Coronavirus: Is Ancient Rome's Warning Pertinent?

Kyle Harper claims that the ancient Roman world's Antonine Plague has an urgent warning for us in the Coronavirus age (February 15/17). The same could be said of the Middle Ages' Black Death (aka the Great Plague) and, more recently, of the Spanish Flu of 1918.

On the other hand, the only message from the pandemics of 2009, 2002, 1968, and 1957 — when no measures were taken and the virus vanished when (and because) the populations gained immunity — would be quite different: Do not overreact. In fact, do not act at all.

While the "vicious pestilence … killed as many as 2,000 Romans a day," I do not believe there is any city in any country of the world in the 2020s where the streets are filled with (rotting?) corpses and with ill and disfigured people collapsing on the sidewalk as they cough up black vomit. 

In fact, we are regularly told that the average age of the the dead is something between 75 and 82, depending on the country, with most of those occurring in nursing homes amongst seniors already suffering from other illnesses.

As can be confirmed by the likes of Tom Hanks, Madonna, Greta Thunberg, Prince Charles, Emmanuel Macron, and Donald Trump, the vast majority of infected are back on their feet after a week or two, if not less (in Boris Johnson's case, after a stay at the hospital).

In that case, I don't see the need for cafés, restaurants, and stores to remain closed, for absurd lockdowns to continue, or for our leaders to otherwise continue in their fixation for destroying jobs and careers as well as the entire economy.

Since the mass hysteria has been partly due to the desire to wreck the West's economies in order to ensure Trump's defeat in the November elections (see Governor Andrew Cuomo's recent remarks) — is that a conspiracy theory? also: doesn't that theoretically make the critics of Trump as bad as, if not even worse than, Trump himself? — I see no reason for the blue states and for the rest of the world's nations not to emulate, say, Florida and re-open up their economies.? By all means, continue to provide help for the elderly and let the infected self-quarantine. The VIPs mentioned above were able to do so, all on their own, so maybe there is a lesson here as well: the common citizen is an adult citizen sensible enough to be expected to act responsibly in the matter.

In short: Offer the elderly, and those with weak immune systems, quarantine, and break the chains of the rest of the population.

• Related: Here Are the 7 Basic Points about Covid-19 that You Need to Know

• Also (thanks to Damian): Let's Review 50 Years of Dire Climate Forecasts and What Actually Happened

Incidentally, the bio of the writer reads as follows:

Dr. Harper is a classics professor whose research analyzes the ancient Roman world and how it was affected by disease, climate change, slavery and other cultural and societal developments.

Affected by "Climate change"?! As in global warming? And as in the new ice age? And that, in which era? In… "the ancient Roman world"?!

So now we have climate change, global warming, and/or the new ice age around the birth of Christ? And, presumably, in all eras throughout human history?! Count on a bio to unearth an admission that the greens' entire mass hysteria has little to nothing to do with man-made emissions of the 20th century — unless, of course, you are speaking about the Tenth Legion's legendary SUVs and the Emperor Nero's notorious orgies in his Gulfstream jet.

Spot the Difference! Republicans "Pounce" While Democrats "See an Opening"

Although the modern journalism rule is that in a scandal involving a deplorable Republican, the scandal is the story, while in a scandal involving a Democrat, the "ferocious" Republicans' drooling, evil, and over-the-top reaction is the story*, sometimes you can't get around it:  a news story demands the Democrats' reaction to an event. 

So, how do you go about doing that? Count on the New York Times to provide an answer: 

Title: "Democrats See an Opening" (in G.O.P. Oversight of Texas Grid); 

Subtitle: As the state reels from power outages, "Democrats look to turn the tables" on the Republicans who dominate state government. 

Quite a different description of the reaction to events, n'est-ce pas? So… civilized! Meanwhile, the very first sentence in the Texas report by David Montgomery, Simon Romero and James Dobbins reverts in a flash to the dirty, unfair, and violent idea of "pouncing" and unsportsmanship when describing the GOP: 

 … the Republicans who have run Texas state government for years, trying to undermine the Democrats who lead the state’s largest cities has been a blood sport for years.

In an October article on a similar subject, The Economist used the word "outlandish" and the verb "scheming" for the GOP, while again suggesting underhanded tactics. And take a look at the violence and the hatred in Luca D'Urbino's cartoon. 

The Economist's subject matter is called, without further inquiry, "Voter suppression" (sic) and the concluding sentence is "Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas … has been [trying] his darndest to prevent opponents from voting."

At risk of losing Texas, Republicans scheme to limit Democratic votes

The state is becoming younger and less white. It is not outlandish to imagine that Republicans would try to keep turnout low

*Republicans Pounce Dept. — Instapundit quotes Jim Treacher on "ferocious" Republicans pouncing, leaping, slamming, seizing, launching brutal attacks, etc, etc, etc:

“When Republicans screw up, that’s the story.
When Democrats screw up, the Republicans’ reaction is the story.”

Trump a Dunce? Well, Does This "4-year-old" Deserve a Nobel Peace Prize? Let Alone 4 or 5?

The next time you are told that Donald Trump is a dunce, a halfwit, an ignoramus, a hater, a racist, or a white supremacist, or that he has the mentality of a 4-year-old (that's how leftists conveniently get around using the un-PC word "retard"), ask them the following question: 

Does this president with the alleged mentality of a 4-year-old deserve a Nobel Peace Prize? Let alone four? Or five?

Chances being their making round eyes and going "ehhh?!" (WTF?!), since they probably have no idea what you are talking about, add as follows:

No, we're not talking about Trump's followers (they probably would never dream of nominating anybody they admire for some kind, for any kind, of European award), we are talking about the Swedes and the Norwegians, notably the members of their respective legislatures and the Nobel Committee, members of whom did just that — somewhat reluctantly, for that matter, in some cases — in the Fall of 2020.

For years, for decades, for half a century, we have been told, we ourselves have been saying (repeating mindlessly?), that what is necessary for peace in the Middle East is for Israel to come to recognize, or to come to some sort of understanding with, the Palestinians.

Nobody, but nobody, ever said during those tumultuous decades that what is necessary to solve the problems in the Middle East, is for Jerusalem/Tel Aviv to sign a peace treaty with… Bahrain (!).

But the dealmaker did just that. While getting Serbia to sign a peace treaty with Kosovo, the president managed to get the Israeli government to sign peace treaties with Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates (the Abraham Accords), Sudan, and Morocco. (For the record, Trump was first nominated for the Nobel Prize in 2018, after his summit with North Korea's Kim Jung Un.)

I hate to tell you this, but what does this tell us? What conclusions can we reach from this?

Four things; 1) Far from being a halfwit neanderthal, Donald Trump seems to be someone who uses his brains and even — imagine that — someone who thinks outside the box (probably has to do with his coming from the business world).

2) In that perspective, and apparently keeping an open mind, President Trump discovered that, in fact, Israel is not thought of as the Arab world's or the Muslim world's primary enemy (or perhaps not even an enemy at all?).

Iran is.

3) What do the Arabs and/or the Muslims really think of the Palestinians? They seem to be fed up with them and with their negative attitude.

4) Finally, the people who do not use their minds and who never think outside the box are revealed to be the professional politicians and the mainstream media — mindlessly repeating platitudes. For years. For decades. For more than half a century. (Perhaps, kinda, like members of a cult?…)

Isn't that the real reason that the professional Drama Queens hate Donald Trump so much? In fact, this is precisely what explains their animus towards the iconoclast come from the world of business.

