"Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy,
And the dogs that bark revolution.
Drunk with talk, liars and believers.
I believe in my tusks. Long live freedom and damn the ideologies!"
(Robinson Jeffers)
“[I]t is not real, you know. It is not stable, not solid—nothing is. Things change, change. You cannot have anything. . . . And least of all can you have the present, unless you accept with it the past and the future. Not only the past but also the future, not only the future but also the past! Because they are real: only their reality makes the present real.” [Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed]
Probably the most important fact, in a space-time continuum filled with facts of every kind, is that things change. Everything. Le Guin’s insight above is fundamental to all kinds of thinking. The past is real; we experienced it, we remember it, and we can see its consequences around us. The future, too, is real; we plan for it, however ineptly, and work to achieve it according to our values, priorities, and understanding of cause and effect. But the present is more ephemeral than the mayfly. It’s gone before we can finish pronouncing its name.
(I’m not endorsing the Anarrestis’ hostility to property here. That was Le Guin’s fictional device to create the contrasts and clashes that animated the novel. It’s a fine tale, but an anarcho-syndicalist society in which property is completely abjured would be less stable than communist egalitarianism. History has spoken on this subject. So have I.)
Yet everyone seeks stability. Stable homes, stable incomes, stable relationships, and stable societies with stable laws and customs. It seems to be a consequence of Man’s nature as a “project pursuer.” (Cf. Loren Lomasky.) For every project aims at an end state, with all that implies. Yet upon the instant that end state is achieved, it begins to change. There’s no escaping it.
If any kind of stability is achievable, it must be one in which the dynamics of time and change actually work to preserve it. However, while we can theorize about such a dynamic stability, we haven’t any idea about how to produce it. Among other things, we cannot answer the question “Just what would that variety of ‘stability’ actually stabilize? What aspects of it would not change?”
The freedom advocate faces an unpleasant reality:
Free Societies Don’t Remain Free For Long.
Freedom in these United States lasted roughly until 1900. For the century-plus from the Founding to the Oklahoma Land Rush, there was a frontier to which people unsatisfied with the constraints of “civilization” could escape. The availability of that frontier was critical to freedom elsewhere, for politicians and their hangers-on had to remain aware that they were escapable. Once America’s land frontier was closed, the State could advance upon us, gradually whittling away our supposedly guaranteed rights.
Today, freedom is only a memory. All human action is hemmed in by laws, regulations, taxes, and the efforts of busybodies everywhere to compel us to conform. As C. S. Lewis put it in Screwtape Proposes a Toast:
Hidden in the heart of this striving for Liberty there was also a deep hatred of personal freedom. That invaluable man Rousseau first revealed it. In his perfect democracy, you remember, only the state religion is permitted, slavery is restored, and the individual is told that he has really willed (though he didn’t know it) whatever the Government tells him to do. From that starting point, via Hegel (another indispensable propagandist on our side) we easily contrived both the Nazi and the Communist state. Even in England we were pretty successful. I heard the other day that in that country a man could not, without a permit, cut down his own tree with his own axe, make it into planks with his own saw, and use the planks to build a tool-shed in his own garden.
Do not imagine that any society, however organized, can escape the State’s best friend: the busybody.
A means of escaping the busybody is the best guarantor of a tolerable degree of freedom. It is not permanently stable; nothing is. But it’s the best-enduring chance we have. That implies that until we regain a frontier:
That’s reachable by common men;
That provides access to places where the State does not rule;
Such places being habitable, perhaps with technological help, by those who go there;
...freedom will only be a sound we make from time to time. A word in the dictionary whose meaning has no referents in objective reality.
Just now, that frontier does not exist. Yet it existed in the past. It might exist again in the future. But whereas its past form was a feature of terrestrial geography, its future form will be harder to bring about, and for a time will be accessible only to a fortunate few. Elon Musk had better find some inheritors who share both his vision and his passion for it.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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:
🧵(1/5) "The ability to simply THINK is the best gift we can give our children — and ourselves.
We can’t do it when we’re overstimulated, when we have too much to do — it really only happens through “boredom” and stillness.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Having reviewed the various topics I have in mind for new pieces, I’ve decided to take the rest of today, September 21, 2025, off to read and reflect. Enjoy your Sunday.
The following tweet offers a penetrating analysis of what happens when migrants from low-trust societies enter a high-trust society:
What I call “The Candy Bowl Problem” is the reason why Indians, who almost no one in the our country thought about 25 years ago, are increasingly hated.
