Thursday, October 2, 2025

Quickies: Success’s Descendants

     I have written both of the following:

     Success breeds emulation. If there are advantages to be had from the ruthless exploitation of a class privilege, over time more and more members of the class will be drawn into doing so. Thus, the coloration given to the class by its privileges will become stronger and more inclusive over time. [From here.]

     And also:

     She scowled. “My mentor liked to say that success breeds failure. You tend to repeat your old, successful moves because they worked, while your enemy is developing a new one to clobber you with.” [From here.]

     Both are true. The successful are attractive. People will tend (if not prevented) to emulate the behavior that made them successful. Initially, that means an increasing number of people doing the “successful thing.” But the more people do so, the greater the pressure becomes for a countermeasure. Eventually a countermeasure will emerge that thwarts the earlier behavior and establishes a new pattern for success. As has been said entirely too often: lather, rinse, repeat.

     Which explains how both “The trend is your friend” and “Contrarians always make money” are both true as well.

Wednesday, October 1, 2025

A Place Along The Riverbank

     I think I first saw the image that contains the title phrase in Kurt Vonnegut’s early novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. It speaks of a Money River known only to a privileged few. Those privileged are entitled to slurp from it. When a candidate for entitlement is approved, those already along the bank make a spot for him. He thus becomes entitled to slurp from the river, but is given a caveat: “Keep the racket down.”

     "It's still possible for an American to make a fortune on his own."
     "Sure -- provided somebody tells him when he's young enough that there is a Money River, that there's nothing fair about it, that he had damn well better forget about hard work and the merit system and honesty and all that crap, and get to where the river is. 'Go where the rich and the powerful are,' I'd tell him, 'and learn their ways. They can be flattered and they can be scared. Please them enormously or scare them enormously, and one moonless night they will put their fingers to their lips, warning you not to make a sound. And they will lead you through the dark to the widest, deepest river of wealth ever known to man. You'll be shown your place on the riverbank, and handed a bucket all your own. Slurp as much as you want, but try to keep the racket of your slurping down. A poor man might hear.'"

     Vonnegut, be it plainly said, was no fan of capitalism. Nevertheless, his image has an important application. For Vonnegut’s Money River, substitute “government.” As the Birchites have told us, there are “insiders” who collaborate to keep themselves in power, and therefore with the wealth and other perquisites that power can bring. These days, we usually call them “the Establishment.” They’ve made arrangements to protect themselves and their places along the Riverbank.


     No one is permitted to rise to power without methods being put in place to keep other powerful men safe from him. There will be levers that can bend him; other powerful men will know what they are. Such levers would only be used in extremis, should a maverick threaten to upset The System, and only if nothing else could curb him. They constitute politicians’ variety of “mutual assured destruction.”

     Among the reasons Establishmentarians feared Donald Trump is they could not find a lever that could daunt him. He, wealthy by his own efforts and widely admired for his accomplishments, is a maverick they could not threaten. Note how many attempts, of how many different kinds, have been made to bring him down. All have failed. With each failure, the anxiety among the Establishment has increased.

     But the protective mechanisms do protect Establishmentarians from one another. Sundance’s excellent article “DC Corruption on Scale” provides a look at the way some of them have functioned.

     Places along the Riverbank are sacrosanct. No one shall be permitted to endanger them. Especially not an elected upstart like Donald Trump. Or so the Establishmentarians believed.


     When I wrote Shadow of a Sword:

