Like the American Founders and the Declaration of Independence, King didn’t seek to abolish the rule of law, but to appeal to it. King saw, as Thomas Jefferson did, that it wasn’t enough to define law as whatever the sovereign power declared it to be. He saw, as did the Founders, that law defined as such provides no constraint on tyrants who want to reduce it to a matter of their own will and power. //

So what distinguishes a just law from an unjust one?

In addressing this question, both King and the Declaration of Independence drew on a classical tradition that perceives law as rooted in objective reality, in the way that things are. It’s a tradition at least as old as Aristotle. King cited St. Augustine as stating the principle that “an unjust law is no law at all.” He cited St. Thomas Aquinas as teaching that “an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.” //

Communism and Nazism both accept a relativism that reduces “truth” to a matter of will and power, while seeking to impose their own truth on others. They’re obviously tyrannical, if not totalitarian. But we see the same tendencies in ideologies and movements promoted by Western elites that deny objective truth and seek to suppress free speech, open debate, and democratic decision-making.

The tyranny of radical relativism is one of its paradoxes. It denies the very existence of objective reality while insisting on its own truth. //

The point is simply that justice depends on recognizing the real, objective nature of truth (beyond what the state or party or leaders says it is at the moment), establishing the truth of the matter, and then telling it (or at least not lying about it), even when the cost of truth-telling is high in terms of job security or, in these days of doxxing, in terms of the risk to one’s family.

one would think General Milley, with several decades of experience, should have had the foresight to see this coming disaster. If he didn’t see the oncoming wreck, he should resign. If he did see it coming and testified to the contrary, he should resign.

If he truly didn’t see this disaster speeding toward him, he’s not fit for the position he holds and he should resign. //

My family has served in America’s military back to the Revolutionary War – the most recent being my eldest son who served as a SEAL for almost a decade. I don’t criticize the men and women in harm’s way, I am critical of those who lead them.

I am critical of politicians and inept generals. Milley is apparently both. In my estimation, he stopped being a “leader of men” when he testified about wanting to “understand white rage”, the “rage he claimed fueled the January 6th riot. That testimony barely 6 weeks ago focused wholly outside the charge of our military. His focus should be our enemies abroad. He should have been focused on a very real rage – that of the Taliban which would soon consume Afghanistan. He should have concentrated his “understanding on contingencies for getting Americans out of harm’s way before Afghanistan turned into a burning cauldron. Instead, we have thousands of Americans trapped outside the wire.

So he’s joining right in with the political hit agenda of Joe Biden, encouraging the censoring of people for a different political opinion than his. Lippincott wasn’t spreading any misinformation. His “offense” was raising a good point that this general didn’t want to answer. But even had Lippincott been spreading something false, it isn’t the role of the military to be encouraging shutting down political opinion with which they disagree. This is just wrong and conduct unbecoming on top of it. The bottom line was the general had no real response, so he wanted to shut down criticism. Some general. He couldn’t even deal with a battle on Twitter. //

Patrick Donahoe
@PatDonahoeArmy
Public Service Announcement. Block and report the trolls and the disinformation tinfoil hat team. //

Article V Convention of States please
@philthatremains
A Major General in the United States Army is calling for people to block and report people for having incorrect opinions.

I assume this includes American citizens, the same citizens protected by the constitution which he has sworn to protect and defend. //

Jim Hanson
@JimHansonDC
A serving officer calling to censor political opponents

You are a disgrace to the uniform

I don’t think anyone, right or left, really thinks Joe Biden can afford to hold Beijing to account for much of anything due to the degree to which he and his drug-addled, sex-addicted grifting son are compromised by China’s intelligence services. It is also difficult to believe that Navy leadership, which has to be at least as aware of the Navy’s ineptitude as the rest of us, didn’t give the Benfold orders to skedaddle when faced with Chinese pushback. The US Navy, indeed the US military, is simply not capable of carrying out a limited conflict to defend freedom of navigation in the South China Sea and protecting the territorial integrity of the nations in the region, including those of our allies. The Chinese know it. Our allies know it. Our military and political leadership know it. Maybe, eventually, the American people will wake up to just how poorly they are being served before too many young Americans have to die to make the point.

the question for any movement is not whether it is righteous on paper, but rather if it betters or worsens a given situation. On that front, I believe I can make a definitive judgment – the woke movement has failed. //

What’s so depressing about this is that it was imminently preventable. Nothing substantive in our laws has changed to cause such divisions. We didn’t start implementing segregation or other forms of state-mandated discrimination again over the last eight years, for example. Instead, every bit of the above collapse can be explained by political rhetoric, almost exclusively coming from the left under the guise of “being woke.”

