexively label anyone who might disagree with him as a “fascist” at the top of his voice. In consequence, sensible persons who saw him coming would swiftly find somewhere else to be. He was the sort of municator I have in mind.

     It’s bad enough when individuals do it, but ultimately that sort of munication reduces to mere noise. It’s usually not difficult to shut it out, or at least walk away from it. It’s much worse when institutions do it. Some intriguing thoughts on the subject:

     We are saturated with media. Young people have no frame of reference so they just assume it has always been thus, but our modern mass media culture is one of those rare things that is truly new. It really was not so long ago when it was easy to be entirely uninformed about the world. It took great effort to be well informed. That’s not to say we are all worldly cosmopolitans, but the world is literally at our fingertips. More important, media is everywhere and it hard to escape it.

     This newness means that the people in charge have struggled to put it to their uses. Buying off a few newspaper publishers was easy. Controlling the three TV networks required hardly any effort at all. A free wheeling mass media with millions of bloggers, podcasters and small outlets is a different task. Rounding up the farm’s bull is a hard job, but rounding up all the barn cats is actually much tougher. The former can get you killed, but the latter has a maddening number of variables.

     When the masses started to get on-line, the “media experts” said it was ushering in an era of wonderfulness because the people would now have a say. The news would be interactive! It was not that long ago when every Progressive commentator went on and on about the wonderfulness of interactive media. I used to laugh at it as I was on-line long before the media airheads had heard of the internet. I knew those hothouse flowers would not last very long in the rough and tumble world of the internet, but like missionaries headed off to the jungle, they were sure it was going to be great

     I was thinking about that yesterday when National Review announced they had been taken over by Facebook. Like a lot of these sites, they learned the hard way that their audience was not going to just nod along and clap when instructed. Instead, they posted articles and the comments filled up with ridicule and criticism. That led to lots of comments from NR writers about the awfulness of the comment threads. Now that millennial pansies are in charge, they have turned it over to Facebook to police their comments.

     Read the whole thing. It’s worth your time.

     “Interactive media” that suppress the expression of divergent or dissenting views aren’t attempting to foster communications or build new levels of comprehension of difficult issues. They’re trying to replicate the hegemony of the three national networks prior to the rise of talk radio and cable television. Back then, CBS, NBC, and ABC would decide on The Official Line and broadcast it to Us the Unwashed without any trace of dissent. We could accept it or turn off the television.

     When blogging arose, complete with the ability of readers to insert comments on what they’d read, I thought a breakthrough was imminent. Individuals would at least have the ability to argue with one another from a safe distance. Ideas would be tested as thoroughly as possible. We’d have a chance of assembling the insights and experiences of millions into new edifices of knowledge – a chance the munications of the previously dominant mass media had denied us.

     The ascendancy of dominant institutions on the World Wide Web – Facebook, Google, Huffington Post, National Review, and other major aggregators of news and opinion – has produced a state of affairs in which individuals’ conveyances of facts and expressions of opinion can again be filtered and tamed – i.e., communications can be displaced by munications while maintaining a pretense of genuine intercourse. While the managers of those institutions don’t agree on everything, they do share a common attitude: We know best. Sit down, shut up, and listen.

     To allow one’s worldview to be shaped by an institution that methodically suppresses dissent from its preferences is to surrender all claim to an individual perspective or opinion. Yet such institutions are gradually winning a stranglehold over the Web. Small voices such as the few genuine bloggers that remain are the sole alternative. However, we’re dwindling in number. Many of the originals have ceased to write. Few with true courage of convictions have stepped forward to replace them.

     I’ve long held that “opinions are like assholes; everyone’s gotta have one.” I certainly have my own set, and I’m not shy about expressing them. But I also maintain that until your opinions are so solidly backed up by real-world evidence that there’s no significant possibility of error, you must be willing to listen to those who disagree politely. The price of not being willing to listen is high. First, you forget how to argue for your positions. Second, you insulate yourself from evidence that might persuade you to alter your stance. Third, in the worst case you’ll become a “true believer:” a worshipper in “a compact and unified church” that will have its own agenda – an agenda that’s unlikely to care much about you or yours.

     Municative institutions are such churches. It’s best to stay away from them. Any representation they make about valuing your opinion is for public-relations purposes only. They don’t want dissenters; they want disciples aflame with the faith who’ll defend it against heresy, no matter from what source.

     Food for thought.

The Sins Of Authority: A Sunday Tirade

     It seems my news reading is insufficiently broad, as yesterday evening I missed a story of considerable importance:

     The Marianist order has suspended a former longtime president of Chaminade High School from functioning as a priest after allegations of sexual abuse involving a former student were found to be “credible,” the order said.