After all (speaking of Israel), they all of them predicted that moving America's embassy to Jerusalem would unleash a major conflict. When did that war occur? Maybe they don't know as much as they like to claim…

In any case: Thanks to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the American government now seem to be back in the hands of the hysterical crisis creators.

“In Danish consciousness, there’s this idea that we were a very small and friendly colonial power, and also that racism is an American problem”

“In Danish consciousness, there’s this idea that we were a very small and friendly colonial power, and also that racism is an American problem.” (Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld, ex-department head at the Art Academy) 

“The notion Danes have of themselves is they built this immaculate welfare society, and built it so to speak singlehandedly by themselves, without help. All the economic funds that flowed in because of the colonial trade doesn’t fit that well into that picture.” (Lars Jensen, associate professor at Roskilde University)

Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld's seemingly innocuous remark holds a volcano of truth beneath it. As I write in 1619, Mao, & 9-11 (History According to the NYT), the education that Europeans, adults as well as kids, get in one country after another (both in schools and from media) — and that, tragically, Americans themselves have been getting since the 1970s — is based on Europeans hailing their respective country as friendly, fraternal, and harmonious, as contrasted with America and their alleged egocentricity, their alleged racism, and their alleged violence. As one French TV news host once (solemnly) put it, "the Americans may have liberty, but we have… (dramatic pause) solidarity!"

The school system was, as everyone knows, invented by Bismarck, a generation after the revolutions of 1848 sent millions of German and other immigrants to the New World, and the idea behind the system was to impress upon future citizens the goodness of der Vaterland (thus convincing them not to leave) or the élite-led nation (later, the nanny state) while demonizing the notion of self-government or "government of the people, by the people, for the people", notably by emphasizing the extent to which Americans were allegedly racist, violent, and dangerous.

The quotes above come from a New York Times story by Cara Buckley.

For a while it seemed no one had noticed that something rather prominent was missing from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, the prestigious institution housed in a palace on the edge of one of Copenhagen’s canals.

 … Midway through the autumn, [the bust of Frederik V, the 18th-century king of Denmark-Norway and duke of Schleswig-Holstein] vanished, though it wasn’t until early November that school officials finally realized it was gone. …

A few days later, the bust’s fate was revealed. An anonymous group of artists had unscrewed it from its plinth, popped a black garbage bag over its head and ferried it to the edge of the canal, before tipping it in. A video was released that showed the bust disappearing into the inky waters of Copenhagen Harbor.

 … About a week after the video’s release, a department head at the Art Academy, Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld, stepped forward to take responsibility for the sinking. She was fired the same day, and became a focal point for opprobrium.

 … Ms. Dirckinck-Holmfeld said she had hoped to trigger a broader reflection on cultural institutions’ role during the colonial period, and link that colonial legacy with controversial policies currently in place, namely the so-called ghetto laws. Defended by the government as a way to dismantle poorer non-Western immigrant enclaves so as to more fully integrate Danish society, the sweeping set of initiatives is criticized by many as harsh and discriminatory.

 … “This is about confronting our own image,” Ms. Dirckinck-Holmfeld said. “In Danish consciousness, there’s this idea that we were a very small and friendly colonial power, and also that racism is an American problem.”

Frederik V wasn’t the first Danish statue to be targeted by protesters last year. Figures of the missionary Hans Egede in Greenland and Copenhagen were daubed with red paint and inscribed with the word “decolonize” last summer. Not long after that, at the Copenhagen waterfront, the words “racist fish” were spray painted on the plinth of the Little Mermaid sculpture — which has been repeatedly vandalized and even decapitated over the years — to some puzzlement over the motives.

But even as monuments were toppled in America and Britain last summer by activists for racial justice, many Danes have not considered statues of their 18th-century royalty as problematic, and view actions against them not as expressions of free speech, but impediments to it.

 … Denmark was long considered a minor player in the slave trade, though recent research out of Harvard has challenged that view. The nation’s colonies included the Danish West Indies, now the U.S. Virgin Islands; Greenland; the Faroe Islands; and Iceland, with minor posts in parts of India and what is now Ghana. In Frederik V’s time, sugar from the West Indies was a major source of the country’s wealth, and some of Copenhagen’s most beautiful buildings of the era were built with lucre from the colonial trade.

Denmark was the first nation in colonial times to issue a moratorium on the slave trade, in 1792, though it gave the colonies until 1803 to acquire enough slaves to become self-sufficient, according to Lars Jensen, an associate professor at Roskilde University. By the time decolonization began in earnest in the 20th century, Denmark had sold or ceded nearly all of its colonies, with the exceptions of Greenland and the Faroe Islands (Iceland became independent during World War II).

There is disagreement over the extent to which Denmark is reckoning with that past. … Lars Jensen, who specializes in postcolonial studies, said there was a blindness in Denmark about the extent of its colonial past and that, he said, informs attitudes toward and treatment of migrants and refugees.

“The notion Danes have of themselves is they built this immaculate welfare society, and built it so to speak singlehandedly by themselves, without help,” Lars Jensen said. “All the economic funds that flowed in because of the colonial trade doesn’t fit that well into that picture.”

The Left's ugly view of the nation’s soul: Spoiled Brats? The NYT defends the 1619 project while (and by) trivializing or outright insulting its critics, with N-word user Hannah-Jones going as far as doxxing one reporter

While the Left is constantly giving conservatives lessons on history, on ethics, and on language (which words are permissable and which are not), history "expert" Nicole Hannah-Jones doxxes (!) a reporter — inquiring about her use of the… N-word (!) — by revealing his cel phone number. Which was promptly defended (and shrugged off) by the New York Times.

The journalist, Aaron Sibarium, was then accused of slander by a Yale professor (who had to immediately backtrack when called out). In the meantime, Hannah-Jones had decided to wipe her twitter slate clean. ("Trying to rewrite history" again? asks Twitchy.)

The doxxing, and the rest of the story, comes in the wake of the Heritage Foundation's Mike Gonzalez writing (read a more lengthy excerpt below) about how all the drama queens — sorry, how all the thinkers, scholars, and polymaths — behind the 1619 Project at the New York Times have dealt with criticism from the start:

From Hannah-Jones, to [Jake] Silverstein, to the paper’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, all have closed ranks and defended the project while trivializing or outright insulting their critics. Hannah-Jones has perfected provocation into something of an art form …

At any rate, it seems clear that the person behind the (preposterous) 1619 Project has not an iota of understanding of the basic tenets of the past — then again, what can you expect from a woman who is presumably, or who has been, a follower of the Reverend Farrakhan? — such as the reverence for the Constitution that filled the heart of Frederick Douglass, "the escaped slave, abolitionist, author, and towering figure in American history" who (by contrast with the "ever amused" Hannah-Jones) never smiled in photographs (for a good reason) and who happens to be the subject of a new biography.

In his new book, A Glorious Liberty: Frederick Douglass and the Fight for an Antislavery Constitution, Reason Senior Editor Damon Root explicates Douglass's classical liberal reading of the Constitution. Far from seeing it as a morally ambiguous document that sanctioned white supremacism, Douglass extolled it as "a glorious liberty document" that justified the ending of slavery and other forms of race- and gender-based inequality. Douglass's message, says Root, is as vital to the current moment as it was in the 19th century.

