“Lies! And damn Lies!” That’s what we have been drenched with for the past week or two: lie after lie, bald-faced lies, insane and patently false assertions put forth by almost the entirety of the media, assented to and propounded by nearly all our politicians (including most deer-in-the headlight “I-don’t-want-to-be-called-racist” Republicans and establishment conservatives), and now taken as dogmatic, undeniable truth that makes the claims of Infallibility by the Supreme Pontiff look like idle speculation. “Never let a crisis go to waste,” once famously said former mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emmanuel. And certainly not this one which can be trotted out to accomplish a whole host of things—advance the radical left/social justice revolution (that increasingly dominates the Democratic Party) while furthering the template of the ineradicable “first sin” of America: “systemic racism.” And, more, that can be employed to maybe, just maybe, bring down President Trump, and more importantly, bring down what he supposedly represents. Now everyone from most of the talking heads over on Fox News, the Martha MacCallums, the Brian Kilmeades, the Marc Thiessens (who recently said that the riots in DC were preventing his daughter from demonstrating peacefully against racism!), to the more exalted types on CNN, MSNBC, NBC, and in The New York Time and Washington Post, has been herded onto the reservation and you can’t get off of it without being labelled and formally damned ex cathedra as a racist or defending “white privilege.” And the list of “racist” offenses—even the most innocent and rational comments which would have never drawn the slightest demurrer two weeks ago—has grown and continues to grow exponentially, day by day, it seems. Following the Dylann Roof episode in 2105, recall it was those offending Confederate monuments: symbols of slavery and racism, squawked the social justice warriors that had to come down in the name of “equality and justice.” And their cry was echoed by the “conservative establishment” in the pages of the once-conservative National Review (e.g., Rich Lowry) and on Fox News (e.g., Victor Davis Hanson and Brian Kilmeade). Just get rid of those “monuments to slavery” and everything would be okay, we were told. We warned that destroying the symbols of our heritage was only one more step in a concerted program to disavow and dismantle our Western civilization. Removing the symbols had far more profound meaning. We were right. Now it’s the fierce frontal attacks on police and law enforcement, one more step in the ongoing revolution. Oppose defunding or abolishing police forces? Why, you’re obviously a bigot and a racist. Just consider the president of the Minneapolis, Minnesota, city council, Lisa Bender. When asked what would happen if there were no police force and someone called 9-1-1 to report an emergency and violence, she responded that asking such a question most likely implied white privilege. After all, she reiterated, fumbling with her answer, “…community trust in this existing [police] department is so low that there is an urgent need for change now…we need to dismantle this department.” Or consider what happened in upscale Cary, North Carolina, filled with rich transplanted Yankees who’ve come South to escape the high taxes and mess they made up North. They brought that mess and mentality with them. Facing fierce demonstrations in that city of 80,000, the police knelt down in obeisance bowing to the mob and proceeded in ritual fashion to wash the feet of twelve of them, a Holy Thursday mockery if there ever was one. But, then, with no backing from authority, with utter cowardice from the city fathers—who fear in their bones being called “racist”—is it any wonder that law enforcement reflects that same pusillanimous behavior? While what happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis was a tragic occurrence, what has ensued has been a virtual canonization of a man who, by all accounts, was an habitual criminal, something of a drug addict, with a long record of criminal charges. But in the frenzy to proclaim Floyd’s sainthood—the untouchable “new martyr” of a radical civil rights movement mired and based in falsehood and lies about equality—just about everyone has signed on to a fake narrative: a simple case of perhaps an excessive police action (although there has been no trial and the evidence and motivations are in dispute), but no one is allowed to dissent or raise questions, even very reasonable ones. Thus Texas Governor Greg Abbott—a “conservative” Republican—who joined the disgraceful huckster Reverend Al Sharpton in Floyd’s funeral exequies, spent time with Floyd’s family declaring that they would hopefully be a “centerpiece of helping America bridge our racial divide & ensure equality, justice & fairness in America….” But, if you read the response to Abbott’s Twitter message you will also see a