Victimhood is not only addictive, it has become a form of currency. That’s not to say that there are no actual victims. It is to say that the idea of collective victimization, i.e. all black people are being oppressed at this very moment because one police officer did something bad in a single instance, on a single street, to a single person, is an incredibly divisive way of thinking. Victimization should logically be based on personal impact, and when it is, it can be dealt with. Yet, when John Doe in Sacramento is a “victim” because of something that happened to Sally Sue in New York, that leaves nowhere to go. Everything becomes so abstract as to have no solution.

Perceptions brought about largely by a well-funded activist class, not actual realities on the ground in individual lives, have caused the absolute collapse in race relations we are now seeing in the country. And again, has anyone actually been helped along the way, black people included? Objectively, the answer has to be no because when relations are trashed based purely on politically pushed narratives, again, there is no end game. There is no big issue to rally around to say “ok, let’s change this specific law and it will fix this specific problem.” //

Zaid Jilani
@ZaidJilani
·
Jul 22, 2021

During other periods of high tension, like the civil war, great depression, 1960s, there were substantive issues impacting the reality for Americans. What sharply changed in 2013 besides media (traditional and social)?

Zaid Jilani
@ZaidJilani
Obama also was critical of some voting laws but I don't remember him talking like this. This kind of racial fear tactic is so common now.

Matt Viser
@mviser
“This is Jim Crow on steroids,” President Biden says of the GOP-led changes in voting laws. //

The division is the point for the woke. //

This is not healthy, and it’s not a situation that a country can survive long-term. A political movement should be judged by its fruit, not by whatever righteousness it bestows upon itself. The fruit of the woke movement has been bitter and rotten. It serves no purpose except to divide and worsen whatever situation it claims to be fixing. For that, it does not deserve respect, but destruction.

The turn language is taking in politics calls to mind that controlling language to control thought was a prime goal of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s ‘1984.’ //

Orwell’s admonition to think precisely is not an admonition to think narrowly. In fact, a casual perusal of the history of English writing will reveal irrefutably that those who have written most precisely have in fact thought—and read—very broadly. It makes sense. To use words precisely, one must have working knowledge of a number of them at one’s disposal.

This leads us to a somewhat ironic conclusion: The neglect of the language in favor of politics that has taken place in English over the past few decades has led to an impoverishment not only of the language but also of our politics. If we want our politics to improve, we need to reverse the process and start once again to cultivate the language. English needs to be about English.

Orwell said, “In Prose, the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender them.” If those whose business in life is to cultivate the language will not take up the fight, then who will?

The only reason to torture Tolkien’s work like this is not to understand it more deeply but to tear it down. And why would modern scholars want to do that? Because everything that Tolkien was, and everything he wrote, is an affront to the modern secular scholar’s understanding of the world, reality, and the meaning and purpose of life.

Put bluntly, the worlds Tolkien created sprang from an imagination shaped and suffused by his deep Roman Catholic faith. “The Silmarillion” in particular is in some ways a poetic and literary reflection on the Catechism of the Catholic Church. In considering Tolkien’s Middle Earth, there is no way to escape this reality.

His creation, as he himself said, was a kind of sub-creation under the inspiration and aegis of almighty God. His grand themes — good and evil, truth and falsehood, power and glory and honor and sacrifice — all flow forth from his Christian faith and his decidedly sacramental view of the world. For Tolkien, all the world is shot through with meaning by a Creator who loves mankind and is manifest in His works.