     “Have you ever heard the name William Graham Sumner, Miss Weatherly?”
     She shook her head. “A relative of yours?”
“An ancestor. Distant in time, but not in convictions. Among the things my ancestor wrote–his writings were rather well known, at one time–was that the concentrating tendencies of power will, over time, bring to the seats of power men ever less suited for them. Recent years have proved him correct. We have raised to high office men of ever more dubious skills and character. Men whose principal talent has been assembling coalitions of special interests, who would bankroll their campaigns and maneuver them into office, and subsequently expect them to steer the ship of state as their thralls. Men and interests entirely unconcerned with the Constitution’s quite explicit limits on federal power. In consequence,” he said, “today America is nearly twenty trillion dollars in debt. Our economy is faltering. Our military is no longer feared by other nations. Our extra-territorial possessions are under assault. Our dollar has ceased to be the world’s reserve currency. Our constitutionally guaranteed rights as individuals are treated as being suspensible at the whims of judges, policemen, and unelected bureaucrats. Washington and the state capitals take six of every ten dollars we earn to spend as they please. Our inner cities resemble nothing so much as free-fire zones. Our society has been shattered into competing interest groups that strive ceaselessly to out-thieve one another in an unending game of beggar-thy-neighbor. And our national identity and confidence are weaker than ever before in history.”
     Sumner had ticked his points off on his fingers. As he concluded, all ten of his fingers stood raised before the cameras.
     “That, Miss Weatherly, is what comes from the dynamic my ancestor perceived: the forces that elevate wealth, privilege, family prestige, and the backing of other powerful men and their little clubs to qualifications for high office. The pattern of devolution it has brought us can be broken in only one way: outsiders must force their way into the halls of power. But the major parties are part of the pattern. They have little interest in fixing what I and, hopefully, you and your audience see as severe problems that urgently require redress. So one who would oppose the devolutionary dynamic must operate outside them as well.”

     ...Stephen Graham Sumner was only a fictional character. I had no idea that a maverick would arise whom the Establishment could not control. I would not have guessed that that maverick would be a real estate mogul from Queens. Nor would I have guessed that he would succeed in bending a major party, a huge contributor to the Establishment, to his will.

     Donald Trump didn’t need nor want a place along the Riverbank. He holds those who line it in contempt. He has defied them more effectively than any president since Grover Cleveland. Which is why the big guns of Establishmentarian privilege have been blasting him from the Left, and working to undermine him from the Right.

     Sundance’s article provides a look at some of the details. Give it some of your time and attention.

Monday, September 29, 2025

Preconditions For Thought

     My Gentle Readers won’t be surprised to learn that my favorite discretionary activity is reading. Yet it’s a rare thing to encounter a devoted reader today. Getting rarer, too. And that’s not entirely because most of what's published today isn’t fit to line a cat’s litter pan.

     I routinely ask new acquaintances if they like to read. More often than not, the answer I get is “I don’t have the time.” Ponder that for a moment. Reading has been called the key to knowledge. Indeed, for most of human history, it was the only route to knowledge beyond whatever one’s elders could convey. But today it’s in a state of desuetude.

     I submit that that’s not because there are other, preferable avenues to knowledge available to us. Rather, it’s because the preconditions for reading have been all but eliminated from our lives... in many cases, with our cooperation.


     The preconditions for reading are time and silence.

     Yes, yes, I know that a lot of people claim that they must have music on “to concentrate.” Don’t believe it for a minute; I don’t. Music worth listening to commands one’s attention. But then, most popular music isn’t worth listening to, is it? Maybe its consumers use it to block out the other sounds around them... or to “fill the silence.”

     As I noted above, time is something a lot of people claim to lack. It isn’t so. The typical American’s life is filled not with obligations but with discretionary activities. Those activities may be rationalized as “important” or “good for you,” but that doesn’t change their discretionary nature. No one forces you to go to the gym, or the yoga class, or the library’s latest lecture on contemporary knitting practices.

     One of the consequences is that when time unallocated to any activity is upon us, we immediately look for distractions with which to consume it. There are plenty such available, of course. A little time on Facebook, or X / Twitter, will provide them in bushelfuls.

     Anything but read, or enjoy the silence and think.


     As it’s been a while, let’s have a little C. S. Lewis:

     Music and silence—how I detest them both! How thankful we should be that ever since our Father entered Hell—though longer ago than humans, reckoning in light years, could express—no square inch of infernal space and no moment of infernal time has been surrendered to either of those abominable forces, but all has been occupied by Noise—Noise, the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless, and virile—Noise which alone defends us from silly qualms, despairing scruples, and impossible desires. We will make the whole universe a noise in the end. We have already made great strides in this direction as regards the Earth. The melodies and silences of Heaven will be shouted down in the end.

     That’s Lewis’s devil-protagonist Screwtape speaking, of course. Lewis characterized the demonic as insatiability, a lust to consume without limit. That hunger embraces all things. Just as Ungoliant demanded that Melkor release the Silmarils so that that ever-hungering spider might consume them, the demonic seeks to consume all that is good. That includes ourselves, whatever we have made that is good, and silence.