But the people at the "newspaper of record" are little better than their history "expert," writes Jonathan Leaf in his City Journal review of Peter W. Wood's 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project:

The New York Times, so dogged in refusing to admit error, remains bedeviled by a mix of arrogance, entitlement, and radicalism. … like MSNBC, the Times now pursues radical messaging for financial reasons, which precludes journalistic objectivity as a guiding light. The New York Times’s motives, in other words, appear to be as much mercenary as devotional. This dynamic is likely contributing to the paper’s obstinacy about the errors of the 1619 Project, notwithstanding the damage it is doing to our educational system and even to the fabric of our democracy.

That said, there have been a plethora of problems from the very start with the Gray Lady, with its double standards, and with the history "expert" who believes that the Aztecs' Pyramids Were Built with Help from Africans Who Crossed the Atlantic Prior to the "Barbaric Devils" of Columbus (whom she likens to Hitler). 

To go back a couple of months: In an October op-ed, the editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette took on the 1619 Project, calling it Counterfactual history. 

[An attempt] to “reframe American history” [is] is the aim of Nikole Hannah-Jones, architect of The New York Times’ 1619 Project. Ms. Hannah-Jones’ contention, that slavery and racism are the foundations of American history, may have been unquestionably embraced by the Times, but it was met with vigorous dissent from leading scholars. 

Among the three claims the newspaper refutes is the assertion that

it was the year 1619, when the first slaves were brought to Virginia, not 1776 that was the “true founding” of the United States. This claim, the project’s central argument, has since been redacted from the 1619 website. When pressed, Ms. Hannah-Jones emphasized that she is a journalist, not a historian, and that her claims of the founding were a bit of “rhetorical flourish.”

As usual, leftists cheat. And manipulate. And mislead. And lie. 

So the history expert born Nicole Hannah claims to have backtracked, but as a visit to Nikole Hannah-Jones' Twitter page (needless to say, No Pasarán is blocked) will confirm — especially the cover panoramic photo — the bit of “rhetorical flourish” is still front and center. (Mike Gonzalez has more below.)

As San Francisco decides to rename several of its schools, Robert Zimmerman points out that

They’re coming for you next: Even as Democrats nationwide embrace blacklists of ordinary Americans for daring to express dissent from that party’s leftist agenda, the extremely leftwing school board in San Francisco is moving to blacklist as many of America’s historical national figures as possible, including Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Paul Revere.

 … what this school board is doing is banning history, so that the students it “educates” will be guaranteed to know nothing about the past noble Americans who made this country a great and free land, for all. Instead, San Fransisco students will be indoctrinated into the Marxist philosophy of hate and envy, hating anyone who doesn’t agree with that ideology and having envy for anyone who works hard to achieve success instead of relying on the central government to feed them.

And most of all, they will be taught that America is, was, and always will be an evil land. They will be taught to hate it, so they can be enlisted in the war to destroy it.

The Left does not hate slavery; its members hate America. Commentary's Christine Rosen adds that

the idea that Western Civilization needs defending is not wrong

Defending from such leftists as Nikole Hannah-Jones, who would do well to listen to the half-black conservative Amala and take the time to watch Lucas Morel's podcast at Hillsdale College, Race in America: Colorblind Constitution? 

As PJMedia's Tyler O'Neil points out, 

Many black leaders have denounced the Black Lives Matter movement, noting that the activists do not focus on the black people who die every year from black-on-black crime.

In that perspetive, Nikole Hannah-Jones might do well to read the Wall Street Journal op-ed by Robert L. Woodson Sr and Joshua Mitchell, How the Left Hijacked Civil Rights. 

The history of black American responses to slavery and Jim Crow generally followed three paths. They were hotly debated, but all emphasized human agency, sought liberation, and rejected despair.

 … Exit, voice, loyalty—however different these strategies were, each supposed that human agency mattered, that oppression wasn’t destiny. That is why, even amid great struggle, black Americans responded by building their own institutions and businesses. Great universities, medical schools, hotels, restaurants, movie companies and even a flight school sprung up. All of this was self-financed—and made possible by two-parent families, churches and other cultural institutions that provided shelter against the outside storm of racism.

 … the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. … paid a heavy personal price for his hope that America was redeemable … but he remained steadfast in his commitment to nonviolence. He united black Americans behind the proposition that racism is evil in itself, not simply because white people visited it upon blacks, and that all must unite to combat evil. He warned us about the self-destructive path of violence, not only for blacks but for the whole nation.

 … Today many black leaders defer to angry white progressives who make the same arguments about blacks’ lack of moral agency, reject the country’s founding principles, and seek to undermine its institutions. For months, the radical left has been exploiting the country’s genuine concern for fairness to keep blacks in a constant state of agitation, anger and grievance, urging them toward behavior that lives down to the slanderous stereotypes of white supremacists. The leaders of these movements insist that every inequity suffered by blacks is caused by institutional and structural racism, that they have no power to liberate themselves, and that they will remain oppressed until white people change. Even to raise the issue of what role self-determination plays for blacks earns you the label of “racist.”

Civil-rights organizations and their leadership, as well as the Congressional Black Caucus, need to wake up before it’s too late. A faction of black leaders has been silent about, or complicit in, the takeover of the civil-rights movement by the radical left. The effect of this is not to glorify black achievement but to crucify low-income blacks, who are represented in national media outlets by their worst-behaved members, and bear the brunt of the attacks by the woke radical left on the cities where they live.

“Justice” for black America cannot be achieved by framing it solely through the distorted lens of the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others in fatal police encounters. For every unarmed black American killed by the police, hundreds are killed in neighborhood homicides.

Those who call for the defunding of police departments, such as leaders of the official Black Lives Matter organization, are silent about this inconvenient truth. They have a narrative and cannot let the facts get in the way. Their story is that the whole of American history is stained and the whole of America must be overthrown. 

 … Like all Americans, blacks have triumphed over their circumstances only when they have adopted bourgeois virtues such as hard work, respect for learning, self-discipline, faith and personal responsibility. In the 19th century, Frederick Douglass found reading to be the key to his own personal liberation amid slavery, and he understood that whites deliberately withheld literacy from blacks precisely because it was so valuable. Bourgeois values drove blacks to build the powerful religious, fraternal, and other voluntary associations that helped them thrive in the worst days of Jim Crow and cultivated the essential virtues in the next generation. 

There would have been no civil-rights movement without this.  

When it comes to the New York Times’s 1619 Project, anthropologist Peter Wood minces no words

writes the Heritage Foundation's Mike Gonzalez.

Toward the end of his book, 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, he makes abundantly clear why such a response is essential. “The 1619 Project is, arguably, part of a larger effort to destroy America by people who find it unbearably bad,” writes Wood. “The project treats the founding principles of our nation as an illusion—a contemptible illusion. In their place is a single idea: that America was founded on racist exploitation.”

In other words, as he methodically demolishes its main arguments, Wood pays the project a compliment: he takes it seriously, but as a threat to our national wellbeing. The 1619 Project, he avers, “poses a particular danger to America.”

