Culture Upstairs, Downstairs What is an aristocrat, really? It was, for me, the highlight of the new Downton Abbey movie. This isn’t saying a lot considering what an innocuous snoozefest it is (“pretty weak Darjeeling,” the Washington Post review calls it), but it was something.  Guy Dexter, the dashing movie star played by Dominic West, returns to Downton two years after making a movie there. During his first visit, Dexter charmed the Crawleys and their upper-crusty friends, but—here’s the point—also treated the servants with respect, with kindness and, in moments, with genuine affection. Now, back for a second visit, he approaches the starstruck cook Daisy (Sophie McShera) and, to her tongue-tied amazement, tells her that he remembers her.  That’s it, so don’t blink. The Grand Finale gang could have done a lot more with this moment, but don’t. Given the treatment they lavish, endlessly, on the Crawleys and their swooning reluctance to face facts and move on, this is hardly surprising.   No one should take any of this seriously. The movie is unintentionally amusing, conjuring up, as it does, “a version of post-Edwardian England that had no reality outside of a Beatrix Potter children’s book,” as Ty Burr put it in the Post—or The Wind in the Willows. But there is still something of note happening in both of these movies, whether Fellowes et al. were even aware of it, and it involves Dexter, the movie star.  He’s a limey himself, who worked in a clothing store before being photographed for menswear ads. Somehow he ended up in the emerging motion picture business, and, though he doesn’t even consider himself a “real” actor, has become a silent-era screen idol. (He was born, he says, Quentin Sidebottom but changed his name for obvious reasons.) He has made his way through all ranks of society with an open and easygoing self-assurance.  When Dexter goes to the servants’ quarters to see the former footman Thomas Barrow (Robert James-Collier), he is asked what people will think of the butler “receiving a visit from an upstairs guest.”  Dexter couldn’t care less, he replies. “I’ve lived in America for 10 years now,” he says, “and I don’t believe in that stuff anymore.” By “that stuff,” he means, of course, the moldy stratification of society that prevailed at Downton and in England generally. Distinctions of that kind make little sense, Dexter has realized, and he, for one, was done with them.  This makes him a member of what Burke called a “natural aristocracy”: one that might have been in large part based on the fact of one’s birth, but not solely, and sometimes not at all when such virtues as “consideration and good will,” in Thorstein Veblen’s words, are on display. Benjamin Disraeli, another upstart who managed to move throughout British society, called “manners, and consideration for others…the two main characteristics of a gentleman.” That Dexter has become an American, and as a result has come to cast off the snootiness of the British aristocracy, is ironic enough, of course. There’s no evidence the Downton servants envy their employers, but envy will be a staple of the American life with which the expat movie star has cast his lot. In America, where lip-service has long been paid to “equality,” the near-constant proximity of classes “make possible envy of the upper by the lower,” Robert Nisbet has written. “This is why envy proliferates [in societies] where equality has come to dominate other values.” As Malcolm Muggeridge put it, “the more egalitarian a society…the more snobbish.” Guy Dexter is a gentleman, but by no means a “gentleman of leisure,” that type that Veblen taxonomized so carefully. Dexter, all the better, is more of a “natural aristocrat” than his high-born hosts. He is not a snob—not yet—but if Fellowes and his fellows produce yet another Downton Abbey movie, maybe he will become one. Let’s hope not.  “Didn’t I always treat you like we wuz equals?” the indignant and uncouth ballplayer in Ring Lardner’s You Know Me, Al asks one of his old friends from back home—one who has not distinguished himself in any way, much less made it to the major leagues. Dexter, God bless him, treats everybody like they wuz equals. The post Upstairs, Downstairs appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics The Big Free Speech Chill The tide was turning against free speech long before the Kirk assassination. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images) A week before it happened, over 1,000 students at the university where Charlie Kirk was assassinated signed a petition asking that he be banned from speaking. Many others came to the event hoping to see Kirk shouted down—the heckler’s veto. One assassin exercised the ultimate stop to the exercise of free speech: a bullet into Kirk’s neck. Violence against the First Amendment exists on a scale. It only takes a little nudge to move the dial the wrong way. “The heckler’s veto” refers to a tactic whereby a person or group of people literally shout down a person exercising his First Amendment rights. Free speech isn’t meant to be a prize for the loudest, of course. But the dial moves, and the natural end of such thinking is mob rule enforced by an assassin’s bullet. There are legitimate ways to challenge speakers: engagement, or ignoring them entirely. The heckler’s veto and its worse successors not only stifle a particular idea, but public discourse in general by discouraging others from sharing controversial ideas. Nobody wants to be shouted down by a mob, online or offline, let alone assaulted or murdered. The Supreme Court has found that protesters may not unduly interfere with communication