This is for you.
Headline of the Day.
When reality intrudes on ideology.
An old adage goes a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged. That of course was a long time ago when there were still liberals with reasoning faculties. No longer. Today, modern liberals are able to skillfully juggle their ideology verses reality without the slightest stress of conflict. When confronted with an ugly truth they simply engages in diversion, never mind their being caught in a logical falsehood.
A fine example of the above is now occuring, which Professor Charles Lipson of the University of Chicago (are conservatives still allowed there?) succinctly gives us the particulars.
It was free—and meaningless—for progressive churches to post banners calling themselves “nuclear free zones” during the Reagan era. Their dwindling congregations loved it. It was free, after George Floyd‘s murder, to post woke catechism signs on your front lawn, proclaiming “In this house, we believe: Black Lives Matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal” and so on. Maybe the neighbors gave you high-fives. And for years it has been free for deep-blue cities to proclaim themselves “sanctuaries” for illegal immigrants. That’s changing now that voters want some sanctuary for themselves.
Changes like this happen when voters realize the old virtue signals actually entail serious costs—and that they will have to pay them. That is exactly what’s happening in New York City and Washington D.C. now that Texas governor Greg Abbott is sending those cities a few busloads of illegal immigrants from his state.
These progressive bastions were silent when the Biden administration flew planeloads of illegal immigrants to suburban airports in the middle of the night. TV coverage was prohibited, and the arrivals were secretly dispersed. Abbott’s buses, by contrast, arrive downtown greeted by local TV crews. Now you can hear the politicians screech.
Indeed you can, but instead of taking a good hard look at their ideologies concerning “sanctuary cities” i. e., where illegal immigrants may tread without fear, and open borders, whence they come, the leaders of these cities resort to a time-honored tactic: demanding tax payers, via the federal government, shovel more money their way to pay for a polyglot of programs, regardless their efficacy, to help cope with the myriad problems illegals bring with them.
Professor Lipson concludes,
The question now is whether those Democratic lawmakers will finally direct their wrath at the president, and whether Biden will duck and cover or respond with more effective policies. The costs are rising, the political damage is intensifying, and Greg Abbott keeps trying to get their attention.
This writer believes Lipson’s question has already been answered. The leaders of Democrat cities have had decades to glean the results of their ideologies. Few, if any, have have had a change of heart or brain. Despite their cities crumbling before their eyes, they continue clinging to and spouting the usual dogmas of liberalism. They did not learn a thing nearly half-a-century ago from the lessons of the southern Bronx viz rent-control
and it is unlikely they will learn anything today allowing illegals, bringing crime, gangs, and drugs, into their cities. If our Democrat-liberals continue on their present course of policide, this writer thinks it not unreasonable to suggest whole cities controlled by them will eventually end up looking like the above or even the city below in 1945.
There, There, Mother. Congress is Going to Make Everything All Right.
Remember, when it comes to climate change, it’s the science.
Nancy Pelosi, on the $369 billion climate change bill just passed by Congress: “Mother Earth gets angry from time to time, & this legislation will help us address all of that.”
One of the ways Pelosi and Congress intend mollifying our infuriated Earth Mother is by providing a $7500 tax credit to the upper-class (they’re the only ones who can afford the things) buying new electric cars and, in a touching display of compassion for the poorish, a $4000 credit to the upper-middle class buying used ones.
You see, everyone knows electric cars are “clean,” producing no hydrocarbons when in use. The same goes for electricity itself, but only when generated by nuclear power of course–oh wait . . . Ah well, there’s always natural gas, vastly cleaner-burning than oil or coal–oh wait . . .
Perhaps this clean car will calm our Earth Mother down.
Unfortunately, the energy production method required keeping clean cars like the above powered is considered by environentalists far and away the dirtiest of them all, thus the most despised of them all.
Our Sinking Institutions.
Has the Atlantic Monthly hit bottom, or is there still a way to go?
A peculiar thing about the radical left: the more of our institutions they subsume, the angrier they get, and the angrier they get, the more incoherent and irrational they become. A case in point is a piece that just appeared in the dreary pages of the once respected and august Atlantic Monthly, bearing the provactive headline: How Extremist Gun Culture Is Trying to Co-Opt the Rosary. In case that isn’t enough to grab the reader’s attention, a subheading then asks (rhetorically, you might suppose, but guess again): Why are sacramental beads suddenly showing up next to AR-15s online?
The author is one Daniel Panneton, who, the Atlantic’s blurb states, is a “writer based in Toronto, Canada,” no other credentials given. His essay certainly starts off with a bang (if you’ll pardon the expression).
Just as the AR-15 rifle has become a sacred object for Christian nationalists in general, the rosary has acquired a militaristic meaning for radical-traditional (or “rad trad”) Catholics. On this extremist fringe, rosary beads have been woven into a conspiratorial politics and absolutist gun culture. These armed radical traditionalists have taken up a spiritual notion that the rosary can be a weapon in the fight against evil and turned it into something dangerously literal.
Gee whiz! That’s quite a mouthful, but hold on. Mr Panneton is only getting started.
