Look at what happened in Canada. There was one Christian-positive law school, and the accreditation organizations shut it down on DIE grounds. “Our own schools”? They will do their best to stop that. They control the Bar associations too, and so set the standards for sitting for the Bar exams: they might add DIE criteria to that.
This all flows from one basic problem: people without children in general have more time to run these organizations than people who do.
I have a perfectly functional bolt-action short magazine British royal enfield rifle with bayonette. It belonged to a relative who was an ensign on the USS Arizona. He carved a cross into the stock. It looks upside down when at rest. Right-side-up when in use. My constitutional rebuke to tyranny.
As scripture says in abundant ways:
“Trouble comes. But woe unto him that bringeth it.”
But that Solzhenitsyn, when here in exile, was no longer wanted when he criticized our materialistic society. Once Russia rejected Soviet communism, he returned to his country. Once there, he supported Putin, and Putin made his anticommunist works, for which he had been deported, required study material in all Russian schools. But wait... Putin an evil thug and and the standin for either Hitler
Just leaders do not attack their neighbors, bringing slaughter and rapine, to seize their lands. That is the deed if a warmonger and it puts Putin in the same category as Genghis Khan and Adolph Hitler.
What do you think happened in 2014? You seem to be ignorant of, or intentionally ignoring that leading neocons, Brzezinski and Wolfowitz on, saw the capture of Ukraine as essential to the ultimate dismemberment of noncommunist Russia since at least 1992. Under Full Spectrum Dominance, the prizes were to be converting Sebastopol to a NATO chokehold instead of a Russian naval installation of centuries, and to install nuclear missiles to the far eastern border, minutes from mushroom clouds over Moscow. The coup overthrowing the compromise elected government that represented both the eastern ethnic Russians and the western Galicians, plunged the country into civil war. The coup government was chosen by the United States, after $5 billion was invested in the coup, as admitted by State Department's Nuland and Pyatt. It then turned upon its eastern citizens, and began bombing their own citizens, and held fake peace negotiations to gain time for war. You never mention these facts because they contradict the false neocon narrative you keep hyping. For some odd reason those who tend to the left have united with the neocons in an imperial war. Probably because those who once claimed to despise war have now found one they can love since it seeks to conquer the world for their ideology. The left, in obeisance to Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, finds lies more useful and convenient than the truth, since there is believed to be no objective truth, only their objectives.
None of that word salad of yours is remotely a justification for Russia's invasion. The bar for going to war is a very high one and it is decidedly not met there. You used to hold some admirable beliefs in those matters, but alas you have sold your mortality for a mess of Putinage. Your adulation of that vile man disgraces you utterly. No one can support bringing on the evils of war for such vain and trivial causes without sacrificing every shred of Christian virtue.Let all warmongering be anathema.
Fran's "word salad" may not be a "justification" but it is a serviceable "explanation."
You don't have to think Putin is a good guy (I don't) nor believe the Russian invasion morally right (I don't) to understand that the arrogance and recklessness of post-Cold War American policy helped in a major way to set the stage for it.
Zelensky is a puppet and the Ukrainian people are the suffering pawns in an insane power play that sees our corrupt, clueless rulers in Washington willing to risk a nuclear war over a far-away country with no bearing on the vital interests of the United States.
You do love name calling. But I care nothing about your supposed excommunication. What's that supposed to accomplish anyhow? You never acknowledge the facts except to throw personal insults. I am absolutely sure your vilifications are not from the Lord I know.
For nine years they poked a bear, then got upset when the bear didn't respond as predicted, but instead did something worse. This is idiocy wearing ideology as a mask.
And yes, a bear is still a bear, i.e., a wild animal. As Jerry said above, explanation need not entail justfication. To attempt to explain why someone did what they did does not necessarily mean they're off the hook.
If American colonists felt justified in waging war to throw off control by the country that spawned them, then it should have been clear that their descendants' attempts to control and obliterate someone else's country would elicit similar war actions. This conflict is markedly not even justified by the old fig leaf of Christian Just War Theory, on our part. It fails all the criteria in objective and in conduct. Rather it is rooted in the same conceits that produced Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine. Namely, that fatal excusing in the Declaration of Independence that encouraged all peoples of the world to violently revolt against their governments and emulate the colonists own values. Which has now perversely metastasized into itself overthrowing all governments in the world and making them subsidiaries to the great "Democracy on the shining Hill" under its rules based international order.
No, Putin is not a wild animal. Nor are Russians overall. They are human beings and we should expect rational and (to at least a minimal extent) moral behavior from them.
Following Rod and Dante, The First Circle. I have read them all. Gulag Archipelago is hard going, but I considered it a moral imperative, to read what others had to go through that I did not.
Yes, he was celebrated when he condemned the Soviet Communists, but when he failed to celebrate our materialistic hedonist culture, his voice was rejected. No American President would meet with him after that, not even Ronald Reagan. Solzhenitsyn was a Christian, not a materialist of either the socialist or capitalist branches of ideology and idolatry.
Yes, he was celebrated when he condemned the Soviet Communists, but when he failed to celebrate our materialistic hedonist culture, his voice was rejected. No American President would meet with him after that, not even Ronald Reagan. Solzhenitsyn was a Christian, not a materialist of either the socialist or capitalist branches of ideology and idolatry.
A great man. A great writer. And yes, a prophet for our time. I mean, he even looked the part.
I have a copy of that Harvard speech in hardback. It gave me chills to read the text the first time all those years ago...and still packs a wallop today.
I concur. I have no Eastern European or Russian relatives or ancestors. I have been strongly anticommunist from youth and played my own part in the Cold War. For some reason in my youth I became an admirer of the brave Soviet dissidents. I believed in an America of the best aspirations which it tragically no longer is. People at the time wondered why I was so interested in these dissidents. I now know the Lord was preparing me for a betrayal of our own nation at the hand of similar demonic forces.
I spent many years of my life on the front lines of the Cold War. In those days our enemy was real: evil, powerful, global...a potentially existential threat...as opposed to the various threats we've concocted or manufactured since our defeat of the Soviet empire.