During Halloween, kiddos go door-to-door saying "trick or treat" and receive candy. Sometimes, a person isn't home and so they…
Please click through and read it all. Then extend the reasoning to domestic exploiters: those who, owing to unnatural and unjustifiable restraint on the part of law enforcement, justice authorities, and decent persons generally, have concluded that they can violate the norms of a high-trust society with impunity.
In yesterday’s piece, I suggested that we should get off the Mishnory Road when it comes to the education of our young. Most “educational reformers” concentrate on curricula, discipline, and the purging of teachers who indoctrinate rather than teach. They seldom contemplate the truly dramatic step I have in mind.
Government-run schools are a total disaster just about everywhere in this country. They produce the lowest-quality graduates in American history: not merely ignorant, but functionally illiterate, innumerate, and uninquisitive. The parents of school-age children agree on this by an overwhelming margin. Yet the system continues. It acquires more “responsibilities” with every passing year. The amounts of money being poured into the schools, already torrential, are regularly criticized as “not enough.”
Clearly someone must be benefiting from all this. Or perhaps we’ve wedged ourselves into a metastable state, such that even small changes could topple the whole edifice. So for a first step, let’s retreat to a comfortable distance. Perhaps the change in perspective will improve our understanding of what we see.
Schooling is one of the largest “industries” in America. It employs millions of teachers, aides, counselors, administrators, and maintenance staff. It requires tens of thousands of buildings and a proportional number of acres of land. It expends nearly a trillion dollars per year to do... whatever it is that it does.
So the system provides a great many jobs. The people who hold those jobs would be as unhappy about losing them as you or I would be about losing ours. And of course, they want their incomes to increase over time. They constitute a formidable political force – so formidable that when he campaigned for the presidency, Jimmy Carter had to sway them to his side by promising them a federal Department of Education.
Now let’s look at the “customers” of the public-schooling “industry:” the school-age children and their parents or guardians. Ultimately, the system must satisfy them to some extent; the public schools are funded mainly at the state and local levels, where they can be (partially) defunded by community votes. So what are those customers getting from the system?
Parents are getting a reduction of their responsibilities. Schoolchildren get access to facilities and activities they might not have otherwise. The kids don’t feel the direct impact of the system’s cost. The parents certainly do. Many families wouldn’t need a second income, were school taxes and other schooling-related expenses to vanish.
Schoolchildren pay a kind of price for the system, too. They pay through their enforced endurance of things they could otherwise avoid. Indoctrination. Hostility. Violence.
No overview would be complete without taking note of the third parties that benefit from the schooling system: labor unions, bureaucrats, and the vendors of “educational materials.” With nearly a trillion dollars per year being spent on the schools, they have a powerful incentive to keep it going – and growing.
Taxpayers routinely find themselves outmaneuvered politically by the system’s beneficiaries. At any rate, the costs keep increasing. Teachers, aides, and administrators want more money. Special interests clamor for the schools to take on new activities. Sometimes school districts float bonds to fund the mounting costs, which only increases them. The special interests, of course, will always push for more.
At the center of it all is the public school: a building, or a cluster of buildings, perched somewhere near the center of the district. Each day ten months of the year, hundreds of individuals of all ages trudge in at an early hour and trudge out at a later one. And the system rolls merrily along.
Now imagine that a hand reaches down from the clouds, plucks the public schools out of our reality, and removes them to some unknown realm. It may be the hand of God. Or perhaps it’s the collapse in birthrates. In either case, what would come next?
First, school taxes would vanish. As they constitute one of the largest expenses families face, the economic relief would be considerable. Mandatory-schooling statutes would lose force, and would probably be repealed.
Some parents would seek a private school for their kids. Without the school tax burden, that would become much more affordable. In response to the demand, private schools would increase in number. Whether their quality would improve is debatable, though the market incentives would favor it.
But some parents would homeschool.
Many working mothers are unhappy with the demands of the working world. They’d rather be with their kids while the kids are young. Once the school taxes are gone, a good percentage of them would calculate that they could leave their jobs without depriving the family of what it needs. These would take the responsibility for their children’s educations onto themselves, whether alone or in combination with some of their neighbors. Home education has proved superior to schooling in nearly every known instance.
Not all mothers would opt to do that, of course. But the sense that American women are made unhappy by the combination of child-rearing and contributing to the family income suggests that many would find it an attractive course.
There would be negative effects as well. A great many persons whose incomes depend on the public schools would need new jobs. The educational labor unions would lose many members. Vendors who sell to the public schools would need to find new markets. Other interest groups would shrink as their participants decreased. Bureaucrats, no longer charged with responsibility for overseeing American education would... well, honestly, who cares what would happen to bureaucrats?
With parental choice in education restored, the homeschoolers would be in direct competition with the private schools. Over time, the more successful model would be revealed. The less successful one would diminish, though probably not to zero.
