The Truth About Giordano Bruno

According to the secular, anti-Catholic narrative he was executed for being a brilliant scientist, and the Church was, you know, anti-science.

From the National Catholic Register

By Angelo Stagnaro

Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 in the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome — but not for the reasons most people think.

Some people would have us believe that Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was executed because of his scientific beliefs. Nothing could be further from the truth. His theological opinions certainly didn’t help his case at his trial but even they didn't condemn the man. In fact, his canonical trial lasted for seven years — if not a record, it’s at least notable — so his was hardly a kangaroo court or star chamber decision. Rather, it was a thorough and methodical court case that was extremely lenient of a fractious and incalcitrant individual.

For the seven years Bruno was on the run, the Catholic Church and the Dominicans urged him to reconcile himself and yet he refused even though he had previously begged to do exactly that multiple times prior to his arrest. Bruno wasn’t tortured as part of his trial and, in fact, was treated fairly and maintained as good a standard of health as could be expected for the 17th century — otherwise he would have never withstood seven years of imprisonment. If his prison conditions were as bad as people think they were, Bruno would have lied and acceded to the court’s demands simply to escape his situation.

At best, people greatly exaggerate Bruno’s martyrdom to science. At worst, it’s completely false and an absolute lie. In reality, Bruno didn’t promote Copernicus’ scientific work. Instead, he denigrated his heliocentric model, which had already gained popularity amongst contemporary Jesuit astronomers, but not by Protestant thinkers. Bruno advocated for a Neo-Platonist Hermeticism, more akin to a gnostic mystery cult than to actual science. In his Natural Philosophy, the sun became the “Monad of Monads” around which the universe revolved. Oddly, Bruno also insisted that all suns also possessed planets that were populated by sentient creatures. But if this were true, he would have to admit that each star was its own Monad of Monads around which the entire universe also revolved, which isn’t logically consistent, let alone physically possible. Bruno isn’t a scientist but more like ore accurately portrayed as Shakespeare’s gnostic magician Prospero from The Tempest than it did the more empirically-based science of the much earlier St. Albert the Great (1193-1280) — an actual scientist.

As to Bruno being judged on his theological views, he was not only excommunicated by the Catholic Church but by the Swiss Calvinists, the German Lutherans and the English Anglicans as well. He, apparently, was generally unliked wherever he went. In modern parlance, Bruno was a “mean cuss.”

Keen insight into Bruno’s personality can be gotten from his 1584 publication entitled Cena delle ceneri (i.e., “Ash Wednesday Supper.”) When he visited Oxford University with the hope of being allowed to lecture there, he was refused. This infuriated him so much, that it prompted him to publish the above manuscript in which he attacked the Oxford professors, saying that they knew more about beer than about Greek. In reality, though Bruno had some interesting insights into Aristotle, he barely had any grasp of the pre-Socratic philosophers but his ego was bruised and thus lashed out.

Bruno later moved to Paris and made several attempts at reconciling with the Catholic Church, all of which failed because of his refusal to accept a specific, imposed condition — namely, that he should return to his order. If he truly hated the Church, why did he hope to be reconciled with it time and time again? If the Church wanted him dead, why did it welcome him back into the fold and ask him to remain a priest?

To be clear, neither the Catholic Church nor the Dominicans ever charged him with heresy. Rather, it was a peevish, superstitious secularist, Venetian patrician Giovanni Mocenigo, who hoped to learn Bruno’s “magical secrets” and who lied to the Inquisitor’s Office, accusing him of heinous things. In 1591, Bruno went to Venice at Mocenigo’s invitation in the hope that Bruno would teach him his famed mnemonic system, which he had plagiarized from Ven. Raymond Llull. When Mocenigo realized that Bruno’s incredible memory was a matter of diligent study rather than “magic,” and thinking his money would have been better spent elsewhere, he falsely denounced Mocenigo to the Venetian Inquisition.

Throughout his trials, Bruno took refuge in the principle of the “two-fold truth” or what moderns would call “talking from both sides of your mouth.” He claimed that the errors imputed to him were held by him “as a philosopher and not as an honest Christian.” This was a lie as he had already been excommunicated by every Protestant denomination, including all of the heretics thought were heretical, by the time of his arrest. Second, he made his living by specifically decrying and attacking Christians, Christianity and the Catholic Church.

Regardless of all of his previous behaviors, Bruno recanted all of his errors and doubts in the matter of Catholic doctrine and practice. This, however, attracted the attention of the Roman Inquisition which intervened and requested his extradition from Venice. In February 1593, Bruno was sent to Rome and was imprisoned for six years while his trial progressed. No one is sure why his trial lasted so inordinately long as this was highly unusual. It’s possible that the Tribunal wanted to test Bruno as to his conveniently newfound respect for the Catholic Church after having denounced it for most of the previous two decades.