Their social-media pages are saturated with images of rosaries draped over firearms, warriors in prayer, Deus Vult (“God wills it”) crusader memes, and exhortations for men to rise up and become Church Militants.Influencers on platforms such as Instagram share posts referencing “everyday carry” and “gat check” (gat is slang for “firearm”) that include soldiers’ “battle beads,” handguns, and assault rifles. One artist posts illustrations of his favorite Catholic saints, clergy, and influencers toting AR-15-style rifles labeled sanctum rosarium alongside violently homophobic screeds that are celebrated by social-media accounts with thousands of followers.
Wow and gee whiz! Wouldn’t you, just for curiosity’s sake, like to catch a glimpse of a few of those images “saturating” social media pages? Sadly, you cannot. Mr Panneton chooses not to provide a single link, reference, or name that might assist ghouls like Bickerstaff to feast theirs eyes upon the gruesome images. Strange, that, but perhaps he does so out of concern for the faint of heart or the fairer sex. And speaking of the fairer sex, note this oddly worded claim.
Many radical-traditional Catholic men maintain the hard-line position that other forms of Christianity are heretical, and hold that Catholics alone adhere to the one true Church.
Really, Mr Panneton, only the men? Speaking as a so-called “radical-traditionalist” (a pejorative, by the way, used only by such progressive Catholic organs as Commonweal or National Catholic Reporter), Bickerstaff knows plenty of women who maintain that “hard-line” position. Perhaps you regard them as being of the weaker sex and don’t consider them a threat?
On and on this silly rant goes, jam-packed with accusations with little documentation to support them, only links to pieces in a litany of leftist publications expressing the exact same opinions as Mr Panneton’s, but dating before his regurgitating them in the Atlantic.
…
How sad the Atlantic Monthly, a 165 year-old American journal that’s so much a part of this country’s history, whose contributors in the past included, picking a few at random, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe, has sunken to the point where it publishes such insubstantial fluff submitted by lightweights like Daniel Panneton.
Traduttore Traditore.
—19th-Century Tuscan proverb.
The translation of the headline, ironically enough, is: “Translator, traitor,” the gist of it being no translation is completely faithful to the text of the original. Of course, there are exceptions to that, as in the case below, where the translation is far more faithful than the speaker might have prefered.
Noted with Satisfaction: The Late, Great American Anglo.
A tribute to a vanished (or vanquished?) species.
Martha Christoph writing in Taki’s Magazine:
Oh, WASP, whither goest thy sting? What happened to the ice blue bloodlines you once kept so sangfroided? The consciousness of class you kept so well bonded? Whither the intolerance, the discipline, the frugality that knew luxury and the luxury that rejected ostentation? Genteel hypocrisies more than compensated for by the patrician sense of public service? How I loathe the persistent conviction I have that the principles that made this country great are now those at the very root of its decline: liberty, individualism, self-invention, the spirit of innovation, the practice of benevolent acceptance, your tired/your poor, etc., etc. In reflecting upon this decline, my conclusion is that such subversion, such a perversion of ideals, has come about by way of cultural erosion, specifically that belonging wholly and totally to the Anglo-American tradition. Let’s be honest. When we wail about “the America we’ve lost,” what we mean is the country that was predominantly Anglo-Saxon in foundation, structure, tone, and tint such that hardworking continental degenerates like my own family would be able to flourish in its soil, and if not “easily” then certainly to a far greater extent than anywhere else. I am convinced that the quiet desperation that is overwhelming the rational portion of this country’s population is not, at the source, political, economic, or ideological in nature, but cultural: that of closet Anglophiles longing for the Anglotopia of a dimming Anglomondo that once burned brazenly and beautifully
This at once a sad and witty piece, written from the perspective of an outsider looking in, is well worth reading in full.
The author however does make one error of omission, the large part the now enfeebled and nearly-late Episcopal Church played in this vanished world, that in many ways was the glue holding Anglo society together, but that is understandable; it must be difficult if you weren’t there to believe, once upon a time, those exquisite and stately gothic edifices dotting the best neighborhoods in this country were once filled to overflowing Sunday mornings.
It’s a chicken-or the-egg puzzler, which came first, the decline of the Episcopal Church or WASP society. It seems probable to Bickerstaff though, as the Episcopal Church became increasingly enslaved to secular humanism (now complete, save for a few outlier parishes), its patrician members, sitting through week after week of leftist harangues from young radicals in the pulpit, while at the same time the gospel, forgiveness and salvation were de-emphasized, began to stay home Sunday mornings and eventually quit the Church altogether, taking their children and money with them.
With the Episcopal Church becoming unglued, it doesn’t require a great stretch to believe Anglo-American society itself became unglued. From there, as the patrician song writer put it so ably years earlier, with bold prophecy,
The world has gone mad today
And good’s bad today,
And black’s white today,
And day’s night today,
And that gent today
You gave a cent today
Once had several chateaux.When folks who still can ride in jitneys
Find out Vanderbilts and Whitneys
Lack baby clo’es,
Anything goes.