     The Rev. James Williams, who resigned in 2011 after 12 years as president of the prestigious all-boys Catholic institution in Mineola, has “completely denied” the allegations, but a “vigorous, thorough and comprehensive investigation” conducted by the order “deemed them to be credible,” the group said in a statement posted Friday on Chaminade’s website.

     The Marianists said they have contacted the Nassau County district attorney’s office and the Diocese of Rockville Centre about the allegations.

     Every case of this sort fills me with both fury and fear. The allegations might not be true; Reverend Williams has denied them, and at this point no rigorous proceeding to determine their validity has yet taken place. However, that an investigation by Reverend Williams’s own order finds them “credible” suffices to evoke many terrible thoughts, of several terrible consequences.

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     Nearly every other kind of evil pales in comparison to the abuse of a child. Yet the abuse of a child by one in a position of moral and practical authority over him plumbs still deeper into the depths of villainy. The authority finds it all too easy to convince the child that the sin and the guilt belong to the victim rather than the offender. It’s an offense capable of warping all but the strongest souls...and very few minors are spiritually strong enough to withstand its effects.

     The scandal over the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests has harmed the Church even more than did the Renaissance popes and their orgiastic indulgences. Never mind that the frequency of such abuses is just as high among Protestant ministers and lay teachers. Catholic priests are a special breed: men sworn to complete celibacy in the service of Christ. Those who’ve been entrusted with the care of the souls of the youngest and most impressionable of their flock have a responsibility weightier than any other:

     “Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me. But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” [Matthew 18:3-6]

     Yet when the Most Reverend William Francis Murphy, the presiding bishop of the Diocese of Rockville Center, called a convocation of the priests of the diocese to hear presentations about this terrible evil, the featured speaker, a bishop from another diocese, styled such offenses “inappropriate behavior.” A steady procession of the clerical listeners thanked him for that speech.

     “Inappropriate behavior!” As Father Edward Kealty has said, that’s a phrase to describe “picking up the wrong fork at dinner.” Father Ed got into a lot of trouble with the diocese for saying that to the convocation. It might be the reason he was forced into retirement against his will and the pleas of his parishioners.

     But this, too, is characteristic of sinful authorities.

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     Authorities of many kinds are prone to taking credit for good developments and foisting the blame for bad ones onto others’ shoulders. They’re also the life form most susceptible to mincing words, especially when they’re confronted with failures and crimes of their own. It’s one of the reasons for the overall decline of mutual trust in recent years. It’s also one of the reasons for what Samuel Johnson called “the general degradation of human testimony:”

     “To doubt whether a man of eminence has told the truth about his own birth is, in appearance, to be very deficient in candour; yet nobody can live long without knowing that falsehoods of convenience or vanity, falsehoods from which no evil immediately visible ensues, except the general degradation of human testimony, are very lightly uttered, and once uttered are sullenly supported.”

     I submit that recategorizing the rape of a minor as “inappropriate behavior” is far worse than a “falsehood of convenience or vanity.” When a person in authority does it, the blot covers more than his individual escutcheon. It taints the credibility and probity of all those of his stature who by their silence concur with his statement.

     Priests, ministers, and rabbis lack coercive authority. Theirs is of a much higher plane: that on which the most critical distinctions of all, those between right and wrong, are found. If these be found unworthy of trust, where do we stand? To what station do we apply for judgment of our own morals and ethics?

     Time was, it was only the moral authority of the Church that bounded the actions of nobles and kings. The nobility of Christendom didn’t need to fear an army of priests with crucifixes and censers. The flock enraged to action was a far different matter – and such flocks, though armed with nothing but the tools of their various trades, removed the crowns and scepters from the heads and hands of many who regarded themselves as above judgment.

     They who think a restoration of justice must begin with changes to the State and its policies may have been looking in the wrong direction all this time.

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     Today is the great Feast of Pentecost, which commemorates the day the Holy Spirit descended upon Christ’s eleven chief disciples. The Paraclete opened their minds to complete understanding of His teachings and equipped them with the gift of tongues, that they might be understood by all who heard them. Thus enlightened and amplified, they went out to do as He had commanded:

     “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.” [Matthew 28:19-20]

     Teaching is possible only under commonality of language. When the student understands the teacher’s words, it becomes possible for the teacher to impart new information and understanding to the student. This is why teachers enlarge their students’ vocabularies incrementally, and couch their other lessons in language their students are able to grasp. But when authorities tear words from their public meanings, such that language itself becomes a maze of Humpty-Dumpty eccentricities that forbids anyone to be certain of the speaker’s meaning, teaching – indeed, communication of any sort – becomes impossible.

     Deception – the cloaking of crimes of every magnitude behind dense curtains of words no longer penetrable by the light of common understanding – is all that remains.

     Confucius told us that “What is necessary [is] to rectify names.” What’s happening to communication in our day is the exact reverse – and it’s authorities of every sort, lay and clerical, determined to conceal their villainy from the common folk, who are the perpetrators.