That men and women now come to slander and distort and ultimately destroy these sub-creations of Tolkien is also, in a strange way, a testament to his legacy. Like Melkor, they are possessed by dark thoughts of their own imaginings, unlike those of the great Tolkien, and seek not so much to increase their own power and glory, but to bring Tolkien’s down to their grubby station, where everything can be reduced to race and sex and politics.

These people are taken today to be Tolkien scholars. What can we, who love Tolkien and his profoundly Christian art, do but repeat in sorrow a line from “Lament for the Rohirrim”—

The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.

The church is more concerned with answering to God than a Twitter mob. In my opinion, this is the church caving to politics, not politics caving to the church. To be sure, when it comes to deciding how a Catholic should act, modern sentiment shouldn’t play a part. At some point, that sentiment will pass, but God will still be there, unchanging, and looking not too pleased about the whole ordeal.

This doesn’t just apply to the Catholic church either. This applies to every church.

A church should be welcoming everyone it can through its doors. Unbelievers should be able to find seats and hear what Christ has to say. Gays and lesbians should be able to hear the gospel and realize that they do have a choice. If they don’t, they don’t, but at least they’ll be showing up and hearing the actual gospel.

God’s word isn’t going to make everyone happy, and not everyone is going to want to follow Christ based on personal opinion. In the end, they’ll either say to God “thy will be done,” or God will say to them “thy will be done.” But let either of these people let them hear the word first honestly. Giving the young a false idea of God or the church will only breed resentment down the line as they find out they were lied to in order to get them in the doors so the church would seem more popular.

The church needs to remember who it is, and more importantly who it answers to.

When a North Korean defector goes to an American, Ivy League university and feels like she’s back in her totalitarian home country, perhaps the country’s education system has got some problems?

That’s the takeaway from Yeonmi Park, who left North Korea at age 13 to defect to South Korea. She is speaking out, giving her commentary on what she experienced at Columbia University after coming to America in 2016 as part of a larger settlement program. Her first encounter with woke-ness was not a pleasant one.

I’ve viewed every part of this journey through many lenses, not the least of which is one we call ‘WOMAN.’

I say all this because suddenly and tragically there is a movement afoot to erase womanhood. The “woke left,” progressives, some well-meaning conservatives, and even my own President have decided that in order to appease the tiniest of slivers of humanity who believe they can change their genders by surgically altering their bodies they must completely erase womanhood for all of us. It has come to the point where our own governmental and academic institutions have replaced the word “mother” with “birthing person,” as if that is some type of equality.

You’ll notice we are not replacing “father” with “sperm producer” or some other idiot term. There is something so grossly misogynistic about the movement to erase womanhood. It’s as if none of the notions of women have changed in the last 1000 years. One philosophy is to the far right and one is to the far left, but both paint womanhood as inherently disgusting, flawed, misshapen, and grotesque. The natural form and function of our bodies are repulsive to each extreme. One extreme sought to eliminate our gender through silence – keeping us tucked away at home, away from the reaches of “civilized” society. The other extreme seeks to eliminate our gender through erasure – denying us the privilege of the markers that make us different than men and seeking to nullify the most beautiful aspects of our bodies. It is vile.

I am not a “birthing person.” I am a mother. I am not a “person who menstruates.” I am a woman. My body and my gender deserve your recognition. God knows I have fought a bloody and emotional battle to obtain that recognition. I have earned the respect of womanhood. How dare anyone suggest that because some people are gender bigots that I do not deserve the respect I have earned in this body?

I have given birth to the very future of humanity. That is the privilege of motherhood and the function of womanhood. And if one happens to be a woman who can’t give birth, or who chooses not to give birth, rest assured she is taking those journeys as a woman. She is dealing with the emotional fallout from how that affects her life as a woman. Those things still fall under the umbrella of womanhood and yes, motherhood. Because motherhood – the choosing of it or the absence of it – is an exclusively female function. //

Live your life how you want, but you will not steal my God-given and gloriously created form. You will not reduce me to a function – a person who can give birth. You will address me with the respect I deserve, the respect my mother and her mother and her mother before her fought for. The respect I deserve and I have earned as a WOMAN.

