The latest ‘Twitter Files’ drop on Thursday night revealed that partisan extremists at one of America’s most influential social media platforms wrapped a torniquet around the vein of free thought and wrenched it tight.
And to add insult to injury, the whole time, Twitter was lying about it.
Then-CEO Jack Dorsey told Congress that he had no idea why conservatives were moaning about being silenced – a.k.a. ‘shadow banned.’
Well, guess what? Conservatives were right.
We learned that in addition to shutting down bombshell reporting, like the New York Post’s exclusive on Hunter Biden’s laptop, Twitter executives were also suppressing individual Americans who didn’t blindly parrot liberal orthodoxy.
The account of Stanford professor, Dr. Jay Battachyara’s was muffled for sharing thoughtful criticism of COVID lockdowns.
America’s kids were kept out of school and in masks. Businesses were destroyed and churches shuttered, and our dying were kept from seeing family, but Twitter pronounced these ideas verboten.
No wonder famously unprofitable, woke Twitter had trouble making money.
If free speech is a pillar of democracy, then Twitter should be charged with sabotage, because they’ve taken sledgehammer to it. And every American has the right to be absolutely outraged.
They censored anything that was even remotely interesting.
St. Nicholas, bishop of Myra, d. 6 December 345 or 352
St. Nicholas was reportedly born in the city of Patara in Lycia in Asia Minor, heir to a wealthy family. He succeeded an uncle as bishop of Myra.
Nicholas left behind a legend of secret acts of benevolence and miracles (in Greek, he is spoken of as “Nikolaos o Thaumaturgos” — Nicholas the Wonder-Worker).
One of the saint’s prominent legends asserts that, in a time of famine, he foiled the crime of Fourth Century Sweeney Todd, an evil butcher who kidnapped and murdered three children, intending to market their remains as ham. St. Nicholas not only exposed the murder, but healed and resurrected the children intact.
Nicholas is also renowned for providing dowries for each of three daughters of an impoverished nobleman,who would otherwise have been unable to marry and who were about to be forced to prostitute themselves to live. In order to spare the sensibilities of the family, Nicholas is said to have secretly thrown a purse of gold coins into their window on each of three consecutive nights.
St. Nicholas’ covert acts of charity led to a custom of the giving of secret gifts concealed in shoes deliberately left out for their receipt on his feast day, and ultimately to the contemporary legend of Santa Claus leaving gifts in stockings on Christmas Eve.
St. Nicholas evolved into one of the most popular saints in the Church’s calendar, serving as patron of sailors, merchants, archers, thieves, prostitutes, pawnbrokers, children, and students, Greeks, Belgians, Frenchmen, Romanians, Bulgarians, Georgians, Albanians, Russians, Macedonians, Slovakians, Serbians, and Montenegrins, and all residents of Aberdeen, Amsterdam, Barranquilla, Campen, Corfu, Freiburg, Liverpool, Lorraine, Moscow, and New Amsterdam (New York).
His relics were stolen and removed to Bari to prevent capture by the Turks, and are alleged to exude a sweet-smelling oil down to the present day.
Matthew Rose, in First Things, describes Leo Strauss’s critique of Liberalism and the Open Society.
…[A]fter his move to the University of Chicago in 1949[,] Strauss worried that Western thinkers were no longer capable of contemplating perspectives beyond liberalism, even against liberalism, from which to judge the present. Far from constituting a threat to clear thinking, such a perspective is essential to it—for only outside the open society can we identify its virtues and its vices, and gain the strength to endure its discontents. But if we are to reach this horizon, Strauss argued, a popular prejudice often directed against critics of liberalism must be rejected. For what is mislabeled “nihilism” is not a destructive doctrine at all. It is a protest on behalf of something of the highest human importance—something liberalism dismisses at its peril.
What kind of protest? In answering this question, Strauss reflected on the generation of students who had been intellectually formed and politically radicalized during the interwar period. As his later writings would make clear, these reflections drew on his own experiences as a student in the early 1920s, when he struggled to reconcile his devotion to Max Weber with his growing interest in Martin Heidegger, who seemed willing to address questions about human existence that no other living German philosopher would. These students, Strauss recalled, had been shattered by war, disoriented by the collapse of traditional authorities, and disturbed by a culture that seemed to celebrate transgression. For many of them, the Weimar-era experiment with parliamentary democracy had proven a failure. Only a rejection of the “cancer” of liberalism, as one author called it, could save them.
