In a 1971 essay entitled “The Bible,” Ken Kesey wrote about what he felt was the most important of questions, the one he felt the Bible addresses: do we treat those around us as tools to be used or as people bound together with us and with God? What is real touches us deeply. We sense the difference clearly between depth and shallowness. To make his point, he asked his reader to compare two artistic views of American forests. One view used to frequently grace the pages of magazines back in the ’60s and ’70s — ads by Weyerhaeuser, the wood products corporation, in which they touted their good stewardship of their forests. Their ad was accompanied with a picture of a nice forest scene, replete with nice forest animals — entirely nice, entirely serving their point, which was to make their products attractive in a time when there was much concern over damage caused by foresting practices then in vogue. It was all nice. The other view was from the magnificent coffee-table sized collection of the photographs of Eliot Porter, then in his 80s, entitled In Wildness. Kesey wrote of Porter’s book: His eerily profound pictures of rocks and flowers and trees convey a concentration so intense that my first time through the book I remember becoming nauseous when I found myself tripping on the pictures to such a degree that I thought I had been dosed. Weyerhaeuser’s art was serving the purpose of selling the products of the forests it owned; Porter’s art was tracing the infinite depths of the art the Creator has put into His world. Paraphrasing how Kesey puts it, there’s all the difference in the world between that and the point of view of one who acts on the belief that if you can’t sell stuff to somebody, then it can’t be worth much.  I’ve had my own pet comparison to illustrate the same point. I grew up with Winnie the Pooh with the original illustrations of E. H. Shepard. His drawings of Christopher Robin, Eeyore, and Winnie the Pooh were welcoming and delightful to a small child and their enchantment only increases with age. Shepard does not draw the characters as treacly; there is no condescension whatsoever in them. Those traits may sell movies and merch, which is just fine, but they do not bring us into wonder. Shepard did that. He joined us in the wonder of the imagination which we discover as children and which we need all our lives. And that is a world that is both powerful and dangerous — Christopher Robin senses that his world is both beautiful and fragile — and we know that with some precision as adults that the lesson of such art is all the more necessary. Compare that to the roly-poly saccharine Pooh of Disney’s cartoon, which has more in common with the bear touting the virtues of Charmin for his posterior than to Shepard’s Winnie. There is no wonder there — only its sellable simulacrum.  Disney did not start out that way. The art of his early movies was no mere imitation. The image of the Wicked Queen standing before her mirror in Snow White haunts the mind as an archetype of evil.  The multiplying brooms in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice sequence from Fantasia imprints itself on the mind the way Frankenstein did in the 19th century, warning us that the work of our hands can turn very, very dangerous when we think that our power is all we need in the world.  But Disney left that kind of depth behind. In recent years, its run onto the shoals. It has plunked for politicized art, which does not trust the viewer or the creator, but relies on its conformity with an intolerant culture to manipulate our assent. A ticket to its products serves as admission to the Uniculture’s approval. One must assent to the message and buy the product because of the pressure of the regnant ideology which requires obeisance in every area of life — and which sickens everything it touches. Learning to distinguish between the invitation to depth and wonder on the one hand and manipulation on the other, Kesey was saying, is a lesson that applies to the art of life as well as art in the smaller sense. Kesey pointed towards Martin Buber’s philosophy of relationship, that the prime reality in life is relationship, and we choose one of two kinds: I-It, in which the other is merely a cipher, an ‘it,’ whom we mean to use as long as it is useful to us; and I — Thou, meaning we relate to the other as having the same kind of innate value as we know in ourselves, and not reducible to mere usefulness. This all follows from Genesis 1 — the human being is created in the image of God and is not reducible to anything. The Infinite One has invested us with infinite worth, and the test of our true humanity is how we live this understanding in every single choice we make. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Grant Power Only to the Accountable)  This principle applies to politics as well. The vision of Shepard was not of airbrushed perfection, but of a genuine lovability. Pooh was silly, Pooh could be weak, as could all the other characters in that book — but they showed their soul, and we loved them not in spite of those flaws but because of them — we felt kinship precisely because we see Pooh as sharing the shortcomings we work to overcome every day. Porter’s photos showed everything in the forest, the rot and the mud as well as the blazing autumn leaves and mighty tree trunks. The dizzying detail in which the whole range of what Aristotle called generation and corruption was all on display and it is the totality of the vision that makes it real, affective, memorable — and part of us, together in God’s creation. Why Real Matters Analyze our current political content by this same sure criterion. Is your candidate looking to sell you a partially real vision crafted to extract your vote, but which can establish no lasting bond of trust? Or is your candidate candidly flawed, but entirely real, and who throws himself with complete reliance on your recognizing his commitment, in faith that that act of trust will bring us all closer to national redemption? (READ MORE: We the People Can Break the Culture of Lies) The campaign already had its signal moment, when bloodied and pushed to the ground Trump stood up, pumped his fist, and yelled “Fight! Fight! Fight!” As Teamsters President Sean O’Brien said at the RNC podium (and think of that! a Teamsters president speaking to the Republican convention!): I think we all can agree whether we like him or don’t like him — in the light of what happened to him on Saturday, he has proven to be one tough SOB. It isn’t hard to discern when you are looking. What is real touches us deeply. We sense the difference clearly between depth and shallowness. Check: is the candidate being sold by artifice and by careful management, trying to find the way to extract votes that trusts the voter very little and commits to the voter even less? Or is the candidate a whole and real person, warts and all, who trusts the voter enough to put forward all that he is, seeking to create a sustaining bond of ongoing trust? There is the choice. The post The Real Choice in This Election appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Pete Rose’s career-defining moment did not come at the 1970 All-Star Game when he barreled over Ray Fosse at home plate to win the contest for the National League. Rather, it involved another catcher ten seasons later. In the deciding game six of the World Series, Bob Boone dropped a Frank White foul ball only to see Pete Rose, backing him up from first base, catch it to make the crucial out. It helped the Philadelphia Phillies defeat the Kansas City Royals to win their first World Series in nearly a century of play. “I attacked my job no differently than my father attacked his job at the bank,” he told an interviewer in 1985. A Little Leaguer first baseman backs up his catcher as Rose did. In the majors, many first basemen might yield to the catcher and just assume he makes the out. Rose relied on the fundamentals on every play. He could not be sure a former Gold Glove winner would catch a somewhat routine fly ball. So, he backed him up. Yes, one