     May God have mercy on their souls, for I doubt that we lesser ones will stay our hands for much longer.

Fundamental Corruptions

First, one of Bill Whittle’s most striking videos:

For those Gentle Readers who prefer text – I do, most of the time – here’s Whittle’s haymaker:

This smiling, normal-looking woman is Ann Ravel. She heads the FEC — the Federal Elections Commission. She’s a Democrat in a Democratic administration pursuing the Democratic party’s goal of intimidating, jailing and otherwise harassing their political opponents, who are mean because they don’t like being told what to do, or to think — the way nice people do. So she has been ordered to weaponize the government against unregulated speech — we don’t call it “free speech” any more because that term is archaic and also probably racist.

It’s not like she doesn’t want to! As a typical progressive Democrat, Ann Ravel has two overriding psychological needs:

First, regulate everything. How on earth with people like Ann Ravel and, for that matter, the President of the United States, ever be able to feel secure when the American people are just running around starting businesses willy-nilly, or irresponsibly making internet videos that don’t conform to the Official Truth, or reading news stories — “news stories!” — on places like Fox or the Drudge Report.

No, the idea of something being unregulated — like, say, the internet — is anathema to these control freaks, so the chance to regulate something — anything — is good to go right out of the gate.

Even better: Ann Ravel not only wants to regulate the internet, she wants to target those regulations against conservatives on the internet.

And here’s Mac Slavo’s comment on the matter:

As Whittle highlighted in the video above, government officials are working to discredit anything that is not part of the mainstream narrative.

They’ll use the Federal Elections Committee to shut down any free political thought. They’ll use the IRS and the threat of prison to intimidate organizations and individuals that don’t tow the party line.

But they aren’t just targeting the organizers or those who produce content and videos that run counter to their ideals. They’re coming after the people as a whole. Your social network pages, forum comments, emails, and phone calls are being monitored .

Moreover, there is clear evidence according to a Department of Homeland Security insider that the very communities where people get together to share ideas are being targeted en masse by paid disinformation agents whose sole purpose is to destroy the credibility of the message through targeted web site takedowns and direct attacks against their users.

Then, you will see the internet being regulated in a manner that will serve only the agenda of this administration. Either right before or during these events, so-called citizen journalists will be particularly vulnerable. Watch for a serious crackdown of bloggers, online news publications and websites, but not in the way that will be immediately obvious.

The ‘plumbers team’ have coordinated their efforts with Internet Service Providers to identify the people like you and others who publish their information on web sites.

At first they will cite violations of terms of service. Then, they will select a few ‘troublemakers’ and identify them for criminal prosecution. Others will experience hacking and other electronic attacks. And during all of that, there will be the Obama team flooding the internet with misinformation and disinformation. In fact, that is already taking place.

The attacks are coming from all sides – this is asymmetric warfare against the American people.

Time was, the above sentiments would have been dismissed as “conspiracy talk.” I would have been among those dismissing it. No longer. Ask Dinesh D’Souza and Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. Ask the CEO of Gibson Guitars. Ask Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. And ponder this as well: Might any of the “SWATtings” aimed at conservative commentators and luminaries have been ordered by commanders fully aware of their malevolent genesis?

Think it over.

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“The people, sir, are a great beast.” – Fisher Ames

“Never tease an old dog. He might have one bite left.” – Robert A. Heinlein

The recent elections have evoked the usual calls from the Left for “compromise” and “collegiality.” I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that we’d never have heard those pleas had the Left carried the field. I’m equally sure that you don’t need to be reminded that to the Left, “compromise” means “let’s do it my way.”

Fisher Ames’s “great beast” has awakened in anger. The electorate isn’t thrilled with the Republicans – God knows the GOP hasn’t exactly over-performed in recent years – but it knows who’s been raping it most recently, and by a hefty majority it’s said that it wants them out of power. So what now?

From the Right, the signals are mixed. There are indications that the Republican Establishment is alive to the danger to its perquisites should it continue to ignore its Constitutional duties and denigrate the conservative base. Yet there are also indications that several GOP kingmakers intend to proceed with “business as usual:” i.e., a slightly more leisurely march into the totalitarian abyss, so the power-brokers themselves won’t be displaced from their perches. The predominant trend won’t become definite for some months.

From the Left, there’s a sense of panic and the “last chance:” “If we don’t act now, we’ll lose our last chance to make America into another Euro-communist state!” The lineaments of their reaction can be seen in Obama’s drive for amnesty for illegal aliens and for the rigid regulation of carbon dioxide emissions in the name of “global warming,” both of which are being cheered on by his left-liberal base. (He really did mean it when he spoke of “fundamentally transforming” the U.S., you know.) Given that it will be only two years more before the Democrats must again face the electorate and a substantial probability that the next president will be Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, or Scott Walker, their panic has a rational basis.