In the spring of 1599, Bruno’s trial begun and was given ample time to recant his previously held beliefs. Unfortunately, he didn't even keep up the pretense of his previous lies. He was finally condemned in January 1600 and handed over to the secular authorities on Feb. 8. On Feb. 17, Bruno was burned at the stake in the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy clearly points out that Bruno wasn’t tried for his theological heresies. In fact, “in 1600 there was no official Catholic position on the Copernican system and it was certainly not a heresy. When [...] Bruno [...] was burned at the stake as a heretic, it had nothing to do with his writings in support of Copernican cosmology.” The Catholic Encyclopedia concurs. Bruno wasn’t condemned for his defense of his wild and untested and untestable astronomical opinions, nor for his doctrine of the many inhabited planets, but for his theological errors, among which were his belief that Christ wasn’t God but merely a preternaturally skillful magician, that the Holy Ghost is the soul of the world and that Satan would be saved.

Rather than being a materialist in the modern atheistic sense, Bruno would be best described as a mystical rationalist/Neo-Platonist defender of materialistic monism. In other words, he agreed more with Spinoza than Einstein.

Thus, instead of the old narrative of the Catholic Church killing Bruno for being a creative, original and independent scientist who employs his rare and precious mental faculties to tear the mask off nature and stare at the Face of God, Bruno was just a regular, run-of-the-mill misanthrope who knew nothing about science. He was a socially-maladroit metaphysician who mistook his feelings with science. In reality, the Catholic Church didn’t kill him. Bruno chose suicide-by-the-state rather than being humble enough to keep his vows as a Dominican priest.

New York Times Sympathizes With Adults Who Pursue Sex With 13-Year-Old Girls

Well, they've 'legalised' murder (abortion and 'euthanasia') and pervert marriage. Polygamy and paedophilia are neck and neck to be next.

From The Federalist

By Holly Scheer

The very last thing we need is child solicitation and rape to be normalized in any way, in any medium, in our society.

In a gross article crossing into territory any decent person would find morally abhorrent, The New York Times decided to defend so-called “victimless” child sex crimes in a lengthy apologetic for men in prison for soliciting sex with minors.

The article is a surreal read. Rather than focusing on how sex crimes devastate victims’ lives, or the efforts of organizations to halt sexual violence against children worldwide and domestically, or even focusing on the grueling work of the law enforcement agents involved in these vile crimes, the Times waxes sympathetically about the lives of three men who were arrested for soliciting sex with minors online and how it has affected their families.

The Times introduces the first not by his crime, sentence, nor any apology for his actions, but by telling about his hobbies and close relationship with his mother. The paper describes him as an avid online gamer, a “Dungeons and Dragons” dungeon master, and, in the words of his mother, “introverted, sensitive, immature, coddled, nerdy.” Jace Hambrick, at 20 years old, connected with a Craigslist ad for sex that was ultimately part of a net nanny sting.

This wasn’t the first time he had solicited sex online. Hambrick answered an ad and exchanged messages with an undercover agent posing as a 13-year-old girl. The cover identified herself multiple times as age 13, including when Hambrick asked clarifying questions about her age.

From the Times’ description, their age discussion from Hambrick’s viewpoint was as follows: “Was this an elaborate game? Again she claimed to be 13. The photo seemed to tell a different story, and the gaming chair she was seated in looked too expensive for a kid. She used slang a 13-year-old probably wouldn’t know, like ‘FTP’ — ‘[expletive] the police’ — that originated in ’80s hip-hop. The vulgarities and snide tone seemed too adult. Her texts were full of ‘lol’s. Was she an immature teenager? Or a sly adult? Her driving directions seemed too specific for 13.”

Children Are Not Potential Sex Partners — Ever

Regardless of whether you think picking up strangers on the internet for sex is a sound idea, hearing that your would-be sex partner is only 13 years old should bring the conversation to a full stop. That should be a total dealbreaker, not an opportunity to think of situations in which the person on the other side of the screen could be saying they’re 13 but are actually older, or why she might be 13 but somehow more mature, or any of this nonsense.

Driving directions were too specific? Slang that 13-year-olds might not know? What on Earth does any of that matter if there’s even a chance she is a child? These excuses are an attempt to duck and shift blame, but there are simply no situations in which adults should be considering sex with kids.