best understands a man with 4,256 hits not through any at-bat but through this play in the field in which he demonstrated a commitment to baseball fundamentals and hustle. And Rose displayed such qualities at numerous positions, playing more than three full seasons at first, second, third, right field, and left field. He could not pitch or hit for power. He pretty much did everything else. And he did it the way coaches teach players and not the way athletes perform after big contracts erode the basics. Rose competed the way the blue-collar people watching him from the stands would if given the chance. This explains their commitment to him after banishment from the game, jail, and now death. Pete Rose died, tellingly, in Las Vegas earlier this week. His last public appearance came, tellingly, at a card show a day earlier in Nashville. Rose’s signature, approaching John Hancock’s in its ubiquity, ranks low in value because he kept wielding the pen at such shows. And Las Vegas seems the one American city surely to embrace a notorious gambler. Well, another city holds Pete Rose in a tighter embrace than Las Vegas. “Pete was about twelve years old when he got hired to work on the boat,” Keith O’Brien writes in the 2024 biography Charlie Hustle of his subject’s work on the Ohio River. “The ferry operator, Mr. Kottmyer, paid Pete a menial wage to dart amid cars and collect the crossing fares — thirty-five cents for automobiles, five cents for passengers.” Rose signed into the Reds system for a measly $7,000, worked for $2.83 an hour loading and unloading freight cars in the offseason, and hit 30 triples — the ultimate hustle hit — during his 1961 stint in the Florida State League. From such a CV, Reds minor league manager Johnny Vander Meer jotted down of the prospect: “Excellent habits.” Vander Meer’s observations presumably concerned the baseball diamond. Off of it, Rose characteristically first set eyes on his wife at Cincinnati’s River Downs, often played a Tampa triple header (horses, dogs, jai alai) after a morning spring training session, and parlayed his gambling prowess to serve as the fill-in on The NFL Today for Jimmy the Greek when the handicapper fell ill. Unfortunately, that degenerate gambler Pete Rose — the guy frantically calling his bookie at five minutes to one on a Sunday afternoon to get his bets in — we remembered in his passing. Even Big Red Machine teammate Johnny Bench spoke at length on the gambling. Did anyone discuss Frank White’s eighth-inning popout to the first baseman in the 1980 World Series? It came about for the same reason the later ignominy did: the competitor, for better and worse, embraced a lot of the same habits as the guys in the stands. Baseball’s hit king described himself as his father living in the succeeding generation with bigger and better opportunities. “I attacked my job no differently than my father attacked his job at the bank,” he told an interviewer in 1985. “He never missed a day at work. He went on Saturdays. He wouldn’t leave until something was completed, he wouldn’t leave at 5 o’clock.” Pete Rose wouldn’t leave the game after more than a quarter century in it. It took a Major League Baseball investigation to force him to go home. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the game’s greatest ambassador while he played acted as its greatest cautionary tale in repose. READ MORE from Daniel Flynn: None Dare Call It Indifference Vance Outclasses Walz in Debate That Validates His Selection The post Pete Rose in Repose appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Following the assassination attempts against Donald Trump, many American Christians have no doubt been praying for the former president, his family, and their safety. But there’s another good reason to pray for the Trumps … Melania Trump, one of only two former First Ladies to call herself a Catholic, has recently spoken in favor of abortion, the slaughter of unborn innocents. “It is imperative to guarantee that women have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government,” Melania writes in her upcoming memoir, according to a report from The Guardian. She continued: Why should anyone other than the woman herself have the power to determine what she does with her own body? A woman’s fundamental right of individual liberty, to her own life, grants her the authority to terminate her pregnancy if she wishes. Restricting a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is the same as denying her control over her own body. I have carried this belief with me throughout my entire adult life. In a video posted to social media after news of her pro-abortion memoir excerpt broke, Melania declared, “Individual freedom is a fundamental principle that I safeguard. Without a doubt, there is no room for compromise when it comes to this essential right that all women possess from birth.” Quoting a popular, though woefully incorrect, pro-abortion slogan, she asked, “What does ‘My body, my choice’ really mean?” Earlier this year, the Donald himself seemingly abandoned the pro-life principles that he championed while campaigning in 2016 and while in office until 2021. While touting the fact that he had appointed the U.S. Supreme Court Justices who wisely reversed the calamitous Roe v. Wade decision in 2022, Trump erroneously said that the Court’s ruling was the right one because it handed the abortion issue back to the states, which is where he said it belongs. To that end, he also gutted the GOP’s platform this summer, removing the Republican Party’s longstanding commitment to the sanctity of life. The existence of such groups as “Catholics for Choice” and “Catholics for Harris” is further evidence of the widespread failure of Catholic leaders. There are, it seems, two chief issues with the Trumps’ reasoning on abortion. The former President’s argument is easier to address: abortion in America is the slaughter of American children and, as such, ought to be criminalized at the federal level. Trump rightly and justly castigates various states and cities for their immigration policy, noting that California or New Mexico has a duty to the wellbeing of the rest of the nation to enforce immigration law. If that duty is not upheld, violence eventually erupts. American citizens are attacked and stabbed, American women are raped, American children are murdered. Likewise, each state has a duty to the rest of the nation to protect the children of that nation. Abortion is a matter not of consensus, not of degree, but of absolute morality. Either it is immoral to kill an innocent child or it isn’t. It isn’t moral in New York or California but immoral in Texas or Louisiana; that isn’t how morality works, and if it were then Trump’s quest to uphold justice and protect the nation’s sovereignty would be meaningless, a mere matter of taste or preference. Melania Trump’s Emotional Appeal The argument proffered by Melania has, perhaps, a more emotional appeal to it than Trump’s and certainly has little, if anything, to do with political expediency, but it is just as wrong and just as flawed. Women should be able to make their own decisions, of course, about having children, without government interference. (To that end, I might note, vaccination requirements ought to be banned in hospitals, but Melania isn’t likely to argue for that.) The interesting thing is that women are able to make their own decisions about having children. Since, it would seem, the beginning of humanity’s lengthy sojourn upon this earth, we have figured out pretty quickly that sex often results in having babies. This isn’t a novelty, it didn’t take Copernicus to figure it out, it didn’t take Magellan to discover it. Yes, there are tragic cases of rape, but those account for an infinitesimally small portion of abortions. The more honest way of saying what Melania says is that some people want to have sex, knowing that it may well result in the conception of another human life, but have decided that sex is so irresistible that it’s worth it to end that life in order to keep having sex, or in order to