Commenter “Brian E” commented by describing a local school shooting and the tragedy that ensued, and added: “Having seen the aftermath relatively close up, it’s hard to have infringement of personal liberty as the hill to die on.”

Later, he added:

I agree with Neo, he [the killer’s father, Colin Gray] should have been charged with negligence, not homicide– but I do think the sentence needs to be serious enough that people change their behavior on how they store their firearms.

Many or perhaps most laws that restrict liberty are rationalized as being necessary and/or desirable in order to protect the innocent. The problem is how far to go, because at a certain point the infringements become unconscionable, and perhaps they don’t even prevent the behavior. These are constant issues, and not just in the field of gun control.

Arguments about the protective benefit of a restrictive law are nearly always used to justify infringements of personal liberty . There are terrible tragedies that appear to be preventable through restrictions on personal liberty. In the case of Colt Gray (the 14-year-old murderer) and his father Colin (who failed to lock up weapons), however, there was no law in Georgia that required such a locking-up. I see the harsh verdict in the Colin Gray trial as an attempt to rectify that, ex post facto, without actually passing such a law. In the service of this effort, another law – one I see as inappropriate to the facts of the case – was pulled into service in order to label one person, the father, as responsible.

The desire to turn back the clock and undo what happened – an impossibility, of course – is part of the motive behind this. The other desire is the one stated by Brian E, which is for the sentence “to be serious enough that people change their behavior on how they store their firearms.” But I doubt that will happen; people think they’re safe and their family is safe, and they don’t foresee what is an extremely unlikely act: that of their child committing mass murder with a gun found around the house. Or, for many who do foresee or at least imagine such possibilities, they either are already locking up their weapons or not owning them in the first place.

In addition: where does this assigning of responsibility stop? In the Colt Gray case, why not the mother, the school, the police? They all had roles and all failed to fulfill them effectively enough to prevent the murders; some were even arguably negligent (the school, for example). And one could argue that the school authorities possessed more training than Colt’s father Colin had, more resources than he had, and supposedly more objectivity about Colt than he had. For that matter, why not blame the school for not using metal detectors?

There’s also an assumption that if the guns had been locked up Colt couldn’t or wouldn’t have killed people. I agree that it almost certainly would have been more difficult for him to do so, but it still could have been accomplished. He could have used a knife. He could have used explosives. He could have bought a gun on the black market or stolen one. Where there’s a will …

If a state or city wants to require people to lock up their guns, it can do so. If someone fails to follow the law, impose the penalty for violation of that law rather than twisting another law around in order to punish someone you have designated as the one to blame even though everyone is to blame.

SCOTUS has ruled on how much can be required of homeowners regarding gun storage – that is, it has ruled on what cannot be required. The case was District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) (see this):

Provisions of the District of Columbia Code made it illegal to carry an unregistered firearm … The Code also contained provisions that required owners of lawfully registered firearms to keep them unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock or other similar device unless the firearms were located in a place of business or being used for legal recreational activities. …

[Heller] sought an injunction against the enforcement of the relevant parts of the Code and argued that they violated his Second Amendment right to keep a functional firearm in his home without a license. The district court dismissed the complaint. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed and held that the Second Amendment protects the right to keep firearms in the home for the purpose of self-defense, and the District of Columbia’s requirement that firearms kept in the home be nonfunctional violated that right.

So the appeals court ruled that the requirements were too strict and effectively disarmed people, making it impossible to use their guns for self-defense. The case ultimately went to SCOTUS and its ruling was 5-4, which is about as close as it can be. The ruling divided along the usual political lines. The majority basically agreed with the need for self-defense and claimed the 2nd Amendment protected that right, whereas the dissenting minority went with the “militia” interpretation and did not think this case unduly limited the right to bear arms because that right only applied to militias or militia-equivalents. SCOTUS has since declined to rule further on the issue of laws about gun locks in the home, which leaves those laws standing. I believe the idea at present is that some restrictions are okay as long as they preserve the right to self-defense.