And that’s just the view from thirty thousand feet.
It won’t happen, of course. “Too many rice bowls,” and so forth. But it’s a very appealing scenario. Among its most attractive aspects would be the diminution of opportunities for political and social indoctrinators to work their wills on our kids. Parental choice would put a severe clamp on such things.
While the public schools are the worst in that regard, private schools are affected by it as well. The parents of privately-schooled children can be as contentious as those of public schoolers. Many political or social axes to grind. Schools, being inherently collectivizing institutions, are always attractive to persons with that agenda.
I suppose that’s enough fantasizing for a Saturday morning. Please add your thoughts in the comments section. And do have a nice day.
Americans in the Right have been exercised about the sad state of American education for decades. While relying on any individual metric is dangerous, as “educational quality” is inherently immensurable, education appears to have hit its peak in the years immediately after World War II and started to slide thereafter. Today it’s a joke. American teens leave high school knowing less, and being less prepared to think for themselves, than at any time since the founding of the nation. The schools largely exist to provide jobs to “educators” and administrators.
The defenders of mass education – note and remember that term, please; its significance will soon be apparent – have all sorts of rationales for it. Remember “basic skills?” Remember “socialization?” Remember “keeping the little monsters out of the labor pool?” No, that last one has never been discussed a lot, but it was among the first of the real reasons for compulsory schooling. The labor unions were big backers.
We in the Right have grappled with all those arguments. Given the abysmal performance of the schools – note this too; with few exceptions, the private schools barely exceed the performance of the “public” ones – we’ve displayed a notable reluctance to break away from the public-education model. Instead, most conservative education activists focus on “reform.” But the notion that one can reform a government-run institution in a significant and enduring way is inherently foolish. Governments and their institutions obey a dynamic wholly different from that of wholesome ones.
Public education and mandatory schooling are inherent to the problem. If we want real, enduring improvement in education, those things must end. Conservatives are steadily moving toward that realization. But the problem doesn’t end with them.
Schooling collectivizes education. Even in its best instances – curricula that omit everything but actual education; teachers who really teach rather than indoctrinate; students who earnestly seek the improvement of their minds – it bends inexorably toward uniformity. Worse, that uniformity gravitates toward the students least ready, willing, and able to learn.
Collectivization is something freedom lovers should know to avoid.
I had a “Mishnory Road” moment a little earlier. A fellow-traveler in the Right was ranting about educational reform. I found that the subject made me unbelievably weary, in that Dear God, haven’t we been here before? fashion. So did my colleague’s prescriptions. All of them were as familiar as leftovers eaten for lunch.
That weariness made me say to myself Why not break the mold? Why not ditch the schooling model instead of trying to make it serve purposes it probably can’t serve?
I didn’t say anything then and there. I just started to think from the premise that the model itself – education collectivized via schooling – is the source of our troubles. The more I thought about it, the more I liked it.
Rather than pursue this further at this early hour, I’ll leave it here for you, Gentle Reader. To think about. What current, widespread practices would have to change were Americans to avoid schooling our kids? Would those changes be beneficial:
To the children;
To their parents;
To their communities;
To the nation?
Please try to be specific about the costs, benefits, and demerits.
I’ll be back later or tomorrow with my own thoughts. Meanwhile, enjoy your day.
When the wheel turns under your hand, you must watch your words. – Ursula Le Guin
This is a piece I feel obligated to write. I don’t want to write it. It comes near to being an insult to my readers’ intelligence. It’s mandatory even so. The yammerers of the Left have made it so.
Here’s the text of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It’s noteworthy that of all the rights mentioned in the original Constitution, or any of the Amendments, only the First Amendment says that “Congress shall make no law.” The other Amendments speak of rights without mentioning any particular possible abridger or infringer. Even when Civics was a routine part of American education, insufficient attention was drawn to that difference. Few lecturers dared to speak of the reason for it.
The reason is simple: The Bill of Rights was a compromise document. Its drafters urgently desired that all thirteen colonies sign onto it. For that reason, they had to make room for certain practices that existed in those colonies at that time. Just as several of the colonies legislatively protected slavery, several had laws that did infringe upon the freedom of speech and religion. Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire had an established church: the Congregational Church. Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia had established the Church of England. Several colonies had laws against public vulgarity and blasphemy as well.
When the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment federalizes all the rights mentioned in the Constitution, such that no state government could pass laws abridging or infringing them, those established churches and laws infringing on freedom of expression were history, de facto if not de jure. It was a landmark in judicial practice, as never before had the Court deliberately ignored the plain language of the First Amendment, nor the care with which the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment had averted any talk of rights. For comparison, here’s the complete Fourteenth Amendment:
1: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
2: Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
3: No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
4: The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.