My gender is not your social experiment.

By this logic, every liberal who has a kid in public school needs to be held accountable for their support of a kindergarten-to-prison pipeline. We hear about it all the time. If you know the system is inherently racist, why are you still participating in it every year? Dear Ellie Kemper last went to a VP Ball in 1999. What’s your excuse?

Give back your car and pick up a bike because the inventor of the combustable engine surely had some problematic views on race and segregation. I’m not sure we can even depend on the bike. Was it invented by a white person? Then it’s probably not a good idea. After all, “whiteness” is inherently evil. The Critical Race Theory hustlers tell us this every day.

As The Post reported, SFGate reviewers Katie Dowd and Julie Tremaine attacked the ride for including the “kiss he gives to her without her consent, while she’s asleep, which cannot possibly be true love if only one person knows it’s happening.” //

Prince Charming believed Snow White was dead. It is entirely normal for a loved one to kiss a deceased person goodbye, and never once have they been able to gain that persons consent….. you utter [. ]. //

I’m not aware of one child who was triggered, over all those years, by the “problematic” question of consent. But I have through the years seen oodles and oodles of smiling young kids — boys and girls alike — not only happy when Snow White awoke from her deep sleep, but also over that whole “happily ever after” thing, as well.

How unwoke we all were, America. How shameless of us.

From the New York Post:

Woke Coke has gone flat.

Coca-Cola has paused its controversial diversity plan — that included penalties on outside law firms if they failed to meet racial diversity quotas — after intense backlash. //

ej38di
@ej38di
Switched to Pepsi made with real sugar and it tastes way better than Mexican coke. Once coca cola told me I should be less white I decided to drink less coke products instead.

Rasmussen Reports
@Rasmussen_Poll
‘Get Woke, Go Broke?’ 37% Buying Less Coke https://bit.ly/3n72Ymx

AssasinGLX
@GlxAssasin
·
Apr 27, 2021
Replying to @grantbza @RabeNgege and @PicknPay
Im not hating, but please explain to me how Coco cola is racist?

grantza
@grantbza
From coca-cola be less white seminar - sure it doesn't affect you so you not bothered, but racism is racism, regardless of who the target is. I'm sure if coca-cola had a be "less black" seminar you would be up in arms: //

VL
an hour ago
Be less woke, buy less Coke.

Vox
@voxdotcom
"It is worth considering whether [Ma'Khia] Bryant might have still been alive today if a mental health expert — or someone else trained in nonviolent deescalation — had responded to the call," says Merushka Bisetty. https://trib.al/kPTwZ1o //

Ian Haworth
@ighaworth
It is worth considering whether Ma'Khia Bryant might have still been alive today if she HADN'T TRIED TO STAB SOMEONE.

Approaching history with condescending arrogance, as the woke movement does, merely highlights the smallness of the examiners. //

Clearly, the political left has a significant problem with our national story. They don’t understand history, either the actual developments that made the United States or the field of study that seeks to make sense of that process.

Historians try to understand how and why human beings acted the way they did in the context of their circumstances and possibilities. But social justice warriors know better. For them, the past is a convenient arena in which to practice the latest exercise in cancel culture.

The shocking ignorance of the past many social justice warriors display is all too evident. The 1619 Project overflows with untruthful assertions and gross distortions, beginning with its ludicrous claim that the American Revolution was launched to protect slavery. A clueless woke mob in Madison, Wisconsin dismembered a statue of an outspoken abolitionist and pulled down another symbolizing the advance of women’s rights.

One of the most egregious errors committed in San Francisco concerned poor Paul Revere, who was unhorsed from his midnight ride because he participated in the Penobscot Expedition of 1779. The school board decried this as a campaign to capture American Indian land when, in fact, it was a failed assault on a British fort during the American Revolution.

While this disdain for historical facts is distressing, even more troubling, however is the woke movement’s profoundly wrongheaded approach to history itself. Sometimes, they simply seek to abolish it.