     Note especially Screwtape’s observation that noise “defends us from silly qualms, despairing scruples, and impossible desires.” He didn’t say thought, but it’s inescapably implied. A noisy environment prevents concentration. Thought demands concentration. If there are any blessed souls who can think effectively despite all-embracing noise, I haven’t met them. I know I can’t.

     It’s no coincidence that the preconditions for reading are also those for thought. To read profitably – that is, to make sense of the material and integrate it into one’s store of knowledge – demands that the reader think, even if the process seems distant from the more conventional notion of thought as a deliberate process applied to the solution of problems.


     A delightful young woman on X / Twitter, whose moniker is “Barefoot Pregnant,” said just today:

     Note the sarcasm-quotes around boredom A lot of people conflate stillness and silence with boredom. No abstract notion more destructive has ever been expressed. Stillness and silence are the womb of thought! Without those preconditions, human existence reduces to motion alone. Whether patterned or random, motion devoid of thought is barren.

     From thought are all good things born.


     One more quote and I’ll close for today:

     Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid ... Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man. – Bertrand Russell

     And it is so. Why else would we so relentlessly seek distractions? Once the obligations and distractions are shoved aside and the noise quenched, we begin to think – and no one, be he a millennial genius or a dunce suited only to shoveling shit, can predict what will emerge.

     Thought is our creative capacity in motion. The universe itself is only a thought in the mind of God. It is when we think that we are most like God.

     Give those you love the preconditions for thought: stillness and silence. Help them to find those things. Especially provide them to your children. You’ll be astounded by what will come of it.

     And who knows? They might even pick up a book.

Friday, September 26, 2025

Weary Unto Death

Dear Gentle Readers,

     People have been writing to ask what happened to Liberty’s Torch V2.0. They’ve also been asking where to go for all the essays that were posted there. The first question is easily answered: Hosting Matters, which was recommended to me as a Web host by a friend – “You’ll love it, Fran!” – rendered the site inaccessible in the process of some back-end maneuver that was never explained to me. After several exchanges of emails with their “support” personnel, I became enraged and decided to terminate my account with them. Frankly, it was overdue; Hosting Matters had provided me many reasons to dislike their services over the not-quite-five years I’d dealt with them.

     The second question is also easily answered: At this time, those pieces are unavailable. There were a lot of them: more than four thousand. As I’m mortally weary of this business of changing hosts and reposting old material, they’ll remain unavailable unless something highly improbable should occur.

     For the time being, whatever I write will appear here at Liberty’s Torch V1.0. Blogger, whatever else might be said about it, is a reliable Web host. I’ve never had an outage here, nor any loss of material. So when the Spirit moves me, here is where any new pieces will appear.

     But I’m tired and sorely tried. I don’t have much left in me. I got up this morning, poured my coffee, perched before this computer, and asked myself, “What will today’s piece be about?” And in contemplating that question, I realized that I’ve come to dread continuing as I’ve done.

     After three decades of regular posting – usually at least one piece per day – I think I’ve shot my wad. It may have been the disaster with Hosting Matters that precipitated the realization, but it’s accurate nonetheless.

     So posting will be irregular henceforward. Apologies to those Gentle Readers who’ve enjoyed the fare here. Unless someone with a better compass than Ponce de Leon should discover the Fountain of Youth, that will be the way of things from here on.

     Yes, I’ll still be writing fiction, though that, too, will slow down. Once again, my apologies to anyone disappointed by these announcements. Be well.

From too much love of living,
     From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
     Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
     Winds somewhere safe to sea.

[Algernon Charles Swinburne]

All my best,
Fran

Thursday, September 25, 2025

“Both Sides,” Now?

     The world of Internet acronyms moves much faster than I can track it. Just a few days ago, I learned about DARVO: “Deny And Reverse Victim and Offender.” It’s easier to pronounce than many of the others, which is a blessing. The tactic to which it refers is a strictly Leftist thing, well exemplified by Leftists’ insistence that the murdered Charlie Kirk was a “fascist” and that assassin Tyler Robinson is merely a “troubled kid” who needs “help.”