5: The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
Read it closely. You won’t find the word rights anywhere in it. Moreover, note that the original ten Amendments in the Bill of Rights don’t say anywhere that “The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.” That too was deliberate. The whole point of those Amendments was to keep Congress from legislating about the rights mentioned there.
There’s a whole education in those differences... and damned near no one even thinks to mention them today.
The above is my gesture at providing some real and important information, something worth saying that my readers might not know. The rest of this piece will be of a different color.
Various Leftist figures, many of them in the media, have felt their positions shaken because of viciously intemperate remarks they’ve made in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The most recent is Jimmy Kimmel. ABC announced that it has suspended Kimmel “indefinitely” for his statements, and has pulled his late-night show from its schedule “for the foreseeable future.”
Other Left-aligned figures have called such actions on the part of media organs offenses against freedom of speech. They’ve striven to equate those things with Biden Administration strong-arming of various organs into muting conservative voices of note. There is some justice to those claims, as the Federal Communications Commission has been involved:
FCC chairman Brendan Carr has threatened to take action against ABC after Jimmy Kimmel said in a monologue that “the MAGA gang” was attempting to portray Charlie Kirk‘s assassin as “anything other than one of them.”
Appearing on Benny Johnson’s podcast on Wednesday, Carr suggested that the FCC has “remedies we can look at.”
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
I can’t approve of that, but it’s just one more example of the perniciousness of licensing. Whoever’s in power decides what will and what won’t be considered licit under a license; note the etymology. Just as they have with tax law, left-wing Administrations have used licensure to suppress voices contrary to their preferences before this. It was wrong then and it’s wrong now.
All that having been said, when governments are not involved in a pressure campaign to punish intemperate remarks, “freedom of speech” as guaranteed by the federalized First Amendment is not an issue. Media barons are fully within their rights to hire, fire, and discipline their employees on whatever basis those barons find appropriate. If well-known media giant Octopus Corp. should decide that some fire-breathing conservative is hurting its bottom line, terminating his employment is merely one more corporate decision. We in the Right might not like it, but it would have nothing to do with “freedom of speech.”
Both Left and Right have been inconsistent about this. Newspapers – say, remember newspapers? I do – have routinely selected and dismissed commentators on the basis of what their readerships tell them they want to read. That’s not a freedom-of-speech issue. Neither is it when a broadcaster or cablecaster does the same. Even so, the partisans of dismissed commentators will try to make it one. This only confuses the issue of freedom of speech still further.
Similarly, when a business loses customers and patronage because one of its owners or employees has said or done something customers find repugnant, no freedom-of-speech issue exists. Indeed, the customers are exercising their freedom of speech: i.e., their right to disapprove and to take their business elsewhere. It’s moderately distressing that anyone should need to say this, but such are the times we live in.
What’s strangely humorous is that many on the Left, having been chastised for belittling Charlie Kirk’s murder or attempting to gloss over its horror, are asserting something akin to a right to be free from criticism. I cannot imagine where or how such a notion originated. It certainly wasn’t honored on the Left when the Bidenites were in power. But people stung by the popular lash will say anything.
Other, better known commentators have reframed the matter in the best possible terms: There is freedom of speech, but there is no freedom from consequences. All actions have consequences. Word gets around, as I’ve said far too many times already. People will decide with whom to associate from several criteria, and what a man says to others is one of them. With whom he associates is another... and several persons of relatively moderate disposition have discovered that to their chagrin, as well.
Yes, your words are protected by the First Amendment. That means that, with the exception of incitement to violence, they are not criminally actionable. But the First Amendment cannot limit the freedom of others to regard you as they see fit, including on the basis of your words.
Words matter. Watch yours, for others surely will.
There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of such videos. There are videos of blacks trashing supermarkets, outdoor grocers’ stalls, fast-food places, convenience stores, and hairdressers’ salons. There are many videos of blacks attacking a lone white man or woman, sometimes in packs. There are videos of blacks deliberately vandalizing cars. There are many videos of gangs of black women brawling in public. There are videos of blacks challenging white cops to a fistfight, usually getting shot or Tased for it. There are videos of blacks disrupting restaurants, of blacks acting up on mass transit, and of blacks deliberately halting traffic on a busy street. You can find as many of these as you can stomach on X/Twitter.
There are plenty of videos of black smash-and-grab robberies and strong-arm robberies, if you prefer.
Many will say “But in a nation of 330 million, surely these are just scattered incidents.” They are not. They’re commonplace and growing more so as you read this. Iryna Zarutska wasn’t a tragic outlier; she was representative of today’s norm.