 … My colleagues at The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin J. Feulner Institute, which includes as visiting scholars the historians Allen Guelzo and Wilfred McClay, have also led a campaign to spotlight the many problems with the 1619 Project. I have written a few of these arguments myself. Robert Woodson, the founder of the Woodson Center, has assembled a number of black academics to join the campaign against what the New York Times is doing, and formed what is now known as 1776 Unites.

Crafting the Narrative

Why is this all needed? The 1619 Project is a venture by the Times to rewrite history and to put slavery at the center of America’s story. It contends that everything about our lives today still revolves around slavery and racism. Along the way, its authors have made a series of other outlandish claims.

 … As Wood makes clear at the start of 1620, “The larger aim of the 1619 Project is to change America’s understanding of itself,” and it is attempting to do that by misleading the nation’s most impressionable minds. The Pulitzer Center, which markets the curriculum, addresses itself to teachers, bypassing the elected legislators in the 50 states and the members of the school boards in the nation’s some 13,000 districts. Wood quotes the announcement by the Pulitzer Center, which is unaffiliated with the Pulitzer Prizes, as saying, “Teachers: Looking for ways to use this issue in your classroom? You can find curriculums, guides and activities for students developed by the Pulitzer Center… and it’s all free!” The lesson plans include Hannah-Jones’s essays and those of others. … 

Overcoming Racism

So with 1620, Wood seeks to take us not back to the ‘60s, nor to the decades that preceded it, but forward to a better place, one where we center our understanding of America on the ideals and customs that have allowed the country to overcome its challenges. “Surely there are ways to incorporate a forthright treatment of slavery, racism, and the black experience into the story of America’s rise as a free, self-governing, creative, and prosperous nation,” he writes. “The key to doing that is to put the pursuit of the ideals of liberty and justice at the center of the story, with ample of acknowledgement of how hard the struggle has been and how imperfect the results.” …

Endless Conflict

Wood makes a compelling case that this date and this act [the Mayflower Compact of 1620] informs what America has become. They inspire our better angels much more than the 1619 Project, which as Wood aptly writes, is “a bucket lowered into the poisoned well of identity politics.” The Mayflower Compact put the country on its way to an American “us”; it began the process of etching out a new belief-driven identity. About a year after it was signed, the Pilgrims held their first Thanksgiving to thank the Almighty for the good harvest. “A key ingredient in this emerging identity was the colony’s gratitude,” he writes.

And here Wood pivots to lower the boom on the opposite of the 1620 vision of contractual ordered liberty, and gratitude for God’s bounty: Hannah-Jones’s ugly view of the nation’s soul. “The opposites of gratitude are envy and resentment. The 1619 Project presents such feelings as righteous, justified, and to be savored as though they were delicious. Valorizing a sense of perpetual victimization can serve, like gratitude, as a social charter of sorts, but it is a charter for endless conflict and bottomless demands for reparations.”

The 1619 Project is more, however, than a national charter of grievances and despair. It is also mendacious. … From Hannah-Jones, to Silverstein, to the paper’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, all have closed ranks and defended the project while trivializing or outright insulting their critics. Hannah-Jones has perfected provocation into something of an art form …

 … in September … Hannah-Jones and her newspaper (for the New York Times is now, for all intents and purposes, her paper) retreated in other ways. Gone from the digital copy of the project were all claims that the country’s “true founding,” was 1619, and Hannah-Jones began to assert that she had never claimed her work was history. All of this is false, of course.

The Woke and the Rest

“My guess is that she’s doing a victory lap,” Wood says of Hannah-Jones’s retreats. At this point the 1619 Project is so well established that she no longer needs to claim historical accuracy.” This is one of the few areas in 1620 where I differ with Wood. Hannah-Jones, Silverstein, and the others had expected adulation—and they certainly have been lionized in woke circles—but had not anticipated pushback from some of America’s most renowned historians, never mind from the World Socialist Website (whose opposition to 1619 owes a lot to a growing divide between cultural and economic Marxists). Their tarnished record could threaten future ventures—especially a deal currently being worked out for multiple platforms between Hannah-Jones and Oprah Winfrey.

RELATED: 1619, Mao, & 9-11: History According to the NYT — Plus, a Remarkable Issue of National Geographic Reveals the Leftists' "Blame America First" Approach to History

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: quite a few contemporary Black problems have very little to do with slavery

NO MAINSTREAM HISTORIAN CONTACTED FOR THE 1619 PROJECT

• "Out of the Revolution came an anti-slavery ethos, which never disappeared": Pulitzer Prize Winner James McPherson Confirms that No Mainstream Historian Was Contacted by the NYT for Its 1619 History Project

• Gordon Wood: "The Revolution unleashed antislavery sentiments that led to the first abolition movements in the history of the world" — another Pulitzer-Winning Historian Had No Warning about the NYT's 1619 Project

• A Black Political Scientist "didn’t know about the 1619 Project until it came out"; "These people are kind of just making it up as they go"

• Clayborne Carson: Another Black Historian Kept in the Dark About 1619

• If historians did not hear of the NYT's history (sic) plan, chances are great that the 1619 Project was being deliberately kept a tight secret

• Oxford Historian Richard Carwardine: 1619 is “a preposterous and one-dimensional reading of the American past”

• World Socialists: "the 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history" by the New York Times, aka "the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party"

THE NEW YORK TIMES OR THE NEW "WOKE" TIMES?

• Dan Gainor on 1619 and rewriting history: "To the Left elite like the NY Times, there’s no narrative they want to destroy more than American exceptionalism"

• Utterly preposterous claims: The 1619 project is a cynical political ploy, aimed at piercing the heart of the American understanding of justice

• From Washington to Grant, not a single American deserves an iota of gratitude, or even understanding, from Nikole Hannah-Jones; however, modern autocrats, if leftist and foreign, aren't "all bad"

• One of the Main Sources for the NYT's 1619 Project Is a Career Communist Propagandist who Defends Stalinism

• A Pulitzer Prize?! Among the 1619 Defenders Is "a Fringe Academic" with "a Fetish for Authoritarian Terror" and "a Soft Spot" for Mugabe, Castro, and Even Stalin

• Influenced by Farrakhan's Nation of Islam?! 1619 Project's History "Expert" Believes the Aztecs' Pyramids Were Built with Help from Africans Who Crossed the Atlantic Prior to the "Barbaric Devils" of Columbus (Whom She Likens to Hitler)

• 1793, 1776, or 1619: Is the New York Times Distinguishable from Teen Vogue? Is It Living in a Parallel Universe? Or Is It Simply Losing Its Mind in an Industry-Wide Nervous Breakdown?

