The people lack virtue

The New Neo Posted on by

People have lost their way, and the press fills their heads with propaganda. You could say it’s a vast conspiracy. And certainly the left is organized, and the internet helps spread the word.

But it wouldn’t matter so much if so many people weren’t already receptive to the message. You see can the evidence of this around you. Fifty years ago, Americans wouldn’t have been so cowed by a virus of this magnitude. In fact, in 1957 we weren’t cowed by one that killed the equivalent of well over 200,000 people in the US and about 3 million worldwide (when corrected for today’s population). Fifty years ago, we also knew much better what socialism and Communism were. We knew the value of free speech, and even the ACLU defended it (how quaint!).

In sum: we knew what we had, and we didn’t want to let it go.

What happened? The decline of family stability, religion, education, journalism, the arts, entertainment, morality, historical knowledge, language, dress – and I’m sure I left some things out.

And this above all:

To our Founding Fathers, it was obvious, or “self-evident,” that self-government, or a democratic republic, could only be perpetuated by the self-governed. Reflecting these precepts, a contemporary German writer to the Founders, J. W. von Goethe, stated: “What is the best government? — That which teaches us to govern ourselves.”…

John Adams stated it this way, “Public virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private Virtue, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics.”…

George Washington said: “Virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government,” and “Human rights can only be assured among a virtuous people.”

Benjamin Franklin said: “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.”

James Madison stated: “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical [imaginary] idea.”

Thomas Jefferson wrote, “No government can continue good but under the control of the people; and … their minds are to be informed by education what is right and what wrong; to be encouraged in habits of virtue and to be deterred from those of vice … These are the inculcations necessary to render the people a sure basis for the structure and order of government.”

Samuel Adams said: “Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt. He therefore is the truest friend of the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue.”

Patrick Henry stated that: “A vitiated [impure] state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom.”

John Adams stated: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

So wise, so true. I think that’s why the fingers we have had in the dike for so long just aren’t doing enough, and the onrushing water threatens to overwhelm us. Perhaps it already has.

It’s not surprising that now the Founders’ names are being tarnished and their statues toppled. It takes a group of people without virtue to do it, and a larger group without virtue to allow it. The irony is that these same people think of themselves as the most virtuous of all.

[NOTE: “Virtue” can be a tricky word. For example, Robespierre thought he was the very embodiment of it, and he justified the Reign of Terror as a necessity in order to further solidify virtue. He wrote, among other things: “Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue.”]

RIP Mike Adams

The New Neo Posted on by

Professor Mike Adams’ death has been ruled a suicide.

No doubt many people will consider this a coverup for a homicide. I am not one of those people, and it would take some new revelation to make me cross over to that camp.

Professor Adams fought the fight for so long against those who would destroy him, and he was about to leave the field and retire. Who knows what can spark feelings of depression powerful enough to cause a person, seemingly strong, to commit suicide? The human heart is a great mystery.

William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection – a man who knows something of the pain of being ostracized by colleagues for political positions – writes:

[Adams] “seemed like” a happy warrior, but who knows? It’s a miserable, unrelenting, stressful life, as the friends fall away and the colleagues, who were socially distant years before Covid, turn openly hostile. There are teachers who agree with Mike Adams at UNCW and other universities – not a lot, but some – and there are others who don’t agree but retain a certain queasiness about the tightening bounds of acceptable opinion …and they all keep their heads down. So the burthen borne by a man with his head up, such as Adams, is a lonely one, and it can drag you down and the compensations (an invitation to discuss your latest TownHall column on the radio or cable news) are very fleeting…

RIP, Mike Adams.

Election 2020: change one voter’s mind

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Eva Marie” writes:

Those of us who support Pres. Trump need to change the mind of one voter – to either vote for Trump instead of Biden or vote 3rd party instead of Biden. I did this prior to the last election and I think I was successful. This election I’m concentrating on a non voter who I hope to convince to vote Trump. If we all do this then Trump will win. It’s tedious work because the aim is NOT to win an argument. The aim is to affect behavior. But it’s worth it.

Even before I read that, I had decided to try the same thing. Actually, I’m working on two voters, each chosen because although they have always voted for the Democrats, they are more moderate in their opinions than other people I know. They are also friends who will tolerate a certain amount of political talk from me, and might even be persuaded to read an article or watch a video or two. But I have to be careful not to wear out my welcome; their patience with this stuff is not infinite.

I have no idea whether this has a chance of succeeding, but I feel the need – a strong need, at that – to try. This election is so important that it’s necessary for me to break my habit/rule of the last decade and risk being obnoxious to my friends, even though in the past it got me exactly nowhere to talk politics and that’s why I backed off in the first place.