Around blacks, whites and our property are not safe.
The “root cause” of racial “disharmony” will remain a matter for dispute. Some will insist it’s cultural. I continue to believe it’s at least partly genetic. But does it really matter? Must civil society continue to suffer while we struggle toward a consensus about it?
When I wrote this piece, I still had hope. I didn’t think that outcome, or anything like it, was inevitable. After all, I told myself, there are still many intelligent, well-socialized blacks. Perhaps they’ll finally realize that they must take their unruly fellows in hand, discipline them, and bring an end to their disruptions of our society.
Then I started to think seriously. I asked myself the key questions: Who is teaching the unruly ones to hate whites? Who is encouraging them to victimize us? Who is shielding them from the consequences of their actions?
It was a long and painful pondering. I sought answers other than the obvious one. I couldn’t find any that were consistent with the available evidence. Then I wrote this piece. No, it doesn't explicitly mention race. Does it need to?
We cannot have them among us.
I’m old. The old are often cynical. I’ve tried to resist that temptation. But cynicism often comes of a particular phenomenon: a pattern of pieties repeated to rationalize the avoidance of an unpleasant or uncomfortable conclusion. The pious ones keep saying “We can’t go that way” to that conclusion even as their preferred explanations fail and the “solutions” they proffer crash and burn beyond recognition.
It’s when the pieties are inflicted upon oneself that they become truly intolerable. I’ve had that experience.
I once had a couple of liberal friends. Liberal in the Sixties sense: tolerant, generous, well-meaning – liberals are always well-meaning; ask them and they’ll tell you so – and certain that America could “solve” its race problem. They ascribed that problem to racism: that is, to white racism toward blacks. It was liberal doctrine; anyone who refused it was “read out of the church.”
I was politically unaligned back then. I’d begun to question that doctrine. At that time I worked near the border between Nassau County and Queens. I’d been mugged several times, always by blacks. Even then, I was willing to notice a pattern, though I still held back from what it implied.
So I asked one of them, a woman not much older than myself, what she thought about racial matters. She responded with liberal doctrine: we must understand blacks’ grievances, we must be tolerant and forgiving, we must compensate for the legacy of slavery, we must give them a “hand up” to balance the scales, and so forth. We must, we must, we must.
Must we? I asked myself silently. My interlocutor lived in a lily-white district and worked as a high-ranking bureaucrat at a prestigious university. She might never have brushed against racial hatred personally. I forbore to ask her about that, of course; it would have been “insulting.” So I asked her something else.
“Suppose my neighborhood,” I said, “were about to find itself home to a couple of black families? Knowing what usually results from that, what would you say I should do?”
She reacted indignantly. Indignation is common among liberals when they’re challenged on one of their dogmas, even indirectly. She insisted stridently that I would have a moral obligation to remain where I am, not to sell my home and move.
Why would I be under such an obligation? She never got there. But she was adamant. That obligation, she insisted, was absolute. It superseded my responsibility for my own well-being.
You might try my query on a liberal of your acquaintance. I can’t recommend it, mind you; the consequences occasionally go beyond simple disagreement. But give it some thought when you’re not otherwise engaged.
I know some highly intelligent persons. More than one of them has echoed that old Sixties-liberal racial doctrine at me. As I once did, they resist the conclusion that the black race cannot mingle peacefully with America’s other races. They want to keep trying. They maintain, sometimes explicitly, that racial separation is simply unacceptable. They insist that there “must be another way” – and that whites are morally obligated to keep trying until we find it.
I no longer feel any such obligation. The obligation I feel is to defend myself, my loved ones, my neighbors, and American civil society. That’s where I have planted my flag.
Though I strive for clarity, the associated virtue of concision often eludes me. I know the reasons, but my efforts to overcome those weaknesses have had only indifferent success. That’s a great part of why I admire writers and commentators who succeed at concision... when they do so.
A fellow who describes himself as a “Dem strategist” posted this to X:
In the middle of Kirk’s memorial yesterday, Donald Trump held a press conference and called Democrats scum. I am not going to be lectured by the modern-day Republican Party about rhetoric.
I didn’t see that press conference. Let’s stipulate that President Trump actually did call the Democrats “scum.” He has earned my regard, so I’m inclined to think well of him, especially in his dealings with the increasingly vulpine press. If he said it, he had his reasons. At any rate, by my lights various Democrats in public office have behaved “scummily” in recent months.