[This post has been deleted.]
Requiescant in Inferno.
Disney continues its long disastrous slide to the bottom and below.
It is an odd thing watching a slow motion suicide while at the same time the soon-to-be corpse offers it up as entertainment, but that is what the Disney Corporation is doing with its increasing embrace of wokeness. RedState blogger Alex Parker gives us the latest in this inch-by-inch self-annihilation.
For a very long time, Disney films were Rated-(Golly)G promotions of America’s most conservative values. But times have changed, and the company has kept up. In fact, it may have run substantially ahead.
Apropos of evolution, a cast addition to an upcoming Marvel series has been announced.
As reported by EOnline, “Shea Couleé is bringing her charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent to [Disney’s] Marvel Cinematic Universe.”
For benighted souls like Bickerstaff, ignorant of the likes of Shea Couleé, Mr Parker helpfully provides a short selection of clips by this creature, soon to be a member of Disney’s repertory company providing amusement for the under-twelve set.
What puzzles your Tatler is why the once immensely profitable Disney Corp. (whose founder was a family friend) is following this curious path, which has so far yielded horrendous results, especially in its share prices. Also puzzling is though there is plenty of carping by shareholders directed at Disney chairman Bob Chapek and his corporate colleagues over their unprofitable obsession with wokeness, no major shareholder actions appear to have been taken against them, though to this writer they are violating their fiduciary responsibilities for a publicly held company. Is the suffocating miasma of wokeness snuffing out Disney shareholders’s inclination to exercise their rights?
Thanks to FWIW.
One Might Well be Excused Thinking the Democrats are Getting Desperate.
From Just the News:
President Donald Trump on Monday evening issued a statement saying that FBI agents had raided his Florida estate in Mar a Lago, describing his home as being ‘under siege.’
Such an assault could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries,’ he lamented. ‘Sadly America has now become one of those Countries, corrupt at a level not seen before. They even broke into my safe!’
‘What is the difference between this and Watergate, where operatives broke into the Democrat National Committee?” Trump queried. “Here, in reverse, Democrats broke into the home of the 45th President of the United States.’
Your servant Bickerstaff has long considered Richard Nixon the most hated politician ever by the left, a hatred going back long before the Watergate scandal to the early 1950s, when he ran for Congress against the left-winger Helen Gahagan Douglas, an actress-turned-politician (perfectly acceptable to the left because unlike Ronald Reagan later on, she was one of theirs). Nixon savaged her for being soft on communism (“pink down to her underwear,” he was alleged to have said), which of course she was, amply documented. The lefties despised Nixon for this, not because it was untrue, but because it was.
Now, Donald Trump is indisputably the most hated politician by the media, left, Hollywood et al. Nixon, though a good man, was not the most endearing of politicians, decidedly ill at ease when speaking before the public and appearing as if he would rather be somewhere else. Not even Trump’s severest critics would accuse him of that, thus he terrifies them. That terror translates into hatred of the man, obvious when witnessing the degree of over-the-top, foaming-at-the mouth condemnations of him.
This latest stunt by the FBI, raiding Trump’s home at the instigation of the Democrats, takes the latter’s hatred of him to a new level and strikes your Tatler as not just ill-thought-out, but irrational. Whatever incriminating evidence they purport to be searching for, whether it exists or not, will be “found,” which could lead to Trump’s indictment, arrest, handcuffing, mugshot and possibly even jail–the lefty wet dream.
To what end, though, this unprecedented action? Do Trump’s haters really think he can be intimidated? Most of us who live or lived in New York in the mid-eighties know otherwise, when he first appeared on the scene railing against Mayor Koch’s administration over the expensive and bungled attempt renovating the Wollmann Skating Rink in Central Park.
Trump made an offer to take on the project himself, which was vehemently objected to by the usual suspects, who already despised the brash young man, and only grudgingly agreed to upon realizing the City simply wasn’t up to the job. He was and got it done successfully, well ahead of schedule and way under budget. For this he received no thanks, but clearly couldn’t have cared less.
So no, most Trump haters know he cannot be intimidated, but seem to believe his supporters can be. Not so. Most of them can hardly be described as shrinking violets and they have watched with increasing rage the phony-baloney Congressional hearings on the 6 January riots. The raid of Trump’s home could well push many of them over the edge, possibly leading to violence and possibly even civil war.
If the Democrats really wants this, and it sure appears at least some do, they ought to know they won’t stand a chance against the angry dissidents. While the elites may own the upper echelons of our armed forces these days, they assuredly do not own the troops, well trained in weaponry, who could quite possibly side with the opposition.
May God save the United States of America.
The President’s Press Secretary Weighs In on the Overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Apparently, according to Karine Jean-Pierre, it was unconstitutional.
From day one, when, uh, when the Supreme Court made this extreme decision, uh, to take away, uh, uh, a constitutional right, uh, it was an unconstitul — unconstitutional action by them, a right that was around for almost fifty years, a right that women had to make a decision on their bodies, and how they wanna start their families . . .
And there you have it.
THE TAOS TATLER. 