It is an historic, mindboggling tragedy that we didn't quit while we were ahead...that we instead went out of our way to make an enemy of Russia, the successor state that survived in the Soviet ashes but with only a fraction of the power and almost nothing in common ideologically.
It's also beyond ironic that today's Dem-Media War Party, which is so hot for conflict with Russia, was once the Soviet appeasement lobby in Washington. Back then, they had a soft spot in their twisted little hearts for Communist totalitarians. Now they're quite happy to court World War III.
My great grandfather Yuri Kharkovinovitch was a soldier from the Ukraine who served under Czar Nicholas. He defected and fled to America. We inherited that iron-souled prophetic demeanor which makes some think we are crazy. Maybe so. I recognized a blood brother in Alexander. He was indeed a voice in the wilderness warning of everything to come.
It certainly will be statism, with maybe a larger percentage of these monstrous little snots in the Ruling Class. You can bet their fauxgalitarianism ( new word, maybe? ) won't extend to the traditional, laudable concern of the American Left, a reduction of income inequality.
Most of these creeps were white, though, weren't they? Don't they realize that now makes them inherently The Enemy?
Be not discouraged. Our Lord warned that these days would come. Children betraying their father’s and mothers. The slander. The love of evil in the name of the greater good. The upside down room.
Rod, I too have my fists clenched when I see this. Being a nearly life-long resident of Berkeley, this is all pretty standard. However it is getting more and more belligerent and the children are more hollow. Its gonna continue to get more weird. I cant have intelligent conversations here on the bay with too many anymore. Its all dogmatic sludge. However, if you go one town North of Berkeley there is a blue collar remnant in El Cerrito (named by the Spanish “The Little Mountain of Saint Anthony.”). This is the home of Creedence and Metallica. Its not hard to find sane folks here.
...these little silver-spooned shithead brats have nothing but contempt for the working class. They are the wave before the jackboots start hob-nailing down the streets of torchlit syncopated gloom. They are the Einsatzgruppen, the left’s John the Baptist precursor for the coming false messiah, the voice of Puritanical Humanism. Anti Christ. The good news is that the Church of Jesus Christ always thrives in persecution. They mark themselves. We must be strong and remain anchored in the Holy Word. God always wins.
The finger snaps, the whining, the insults, the whole thing is so pathetic, so idiotic, and so dangerous, more dangerous than I want to admit, wanting to reflexively dismiss these horrifying people as incompetent, anti-social rejects, and yet, they obviously aren't. They are ideologues. They are successful. They are the future, or part of it, at the very least.
There's an old joke from the communist days: of course, we know what's going to happen, but what's going to happen until then?
In the old days, when the communists came to power in Romania after the war, the villagers buried their guns, or walled them up, along with all the land deeds and paperwork they could save from the collectivizers, for they knew one day it would end. They didn't have enough guns to resist a conquering army or a fully militarized state power in any case, but it might be a different story in America. Generally, I tend to think not, because the First Amendment is more important than the Second. If there is enough societal buy-in to cancel the First Amendment -- which appears to be working up steam, slowly but surely -- then how will guns save us? We will have already been changed from within, part of an inexorable process that must come to its expected conclusion, out with a whimper, not with a bang. For that's how communism ends.
It is our duty to prevent this fate. For my part, I'm a liberal and have been blindsided. I have been voting Democrat since after I gave props to Ross Perot in '96, as a tribute to his famous '92 campaign. In 1992, I was sixteen, and speaking English already, having arrived in America in 1988. The 1992 debates were incredible to this young immigrant, we discussed them in my high school classes, they introduced me to American politics, to the meaning of freedom, to lively discussion and choices, consequence-bearing by a responsible, mature population. And politics is interesting, too, as Ross proved so ably. I knew he wasn't very liberal, but I liked his honesty, confidence, and common sense. And I knew that in America, it was okay, I could support anyone I wanted, politically. People here were simply more reasonable, more relaxed about disagreements, more accommodated to not getting their way all the time, more used to giving the other side a turn at the wheel.
Rejecting the racism against blacks and Puerto Ricans I saw in my life as a teenager in working class Philadelphia, and also rejecting the ethnic conflict and occasional hatred between Hungarians and Romanians I knew well from my earlier life, I became a liberal by choice/disposition, and a Democrat. As liberals, we deconstruct and we explain and we reject and we know better. Yes, the Dems were always bad, but for me they were better than the alternative, the stern, lordly Republicans.
Basically, of my own accord and powers of perception, I have foreseen none of this Woke Neo-Stalinist Nightmare coming, even though I escaped communism. For most of my adult life, I have been hard on right-wingers, expecting them to police their ranks, stamp out the extremists, denounce the fascists, expose the hiding theocrats, etc, and also tolerate being voted against, and being called names.
So, however it happened, however poetically and tragically, somehow we fucked this all up, speaking on behalf of American liberals, or else, maybe the Left as a whole is simply fated to do this cyclically-- I have no explanation, I don't know if it's a virus or an inherent feature of the product. But God bless America, that's all I can say, at least while she lasts.
All Biblical references are appreciated, and probably the most apt way to combat this Illiberal/Liberal phenomenon, for it is the work of heathens. However, showing the muzzle of a gun never hurts, either. In my own admittedly evolved view, it's not a threat, it's a promise. And a healthy promise, too.
Stanford Law's administration should be ashamed of itself and the childish antics it has fomented among a segment of its students. It should immediately issue an apology to Judge Duncan, the student branch of the Federalist Society, and the greater student body that it has failed. It should also immediately discipline the DEI administrator. I know, this is all more than wishful thinking, as the administration is a bunch of myopic cowards.
As a lawyer, I cannot conceive how any of these students will be able to effectively practice law. They will be terrible advocates for their clients because they will not be able to look at multiple factual and evidentiary perspectives with neutral eyes, they will be unable to interpret legal opinions without an ironclad bias, they will not be able to compromise or negotiate when it is in their client's interest, they will be disrespectful to other lawyers, to witnesses, and to the judiciary, and they will not be able to be honest with their clients about the challenges in their cases.