Leftist disciples shrewdly sense (and fear) that history tends to create a sense of attachment and perspective, qualities that blunt efforts to remake the world anew. Revolutionary zealots have always targeted historical symbols as a key enemy in their crusades for purification. In the French Revolution, Jacobins sought to erase the centuries-old influence of Christianity by installing the Cult of the Supreme Being to harness religious feeling without the danger of religious content. //

The awakened believe that the past is just like the present and its inhabitants should be judged by contemporary standards. This is mistaken. Early on, the student of history learns to beware of “presentism,” or judging the past by the standards of the present. If not, you end up condemning Charlemagne for not endorsing women’s rights or Susan B. Anthony for insensitivity to transgenderism. The awakened believe that the past is a pantheon of heroes and villains to be lionized or condemned. //

The awakened believe that the past is a morality tale to be ransacked for lessons illustrating good and evil. Yet even a cursory look at past events discloses a whirl of motivations, often conflicting or ambiguous, at work in shaping outcomes. Henry Ford’s adoption of the assembly line in 1911, for instance, a move that reshaped the modern world, combined idealism (lowering costs to make the automobile available to average people), interest (boosting profits from an increased volume of sales), and unforeseen developments (such as overly repetitious labor workers often resented or rejected).

The awakened, however, believe that an overarching theory — class conflict or modernization not long ago; whiteness, the patriarchy, heteronormativity, intersectionality currently — offers a tidy explanation for everything. This is mistaken. The incredible complexity of human history demands multicausal explanations and vigorous debate among competing interpretations, not a conga line of liberationist theorists sent snaking through the past shimmying and shaking to the rhythm of revolution.

‘Interrogate the Past, But Don’t Bully It’

Judicious students of the American experience steer clear of these mistakes and approach it cautiously, seeking wisdom, not weaponization. They understand that history does not repeat, but instead unfolds as a process that produces the present. They understand that historical facts matter to provide credible evidence in support of reasonable judgments along with all the facts, not just those cherry-picked for ideological reasons. //

Edmund Burke observed that human society is a contract between “those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born,” and urged citizens to beware those who “should act as if they were the entire master.” In that spirit we should ponder American history as a pursuit of political participation, individual equality, constitutional order, social opportunity, and economic freedom, however imperfectly realized and full of ambiguities it has been.

We should celebrate what is worthy in our past and chastise what is reprehensible. We should submit our history to rigorous, fair-minded analysis and see what it can tell us about the human condition and how we got where we are.

This important task demands thoughtful examination and nuanced judgments, not a frenzied kangaroo court convened by wokesters jacked up on ideological amphetamines and spouting slogans. Confronting the imperfections of the past — as well as the human beings who inhabited it — should heighten an awareness not of our superiority but our shortcomings. In the end, such a careful investigation of history can provide the key inspiration for us to overcome them.

H.R. 1 is a Democratic Party wishlist to eliminate election security. Among other things it does, which The Federalist has reported on here, here, and here, the For The People Act would turn election day into election season. It would also require blanketing the country with hundreds of millions of mail-in ballots, extending the confusion of 2020 to every future federal election.

Mayer’s backing of President Joe Biden’s press conference claim the GOP opposing the bill is “sick” and “un-American” is only fitting, since both Biden and The New Yorker writer oversimplify the measure and do not mostly address GOP concerns. This includes a two-week delay in ballots being opened, zero voter ID at polls, enabling 16- and 17-year-olds to register to vote, a mandate against election audit recounts, and much much more. //

There is a thing called right and wrong in society, and eliminating privacy for law-abiding citizens to expose them to harassment by pressure groups is surely wrong. As The Heritage Foundation cites, H.R. 1 would mandate exorbitant rates for “candidates, citizens, civic groups, unions, corporations, and nonprofit organizations” and “its onerous disclosure requirements for nonprofit organizations would subject their members and donors to intimidation and harassment.”

The writer also trivializes the fact that the left-leaning American Civil Liberties Union has voiced disapproval over the donor disclosure provision in H.R. 1. The ACLU acknowledged in a January letter to House Democrats the measure “could harm political advocacy and expose non-profit donors to harassment and threats of violence should their support for organizations be subject to forced disclosure.” //

The major crux of Mayer’s argument is groups ought to have to disclose donors in the name of transparency. But a necessary follow-up to this claim is why? Do Democrats seek to uncover who is funding right-leaning organizations and people just in the holy name of “transparency,” or is another motivation fueling this effort?