Strauss’s portrait of his classmates was unsparing, but not disdainful. Strauss described young men full of vehement certainty about what they rejected, but inarticulate and unreflective about what they affirmed. “The prospect of a pacified planet, without rulers and ruled,” he observed, “was positively horrifying to [them].” Strauss lamented that their passions found no outlet other than the crudest propaganda. Unable to understand or express themselves in any other way—Strauss noted that they had largely rejected Christian belief—they gave voice to savage forms of group identity. The mark of barbarism, Strauss explained, was the belief that truth and justice should be defined in terms of ethnic or racial membership.
But Strauss acknowledged that these students, shaped by defeat, conflict, and social disintegration, were inspired by an ideal—an ideal whose dangers they did not understand but whose allure they keenly felt. Here we approach the heart of Strauss’s lecture, which sought to place these interwar students and their ideal in a broader intellectual history. Strauss cautioned that he sought not to pardon what deserved condemnation, but to make intelligible what required understanding. He therefore challenged his class to see in the youthful German protest what many had failed to perceive two decades earlier: its moral basis. This protest against liberalism was not fundamentally inspired by a love of war or a love of nation, Strauss insisted. Nor could it be explained by material or class interests. It was inspired, as he put it in a bracing passage, by “a love of morality, a sense of responsibility for endangered morality.”
Strauss named this outlook the morality of the “closed society.” No sensitive reader of the lecture can avoid being struck by the intensity of the passages in which Strauss describes the gravity of the challenge this “endangered morality” poses to the “open society.” What is the closed society? Strauss didn’t identify it with any one people, tradition, or form of government. By the “closed society” he didn’t mean non-Western cultures, pre-Enlightenment thought, or even undemocratic polities. The closed society represented a perennial moral possibility, whose roots are found in every human soul and whose demands must be confronted by every human community. In its most common expression, the closed society levels a familiar accusation: that the open society is immoral, or at least amoral, because it jeopardizes the very possibility of living a virtuous life.
Strauss assumed his American students might have difficulty seeing the possible strengths, to say nothing of the seductive appeal, of a way of life associated with ignorance and bigotry. He therefore tried to show them how liberal and democratic ideals might appear from a perspective that denies their moral legitimacy—not out of resentment or bad faith, but out of loyalty to a higher order of values. The rights of man, the relief of the human estate, the happiness of the greatest possible number—for advocates of the open society, these are ideals that have inspired social progress. They are part of a shift in modern consciousness, through which we have recognized our power to change the present, rather than simply accept the authority of the past. But to defenders of the closed society, Strauss argued, the moral prestige of these slogans evinces a different kind of shift. It is a sign that humanity has been debased rather than ennobled.
To draw his listeners into anti-liberal ways of thinking, Strauss sketched the development of modern political thought from the perspective of the closed society. This interpretation casts the arc of modernity in a disturbing light, depicting as decline what Enlightenment thinkers hailed as advance. It sees modernity as the story of how and why Western societies chose to lower their moral ideals, exchanging the demanding codes of antiquity and biblical religion for the comfortable norms of commercial society, legal proceduralism, and bourgeois life. Heroic ideals, attainable only by the exceptional few, were defined down for the ordinary many; ideals that promoted spiritual or intellectual excellence were balanced by those promoting health and prosperity; ideals that imposed self-denial were replaced by those that indulged self-expression.
As Strauss’s reading of modernity suggests, the closed society is defined by what it affirms no less than by what it rejects. He emphasized that its conflict with the open society is ultimately over the most fundamental question: Which way of life is best for man? For defenders of the closed society, human life should be ordered to a political end whose achievement requires the highest and rarest human qualities. So demanding is its vision of moral excellence, so uncommon are the virtues it requires, and yet so necessary is it to the sustaining of human life, that its fulfillment involves the greatest personal risk. As Strauss described it:
Moral life . . . means serious life. Seriousness, and the ceremonial of seriousness . . . are the distinctive features of the closed society, of the society which by its very nature, is constantly confronted with, and basically oriented toward, the Ernstfall, the serious moment. . . . Only life in such a tense atmosphere, only a life which is based on constant awareness of the sacrifices to which it owes its existence, and of the necessity, the duty of sacrifice of life and all worldly goods, is truly human.