I cannot imagine working with such individuals, nor can I conceive that these students will understand and display the professionalism and decorum required to be a good lawyer, and to safeguard the profession as a whole.
One of the things I took away from my ethics class in law school all those years ago was the need to respect the judiciary, even when a judge issues opinions I might not agree with. The idea of publicly trashing a judge was impossible to imagine.
In fact, some lawyers who have avoided this ethical obligation have been professionally disciplined by their bar association. Take, for example, this comment in California's code of professional conduct, which all lawyers should adhere to: "To maintain the fair and independent administration of justice, lawyers should defend judges and
courts unjustly criticized. Lawyers also are obligated to maintain the respect due to the courts of justice and judicial officers."
Did anyone see any sign of respect for Judge Duncan at that lecture? Absolutely not. And the foremost violator of that principle was the DEI officer. For shame. She could truly be brought before the bar association for an ethics violation. She probably would not be disciplined, but I am confident she would be verbally admonished and warned, as she should be. What a disgusting example she is for those training to be lawyers.
And as for those students who engaged in insulting the judge, I highly doubt any of them have even read more than an excerpt or two from Judge Duncan's many written opinions. They have no courtroom experience, and they are in for a rude awakening when they actually have to go before a judge and argue a case. Their arrogance won't be tolerated by the overwhelming majority of judges and opposing attorneys who (thankfully) attended state schools and not such an arrogant and blindly out of touch school like Stanford.
Lastly, you better believe that many federal judges will privately choose not to employ Stanford law students as their law clerks after watching these shenanigans. I can only hope other employers will see the faces of the students in the video so that they can protect themselves from making an awful hire.
I don't know that most of them want to practice law; they want to get hired by the governmental agencies and the nonprofits and the NGOs to "nudge" society further to the left - or take a sledgehammer to it if that doesn't work.
I'm also a lawyer in CA and I agree with every word. When you're representing a client, political or any other kind of bias MUST go out the window. I refer to it as "falling in love with your client's case". I've seen attorneys do this, and they become completely blind to the strengths of the opposing party's case, or the weaknesses in their own. Also, you can have the best argument with the strongest evidence, but if you act like a jackwagon in front of a Judge or a jury, you will lose. And the firm or public entity that employs you will have no difficulty placing blame where it squarely belongs.
Christopher Rufo substack today shared an essay from Heather Mac Donald on the “mass nervous breakdown on campus.” It almost gave me a nervous breakdown reading it.
“I cannot stand Donald Trump. I wish he would go away. He’s not good for our country. But I tell you this: if he is on the ballot in 2024, I will crawl over broken glass to vote for him as a strike against these ruling-class woke totalitarians, and hope that President Trump will appoint many more federal judges to hold the line against the Jacobins. Personally, I’d rather have Ron DeSantis, who is demonstrating right now that he has the spine and the smarts to attack wokeness. “
Brilliantly stated, Brother Rod. My thoughts exactly. I am all in to resist those sons of Belial.
Where's the rest of the post? ;) just kidding. Substack is not TAC is not a newspaper column, and you'll find a "fit" for this place as well. And if Substack doesn't do something you want it to, there's always letting them know repeatedly that you would like it. *L* It worked for Mark Belling in Milwaukee on the radio. IHeartMedia bought out the station that he was on (WISN radio) and he noticed that on their Milwaukee music stations, the names and artists come up for the songs that play. He wanted the same thing to happen for his bumper music, and he kept pushing until he got it to happen. He's still the only one that this happens for, and when there are fill-ins for him, it doesn't happen, but he got them to do things the way he wanted for his show.
Very distressing to see a federal judge mistreated in this way - I’m not sure what the long term strategy is, like do they expect to act this way in an actual courthouse? They’ll take you into custody right there at the podium if you talk to a judge that way.
That said, I’ve been a law student recently enough to respond that this was not the norm, at least where I went to school. The other students in that classroom are paying $60k a year in tuition, and I wasn’t there to hear about other people’s sensibilities. I also found that in practice, isolation has a lot to do with this kind of behavior - many of my classmates had largely stopped speaking to the 7 or 8 wokesters in our section after the first 4ish weeks. After all, there was nothing I could do or say that would be queer enough, or anti-racist enough, or anti-capitalist enough to satisfy, so why interact? They literally end up funnelled into parallel educational systems - while the rest of us were actually helping low income people file their taxes, or helping immigrants become documented, they’d be cosseted in their CRT and gender and the law echo chambers.
I’ve often wondered if requiring law students to interact more face to face and emphasize practical coursework (some of the most no-nonsense instructors I ever had were adjunct professors who were still actively working as lawyers, you’re not going to lecture the head of the Innocence Project on being insufficiently anti-racist) would be another way of coming at this issue. The truth is that when I actually took the time to talk to several people who I would probably consider this woke, many of them feel the way they do for semi-decent reasons (at least from their perspective) and they’re much less insane one-on-one.
It won't be soft totalitarianism when they have vanquished free speech rights. We have here a consolidation of Woke, government, secret police, institutions and corporations into a fasces of unbreakable power. Hope it fares as badly as the previous incarnations last century.
We have become collaborators with wickedness. The Declaration's urging all peoples to overthrow their governments in imitation of the colonists' own values, has been perverted into America itself trying to overthrow all governments and establishing them as subsidiaries to its elites' own interests, and calling that democracy and its own laws the rules based international order. This malign effort, now in pursuit of forcing Woke hegemony, requires an enormous propaganda effort, not just against the rest of the world, but with lies directed against the domestic population, to manufacture imaginary consent through deceit. Such grossly misconceived policies can only result in disastrous calamity that will engulf all: the wicked, the ignorant and the innocent.
Protesting a speaker, outside the hall, is one thing. Silencing him and preventing him from speaking at all is quite another.