The approach has to be tailored to the person. In both these cases, I began by asking them if they’d heard about certain things – for example, have they visited the website of Black Lives Matter and are they aware of the Marxist affiliation of its leaders and the extremism of some of its goals, as well as the goals of their partner organization M4BL, the Movement for Black Lives? To get up to speed, read that link I just gave.

Antifa is another group I don’t think many moderate liberals are knowledgeable about; the ones I’ve queried have thought it was about being anti-fascist, and had no idea it was a violent extremist anarchist group (or perhaps even what anarchists are or what they stand for).

Or perhaps, if the person you talk to likes to watch TV news, offer to watch one episode of Tucker Carlson (or another pundit of your choice) with the person, particularly if he or she has only heard about Big Bad Fox News and has never actually watched it.

The polls these days are puzzling. With overwhelming evidence of the utter destructiveness of today’s Democratic Party, and how far it has strayed from the beliefs of most Americans – not to mention that its figurehead leader is a senile man due to turn 78 shortly after Election Day, who was a strange combination of mediocre and corrupt even in his prime – the polls nevertheless indicate that Democrats are way ahead both in the presidential contest and in both houses of Congress.

How can this be? A lot of people reply that the polls are wrong, rigged to discourage Republicans as well as to set up the story, if Republicans somehow happen pull out a victory in November, that it was accomplished through foreign influence and/or trickery. But if the polls are correct or anywhere in the ballpark of correct, it’s extremely troubling. The troubling part is not just the prospects for disaster in November, but what it would say about the American people these days.

After all, it’s not like things aren’t clear. Defund the police? Abolish jails? Support rioters and looters? White people are all racist and need to take a knee for things they never did? Martin Luther King’s dream, dead in the water? George Washington, slaveholder and that’s all? Free speech at universities and elsewhere jettisoned in favor of “my feelings are all that count”? The Green New Deal?

I could go on, but you get the idea. If the American people have abandoned their traditional liberties and protections to this extent, when the dire alternatives are staring them in the face up close and personal, then there is no hope.

I refuse to believe that at the moment. So it’s worth the effort to try.

I titled this post “change one voter’s mind.” Obviously, if you can work on more than one, that would be even better.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

A roundup of recent news:

—Victor Davis Hanson presents a very gloomy picture of what might happen if Biden wins.

—Seattle’s police chief warns citizens of the dire results if the City Council is able to enforce its edict to take away the police’s best non-violent tools of crowd control. One would almost think the leftists of Seattle want to increase violence at the hands of police or at the hands of the rioters, in order to cause an even greater backlash (and we should probably leave out the “almost” in that sentence). The action of the Council has been temporarily blocked by a federal judge, but will that last?

–Hagia Sophia re-Islamized by Erdogan. I learned about Hagia Sophia long ago in my art history class, which was heavy on churches. Yes, churches:

Built in 537 as the patriarchal cathedral of the imperial capital of Constantinople, it remained the largest church of the eastern Roman Empire (the Byzantine Empire), except from 1204 to 1261 when it was converted to a Roman Catholic cathedral. In 1453, after the city’s fall to the Ottoman Empire, it was converted into a mosque. In 1935 Turkey established it as a secular museum. In 2020, Turkey re-established Islamic worship there and re-opened it as a mosque.

Built by the eastern Roman emperor Justinian I as the Christian cathedral of Constantinople for the state church of the Roman Empire between 532 and 537, the church was then the world’s largest interior space and among the first to employ a fully pendentive dome. It is considered the epitome of Byzantine architecture and is said to have “changed the history of architecture”.

Apparently Erdogan invited the Pope to the festivities:

Not only does Erdogan want the Pope to attend an event where the Turkish president anoints himself as the conqueror sultan by recreating the Islamic takeover of one of the world’s most famous churches, he also wants him to watch how Turkey covers up Christian symbols to allow Muslims to pray in the building…

Erdogan seems unaware that – unlike Islam’s divine shrines in Mecca, Medina and to a lesser extent Jerusalem – Hagia Sophia has no significance in Islam. In fact, Ottoman conquerors turned it into the sultan’s mosque as a proclamation that a new sheriff was in town, but otherwise did not even bother to Islamize its Christian name.

To Christians, however, Hagia Sophia has immense religious value. To start with, Constantinople is one of the five seats of Christ, together with Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch and Rome. Constantinople was Christianity’s New Rome. The city was built by Constantine the Great, who made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.

