Saying the Wrong Thing

It's easy to do. From The Federalist:

When I got unpersoned, in a social-media driven mobbing, I was self-injurious and my life was at risk. My family was there for me, and they helped me get healthy again. Then I met some friends. Some people had seen what I had gone through and wanted to offer support and discussion. My new friends were politically conservative, so I was hesitant at first. Old prejudices die hard. But two friends in particular kept encouraging me to tell my story. They checked on me to make sure I was okay, and encouraged me when I entertained a creative thought. I started anxiously writing notes to myself and organizing my thoughts until I finally had an essay.

That essay was published at Quillette. It went viral, and it started me on this brand new journey as a writer—fighting on the side of sanity in the culture wars. I will never forget what those two special people did for me by consistently encouraging me to tell my story until I did. After my debut essay, I began to forge more and more friendships. These friendships were not exclusively with conservatives. I would estimate a 70/30 split between conservative/centrists and exiled liberals. My debut essay also helped me land a new job. I work at a news outlet called The Post Millennial. It’s a center-right news website, but my colleagues are all over the political spectrum, from old-school fiscal conservatives to lefty former Bernie bros. It’s a great place to work and a testament to ideological diversity. I think that’s why it’s growing. I think that’s why I love it there so much. (Read more.)

From Life News:

 In a highly anticipated ceremony on Thursday, President Trump signed an executive order directing the government to take action in protecting free speech on college campuses. It wasn’t something that enthused the liberal broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and, NBC) so they omitted it from their evening broadcasts. Instead, they all cheered on New Zealand for their swift movement in banning so-called “assault weapons.” So, that’s two rights the liberal media seemingly don’t like.

In sharp contrast, Fox News and chief White House correspondent John Roberts covered the story early on during Special Report. “At a ceremony in the East Room this afternoon, President Trump took a step he hopes will ensure all voices are heard on college campuses across the nation,” Roberts reported. “In an executive order, the President directed his cabinet agencies to tie federal grants for education and research to more aggressive enforcement of the First Amendment.”

At the signing ceremony, President Trump explained to the crowd how “under the guise of speech codes, and safe spaces, and trigger warnings, these universities have tried to restrict free thought, impose total conformity and shut down the voices of great young Americans.” Roberts added: “The move follows incidents at several colleges and universities where conservatives have been targeted, including UC Berkeley were a student, Aidan Williams, was punched in the face for supporting the President and conservative policies.” And it was something Trump had announced during his annual CPAC address earlier this month. (Read more.)

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The Counter-Revolution Begins at Home

From Life Site:

You trampled upon our culture and dignity and honor. You mocked the beautiful, the true, and the good, and raised us like animals who play in the mud and who learn early on how to rut and procreate like animals, now only supported by some new medications and methods. You did not raise us toward the beautiful, but you lowered us toward the ugly. In part, you did not even want to take care of your own offspring, and then you taught the world how one can simply kill the little ones in the thousands, and before they are even allowed to see the light of the world. How is it, then, that in that supposedly bad bourgeois-Christian society, there were never so many isolated, abandoned, drug-addicted, criminal and suicidal children and youth as there are today?

And we should thank you for this and praise you?

True humanity begins in the small things, not with big words. Humanity starts with the little ones who are vulnerable. Humanity starts by civilizing the little ones and teaching them the rules with which they can measure themselves and others so that they have a human standard with which to assess whether or not a war is just, a law a lie, or the conduct of a politician to be fitting or not. You destroyed all the rules and also the virtues and now are astonished that the politicians lie to you right and left? That they do not know anymore the word common good? Nor the Ten Commandments which still teach us clearly how one can be human?

Are you proud that your grandchildren follow the newest fashion, the newest computer games, and the latest ugly music fashion? Where are the great ideals of the younger generation?

Did you wake up at all when the great member of the 1968 movement, Gerhard Schröder, after laying down his office as chancellor, started to work for the Rothschild financial imperium; and were you awakened when the icon of the 1968 movement Joschka Fischer became a counsellor to the Albright Stonebridge Group? Is this a so-called anti-capitalism under new colors? Does this fit to Karl Marx? Perhaps somehow, since he himself also let himself be funded by a wealthy man – by financial capitalism.