• No longer America's "newspaper of record," the "New Woke Times" is now but a college campus paper, where kids like 1619 writer Nikole Hannah-Jones run the asylum and determine what news is fit to print

• Spoiled Brats? The NYT defends the 1619 project while (and by) trivializing or outright insulting its critics, with N-word (!) user Hannah-Jones going as far as doxxing one pundit

• The Departure of Bari Weiss: "Propagandists", Ethical Collapse, and the "New McCarthyism" — "The radical left are running" the New York Times, "and no dissent is tolerated"

• "Full of left-wing sophomoric drivel": The New York Times — already drowning in a fantasy-land of alternately running pro-Soviet Union apologia and their anti-American founding “1619 Project” series — promises to narrow what they view as acceptable opinion even more

• "Deeply Ashamed" of the… New York Times (!),  An Oblivious Founder of the Error-Ridden 1619 Project Uses Words that Have to Be Seen to Be Believed ("We as a News Organization Should Not Be Running Something That Is Offering Misinformation to the Public, Unchecked")

• Allen C Guelzo: The New York Times offers bitterness, fragility, and intellectual corruption—The 1619 Project is not history; it is conspiracy theory

• The 1619 Project is an exercise in religious indoctrination: Ignoring, downplaying, or rewriting the history of 1861 to 1865, the Left and the NYT must minimize, downplay, or ignore the deaths of 620,000 Americans

• 1619: It takes an absurdly blind fanaticism to insist that today’s free and prosperous America is rotten and institutionally oppressive

• The MSM newsrooms and their public shaming terror campaigns — the "bullying campus Marxism" is closer to cult religion than politics: Unceasingly searching out thoughtcrime, the American left has lost its mind

• Fake But Accurate: The People Behind the NYT's 1619 Project Make a "Small" Clarification, But Only Begrudgingly and Half-Heartedly, Because Said Mistake Actually Undermines The 1619 Project's Entire Premise

• The Truth Is Out: "The 1619 Project Is Not a History," Admits Hannah-Jones, and "Never Pretended to Be" 

THE REVOLUTION OF THE 1770s

• The Collapse of the Fourth Estate by Peter Wood: No one has been able to identify a single leader, soldier, or supporter of the Revolution who wanted to protect his right to hold slaves (A declaration that slavery is the founding institution of America and the center of everything important in our history is a ground-breaking claim, of the same type as claims that America condones rape culture, that 9/11 was an inside job, that vaccinations cause autism, that the Moon landing was a hoax, or that ancient astronauts built the pyramids)

• Mary Beth Norton:  In 1774, a year before Dunmore's proclamation, Americans had already in fact become independent

• Most of the founders, including Thomas Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, writes Rick Atkinson, despite the fact that many of them owned slaves

• Leslie Harris: Far from being fought to preserve slavery, the Revolutionary War became a primary disrupter of slavery in the North American Colonies (even the NYT's fact-checker on the 1619 Project disagrees with its "conclusions": "It took 60 more years for the British government to finally end slavery in its Caribbean colonies")

• Sean Wilentz on 1619: the movement in London to abolish the slave trade formed only in 1787, largely inspired by… American (!) antislavery opinion that had arisen in the 1760s and 1770s

• 1619 & Slavery's Fatal Lie: it is more accurate to say that what makes America unique isn't slavery but the effort to abolish it

• 1619 & 1772: Most of the founders, including Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, despite many of them owning slaves; And Britain would remain the world's foremost slave-trading nation into the nineteenth century

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: Slavery was legal in Britain in 1776, and it remained so in all overseas British colonies until 1833

• Not 1619 but 1641: In Fact, the American Revolution of 1776 Sought to Avoid the Excesses of the English Revolution Over a Century Earlier

• James Oakes on 1619: "Slavery made the slaveholders rich; But it made the South poor; And it didn’t make the North rich — So the legacy of slavery is poverty, not wealth"

• One of the steps of defeating truth is to destroy evidence of the truth, says Bob Woodson; Because the North's Civil War statues — as well as American history itself — are evidence of America's redemption from slavery, it's important for the Left to remove evidence of the truth

TEACHING GENERATIONS OF KIDS FALSEHOODS ABOUT THE U.S.

• 1619: No wonder this place is crawling with young socialists and America-haters — the utter failure of the U.S. educational system to teach the history of America’s founding

• 1619: Invariably Taking the Progressive Side — The Ratio of Democratic to Republican Voter Registration in History Departments is More than 33 to 1

• Secular humanistic indoctrination dumbs down children, drives wedges between them and their parents, and has grown increasingly hostile to patriotism and parental authority

• Denying the grandeur of the nation’s founding—Wilfred McClay on 1619: "Most of my students are shocked to learn that that slavery is not uniquely American"

• Inciting Hate Already in Kindergarten: 1619 "Education" Is Part of Far-Left Indoctrination by People Who Hate America to Kids in College, in School, and Even in Elementary Classes

• "Distortions, half-truths, and outright falsehoods": Where does the 1619 project state that Africans themselves were central players in the slave trade? That's right: Nowhere

• John Podhoretz on 1619: the idea of reducing US history to the fact that some people owned slaves is a reductio ad absurdum and the definition of bad faith

• The 1619 Africans in Virginia were not ‘enslaved’, a black historian points out; they were indentured servants — just like the majority of European whites were

• "Two thirds of the people, white as well as black, who crossed the Atlantic in the first 200 years are indentured servants" notes Dolores Janiewski; "The poor people, black and white, share common interests"

LAST BUT NOT LEAST…

• Wondering Why Slavery Persisted for Almost 75 Years After the Founding of the USA? According to Lincoln, the Democrat Party's "Principled" Opposition to "Hate Speech"

• Victoria Bynum on 1619 and a NYT writer's "ignorance of history": "As dehumanizing and brutal as slavery was, the institution was not a giant concentration camp"

• Dennis Prager: The Left Couldn't Care Less About Blacks

• A Prager U Video and a Book, "1620," Take on the 1619 Project

• When was the last time protests in America were marred by police violence? 1970, according to Ann Coulter, who asks "Can we restrict wild generalizations about the police to things that have happened in our lifetimes?" (Compare with, say, China…)

• The Secret About Black Lives Matter; In Fact, the Outfit's Name Ought to Be BSD or BAD

• The Real Reason Why Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and the Land O'Lakes Maid Must Vanish

• The Confederate Flag: Another Brick in the Leftwing Activists' (Self-Serving) Demonization of America and Rewriting of History

• Who, Exactly, Is It Who Should Apologize for Slavery and Make Reparations? America? The South? The Descendants of the Planters? …

• Anti-Americanism in the Age of the Coronavirus, the NBA, and 1619

What's with the Animus Towards Instapundit's Guest Posters?

A lot of nonsense is being spewed in the comments section of an Instapundit post.

1) If you don't like to read about, say, sports in your daily paper, skip over the section and use it for your cat's litter box. Do not request that the editor remove the sports section. Just like you wouldn't want a rabid sports fan to demand the editors remove the arts section or the (main) current events section.

2) If the sports section were to be left out of the paper, you wouldn't get 8 or 12 more pages on Arts or on Current Events; you would simply have fewer pages in your newspaper. If you don't like an op-ed writer and ask for (and get) his removal, it does not mean that the pundit(s) that you do like will have more room for writing on the op-ed page; they will have exactly the same space.

If Stephen Green, Ed Driscoll, Sarah Hoyt, Gail Heriot, Mark Tapscott, David Bernstein, Robert Shibley, and/or Austin Bay — I'm sure I am forgetting one or two — were to heed some cranks' calls to leave Instapundit, you wouldn't get more posts from Glenn Reynolds, you would have exactly the same amount of posts from the Blogfather (as well as exactly the same number of posts from all the guest posters, if any, who remained). And you would have fewer things to read. Anything, any subject, or anybody you don't want to read, simply skip them over (see 1 above)… 

3) In that perspective — and this also applies to the cranks complaining about reading the same type of message over and over again — you do not seem to remember the Republicans' 1980s hero (fully deserved), who never hid that he repeated the same basic message for years on end, which led to the ideas getting more and more widely adopted and himself — I am speaking of Ronald Reagan, natch — emerging as candidate for the White House

4) Indeed, with Fox News veering left, there are fewer and fewer news sources to read and trust. I don't want fewer; I want more. Or at least the same.