In the fall of 1979, my first semester at the University of Texas, one of the several international organizations on campus arranged for the Hon. Fereydoon Hoveyda, former Iranian ambassador to the United Nations, a former deputy foreign minister, and a long time state secretary in the Iranian foreign ministry. He had an interesting background -- he'd been born in Syria when his dad was Consul-General in Damascus, mom was a Qajar Princess (the dynasty that preceded the Pahlavis), raised in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and France and educated at the Sorbonne (PhD, Int'l. Relations).
Among other things, he was one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; as well as being an author and film critic. His brother had been one of the Shah's last prime ministers.
In any case, they'd reserved a room for him on the second story of the Texas Union for him to come and talk and the house was packed. There were some pickets outside which, at the time, I didn't pay a lot of attention to. Anyway, a girl I knew slightly (can't recall her name just at the moment) gave a nice little speech introducing Dr. Hoveyda, and he came up to speak.
He never got a word out. There were a couple hundred people in this room. But there were about 15-20 people in the back, mostly a combination of the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade, and pro-mullah students, who started shouting and putting up quite a din, so much you could never have heard anything.
This went on for about 20 minutes. Professor Hoveyda,stood at the podium, a little smile on his face. I had the distinct impression that he was not very surprised; but the University types were all milling around quite a flutter.
Finally there was a conclave at the front and a few minutes later somebody from the University announced that the speech would not take place.
I was gobsmacked, and hugely disappointed. Instead of summoning the police and carting the screaming scumbags off to jail -- they gave the scumbags what they wanted and cancelled the speech. So, freedom of speech to these people meant the right for an organized minority, using fascist tactics (Mussolini's mobs used to break up speeches of their opponents just that way) to stop somebody else from speaking -- somebody who many others wanted to hear.
I was angrier at the University than the demonstrators. No doubt the demonstrators had their story to tell, but they had no right to break-up the man's speech. But I thought the University administrators were a bunch of craven jellyfish for folding and letting that mob break up the speech. What did they have a police force for?
I never did hear Professor Hoveyda speak, or see him again, but I read several of his books. He died in Virginia in his 80's (06).
Perhaps what has to happen is for the rest of the audience to start shouting “WE WANT SPEECH! WE WANT SPEECH!” But then, would the university take measures against counter-protesters?
Even remotely right-of-center judges must stop accepting invitations to speak at these schools. Watching it, I tried to think of something he could have said to that horrid woman, but there's nothing. She and the students would have LOVED to have him say anything. If he had even raised a finger and said "excuse me" she would have started crying and the students would have swarmed. What about walking out? Nope. Then their story would be "We invited him to speak, and we pleaded with him to stay, but he refused to talk to us because he was unwilling to hear any side but his own...."
Nope, the only avenue open to him was to stand there and listen to all that nonsense.
It does no good for anyone to speak at these schools or to employ their graduates. Regardless, people love to say they "spoke at Stanford" and they pay their graduates massive salaries because they have this idea that they are smart.
In his place I'd find myself randomly chuckling over the upside down sign for days afterwards. That, plus the apology from the Stanford president and the law school dean, Steinbach's boss, makes it all totally worth it.
"Even remotely right-of-center judges must stop accepting invitations to speak at these schools"
Exactly the wrong answer.
This incident has been a nice PR coup for the right. Stanford was forced to issue a groveling apology and moderates were alienated by lefty thuggishness. Plus, incidents like this put pressure on red state legislatures to dismantle DEI in the universities. Florida has led the way, and several other red states are following.
None of that happens without a public record of crybully misbehavior.
Exactly! This incident actually forced the Stanford president and law school dean to apologize to Judge Duncan & take a stand for free speech. It really does make the whole drama worth it.
Ah youth. You still think an anchored right can still be ascendent politically. Read the interview with Judge Duncan. He gets it:
The elites set the tone of our society, like it or not. The law students we graduate from Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and the like are the ones who, inevitably, will be occupying the commanding heights of government, academia, big business, philanthropy, and so on. So what they think is acceptable behavior matters immensely. And if it doesn’t seem to matter as much right now, just wait five or ten years. Then they will have percolated up through the ranks and will be calling the shots. And then you will see this illiberal mindset more and more in action.
What a bizarre response on your part: I agree with every word that Judge Duncan uttered.
That's why I proposed realistic solutions to fight back against the danger of left-controlled institutions. Like many on the political right, you seem disgusted and embarrassed at the prospect of fighting back.
It's impossible to overstate the level of contempt I have for such cowardice.
Universities should add to their code of conduct for both staff and students: disruption of events like this should be grounds for expulsion or termination of employment (and tenure be damned). It really could be that simple.
Look at what happened in Canada. There was one Christian-positive law school, and the accreditation organizations shut it down on DIE grounds. “Our own schools”? They will do their best to stop that. They control the Bar associations too, and so set the standards for sitting for the Bar exams: they might add DIE criteria to that.
This all flows from one basic problem: people without children in general have more time to run these organizations than people who do.
“It’s not going to be persecution like the older Romans, or even communist Russia…”
In my more paranoid or despairing moments, I worry that that kind of persecution isn’t that far fetched. How to not give in to despair and fear?
1. We are never surrendering our firearms.
2. Despair is a sin! The battle has already been won. Keep praying : )
3. Read Solzhenitsyn. He will, strangely enough, give you hope! It’s always darkest before the dawn…
More here:
https://gaty.substack.com/p/2023-preview-the-end-of-medicine
Thank you 🙏
I have a perfectly functional bolt-action short magazine British royal enfield rifle with bayonette. It belonged to a relative who was an ensign on the USS Arizona. He carved a cross into the stock. It looks upside down when at rest. Right-side-up when in use. My constitutional rebuke to tyranny.
As scripture says in abundant ways:
“Trouble comes. But woe unto him that bringeth it.”