     Owing to the rise of popular fury over that assassination and other attempts to gun down Republicans and conservatives, the DARVO gambit isn’t getting much traction lately. So the Left’s spokesmen are trying another, which – so far as I know – doesn’t yet have its own acronym. The new mantra is “Both Sides Are Responsible.” (BSAR, anyone?)

     Given the reported acts of violence of recent years, that’s more than a little disingenuous. At least, I can’t name a conservative who’s targeted a Leftist. While the initial attempts to characterize Tyler Robinson as a MAGA fan failed miserably, the attempts themselves are a giveaway of the Left’s rhetorical desperation. “Racist,” “fascist,” “homophobe,” “Islamophobe,” and “xenophobe” haven’t been carrying their weight lately. The first two have been brutally overused, whereas the other three simply haven’t gained traction.

     Political polemicists have to work with what they’ve got. On the Left, that’s precious little. They’ve striven to equate the murder of a popular conservative by an AntiFa-aligned killer to an intemperate statement from the chairman of the FCC. If that doesn’t suggest desperation, I can’t imagine what would. Still, the chant has gone up that “both sides are responsible” for political violence in the Twenty-First Century United States.

     As the major channels of communication continue to be far more friendly to the Left than the Right, there haven’t been many prominent slapdowns of the BSAR assertion. One must stand for many: Greg Gutfeld’s evisceration of Jessica Tarlov yesterday night. A choice snippet:

     The left calls Trump a hate monger. They’ve called me a hate monger because I ridicule the left. I ridicule protesters. I ridicule academia, Hollywood, the news media. I make fun of The View every day. I make fun of the UN. Guess what? No one acts on the things that I say because my side doesn’t do that!
     We say people are stupid, we say people are wrong, but we don’t say they’re evil. That is YOUR game!
     And then you come and you say, ‘This is a mentally ill loner.’ Well, who do you think does this stuff? It’s not Ben Affleck, it’s not Tom Brady…People who do this stuff are always that way.
     The question is, who points them in that direction? Why pick ICE? Why pick Charlie Kirk? Why target TV stations and put bombs under FOX trucks? Why vandalize memorials? Why kill kids in Catholic schools?”

     And indeed, both the vicious rhetoric and the consequent violence are emitted solely by the Left. The Right has produced no James Hodgkinsons or Tyler Robinsons. But even one act of violence from a conservative against a popular Leftist could provide BSAR the grounding it seeks. The Right must be careful not to provide even the slightest substantiation for the Left’s calumnies against us. Else BSAR’s ceremonial tune will resound from coast to coast. The Right, with its far lesser media presence, will be hard pressed to counter it.

Tuesday, September 23, 2025

The Left’s Model Of History

     Long, long ago, in a suburb not too far away, I had a teacher for American history who started the year with a striking proposition: specifically, that American history education has been forced into a “good guys versus bad guys” model. (Henceforward, the Model.) He could have named names, but he didn’t. Instead, he presented the Model to us and asked us whether it accurately summarized the way we’d been taught to view American history in our earlier school years.

     It did. It does. It continues to dominate the teaching of American history to this day. It will come as no surprise to my readers that the Model proposes that the “good guys” are on the big-government / international-interventionist left.

     Now, that teacher had a screw or two loose. He thought compound interest on mortgages (especially his) was “unfair.” He felt it was entirely acceptable to belittle those of us who sought careers in science and technology. And he was an ardent, evangelistic political conservative, one of the very few I encountered in my school years. I shan’t describe his idiosyncrasies any further than that. But he did capture the prevailing Model of American history accurately. (Needless to say, he taught from the opposite perspective.)

     One of the implications of the Model is, of course, that those administrations opposed to big government and international meddling are therefore bad. A teacher presenting American history to his students under the Model faces certain challenges. For example, he must reconcile the admiration of the administrations of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Grover Cleveland – three Democrat presidents – with the Left’s disapproval of limited government / noninterventionist sentiments. Preserving the Democrat label from association with limited government and noninterventionism can be a chore, especially when the first genuinely “progressive” president, in the contemporary sense, was Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican.