But there are problems for the kakistocrats on both sides of the aisle. Their names? Why, Gentle Readers, how could you need to ask? They’re your names...and mine.

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“Too many people know too much.” – Old slogan

We know too much. Far too much to please the political elite. Worse, we’ve begun to act on our knowledge.

In an analogically comparable situation, Garet Garrett wrote as follows:

Now regard the credit reservoir as a lake fed by thousands of little community springs, and at the same time assume the point of view of a government hostile to the capitalistic system of free private enterprise. You see at once that the lake is your frustration. Why? Because so long as the people have the lake and control their own capital and can do with it as they please the government's power of enterprise will be limited, and limited either for want of capital or by the fact that private enterprise can compete with it.

So you will want to get rid of the lake. But will you attack the lake itself? No; because even if you should pump it dry, even if you should break down the retaining hills and spill it empty, still it would appear again, either there or in another place, provided the springs continued to flow. But if you can divert the water of the springs—if you can divert it from the lake controlled by the people to one controlled by the government, then the people's lake will dry up and the power of enterprise will pass to government.

Garrett’s subject in the above passage was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Social Security scam. Yet the pattern is equally applicable to the dissemination of information. When information, particularly news about important current events, flows freely along multiple conduits easily accessed by any private citizen, the “lake of public knowledge” is kept full and fresh. The political class cannot easily get away with much. The “springs” in this analogy are the information carrying conduits of today, with the Internet most prominent among them. The “lake” is the ultimate enemy, but the Left’s crosshairs are on plugging or diverting the “springs.”

To have a fighting chance of totalitarianizing America from their current disfavored position, the Obamunists must seize control -- absolute control, for nothing less will serve them – over the Internet.

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In light of the above, anything you hear from a political source about “net neutrality,” “illegal in-kind campaign contributions,” or other denigrations of the free and open Internet should be regarded as hostile propaganda, aimed at destroying the Right’s bastions in the last medium open to the free exchange of ideas. Any suggestion that Internet communications, whether textual or by audio or video, should be regulated must be resisted fiercely. This must be our last stand, for once we have been separated from one another, our effective capacity to resist further encroachments on our remaining liberty will dwindle to nothing.

It will be more difficult to defend the few non-Internet bastions for conservative views. There are too many legal and quasi-legal avenues by which the political class can attack and harass them. It approaches certainty that the Obamunists will mount a fresh assault on cable narrowcasters such as FOX News. That battle might need to be fought in the courts.

The more insidious attacks mounted by discreditors and “trolls” are also part of this campaign, and must be combated relentlessly. If you’re a blog proprietor, don’t be afraid to “censor” such villainy. Resist the suggestion that you “owe” the totalitarians a place to spew their deceits. Be forthright in asserting your privileges.

The Left has lost the battle over private ownership of firearms. Its grip on American education is slipping as we speak. The fight over communications freedom is its “Battle of the Bulge,” its win-or-die engagement. Let’s make it “die.”

Authoritations

The more I think about...well, everything, the more overwhelming becomes the realization that it's all of a piece: a single process operating to create unambiguous battle lines so the serious shooting can begin.

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Allow me to start by citing an exceptionally insightful piece from Ace of Spades. Please read it all. The conclusion is what lit my boiler this fine morning. Set it aside; we'll come back to it soon enough.

Virtually everyone is touched at some point by the arrogance of an expert. I have to saw one in half about once a month, but for a reason tangential to Ace's analysis: their readiness to assert "expertise" in fields other than their own. Arthur Herzog skewered this tendency in his 1973 classic The B.S. Factor:

The thirst for answers in a difficult world has brought about the rise of Anything (or Everything) Authorities. The Anything Authority is one whose credentials in one field are taken as valid for others -- sometimes many others....

The trouble with an Anything Authority is not that he takes a position or works for a cause, but that he seldom seems to apply the same standards of research and documentation to the field in which he is not an expert as he would to his own....

Psychiatrists are a special breed of Anything Authorities because their field is anything (or almost) in the first place....

When an Anything Authority becomes successful, he joins the Permanent Rotating Panel Show and appears on television programs, which pay him....the Anything Authority must never be stuck for an answer. Glibness helps, and so does the fact that many emcees do not know the hard questions to ask.

If the above passage has you thinking of Fox News regular Dr. Charles Krauthammer, you're not alone.

The progression is plain:

1. Acquisition of a credential of some kind, often an academic one.
2. Practice in one's field.
3. Acquisition of notoriety in consequence of some publicized event.
4. Interest in one's thinking from persons other than one's fellow specialists.
5. Increasing boldness, in part due to sustained attention from laymen and journalists.
6. Ascent to Anything Authority status.
7. Television gigs and book tours.

