THE TAOS TATLER.

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.]

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.

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.

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.

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.