NOTE: Once again I am reminded of the chilling poem by A. E. Housman, “The Culprit.” Regarding the Gray case, the poem is somewhat ironic, because Colin the father is being punished (15 years), although the son Colt still drew the harsher sentence (life without parole):

THE CULPRIT

The night my father got me
His mind was not on me;
He did not plague his fancy
To muse if I should be
The son you see.

The day my mother bore me
She was a fool and glad,
For all the pain I cost her,
That she had borne the lad
That borne she had.

My mother and my father
Out of the light they lie;
The warrant would not find them,
And here ’tis only I
Shall hang so high.

Oh let not man remember
The soul that God forgot,
But fetch the county kerchief
And noose me in the knot,
And I will rot.

For so the game is ended
That should not have begun.
My father and my mother
They had a likely son,
And I have none.

The post Regulating guns in the home: how far to go? appeared first on The New Neo.

[Ortego said] There won’t be any more elections here. There won’t be any more elections for them [the opposition factions] to try to seize the government, to seize power.

And we are going to work with the national assemblies and the corresponding organizations on the laws because laws need to be made.

Let them build a wall, a blockade against the coup plotters, the traitors and no matter how much money the Yankees give them, they won’t be able to.

The polls must not have been looking so good.

If you’re wondering how long Ortega has been around, he’s 80 years old now and was the country’s head from 1979 to 1990, was voted out, won again in the 2006 election and has been in power ever since:

In June 2018, organizations such as Amnesty International and the Organization of American States reported that Ortega had engaged in a violent oppression campaign against anti-government protests. The violent crackdown and subsequent constriction of civil liberties have led to waves of emigration to neighboring Costa Rica, with more than 30,000 Nicaraguans filing for asylum in that country.

His government jailed many potential rival candidates in the 2021 general election, including Cristiana Chamorro Barrios. Ortega’s government also imprisoned other opponents, such as former allies Dora María Téllez and Hugo Torres Jiménez. In August 2021, Nicaragua cancelled the operating permits of six US and European NGOs. Many critics of the Ortega government, including opposition leaders, journalists and members of civil society, fled the country in mid-2021. In his fourth term, Ortega ordered the closure of several NGOs, universities, and newspapers, and resumed his repression of the Catholic Church after a brief rapprochement, imprisoning prelate Rolando José Álvarez Lagos.

Nice guy.

Now he wants the Nicaraguan legislature to abolish elections. Apparently, they have the power to do that. It’s not quite the Enabling Act in Nazi Germany – by which the Reichstag effectively dissolved itself. But the Nicaraguan legislature has been cooperative with Ortega’s accumulation of more and more power, and it will continue down that path:

Ortega and [his wife] Murillo expanded their authority through sweeping constitutional changes that took effect in 2025. The reforms included extending the presidential term from five years to six and placing the legislative, judicial and electoral institutions under the authority of the presidency.

The pair now exercise control over nearly every branch of government, including the armed forces, police and judiciary.

Ortega, Nicaragua’s longest-serving leader, is scheduled to remain in office until early 2028, although his statement on Sunday effectively canceled Nicaragua’s next elections, which had been scheduled for November 2027.

Critics say Ortega had already effectively eliminated meaningful electoral competition during elections in 2011, 2016 and 2021.

As Rubio says:

“Daniel Ortega’s declaration that, under his family’s dictatorship, Nicaragua will never again hold elections lays bare their true authoritarian nature. Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo have abandoned even the pretense of popular consent,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Tuesday.

The US had already imposed some sanctions and visa restrictions on government officials. The international community has been condemning Ortega for quite some time. But they are powerless to do anything. I doubt Trump will pull another Maduro caper, although I suppose it’s not out of the realm of possibility.

As Turkey’s Erdogan once said, “Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off.” Ortega stepped off a long time ago, but now he’s telling the world in no uncertain terms. And, in the usual way of Newspeak, he says he’s doing it in order to save democracy.

The post Ortega of Nicaragua decides to become official dictator appeared first on The New Neo.

Some of history’s greatest empires have devolved into genocidal lunacy—often with shocking compliance from their own people. What methods can create this madness?