It should go without saying, but if someone says she’s a child, she is not a potential sex partner. It doesn’t matter how pretty she is, how much slang or how many pop culture references she can spit, or how many mutual interests you share. Children are not sex partners, and hooking up with them or making plans to hook up with them is criminal. No mitigating factor suddenly makes this acceptable, and attempting to normalize this by describing laws tailored to protect children as draconian is bizarre.

New York Times Bemoans Sentencing for Solicitors

The article also spends a significant amount of time complaining about the length of sentences for these internet-based solicitation crimes — wherein people take the further step of actually buying condoms and showing up to meet who they think are young children for sex — versus crimes against real children.

“The men caught in these cases can wind up serving more time than men who are convicted of sexually assaulting and raping actual children,” the Times article reads. “While there are no statistics comparing sentencing among different states in such predator stings, Washington’s criminal code has some particularly draconian provisions that result in unusually lengthy sentences.”

Another section of the article again casts the perpetrator as the victim, especially with sentencing, saying, “Unfortunately for Wright, there was no victim in his case, or in any of these cases. In Washington, a man could be caught fondling his niece and potentially qualify for an alternative sentence, but if he sends lewd texts to an undercover detective, he does not.”

As Tim Ballard, CEO of Operation Underground Railroad, an organization that rescues children from human trafficking, told me in an email in response to the Times’ article and portrayal of perpetrators:

I’m saddened to see an article like this come out that sympathizes with child predators. We are seeing a shift in society where sympathy is somehow given to these monsters who show up to rape children. The New York Times’ criticism of the Net Nanny operation having ‘no victims,’ is appalling and to that I would ask, what would have happened if it wasn’t law enforcement on the other side of that door?

…Operations like Net Nanny are successful in pulling dangerous people who are scavenging the internet for children off the streets. While the New York Times didn’t include this in their article, once perpetrators are arrested in operations like Net Nanny, oftentimes you will have past victims of theirs come forward or law enforcement is able to investigate other child assault crimes and these offenders are properly brought to justice.

Don’t Normalize Child Sex Crimes

I feel for the parents in this article. It must be devastating to watch your child be arrested, tried, and dragged through the media for attempted sex crimes against a child. I can’t imagine the stress of worrying about them in prison, especially with the reputation of how awful prison is for sex offenders. But I’m also taken aback by the idea of fighting these sentences and blaming the law enforcement officers involved, as well as organizations such as O.U.R.

It’s clear from the communications to those convicted of these crimes from the undercover agents that the potential sex partner in these situations was a child — and sometimes a very young child. Some of the net nanny setups involve hypothetical children as young as six years old. Until the men walk through the doors of the sting house and see the waiting police officers, they don’t know it’s all adults and no real children. They’re walking into situations with sex with a child in mind.

There’s no reason to create sympathetic narratives around these situations and the people snared by these online ads. Decrying the sentencing because a real child’s life wasn’t actually destroyed, just planned to be destroyed, is baffling and horrifying. The very last thing we need is child solicitation and rape to be normalized in any way, in any medium, in our society.

Left Summons Demons Of Ideological Terror

Public school teachers union endorses beheading the rich! This is a long read, but it's worth it. The Revolution is turning deadly!

From The American Conservative

By Rod Dreher

Look at this:

Silly me, I wasted an hour or so writing a post about a Christian radio host who delivered an uneventful, glancing punch to the helmet of an antifa cyclist, when oh my God, a Chicago union representing 28,000 public schoolteachers has endorsed the concept of guillotining the rich!

You know how I’ve been saying for years that these left-wingers have no idea at all what demons they are summoning up? I am screaming that into a bullhorn now. My God, think of it! We’re not talking about campus Maoist weirdoes associating themselves with public executions of the wealthy. We’re talking about public schoolteachers.

NPR published a lengthy interview with a woman who has written a book titled In Defense of Looting. I don’t want to blame NPR, exactly, for paying attention to this argument, but I do simply want to point out that here is a mainstream media outlet injecting into the mainstream a radical argument that should not be entertained. The left is talking itself into embracing and ratifying violence, anarchy, and theft.

And liberals wonder why so many people are buying guns and ammo. They wonder why some conservatives think that that Kyle Rittenhouse kid is a hero.

A reader e-mailed today to point me to a 2018 debate about political correctness. Speaking for the left was Michael Eric Dyson and Michelle Goldberg; for the right, Stephen Fry and Jordan Peterson. The reader suggested taking a look at the part in which Peterson asks the left-wing panelists how we are to know when the left goes too far. I’ve cued the two-hour video to that moment. Take a look:

Goldberg says censorship and violence. “I’m against violence, and I’m against censorship” — that’s it. No elaboration. Then she says that “there’s a lot of left-wing annoyance,” and that’s bad, but there’s nothing we can do about it, and anyway, a reasonable person cannot possibly believe that the radical left is more of a threat than the radical right. Dyson, who is black, behaves with shocking arrogance, accusing Jordan Peterson of being drunk on his own white privilege for even asking the question. “You’re a mean, mad, white man, and the viciousness is evident,” says Dyson.

