Unless you have a power to ask a soul without a physical body a question, the issue is no longer in the political arena.

The question – again, unanswered by Neo’s quotes of him – is whether FredHJr would have undertaken the social activism that’s practically necessary to solve the problem, inspired by and consistent with the Founding Fathers’ essential activism that won our nation via competition in the arena, as much he’s inspired by their ideal aspirations.

FredHJr would have recognized immediately that Trump’s rhetoric is consistent with Russian propaganda.

Based on his comments, I believe FredHJr would choose neither Clinton nor Trump with the grim recognition that both the presumptive GOP and Dems presidential candidates, and more significantly, their contextual social activist movements, to be sides of the same dis-civic coin.

Based on his comments, FredHJr evidently understood the big picture and long view that the activist game is the only social cultural/political game there is.

The current challenge to America the leader of the free world would have been a crystalline moment for FredHJr. I believe he would have understood the epochal crossroads that We The People now face.

As such, I believe FredHJr would have advocated for American conservative and liberal patriots to rally collectively for a viable 3rd option with a competitive activist awakening to save our country and the civilization that depends on our Shining City upon a Hill from both intolerable options – again, more than Trump and Clinton the individual candidates, but their contextual toxic social activist movements to which FredHJr, based on his comments, was evidently sensitized.

I’m curious – because Neo hasn’t quoted it – whether FredHJr advocated prescription beyond his worthy diagnosis.

Generally speaking, conservative intellectuals, including Neo, are sharp with diagnosis but also tend to fall short on prescription due to their ingrained aversion to the practical activism that’s necessary to compete for real in the arena versus social activist movements like the Democrat-front Left and Left-mimicking Trump-front alt-Right.

I arrived here shortly after Fred’s passing, but I did know strcpy (who was, as I recall, a young man, making his likely death from cancer all the more tragic), and Occam’s Beard, whose blunt, sometimes endearingly curmudgeonly witticisms and observations were a big part of what made this place so uniquely attractive to me.

It’s such a noble thing for neo to keep their memories alive – each in his unique way an embodiment of what makes America special (as another commenter said, “ordinary people with common sense”).

God rest.

The most frustrating part of it is the loss of relationships, however casual they may be. Then again, is it right to call a relationship “casual” when you spend days talking about philosophy and culture, politics and art? The best you can do, I guess, is to respect other people’s personal privacy if they approach you on an anonymous blog. It’s weird, though.

“I think the beginning of the end of our civilization began with the French Revolution and The Terror. It was the beginning of the elaboration of totalitarian thought and throughout the 19th century this kept on finding newer permutations of elegant, intellectual terror. The 20th century was the culmination of the barbarity of totalitarianism.”

I think that that is an especially important observation about which we need to be periodically reminded. Especially now that many of our politicians are more enthralled by the French Revolution and it’s predicates, than our own.

You have of course dealt with this in the past: even contrasting their national slogan with our own Lockean statement of fundamental rights and interests.