between a speaker and an audience, and that the government must control those who threaten or act out disruption rather than to sacrifice the speaker’s First Amendment rights. Balancing the rights of the speaker, the hearers, and protestors is complicated. Shutting down one party entirely in defiance of the rights of the others is illegal. It is a tactic for brownshirts. Yet it is easy in a divided America to claim the struggle against the monster of the week—fascism, racism, misogyny, white supremacy, whatever—overrides the old norms. Imagine the criminalization, capped by the death penalty, of certain thoughts and beliefs. Then look online (and on CNN and MSNBC) to see the cheering over Kirk’s death, the gleeful belief he deserved to die because of what he believed. Or listen to presidential wanna-be and governor of Illinois J.B. Pritzker, who said of political violence “I think the president’s rhetoric often foments it,” as if Kirk’s death was retribution. Though it appears the killer’s motives were “anti-fascist” (or something like that), it matters little. Regardless of what some social media post or irrational manifesto might say, his action is in itself a political one on its face, with political results up to and including threatening our most basic right to free speech. It would not matter to history if the Reichstag fire were started by a sloppy janitor smoking or hardcore ideologues; the result as far as society is concerned is the same. There might even be some room to argue about that if our society were not at present so skewed against the idea of free speech. From 1984 through every dystopian movie, as well as in the sordid history of real dictatorships, the loss of free speech comes from the top down: A powerful man crushes the press, thugs take over TV stations, that sort of thing. Nobody foresaw the loss of free speech would come—by popular demand—from The People themselves. Yet that seems to be the way things are going. The sixth annual College Free Speech Rankings, released by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) only the day before Kirk was killed, show a continued decline in support for free speech among higher education students. Students of every political persuasion show a deep unwillingness to encounter controversial ideas at an age when they once were typically putting up Che Guevara posters in their dorm rooms. “This year, students largely opposed allowing any controversial campus speaker, no matter that speaker’s politics,” said FIRE President Greg Lukianoff. “Rather than hearing out and then responding to an ideological opponent, both liberal and conservative college students are retreating from the encounter entirely. This will only harm students’ ability to think critically and create rifts between them. We must champion free speech on campus as a remedy to our culture’s deep polarization.” Students now see speech that they oppose as threatening. The idea students are running from difficult ideas is bad enough. But the next statistic is chilling: a record 1 in 3 students now hold some level of acceptance—even if only “rarely”—for resorting to violence to stop a campus speech. At my own Midwest alma mater, 76 percent of students say shouting down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus is acceptable. It is thus no surprise that when hundreds gathered at the Idaho State Capitol in Boise for a candlelight vigil honoring Kirk, the peaceful event erupted into violence when a local Black Lives Matter activist rode through the crowd on a scooter shouting obscenities, leading to a physical confrontation. Giving up on free speech is no longer some sort of out-there viewpoint. A recent poll found that while ​few Democrats or​ Republicans support violence against opposition party leaders in general, that rises to about 10 percent for opposition party leaders who enact “harmful or exploitative policies.” The former president of the now-defunct Newseum (itself dedicated to honoring the First Amendment) argues people have developed an alternate understanding of free speech, with students in particular believing “offensive” speech should not be protected, particularly when the offense is directed at groups defined by race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. Under such circumstances, political violence to silence speech should not be surprising. It should just be expected. It is not a turning point. It is a point on a spectrum. Regrettably, Charlie Kirk is not likely to be the last to die. The post The Big Free Speech Chill appeared first on The American Conservative.

from The People’s Voice: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

by Matt Agorist, The Free Thought Project: How we can stop the pandemonium of left vs right tribalism. Tragedy struck while I brainstormed with visionaries at the Radical Innovation Summit in Mexico City on overcoming the political crisis. At the peak of that conference, an assassin’s bullet ended Charlie Kirk. His untimely death fanned the flames of polarizing […]

from Breitbart: KYIV, Ukraine (AP) – Russia launched a large-scale missile and drone attack targeting regions across Ukraine early Saturday, killing at least three people and wounding dozens more, Ukrainian officials said. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said attacks took place across nine regions, including Dnipropetrovsk, Mykolaiv, Chernihiv, Zaporizhzhia, Poltava, Kyiv, Odesa, Sumy and Kharkiv. TRUTH […]

Tuomas Holopainen, Johanna Kurkela and Troy Donockley step off the Nightwish oil tanker to drift on the luxury yacht of their ethereal offshoot’s third album