In Manufacturing Delusion, acclaimed conservative commentator and former CIA officer Buck Sexton offers answers. Drawing on his intelligence experience, expertise in crowd psychology, knowledge of propaganda, and research into some of history’s darkest totalitarian chapters, he equips you to identify mind control tactics used to form compliant citizens. He explores the eight tactics of mass delusion through examining:

— How Stalin used Pavlovian mind games to establish absolute control
— How Chinese thought reform transformed opposition into terrorized pawns
— How Jihadist preachers replace shared humanity with weaponized fear

Using these examples and others, Sexton walks you through a history of controlling regimes and the methods they used to create passive citizens. More importantly, he shows you how some of the early stages of mass delusion have already occurred right here in the United States of America, on issues of public health, gender, and racial justice.

I heard about the book through this interview with the author. Although the book’s title only mentions the left, he says in the interview that he also sees it on the right (or the former right, or the pretend right – aka Carlson and Owens). However, that is still a fringe group on the right, whereas it’s a widespread and mainstreamed tool of the left.

Here’s the interview:

In the interview, Sexton also mentions a much older book, The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing by Joost A. M. Meerloo. It was first published in 1956 and this is from Amazon’s description:

In 1933 Meerloo began to study the methods by which systematic mental pressure brings people to abject submission, and by which totalitarians imprint their subjective “truth” on their victims’ minds. In “The Rape of the Mind” he goes far beyond the direct military implications of mental torture to describing how our own culture unobtrusively shows symptoms of pressurizing people’s minds. He presents a systematic analysis of the methods of brainwashing and mental torture and coercion, and shows how totalitarian strategy, with its use of mass psychology, leads to systematized “rape of the mind.” He describes the new age of cold war with its mental terror, verbocracy, and semantic fog, the use of fear as a tool of mass submission and the problem of treason and loyalty, so loaded with dangerous confusion. The “Rape of the Mind” is written for the interested layman, not only for experts and scientists. Contents: Part One: The Techniques of Individual Submission. 1. You Too Would Confess. 2. Pavlov’s Students as Circus Tamers. 3. Medication into Submission. 4. Why Do They Yield? The Psychodynamics of False Confession. Part Two: The Techniques of Mass Submission. 5. The Cold War against the Mind. 6. Totalitaria and its Dictatorship. 7. The Intrusion by Totalitarian Thinking. 8. Trial by Trial. 9. Fear as a Tool of Terror. Part Three: Unobtrusive Coercion. 10. The Child is Father to the Man. 11. Mental Contagion and Mass Delusion. 12. Technology Invades Our Minds. 13. Intrusion by the Administrative Mind. 14. The Turncoat in Each of Us. Part Four: In Search of Defenses. 15. Training Against Mental Torture. 16. Education for Discipline or Higher Morale. 17. From Old to New Courage. 18. Freedom — Our Mental Backbone

I think “our mental backbone” has gone rather squishy lately.

The reason I have highlighted the Meerloo book, though, is that – strangely enough – I read it when I was about ten years old. Did I understand it? Certainly not deeply. But the topic already interested me so much that I plowed through it.

How did it fall into my hands? My family had received a free and unsolicited catalogue in the mail from Marboro Books, which was (according to Google AI) “a notable discount book retailer and publisher founded in 1947, famous for selling remainders and overstock books at steep discounts through retail stores and mail-order catalogs, the chain was acquired by Barnes & Noble in 1979.” When the catalogue came, I pored over it, fascinated. It was the first time it occurred to me that I could order an adult book – and by “adult” I certainly don’t mean anything to do with sex.

My childhood interests were a portent of things to come as a blogger, because not only did I order that Meerloo book with my allowance, but I also ordered Charles MacKay’s classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds. That one was first published in 1841:

The subjects of Mackay’s debunking include alchemy, crusades, duels, economic bubbles, fortune-telling, haunted houses, the Drummer of Tedworth, the influence of politics and religion on the shapes of beards and hair, magnetisers (influence of imagination in curing disease), murder through poisoning, prophecies, popular admiration of great thieves, popular follies of great cities, and relics.

I think I’m going to order the Sexton book. I seem to have lost the others along the way, although I had them for a long long time.

The post Writing the book on mass indoctrination appeared first on The New Neo.