Peterson responds by saying that “violence” is not enough. Everybody is against violence, but much of the the violence of the 20th century came out of certain left-wing ideas. These have to be accounted for.

It appears that neither Goldberg nor (especially) Dyson can conceive of the left going too far. This is how you get guillotines erected in front of the home of a rich man, and a Chicago teachers’ union tweeting its total “support for wherever this is headed.”

The Terror is where the first guillotines led France. The Red Terror, which took vastly more lives, was the same principle at work in the Soviet Union. The ideas that led to both Terrors — well, they’re right there in Dyson’s racist harangue, in which he refuses to answer Peterson’s perfectly legitimate and necessary question because it is posed by a white male.

I write about this stuff in Live Not By Lies. Check this passage, in which the late Sir Roger Scruton talks about how leftist ideologues cancel people:

“It’s just like ‘homophobia’ or ‘Islamophobia,’ these new thoughtcrimes,” Scruton continued. “What on earth do they mean? And then everyone can join in the throwing of electronic stones at the scapegoat and never be held to account for it, because you don’t have to prove the accusation.”

The reach of contemporary thoughtcrime expands constantly—homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, biphobia, fat-phobia, racism, ableism, and on and on—making it difficult to know when one is treading on safe ground or about to step on a land mine. Yet Scruton is right: All of these thoughtcrimes derive from “doctrines”— his word — that are familiar to all of us. These doctrines inform the ideological thrust behind the soft totalitarianism of our own time as surely as Marxist doctrines of economic class struggle did the hard totalitarianism of the Soviet era.

One imagines an entry-level worker at a Fortune 500 firm, or an untenured university lecturer, suffering through the hundredth workshop on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and doing their very best not to be suspected of dissent. In fact, I don’t have to imagine it at all. As a journalist who writes about these issues, I often hear stories from people—always white-collar professionals like academics, doctors, lawyers, engineers—who live closeted lives as religious or social conservatives.
They know that to dissent from the progressive regime in the workplace, or even to be suspected of dissent, would likely mean burning their careers at the stake.

For example, an American academic who has studied Russian communism told me about being present at the meeting in which his humanities department decided to require from job applicants a formal statement of loyalty to the ideology of diversity—even though this has nothing to do with teaching ability or scholarship.

The professor characterized this as a McCarthyite way of eliminating dissenters from the employment pool, and putting those already on staff on notice that they will be monitored for deviation from the social-justice party line.

That is a soft form of totalitarianism. Here is the same logic laid down hard: in 1918, Lenin unleashed the Red Terror, a campaign of annihilation against those who resisted Bolshevik power. Martin Latsis, head of the secret police in Ukraine, instructed his agents as follows:

Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.

Note well that an individual’s words and deeds had nothing to do with determining one’s guilt or innocence. One was presumed guilty based entirely on one’s class and social status. A revolution that began as an attempt to right historical injustices quickly became an exterminationist exercise of raw power. Communists justified the imprisonment, ruin, and even the execution of people who stood in the way of Progress as necessary to achieve historical justice over alleged exploiters of privilege.

Live Not By Lies will be published one month from today. Please pre-order it — you’re going to want to read it to understand the meaning of this moment, and start building the resistance within yourself, your family, and your community.

Michael Eric Dyson is the kind of person who would make a first-rate commissar, sending people into exile or worse for being an enemy of the people — his kind of people, that is. And Michelle Goldberg would sit there justifying it by saying that the right is so much worse. This is what we’re dealing with today. The guillotine was an instrument of mass terror. If some right-wing loons had displayed a hangman’s noose on the streets of Washington DC, it would be front page news everywhere. These leftists parade a similar instrument of ideological terror, and not only do our media not much care, but a Chicago teachers’ union endorses it.

They do not see what’s happening, our leftists and liberals. They don’t believe the left can go too far. No enemies to the left. To object to it is to admit your guilt.

Eric Zorn, a liberal columnist at the Chicago Tribune, objected to the Chicago teachers’ union tweet, and the Black Lives Matter mob harassing peaceful diners in DC, not because it’s bad, necessarily, but because it stands to help Trump. Excerpt:

Yes, like the display of a mock guillotine, it was a peaceful protest in that nothing was thrown, broken or set on fire. But it was ugly, portentous and helped to sell the narrative the GOP was peddling all week about the looming threat of “left-wing anarchy and mayhem,” as President Donald Trump put it during his convention speech Thursday night.