The redoubtable Kurt Schlichter responded to the above with brilliant concision and penetration:
See there’s your mistake. No one’s lecturing you. We’re not interested in convincing you of anything. When your side lies about obvious truths, there’s no point in argument. We’re just going to use our legitimate power to prevent your friends from murdering us. If that makes you sad, that’s a fringe benefit. https://t.co/HIyz3uz49t
Kurt has gone to the heart of the thing. The Left is at war with us. Its public figures wield language as a weapon rather than as a means of conveying information or opinion. That includes the deliberate denial of objective truths, as if observers were incapable of seeing the reality.
Argument has been taken off the table. What remains is combat.
Rhetorical combat can be as vicious as any other kind. While words alone cannot do damage to others, they can induce some persons to use actual weapons with which to do so. The recent murder of Charlie Kirk is only the most recent demonstration.
Rhetoric can also be used in defense. The Left’s numerous attempts to defame Charlie as a fascist, racist, misogynist, et cetera ad nauseam infinitam are desperate attempts to blunt the impact of his assassination. The intent behind them is perfectly clear: “He deserved it.”
But let’s not stray from the core of the thing: Argument with the Left is impossible. The Left has made it so. If there was a time when Leftists were willing to debate rather than defame, it’s come and gone. The implications for us in the Right, if I may use a disfavored word for its dictionary meaning for once, are obvious.
But if argument is impossible, what remains? Reciprocal defamations? Fisticuffs? Counter-assassinations?
None of the above. While the Right must acknowledge the reality, it’s enough that we take an active stance. There’s no longer any point in William F. Buckley’s approach of inviting the adversary to sit down and reason with us. He tried it; he had some successes; but that era is over. The hour for an all-out attack on Leftists’ deceits, distortions, deflections, and defamations is upon us.
Make them appear like what they are... what they have become.
In combat of any kind, a tactic that succeeds will be reused. The reuses will continue until its enemy discovers a counter-tactic that defeats it. In other words, success breeds failure. When you hear someone deride military planners for “fighting the last war over again,” that’s what they’re saying.
The tactic that defeats lies is truth: the presentation of unadorned facts and their immediate implications, including the plain import of the deceits being proffered in their place.
No, the truth will not persuade the committed Leftist. He’s sold his soul. But the unaligned political middle of America, the approximately twenty percent of voters who decline to become partisans, are reachable. Moreover, my sense is that they’re growing weary of being lied to.
It’s our time. Use it for all it’s worth.
UPDATE: Braden Langley has gone the extra mile for all of us:
[An imagining. Not a prediction. At least, not yet. – FWP]
“Dad!” I shouted over my shoulder. “The groceries are here.”
“Why tell me?” came the answering shout. “You know what to do.”
Well, yes, I did. But I didn’t like to do it. All the same, I stepped over to the master console, pressed the toggle that focused the monitor camera, and winced as the driver’s face became visible. It was the same one as last week. He leered at me the same way.
“Do you have a shipment for Hayes?” I said.
“I got a medium-size package marked Hayes and a great big one for you, sugar.”
I forced myself not to react. “Put the package on the conveyor.”
He took his time about it, but after a couple of minutes he fetched a box marked Hayes in large block letters and tossed it onto the belt. I waited until his whole body was back inside his vehicle, then triggered the belt. It jerked forward. Five seconds later, the package was completely inside the safety box. I slapped the safety that dropped the outer security panel. The driver awarded me a parting sneer and sped off.
Dad ambled over to peer at the sensor readings. Temperature and vapor emissions were within normal limits. The needle on the radiometer ticked forward once, then settled against the left stop. My heart fluttered.
“Dirty bomb with a crack in the shielding?” I murmured.
Dad shook his head. “We’d get a persistent positive reading. Probably an activation glitch. I don’t usually use the radiometer. Why would anyone dirty-bomb a private home?”
“Well, there was Houston—”
He nodded. “And then there wasn’t. It looks safe, Leah. Let it in.”
I pressed the Admit key. The inner security panel rose, the belt groaned as it went through its slow, spiraling descent to our level, and presently the parcel entered our home proper. I slapped the safety to drop the inner security panel. I would have opened the parcel myself, but Dad shooed me back.
“Let me do this, hon.”
He did, in his usual painstaking way. Fortunately, the parcel was perfect and innocent. It contained no surprises. The contents were what we’d ordered. Three precious pounds of ground beef, a two-pound loaf of bread, a quart jar of strawberry preserves, and assorted canned beans, vegetables and fruits. The quantities were correct. Every item bore an origination-point seal. It was one of our better days.
No fresh vegetables or fruit, of course. Those days are over.
“So we’ll eat for another week,” I muttered.
“Yeah. Put the perishables in the fridge, Leah?”