     To that end, American history before the Wilson Administration is glossed over rather than treated as a serious subject worthy of detailed attention. When the teacher presents details for study, they’re the ones that run counter to the sentiments that prevailed in those years: Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase; Jackson’s support for slavery; Cleveland’s intervention in the Pullman strike. The rest is wrapped in murk, lest the young mind be drawn to the limited government / noninterventionist way of thought.

     The Model can follow the young person into his adult life, and often does. It can warp his perception of social and political developments. It can predispose him against public figures identified with the small-government / America-First ideology. That the big-government / globalist model is antithetical to the principles on which the country was founded doesn’t get his attention, much less serious study.

     This comes to mind this morning for reasons disconnected from most current events. However, it does explain the Left’s sanctification of Democrat administrations starting with Woodrow Wilson, America’s first openly globalist president. It also explains the Left’s vilification of the administrations that have run counter to the big-government / globalist pattern. If the former is Good, the latter must be Evil, regardless of any other considerations.

     A little while ago, I encountered a poster on X / Twitter who claimed, quite barefacedly, that it’s been Republican administrations that have been responsible for America’s involvement in foreign wars. I couldn’t quite believe my eyes, as that poster has said many intelligent and observant things. But she had not paid attention to the details of history since 1900:

  • World War I: entered by Woodrow Wilson.
  • World War II: entered by Franklin D. Roosevelt.
  • Korean War: entered by Harry S. Truman, concluded by Dwight Eisenhower.
  • Vietnam War: entered by John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, concluded by Richard Nixon.

     Only the grip of the Model can explain that degree of historical ignorance in an otherwise intelligent, generally erudite person.

     If you’re the parent of a young American in high school today, watch for the effects of the Model. Chat with Junior about what he’s being taught about the history of his country. If you sense the Model in operation, do what you can – gently, of course – to correct its influence. Introducing your child to the facts, and to other historical perspectives, is critical. In this regard I heartily recommend the late Clarence Carson’s six-book series A Basic History of the United States, which is suitable for teenaged readers.

     Historical literacy is among the things the Left fears most. Consider only the effects of the Model on contemporary left-inclined Americans. How many fewer would there be, were it not for the tendentiousness of juvenile education in American history?

Monday, September 22, 2025

The Memorial

     Just in case you’ve spent the month of September on Ganymede, Charlie Kirk’s memorial was held yesterday. It overfilled a giant stadium. It included the president and vice-president of the United States, most Cabinet secretaries, and a number of other notables. The estimates of the crowd in attendance, both inside and outside State Farm Stadium, hover around 300,000. That makes it the largest scheduled event to have occurred in America in the Twenty-First Century.

     One must conclude that it drew some interest.

     I shan’t go on about Charlie Kirk. Plenty has been said about him by people who actually knew him. I didn’t, so my opinion counts for little. But his murder has proved to be a galvanizing event. Various people have said it’s sparked a revival of Christian faith. That’s notable in a nation that’s been trending secular for some decades.

     How? Why?

     I could go on about that, too, but I’ll spare you. If you’ve been reading my crap for any length of time, you know I’m a serious Catholic. You also know that I’m an unabashed promoter of the Christian faith. Denomination matters less than the acceptance of the Resurrection. That underpins everything else.

     There’s a book on my shelves by a certain Richard Rubinstein, titled When Jesus Became God. It’s about the doctrinal conflicts within early Christianity that eventuated in the Council of Nicea and its proclamations. It makes fascinating reading. But what I have in mind at the moment is a passage from the very beginning of the book, when the author is talking to a Catholic priest about the various notions that circulated in the late Roman Empire about Christ. Rubinstein says point-blank that except for the assertion that Jesus of Nazareth was divine, he could become a Christian himself.

     That’s the impact the life and teachings of Jesus have on people today, quite apart from Christian doctrine that He is the Second Person of the Divine Trinity.

     Unfortunately, Christianity today is in the hands of conservators and promulgators who are at best inept. Many of them act as if they’re embarrassed by their faith. Nearly all of them seem reluctant to talk to non-Christians about it.

     From what I’ve read about Charlie Kirk, he was the reverse of reluctant. He took pride and pleasure in his faith. It was the foundation of his identity. It pervaded his marriage and family. He would talk about it with anyone who would listen.