5) What's with the Ed Driscoll animus? Personally, I read, and/or agree with, perhaps 90% of what he posts. (Full disclosure: I know Ed personally, from having visited him and his wife at their Texas ranch — as well as his (highly impressive) sound studio — one memorable afternoon and evening four years ago.) I agree that for someone of Jim Treacher's intellect, his animus towards Donald Trump is incomprehensible, but that doesn't negate the many good things that he has said, not least his Twitter definition of modern journalism (which, indeed, makes his Trumpitis all the more baffling)… 

You do not like Ed's long posts? Based on Glenn's (recurring) take on the Democrats' declarations on Saddam's Iraq prior to the Dubya administration's invasion, they are meant to provide all the information, i.e., all the ammunition, that you need in a particular debate. In fact, several of these lengthy pieces have proven invaluable over the years. 

To mention only the first two that come to mind: 

• Ed's take and insights on Star Wars and George Lucas

• And his revelations about the Democrats' slander of every Republican candidate as an Adolf Hitler-like fascist as far back as… 1940 (!!) 

In online debates, often I don't bother to argue; I simply post a hyperlink to Ed's (or Glenn's, or Stephen's, or Sarah's, or Gail's, or Mark's, etc…) Instapundit posts

6) What is really worrying is the comment below: Is what the priestess says true (I have only heard positive so far about eradicating section 230) and can someone with a legal mind — Glenn or somebody else (I'm sorry, I forget the name of the expert with the Russian name) — look into that? 

Karen, L4 Priestess of Science 

With apologies for interjecting a political comment into what was a truly nice thought, it would be nice if the idiot wing of the Republican Party would stop clamoring to eradicate section 230, which is what protects sites like this from the barrage of lawsuits that would overwhelm it and all others were it repealed.

7) Someone mentioned, tongue-in-cheek, Glenn's and the guest posters' writing styles, so to end this post on a lighter note, check out the piece called Entertainment During the Coronavirus Lock-Down: Do You Know the Rules to the Instapundit Game?

The … Instapundit game … should only be played, really, by veteran readers of the Glenn Reynolds blog …

The goal of the game is to read a post on Instapundit, while keeping the name of its author hidden below the bottom the screen.

 …  What you have to do now is figure out, to the best of your ability, who is the author of the post!

Update: I don't know what the deal is with Instapundit; all the comments (over 370 total so far) criticizing the blog and its bloggers seem to have remained, while my post defending Glenn's guest bloggers (which basically is/as the same text as this post) has vanished… I posted it three times, getting the message "considered spam" twice (because of the html langauge and the hyperlinks?). Maybe (hopefully) it's some technical bug, but… I don't know…

The Take of Bill Maher's Coronavirus Expert Guests Happens to Apply Perfectly to the 2020 Election

"That's not how science works." Or inquiry. Or investigations. Or reporting. Or journalism. Neutral, objective journalism.

In his podcast episode 553, Bill Maher welcomes two evolutionary biologists to discuss the nature and possible origins of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.

As you read, or listen to, the conversation about the Chinese virus in the first minute and a half between Bill Maher, Bret Weinstein (whom some may remember from the Evergreen campus protests of 2017), and Heather Heying, notice how it could just as well be about the 2020 election:

• Bill Maher: …maybe the virus did start in a lab … in Wuhan … It would almost be a conspiracy theory to think that it didn't start in a lab (chuckles)…

• Heather Heying: No, it did.

• Bill Maher: Right, and that theory was demonized at first, "Oh, it can't, c'mon, that's conspiracy thinking, that it was started in a lab!" But it certainly is a 50-50, would you say that?

The demonization of voter fraud speculations — an entirely banal contention — applies to the many instances of shenanigans, small and large, in the 2020 Election — listed by Dennis Prager — otherwise known as "an election that violated every anti-fraud protocol and that resulted in statistically impossible numbers." To paraphrase Maher, "it would almost be a conspiracy theory to think that" the Left did not commit voter fraud.

• Bret Weinstein: Oh, it's far more likely than that. As a matter of fact…
• Bill Maher: Right

• Bret Weinstein: …I said I think in June that the chances that it came from a lab looked to me to be about 90%. So this was never a conspiracy theory, in fact that term is simply used to make it go away. It's an obvious hypothesis that is in need of testing, and we are only now, a year in, getting to the point where we can discuss it out loud without being stigmatized.

Stigmatized, in the case of conservative Trump supporters during the 2020 election, as conspiracy theorists, seditionists, and domestic terrorists (in addition to racists, sexists, deplorables, etc, etc, etc…)

• Heather Heying: A big part of the problem, of course, is that we are so politicized, we are so polarized and partisan now as a country that…

The people who are politicized, polarized, and partisan are the Drama Queens on the left. People on the right just want to be laid back and left alone…

In the next segment, think about the assumption of voter fraud being proposed by President Donald Trump, and what Heather Heying says about science, or inquiry, or investigations, or reporting, or journalism (neutral, objective journalism)…

• Heather Heying: …that if the wrong guy proposed this to begin with, and for half the country it was the wrong guy, then the rest of the country says "No way, no how, we're gonna call that a conspiracy theory, and — and we're never gonna revisit it." And the fact is, that's not how science works. That's not science. You need to say, "I've got a pattern, I'm going to make some observations, and I'm going to consider every possible explanation on the table." And did it leak from a lab? That was clearly from the beginning a possibility.

"The term [#conspiracytheory] is simply ,
used to make [the conversation] go away"

Do @billmaher, the #Democrats, & the #MSM
realize that this video applies as much to
the debate about #VoterSuppression in
the #2020Election?!

"It's an obvious hypothesis in need of testing" https://t.co/gxQsLeRsWk

— ¡No Pasarán! (@nopasa) February 3, 2021

The Mote in Thine Own Eye (in the Eye of the Conservative): Why Are Conservatives So Naïve That They Refuse to See the Beam in the Eye of Those Who Hate Their Very Existence?

Giving [Nancy Pelosi] breathing room makes it easier for her to install the socialism that Jonah [Goldberg] should worry about instead of what the staff at the New Yorker thinks. As a grown man, I do not seek the approval of those who hate me. I will not accommodate their efforts to ruin me and my country.

— Don Surber

The day I read Liberal Fascism (and it was really a single day or, rather, a single night; on a flight 13 years ago across the Atlantic, I was supposed to rest, sleep if possible, but I couldn't put the massively enlightening — and deeply troubling — eye-opener down), I went from simple admirer of Jonah Goldberg to fervent follower of Jonah Goldberg. 

His regular NRO articles, which I started reading pretty much religiously, confirmed his insight into all manners of subjects — as well as his refusal to bow before the Left while setting them, and their ideas, straight (see half a dozen examples a couple of paragraphs down that have been linked through the years on this blog).

That is why I have been so dumbfounded by his attitude in the past four or five years.

By all means, eviscerate President Donald Trump all you want (although "a bane of humanity"! — really?!) — in 2016 I too was among those who were suspicious of the New York billionaire's intentions — and go after the (rare) Republican who shows signs of delusion and/or derangement.

