THE TAOS TATLER.

Never knighted by the King of England, but knighted just the same.

Interesting piece in Columbia Magazine, the organ of the Knights of Columbus, in which your Tatler learns G. K. Chesterton, while on a tour of the US in 1921, gave a lecture at Yale, which one might expect, but later, and somewhat surprising to this writer, also

became acquainted with another New Haven institution as well. He met with local Knights of Columbus, led by Edward P. O’Meara, a past Grand Knight of San Salvador Council 1, and received a gift from them — a gift he so treasured that he chose to have it with him when he entered the Catholic Church the following year, in July 1922.

Chesterton, though nominally still C of E at the time, was obviously well advanced in his swim across the Tiber. O’Meara, a prominent lawyer and judge “presented Chesterton with unusual ‘snakewood’ walking stick on behalf of the Knights of Columbus.”

Chesterton was delighted with the gift, preferring it even to the one he already carried, which he had with him on an earlier tour of the Holy Land. As the article’s author, Dale Ahlquist–himself a convert, as well your Tatler–writes, Chesterton

valued the stick from the Knights of Columbus ‘even more’ than the first — ‘and I wish I could think that their chivalric title allowed me to regard it as a sword.’

A year later, Father John O’Connor, who received his close friend Chesterton into the Holy Catholic Church. In a letter to an American shortly afterward he wrote:

It is sure to interest my beloved Yanks to know that when we were setting out for the mission chapel on the morning of July 30th, G.K.C. selected with much more care than usual the beautiful snakewood stick that was given to him by Knights of Columbus on his recent visit to the United States. So fortified he walked even unto the City on the Hill.

Ahlquist nicely closes his piece thus:

Never knighted by the king of England, Chesterton was knighted by Pope Pius XI in 1934 when the Holy Father named him a member of the Order of St. Gregory the Great. But in a symbolic way, he had already been knighted by the Knights of Columbus years before, when Edward O’Meara gave him the snakewood walking stick that he regarded as a sword.

A new direction for our Vice President.

This time, for the first time, our Vice President departs from the relatively free and easy form of free verse and tries her hand at the tight and disciplined strictures of pentameter (sort of, if you kinda squint your eyes). In your humble correspondent Bickerstaff’s opinion, she succeeds magnificently.

Note to readers: Your Tatler has taken the liberty of making a tiny insertion for scansion’s sake [bracketed] at the close of Ms Harris’s noble sestet. He prays it will it will not detract from it.

While we send our prayers, and our love,

We also, with each day, renew our com-

Mitment to the urgency of now

And the ability that we have collectively,

All of us in it together, to

Do something about it [la-di-da].

Bickerstaff is not a fan of soccer, which he regards as one of the sillier sports, where players are pointlessly (often in both senses of the word) prohibited from using their God-given upper limbs while in play.

Nevertheless, congratulations are in order to England’s Lionesses, a women’s soccer team (if you’ll pardon the double negative) that has just triumphed at Wembley, bringing home the Euros final victory to England for the first time in decades. Even HM the Queen was moved to issue a gracious (is she capable of anything else?) statement sharing her great pleasure at the outcome and offering her own congratulations.

Even more remarkable in this day and age to your humble correspondent Bickerstaff, to the best of his knowledge the Lionesses achieved their splendid victory without benefit of players with, or formerly with, penises. Good show, ladies.

Lee Smith in The Tablet writes the continuing horrors being revealed from Hunter Biden’s laptop are far more damning to the security apparatus of this country than to the two-bit player and slime bucket himself. It seems every national security agency, as well as most major media, have been aware of the corrupt international undertakings by the younger Biden and his well-connected cronies, doing everything in their power to deflect them by dismissing all as “Russian Disinformation.”

Smith writes:

The U.S. spy chiefs . . . including John Brennan, Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, and James Clapper—had directed America’s foreign intelligence services while Biden was vice president and before that chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. They knew what his son Hunter was doing abroad, because it was their job to know what foreign services know about leading U.S. officials and their families, and how it might affect U.S. national security.

But none of these powerful and experienced men, presumably dedicated to defending the national interest, lifted a finger to stop Hunter Biden—and really, how could they? He was Joe Biden’s son, after all. And by doing nothing about him, the pillars of America’s intelligence community became the curators of the Biden family’s scandal.

Here your Tatler must take exception to Smith. “[T]hese powerful and experienced men, presumably dedicated to defending the national interest” could certainly have stopped Hunter Biden but that would have required putting self-interests aside, which is to say their careers, well-being, and possibly lives. Sadly, virtues like that are increasingly rare in this country, especially in most of those coming out of our most distinguished colleges and universities, where moral-relativism (a euphemism for cowardliness) holds sway. But that is a minor quibble.