“Sure.” I hefted the box of goods and headed downstairs.
I returned to the living-room level to find Dad sitting on our sofa, staring at his tablet screen with a look of annoyance.
“Something up?” I said.
He scowled. “They’re sending a truck.”
I peered at him. “They want you to come in on a Sunday?”
He nodded.
“Any explanation?”
“None. Last time, it was some garbage about employee security.”
“I remember.”
Dad grunted. “I’d better tog up.” He headed up the stairs to the storage area.
I couldn’t help but worry. The last time he left the house, his car was attacked on the way out and on the way back. The driver had to spray tear gas to drive off the mobs.
It hasn’t happened often, but more than once mobs like those have shucked a man out of his vehicle and stomped him to death. Yes, even out of an armed and armored, high-security truck like the ones Dad’s employer sends for him. What do you mean, were they looking to steal something? Get serious. Mobs don’t need a reason. That’s what makes them mobs.
Dad came down the stairs in his going-to-the-office gear: combat helmet, plate-carrier overshirt and Kevlar pants, steel-toed construction boots, a .45 in an appendix-carry holster, Bowie blade at his side, and a chest rig stocked with loaded mags, Mace, and first-aid items. Only his head was visible, and not all of that. He looked ready for the Manhattan front lines. I had a hard time believing he wouldn’t smother under the weight.
He saw me inspecting him and chuckled. “What am I missing, hon?”
“Varmint gun.”
“Won’t need it this time. Going to the Tarrytown offices. The town was fumigated day before yesterday.”
“Doesn’t always kill the bigger rats. Think you’ll be back by game time?”
“Hope so. It’s Bears–Packers at Lambeau Field. Old-time football.”
“Give me a call if you think you’ll miss the kickoff, okay?”
“Leah,” he said, “you know I’ll call you as soon as the pow-wow is over. What are you going to do while I’m out?”
“I think I’ll fix some pilaf.”
“To go with hamburgers?”
“I still have a good onion and some garlic. Anyway, we haven’t had beef in a month. Live a little, okay?”
He grinned. “Okay.” He glanced at the monitor. “Truck’s here. Try not to worry, hon.”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
He went upstairs to the exfiltration area. I slid the lever forward that extended the access tube. When I got the mouth to within about a foot of the truck’s security portal, I took manual control, docked it, and waited for the green light. It lit at once.
I could see Dad’s silhouette as he passed through the umbilical, knocked on the portal, and waited. The driver’s-side gunner gave him a once-over, nodded to the driver, and the driver allowed him into the interior. Seconds later the truck was moving at high speed toward the turret-lined entrance to the Hutchinson River Parkway.
I closed the umbilical’s security panel, retracted it, and headed downstairs to cook and fret.
#
Dad did get back by game time. He said there were no incidents this time, coming or going, other than a little rock throwing. Still, he looked wearier than usual. He went to the bedroom to shed his gear. I scooped modest portions of my not-quite-gourmet concoction into two shallow bowls and toted them to the living room.
Dad was back just before the coin flip, once more in his usual garb. The clothes he’d taken to calling his fatigues. He wouldn’t explain why. He settled into his chair in front of the transceiver, picked up his bowl, sampled the pilaf, and smiled approval.
“It’s good, hon,” he said. “Mom would have liked it.”
I just nodded thanks. He doesn’t often mention Mom. It’s not smart to continue when he does.
The Packers won the toss and elected to receive.
It was old-time football, all right. What Dad calls smash-mouth. The Packers stayed on the ground all the way to the Bears’ fifteen, threw an incompletion, and had to settle for a field goal. The kicker must have been angry. The ball bounced off the Lambeau Field dome and back onto the field.
“That’s the way it’s been going for them,” Dad muttered. “Quarterback’s got no arm.”
“He’s not that bad,” I said. “It’s got to be hard to throw accurately with that little light.”
“Power allotment,” he grunted. “The nukes are at their limits. We’re fortunate, Leah. If it weren’t for the geothermal unit, we’d be feeling our way around like moles.” Just how different are we from moles, I didn’t say.
“Why couldn’t they have made the dome out of Lucite?” I said.
“They wanted to,” Dad said. “The cost was prohibitive. Takes a lot of Lucite to stop a Vulcan round, and the fabrication and installation would have been a bitch, so they went with steel.”
The Bears took the kickoff all the way back to midfield and played the hurry-up to catch the Packers unready. It worked. The Bears’ wide receiver snagged the ball in the Packers’ endzone. He waited for the ref to signal the score and trotted to the sideline.
“No touchdown dance,” I murmured.
“No fans,” Dad said, “so why bother?”