I’m thinking that the country feels like it’s under internal siege. But you know, I’ve felt that way before. I write about the dangers often, and so I’m not going to write about them today. It’s a holiday, a big one.

Today I’m just going to note that I really do believe this is the greatest country on earth. Although threatened at times, our commitment to liberty is unmatched by that of any other country. The World Cup visitors from afar are surprised at our friendliness, our energy, our huge portions, our generosity.

I remember hearing from my son, when he lived in South America for quite a while, that although in some ways he could pass for a native, people always knew he was an American even before he opened up his mouth and demonstrated that he had an accent. Why? It was because of the way he walked. And I’ve heard other people say that Americans stride in a different way, a more open and free gait that identifies them.

America may just be the most beautiful country in the world in the sense of natural wonders, too. It’s certainly one of them, anyway. That’s partly because it’s so large and the terrain and climate and flora and fauna so varied. I recall learning in art history class that many of the early paintings of the American West – such as, for example, by Bierstadt – were designed to show Easterners and denizens of the Old World the wonders of the New. They could scarcely believe what they saw. And granted, it was a somewhat idealized version – but not that far off from reality:

I remember the 1976 Bicentennial vividly. But that was a long time ago. I was young, and now – well, let’s just say I’m not young anymore. But that star-spangled banner still waves o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Have a wonderful celebration!

The post Reflections on the 250th Fourth appeared first on The New Neo.

I’ve been visiting New York City, the place where I grew up. I decide to take a walk to the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, never having been there before.

When you approach the Promenade you can’t really see what’s in store. You walk down a normal-looking street, spot a bit of blue at the end of the block, make a right turn–and, then, suddenly, there is the city.

And so it is for me. I take a turn, and catch my breath: downtown Manhattan rises to my left, seemingly close enough to touch, across the narrow East River. I see skyscrapers, piers, the orange-gold Staten Island ferry. In front of me, there are the graceful gothic arches of the Brooklyn Bridge. To my right, the back of some brownstones, and a well-tended and charming garden that goes on for a third of a mile.

I walk down the promenade looking first left and then right, not knowing which vista I prefer, but liking them both, especially in combination, because they complement each other so well.

All around me are people, relaxing. Lovers walking hand in hand, mothers pushing babies in strollers, fathers pushing babies in strollers, nannies pushing babies in strollers. People walking their dogs (a preponderance of pugs, for some reason), pigeons strutting and courting, tourists taking photos of themselves with the skyline as background, every other person speaking a foreign language.

The garden is more advanced in time than gardens where I live, reminding me that New York is really a southern city compared to New England. Daffodils, the startling blue of grape hyacinths, tulips in a rainbow of soft colors, those light-purple azaleas that are always the first of their kind, flowering pink magnolia and airy white dogwood and other blooming trees whose names I don’t know.

In the view to my left, of course, there’s something missing. Something very large. Two things, actually: the World Trade Center towers. Just the day before, we had driven past that sprawling wound, with its mostly-unfilled acreage where the WTC had once stood, now surrounded by fencing. Driving by it is like passing a war memorial and graveyard combined; the urge is to bow one’s head.

As I look at the skyline from the Promenade, I know that those towers are missing, but I don’t really register the loss visually. I left New York in the Sixties, never to live there again, returning thereafter only as occasional visitor. The World Trade Center was built in the early Seventies, so I never managed to incorporate it into that personal New York skyline of memory that I hold in my mind’s eye, even though I saw the towers on subsequent visits. So what I now see resembles nothing more than the skyline of my youth restored, a fact which seems paradoxical to me. But I feel the loss, even though I don’t see it. Viewing the skyline always has a tinge of sadness now, which it never had before 9/11.

I come to the end of the walkway and turn myself around to set off on the return trip. And, suddenly, the view changes. Now, of course, the garden is to my left and the city to my right; and the Brooklyn Bridge, which was ahead of me, is now behind me and out of sight. But now I can see for the first time, ahead of me and to the right, something that was behind me before. In the middle of the harbor, the pale-green Statue of Liberty stands firmly on its concrete foundation, arm raised high, torch in hand.