Over the span of a millennium, Hagia Sophia saw generations of Christians holding mass, ceremonies and prayers in its halls. Relics of saints were buried in its gardens while frescoes depicting Christ, Mary, the disciples and saints were painted on its walls.

I disagree with the author about what Erdogan knows and doesn’t know. I think he knows this history full well.

If you believe this poll, the anti-racism cult hasn’t made inroads on too many Americans

The New Neo Posted on by

At least, not yet:

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 75% of American Adults think the term “racism” refers to any discrimination by people of one race against another. Just 15% say it refers only to discrimination by white people against minorities. These findings have changed little in surveys for the past several years.

That’s encouraging, because it seems that most Americans hold to the old, tried-and-true, logical definition of “racism” rather than the Marxist, divisive, and might I say racist one touted by the anti-racism trainers.

And although there’s a slight difference in the numbers by race, it’s not all that different, and no race is characterized as majority racist:

Eighteen percent (18%) say most white Americans are racist. But 25% believe most black Americans are racist. Fifteen percent (15%) think most Hispanic-Americans are racist, while nearly as many (13%) say the same of most Asian-Americans.

More at the link. The poll was taken just a few days ago, so it presumably reflects recent events. Then again, do people tell the truth to pollsters? Especially about matters such as racial attitudes? I don’t answer polls about anything anymore, but then again I never did.

Here’s a description of the methodology:

…[A]utomated polling systems use a single, digitally-recorded, voice to conduct the interview while traditional firms rely on phone banks, boiler rooms, and operator-assisted technology…

Calls are placed to randomly-selected phone numbers through a process that ensures appropriate geographic representation. Typically, calls are placed from 5 pm to 9 pm local time during the week. Saturday calls are made from 11 am to 6 pm local time and Sunday calls from 1 pm to 9 pm local time.

To reach those who have abandoned traditional landline telephones, Rasmussen Reports uses an online survey tool to interview randomly selected participants from a demographically diverse panel.

After the surveys are completed, the raw data is processed through a weighting program to ensure that the sample reflects the overall population in terms of age, race, gender, political party, and other factors. The processing step is required because different segments of the population answer the phone in different ways. For example, women answer the phone more than men, older people are home more and answer more than younger people, and rural residents typically answer the phone more frequently than urban residents.

I’m surprised anyone answers these things anymore.

Forecasting Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

The left loves to tell us the awful things that Trump is about to do. And since Trump is infinitely flexible in his awfulness, sometimes those things are contradictory.

For example, there’s been a spate of articles on how, if Trump loses in November, he will refuse to concede and refuse to leave. At the same time, we have pieces like this one in which the ever-obnoxious James Carville says that Trump stands a good chance of dropping out of the race before the election to avoid a defeat.

What do these two versions have in common? Quite a bit, actually. One is that of course – of course – the polls are correct and Trump will lose the election. Yay, team! Another is that Trump is a loose cannon, poised to do just about anything the left can imagine.

Both predictions have something else in common: the idea is that since Trump will inevitably lose, if he does by some strange chance end up winning – as in 2016 – he is an illegitimate president whom the Democrats must spend all their energy trying to remove, utterly discredit, and/or block.

The Breakdown of Higher Education

The New Neo Posted on by

This new book by John M. Ellis certainly deals with a topic that’s timely – or actually, somewhat behind the times, because the damage the left has done to education has already been so great. Apparently, the last section of the book deals with suggested solutions, which sounds valuable.

Of course, it’s not just higher education that’s broken down. Lower schools are most definitely involved as well. It’s very late and getting later.

Tom Cotton has an interesting proposal, but it has no chance of passing in the current Congress:

Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) introduced the Saving American History Act of 2020, a bill that would prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project by K-12 schools or school districts. Schools that teach the 1619 Project would also be ineligible for federal professional-development grants.

Under the bill, the Secretaries of Education, Health and Human Services, and Agriculture would be required to prorate federal funding to schools that decide to teach the 1619 Project—determined by how much it costs to plan and teach that curriculum. Any federal funds intended for low-income students or special-needs students are not affected by this legislation.

“The New York Times’s 1619 Project is a racially divisive, revisionist account of history that denies the noble principles of freedom and equality on which our nation was founded. Not a single cent of federal funding should go to indoctrinate young Americans with this left-wing garbage,” said Cotton.

“Censorship! Thought control! ” will be the cry of those who favor the 1619 Project’s adoption in our school systems. But at what point is the federal government required to support all the decisions of local school boards? Nothing in the bill prohibits the teaching of the mendacious 1619 Project’s alternative history (or for that matter, all the other leftist history that’s been taught in school systems for many years). It merely says that the federal government shouldn’t have to pay for it.

A radical idea, I know.