The strong relationship between the Anything Authority and major figures in national politics follows automatically.

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It might not be perfectly obvious (a break from tradition here at Liberty's Torch), but any man who bids for a high political office must present himself to the public as a sort of Anything Authority: i.e., one who "has the answers" to a wide range of questions concerning the issues most prominent in political discourse. As distasteful as it sounds, arrogance is therefore a qualification for office. He who lacks the glibness and certitude required will be dismissed by a large fraction of the voting public. Seldom does the less glib, less arrogant of two candidates prevail in an electoral showdown.

And of course, that glibness and arrogance carries over to one's tenure in office. Here's a perfectly lovely example from Andrew Cuomo, currently the governor of New York:

You have a schism within the Republican Party. … They’re searching to define their soul, that’s what’s going on. Is the Republican party in this state a moderate party or is it an extreme conservative party? That’s what they’re trying to figure out. It’s a mirror of what’s going on in Washington. The gridlock in Washington is less about Democrats and Republicans. It’s more about extreme Republicans versus moderate Republicans.

…You’re seeing that play out in New York. … The Republican Party candidates are running against the SAFE Act — it was voted for by moderate Republicans who run the Senate! Their problem is not me and the Democrats; their problem is themselves. Who are they? Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.

If they’re moderate Republicans like in the Senate right now, who control the Senate — moderate Republicans have a place in their state. George Pataki was governor of this state as a moderate Republican; but not what you’re hearing from them on the far right.”

Yes, you read it correctly: Cuomo, a Democrat, has taken it upon himself to tell the Republican Party of New York whom it may and may not have as members. Indeed, he's told those of us New Yorkers who disagree with him that we don't belong in "his" state! We once heard this sort of thing from Big Daddy Mario, who also treated the state as his personal fiefdom. Clearly, the apple fell very close to the tree.

What's ultimately most important is the reflexive acceptance of this sort of pol-speak: Cuomo II, whose background before attaining public office is notably lacking in any sort of accomplishment, has not been backhanded across the chops for his arrogance by any figure of note on the Right. In part, that's out of distaste for the possibility of reprisal, but in equal or greater part it's because the practice of presenting oneself as an unquestionable Anything Authority has become established for officials at the gubernatorial level and above.

The "expert" no longer needs to have demonstrated "expertise" of any sort; all he needs to do is win an election.

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The practice of promoting themselves as Anything Authorities compels politicians to become vengeful toward anyone who suggests that there are flaws in their reasoning, evidence, candor, or veracity:

After Benghazi on 9/11/2012, the Obama administration tried very hard to discourage Fox News Channel from reporting on it. The effort was obstruction – pure and simple.

They tried to prevent the truth from coming out and the Administration tried just about everything to discourage Fox from investigating and reporting.

All the American people wanted, and all I ever wanted, was just the facts – why did 4 Americans die? What happened?

Please read the entire article. Greta Van Susteren, an accomplished and painfully thorough journalist, is one of the very few persons anywhere in the media who has aggressively prosecuted the investigation of the Benghazi attack. The Obama Administration perceived -- correctly -- that her efforts were a danger to their "narrative." Administration operatives did everything possible within the law to inhibit her and her staffers from continuing onward. Given the viciousness the Obamunists have displayed to date, the mind recoils from what might have happened to her and hers, were the United States not steeped in a tradition of press freedom that reaches back to John Peter Zenger.

Be warned: Pressure has mounted, always from the Left, to classify ever more varieties of expression as "hate speech," and therefore not protected by the First Amendment. The Democrats want to study "Internet hate speech," no doubt with an eye toward making it legally actionable as a "proximate cause" for violence. Such an effort will inevitably expand to embrace reportage and opinion writing that dissents from the "official line."

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Let's return to the conclusion of Ace's essay:

Laymen know that "all professions are a conspiracy against the laity."

And laymen also know something else: In a democracy, the common citizen must decided upon the course of the nation, whether the citizenry is right or wrong about it.

The layman resents the never-ending agitation for a "democracy" in which all important decisions are made by a Council of Experts (generally government bureaucrats and academic gadflies with their own very serious bias issues) and then simply announced to the public.

In all these ways, the layman suspects he is being bullied into taking a position he does not favor by the invocation of the word "expert," and not just bullied-- often, he feels like he is being straight-up conned.

I actually do respect knowledge and expertise. And I do think it is a lamentable thing that this nation now holds such things in lesser respect than they once did.

But the self-declared experts must also take some of the blame for this state of affairs.

You only get to lie to someone so many times before he stops listening to you entirely.

And you don't need to be an expert to know that.