Humanity starts in the small things. And demands loyalty. A man who is not loyal toward himself and others cannot be convincing, but he always appears to be only egoistical. Only in self-sacrifice and in perseverance are great things being created, as one can see in great artists. The lukewarm, in the long run, do not attract. They also do not bear good fruit. (Read more.)

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Amazon and Tolkien

From Coming Soon:

Casual fans may not realize it, but Jackson’s Fellowship of the Rings actually depicted the end of the Second Age, when the last alliance of elves and men confronted Sauron’s forces. The Second Age covered nearly 3,441 years, and it began after the banishment of Morgoth, the dark lord before Sauron. There’s a lot of story potential in that time, including the rise of Sauron, the creation of the One Ring, and the emergence of the Ringwraiths. Amazon’s map also includes Númenor, an island kingdom of men that was lost beneath the sea to a cataclysm. In Tolkien’s mythos, Sauron was captured by the king of Númenor, but he slowly corrupted the kingdom from within. Only the intervention of the deity, Eru, prevented Sauron’s plans and led to the destruction of Númenor.

Production has yet to begin for Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series, but is expected to premiere in 2021. (Read more.)

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Mary Queen of Scots Documents

From The BBC:

A group of documents believed to have been signed by Mary Queen of Scots have come to light at the Museum of Edinburgh after decades spent unseen. Files showed they were gifted in 1920 but they had been lost in storage until recent inventory work by curators. The handwritten documents are said to provide a "fascinating insight" into commercial life in Edinburgh in the 16th Century. They can be viewed online and will hopefully go on display in future. For the time being, the documents will remain in safe storage at the Museum of Edinburgh because of their fragile state. Future plans are to have them assessed by a conservator and for further research to be done on them by experts on Mary's reign, after which the hope is to exhibit them for residents and visitors to enjoy. Meanwhile, the new discovery can be viewed online. (Read more.)

From Smithsonian:

The papers date from 1553 to 1567, spanning Mary’s time in both France and Scotland. This in turn suggests that she kept a close eye on domestic affairs, even when she was abroad. Some of the documents bear Mary’s signature, others were signed by her third husband James Hepburn and still others by James, Duke of Chesterault, Mary’s regent until 1554. Among the newly unearthed trove is an order from 1567, signed by both Mary and James Hepburn, granting ground for salt-making to London merchants. Another extends privileges to “fleshers” selling meat, and yet another deals with the rights of deacons and tradesmen.

It’s not the zestiest content, but the documents offer some insight into Mary’s reign, Vicky Garrington, history curator at the Museum of Edinburgh, says in a statement. “We all know the story of Scotland’s Queen, her eventful life and eventual execution, but in these documents, we see a different side to Mary. Here, she can be seen carefully managing the everyday affairs of Edinburgh and Scotland,” Garrington says. (Read more.)

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The Clinton-Ukraine Collusion

From The Hill:

After nearly three years and millions of tax dollars, the Trump-Russia collusion probe is about to be resolved. Emerging in its place is newly unearthed evidence suggesting another foreign effort to influence the 2016 election — this time, in favor of the Democrats. Ukraine’s top prosecutor divulged in an interview aired Wednesday on Hill.TV that he has opened an investigation into whether his country’s law enforcement apparatus intentionally leaked financial records during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign about then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort in an effort to sway the election in favor of Hillary Clinton.

The leak of the so-called black ledger files to U.S. media prompted Manafort’s resignation from the Trump campaign and gave rise to one of the key allegations in the Russia collusion probe that has dogged Trump for the last two and a half years. Ukraine Prosecutor General Yurii Lutsenko’s probe was prompted by a Ukrainian parliamentarian's release of a tape recording purporting to quote a top law enforcement official as saying his agency leaked the Manafort financial records to help Clinton's campaign. The parliamentarian also secured a court ruling that the leak amounted to “an illegal intrusion into the American election campaign,” Lutsenko told me. Lutsenko said the tape recording is a serious enough allegation to warrant opening a probe, and one of his concerns is that the Ukrainian law enforcement agency involved had frequent contact with the Obama administration’s U.S. Embassy in Kiev at the time. 