The sight is intensely familiar to me – I used to see it frequently when I was growing up. But I’ve never seen it from this angle before. She seems both small and gigantic at the same time: dwarfed by the skyscrapers near me that threaten to overwhelm her, but towering over the water that surrounds her on all sides. The eye is drawn to her distant, heroic figure. She’s been holding that torch up for so long, she must be tired. But still she stands, resolute, her arm extended.

NOTE: I was going to add a photo of the Statue of Liberty here. But instead I was very taken with a video about how the statue was constructed. I’d never previously thought about the challenges involved and how they were surmounted, but I learned about them here. And the video also caused me to reflect, and not for the first time, on how the forces arrayed against the US right now are good at destroying but not at building. Destroying is so much easier:

The post For the Fourth: on liberty appeared first on The New Neo.

The post For the Fourth appeared first on The New Neo.

It’s been ten years since the purges began, and I still have a hard time believing it actually happened. Did so many of my friends really go along with it? Did institutions, corporations, and all of Hollywood allow themselves to be shamefully cowed by the fanatical mob? Yes.

Stone underwent her political change in recent years, and this phenomenon still has the power to surprise her. I experienced it over twenty years ago, and so I’m more used to the idea that most people will follow the tyranny du jour. From my observation, this mentality is more common on the left, but the right is hardly immune. It just takes a different form.

Many years ago I read Dorothy Thompson’s 1941 essay that appeared in Harper’s and was entitled, “Who Goes Nazi?”. It’s a catchy title, isn’t it? Thompson presents it as a parlor game, but a deadly serious one:

It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.

I have many quarrels with Thompson, and I also disagree with some of what she wrote in the essay. That’s not the subject matter of this post, however. I’m introducing it here because I very much agree with her basic premise, which is that most people are susceptible to totalitarian leanings and to propaganda. In the essay it’s “Nazism” – after all, it was written in 1941. But it’s hardly limited to that; we’re talking about the totalitarian impulse, either “for your own good” which turns into evil, or for outright evil.

Some embrace it wholeheartedly and some half-heartedly, some think they are being virtuous, some are indifferent but go along to get along, some don’t pay any attention, and some do it out of fear. But to defy it takes a great deal of insight and courage.

In addition to the Thompson essay, I sometimes think of the Milgram experiment. This particular post from 2008 explains the phenomenon best. An excerpt:

If you’re unfamiliar with the Milgram experiments, here’s a summary. The gist of it was Milgram’s shocking (literally) finding that ordinary people in this country could be persuaded to inflict what they thought were painful electric jolts to “subjects” (actually, actors) in what was billed as a learning experiment, if an authoritative “researcher” (also an actor) told them it was okay.

This was true for most subjects even if the “victim” was screaming in pain and complained of a weak heart. It was also true if the “doctor” didn’t have a white coat, and was in a lab in a seedier part of town. No actual shocks were administered, but I recall that, in follow-up interviews, most of the subjects thought the shocks were real.

Milgram varied the details of the experiment over and over (read his book if you have time; it’s a masterpiece of its genre), but the results always pointed to the troubling fact that the majority of people failed to “question authority” …

“Authority” can vary. It can, for instance, be some online charlatan whom a person has come to trust. It can be a leftist professor, or a series of leftist professors, at a university. It can be the baying hounds of cancel culture, or the Furies of the “Me Too” witch hunt. It can be Jew-haters of all persuasions. It’s a shape-shifter exploiting a fact of human nature.

Our Founders believed it was possible to create a system of government that would be at least somewhat resistant to these forces. They did the best they could, and they were brilliant men. Perhaps they did the best possible. But no system can guard against the tendency well enough to make tyranny impossible, and the Founders were well aware of that, too.

[NOTE: Sasha Stone’s entire essay is worth reading, and there are some especially good short videos there.]

The post On the ever-leftward turning appeared first on The New Neo.

So, will they wear out their welcome and be just a passing phase? Maybe, but I absolutely wouldn’t count on it. Another phrase occurs to me:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

I’ve quoted the poem many times over the years. But it now occurs to me that the first part isn’t correct. In other words, do “the best lack all conviction”? Not in the least. If they’re “the best,” they have plenty of conviction and principles and are serious about them. The real question is whether those convictions are a match for the obvious “passionate intensity” of the far left.