But that Solzhenitsyn, when here in exile, was no longer wanted when he criticized our materialistic society. Once Russia rejected Soviet communism, he returned to his country. Once there, he supported Putin, and Putin made his anticommunist works, for which he had been deported, required study material in all Russian schools. But wait... Putin an evil thug and and the standin for either Hitler
...or Stalin or both! Or is he?
Just leaders do not attack their neighbors, bringing slaughter and rapine, to seize their lands. That is the deed if a warmonger and it puts Putin in the same category as Genghis Khan and Adolph Hitler.
What do you think happened in 2014? You seem to be ignorant of, or intentionally ignoring that leading neocons, Brzezinski and Wolfowitz on, saw the capture of Ukraine as essential to the ultimate dismemberment of noncommunist Russia since at least 1992. Under Full Spectrum Dominance, the prizes were to be converting Sebastopol to a NATO chokehold instead of a Russian naval installation of centuries, and to install nuclear missiles to the far eastern border, minutes from mushroom clouds over Moscow. The coup overthrowing the compromise elected government that represented both the eastern ethnic Russians and the western Galicians, plunged the country into civil war. The coup government was chosen by the United States, after $5 billion was invested in the coup, as admitted by State Department's Nuland and Pyatt. It then turned upon its eastern citizens, and began bombing their own citizens, and held fake peace negotiations to gain time for war. You never mention these facts because they contradict the false neocon narrative you keep hyping. For some odd reason those who tend to the left have united with the neocons in an imperial war. Probably because those who once claimed to despise war have now found one they can love since it seeks to conquer the world for their ideology. The left, in obeisance to Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, finds lies more useful and convenient than the truth, since there is believed to be no objective truth, only their objectives.
Remember also that Soros had a big hand in stirring the pot in 2014.
Neocons and Woke are hand in hand and they are not tiptoeing through the tulips.
None of that word salad of yours is remotely a justification for Russia's invasion. The bar for going to war is a very high one and it is decidedly not met there. You used to hold some admirable beliefs in those matters, but alas you have sold your mortality for a mess of Putinage. Your adulation of that vile man disgraces you utterly. No one can support bringing on the evils of war for such vain and trivial causes without sacrificing every shred of Christian virtue.Let all warmongering be anathema.
Fran's "word salad" may not be a "justification" but it is a serviceable "explanation."
You don't have to think Putin is a good guy (I don't) nor believe the Russian invasion morally right (I don't) to understand that the arrogance and recklessness of post-Cold War American policy helped in a major way to set the stage for it.
Zelensky is a puppet and the Ukrainian people are the suffering pawns in an insane power play that sees our corrupt, clueless rulers in Washington willing to risk a nuclear war over a far-away country with no bearing on the vital interests of the United States.
You do love name calling. But I care nothing about your supposed excommunication. What's that supposed to accomplish anyhow? You never acknowledge the facts except to throw personal insults. I am absolutely sure your vilifications are not from the Lord I know.
For nine years they poked a bear, then got upset when the bear didn't respond as predicted, but instead did something worse. This is idiocy wearing ideology as a mask.
And yes, a bear is still a bear, i.e., a wild animal. As Jerry said above, explanation need not entail justfication. To attempt to explain why someone did what they did does not necessarily mean they're off the hook.
If American colonists felt justified in waging war to throw off control by the country that spawned them, then it should have been clear that their descendants' attempts to control and obliterate someone else's country would elicit similar war actions. This conflict is markedly not even justified by the old fig leaf of Christian Just War Theory, on our part. It fails all the criteria in objective and in conduct. Rather it is rooted in the same conceits that produced Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine. Namely, that fatal excusing in the Declaration of Independence that encouraged all peoples of the world to violently revolt against their governments and emulate the colonists own values. Which has now perversely metastasized into itself overthrowing all governments in the world and making them subsidiaries to the great "Democracy on the shining Hill" under its rules based international order.
No, Putin is not a wild animal. Nor are Russians overall. They are human beings and we should expect rational and (to at least a minimal extent) moral behavior from them.
What Solzhenitsyn should I start with?
What started it all was Ivan Denisovitch during the post Stalin Khrushchev thaw.
The abridged Gulag Archipelago, or at least the first two volumes of the unabridged trilogy. For fiction: after Ivan Denisovich, read Cancer Ward.
Following Rod and Dante, The First Circle. I have read them all. Gulag Archipelago is hard going, but I considered it a moral imperative, to read what others had to go through that I did not.
Locate his speech he gave at Harvard in 1978. Shockingly prophetic.
Yes, he was celebrated when he condemned the Soviet Communists, but when he failed to celebrate our materialistic hedonist culture, his voice was rejected. No American President would meet with him after that, not even Ronald Reagan. Solzhenitsyn was a Christian, not a materialist of either the socialist or capitalist branches of ideology and idolatry.
Yes, he was celebrated when he condemned the Soviet Communists, but when he failed to celebrate our materialistic hedonist culture, his voice was rejected. No American President would meet with him after that, not even Ronald Reagan. Solzhenitsyn was a Christian, not a materialist of either the socialist or capitalist branches of ideology and idolatry.
A great man. A great writer. And yes, a prophet for our time. I mean, he even looked the part.
I have a copy of that Harvard speech in hardback. It gave me chills to read the text the first time all those years ago...and still packs a wallop today.
I concur. I have no Eastern European or Russian relatives or ancestors. I have been strongly anticommunist from youth and played my own part in the Cold War. For some reason in my youth I became an admirer of the brave Soviet dissidents. I believed in an America of the best aspirations which it tragically no longer is. People at the time wondered why I was so interested in these dissidents. I now know the Lord was preparing me for a betrayal of our own nation at the hand of similar demonic forces.
.
I spent many years of my life on the front lines of the Cold War. In those days our enemy was real: evil, powerful, global...a potentially existential threat...as opposed to the various threats we've concocted or manufactured since our defeat of the Soviet empire.
It is an historic, mindboggling tragedy that we didn't quit while we were ahead...that we instead went out of our way to make an enemy of Russia, the successor state that survived in the Soviet ashes but with only a fraction of the power and almost nothing in common ideologically.