“Today we will launch a criminal investigation about this and we will give legal assessment of this information,” Lutsenko told me. Lutsenko, before becoming prosecutor general, was a major activist against Russia’s influence in his country during the tenure of Moscow-allied former President Viktor Yanukovych. He became chief prosecutor in 2016 as part of anti-corruption reforms instituted by current President Petro Poroshenko, an ally of the U.S. and Western countries. (Read more.)

From The National Review:

 Polling finds support for impeachment dropping; earlier this month Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi irked some Democrats by declaring that she doesn’t support impeachment, calling it “so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he’s just not worth it.”

No one outside of special counsel Robert Mueller and his team knows when they will turn in their report; every now and then someone in Washington claims the probe is “wrapping up.” But we’ve heard variations of that claim and claims in May that it would be wrapped up “by September,” “soon after the November elections,” in December . . .  This is the Brexit of investigations, a probe with more delayed endings than George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice series.

A lot of Democrats probably thought they would have the Mueller report by now. The closer we get to Election Day, the sillier it seems to impeach a president who’s about to be evaluated by the country at the ballot box within a matter of years/months. (Read more.)

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Ben Shapiro: The Protests on College Campuses

From The New York Post:

Western civilization, including our modern notions of values and reason and science, was built on deep foundations. And we’re tossing away what’s best about our civilization because we’ve forgotten that those foundations even exist. This realization hit me on a precise date: Feb. 25, 2016.

I was scheduled to give a speech to the Young America’s Foundation group at California State University at Los Angeles. My speech posited that all people of good heart wanted to fight racism, but that vague charges of institutional racism and white privilege obscured individual evil — and slandered the country more broadly. Two weeks in advance of the speech, we began hearing rumblings about protests; the week before the speech, the president of the university announced that the event had been canceled outright. I refused to accede to that clear breach of First Amendment rights, and I announced that I would show up anyway.

My business partner insisted I bring a security team, but I was pretty skeptical. This wasn’t Fallujah. This was a major college campus in the middle of my home city. Just to be safe, he hired security anyway. Thank God I listened. As we approached the campus, we could see helicopters swirling overhead. Dozens of armed, uniformed police quickly formed a cordon and rushed me through the back door. A few rioters were physically assaulting students who wanted to enter; the police set up a back-door route but could only sneak students in two at a time. I put my ear to the auditorium door; it sounded like a zombie apocalypse outside.

We decided to go ahead, despite the mostly empty auditorium. As the speech progressed, students pulled the fire alarm; the lights went out, and the alarm began beeping loudly. Students continued pounding the doors outside. I spoke through the discord, announcing that the disrupters wouldn’t stop us from exercising our free-speech rights. (Read more.)

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A Careers Guide for the Eighteenth-century

From All Things Georgian:

In 1761, Joseph Collyer developed a careers guide for parents including information about the requirements for being an apprentice. He stressed the importance of good education of course, but it also began with a ‘how to’ guide for new parents describing how the mother should establish a moral code for children and ensuring that they behaved well from infancy, including discipline. Mothers should take care not to create groundless fears in the child, such as making the child afraid of the dark, telling him idle tales of ghosts, hobgoblins and haunted houses. She should instil the principles of religion and virtue. She should help shape not only their bodies but their minds too. The book offers guidance on many trades, so here are a just a few of them with more to follow in future articles. The first three occupations that Collyer considers are Divinity, Law and Physic.

In a nutshell, if the child is likely to be easily led into drink, women and other vices then divinity would not be the right careers path and law would be a much better option as people are more forgiving of these vices.  They would need to be fluent in Hebrew, Latin and Greek. To study ethics and moral philosophy and to apply himself to the Holy Scriptures and be good at public speaking in order to deliver sermons. (Read more.)