Yes, there’s plenty for the agitators to be agitated about. But providing B-roll for Trump reelection commercials is tactically insane.

Tactically insane. Not morally wrong — “tactically insane.” Because these incidents show the contemporary left for what it really is.

Do not be fooled.

UPDATE: Wait, so I gave NPR the benefit of the doubt about that pro-looting book, assuming that maybe they just thought it was an interesting and provocative title worth talking about. Nope. Turns out the NPR staffer who did the interview thought the book was swell because it taught her how to stop worrying and embrace the looters and rioters:

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the hand-wringing over looting and rioting, and talking with Vicky Osterweil about her new book “In Defense of Looting” for @NPRCodeSwitch was really clarifying. Take a read. https://t.co/hJRMKJlTg0

— Natalie Escobar (@_NatalieEscobar) August 27, 2020

What in the actual hell? From that interview, here’s author Vicky Osterweil:

Importantly, I think especially when it’s in the context of a Black uprising like the one we’re living through now, it also attacks the history of whiteness and white supremacy. The very basis of property in the U.S. is derived through whiteness and through Black oppression, through the history of slavery and settler domination of the country. Looting strikes at the heart of property, of whiteness and of the police. It gets to the very root of the way those three things are interconnected. And also it provides people with an imaginative sense of freedom and pleasure and helps them imagine a world that could be. And I think that’s a part of it that doesn’t really get talked about—that riots and looting are experienced as sort of joyous and liberatory.

More:

But there’s also another factor, which is anti-Blackness and contempt for poor people who want to live a better life, which looting immediately provides. One thing about looting is it freaks people out. But in terms of potential crimes that people can commit against the state, it’s basically nonviolent. You’re mass shoplifting. Most stores are insured; it’s just hurting insurance companies on some level. It’s just money. It’s just property. It’s not actually hurting any people.

There is nothing more hurtful to black people who live in riot-torn areas than riots. Riots destroy the local economies. But transgendered white person Vicky Osterweil does not care:

To say you’re attacking your own community is to say to rioters, you don’t know what you’re doing. But I disagree. I think people know. They might have worked in those shops. They might have shopped and been followed around by security guards or by the owner. You know, one of the causes of the L.A. riots was a Korean small-business owner murdering 15-year-old Latasha Harlins, who had come in to buy orange juice. And that was a family-owned, immigrant-owned business where anti-Blackness and white supremacist violence was being perpetrated.

White supremacist Korean immigrant shopkeepers who deserved to be looted. Right. This is the kind of lunatic NPR puffs. It’s almost like NPR exists to serve the interests of college-educated progressives, and that means hating anybody who isn’t a college-educated progressive and the bearers of identities of which they approve. And not only hating, but approving the destruction of those enemies’ lives. NPR, what has happened to you? You used to be liberal, and that was cool, I could swing with that; I would learn things about the world that I didn’t know. But now you’ve lost your collective mind.

Vicky Osterweil

UPDATE.2: This letter from a Texas friend:

Just to give you an idea of just how many people are buying guns and ammo.

9mm, one of the most common handgun cartridges in the world is selling out in minutes, sometimes seconds, online at prices more than double what they were last year.

This year is so bad the ammo manufacturers are not selling as many primers to consumers (thats the part at the back where the hammer hits to ignite the powder).  They are keeping these components in house to try and meet the staggering demand for completed ammo.  Doubling the normal election reloading component shortages we usually see.

You would think with all these new guns the ranges would be packed right?  Last couple I’ve been too have been quieter than normal.  If you can’t restock your ammo you won’t want to use it.

I know I’ve been moderately stocked on ammo and reloading gear, I’ve topped that off and bought a new long gun more suited to protecting the house than a pistol alone.

People are scared.  I still couldn’t say I’d vote for Trump but I really kind of hope he wins so I don’t have to deal with what comes after on the other side yet.  Although, I have a bad feeling that whoever wins the cities will burn for weeks.

I would say that people are scared in part because idiot left-wing media like NPR do things like valorize radicals, such as Vicky Osterweil, who tells NPR’s audience that looting and rioting is a positive thing.

Another reader writes:

In your most recent post, you wrote:

“You know how I’ve been saying for years that these left-wingers have no idea at all what demons they are summoning up?”

While I appreciate your desire to assume/grant the good will of the Left, I think continuing to do so may be naïve and self-defeating.