avoid the responsibility that would follow from having sex and conceiving a child. Protecting unborn life does not inhibit anyone’s “individual freedom,” it is not an infringement on some “fundamental principle” or “essential right.” On the contrary, it is upholding those very goods, safeguarding the individual freedom of the unborn child and shielding the most fundamental principle, the most essential right, the right to live. Abortion activists always portray pro-life legislation as a form of oppression, a roadblock on the path to uninhibited freedom, when it is in fact a necessary check against the raging sexual appetites, which would (in this case) literally kill in order to engorge themselves. Melania says that she has “carried this belief with [her] throughout [her] entire adult life,” which is a damn shame, since it shows that the moral tenets of the Catholic faith she professes have been left behind, presumably somewhere before adulthood. The Catholic Church is notoriously opposed to abortion and has unwaveringly proclaimed the unequivocal moral evil of abortion since the first century. This also, sadly, more than likely means that she has been poorly catechized. The existence of such groups as “Catholics for Choice” and “Catholics for Harris” is further evidence of the widespread failure of Catholic leaders to proclaim the truth and, just as importantly, ensure that it is taught to and understood by Catholics. The absence of clear, correct catechesis has wrought untold damage on the Western World and, especially through the evil of abortion, been at least indirectly responsible for tens of millions of the most brutal deaths. So while American Christians (and Catholic in particular) are right to pray for the safety of President Trump and his wife, do not forget to pray for the conversion of their hearts, that they might reject the grave evil of abortion and truly lead the United States in the paths of righteousness. READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy: Tim Walz Is the Embodiment of Oddity German Bishops Firing Conservative Voters The post Two Reasons To Pray for the Trumps appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

If there were a Bartlett’s dedicated to the most cluelessly smug quotes ever spoken by the Left, journalist Hanna Rosin would have her own entry. In a recent article in the venerable Atlantic, “The Insurrectionists Next Door,” Rosin tells how her partner Lauren Ober tried to enlighten her new neighbors in southeast Washington, D.C.  Writes Rosin for the ages, “Lauren gives a delicate but effective lesson on how white privilege works, and explains that having had to work hard doesn’t exempt you from it.” To sustain their jerry-rigged world view, the Left routinely create their own alternative sets of facts as Rosin does in describing Babbitt’s death. The recipient of Ober’s wisdom is one of her new neighbors, Micki Witthoeft. Other than perhaps the mother of Derek Chauvin, it is hard to imagine any woman less deserving of a lecture on white privilege than Witthoeft.  Without warning, on January 6, 2021, black police lieutenant Michael Byrd shot and killed her daughter, a 14-year Air Force veteran named Ashli Babbitt. A suit brought by Ashli’s husband Aaron Babbitt suggests why Witthoeft has abandoned her home and husband in California to crusade for justice in Rosin’s DC neighborhood, a crusade that includes a nightly vigil at the DC jail, “the Gulag.” According to the suit, Byrd, who was masked and out of uniform, did not identify himself as a police officer, did not give Ashli verbal orders to stop, did not give her a chance to comply, did not “diligently assess” the situation before firing, and never considered any other compliance techniques.  Most critically, the 5’ 2” Ashli did not pose “an imminent danger of death or serious injury.” After a cursory internal review, Byrd was promoted to captain. In its 800-page report, the House January 6 committee did not so much as mention Byrd by name. Micki Witthoeft won’t stop saying it. Rosin describes Witthoeft as “the anchor of the house, of this whole universe.” Like Conrad’s Charles Marlow, Ober and Rosin are fascinated by “the blank spaces” on their map. For the cocooned Left, MAGA country is blank enough, but no space within it is as blank as Witthoeft’s universe, a universe peopled by the victims of the judicial tyranny unleashed on January 6, 2021.  These victims include the 1,500 or so people prosecuted to date and their friends and families. To sustain their self-image as champions of social justice, Rosin and her fellow travelers have to ignore how uniformly and egregiously the arrested J6ers have been overcharged. To sustain that ignorance they have to reject all evidence that presents January 6 as something other than an insurrection.  It troubles the Atlantic reporters that Ashli Babbitt has emerged as a martyr for her fellow insurrectionists, but it does not surprise them. Rosin accuses the jailed J6ers, for instance, of having “created a mythology — effectively a set of alternative facts — about who they were.” She writes this, alas, unaware of the mythology she and her allies have created about themselves. (READ MORE from Jack Cashill: Who Had Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick ‘Murdered’?) Rosin and Ober interact with the “insurrectionists” next door with the patient paternalism Dr. Livingstone did with Kololo in Central Africa. The difference is that Livingstone and other missionaries worked from a consistent philosophy whose Judeo-Christian principles had been honed over the centuries. They had wisdom to share. The woke, by contrast, improvise on the fly. They have bromides to share, bromides about such ephemera as, say, “white privilege.” As Kamala Harris has shown, those bromides can be ditched overnight and, if need be, by the bushelful. To sustain their jerry-rigged world view, the Left routinely create their own alternative sets of facts as Rosin does in describing Babbitt’s death. For Rosin’s story line to work, Babbitt has to be an insurrectionist. Tailoring the evidence accordingly, Rosin pictures Babbitt marching down the hallway “at the front of a column of rioters.”  In fact, Babbitt avoided a large group jawing with a handful of Republican congressman at the entrance to the House floor and walked down the empty hallway followed by one other person, Tayler Hansen, a young citizen journalist who recorded the encounter.  “She strides down the hallway,” Rosin adds, “like she knows where she’s going.” Implied in this remark is that Babbitt had a plan. Rosin ignores the reality that Babbitt had come to DC by herself, entered the Capitol 90 minutes after the riot started, and wandered around the building as cluelessly as everyone else for the 20 minutes before dead-ending at the doors to the Speaker’s lobby. As Hansen reports, he and Babbitt joked with the three Capitol Police officers guarding the doors. Having served most of her Air Force career in police work, she identified with the police. After a minute or two, a swarm of protesters made their way to these same doors. In that crowd was an ex-con named Zachary Alam. In October 2023, former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson did a feature on Alam and two other potential provocateurs for her show “Full Measure.” Attkisson explained. “I didn’t see key provocateurs removed from the crowd. In fact, the key provocateurs in this case seem to be sort of tolerated, if not encouraged, by some of the police officers on the front line.” Free to roam, Alam moved to the front of the crowd, reached between the officers, and began punching the doors’ glass panels while yelling, “Fuck the blue.” Appalled by Alam’s behavior, Ashli shouted at the feckless officers over the din. “She was basically yelling at these officers telling them to do their jobs,” said Hansen.  