Duty, sacrifice, danger, struggle—here we enter the charged atmosphere of a moral world that Strauss feared his students, and not only his students, failed to understand. It saw the best human life as one that dares to risk all for the sake of heroic possibilities. It saw the desire to pledge oneself to a great cause and to prostrate oneself before great authorities as essential to human virtue. In later writings, Strauss would examine a tension between the life of philosophy and the life of faith, a tension that he believed was foundational to Western civilization. But the conflict between the open and closed societies is not a conflict between reason and revelation. It is a conflict over the necessity of life-and-death struggles for human excellence. If the open society is constituted by free argument and equal recognition, the closed society is formed by loyalty, courage, sacrifice, and honor. It celebrates the virtues that it believes make political order possible: the willingness to forgo material comforts, to close ranks against outsiders and oppose enemies, and, above all, to fight to the death with no thought for profit or pleasure. Though these virtues animate other spheres of life, they are, in their deepest origin and highest expression, martial virtues.
At the time of his lecture, Strauss was completing his famous essay “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” which he privately called a “bomb” that would forever change how scholars interpreted the history of ideas. It argued that many Western philosophers had protected themselves from political persecution (and shielded their communities from intellectual harm) by carefully disguising their most subversive and heterodox views from average readers. Strauss’s lecture has an element of indirection that suggests its author’s desire to shield himself from attack. It draws upon his experiences in right-wing movements of the 1920s as well as from his careful study of the controversial legal theorist Carl Schmitt, who interpreted political life in light of moments of supreme crisis that reveal the true nature of authority. Strauss became a Zionist at age seventeen, and his earliest writings evinced a concern that liberal ideals encouraged frivolity and complacency, not least among assimilated Jews. Strauss eventually drifted away from active Jewish life, but he preserved a lifelong distrust of liberalism and its “permissive egalitarianism.”
But in defending the martial virtues of courage, heroism, and loyalty, Strauss was not simply giving guarded expression to past political views. He was giving voice to a moral ideal that defenders of democracy were jeopardizing, at significant human cost. That ideal insisted that these are the virtues through which, and only through which, a man can prove himself to be a man in full. It contended that what makes us human is not the way we pursue and enjoy the goods of bodily life, however refined our habits might be. Rather, we prove our humanity only by exercising our radical ability to contradict those goods, only by risking our lives for a value greater than mere survival. To live as a human being is to fight to the death for something higher than life. Within this moral world—a world so fundamentally hostile to liberal modernity—man is not made for comfort and security. He is tempted by them. The man who wishes truly to live must flirt with death.
Strauss was aware of the destructive power of this impulse and its pursuit of meaning through confrontation with annihilation. But before it could be corrected, he believed, its moral critique of liberal modernity had to be confronted. Proponents of the closed society regard the open society as degrading not simply because it places bodily safety and well-being at its political center. They regard it as degrading because it diminishes the soul’s need for moral risk, demotes the virtues needed for pursuing and protecting the highest things, and devalues the men who strive to live by its severe code. For those, such as Ernst Jünger, who found the most sublime virtues in the trenches of a world war, the open society was hypocritical. It lived by achievements it did not properly honor, or merely pretended to honor, and in doing so lied about the basic facts of human experience. Its dream of a world of freedom and equality, a world in which everyone was happy and satisfied and at peace—such a world was no dream, but a posthuman nightmare, “in which no great heart could beat and no great soul could breathe.” …
Strauss certainly saw the potential for savagery in [the] rebellion against the open society and its intellectual gatekeepers. He was alarmed by the ease with which theoretical attacks on liberalism could turn into excuses for political evil. But as Strauss looked to the war raging in Europe and imagined a future that learned from its mistakes, he proposed a strikingly different form of education. He argued that good teachers should not seek to dispel the allure of the closed society; instead, they should carefully draw students directly inside of it. This pedagogy would enable students to experience the power of the closed society’s moral demands, to sense the appeal of its political life, and to feel challenged by its vision of human excellence.