I think at least some of these Leftists know *exactly* what they are doing, and what demons they are summoning. For example, the leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union has been of the hard-core ideological Left for at least a decade. Just Google their former president, Karen Lewis. The current president, Jesse Sharkey, is a disciple of Lewis and every bit as hard left as she is.

People like Lewis, Sharkey, and Dyson know exactly what they are doing and what demons they are summoning. They *want* the demons, because they believe that *they* will be the ones controlling them. They’re wrong, of course, but, as always, they won’t find out until it’s too late.

There will be violence. And the way the Democratic-run State and its corporate collaborators in Woke Capitalism will maintain order in the future is through an American version of China’s social credit system. That’s how they will keep any resistance from forming. From Live Not By Lies:

“China is about to become something new: an AI-powered techno-totalitarian state,” writes journalist John Lanchester. “The project aims to form not only a new kind of state but a new kind of human being, one who has fully internalized the demands of the state and the completeness of its surveillance and control. That internalization is the goal: agencies of the state will never need to intervene to correct the citizen’s behavior, because the citizen has done it for them in advance.”

He is talking about Beijing’s pioneering use of artificial intelligence and other forms of digital data gathering to create a state apparatus that not only monitors all citizens constantly but also can compel them to behave in ways the state demands without ever deploying the secret police or the threat of gulags (though those exist for the recalcitrant), and without suffering the widespread poverty that was the inevitable product of old-style communism.

More:

The Chinese state is also utilizing totalitarian methods for ensuring the coming generations don’t have the imaginative capacity to fight back.

In his 2019 book, We Have Been Harmonized—China’s term for neutralizing citizens as a threat to the social and political order—veteran journalist Kai Strittmatter, who spent years in Beijing reporting for a German daily, reveals the techno-dystopia that modern China has become. He interviews a Chinese teacher who gives his name as “David,” and who despairs of his country’s future.

“People born in the 1980s and afterwards are hopelessly lost,” David says. He continues:

The brainwashing starts in nursery school. It was different for us. They called us a lost generation because schools and colleges were closed back then, and many of us were denied an education. But in reality, we were probably the lucky ones. We fell through the cracks. The brainwashing didn’t get us. Mao was dead, and everyone was desperate for China to open up, for reform, freedom.

The state’s information-control apparatus has demolished the ability of young Chinese to learn facts about their nation’s history in ways that contradict the Communist Party’s narrative. The 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, for example, has been memory-holed. This is something that we will almost certainly not have to endure in the West.

But the condition of the youth in consumerist China is more Huxley than Orwell. As the American media critic Neil Postman once said, Orwell feared a world in which people would be forbidden to read books. Huxley, by contrast, feared a world in which no one would have to ban books, because no one would want to read them in the first place. This, says David, is China today. Even though a great deal of information remains available to students, they don’t care about it.

The state does not have to forbid the people to read anything if most of them don’t want to read it in the first place. In my anecdotal experience, young Americans born after the Cold War ended in the early 1990s have no idea what totalitarianism is. They are defenseless against it. And look, now they are taught in schools from kindergarten on a progressive catechism, one that is reinforced constantly by media and pop culture. It’s coming. It’s 1943 in America.

UPDATE.3: A college prof friend e-mails to say he feels total sympathy with Eric Metaxas, re: Metaxas’s punching the antifa dude pedaling his bike towards the Metaxas party, screaming “F–K YOU! F–K TRUMP!” The friend writes that he was having dinner in suburban DC recently when a young black progressive walked by screaming racist abuse at the diners. The professor stood up to him:

I talked back to him on his level. Angry as hell. The fact that I acted impulsively tells me a lot about were we are. The strange thing is that I did not feel offended personally. If he yelled at me I would have just shrugged. It was the fact that this is now the accepted norm pushed me over the edge. His presence and behavior was an offense against everything I value. It was an affront to the thousands of years of Civilization. What’s happening now is much deeper than personal. It is an attempt to undo what we are, perpetrated by people who are nothing.

He goes on:

People who we know as gentle, balanced, educated are being pushed to the edge. Everybody is arming to teeth. It’s a powder keg waiting for its spark. Anybody can become a monster.

The left is pushing the rest of America to a Dirty Harry moment. I just heard from another Republican friend who despises Trump, and was talking herself into voting for Biden — but after this week, can’t do it. “Lawlessness in the cities” is a big one for her.

UPDATE.4: Reader Voltaire:

I am voting for Trump. I cannot stomach him and was a never Trumper, but I am fed up with the rioters and the left’s lying and sense of entitlement to destroy.

Your friend’s comment about ammo hoarding is 100% correct and is absolutely being driven by the rioting. People are very open about that.