Smith is spot on when he points out it was only when Donald Trump, unlike the entire DC establishment and mainstream media,

[S]tarted asking questions in 2019 about Hunter and his father, prompted by Joe Biden’s public comments about protecting Hunter’s business associates abroad, it became clear that the only way to contain the mushrooming scandal involving key U.S. interests in Ukraine and China—a scandal whose magnitude they had known about for a decade—was to provide the former vice president with all the resources the U.S. government could muster. And that helped make him president.

Thus the coverups and lies will continue at least until the upcoming fall election or, more likely, the 2024 presidential election, but only possible with the happily decreasing chances of Biden or some other Democrat winning.

Which raises a question for all those Trump haters on the right: Donald Trump was the only major political figure to make a stink against the sleazy doings of Hunter Biden and Company, possibly even including his old man (though the latter is so far non compos mentis he’ll probably get a pass). Is there any other political figure out there who has the guts and stamina to call out the Washington establishment over their failures when it comes to the Biden corruption machine?

There are some who will point to the Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, a figure much admired by this writer and who no doubt has a brilliant future in politics. “Politics” however is his bugaboo. DeSantis has never to this writer’s knowledged had a job outside of Government, if the military is included. To the contrary, for which he was much criticized, Donald Trump had zero government experience until he landed the highest position of all in American politics.

Instead, Trump made his career in one of the roughest and nastiest businesses there is, New York real estate and succeeded brilliantly, despite having to compete with such charming players as the Fisher Brothers, the Macks, and the Milsteins. Yes, Trump is as vulgar as they come, loud, brash, mannerless, and often tasteless,

but he also is utterly fearless, loves his country with a passion and is the only person in this writer’s opinion who can take on and bring down the rank beast that is the Biden Administration, along with all its foul cohorts.

Though however disagreeable that scent is to some, it is perfume to others.

From the Epoch Times:

The Biden administration is set to close four wide gaps in the U.S.-Mexico border wall in an open area of southern Arizona near Yuma, to ‘address operational impacts’ and ‘immediate life and safety risks.’

The four gaps are within an incomplete border barrier project—the former Yuma 6 project area near the Morelos Dam, according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The area has become one of the busiest corridors for illegal crossings.

Halting construction of the border wall was one of our president’s many day-one “spite” commands, i.e., “if Trump is for it, I’m against it,” thus providing valuable insights at the time to Biden’s rational faculties. While there has been noising from the Administration from time to time that, as illegals continue to pour over our border, work may resume on the wall, little has. The President’s staffers are obviously adherents to the Cloward-Piven Strategy regarding illegal immigration.

Now, however, with Democrats bracing for catastrophe this November and complaints coming in from the party’s own about the increasing flood of illegals arriving in their bluest of cities, the Biden’s administration has been forced to act. Work will resume on the border wall, to the extent at least of filling in a few gaps where the number of crossings is particularly burdensome.

Here’s a prediction, though. Whereas wall construction during the Trump Administration proceeded rapidly, as much as a mile a day, we will be lucky if only a few hundred feet, if that, are completed by the upcoming election, just enough for Biden and his puppeteers to brag they are doing something about our open borders. Yet even if the election results for the Democrats are as disastrous as pollsters predict, count on work on the border wall once again ceasing, only to resume in 2024. Millions upon millions of illegal immigrants flooding into this country and somehow permitting them to vote is about the only hope remaining for the left.

Statuae delendae sunt.

Published back in 2017 in Crises, the author essays the then nascent trend, now in full swing, of the liberal [sic]-left  expunging those parts the American legacy they find “problematic,” which seems to be most of it. While the scope of whitewashing (to pardon the expression) is vast, pulling down, knocking down or blowing up statues of personages deemed offensive is a particular favorite, going back to the dawn of civilization and otherwise. Fr. Rutler takes a stroll down Damnatio Memoriae Lane, as it were, surveying personages once enjoying public esteem, losing it and the consequential destruction by iconoclasts of their representations.

Some excerpts:

Protestant iconoclasts did much damage to art in the sixteenth century, and Puritans did worse in the Cromwellian period like a battalion of post-Vatican II liturgists, smashing some of the world’s most glorious windows, and leaving the cathedrals pockmarked with their contempt. The Eleanor Cross erected in London in the thirteenth century and destroyed in 1647, had its second restoration in 2010—but at considerable cost. Not content with beheading their own king, French revolutionaries decapitated the twenty-eight stone kings of Judah on the west façade of the cathedral of Notre Dame.

***

There are some historical figures who made big mistakes because they also took big risks. [Theodore] Roosevelt grinned as he said in Paris at the Sorbonne in 1910: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds…” But in recent times, dilettantes who have never ventured into the arena actually want to pull down the statue of Teddy in front of the Museum of National History. [This has now been done–ed.]