But can it really be that Jonah himself might be among the latter? Doesn't he realize that the entire left is anti-Jewish (with numerous examples of antisemitism in the past decade(s)) and anti-Christian to boot — not to mention… anti-American?! (Thank you, professor, for the Instapundit link.)

Bookworm's article The West is reverting to paganism (obrigado to Sarah Hoyt) helps explain why Leftism — allegedly anti-superstition, rational, and scientific — is actually akin to a religion itself and, more specifically, to a cult. A cult of Drama Queens and crisis seekers mounting non-ending crusades — not least (and unsurprisingly) against what is quite probably its greatest foe, precisely its main competitor, the entire Judeo-Christian religion along with the nation that is exceptional precisely because it best embodies the Golden Principle.

It is in that perspective that I am shocked by conservatives like Jonah Goldberg going ballistic on one single solitary Republican as well as believing in the Democrats' charge of a "Big Lie" and by devout Christians like Sunday Bible Study teacher (and regular CPAC attendee) Myra Adams likening the Christian rights party to the un-Christian rites party: "Where do people like me go, when both parties are extreme?" Neither does anything but regurgitate mainstream (and deeply partisan plus anti-Christian and anti-Jewish) media focal points. 

What in God's name (if I may use the expression) is it about perspective and partisanship and double standards that these people — along with the squishes in the government (on federal as well as on state level) — fail to understand?!

Has Jonah Goldberg given in to the condescending mainstream media and stopped watching the content of "cable- and Facebook-fueled culture war tribalism" and its "green room farts"? Has he stopped reading people like Derek Hunter? Read his whole article, Jonah (excerpt below), and tell us if the author of Outrage, INC. has a point or if he should just be dismissed like every other conservative is dismissed by the Left (most recently, quite volubly by the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and CNN, along with demands for more censorship, governmental as well as by private business)…

Joe Biden has used “the Big Lie” to describe United States senators exercising their constitutional authority to question state certification of the Electoral College vote.

Of course, Biden’s framing was, in and of itself, a Big Lie. Those Senators were not attempting to thwart democracy, they were engaging in it. They weren’t trying to overturn the election results, they were demanding answers to the subversion of the Constitution by state officials circumventing election laws. That should concern everyone. You can tell who benefited from the thwarting of rules by who objects to their enforcement, or even looking into it.

Still, the Big Lies are flying from the left, from their mouths and through the megaphone of journalists.

A Republican’s old Facebook posts are one of the top stories, even though most people have never heard of her and her voters voted for her anyway. She must resign, or so we’re told, because…well, just because. But a Democrat marries her brother to get him citizenship, launders a fortune through her campaign to the joint bank account she shares with her third husband, while spewing Hitler-level anti-Semitism and she’s a rock star. To call it a double standard is to imply there are any other standards Democrats have.

Didn't Jonah Goldberg — who has seen through the Left on so many subjects, from the JournOlist and the left's alleged propensity for debate and discussion, to their alleged compassion and its opposition to the right allegedly imposing their values, through immigration reform and climate deniers, not to mention the Left's Tyranny of Clichés — once bring extreme focus to the problem, currently as well as historically, by writing the stunning eye-opener, Liberal Fascism? 

Didn't what I called the book's most important single paragraph 13 years ago describe "how liberals cheat in the war of ideas" and thereby prefigure the Antifa riots as well as mainstream and social medias' revolutionary step in late 2020 and early 2021, the massive campaign for the cancellation and the de-platforming and the muzzling of key conservative voices (not least President Trump himself)?

That is how the liberal Gleichschaltung works; contrary voices are regulated, barred, banned when possible, mocked and marginalized when not. Progressive voices are encouraged, lionized, amplified — in the name of "diversity," or "liberation," or "unity," and, most of all, "progress."

 As Bernie Marcus clarified nine years ago what lies behind the squishes' attitude, 

the Republicans play the rules of … golf. In golf, if you miss a putt or you touch the ball, you call a shot on yourself. We're playing the game of golf. The Democrats are playing ice hockey. It's a killer game. And that's the difference in politics. 

This explains, of course, the wide hostility to Donald Trump, a Republican who understood — and who understands — that to fight the Democrat party, a Republican must act like an ice hockey player himself.

As I wrote in my book, the attitude (that of a gentleman, whether truly gentlemanly or simply virtue signalling) is akin to refusing to see the beam in your brother's eye, because of your focus, indeed your obsession, with a mote (real or alleged) in your own eye. 

I don't know if Marjorie Taylor Greene is an antisemite or not, but to quote Bookworm, what we now face in the (heavily partisan) view of just about every member of the Left, not excluding those who now wield massive government power, "Traditional Christians and Jews are now automatically considered to be far-right extremists and, especially, white supremacists." 

Derek Hunter, again:

There’s a media-perpetrated myth that Joe Biden is a moderate; that he’s an honest man. He is not, and never has been. He’s a politician, a Democrat, who now has the authority of the United States government behind him. … We’re in for four years of abuse, of demonization …

Roger Kimball has more on what awaits us:

The Swamp tells us [that those thousands of armed troops in the nation’s capital are] to protect against “domestic terrorism” and “insurrection.”

Thus, we see The Washington Post, megaphone of the richest man in the world, warning that “ideologically motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority … could continue to mobilize to incite or commit violence.” That was in a story headlined “The U.S. is finally catching up to the domestic terrorism threat.”

Whence the threat?

Why, from Donald Trump, of course.

Don’t you remember? He “incited” “insurrection,” “sedition,” and “violence” on Jan. 6 when he held a rally in Washington and urged his followers to make their way “peacefully and patriotically” to the Capitol to “make their voices heard.”

That was the pretext for the latest Washington entertainment, “The Impeachment of Donald Trump, Episode II” of the mini-series. 

Breitbart adds a Tucker Carlson segment showing that Democrats "Think It Is Fine to Mobilize the Army in Order to Put Down Domestic Opinions."

Daniel Greenfield: 

Inside of a month, Democrats had redefined riots and election challenges from the highest form of patriotism to an attack on democracy

  … the Democrat media went from writing sympathetic pieces about BLM lawyers throwing molotov cocktails at the police to demanding a thorough purge of every single person who had ever questioned the idea that Joe Biden might not be the most popular politician ever.

 … Questioning an election has become incitement to insurrection. To suggest that there’s anything illegitimate about Biden is sedition. Unity means believing that Joe Biden legitimately won an election for which Democrats changed the rules beforehand, then declared a national emergency, and inaugurated him behind barbed wire and lines of soldiers authorized to shoot. 

 … D.C. isn’t the epicenter of unity and healing, but of a wave of political purges targeting everyone from President Trump to ordinary Americans whose political views are being criminalized.

There’s no healing to be found in show trials and political purges.

And you freak out, Jonah, and you expect us to freak out, about an unknown conservative?! (Or about Trump himself, for that matter?! Is he the one who wants to "completely [overturn] the Constitutional order"?! Have you never read the book called… Liberal Fascism?!)

Moreover, this woman is just like the Confederate statues and the Rebel flags — an easy target. It is quite clear that this easy target is not the last, far from it, only the first to start off a campaign; give in and she is only the first of the many who must be ousted the Congress — calls have already going out left and right for the scalps of Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, as well as all the skeptics in Congress who voted against certification, to be not censured but ousted once and for all… No one is to remain in power who doubts the (improbable) victory of Sleepy Joe. The Left is here to stay once and for all. With a boot on your neck forever.