Note also that “the worst” are riding almost entirely on emotional intensity; reason really doesn’t enter into it for them. Thus we have today’s cuckoos, who – although they talk academic theory gobbledygook – are full of such passionate intensity that I don’t doubt they would “cut down every law” to get their way.

Another relevant quote occurs to me, and it’s this one from Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, uttered by O’Brien to Winston Smith as he’s being interrogated and tortured:

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?

In another cuckoo-like move, however, the Party pretends to be interested in the good of others. Perhaps certain members even think they are interested in that. But the gleaming attraction of power is tantamount (true of many politicians, by the way).

Plus, also from Orwell:

There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.

Forever? Well, maybe not, but once these things get going they are difficult to reverse. Most Democrat politicians of the more “moderate” sort are loathe to condemn the Democratic Socialists, who already seem to have a lot of power in blue areas. The old-time Democrats seem to think the crocodile will eat them last. Hakeem Jeffries doesn’t have that luxury (although he refuses to address it); the chant at some of the NY primary victory get-togethers, when Jeffreys’ face appeared on the screen for a moment, was “You’re next!”

As that article says:

“To be shouting ‘you’re next’ — a majority white audience to a Black man — just harkens back to some dark times in history,” said Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, who endorsed Valdez’s opponent Antonio Reynoso. …

In interviews with the New York Times and CNN, New York Attorney General Letitia James spoke about “hurt feelings” in communities of color. She said she was disappointed by Mamdani’s lack of understanding about race and class issues in the city.

“Some of the candidates that he has supported are individuals who do not understand the politics of New York City, the cultural differences from district to district, who have not been part of the history and the struggle of some of these districts …

So there’s a very interesting racial aspect to all of this, and it seems to be the case – from an analysis of the results in different areas of New York – that the main DSA support comes from affluent and highly educated white people rather than black or Hispanic voters. But the overall voting turnout was very very low, reported variously as between 10% and 15%. That makes it somewhat more difficult to analyze.

Why is turnout so low in these primaries? I don’t know. If I lived in NY, I’d be strongly motivated to vote. I think that, in many deep blue enclaves, it’s a foregone conclusion that the Democrat nominee will win the regular election, and that all Democrats are at least somewhat alike. Therefore, people who aren’t political junkies and aren’t paying a whole lot of attention don’t realize what’s actually happening here and who these candidates are and how much they differ. So the 10% or 15% who do turn out and vote are the ones filled with that “passionate intensity” of the far-left fanatic. That’s the best I can do for an explanation for such tremendous voting apathy on the part of most people there.

One of the few Democrats speaking out against the DSA is James Carville, of all people. But he’s an old fossil [emphasis mine]:

True to form, Carville lit into the party crashers with his colorful “Ragin’ Cajun” rhetoric. Focusing on Chevalier, he said that she “has attacked interracial relationships and the American flag. Lady, I ain’t in the same party as you. I’m sorry, I’m just not.”

He then revealed how very serious he considered the situation to be by calling for his own party to do something drastic: “And I actually do think it’s time for Democrats to talk the S word: schism. I really do.”

“Everybody’s always said, ‘No, no, we’re a coalition, we’re a big tent,’” Carville went on, but there’s “just some s**t that I can’t be in the same tent with.” …

“But, and understand, these people do not like Democrats; not only are they not Democrats, they wish Democrats poorly. …

“I am totally comfortable in a political party that spends time questioning the policies of the government of Israel. In fact, I’m enthusiastic about that,” Carville clarified, but “I don’t want to be in a political party that denies the right of the state of Israel to exist. That’s just not — I just can’t do that. I’m sorry. It’s just not doable.”

But Carville is an outlier on this. Must Democrat politicians seem to be finding it very doable indeed – so far.

The post The Socialist cuckoos and the Democrats appeared first on The New Neo.