“There’re fans,” I objected. “There must be ten million people watching them right now.”
Dad didn’t reply.
The Packers took the kickoff for a touchback. Their offensive unit returned to the field sluggishly, as if they weren’t sure why they were there.
“Geez, guys,” I muttered. “Show a little spirit.”
“Why should they?” Dad said. “No fans cheering wildly in the stands.” He snorted. “No stands.”
“Why couldn’t they have kept the stands?” I said. “People used to pay a fortune to attend an NFL game.”
“Cost and security,” he said. “The security dome would have had to be four or five times as large. As it is, the cost nearly broke the Packers. It did break a lot of other teams. There were thirty-two at one time. Now there are eight, and staging games just for those eight is so expensive there’s only one per week. If it weren’t for the federal subsidy, there wouldn’t be any. Besides, can you imagine what it would take to get ten or twenty thousand people into an enclosed stadium without mass bloodshed?”
I shook my head. “I know. It’s just... oh, forget it. I don’t know why we bother watching.”
Dad did something he seldom does, these days. He turned to face me squarely and took my hands in his.
“Leah,” he said, “it’s what we have left. It’s something. We have power and a working transceiver. The wireless signal here is pretty good. The game is on, so we watch. What else would we do on a Sunday afternoon, buried here like a pair of corpses?”
I started to say something, bit it back.
“We can’t go out,” he said. “We can’t go visiting, or shopping, or to a movie, or to a park, or to church. We don’t have the means and even if we did, the risk is too great. The savages are always on the lookout for targets. We have to make do with what we have in this little fortress I built for us. This damned, dark, damp underground fortress.” His voice trembled. “Thank God we got out of the Bronx before... before it got really bad.”
He wouldn’t say in time. We hadn’t been in time. Not quite.
“Remember how you used to complain about the apartment? How cramped it was, how there was only one bathroom and practically no closet space?”
I nodded.
“If we hadn’t ditched it and moved out here, do you think we’d be alive today?”
He was plainly on the verge of tears. Part of it was losing Mom to the savages, but another part was the sense of failure. He’d wanted more for me. A regular college education. A social life like the one he’d had. A horde of suitors vying for the hand of his only daughter, marriage and children and a regular family. Those things had receded into the mists.
I haven’t been out of the house in eleven years. What higher education I could get came from the Internet. I haven’t yet had a paying job. I might never have one. I’m twenty-three and a virgin. I might die a virgin.
Others have it worse. A lot of others and a lot worse. We’re safe in here. We eat regularly. Dad seldom has to go out and when he does, he gets the best protection Teleoperated Systems can provide. They think a lot of him. They should. There aren’t a lot of waldo operators who can do the nano-etching he does.
I should have been more thankful and I knew it.
“Forgive me, Dad,” I said. “I know we’re the lucky ones. I just have... you know, girl stuff to deal with.”
“I know, hon,” he said. “So did... Mom.”
We sat in silence for an endless moment. The game continued without our attention.
A little animation returned to his face. He perked up.
“There’s a boy at the office...” He hesitated. “I like him. You might like him too.”
My flags went up. All red. I struggled to control myself.
“Tell me about him,” I said.
“Well, he’s... in agriculture,” he said. “Works a combine waldo. He’s good at it, a real natural talent. He’s well-mannered, too. A Christian.”
“Oh? What denomination?”
“I never asked,” he said. “He wears a cross pendant, though. You don’t see those much anymore.” We don’t see anything much anymore, I didn’t say.
“Keep going,” I said. “Is he decent-looking?”
Dad shrugged in that way that says How am I to judge?
“Leah,” he said. “He’s alone in the world. He lives at the office, in the barracks there. He lost his family in the Trenton riots. Both parents and two younger sisters.”
“And he wants to start a new one,” I muttered.
Dad nodded.
“You haven’t said how old he is,” I said. “Or his race.”
He grimaced. “Seventeen. He’s white.”
I forced myself to keep still.
“Would you like to meet him?” Dad said.
“Can you arrange for us to chat over the Net?” I replied. “I think it would be a bad idea to bring him here before we’ve had a conversation or two.”
“I’ll get on it.” His gaze flicked to the transceiver. Halftime had arrived. The Bears were up by seventeen.
“The Packers don’t have it today,” he said.
“Or they’re not putting it out,” I said.
“They looked a lot better back in October,” he said. “Well, that’s the game. On any given Sunday—”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Heard it all before.” I headed to the stairs to fetch a bottle of water from the fridge, stopped. “Dad?”
“Hm? What, hon?”
“I miss... Eucharist.”
He winced. “I don’t know, Leah. I’ll see what I can do.”
I nodded and continued on.