It's also beyond ironic that today's Dem-Media War Party, which is so hot for conflict with Russia, was once the Soviet appeasement lobby in Washington. Back then, they had a soft spot in their twisted little hearts for Communist totalitarians. Now they're quite happy to court World War III.
My great grandfather Yuri Kharkovinovitch was a soldier from the Ukraine who served under Czar Nicholas. He defected and fled to America. We inherited that iron-souled prophetic demeanor which makes some think we are crazy. Maybe so. I recognized a blood brother in Alexander. He was indeed a voice in the wilderness warning of everything to come.
Madame defarge… exactly.
I couldn't help laughing at the young termagant who shrieked, "Your racism is showing!!"
No, we won't give up our guns. I hate what that implies.
The leftists are the racists, bent on giving us Communism.
It certainly will be statism, with maybe a larger percentage of these monstrous little snots in the Ruling Class. You can bet their fauxgalitarianism ( new word, maybe? ) won't extend to the traditional, laudable concern of the American Left, a reduction of income inequality.
Most of these creeps were white, though, weren't they? Don't they realize that now makes them inherently The Enemy?
A relevant essay by Heather Macdonald:
https://www.city-journal.org/the-great-feminization-of-the-american-university
Pearls before swines.
Be not discouraged. Our Lord warned that these days would come. Children betraying their father’s and mothers. The slander. The love of evil in the name of the greater good. The upside down room.
Rod, I too have my fists clenched when I see this. Being a nearly life-long resident of Berkeley, this is all pretty standard. However it is getting more and more belligerent and the children are more hollow. Its gonna continue to get more weird. I cant have intelligent conversations here on the bay with too many anymore. Its all dogmatic sludge. However, if you go one town North of Berkeley there is a blue collar remnant in El Cerrito (named by the Spanish “The Little Mountain of Saint Anthony.”). This is the home of Creedence and Metallica. Its not hard to find sane folks here.
...these little silver-spooned shithead brats have nothing but contempt for the working class. They are the wave before the jackboots start hob-nailing down the streets of torchlit syncopated gloom. They are the Einsatzgruppen, the left’s John the Baptist precursor for the coming false messiah, the voice of Puritanical Humanism. Anti Christ. The good news is that the Church of Jesus Christ always thrives in persecution. They mark themselves. We must be strong and remain anchored in the Holy Word. God always wins.
“God is dead” - Nietzsche
“Nietzsche is dead.” -God
Be strong.
God bless.
The finger snaps, the whining, the insults, the whole thing is so pathetic, so idiotic, and so dangerous, more dangerous than I want to admit, wanting to reflexively dismiss these horrifying people as incompetent, anti-social rejects, and yet, they obviously aren't. They are ideologues. They are successful. They are the future, or part of it, at the very least.
There's an old joke from the communist days: of course, we know what's going to happen, but what's going to happen until then?
Right?!!! The finger snaps!!!!! Cultist mother fxxxers.
God forgive me but i wish a violent earthquake would open in that moment and swallow them like Korah and her acolytes in the Book of Numbers.
In the old days, when the communists came to power in Romania after the war, the villagers buried their guns, or walled them up, along with all the land deeds and paperwork they could save from the collectivizers, for they knew one day it would end. They didn't have enough guns to resist a conquering army or a fully militarized state power in any case, but it might be a different story in America. Generally, I tend to think not, because the First Amendment is more important than the Second. If there is enough societal buy-in to cancel the First Amendment -- which appears to be working up steam, slowly but surely -- then how will guns save us? We will have already been changed from within, part of an inexorable process that must come to its expected conclusion, out with a whimper, not with a bang. For that's how communism ends.
It is our duty to prevent this fate. For my part, I'm a liberal and have been blindsided. I have been voting Democrat since after I gave props to Ross Perot in '96, as a tribute to his famous '92 campaign. In 1992, I was sixteen, and speaking English already, having arrived in America in 1988. The 1992 debates were incredible to this young immigrant, we discussed them in my high school classes, they introduced me to American politics, to the meaning of freedom, to lively discussion and choices, consequence-bearing by a responsible, mature population. And politics is interesting, too, as Ross proved so ably. I knew he wasn't very liberal, but I liked his honesty, confidence, and common sense. And I knew that in America, it was okay, I could support anyone I wanted, politically. People here were simply more reasonable, more relaxed about disagreements, more accommodated to not getting their way all the time, more used to giving the other side a turn at the wheel.
Rejecting the racism against blacks and Puerto Ricans I saw in my life as a teenager in working class Philadelphia, and also rejecting the ethnic conflict and occasional hatred between Hungarians and Romanians I knew well from my earlier life, I became a liberal by choice/disposition, and a Democrat. As liberals, we deconstruct and we explain and we reject and we know better. Yes, the Dems were always bad, but for me they were better than the alternative, the stern, lordly Republicans.
Basically, of my own accord and powers of perception, I have foreseen none of this Woke Neo-Stalinist Nightmare coming, even though I escaped communism. For most of my adult life, I have been hard on right-wingers, expecting them to police their ranks, stamp out the extremists, denounce the fascists, expose the hiding theocrats, etc, and also tolerate being voted against, and being called names.
So, however it happened, however poetically and tragically, somehow we fucked this all up, speaking on behalf of American liberals, or else, maybe the Left as a whole is simply fated to do this cyclically-- I have no explanation, I don't know if it's a virus or an inherent feature of the product. But God bless America, that's all I can say, at least while she lasts.
All Biblical references are appreciated, and probably the most apt way to combat this Illiberal/Liberal phenomenon, for it is the work of heathens. However, showing the muzzle of a gun never hurts, either. In my own admittedly evolved view, it's not a threat, it's a promise. And a healthy promise, too.
Stanford Law's administration should be ashamed of itself and the childish antics it has fomented among a segment of its students. It should immediately issue an apology to Judge Duncan, the student branch of the Federalist Society, and the greater student body that it has failed. It should also immediately discipline the DEI administrator. I know, this is all more than wishful thinking, as the administration is a bunch of myopic cowards.