Hansen meanwhile chastised Alam, “Chill out! Chill the fuck out, bro!” For more than a minute after the first window was cracked, protestors argued with the officers but did not touch them or threaten them. Nor did they smash any more windows. At one point, Alam stood with his back to the officers keeping the crowd at bay. Writes Rosin, “The policemen guarding the doors, overwhelmed by the sheer number of rioters, abandon their post” The video does not bear this out at all. The officers were not in any imminent danger. They appear to have noticed a Capitol Police emergency response team mount the stairs to the lobby and left before the response team could reach them. As soon as the officers pulled away, Alam grabbed a helmet from another protestor and broke out all the glass from the transom on far the right side. “Ashli was actively trying to disarm these people,” Hansen observed, “trying to calm them down through this entire kind of confrontation with these police officers.”  So frustrated was Babbitt by Alam’s action that she punched him in the face, knocking his glasses off. It was then that she climbed into the window frame — most likely to escape the crowd, but certainly not to lead an insurrection — and Byrd promptly shot her. (READ MORE: First, They Came for the J6ers) Rosin has no excuse for not reporting any of this. On Memorial Day of this year I met her during the Annual Ashli Babbitt Freedom March. As we marched through Rosin’s neighborhood on the way to DC “Gulag,” I encouraged her to stake out new territory by being the first “mainstream” reporter to tell the true story of January 6. To make her job easier, I gave her a copy of my newly published book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6. In the book, I explain what motivated these women and other protestors to go to Washington on that fateful day: the Russia collusion hoax, the internet censorship, the COVID lockdowns, the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop, the 51 intel officers coup, and, yes, an intentionally chaotic election whose announced results only the brain dead could trust.  Unwilling to confront the protestors’ real motivations, Rosin seems to include all these injustices under the Orwellian rubric, “the Big Lie,” a phrase she uses without irony. She concludes her article with the wishful thought, “But the Big Lie’s hold on Mamma Micki may be loosening.” I don’t think so. The tweet Witthoeft posted on October 1 reveals just how futile was the Atlantic’s effort to enlighten the natives: “Day 1364 of the Political Hostage Crisis. Day 792 of the Continuous J6 Nightly Vigils on #Freedom Corner.” The struggle continues. Jack Cashill’s new book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, is now available in all formats. The post The <i>Atlantic</i> ’s Hanna Rosin Brings Woke Gospel to MAGA Country appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Before Netanyahu It was codenamed Operation Opera — Israel’s daring and successful air attack on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor at Tuwaitha. On June 7, 1981, fourteen Israeli fighter jets (F-16s and F-15As) plus other aircraft flew from Etzion airport more than 600 miles over hostile countries into Iraqi airspace. To avoid radar detection, the fighters flew low, and when they reached the reactor each fighter jet released its bombs. The attack  partially destroyed the reactor and killed ten Iraqi soldiers and a French engineer. (Iraq had purchased the reactor from France on the condition that it be used for “peaceful” purposes). Netanyahu’s greatest fear is a nuclear armed Iran, and he will do whatever he deems necessary to prevent that from happening. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin had been warned by Israeli intelligence that the reactor would become operational sometime between July and November of 1981, and that after that Saddam Hussein would be able to extract plutonium from spent atomic fuel to manufacture an atomic bomb. As John Correll wrote in Air Force Magazine, “If Israel was going to act, it had to be soon. Once the reactor was in operation and … fueled with uranium …. a bombing attack would spread radioactive fallout across Baghdad,” which was only 12 miles away. Begin’s advisors were not of one mind regarding an attack on the reactor. Begin wanted to disable the reactor, and he was supported by then Agricultural Minister Ariel Sharon, Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, armed forces chief of staff Lt. Gen. Rafael Eitan, and air force commander Maj. Gen. David Ivy. (READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: A Conservative Realist Foreign Policy for the Twenty-First Century) All of the Israeli fighters returned to Etzion after the three-hour mission. World reaction was hostile. United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim characterized the attack as a “clear contravention of international law.” The New York Times called Israel’s attack “an act of inexcusable and short-sighted aggression.” Even the Reagan administration initially criticized the attack, temporarily suspended deliveries of F-16s to Israel, and voted to condemn the Israeli strike in the UN Security Council. But Prime Minister Begin, as the Jerusalem Post later noted, “would not allow nuclear weapons in the region to threaten Israel.” On September 5, 2007, in an air strike ordered by then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert codenamed Operation Out of the Box, Israeli F-16 and F-15 fighters destroyed Syria’s nuclear reactor near Deir Ezzor and, thereby, prevented the Syrians from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Israel only publicly admitted that it carried out this operation in 2018. Israel’s intelligence minister Yisrael Katz tweeted that the raid “sends a clear message: Israel will never allow nuclear weapons to countries like Iran who threaten its existence.” Netanyahu Here and Now With those two precedents in mind, and with a current Israeli Prime Minister who, like Begin and Olmert, understands that Israel has no margin for error when it comes to its enemies acquiring nuclear weapons, we may be approaching another Osirak moment. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has often praised Menachem Begin’s political legacy. Netanyahu once remarked that “Begin understood that security comes first,” noting Begin’s attack on Iraq’s Osirak reactor and Begin’s pledge to not allow Israel’s enemies to acquire nuclear weapons. It is inconceivable that Netanyahu would allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. Iran is Israel’s most dangerous enemy. It is currently waging war against Israel by proxy (Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis) and directly with the recent Iranian ballistic missile attack on Israel. Despite the cautionary mumblings of a mentally frail American president, Netanyahu will do whatever is militarily necessary to protect Israel from a nuclear threat. Recently, the historian Niall Ferguson and Jay Mens compared Netanyahu to Germany’s Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Netanyahu, they wrote, is Israel’s “Iron Prime Minister,” who exercises “Machiavellian mastery of the dirty game of politics, domestic and international.” Like Bismarck, Netanyahu is a political survivor in the rough and tumble of Israeli politics. Like Bismarck, Netanyahu looks at a map to envision Israel’s security. And Netanyahu’s map shows Israel “tiny and surrounded by foes.” He has focused “relentlessly on the Iranian threat,” which has improved Israel’s diplomatic position in the region because other Gulf states also fear Iran. Netanyahu is a foreign policy realist. Bismarck was known for his devotion to Realpolitik. Bismarck fought three short, limited wars in the 1860s and early 1870s to unify Germany, then spent the rest of his career forging alliances and conducting diplomacy to avoid wars and provide for Germany’s security. (READ MORE: Endless War Champions Back Harris for President) Both leaders looked to history and geography, not ideology, to ensure their country’s survival. Bismarck’s greatest fear was that Germany would be faced by an alliance between France and Russia — his wars and diplomacy prevented that until he was dismissed from office by Kaiser Wilhelm II who led Germany to ruin. Netanyahu’s greatest fear is a nuclear armed Iran, and he will do whatever he deems necessary to prevent that from happening. And he knows that the nuclear clock is ticking. The post Is Netanyahu Facing Another Osirak Moment? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Millions of voters remain on the fence about Donald J. Trump v. Kamala Harris. Everybody knows President Trump. Frankly, many dislike his personality, particularly his frequent name calling. But most honest people also acknowledge that they were better off during Trump’s presidency. Harris argued, “It is status quo thinking to believe that putting more police on the streets creates more safety. That’s wrong. Conversely, many of these conflicted Americans know little about Vice President Harris or her policies. Harris’ historical statements shed light on both:   In 2019, GovTrack, a non-partisan organization that rates congressional votes, ranked California Democrat Kamala Harris as the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate. On a scale of 0.00 (most liberal) to 1.00 (most conservative) Harris scored a perfect 0.00. This placed Harris even further Left than Socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont (0.02) and Democrat Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts (0.26). While serving as San Francisco District Attorney, Kamala Harris cavalierly dismissed gun owners’ Second and Fourth Amendment rights. In 2007, she declared: “Just because you legally possess a gun in the sanctity of your locked home doesn’t mean that we’re not going to walk into that home and check to see if you’re being responsible and safe in the way you conduct your affairs.” In April 2017, Senator Harris rejected Trump’s border wall as “just a stupid use of money. I will block any funding for it.” She also dismissed it as a “vanity project.”  While running for President in 2019, Harris displayed contempt for the First Amendment, vowing to “double the Civil Rights Division [of the DOJ] and direct law enforcement to counter [free speech] extremism. We will hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms because they have a responsibility to help fight against this threat to our democracy. And if you profit off of hate, if you act as a megaphone for misinformation or cyber warfare, if you don’t police your platforms we are going to hold you accountable as a community.” What could possibly go wrong if we allow government to define “misinformation”? In response to Jake Tapper’s 2019 question on CNN about whether Harris wished to eliminate private health insurance while creating a “Medicare for  All” system, Harris responded: “Let’s eliminate all of that. Let’s move on.” While running for president in 2020, Harris announced: “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.” Days after the death of George Floyd and the ensuing riots in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and other  major U.S. cities,  Harris promoted defunding the police: “I applaud [Los Angeles] Mayor Garcetti for doing what he’s done,” namely cutting the Los Angeles Police Department’s 2020-2021 fiscal budget by $150 million. Harris argued, “It is status quo thinking to believe that putting more police on the streets creates more safety. That’s wrong. It’s just wrong.” Harris raised money for the Minnesota Freedom Fund to post bail for the rioters who destroyed downtown Minneapolis during the Floyd riots. Several of those whom the MFF bailed out went on to beat and even murder people.  In September 2019, Kamala Harris declared: “I do believe that we need to do [mandatory gun] buybacks.” Asked in 2018 by an MSNBC reporter whether ICE should be abolished, Kamala Harris opined: “We need to probably think about starting from scratch.” The Biden/Harris DOJ just released alleged golf-course shooter Ryan Routh’s  manifesto promising to pay a $150,000 bounty to anyone who assassinates  Trump, incentivizing yet another attempt on the president’s life. Kamala Harris and Her Party Kamala Harris is also a proud member of a political party whose leaders do not hesitate to violate the U.S. Constitution: For the past eight years, Democrats successfully have coerced social media platforms to censor politically conservative speech, including deplatforming President Trump. The 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign spied on the Trump campaign and fabricated a three-year-long Russia-collusion hoax. In August 2022, President Biden’s DOJ raided his political opponent’s Mar-a-Lago home in search of classified records that the former president is permitted to possess. Biden’s DOJ has colluded with various Manhattan and Georgia prosecutors and private parties to pursue criminal charges and litigate civil claims against President Trump. Democrat secretaries of state across the country tried to pry President Trump from the 2024 primary ballot. Harris’ running-mate, Governor Tim Walz (D – Minnesota), revealed his disdain for the First Amendment in August: “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.” Hillary Clinton believes that Americans who post “propaganda” as she defines it, should be punished: “I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda. And whether they should be civilly or even in some cases criminally charged is something that would be a better deterrence.” Finally, immediately after the second assassination attempt against Trump on September 15, Rasmussen polled 1,000 registered voters and asked them if “America would have been better off if former President Trump had been killed last weekend?” Shockingly, a majority of Democrats wish that President Trump had been murdered (28 percent) or do not know how they feel about it (25 percent). If unlimited government, dwindling constitutional rights, and deadly political violence are your cup of tea, then please vote for Kamala Harris. Otherwise, the alternative could not be clearer. READ MORE from Mark Sonnenklar: Arizona Election Snafus: We Won’t Get Fooled Again READ MORE: Kamala Harris’ Economic Program: Export US Jobs Mark Sonnenklar, Esq. is a business transactions attorney who practices in Los Angeles and Phoenix. He is also a Maricopa County, Arizona, precinct committeeman. The post Still Unclear About Kamala Harris? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Foolsburg: The History of a Town By Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin (Vintage, 304 pages, $17) In the spring of 2022, as Russian armored columns plunged into the Ukrainian heartland, and as 152 mm artillery shells and Iskander missiles rained down upon Ukrainian towns and cities, the Odesa-based artist Igor Gusev began a series of mixed media artworks entitled “Третя світова війна,” or “Third World War.”The History of a Town, however bizarre its flights of fancy, is at all times rooted in Russian facts on the ground.   