Exactly. It is in the nature of expertise that it must admit to both its fallibility and its limits. The "expert" who postures as though he cannot be wrong will sooner or later come to grief -- often by the actions of competitors in his field. When an "expert" assumes the mantle of an Anything Authority, his need to protect his reputation as such climbs to the heights. The pinnacle is occupied by public officials: Anything Authorities who become political authorities. At that altitude, their pose of unbounded expertise, if not shielded by credible threats of vengeance, self-ruptures almost immediately. It only takes one egregious mistake, and most officials make that many in their oaths of office.

The rest is an exercise for the reader.

No One Will Like This Piece

I don't watch Duck Dynasty. I watch very little television -- mostly Yankees baseball and New York Rangers hockey -- and I have no particular interest in life in rural Louisiana, even if the protagonists are Christian multimillionaires and devoted family men with prodigious shooting skills and extremely impressive beards. I'd much rather read...or write.

That having been said, let's get to the A&E / Phil Robertson dustup.

Whatever A&E's motives were in arranging for Phil Robertson's interview by "Gentleman's Quarterly," the Robertson family patriarch was unwise to accept it. "GQ" -- an Orwellian title for a periodical if ever there was one -- had a single, quite obvious motive for the interview: to denigrate the Robertson family and the lifestyle it practices. The interviewer was determined from the first to portray the Robertsons as idiots at best, repulsive backwoods bigots at worst. The audience to which "GQ" caters is heavily left-liberal and fop-friendly. It's guaranteed to view the Robertsons, their faith, and their practices with repugnance.

Phil Robertson appears to have the sort of nature to which Christians aspire, and which few of us manage to maintain in the face of temptation: that of a charitable and trusting soul who's unafraid to express himself candidly. That made him virtually ideal bait for the "GQ" types, who -- as with most leftists -- see nothing wrong with reframing a Christian's statements of belief to suit their own agenda.

As the saying goes, the subsequent uproar was "baked into the cake" in all its ugly particulars.

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A&E's suspension of Phil Robertson from the filming of Duck Dynasty involves the First Amendment's protection of freedom of expression in no way whatsoever. All the participants in this mess are private persons with an absolute right to freedom of association, including commercial association. The only limits on that right arise from contractual provisions to which the parties involved have freely assented.

(I don't give a BLEEP! what the courts have said about the obligations of wedding-cake bakers and photographers to accommodate homosexuals who imagine that they can actually marry one another. The courts are wrong, the homosexuals and enablers who cheer them on are wrong, and the whole sorry mess is just part of the approaching storm that will shortly tear this country apart. But that's a subject for another tirade.)

All that having been said, A&E has exhibited both extreme cowardice and poor judgment in its actions to this point. Popular sentiment is running heavily against the suspension. The Robertson family, which has already displayed considerable courage of conviction, might just pull the rug out from under the A&E network. That won't hurt the Robertsons at all, as numerous other outlets are openly slavering over the chance to host the most popular show on cable TV.

However, one element of this dustup about which I have inadequate information is just how important to A&E's finances is its backing by homosexuals and their enablers. Those communities of perversion and idiocy are overrepresented in the arts and communications trades generally, which is partly why they wield so much influence over what appears on TV. Besides, left-liberals have "taken one for the team" before, even when significant financial loss was involved. How this one will play out is something I cannot predict.

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The core issue illuminated by the A&E / Robertsons contretemps is the war being conducted against Christians, Christian living, and Christianity generally by the Left. In a country 74% of whose residents self-identify as Christians, you'd think the correlation of forces would make such a jeremiad unwise. However, there are other factors involved that significantly cloud the matter:

• The Left's disproportionate influence over the entertainment media;
• The homosexual-activist community's disproportionate influence over the Left;
• The federal government's cooperation with the homosexual-leftist agenda;
• The difficulty Christians have in mustering significant resistance to the attacks on them.

As the song goes, "They got the guns; we got the numbers." But numbers don't always prevail over firepower. Ask the Sudanese about the Battle of Khartoum...preferably from a safe distance.

Atop that, the Left has a powerful objective interest in extirpating Christianity, at least the public expression thereof, from these United States. Hearken to T. L. Davis on the subject:

There is a deep necessity of those on the left to abolish Christianity. Now, I would say religion, but that is not true. They are accommodating of almost any religion, even phony religions, but not Christianity. To them, Christianity must be banished from the public eye. All references to Christianity must be stricken from the record, banned from the schools, ripped from the monuments....

Is it that they (Marxists in general and their stooges) intend to obliterate, defame and denigrate our founders to make change that much easier? They have already done what they can to link them with slavery, with racism, with every evil under the sun. They speak of them as if they were doddering old, racist fools who clung to religion and guns just like our friends in Pennsylvania. "Old White Men". Why do they need to pretend that Lincoln, their hero, was not a Christian? He was not of a particular religion, but he was extraordinarily well versed with the Bible and could quote from it verbatim.