Strauss didn’t wish to turn his students into sophisticated enemies of liberalism. His goal was to turn them into virtuous defenders of democracy. But to become true patrons of the open society, they needed qualities of character that could be developed only through a proper appreciation of traditional society. The open society was right to order its common life through the exercise of reason and the arts of civility. But the closed society was also right about some important things. It acknowledged our need to be loyal to a particular people, to inherit a cultural tradition, to admire inequalities of achievement, to reverence the authority of the past, and to experience self-transcendence through self-sacrifice. It acknowledged as well the importance of a leadership class whose decisions expose them to special risk rather than shielding them from it. As Strauss observed, these are permanent truths, not atavisms, no matter how unpalatable they are to the progressive-minded. A society that cannot affirm them invites catastrophe, no less than does a society that cannot question them.
David Douglas Duncan, Captain Francis “Ike” Fenton Jr., commander of Baker Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment near the Naktong River, 1950, Nelson Gallery, Kansas City.
In hilly terrain near Pusan, South Korea, Capt. F. I. “Ike” Fenton of the U.S. Marines hears more bad news. It is August 1950, and his company has been fighting all night. More than half of his 190 men are wounded or killed. They are out of ammunition. He has lost radio contact with his superiors. His radioman’s batteries have just expired, and that his much needed resupply was not coming. And now, he is told, his first sergeant is mortally wounded.
David Douglas Duncan takes Fenton’s picture. Duncan, a former marine, is on assignment for Life magazine. He gets as close to the action as possible, trying to show, he says, “what a man endures when his country decides to go to war.” Duncan’s photographs are among the best known of the war, and a few, including that of Fenton, are ranked among the top American combat photographs ever.
Captain Francis “Ike” Fenton Jr., was the son of Colonel Francis Fenton Sr., a Marine Corps chaplain who was famously photographed on Iwo Jima giving funeral rites to his other son Pfc. Michael Fenton in 1945. Ike Fenton also served in the Second World War, and was a veteran marine by the outbreak of the Korean War.
At the outbreak of war, the 195 men and officers of Baker Company found themselves in combat on the frontlines of the Pusan perimeter, holding off an onslaught of North Korean attacks. Desperately short of food, ammunition, and supplies, he petitioned battalion headquarters for relief. He was told something along the lines of “hold the line, at all costs.” He assured his commanding officer that Baker Company would not retreat. “The only Marines coming off that hill are dead Marines.” he promised.
The photograph is taken in that cold September in 1950 shortly after that request for supplies and Fenton’s grim expression is evident. Without communications, ammunition, and at half strength, Baker Company continued to hold the line. The fighting had been so vicious that many men were down to their last few rounds of ammunition, and the close quarters fighting had left many men with broken or missing bayonets. Baker Company would continue to hold its ground at the Pusan perimeter for several more days, borrowing hand grenades and bayonets from sister companies. The Incheon Landing on 15 September caught the North Koreans off guard allowing Baker Company to be finally pulled off the line.
Of the 195 officers and men, only 88 enlisted men and Captain Fenton were able to walk off the line, evacuating back to the United States in 2 November 1950.
Fenton continued to serve in the Marine Corps, commanding a battalion during the Vietnam War before finally retiring at the rank of Colonel. He died in 1997 and is buried at Arlington.
In 1971, the proportion of Londoners who were “White British” was 86.2 percent. Fifty years later, it’s 36.8 percent. That’s not a population change; it’s an entire paradigm shift.
Some of the friends I saw last week love this. “I cannot tell you how happy it makes me,” one told me, “that I can go around London and never hear English spoken!” And there are times I see her point: London is far more dynamic, diverse, and prosperous than it was in my childhood. I love much of it too — I’d much rather live in the London of 2021 than 1971 — and feel pride in my native land’s capacity to be so inclusive. But this is little short of a cultural revolution in a tiny, already densely packed island, which knew minimal immigration for centuries until the 1950s and 1960s.