Britain is even further along on this “the brown minorities are always right” road than we are here. For example, one of the first things that came to mind for me were the Rotherham rapes in which Muslim (mostly Pakistani) men groomed and raped underage white British girls. I recalled that not only was the situation allowed to continue for decades, despite constant reports, because British authorities feared upsetting the Muslim immigrant communities by pointing the finger at them, but also that some of the Rotherham victims were themselves arrested. Checking to see if that memory was accurate, I found this sort of thing [emphasis mine]:

On a number of occasions, victims of sexual abuse [in Rotherham] were criminalised – arrested for being drunk – while their abusers continued to act with impunity. Vital evidence was ignored, Jay said, with police apparently trying to manipulate their figures for child sexual exploitation by removing from their monitoring process girls who were pregnant or had given birth, plus all looked after children in care.

Blame the victims, not the perpetrators, if it was racially woke to do so.

Also, we could go all the way back to the post-9/11 emphasis in the US on a backlash “Islamophobia” which really didn’t even exist to any extent. There was a bending over backwards to make Muslims in the US the potential victims.

In Britain, there’s also the phenomenon in which Jews are being told not to wear symbols of their religion so as not to inflame or enrage their persecutors, rather than punishing the demonstrators harassing them. And some Jews have been arrested; for example these cases:

(1) Niyak Ghorbani:

Niyak Ghorbani, 37, waved the sign in the middle of last Saturday’s rally before protesters turned on him leading to a confrontation.

Police said he was arrested for assault before being de-arrested after officers reviewed footage. …

Ghorbani said that he would make a complaint after the incident and that he was not given back his sign.

He said: “[Police] told me that it is a danger for [my] life and for the people when they see maybe attack [me]. I told the police they attacked me and I want to complain and they say go to police station near your home.”

(2) Gideon Falter:

London’s police force has been forced to issue two apologies after officers threatened to arrest an “openly Jewish” man if he refused to leave the area around a pro-Palestinian march because his presence risked provoking the demonstrators.

Gideon Falter, chief executive of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, was wearing a traditional Jewish skullcap when he was stopped by police while trying to cross a street in central London as demonstrators filed past on April 13.

One officer told Falter he was worried that the man’s “quite openly Jewish” appearance could provoke a reaction from the protesters, according to video posted by the campaign group. A second officer then told Falter he would be arrested if he refused to be escorted out of the area because he was “causing a breach of the peace.”

Here’s another article on the phenomenon. Fortunately, none of those incidents caused serious physical harm, but they are indicative of the same trend of placating the country’s Muslim population at the expense of white British natives and of Jews.

As I said, it’s not quite as bad in the US; at least, not yet. But there is the MSM believing Hamas reports on the Gazan conflict, which exploit this same “brown people are automatically the truthful victims” mentality. This is in line with fake hate crimes here (Jussie Smollett, take a bow), a tactic which began long ago (Tawana Brawley, for example). The belief in the veracity of a once-persecuted group came originally from the desire to correct what used to be the opposite – the automatic belief in the white person even if that person was lying. But what started out as a needed correction ultimately became a dangerous overcorrection.

Will the same dynamic be at play in the Karmelo Anthony trial now beginning? He will be pleading racism on the part of the victim, whom he allegedly stabbed and killed with little to no provocation.

Then we also have the coverup – until recently, anyway – of various kinds of government aid fraud perpetuated by Somalis and allowed to go on for fear of being called a racist if it were to be exposed and prosecuted. Officials would rather lose billions of dollars than be called racists.

The post On the treatment of Henry Nowak: it didn’t happen in a vacuum appeared first on The New Neo.

The story “The Man Without a Country” used to be standard reading matter for seventh graders. In fact, it was the first “real” book – as opposed to those tedious Dick and Jane readers – that I was assigned in school.

It was exciting compared to Dick and Jane and the rest, since it dealt with an actual story with some actual drama to it. It struck me as terribly sad – and unfair, too – that Philip Nolan was forced to wander the world, exiled, for one moment of cursing the United States. “The Man Without a Country” was the sort of paean to patriotism that I would guess is rarely or never assigned nowadays to students – au contraire.

Patriotism has gotten a very bad name during the last few decades.