***

The vandalism by those who would plant themselves on moral pedestals is highly selective. There have been no protests about a statue of Lenin on La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles, or one on Norfolk Street in Seattle, or one on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, notwithstanding the more than 60 million humans whose deaths he engineered, and the pall of misery with which he blanketed much of the world. As for race, there are untouched statues of Margaret Sanger whose eugenic symbiosis with the National Socialists set in motion the annihilation of millions of African-American babies.

From Fox News:

Twitter blows up over Kamala Harris introducing herself with ‘she/her’ pronouns, description of her clothing.

Admirable as our Vice President’s strivings for inclusivity, diversity and equity, ensuring safe spaces for all in the aftermath of the overturning of Roe v. Wade and its effects on the disabled are, she nonetheless in a speech given at a conference recently exercised serious misjudgment by failing to recognize the implicit bias against the differently-visioned when describing the gender-based item of clothing she habited in terms of its specific color identity, blue.

By doing so Vice President Harris committed micro-aggressions and violence against those who do not engage in color-specificationizing regarding their visionally characteristic behavioral paradigms, a class who suffer under the yoke of their neo-colonialistic, opprobriumatically and obviously neo-slavistic oppressors: the visionally-privileged, who further their suppression and victimization of this class by the employment of the cruel hate word in their description of them, colorblind.

Such insensitivity, for shame! Not presidential material.

From Not the Bee.

More at the link if you must.

–h/t FWIW.

They’ll stop only when stopped.

The Wokes’s campaign to ruin childhood scored a short-lived conquest last week when Crayola, the crayon maker whose customer base is mainly kids aged two to ten, decided it would be just ducky to use the creature seen above in a PR campaign on social media. According to TheBlaze, Crayola

. . . shared images of a transgender model on its social media accounts. Crayola promoted Julian Gavino AKA The Disabled Hippie, on the crayon company’s Facebook and Instagram pages to celebrate ‘Disability Pride Month.’

‘Julian Gavino, (he/him) a fashion model, writer, and activist who identifies as a transgender man,’ Crayola wrote. ‘He was born with a progressive neurological condition. Julian is passionate about advocating for his respective communities. As someone who grew up not seeing anyone who looked like him in the media, Julian is determined to normalize disabled and trans bodies in the fashion world.’

[snip]

Crayola posted three images of Gavino, including one where he is wearing a leopard-print jumpsuit and another with a lime green jacket with a chain bra as well as latex pants and high-heeled boots.

With all the good will in the world for the physically disabled, your correspondent Bickerstaff wonders how someone high up in the Hallmark Company, the sole owner of the Crayola, which in addition to greeting cards is a major producer of movies stressing family values, okayed this project. Did anyone involved in it stop and ask, even fleetingly, is it appropriate to pitch to those in their single digits, “(he/him) a fashion model, writer, and activist who identifies as a transgender man” who’s goal is to “normalize trans bodies?”

The answer is likely yes. Probably even more than a few at the company questioned the wisdom of the project, but kept it to themselves lest they face the wrath and retribution from pagan clerics in Hallmark’s Diversity and Inclusion Department (or whatever it’s called), departments that are now de rigueur at all US corporations.

Fear is the engine of the Wokes. Even though they consist only a tiny segment of our society, because they have most media, social and traditional, in the palms of their hands they usually get their way. They have the power to wreak holy hell on dissenters and cow them into submission.

Happily, though, this particular scheme of the Wokes seems to have fizzled, for they failed, as they usually do, to consider the opinions of a group that vastly outnumbers them, the public at large. Reactions to Crayola’s campaign were swift and furious, no doubt because it was clearly aimed at children. A flood of negative comments rained in, many calling for boycotts of Crayola, and the commenters did not mince words. Via TheBlaze, a sampling follows.

Stop! Children need to be protected from this! It is sad when I want to go against the school supply suggestions and NOT buy Crayola. Get off the woke bus. Go woke, go broke.”

Kids don’t need to be taught about sexual preference or changing genders while trying to color.

I guess I’ll be switching the brand of crayons I buy for my children.

Stick to crayons.

And this one must have stung.

Our kids don’t need to be pushed through media and this is messed up. I support LGBTQ but I don’t support pushing our children in these ways. JUST LET THEM BE KIDS!

It now appears all of Crayola’s ill-conceived social media postings have been pulled. No doubt its creators are licking their wounds, but be assured, they’ll be back. For it is the goal of the left and has been for years to force the young into adolescence quicky as possible and to keep them there long as possible, which explains the behavior of so many in the colleges, media and, increasingly, corporations.

We should remember though, the good and decent still outnumber by far those emotionally stunted and superannuated teens. In time, the former will become sufficiently fed up with the destructive behavior of the latter and put a stop to it. It won’t be pretty, possibly violent, but will happen.

Also, did he throw his plate on the floor?

How long will those horrid chuckling reporters keep the pathetic charade going?

—Thanks to FWIW.