As a lawyer, I cannot conceive how any of these students will be able to effectively practice law. They will be terrible advocates for their clients because they will not be able to look at multiple factual and evidentiary perspectives with neutral eyes, they will be unable to interpret legal opinions without an ironclad bias, they will not be able to compromise or negotiate when it is in their client's interest, they will be disrespectful to other lawyers, to witnesses, and to the judiciary, and they will not be able to be honest with their clients about the challenges in their cases.
I cannot imagine working with such individuals, nor can I conceive that these students will understand and display the professionalism and decorum required to be a good lawyer, and to safeguard the profession as a whole.
One of the things I took away from my ethics class in law school all those years ago was the need to respect the judiciary, even when a judge issues opinions I might not agree with. The idea of publicly trashing a judge was impossible to imagine.
In fact, some lawyers who have avoided this ethical obligation have been professionally disciplined by their bar association. Take, for example, this comment in California's code of professional conduct, which all lawyers should adhere to: "To maintain the fair and independent administration of justice, lawyers should defend judges and
courts unjustly criticized. Lawyers also are obligated to maintain the respect due to the courts of justice and judicial officers."
Did anyone see any sign of respect for Judge Duncan at that lecture? Absolutely not. And the foremost violator of that principle was the DEI officer. For shame. She could truly be brought before the bar association for an ethics violation. She probably would not be disciplined, but I am confident she would be verbally admonished and warned, as she should be. What a disgusting example she is for those training to be lawyers.
And as for those students who engaged in insulting the judge, I highly doubt any of them have even read more than an excerpt or two from Judge Duncan's many written opinions. They have no courtroom experience, and they are in for a rude awakening when they actually have to go before a judge and argue a case. Their arrogance won't be tolerated by the overwhelming majority of judges and opposing attorneys who (thankfully) attended state schools and not such an arrogant and blindly out of touch school like Stanford.
Lastly, you better believe that many federal judges will privately choose not to employ Stanford law students as their law clerks after watching these shenanigans. I can only hope other employers will see the faces of the students in the video so that they can protect themselves from making an awful hire.
I don't know that most of them want to practice law; they want to get hired by the governmental agencies and the nonprofits and the NGOs to "nudge" society further to the left - or take a sledgehammer to it if that doesn't work.
I'm also a lawyer in CA and I agree with every word. When you're representing a client, political or any other kind of bias MUST go out the window. I refer to it as "falling in love with your client's case". I've seen attorneys do this, and they become completely blind to the strengths of the opposing party's case, or the weaknesses in their own. Also, you can have the best argument with the strongest evidence, but if you act like a jackwagon in front of a Judge or a jury, you will lose. And the firm or public entity that employs you will have no difficulty placing blame where it squarely belongs.
Christopher Rufo substack today shared an essay from Heather Mac Donald on the “mass nervous breakdown on campus.” It almost gave me a nervous breakdown reading it.
https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=1248321&post_id=107282132&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&action=share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=true&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoyNTc3NDQ4MCwicG9zdF9pZCI6MTA3MjgyMTMyLCJpYXQiOjE2Nzg0NjA5MDEsImV4cCI6MTY4MTA1MjkwMSwiaXNzIjoicHViLTEyNDgzMjEiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.Xmm2bgIjQPFBrdOx-7-SAT3xWjuMKdOKGNoH7IJOOeg
“I cannot stand Donald Trump. I wish he would go away. He’s not good for our country. But I tell you this: if he is on the ballot in 2024, I will crawl over broken glass to vote for him as a strike against these ruling-class woke totalitarians, and hope that President Trump will appoint many more federal judges to hold the line against the Jacobins. Personally, I’d rather have Ron DeSantis, who is demonstrating right now that he has the spine and the smarts to attack wokeness. “
Brilliantly stated, Brother Rod. My thoughts exactly. I am all in to resist those sons of Belial.
Where's the rest of the post? ;) just kidding. Substack is not TAC is not a newspaper column, and you'll find a "fit" for this place as well. And if Substack doesn't do something you want it to, there's always letting them know repeatedly that you would like it. *L* It worked for Mark Belling in Milwaukee on the radio. IHeartMedia bought out the station that he was on (WISN radio) and he noticed that on their Milwaukee music stations, the names and artists come up for the songs that play. He wanted the same thing to happen for his bumper music, and he kept pushing until he got it to happen. He's still the only one that this happens for, and when there are fill-ins for him, it doesn't happen, but he got them to do things the way he wanted for his show.
If I were king there would be one response to these spawn of Trotsky:
We they leave the building they are escorted by USMC DI’s. “Get on the bus. Now. You are late for class”. Ship their asses off into two groups:
Group 1: Paris Island
Group 2: Camp Pendleton
Time for 6 weeks of attitude adjustment.
Semper Fidelis🇺🇸
Very distressing to see a federal judge mistreated in this way - I’m not sure what the long term strategy is, like do they expect to act this way in an actual courthouse? They’ll take you into custody right there at the podium if you talk to a judge that way.
That said, I’ve been a law student recently enough to respond that this was not the norm, at least where I went to school. The other students in that classroom are paying $60k a year in tuition, and I wasn’t there to hear about other people’s sensibilities. I also found that in practice, isolation has a lot to do with this kind of behavior - many of my classmates had largely stopped speaking to the 7 or 8 wokesters in our section after the first 4ish weeks. After all, there was nothing I could do or say that would be queer enough, or anti-racist enough, or anti-capitalist enough to satisfy, so why interact? They literally end up funnelled into parallel educational systems - while the rest of us were actually helping low income people file their taxes, or helping immigrants become documented, they’d be cosseted in their CRT and gender and the law echo chambers.
I’ve often wondered if requiring law students to interact more face to face and emphasize practical coursework (some of the most no-nonsense instructors I ever had were adjunct professors who were still actively working as lawyers, you’re not going to lecture the head of the Innocence Project on being insufficiently anti-racist) would be another way of coming at this issue. The truth is that when I actually took the time to talk to several people who I would probably consider this woke, many of them feel the way they do for semi-decent reasons (at least from their perspective) and they’re much less insane one-on-one.