Conceived of as a form of “rapid reaction art,” Gusev’s series responded to the brutal invasion primarily through the parodical transformation of famous Russian paintings, so that Vasily Perov’s Hunters at Rest becomes a depiction of “Special Military Operation” participants lounging in the grass, dreaming of looted kitchen appliances, and Aleksei Venetsianov’s Sleeping Peasant Boy is presented bound to a tree by (possibly illusory) white cords alongside the caption “We are Russians! We have Stockholm Syndrome!” Other surrealistic images draw from Slavic folklore and Soviet history, like the memorable portrayal of Lenin’s Mausoleum striding forth on blood-soaked Baba Yaga chicken legs — “the Russians are coming” — thereby casting the Russian onslaught as a sort of moral monstrosity born out of the dark forces of mytho-history. (READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky: The Vatican–China Pact Has Proved to Be a Catastrophe) Some of Gusev’s works are all the more poignant for being relatively understated, like his sketch of Odesa’s Duc de Richelieu Monument, shown encased in protective sandbags as a Russian missile streaks overhead. And then there is Gusev’s trompe-l’œil representation of a copy of an imaginary Russian book given the title War and Punishment, and authored by a certain “Tolstoyevsky,” a literary amalgamation that crops up elsewhere in contemporary Ukrainian art. Around the same time that Gusev was churning out his “Third World War” paintings and drawings, the Kyiv-based digital artist Oleksiy Say produced his own print series that included Tolstoyevsky (2022), wherein the double-headed eagle of the Muscovite coat-of-arms is given the faces of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy, and the legs of a ballerina, with which the ghastly chimera undertakes a grand jeté over the smoking rubble of a Ukrainian city. Igor Gusev’s War and Punishment and Oleksiy Say’s Tolstoyevsky both critique the cynical weaponization of so-called “great Russian culture,” which the Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Rafeyenko has acidly described as “a stillborn set of occasionally truly distinguished works of art that proved to be incapable of transforming biological beings into humans.” Igor Gusev would certainly agree; his reworking of Vasily Perov’s portrait of Dostoyevsky, folded so as to eliminate the novelist’s eyes, is given the legend “A Society of Informationally Disabled People,” and it should be abundantly clear by now that the effect of Dostoyevsky’s Christianity or Tolstoy’s pacifism on those Russians launching cruise missiles at children’s hospitals, or dropping guided aerial bombs on nursing homes, or starving, torturing, and executing Ukrainian civilians and POWs, is essentially non-existent. Mockery of the two-headed figure of “Tolstoyevsky” likewise serves to draw attention to the outside world’s superficial understanding of Russia’s literary legacy, given that to the extent that non-Russians are familiar with Russian literature, it is typically through the lens of the Tolstoyevskian realism of War and Peace and Crime and Punishment.  David Brooks, in his 2015 essay “The Russia I Miss,” contrasted the cultural sclerosis of Putin’s Russia with the supposed “unmatched intensity,” the “depth of soul,” and the “vision of total spiritual commitment” of Old Russia as epitomized by Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, who in the Russian cultural Golden Age “addressed universal questions in their most extreme and illuminating forms.” We will set aside for the time being the fact that any nostalgia for the Russia of Tolstoyevsky is nostalgia for a despotic Asiatic empire which partitioned Poland, introduced serfdom to Ukraine, committed outright genocide against the Circassians and other captive nations, and established the inhuman Siberian exile system. And we will ignore for the moment that non-Russian contemporaries of Tolstoyevsky — writers like Hugo, Flaubert, Fontane, Melville, Prus, Machado de Assis, &c. — were perfectly capable of addressing questions pertaining to the human condition in any number of enlightening ways.  The cult of Tolstoyevsky blinds its adherents to the grotesqueries of Russian history, and all too often represents a misguided form of ethno-narcissism (first-hand or vicarious), but it also has the unfortunate tendency to leave deserving Russian language writers languishing in obscurity. With Tolstoyevsky and perhaps Pushkin firmly atop the league table of Russian literary history, and with Gogol (Hohol), Turgenev, and Chekhov trailing in their wake, far too many brilliant Russian Golden Age writers — Goncharov, Leskov, Khvoshchinskaya, Pavlova, and others — remain buried in the cultural relegation zone. It is for this reason that the recent publication of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s English language translation of Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s satirical 1870 novel Foolsburg: The History of a Town is so welcome. Whereas the profoundly antisemitic and xenophobic Dostoyevsky grandiosely envisaged Russia’s historical mission as one of ushering in a state of universal brotherhood through the diffusion of the spirit of Christian love, despite the fact that precious few nations on earth are less suited to such a task, the satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin more accurately treated Russian history instead as a deeply troubling object lesson. The works of Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826-1889), a civil servant-turned-satirist who found himself arrested and exiled to Vyatka during the reign of Czar Nicholas I, are sadly seldom read today. Gary Saul Morson, in his heartfelt but flawed meditation on Russian literary history, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (2023), mentions him three times and only very much in passing. Naturally he is somewhat better remembered inside Russia, mainly for The Golovlyovs (1880), which the literary historian D. S. Mirsky called “the gloomiest [book] in all Russian literature,” a tremendous triumph given all the competition, and for his innumerable aphorisms, which are still in common use in the Russian-speaking world, including  Российская власть должна держать свой народ в состоянии постоянного изумления. [The Russian government must keep its people in a state of constant amazement.] and Строгость российских законов смягчается необязательностью их исполнения. [The severity of Russian laws is mitigated by the non-binding nature of their implementation.] and, perhaps most famously, Многие склонны путать два понятия: «Отечество» и «Ваше превосходительство». [Many people seem to confuse the two concepts: “Fatherland” and “Your Excellency.”] In Istoriya odnogo goroda, or The History of a Town, Saltykov-Shchedrin served up a madcap, burlesque fictional chronicle of public and private life in the provincial town of Glupov (the Russian word for “stupid” being глупый, glupyy) from medieval times to the mid-nineteenth century. It was arguably his finest work of satire. Ivan Turgenev, in his 1871 review of Saltykov-Shchedrin’s masterpiece, declared that the author of The History of a Town “knows his own country better than any man living,” adding that There is something of Swift in Saltykoff [sic]; that serious and grim comedy, that realism — prosaic in its lucidity amidst the wildest play of fancy — and, above all, that constant good sense — I may even say that moderation — kept up in spite of so much violence and exaggeration of form. I have seen audiences thrown into convulsions of laughter by the recital of some of Saltykoff’s sketches. There was something almost terrible in that laughter, the public, even while laughing, feeling itself under the lash. I repeat that the History of a Town could not be translated as it stands, but I think that a selection might be made out of the different forms of its Governors which pass before the reader’s eyes, sufficient of give an idea to foreigners of the interest excited in Russia by a strange and striking book — one which, under a form necessarily allegorical, offers a picture of Russian history which is, alas! too true. That The History of a Town, however bizarre its flights of fancy, is at all times rooted in Russian facts on the ground surely stands as one of the great indictments of that country’s sordid history. In the town of Glupov we find the residents engaging in the widespread, infamous, and unfortunately very real practice of snokhachestvo, in which the Russian paterfamilias would systematically sexually prey upon his daughter-in-law (snokha). We find the authorities congratulating themselves on “having killed and drowned a lot of people, [so that] they had reason to conclude that now there was not a whit of sedition left in Foolsburg.” We find a government that at every stage in its history has been inclined “to build an edifice on sand today, and tomorrow, when it collapses, to start erecting another edifice on the same sand.” And at all times we find a herd-like populace completely passive in the face of every official indignity imaginable. Under the influence of Gogol, Saltykov-Shchedrin engaged in absurdist satire in order to make his political points. (READ MORE: A Sacred Peace: The Promise and Perils of Localism) One of Glupov’s mayors, Dementy Brudasty, for example, has a special mechanical device, a sort of music box, installed in his skull to replace his brain. It becomes a running gag that Brudasty and his fellow mayors tend to meet increasingly outlandish untimely ends. Amadei Manuilovich Klementy has his nostrils torn out and is sent into exile. Foty Petrovich Ferapontov, who was “such a lover of spectacles that he did not allow any floggings unless he himself was present,” was “torn to pieces by dogs in the forest.” One mayor is found “in his bed bitten to death by bedbugs.” Another dies “from strain, trying to comprehend a certain Senate decree.”  