     It made Kirk the most effective evangelist for Christianity since Aimee Semple McPherson. Forget the televangelists and the revival-tent preachers. Their events are attended almost exclusively by the already persuaded. Kirk was the real deal: a speaker who could bring even a lifelong atheist to Christ.

     Never mind the politics. Kirk was first and foremost a Christian and an evangelist for Christ. His words reached open ears, not because of the words themselves – plenty of preachers have said the same things, sometimes more eloquently – but because those who listened to him knew at once that he was wholehearted and sincere. Admirable.

     An admirable man draws admiration. That brings about emulation. But the emulator realizes at once that the admirable one’s foundation is utterly vital. He must start from there, for all else is built upon it and would collapse without it.

     If there is to be a revival of Christian faith and adherence in the United States, Charlie Kirk must be credited with a great part of it.


     The world will miss Charlie Kirk. We needed him more than anyone knew. It doesn’t matter that not everyone will accept all of his prescriptions and proscriptions. The Christian denominations vary somewhat, too. But all of them accept the Resurrection.

     Accepting the Resurrection is the key to all the rest. Lee Strobel learned that by trying to refute the Resurrection... and failing. His book, not long ago dramatized in an exceptional movie, tell a compelling tale of a man’s transformation from atheist to believer. Yet Strobel, a well-regarded journalist, was unexceptional in any way but this: he was willing to look at the evidence.

     It’s the evidence that transforms the unbeliever into a believer. From that all else follows: Christ’s teachings, His miracles, His combined human-divine nature, and what follows from them.

     And it is exactly what we need today.

     Rather than belabor this still further, herewith please find a piece from Liberty’s Torch V2.0 that first appeared there on May 19, 2024. It’s mostly about another young Christian who experienced a great deal of vilification for daring to express his faith and its teachings in a forum much smaller than State Farm Stadium. Concerning the predicted revival of American Christianity, let’s hope Charlie Kirk’s memorial is only the beginning.


Births And Rebirths

     Happy Pentecost, the birthday of the Church. On this day two millennia ago, the Apostles were granted the gift of the Holy Spirit, which emboldened and equipped them for the mission with which Christ had charged them:

     Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, into a mountain where Jesus had appointed them. And when they saw him, they worshipped him: but some doubted.
     And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. 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 28:16-20]

     Christ’s final promise to His Apostles was that He would send the Holy Spirit to them, that they might fulfill that mission. That promise was kept ten days after His Ascension. That was also how the Apostles finally gained the courage to leave their refuge and begin their public ministry.

     They needed courage. They had seen Him crucified. Were they to reveal themselves as His Apostles, would not the same fate befall them? And indeed, all but one of the Apostles were martyred in the course of their ministry. Only John, youngest of the Twelve, escaped that fate.

     And two millennia later, we confront a new age of disdain for Christ’s teachings and persecution of those who follow Him. It sometimes seems we have learned nothing from our trials and the sorrows of our forebears. But our enemies have learned something. They no longer crucify. Today they wield weapons far more formidable: ridicule and deceit.

***

     We were warned:

     Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you. [Matthew 5:11-12]

     You don’t need to look very hard, or very far, to see that Christ spoke truly. Some of the abuse even comes from within our own number. Note what’s happened to Harrison Butker. You’ve heard about the talk he gave at Benedictine College’s graduation ceremony, haven’t you? Well, just in case you haven’t:

     I didn’t know the first thing about Butker before the contretemps over that talk erupted on the Web:

  • I didn’t know he’s an NFL placekicker;
  • I didn’t know he has two Super Bowl rings;
  • I didn’t know he’s a Catholic, or a married man, or the father of two children.

     Today I know all those things, and that he’s an admirable speaker as well. I also know this: he is currently experiencing exactly what Christ predicted:

     Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.