Besides that — and this is a message to Democrats and media members as well as to Jonah — the very fact that all of you are so adamant in refusing to even entertain what in the final analysis is quite a banal idea — that there was, or may have been, voter fraud during an election (local, state, and/or national), any election — is actually one of the main pieces of evidence that the accusations of voter fraud of 2020 was, and is, real and very serious.

Having said all that, it is time to turn to Don Surber's reply to Jonah Goldberg (thanks to Ed Driscoll and Glenn Reynolds).

Five years ago, on January 26, 2015, Jonah said on Fox, "Donald Trump has a long record of clownishly pretending he’s going to run for president, and people take him seriously — including a lot of people at this network, which drives me crazy."

And he said, "I think Donald Trump is a bane of humanity."

 

 … By going on and on about President Trump's style, he missed the substance of the most genuine and most successful conservative president since Ronald Wilson Reagan.

Now Jonah is unhappy with the party. 

He wrote, "A party of conspiracy theorists and would-be secessionists will be a failed party—I hope. A party merely perceived as a party of conspiracy theorists and would-be secessionists will be a failed party—I hope."

I do not know about that.

Democrats seem to do OK with their Russian Collusion conspiracy theorists, AOC, the Squad, and that presidential candidate who sniffed little girls. 

If Jonah is upset with the state of the Republican Party these days, he has no one but himself and the rest of the frauds in Washington to blame. They spent 2016 trying to bring Donald Trump down and then the next four years trying to trip up President Trump.

 

A Republican Congress refused to repeal and replace Obamacare, as they promised they would.

A Republican Congress refused to fund building the wall.

A Republican Congress refused to investigate Spygate.

And Paul Ryan and 40 other lifers in the House refused to seek re-election in 2018, knowing this would saddle the nation with Speaker Nancy.

That is far more dangerous to the nation than some congresswoman's old postings and retweets. The sabotage of the Republican Party by the people it sends to Washington is legendary.

In 2008, they abandoned Sarah Palin.

In 2010, they abandoned Christine O'Donnell.

In 2012, they abandoned Todd Akin.

In 2016, they abandoned Donald Trump.

In 2017, they abandoned Roy Moore.

And in 2018, they abandoned the country by paving the way for Democrats to take back the House.

Name a Democrat nominee for public office that his party has abandoned. You cannot because Democrats band together. When Anthony Weiner was caught in his underwear on Twitter, it took a few weeks of late-night jokes to get Nancy to tell him to resign.

 

I refuse to denounce Congresswoman Greene because I am not suicidal. Nancy barely has a majority in the House. Picking off a few newcomer Republicans would give her breathing room. 

Giving her that breathing room makes it easier for her to install the socialism that Jonah should worry about instead of what the staff at the New Yorker thinks. As a grown man, I do not seek the approval of those who hate me. I will not accommodate their efforts to ruin me and my country.

Maybe Bill Kristol and Jonah Goldberg want us to be the stupid party, but I don't.

That's right, believe it or not: some of us are determined not to join the "bowing" GOP leaders on their suicide mission. Glenn Reynolds adds that

Yes, QAnon is stupid — and probably a disinfo program intended to harm the Trump movement — but it’s pretty rich, after four years of Russian Collusion and #Resistance and “hacked election” talk, to act as if this is somehow a largely Republican problem. And “the rules?” What rules are those? Not any rules that we’ve been operating under since 2016.

Who cannot agree with Don Surber?

To paraphrase the most insightful sign of the Tea Party Movement: It doesn't matter who you have represent the GOP party (Mitt Romney, Rob Portman, a Bush, a Trump, etc…), Jonah, it doesn't matter if you repudiate Marjorie Taylor Greene or David Duke or the Proud Boys — the Left will call you (or, alternatively, your followers — if not both) racist anyway. And the media will end up demonizing you anyway. And that will lose you votes, yes, even among "the very conservative voters in [your] district." 

(Back in the 1980s, an analyst said that the point of Kremlin disinformation was not to get the entire population to change its mind, nor a majority nor even a minority, not even a sizable one; just 5%. If 5% could be counted on to believe a certain piece of Soviet propaganda, a national election might be turned towards the USSR's preferred candidate or outcome — I believe that the subject was the KGB-originated story of the creation of the AIDS virus by the CIA and that this story emerged (again?) before an election or a referendum in Spain either to join or more likely (later) to remain within NATO.)

Yes, Jonah, I am talking about the media you now trust, the ones wanting to silence cable news, scare away Fox's advertisers, close down Parler, cancel the Epoch Times, banish the OneAmericaNetwork, and shut down Newsmax TV. (In fact, you could say that every MSM outlet in the nation, along with a number of private companies, have been competing to turn into Brett Kimberlin.) After all, the warriors for the truth who oppose these outliers' "green room farts" are in total agreement with you for wanting to protect "some decent Americans who’ve been deluded by cable- and Facebook-fueled culture war tribalism."

Don't you — you, Jonah, of all people — know the The First Rule of MSM News Coverage? 

Whenever the prejudices and illusions of left-wingers are confirmed by an individual incident, the incident is treated as representative; when those prejudices and illusions are contradicted, the incident is considered an aberration — and treating it as representative is deemed hateful. (Andrew Klavan)

Does Jonah not feel the oppression? "Biden is now unapologetically leading the most radical left-wing movement in the nation’s history", writes Victor Davis Hanson, and

Right-leaning Americans are living as if  occupied by a foreign power intent on denigrating and destroying our way of life, impoverishing us, and punishing us for objecting. (Angelo Codevilla at American Greatness)

Can Jonah find no "bane of humanity" among the left? (He hasn't seemed to mention many in the past four or five years.) Can Mitch McConnell find no "cancer", not a single one, in the Democrat party? The only people who want to "completely [overturn] the Constitutional order," Jonah, are members of the Left which, as you yourself once wrote about, has been burning for a hundred years or more to rid the Constitution of the electoral college and thereby overturn said Constitution, giving most power to the left-run cities and giving the Republican party the death knell in the process. And yes, Jonah, that (packing the courts, sinking the electoral college, creating a 51st and a 52nd state, etc, etc, etc…), along with hard evidence of cheating, voter fraud, and stealing the election, is proof enough for fighting back with lawsuits and with other obstacles to certification. (Dennis Prager makes several common-sense remarks in his Numerous Troubling Anomalies Regarding the 2020 Election That Cannot Be Ignored, but as Stacy McCain points out (thanks to Ed Driscoll), "the important thing about the media narrative … is how skepticism is basically forbidden.")

If the left gets its most fervent (and secret) wish, it doesn't matter if the GOP will reflect a Trump party or a (Not?) Running With Scissors party or a party of "conspiracy theorists and would-be secessionists" or a party of "gasoline-fighters, meme-warrior entertainers, grifters, and tinfoil hatters" or an exciting conservatism or a boring conservatism. 

It will be a defanged party and the United States will be like California or any country of Europe, a de facto one-party state, always leaning more or less left, always devoted to rewriting history, and always engaged in oppressing the half of the population that still believes in freedom along with regular religion. 

What in God's name is it that a Jonah Goldberg or a Myra Adams or, for that matter, a Mitch McConnell or a Mike Pence do not understand about that?