And through it all the good people of Foolsburg, “exhausted, maligned, and annihilated,” try to survive as best they can, rioting only “in the name of potatoes,” a reference to the mass rebellions in 1834 and 1840 that resulted from the forced introduction of potato cultivation to the Russian countryside, and the curious peasant belief that “potatoes are a rebirth of that cherished apple, for which the original man lost his bliss, and that when it was with curses thrown on the earth, then potatoes were born from it and, therefore, this seed is the Antichrist’s.” If the truth is stranger than fiction, life in Russia can be stranger than even the most vicious satire. Another case in point: Saltykov-Shchedrin’s chronicle builds to a crescendo with the arrival of the last governor of Glupov, a certain Ugryum-Burcheev, “in whose face,” wrote Turgenev, “every one has recognised the sinister and repulsive features of Arakcheeff, the all-powerful favourite of Alexander I during the last years of his reign.” Yet Ugryum-Burcheev’s totalitarian reign, in which war is waged on nature itself, pales in comparison to that of the later Soviets, who murdered tens of millions and waged not just war but total war on nature, seeking to reverse the south-to-north flow of Siberian rivers, and leaving behind a noxious legacy of desertification and pollution, all predicated on the communist slogan “We can’t wait for charity from nature, we must conquer it.” “If I were to fall asleep and wake up in a hundred years,” Saltykov-Shchedrin once wrote, “and they were to ask me what was happening in Russia right now, I will answer: drinking and stealing [p’yut i voruyut].” The author of Foolsburg: The History of a Town would hardly be surprised at the current state of the Russian Federation. In the last few days alone we see reports of Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine being punished in various kinds of “correctional pits,” including “wet pits” that are open to the raging elements, and “phone booth pits” that have limited internet access. Those who do not wish to serve their time in the pits are sentenced to “nullification” in the form of physical abuse or inclusion in suicidal “meat assaults” against Ukrainian positions. Meanwhile, back on the home front, we see a deadly shoot-out at the headquarters of Wildberries (Russia’s equivalent to Amazon), with gunfire exchanged between Wildberries security and forces loyal to Vladislav Bakalchuk, ex-husband of current Wildberries CEO Tatiana Bakalchuk. It is said that Vladislav has sought the backing of the Chechen gangster-warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, while Tatiana is supported by Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office Anton Vaino and the oligarch Suleiman Kerimov. Somehow none of this nonsense would look one bit out of place in the pages of Saltykov-Shchedrin’s only seemingly outlandish satirical chronicle of Glupov. Thanks to the assiduous work of the husband-and-wife literary translating team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, this long-lost masterpiece of Russian literature is finally available to a wider international audience. By venturing beyond the confines of the Tolstoyevsky complex, and beyond the well-thumbed pages of what the painter Igor Gusev calls War and Punishment, readers can benefit from the wisdom of a writer who knew his country better than any man living, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy included, and understood that behind its “enormous” and “all-vanquishing force” was all too often “nothing but boundless idiocy.” Saltykov-Shchedrin ended his chronicle of Foolsburg with the town being destroyed by a mysterious force he dubbed “It,” which caused the sun to darken and the earth to tremble and history to “cease its course” entirely. His contemporaries, discomfited by the satire’s razor sharp edge, chose to ignore its lessons, and the book promptly fell into obscurity, Turgenev’s fulsome praise for it notwithstanding. The Soviet authorities, imagining themselves to have been the “It” that brought an end to Russian history, briefly resuscitated it, only to realize that the story of Foolsburg, and Ugryum-Burcheev in particular, was hardly an endorsement of utopian socialism, and indeed served as a timeless indictment of Soviet as well as of czarist tyranny, and so the book was once again consigned to the cultural dustbin. Having survived its years in the shadows, Foolsburg: The History of a Town now reappears in the western world as an important literary document, bridging as it does the gap between the Voltairean and Swiftian satires of the Enlightenment and the twentieth century dystopias of Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell. More importantly, it reminds us that Putin’s regime is part of a continuum of folly that stretches back centuries. In another one of his celebrated aphorisms, Saltykov-Shchedrin noted that “idiots are generally very dangerous, and not even because they are necessarily evil, but because they are alien to any considerations, and always go straight ahead, as if the road on which they find themselves belongs to them alone [Идиоты вообще очень опасны, и даже не потому, что они непременно злы, а потому, что они чужды всяким соображениям и всегда идут напролом, как будто дорога, на которой они очутились, принадлежит им одним].” As Putin and his junta continue down that very road, the rest of us are fortunate to have a handy roadmap in the form of Saltykov-Shchedrin’s bloody and burlesque (and decidedly un-Tolstoyevskian) chronicle of the hapless Russian town of Glupov/Foolsburg. The post War and Punishment: Saltykov-Shchedrin’s <i>Foolsburg</i> appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. — Aristotle There is a dichotomy of thought present when tolerance is the subject. Thomas Mann asserted that “tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.” Then there is Bertrand Russell’s comment, “Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.” Among academic, political and social elite classes, those who most advocate “tolerance” are themselves frequently and fervently “intolerant.” The vast majority of people look at tolerance somewhere between those extremes. Moreover, when asked, they seem quite convinced of the lack of tolerance in the world, except when it relates to them, personally. Perennially, modern liberals have complained about intolerant conservatives. This view is ever present in the news. On the other hand, the latter point the finger at modern liberals as being afflicted with the same “malady,” and who use the strictures of political correctness and “wokeness” as a weapon of oppression. So, which side of the political divide is right?  