I think this feeling gathered more adherents (at least in this country) during the Vietnam era, and certainly the same is true lately. But patriotism and nationalism seem to have been rejected by a large segment of Europeans even earlier, as a result of the devastation both sentiments were thought to have wrought on that continent during WWI and WWII. Of course, WWII in Europe was a result mainly of German nationalism run amok, coupled with a lot more than nationalism itself. But the experience seemed to have given nationalism as a whole a very bad name.

Here’s author Thomas Mann on the subject, writing in 1947 in the introduction to the American edition of Herman Hesse’s Demian:

If today, when national individualism lies dying, when no single problem can any longer be solved from a purely national point of view, when everything connected with the “fatherland” has become stifling provincialism and no spirit that does not represent the European tradition as a whole any longer merits consideration…

A strong statement of the post-WWII idea of nationalism as a dangerous force, mercifully dead or dying, to be replaced (hopefully) by a pan-national (or, rather, anational) Europeanism. Mann was a German exile from his own country who had learned to his bitter regret the excesses to which a particular type of amoral nationalism can lead. His was an understandable and common response at the time, one that many decades later helped lead to the formation of the EU. The waning but still relatively strong nationalism of the US (as shown by the election of Donald Trump, for example) has been seen by those who agree with Mann as a relic of those dangerous days of nationalism gone mad without any curb of morality or consideration for others.

But the US is not Nazi Germany or anything like it, however much the far left may try to make that analogy. There’s a place for nationalism, and for love of country. Not a nationalism that ignores or tramples on human rights (like that of the Nazis), but one that embraces and strives for and tries to preserve them here and abroad, keeping in mind that – human nature being what it is – no nation on earth can be perfect or anywhere near perfect. The US is far from perfect, but has been a good country nevertheless, always working to be better, with a nationalism that traditionally recognizes that sometimes liberty must be fought for, and that the struggle involves some sacrifice.

So, I’ll echo the verse that figured so prominently in “The Man Without a Country,” and say (corny, but true): …this is my own, my native land. And I’ll also echo Francis Scott Key and add: …the star-spangled banner, O long may it wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave. Those lines from the anthem express a hope that has been fading. But even though things had been looking dim for both liberty and courage in recent years, it is not over.

When I looked back at my original, longer version of this post, I saw that it was written on Memorial Day in 2005, not that long after I began blogging. Seems longer ago than that. This is another portion of what I wrote then, and although I was describing my post-9/11 thoughts, I think it’s especially appropriate now [updates in brackets]:

I’d known the words to [our national anthem] for [over sixty years], and even had to learn about Francis Scott Key and the circumstances under which he wrote them. But I never really thought much about those words. It was just a song that was difficult to sing, and not as pretty as America the Beautiful or God Bless America (the latter, in those very un-PC days of my youth, we used to sing as we marched out of assembly).

The whole first stanza of the national anthem is a protracted version of a question: does the American flag still wave over the fort? Has the US been successful in the battle? As a child, the answer seemed to me to have been a foregone conclusion – of course it waved, of course the US prevailed in the battle; how could it be otherwise? America rah-rah. America always was the winner. Even our withdrawal from Vietnam, so many years later, seemed to me to be an act of choice. Our very existence as a nation had never for a moment felt threatened.

The only threat I’d ever faced to this country was the nightmarish threat of nuclear war. But that seemed more a threat to the entire planet, to humankind itself, rather than to this country specifically. And so I never really heard or felt the vulnerability and fear expressed in Key’s question, which he asked during the War of 1812, so shortly after the birth of the country itself: does that star-spangled banner yet wave, o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

But now I heard his doubt, and I felt it, too. I saw quite suddenly that there was no “given” in the existence of this country – its continuance, and its preciousness, began to seem to me to be as important and as precarious as they must have seemed to Key during that night in 1814.

And then other memorized writings came to me as well–the Gettysburg Address, whose words those crabby old teachers of mine had made us memorize in their entirety: and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. Here it was again, the sense of the nation as an experiment in democracy and freedom, and inherently special but vulnerable to destruction, an idea I had never until that moment grasped. But now I did, on a visceral level.

The post For Memorial Day: on nationalism and patriotism appeared first on The New Neo.