     Do a Google search on Butker’s name. He’s been attacked from every point of the compass. His employer, the Kansas City Chiefs, is being attacked. His wife is being attacked. Benedictine College is being attacked for inviting him to give his talk. Perhaps worst of all, an order of supposedly Catholic nuns – indeed, the order that co-founded Benedictine College – has attacked his talk as “divisive:”

     The sisters of Mount St. Scholastica do not believe that Harrison Butker’s comments in his 2024 Benedictine College commencement address represent the Catholic, Benedictine, liberal arts college that our founders envisioned and in which we have been so invested.
     Instead of promoting unity in our church, our nation, and the world, his comments seem to have fostered division. One of our concerns was the assertion that being a homemaker is the highest calling for a woman. We sisters have dedicated our lives to God and God’s people, including the many women whom we have taught and influenced during the past 160 years. These women have made a tremendous difference in the world in their roles as wives and mothers and through their God-given gifts in leadership, scholarship, and their careers.
     Our community has taught young women and men not just how to be “homemakers” in a limited sense, but rather how to make a Gospel-centered, compassionate home within themselves where they can welcome others as Christ, empowering them to be the best versions of themselves. We reject a narrow definition of what it means to be Catholic. We are faithful members of the Catholic Church who embrace and promote the values of the Gospel, St. Benedict, and Vatican II and the teachings of Pope Francis.
     We want to be known as an inclusive, welcoming community, embracing Benedictine values that have endured for more than 1500 years and have spread through every continent and nation. We believe those values are the core of Benedictine College.

     I could hardly have believed it, were it not an official, public statement from the Daughters of St. Scholastica. That it misstates Butker’s speech in the sole objective criticism it makes is merely icing on an already distasteful cake. Clearly, that order of nuns has “gone woke.”

     Isabelle Butker stands staunchly behind her husband. You can read about her at several places on the Web. Her faith is as joyous as his, and just as undisguised:

     Much like Harrison, Isabelle was also a college athlete, playing women’s basketball at Rhodes College in Tennessee. According to her player bio, Isabelle played in 26 games and averaged seven minutes per game.”
     During his controversial speech, Harrison revealed that Isabelle converted to Catholicism after she began dating him. “I had a moment one day where I was asking God, you know, ‘OK, can you just show me what is the right path? Do I go this way or do I go with what Harrison’s doing? And it was weird in that moment, I actually felt like I was physically being embraced,’” Isabelle shared in a May 2019 interview with EWTN. “And we were at Mass at the time, and that was kind of the moment when I decided, ‘I want to be Catholic. This is real, this is the truth.’”
     Harrison and Isabelle tied the knot in 2018. “I will continue to pray for the strength and perseverance to sacrifice for you everyday [sic] of our marriage,” Harrison captioned photos from their big day via X in April 2018. “I love you Izzy!”
     The couple went on to welcome their son, James, in January 2019, followed by their daughter, whose birthday and name have not been publicly revealed. The couple are currently expecting their third child.

     The Butkers stand above all of the Sturm und Drang. They have something their attackers don’t: the gift the Apostles received on that first Pentecost, two millennia ago. In every individual who prays for and receives that gift, the Church is reborn.

***

     I’ll say it again, and in large font so that there’s no mistaking it:

We don’t need governments.
We need Christ.

     That’s what Harrison Butker and Isabelle have: a genuine, undisguised, Holy-Spirit-powered faith and the courage to live and proclaim it.

     What do their detractors have? What do they have to show that compares at all to the Butkers’ unconcealed joy in their marriage, their children, or their faith? What if they were to succeed in destroying him utterly? What joy would that bring them? Wouldn’t they just go hunting for new victims – more of Christ’s people to denigrate and destroy?

     C. S. Lewis called them “those who have not joy.” He was quite accurate in that, possibly more so than even he knew. Their pleasures come from destruction, like the apotheoses of O’Brien’s vision in 1984:

     “The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.”

     If you ever yearned to know toward what end, what ultimate satisfaction, the enemies of Christ are aimed, there it is. The label doesn’t matter. Socialist? Communist? Humanist? Atheist? Pagan? Satanist? Muslim? Environmentalist? Feminist? They all have that one thing in common: they want absolute and unbounded power over you: what you do, what you say, even what you think. Because it’s the firmest barrier against them, they hate the Church that was born on the Pentecost. And they will do anything whatsoever, including things no decent man could imagine, to tarnish and damage it.

***

     Today of all days, let the Church be reborn in you. Profess Christ. Embrace Him and His Gospel. Denominational differences fade in importance if you can do that one indispensable thing. For as He said to the Pharisees:

     “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” [Matthew 22:37-40]

     Let the Pentecost come upon you as it came upon the Apostles two millennia ago. And may God bless and keep you all.