For years, sociologists have told us that in developed countries, such as the U.S., conservative populations (including fundamentalist Christians) exhibit characteristics that tend to predispose people toward being less “open-minded.” For example, this group is oriented towards tradition and believe in objective truth. Modern liberals (including agnostics, atheists, and those with no religious interest) are more open to relativism and new interpretations of correctness, and many truths — traits ostensibly associated with being more “open-minded.” Thus, one could surmise that conservatives and Christians should be given to prejudice more than our modern liberal. How Left and Right See Tolerance More recent psychological research regarding prejudice has some unexpected results. Some of it, presented at the annual meeting of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology, reveal some striking characteristics about “left” and “right.” Research papers published in Social Psychological and Personality Science asked a variety of Americans about their political ideologies. Liberals were found to be as discriminatory toward conservative groups as conservatives were toward liberal groups. And these findings have been echoed elsewhere: Independently and concurrently, the work of John Chambers at St. Louis University and Jarret Crawford at The College of New Jersey have also found essentially equal prejudice among conservatives and liberals. We Tolerate People Similar to Us None of this, of course, explains why liberals’ open-mindedness doesn’t better protect them against prejudice as psychologists expected. One theory is that the effects of liberals’ unique traits and worldviews on prejudice are swamped by a simple fact about humanity: We like people similar to us. There’s a long line of research showing that we prefer members of our own group. Social identity is strong — stronger than any inclination to seek or suppress novelty. Thus, apparently the openness-related traits of liberals defined by psychologists are not an antidote against prejudice. Education Teaches Us to Cover Up Prejudice Knowing all this, since prejudice and discrimination apparently exists across the political divide, is it possible to alter one’s degree of tolerance for an “other”? One might expect that the presumed mind-expanding enterprise of education would reduce prejudice (i.e. increase tolerance). But according to another presentation at the SPSP meeting, it does not. It does, however, teach people to cover it up. Researchers at the University of Kentucky, asked people if they would consider voting for a presidential candidate who was atheist, black, Catholic, gay, Muslim, or a woman. When asked directly, participants with a formal education beyond high school reported a greater willingness to vote for these groups than did those with less post-secondary education. But when asked in a more indirect way, with more anonymity, the two groups showed equal prejudice. Thus, higher formal education seems to instill an understanding of the appropriate levels of intolerance to express (i.e. what you can and can’t say so as to appear less prejudiced and thus more tolerant). Thus, education does not necessarily reduce prejudice or provide any increased degree of tolerance. Education’s suppression of expressed prejudice suggests a culture of political correctness in which people don’t feel comfortable sharing their true feelings for fear of reprisal—just the kind of intolerance conservatives complain about. Liberals, of course, try to make the argument that conservative intolerance does more harm than liberal intolerance, as it allegedly targets more vulnerable people. According to the research, there is liberal pushback when it is suggested that prejudice towards Christians and conservatives is prejudice. It seems that, to those who identify as liberals, many say it’s just standing up to bullies. Conservatives, however, don’t view it that way, and this has been going on for some time. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, remarked to a reporter: “We are on the losing side of a massive change that’s not going to be reversed, in all likelihood, in our lifetimes.” Context apparently is critical. Secularism, the circumstance in which all the above research was carried out, and to which the issue of tolerance is inextricably linked, is not a neutral governance structure; rather it has its own interests and strives to protect and perpetuate itself. Moreover, through the state, the education system, and the media, secularism exercises awesome disciplinary power and control mechanisms to achieve its agenda. It authorizes (i.e. tolerates) certain kinds of subjectivity, truths, and behaviors while marginalizing others (in today’s woke world that translates as censoring). Secularism, therefore, is coercive through its means and frequently disguises this under the name of “tolerance.” Among academic, political and social elite classes, those who most advocate “tolerance” are themselves frequently and fervently “intolerant.” In the early part of this essay, we observed how and in what ways different groups are less than tolerant of each other. But what is apparent is that irrespective of one’s political views, education or socioeconomic status, the lack of tolerance for the “other” remains an intractable problem that remains unremitting. So, why is that? If one approaches the question from a purely philosophical perspective, the answer may lie in the concept of tolerance and with its character as a virtue. People today often are intolerant, because they have no idea what it means to actually be tolerant. Said another way, according to the research, people often behave in ways completely inconsistent with their claimed intentions. To accomplish what we, ostensibly at least, intend — thought, word and deed must serve that purpose. To understand why this does not happen today with regard to tolerance, one must understand what tolerance really is (a virtue) and its fundamental interrelatedness with the other virtues. Tolerance Isn’t the Only Virtue A huge concern in today’s society is that the virtue of tolerance is often attempted in isolation and promoted apart from other traditional virtues such as justice, temperance, courage, and, of course, wisdom. The result is a society populated by individuals who single mindedly extol tolerance, but who clearly lack the wisdom necessary to avoid the extremes of too-tolerant and not tolerant enough. Those who fall into the latter extreme — of suppressing what should be put up with — are those “intolerant” people who are so self-assured of their own tolerance. The former are those who are “intolerant” of almost any degree of intolerance. Dr. Montague Brown, Saint Anselm College Professor and Thomistic scholar, spoke of the stark choices for us, today in society, regarding tolerance: “Tolerance accepts some inappropriate behavior for the sake of the common good.” “Relativism denies that good has any universal meaning and so accepts all behavior.” This state of affairs should be a warning to us all. We cannot compensate for the collapse of tolerance in society by solely advocating tolerance as an end in itself. This is the mistake to which academics and social critics seem oblivious. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle proposed that humans are social, rational animals that seek to “live well.” To that end, he proposed a system of ethics designed to help us reach eudaimonia, a state that means living well or flourishing. Eudaimonia is reached by living virtuously and building up your character traits until you don’t even have to think about your choices before making the right one. Aristotle sees virtues as character traits and tendencies to act in a particular way. This student of Plato and tutor of Alexander the Great was clear regarding the virtues and how they influence each other to form character traits. Absent temperance, courage and justice, there can be no wisdom, and without the latter – tolerance or ‘practical wisdom’ is just a word we use to make ourselves feel better – about who we say we are – in relation to others. READ MORE from F. Andrew Wolf Jr.: Kennedy Endorses Trump, Media Endorses Kamala Is Donald J. Trump Channeling Pat Buchanan? The post Tolerance Is Just One of Many Important Virtues appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

from Candace Show Podcast: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

by Jim Quinn, The Burning Platform: Via Chris Martenson This needs to go far and wide to put pressure on the government to do the right thing and save lives.  This evening, from a Peak Prosperity member to me via PM at my site: Them: I can’t post this online because it’s not quite public yet, […]