I was extremely open to voting for any Democrat who ran against Trump. I liked guns but was not passionate about them. When the Third Precinct in Minneapolis was overrun it was as big of a shift for me mentally as was 9/11, probably bigger.

I am scared as to how we put this country back together again. We cannot become like the hard left. We need to remain decent, humane people. But by not fighting back we are letting evil spread. I just don’t know, and I don’t like who I feel myself becoming.

UPDATE.5: And here we are with dinner in Washington DC on Saturday night, with Black Lives Matter protesters winning hearts and minds through screaming and intimidation:

Elsewhere in our nation’s capital, the left is doing its best to campaign for Trump:

UPDATE.6: As I figured, Vicky Osterweil used to be a Willie. If you follow Andy Ngo on Twitter, there are a startling number of transgendered people in the police mug shots of antifa arrested in Portland:

The Catechism of the Summa - Tertia Pars - LIII. OF ETERNAL HAPPINESS (C)

(C)
May one say that the elect in heaven will be invested, as it were, with a royal dignity?

Yes, because the beatific vision unites them to God, and thus they participate in the divinity of God; and since God is the immortal King of ages, the elect participate in this sovereign royalty and its glory (XCVI. 1).

Is it then by reason of this that the blessed are said to receive a crown in heaven?

Yes, it is for this precisely (XCVI. 1).

Next - The Catechism of the Summa - Tertia Pars - LIII. OF ETERNAL HAPPINESS (D)

Who Started This Culture War?

The article is about Britain but it applies, mutatis mutandis, equally well to the US, Canada, and most of the West.

From Sp¡ked

By Tom Slater

The identitarian left stirs up cultural conflict and then blames it on everyone else.

Who started Britain’s culture war? If the commentariat is to be believed, it is all the work of the Tory government, which is pushing confected controversies over political correctness to stir the prejudices of voters and distract from more important issues.

Take the almost week-long row over Last Night of the Proms, sparked by a Sunday Times report suggesting the BBC was planning to drop jingoistic singalong favourites ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ in response to Black Lives Matter.

According to TV’s Ash Sarkar, it is ‘completely made up’. Johnson – who weighed in on the controversy on Tuesday – is merely ‘drawing attention away from… a bungled pandemic response’, and ‘nurturing a sense of grievance’ among his white, privileged base.

This row, says former chief prosecutor Nazir Afzal, was ‘deliberately timed to stop us focussing on the systemic problems we have’ in relation to race and inequality. Identitarian academic Kehinde Andrews tells CNN this is an ‘effort by right-wing media to undermine momentum from the Black Lives Matters movement’.

So it seems Johnson is at once incompetent (on Covid) and playing a blinding game of 4D culture-war chess, enlisting national newspapers to the end of ‘polarising once marginal issues’ and ‘turning them into potent symbols of the nation under threat from despotic minorities’.

Now, this ascribes to our increasingly at-drift government a level of strategic genius it really hasn’t earned. Plus the only ‘despotic minority’ being railed against is a cultural establishment determined to see imperial nostalgia and resurgent racism even in naff Proms singalongs.

But most importantly, even if you think the government is making hay out of this controversy, it didn’t conjure it out of thin air. And if the identitarian left is so keen to avoid the distraction of endless culture-war skirmishes, it should probably stop initiating so many of them.

Debate still rages around the precise facts of the Proms controversy. The BBC later announced that the songs would be performed, only without lyrics. It somewhat implausibly cited coronavirus, and singers’ spittle, as justification – even though other numbers will be sung on the night.

But you didn’t need to go far to find people in the cultural establishment who thought that ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ were indeed quasi-racist, neo-imperialist anthems, and that the current moment demanded they be reworked if not junked.

Wasfi Kani, chief executive of Grange Park Opera in Surrey, told the ST that she supported the removal of the songs. Executive producer for the BBC’s Songs of Praise memorably compared singing ‘Rule Britannia’ at the Proms to Nazis shouting about gas chambers.

Indeed, many of those saying the Proms thing is just a big bad Tory distraction, pointing out that it was never called for by Black Lives Matter or any other anti-racist group, basically agree with the idea that it is time to drop the songs from the programme.

‘No one’s banned the song, no one’s said nobody can listen to it, it’s not being burned in the Houses of Parliament’, Kehinde Andrews told CNN, only immediately to follow up: ‘Is this a song you want to sing to celebrate our public-service broadcast television? No it’s not, it’s not appropriate.’

The point here is that the woke set can’t accuse the government of fighting a cultural battle that it definitely didn’t start. Nor can they completely wash their hands of attempts at absurd cultural cleansing that they, in principle, support.