They are rabid. Neutralize. post haste.
It won't be soft totalitarianism when they have vanquished free speech rights. We have here a consolidation of Woke, government, secret police, institutions and corporations into a fasces of unbreakable power. Hope it fares as badly as the previous incarnations last century.
We have become collaborators with wickedness. The Declaration's urging all peoples to overthrow their governments in imitation of the colonists' own values, has been perverted into America itself trying to overthrow all governments and establishing them as subsidiaries to its elites' own interests, and calling that democracy and its own laws the rules based international order. This malign effort, now in pursuit of forcing Woke hegemony, requires an enormous propaganda effort, not just against the rest of the world, but with lies directed against the domestic population, to manufacture imaginary consent through deceit. Such grossly misconceived policies can only result in disastrous calamity that will engulf all: the wicked, the ignorant and the innocent.
Protesting a speaker, outside the hall, is one thing. Silencing him and preventing him from speaking at all is quite another.
In the fall of 1979, my first semester at the University of Texas, one of the several international organizations on campus arranged for the Hon. Fereydoon Hoveyda, former Iranian ambassador to the United Nations, a former deputy foreign minister, and a long time state secretary in the Iranian foreign ministry. He had an interesting background -- he'd been born in Syria when his dad was Consul-General in Damascus, mom was a Qajar Princess (the dynasty that preceded the Pahlavis), raised in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and France and educated at the Sorbonne (PhD, Int'l. Relations).
Among other things, he was one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; as well as being an author and film critic. His brother had been one of the Shah's last prime ministers.
In any case, they'd reserved a room for him on the second story of the Texas Union for him to come and talk and the house was packed. There were some pickets outside which, at the time, I didn't pay a lot of attention to. Anyway, a girl I knew slightly (can't recall her name just at the moment) gave a nice little speech introducing Dr. Hoveyda, and he came up to speak.
He never got a word out. There were a couple hundred people in this room. But there were about 15-20 people in the back, mostly a combination of the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade, and pro-mullah students, who started shouting and putting up quite a din, so much you could never have heard anything.
This went on for about 20 minutes. Professor Hoveyda,stood at the podium, a little smile on his face. I had the distinct impression that he was not very surprised; but the University types were all milling around quite a flutter.
Finally there was a conclave at the front and a few minutes later somebody from the University announced that the speech would not take place.
I was gobsmacked, and hugely disappointed. Instead of summoning the police and carting the screaming scumbags off to jail -- they gave the scumbags what they wanted and cancelled the speech. So, freedom of speech to these people meant the right for an organized minority, using fascist tactics (Mussolini's mobs used to break up speeches of their opponents just that way) to stop somebody else from speaking -- somebody who many others wanted to hear.
I was angrier at the University than the demonstrators. No doubt the demonstrators had their story to tell, but they had no right to break-up the man's speech. But I thought the University administrators were a bunch of craven jellyfish for folding and letting that mob break up the speech. What did they have a police force for?
I never did hear Professor Hoveyda speak, or see him again, but I read several of his books. He died in Virginia in his 80's (06).
Perhaps what has to happen is for the rest of the audience to start shouting “WE WANT SPEECH! WE WANT SPEECH!” But then, would the university take measures against counter-protesters?
Even remotely right-of-center judges must stop accepting invitations to speak at these schools. Watching it, I tried to think of something he could have said to that horrid woman, but there's nothing. She and the students would have LOVED to have him say anything. If he had even raised a finger and said "excuse me" she would have started crying and the students would have swarmed. What about walking out? Nope. Then their story would be "We invited him to speak, and we pleaded with him to stay, but he refused to talk to us because he was unwilling to hear any side but his own...."
Nope, the only avenue open to him was to stand there and listen to all that nonsense.
It does no good for anyone to speak at these schools or to employ their graduates. Regardless, people love to say they "spoke at Stanford" and they pay their graduates massive salaries because they have this idea that they are smart.
Nah, him pointing out at the end that the protestor's sign was upside down made it totally worth it. :) You could tell he was trying not to laugh.
Worth it?
In his place I'd find myself randomly chuckling over the upside down sign for days afterwards. That, plus the apology from the Stanford president and the law school dean, Steinbach's boss, makes it all totally worth it.
"Even remotely right-of-center judges must stop accepting invitations to speak at these schools"
Exactly the wrong answer.
This incident has been a nice PR coup for the right. Stanford was forced to issue a groveling apology and moderates were alienated by lefty thuggishness. Plus, incidents like this put pressure on red state legislatures to dismantle DEI in the universities. Florida has led the way, and several other red states are following.
None of that happens without a public record of crybully misbehavior.
Exactly! This incident actually forced the Stanford president and law school dean to apologize to Judge Duncan & take a stand for free speech. It really does make the whole drama worth it.
Ah youth. You still think an anchored right can still be ascendent politically. Read the interview with Judge Duncan. He gets it:
The elites set the tone of our society, like it or not. The law students we graduate from Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and the like are the ones who, inevitably, will be occupying the commanding heights of government, academia, big business, philanthropy, and so on. So what they think is acceptable behavior matters immensely. And if it doesn’t seem to matter as much right now, just wait five or ten years. Then they will have percolated up through the ranks and will be calling the shots. And then you will see this illiberal mindset more and more in action.
What a bizarre response on your part: I agree with every word that Judge Duncan uttered.
That's why I proposed realistic solutions to fight back against the danger of left-controlled institutions. Like many on the political right, you seem disgusted and embarrassed at the prospect of fighting back.
It's impossible to overstate the level of contempt I have for such cowardice.
Universities should add to their code of conduct for both staff and students: disruption of events like this should be grounds for expulsion or termination of employment (and tenure be damned). It really could be that simple.
They won't unless they are forced to.
State governments easily have the power to force that on state institutions and probably should.