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The Release from Deception

From My Modern Met:

For centuries, sculptors around the world have adopted marble as their medium of choice. In order to both illustrate marble’s carving capabilities and showcase their own sculpting skills, these artists often select subjects that require a certain level of expertise. These challenging motifs include anatomical details, dynamic drapery, and, in the case of Il Disinganno, delicate netting. Every piece of this incredible sculpture is carved out of marble, including the carefully crafted knots in the draping net wrapped around the large figure of a fisherman. The Release from Deception depicts a scene that is both biblical and allegorical. It features two subjects: an angel and a fisherman. The angel stands on a globe as he untangles the man from a net and floats above exquisite drapery. (Read more.)

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We Are a Republic, Not a Democracy

From Intellectual Takeout:

Many people whine that using the Electoral College instead of the popular vote and majority rule is undemocratic. I’d say that they are absolutely right. Not deciding who will be the president by majority rule is not democracy. But the Founding Fathers went to great lengths to ensure that we were a republic and not a democracy. In fact, the word democracy does not appear in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, or any other of our founding documents. How about a few quotations expressed by the Founders about democracy?

In Federalist Paper No. 10, James Madison wanted to prevent rule by majority faction, saying, “Measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.” John Adams warned in a letter, “Remember democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet, that did not commit suicide.” Edmund Randolph said, “That in tracing these evils to their origin, every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy.” Then-Chief Justice John Marshall observed, “Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.”

The Founders expressed contempt for the tyranny of majority rule, and throughout our Constitution, they placed impediments to that tyranny. Two houses of Congress pose one obstacle to majority rule. That is, 51 senators can block the wishes of 435 representatives and 49 senators. The president can veto the wishes of 535 members of Congress. It takes two-thirds of both houses of Congress to override a presidential veto. To change the Constitution requires not a majority but a two-thirds vote of both houses, and if an amendment is approved, it requires ratification by three-fourths of state legislatures. (Read more.)

Are we headed towards a new civil war? From  The American Thinker:

In “No Hate Left Behind,” Thomas Edsall cites a study from political scientists Nathan Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason on the growing ease at which Americans are willing to employ violence against their partisan opponents. “Just over 42 percent of the people in each party view the opposition as ‘downright evil,’” Edsall despairs, unaware that one of his byline colleagues once suggested “good people can’t be Republicans.” The data only gets worse from there. When asked if their favored party loses the 2020 presidential election, “18.3 percent of Democrats and 13.8 percent of Republicans said violence would be justified on a scale ranging from ‘a little’ to ‘a lot.’”

One wonders the difference between a “little” violence and “a lot.” Perhaps a walloping with a bar of soap stuffed in a sock is seen as a small-beer beating compared to the guillotine or firing squad? Sure, there’s the difference in degree, but as any victim of domestic abuse can tell you, soft beatings inevitably turn hard. Then there’s the question of ontological moral status. The researchers found that “nearly one out of five Republicans and Democrats agree with the statement that their political adversaries ‘lack the traits to be considered fully human — they behave like animals.’” (Read more.)

From The Federalist:

I am a middle-of-the-road Republican who voted for Trump with the utmost reluctance in 2016. He sure wasn’t perfect. He was no Cicero, either––though he can give a decent speech when the chips are down. He had a few extra skeletons rattling in his closet, especially compared to colorless non-entities like Jeb. So yeah, I was queasy about voting for an ex-registered-Democrat-from-New-York-and-possible-liberal-now-turned-Republican.

Was I worried? Hell, yeah! Was I depressed? You bet. But, really, what options were there? Hillary? Jill Stein? Seriously? Trump wasn’t my first choice or my second choice or my third choice, but by the time November 2016 rolled around, Trump was the only choice on the menu. So I swallowed hard, took a leap of faith, and pulled the lever for the Donald.

And let me tell ya, every time one of these newly minted Democratic “stars” opens their mouth, the same thought goes through my mind: Thank God for Trump. Trump is my last line of defense. Trump is the only thing that stands between me and these hallucinogenic socialist nut jobs. Trump is what’s keeping chaos and left-wing insanity at bay. (Read more.)

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