Philip Larkin wrote a poem in 1972, “Going, Going,” about the pace of change in his native land:
It seems, just now,
To be happening so very fast;
Despite all the land left free
For the first time I feel somehow
That it isn’t going to last
He was talking about putting economic and population growth before cultural and environmental stability, and not specifically about demographic change (though his views on the latter were similar, if not downright reactionary).
And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
But the change he lamented was utterly trivial compared with what is happening now, let alone what is now baked in for the next few decades. The phrase “great replacement” is rightly abhorred for its racist, anti-Semitic inspirations. Larkin eschewed any idea of a conspiracy of some kind:
Most things are never meant.
This won’t be, most likely;
But an accidental revolution is still a revolution. And I would just ask those who rightly denigrate the term “great replacement” to provide an alternative phrase to describe a city which was 87 percent “White British” a half-century ago and 36 percent today? It’s the kind of demographic change only previously seen in other parts of the world in times of plague, invasion, or campaigns of ethnic cleansing.
And then I think of George Orwell’s passionate defense of Englishness, his fusion of that patriotism with socialism, his detestation of the kind of left elites who now foment not just demographic but cultural revolution out of hatred of the past, performative virtue-signaling and thinly veiled contempt for so many of their stodgier countrymen. I think of his conviction that “it needs some very great disaster, such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture.”
Orwell backed huge structural changes in British society in 1941 and yet insisted that a nation could retain its cultural integrity:
The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children’s holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.
I hover between these two visions of pessimism and optimism as I watch the English-speaking world transform.
“Practically, What have you to recommend? I answer at once, Nothing. The whole current of thought and feeling, the whole stream of human affairs, is setting with irresistible force in that direction. The old ways of living… are breaking down all over Europe, and are floating this way and that like haycocks in a flood. Nor do I see why any wise man should expend much thought or trouble on trying to save their wrecks. The waters are out and no human force can turn them back, but I do not see why as we go with the stream we need sing Hallelujah to the river god.”
Andrew says that he hovers between pessimism and optimism, but that’s complete malarkey.
When today’s Trans-Atlantic Community of Fashion runs off the tracks, effects another atrocity, delivers “un autre jolie cadeau de la Révolution française,” you will always find Andrew in the front row of the media choir warbling Hallelujahs to the river god.
Andrew was once, long ago, professionally conservative, but he had another, deeper affiliation, and between Conservatism and Sodomy there was ultimately no contest. Going over to the other side was de rigeur for affiliates of Andrew’s subculture, and Andrew will never ever be found dying in defense of any hill assailed by what Curtiss Yarvon likes to call “the Cathedral.”
Andrew is glib. Andrew is clever. But Andrew is not tough.
It is enormously ironic that even timid little Andrew, with his fondness for performing ceremonial nods in the direction of his long-discarded conservatism was unfortunate enough to provoke the Woke Inquisition which brutally liquidated him from New York Magazine despite his in-the-end invariably reliable Gleichshaltung.
It just goes to show that the Revolution/”the river god” is a jealous and unkind deity.
Ann Coulter, a few years back, told the world what she really thought of soccer.
I’ve held off on writing about soccer for a decade — or about the length of the average soccer game — so as not to offend anyone. But enough is enough. Any growing interest in soccer can only be a sign of the nation’s moral decay.
• Individual achievement is not a big factor in soccer. In a real sport, players fumble passes, throw bricks and drop fly balls — all in front of a crowd. When baseball players strike out, they’re standing alone at the plate. But there’s also individual glory in home runs, touchdowns and slam-dunks.
In soccer, the blame is dispersed and almost no one scores anyway. There are no heroes, no losers, no accountability, and no child’s fragile self-esteem is bruised. There’s a reason perpetually alarmed women are called “soccer moms,” not “football moms.”
Do they even have MVPs in soccer? Everyone just runs up and down the field and, every once in a while, a ball accidentally goes in. That’s when we’re supposed to go wild. I’m already asleep.
• Liberal moms like soccer because it’s a sport in which athletic talent finds so little expression that girls can play with boys. No serious sport is co-ed, even at the kindergarten level.