If anyone is ‘polarising once marginal issues’, it is a bourgeois left that seems oddly obsessed with cultural, historical remnants of our racist, imperialist past rather than the present; that claims to care about the more substantive issues but spends an inordinate amount of time raging against inanimate objects.

In the post-BLM battle over statues, sitcoms and now songs, those the left accuse of being right-wing culture warriors are often just reacting, often quite defensively, to the left’s own increasingly unhinged campaign of cultural cleansing and censorship.

What gets many people’s backs up about all this is not some deep respect for former slave traders or imperial nostalgia – it’s the idea, implicit in all these debates, that Britain is a foul place, with a foul history, full of foul people who need to be reminded of all this at every possible opportunity.

No doubt there are some of the right looking to make political capital out of this lunacy, and who have a tendency to respond to it with caricatured, performative patriotism. But for many people looking on aghast, this is not really political at all. In fact, it is the intrusion of politics into absolutely every area of life that irks them.

So, who started this culture war? Maybe it’s the people who have been charging around demanding that statues be toppled, speech be censored and now songs not be sung in the name of equality – rather than the people who, in the face of all this guff, dare to say ‘hang on a minute’.

Schooling the Horan of Babylon About the Rosary. Yes, It Is a Weapon!

Horan signs in to Twitter and makes an utter fool of himself, AGAIN! Father Zed points out just a few quotes to prove he has no idea what he's talking about.

From Fr Z's Blog

Look at this:

I’ll tell you what is disgusting… this twerp’s distortion of reality.

Friends, we are the Church MILITANT while we are in this earthly realm, this vale of tears.  We are like pilgrim soldiers on the march in ENEMY territory, which is under the domination of “the prince of this world”.  We are at war with the twisted spiritual powers which are arrayed against us with relentless malice.

The Horan’s fellow Franciscan St. Maximilian Kolbe founded the Militia Immaculata… ooops!… to combat enemies of the Church, such as Freemasons and just about every one at Chicago’s catholic Theological Union.  Well… had he known about CTU he would have fought it too.

Moreover, he described the Miraculous Medal as a weapon. He had the medals widely distributed, saying that it is “our weapon with which to strike hearts” and “a bullet with which a faithful soldier hits the enemy, that is evil, and thus rescues souls.”

St. John Paul II wrote in his Letter on the Rosary:

2. Numerous predecessors of mine attributed great importance to this prayer. Worthy of special note in this regard is Pope Leo XIII who on 1 September 1883 promulgated the Encyclical Supremi Apostolatus Officio a document of great worth, the first of his many statements about this prayer, in which he proposed the Rosary as an effective spiritual weapon against the evils afflicting society.

YES. The Rosary is precisely a WEAPON for our spiritual warfare.

We’ve been over this ground before with Michael Sean Winters, who is the Fishwrap’s official tricoteuse, who wrote that he wants to watch people he disagrees with die.  We been over this with Massimo “Beans” Faggioli, the incessant self-promoter whose manifest logorrhea is matched only by his uncanny ability to be wrong so often.

I created this masthead image for them.

The image I used is a fresco in the Vatican Museums.

At a Mass for the Assumption 2013, Francis told the crowds:

“Mary joins us, she fights at our side. She supports Christians in the fight against the forces of evil. Especially through prayer, through the rosary. Hear me out, the rosary… Do you pray the Rosary each day? I don’t know, are you sure? There we go!”

Archbp. Wenski:

[I]n the contemplative prayer that is the recitation of the rosary, Mary has given us a simple yet powerful weapon for the spiritual warfare that is part of our daily life in this “valley of tears.” It is not a weapon of violence or intimidation but rather one of peace and healing, for praying the rosary leads us to a more intimate relationship with Mary, the Mother of Mercy, our Life, our Sweetness, and our Hope. In a world still threatened by weapons of mass destruction, we have in the rosary — as Mary indicated to the shepherd children of Fatima — a weapon of mass conversion.

Fr. Calloway recounts

Mother Teresa passed through the airport security checkpoint, she had to endure that embarrassing procedure that is part and parcel of our troubled times: “Any weapons on your person?” Unexpectedly, the childlike yet remarkably bold sari-clad woman replied in the affirmative! She did have a weapon. She then indicated the Rosary beads dangling from her hand.

Hey…. Franciscan twerp!  Your fellow Franciscan St. Pio of Pietrelcina says:

“Love the Madonna and pray the Rosary, for her Rosary is the weapon against the evils of the world today.”

Yeah… I think I’ll go with his version, not yours.

Finally… again…

Fr. Horan… you aren’t half the woman Sr. Dede is.