The whole reasoning behind the Revolution is undermined if God is taken out of government, because it is religion that founded this nation, gave it spirit, emboldened its revolutionaries and sustained them in the darkest days. Think of George Washington dropping to his knees and praying for his troops, for the survival of the new republic.

Any fight for liberty includes the right to practice religion, of any kind, freely, openly, without fear of reprisal by the government. In today's society George Washington would have been reported to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and replaced by a more sensitive, diverse general, who would have promptly lost the war and everything could return to normal with the king.

Christianity is and has always been the stoutest of bulwarks against the encroachments of the Omnipotent State. By contrast, the other religions of the world are pillars of statism. Only Jesus of Nazareth dared to separate religion from politics -- "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar, and unto God the things that are God's" -- and sin from temporally punishable crime -- "Whoever among you is without sin, let him cast the first stone." It's a great part of the reason why Caiaphas and his buddies on the Sanhedrin were desperate to see Him killed.

We in the Right often speak of the "intermediating institutions:" the organizations, practices, and traditions that stand between the individual and the State, helping us to resist its overreaches. Not one -- not family, not community, and not commerce -- is nearly as important as the Christian faith. Indeed, without Christianity, it's doubtful whether these other things could survive, at least in the forms to which we're accustomed. If I may paraphrase a famous atheist, George Bernard Shaw, Christianity is the idea that, put into a coward's head, turns him brave -- brave enough to resist subjugation to the last drop of his own blood, as many a historical incident will attest.

Left-liberalism is the Creed of Government Uber Alles. It knows Christianity to be its principal opponent in the all-important war of ideas. Therefore, Christianity -- all traces of it if possible; the public expression thereof if not -- must be destroyed.

If you're looking to fight in a war, there's no more righteous not critical battlefield than this one.

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As a writer of Christian-themed fiction and an outspoken Christian opinion monger, it should be obvious which horse I back in this race. That doesn't mean I'm confident of victory.

Millions have already rallied to Phil Robertson's defense. That's extremely heartening. But whether those millions will "hold the line" against the considerable media counterforces of the Left remains to be seen. Christians have all too frequently accepted a mess of pottage in exchange for conceding the public square to their enemies. We've grown far too comfortable with our public marginalization and exclusion.

As with the ultimate outcome of the A&E / Phil Robertson clash, whether it will be the falling stone that looses an avalanche of stouthearted reprisal against the enemies of Christianity cannot be predicted. For the reasons stated above, I am mildly pessimistic about the matter. Silence and deliberate disengagement have become habits for too many of us.

However the thing plays out, the Robertsons will not be harmed. Their "intermediating institutions" have served them well. They will not fail them at any time to come. The rest of us should draw the moral.

Be not afraid.

There Is No Defense Part 2: Silencers

Reactions to the earlier piece in this short series have been exactly what I expected: A blend of outrage and gratitude, roughly in equal measures. However, a few correspondents have written to ask for tactical direction: i.e., how best to counter the agendaists in practice. And yes, the earlier essay was a bit low on that sort of detail.

In the usual case, the deeds of evil men are best combated by publicity...if the surrounding society is overwhelmingly moral and ethical. Let's leave aside for the moment the question of whether America in the year of Our Lord 2013 satisfies that qualifier. What is the evildoers' best countermeasure to the tactic of public disclosure by those who would thwart them?

Exactly: Enforced silence.

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Have a gander at this:

I just posted a piece at The Huffington Post about Robert Van Tuinen, a student at Modesto Junior College in California who was told he would not be allowed to pass out Constitutions on Constitution Day....

I note:

Not 10 minutes after Van Tuinen began handing out copies of the Constitution, a campus police officer arrived to stop him. Van Tuinen was informed that anytime someone wants to pass out anything on campus, it must first be registered and approved by the Student Development office.

And as my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), writes in a press release today:

Upon arriving at that office, Van Tuinen talks with administrator Christine Serrano, who tells him that because of “a time, place, and manner,” he can only pass out literature inside the “free speech area,” which she informs him is “in front of the student center, in that little cement area.” She asks him to fill out an application and asks to photocopy his student ID. Hauling out a binder, Serrano says that she has “two people on campus right now, so you’d have to wait until either the 20th, 27th, or you can go into October.” Van Tuinen protests that he wants to pass out the Constitution on Constitution Day, at which point Serrano dismissively tells him “you really don’t need to keep going on.”

Modesto Junior College is an element of the California Community Colleges System -- an institution of the State of California. If memory serves, California, like the other 49 states of the Union, is bound by the Constitution of the United States, "the supreme Law of the Land." Amendment 1 to that Constitution guarantees the right of free expression -- "freedom of speech, and of the press" -- immune to Congressional displeasure. Inasmuch as Supreme Court decisions have declared the various rights guaranteed by the First Amendment to have been "incorporated" against interference by state governments, this would appear to be a clear violation of Robert Van Tuinen's civil liberties -- and grounds for a big, fat lawsuit against the administration of Modesto Junior College.