Given that two-thirds of Americans agree that cancel culture is a threat to freedom, and similar numbers fear saying what they truly think, it’s pretty obvious that a supermajority of Americans agree privacy is needed to secure people’s freedoms to support whatever candidates they believe in.

In a unanimous ruling, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that Shawnee State University violated Prof. Nicholas Meriwether’s rights of free speech and free exercise of religion by punishing him for resisting school rules that forced him to address students in the terms of their choosing.

Meriwether, a philosophy professor and devout Christian, sued Shawnee State, claiming that its mandate to use terms that conflict with biology infringed on his religious belief that gender is fixed from the moment of conception.

The court’s decision, written by a judge appointed to the bench by President Trump and issued Friday, upheld Meriwether’s argument.

“The First Amendment interests are especially strong here because Meriwether’s speech also relates to his core religious and philosophical beliefs,” Judge Amul Thapar wrote in a 32-page decision. //

“To accede to these demands would have required Dr. Meriwether to communicate views regarding gender identity that he does not hold, that he does not wish to communicate, and that would contradict (and force him to violate) his sincerely held Christian beliefs,” the lawsuit reads.

The suit claims that “the number of potential gender identities is infinite” and that there are over 100 “different options currently available.”

School officials countered by saying that respecting students’ pronouns is a part of Meriwether’s job, and therefore not protected by the First Amendment. //

Meriwether’s win on appeal, handed down by Thapar, who was rumored to be one of the attorneys on the list to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg on the Supreme Court, allows him to recoup damages for the school’s decision to reprimand him.

“Nobody should be forced to contradict their core beliefs just to keep their job,” his attorney John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom, said of Meriwether’s case.

compliments of The Heritage Foundation:

“The New Intolerance: Critical Race Theory and Its Grip on America.”

Critical Race Theory (CRT) and public policies based on this worldview will not alleviate racial inequality in the real world. In fact, this dogma undermines human and social factors—such as family, entry-level work, and merit-based education—the wellspring of upward mobility. Yet, the rigid persistence with which believers apply this theory has made CRT a constant, daily presence in the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

CRT underpins Identity Politics, an ongoing effort to reimagine the United States as a nation riven by the division between racial groups, each with specific claims on victimization. In education and the workforce, as well as entertainment and social media, CRT has become entrenched, driving decision-making based on skin color rather than individual merit and talent.

As Critical Theory becomes more familiar to the public in everyday life, CRT’s intolerance, and the idea of systemic racism is being “normalized” in the American psyche. This weakens public and private bonds that create trust between citizens and allow for civic engagement.

Instead of honoring those who truly made black history into American history, leftist media, corporations, and the left have appropriated this tradition into a vehicle for virtual signaling. //

As a result, we have people complaining on social media that it was racist for a team with a white quarterback to win the Super Bowl against a team with a black quarterback during Black History Month! We are trending toward celebrating victimhood instead of championing survival and perseverance.

Because of this, I aspire to eradicate Black History Month in its current form. I would like to see American history taught so it thoroughly integrates black, white, Asian, Hispanic, women’s, Jewish and everyone’s history together. Like Woodson envisioned, we could still have specific months to highlight specific groups.

By thoroughly and objectively integrating the recognition of black contributions into our society, we will not only be able to say black history is American history, but also make it worth celebrating again.

Between 10 and 15 million voters in this country decide the outcome of Presidential elections and the partisan makeup of the Congress. These are the voters who “swing” from one party to the other during election cycles. Capturing the majority of these voters is the path to winning control of the government. //

The amplification of her views through the megaphone of her Hollywood celebrity could not be tolerated by maybe the wokest of woke companies in Hollywood — Disney, a world-wide media behemoth. That one of their topline stars would align herself with the non-woke in such public ways was not tolerable. She could not be a source of conservative thought extending its reach via Disney portals of entertainment and communication.