response from someone who knows George Floyd’s criminal record: “[Governor Abbott] did you spend any time with the family of the pregnant woman he [Floyd] held a gun to for drugs and money?” And it took a black woman, Candace Owens, on June 4, 2020, to blow the whistle on Floyd and his dark and seamy criminal past, and to do it fearlessly while almost all white conservatives and Republicans shivered in fear in the tall grass or hoped to somehow convince the farther Left social justice mob that they, too, were fighting even more strenuously against racism in memory of the sainted George Floyd. Owen’s eighteen minute podcast was still up on Youtube the last I looked, including the account of how Floyd pointed a gun at a woman’s unborn fetus and threatened to kill them both. Here is the access link. It’s a riveting commentary. But who knows if the zealous and fanatical “woke” censors won’t take it down and ban it? (It had over six million views as of June 13, 2020.) Notice, also, in particular her precise and correct use of statistics, official government stats which even appeared in The Washington Post, which give the lie—another big one—to the rampant view that somehow the police have engaged in a “war” against blacks, in particular black males. That charge, propagated in every news outlet, from CNN to my local leftwing garbage dispenser, WRAL-TV, is now established truth: you cannot question it, you can only accept it and accede to the new religious cult that makes the frenzied Jim Jones and the Jonestown Massacre seem like child’s play. But there is very little evidence to support the assertion of never-ending racist attacks by police on innocent blacks—just ten cases documented for 2019. On June 5, Dr. Heather MacDonald, author of the book The War on Cops, appeared on Fox to discuss the narrative that there is a huge wave of police murdering unarmed black people, stating: “The irony is it is The Washington Post's own database [which] collects the statistics…[that documents] a police officer is 18 and a half times more likely to be murdered by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be murdered by a cop, or killed by a cop.” All of this, of course, is not really important to pro-demonstrators Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, Colin Powell, and General “Mad Dog” Mattis…or to ambitious anti-Southern Nikki Haley (AKA, Nimrata Randhawa), who would just love to replace Donald Trump at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue supported by a “delivered” GOP, saved from all those uncouth “deplorables” and once more back in the manicured, secure hands of the Republican/conservatives elites. So, they harshly condemn “systemic racism” or march like Romney with the “peaceful rioters” in Washington DC. Like all compromisers and cowards historically, the Romneys and others of his ilk think they can temporize and “engage” with the radicals. But the radicals have sheer and unbounded conviction on their side, while Romney is little more than a cipher for intellectual and moral decrepitude and cowardice, an embarrassing example of those who will—as all others of such praxis in history—perish just the same at the hands of the revolutionaries, despite their craven surrender. The words of Irish poet William Butler Yeats (in his poem, “The Second Coming”) come once more to mind, words written shortly after the end of the Great War, the horribly destructive conflagration of 1914-1918:
I am not at all sanguine about our prospects, about the future of the American republic. There can be NO compromise with pure evil, with the forces which openly deny Natural and Divine Positive Law, which destroy our civilization and now parade fiercely in the streets in opposition to everything held dear in Christian and Western tradition.
Our prospects look grim. Yet, we hold fast to our God-given and inherited convictions. As President Jefferson Davis said eight years after the end of the War for Southern Independence: “Truth crushed to earth is truth still and like a seed will rise again.”
1 Comment
David Smith
6/20/2020 05:40:22 am
Thank you for this, Dr. Cathey!
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AuthorBoyd D. Cathey holds a doctorate in European history from the Catholic University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain, where he was a Richard Weaver Fellow, and an MA in intellectual history from the University of Virginia (as a Jefferson Fellow). He was assistant to conservative author and philosopher the late Russell Kirk. In more recent years he served as State Registrar of the North Carolina Division of Archives and History. He has published in French, Spanish, and English, on historical subjects as well as classical music and opera. He is active in the Sons of Confederate Veterans and various historical, archival, and genealogical organizations. Archives
May 2024
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