With FIRE on the case, we might yet see that come to pass. But there's a larger topic here, so permit me to move on from this instance of silencing, however egregious.

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A man can be denied his rights in a number of ways. The most insidious of all is to prevent him from learning of them in the first place. He who does not know his rights is unlikely to assert them and has little chance of defending them.

Similarly, a society can be kept from learning of rampant evil by suppressing all disclosure thereof. If the evildoers have ways to block such news from reaching the channels by which we would learn of it, they can continue on in near-perfect safety.

There is rampant evil in America. The overwhelmingly greater part of it is being perpetrated by persons in public office, high, middle, and low, elected and appointed. They labor ceaselessly to keep their identities and deeds out of public view, in which effort they have a great deal of support from other evildoers who control the major organs of popular news dissemination.

They have been appallingly successful. Consider the handling of the Benghazi atrocity alone:

During the second portion of a House Oversight and Government Reform hearing about Benghazi Thursday on Capitol Hill, the majority of Democrats on the Committee left the room and refused to listen to the testimony of Patricia Smith and Charles Woods. Ms. Smith is the mother of Sean Smith, an information management officer killed in the 9/11 Benghazi attack. Charles Woods is the father of Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods, who was also killed....

The only Democrats who stayed were Ranking Member Elijah Cummings and Rep. Jackie Speier.

The indefatigable, invaluable Bryan Preston adds a few details:

Patricia Smith, mother of slain U.S. Foreign Service information officer Sean Smith, testified that she met with President Obama, Vice President Biden, and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the day the four Americans’ bodies were returned to American soil. Smith says that the three and other senior administration officials lied to her about the cause of the attack.

“I was told a few things,” Smith told the remaining members of the committee, “and they were all lies. Obama, and Hillary, and Panetta, and Biden, and Susan [Rice] all came up to me at the casket ceremony. Every one of them came up to, gave me a big hug. And I asked them ‘What happened? Please tell me.’ And every one of them says, ‘It was the video.’ And we all know that it wasn’t the video. Even at at time they knew it wasn’t the video. So they all lied to me.”

Smith also said that all of the officials said that they would “check up” on what happened and get back to her. To date, she has heard from none of them.

“I don’t count,” Smith said, “the people of America don’t count. The only thing that counts is their own selves, and their own jobs.”

Charles Woods, father of slain Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods, also testified. In his soft-spoken voice, Woods also leveled grave criticisms at the Obama administration.

“It’s been over a year since four brave Americans were tragically killed in Benghazi,” Woods said. “And after one year we know very few answers. We’ve been asking for the last year. We don’t know much more than we did a year ago.

“Two of my heroes while growing up were John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King,” Woods said. “Rev. King made the statement, that ‘Justice delayed is justice denied.’ It’s been over a year. We have no justice. We have very few truthful answers that have been provided.”

Given the behavior to date of the Obamunists -- in which I include every last member of the Democrat caucuses in both houses of Congress -- it strikes me as near to certainty that all the Democrats who fled the chamber possess knowledge about what happened a year ago in Libya that they prefer to keep to themselves, for political reasons. If they were to remain for the testimony, the witnesses might call upon them to speak, with cameras recording their responses. Can't have that.

That's agendaism at work. The Democrats' sole agenda item is to retain and enlarge their power over these United States and every living soul in it. (Granted that there are some Republicans who'd like to do that for their own party.) It's a perfect demonstration of the willingness of the agendaist to jettison all moral and ethical principles when his agenda is threatened.

Feeling that old "take the musket down from the mantel" impulse yet, Gentle Reader? If not, why not?

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It's never been clearer how important it is to have channels of information distribution that defy all attempts to put them under political control. Before Fox News and the rise of the World Wide Web, we had little, if any, hope of learning anything the social-fascist Left, and its wholly owned subsidiary the Democrat Party, was willing that we should learn. Now that alternatives exist and are functioning to contradict the dominant media narratives, the Left's most ardent desire is to find a way to silence them. Needless to say, any easier targets will be picked off with regulation, licensing, or litigation, according to which of those weapons is most applicable.

As I've written innumerable times before this, a free society requires freedom in three aspects to sustain its freedom: education, weaponry, and communications. Granted that in a society that enshrines the freedom of speech as a sacred right, there is also freedom not to speak. We cannot compel the evildoers to testify against themselves. But they are striving to silence those who, however they manage to do so, learn of evil deeds and seek to disclose them. It's critically important that they be defeated.

"The greatest crime is silence! Record everything, record..." -- Jewish historian Simon Dubnov as he was being dragged off to Rumbula to be executed by the Nazis.