• No other “sport” ends in as many scoreless ties as soccer. This was an actual marquee sign by the freeway in Long Beach, California, about a World Cup game last week: “2nd period, 11 minutes left, score: 0:0.” Two hours later, another World Cup game was on the same screen: “1st period, 8 minutes left, score: 0:0.” If Michael Jackson had treated his chronic insomnia with a tape of Argentina vs. Brazil instead of Propofol, he’d still be alive, although bored. …
• You can’t use your hands in soccer. (Thus eliminating the danger of having to catch a fly ball.) What sets man apart from the lesser beasts, besides a soul, is that we have opposable thumbs. Our hands can hold things. Here’s a great idea: Let’s create a game where you’re not allowed to use them!
• I resent the force-fed aspect of soccer. The same people trying to push soccer on Americans are the ones demanding that we love HBO’s “Girls,” light-rail, Beyonce and Hillary Clinton. The number of New York Times articles claiming soccer is “catching on” is exceeded only by the ones pretending women’s basketball is fascinating.
I note that we don’t have to be endlessly told how exciting football is.
• It’s foreign. In fact, that’s the precise reason the Times is constantly hectoring Americans to love soccer. One group of sports fans with whom soccer is not “catching on” at all, is African-Americans. They remain distinctly unimpressed by the fact that the French like it.
• Soccer is like the metric system, which liberals also adore because it’s European. Naturally, the metric system emerged from the French Revolution, during the brief intervals when they weren’t committing mass murder by guillotine.
Myriad reasons are given for America’s lack of interest in the most popular game in the world. The lack of scoring makes for a boring game. The U.S. men’s team isn’t very good at it, and Americans only want to watch sports in which we dominate. FIFA, the international soccer governing body, is a snake pit of corruption. (It is.) …
[M]ore than anything, soccer offends Americans’ sense of fairness. Soccer is unjust.
In few other sports can a team completely dominate a game for 88 percent of the game and still go home a loser. Because of the paucity of scoring, a team that outplays its opposition (like the U.S., which possessed the ball for nearly 60 percent of the game against Wales) is always in danger of having nothing to show for it.
And this injustice is further intensified when a game hinges on an overly punitive penalty call based on where a player is standing on the field. Had Bale been standing ten yards closer to midfield, the only penalty the U.S. would have had to pay is to have a Welsh player kick the ball back into live play. But because Bale was too close to the goal, he was granted an automatic score equalizer. (About 78 percent of penalty kicks are made — for a superstar like Bale, it is almost automatic.)
In American sports terms, this would be like granting 10 points to a team if one of its wide receivers is held by the defense within 20 yards of the end zone. Or giving a basketball team the chance to shoot a 10-point free throw if a player is fouled in the lane.
This injustice is further intensified by the role that diving plays in soccer. In American sports, one’s toughness is determined by how big of a hit a player can take and remain on his or her feet. In soccer, a team’s most valuable player may be one who can react to being tapped on the ankle by dropping to the ground as if he had been hit by a sniper on the stadium roof. …
Soccer fans acquit the sport of the charge of being boring, noting that the lack of scoring doesn’t mean there is a lack of excitement. The fact that goals are so hard to come by makes each shot, counterattack, and corner kick even more important. For hard-core fans, soccer is the jazz of athletics — like the notes that aren’t played, it’s the goals that aren’t scored that provide the true drama.
But the lack of scoring does drive the inequity of outcomes. In soccer, one foul in the penalty box equates to 80 minutes of dominance on the pitch. In American sports, teams almost always have the chance to make up for a bad call — when football teams score 30 points and basketball teams score over 100, the team that dominates always wins. Prolonged excellence leads to large leads, which leads to victories.
Not so in soccer, where a 2-0 win is basically a blowout.
This does not conform to the American value of equal opportunity. We even make our schoolchildren pledge allegiance to the flag because it stands for “justice for all.”
In America, we promise that if you work hard and play by the rules, you will come out ahead. Losing a soccer game because a guy fell to the ground is like having to close the business you spent your life building because a guy pretended to slip and fall on an ice patch outside your hardware store. Both perpetrators are deserving of equal enmity.
