Over at Instapundit, Sarah Hoyt links to a trifecta of posts on secularism — as well as to her own outstanding
In Praise of Populism — to wit, they are Keith Lowery's The Myth of Secular Neutrality, Holly MathNerd's The Disappearance of Secularism, and Francis Turner's Faith and Ritual.
Before we get to the gist of this post (the point here is not to quote all of these remarkable posts, although I would love to), I will do a quick quote from Keith Lowery's article:
The point is to psychologically condition Americans until they believe that they cannot afford to exercise their civil rights. From Jack Phillips to Donald Trump, the law-fare being run by progressives is less about winning those cases than about publicizing the cases so that other non-progressives will think twice before exercising their own civil rights, or doing anything that has a practical political impact that is negative for progressives.
… So the cost of exercising any actual civil rights, those which run afoul of progressive goals, is being intentionally inflated beyond all affordability. Progressives know exactly what they are doing.
The radical partisanship of the government bureaucracy, brazenly on display in 2020, unmasked the ideal of secular neutrality to reveal only a delusion.
The point of the present post is one part of my January article on the 2020 Election, and below I have expanded upon that passage.
But first, Sarah Hoyt (and thanks for the Instalink): Nancy Pelosi's
opponent is an idiot — and not an American — by saying that Trump should have “Accepted” the election results. I’ll assume he doesn’t understand mathematics or didn’t watch the results come in. NO ONE should accept impossible results that almost guarantee an election was tampered with. That’s known as disenfranchising the people, and any American should be revolted at the idea. There’s nothing sacred against election results. If there’s sufficient reason to SUSPECT let alone prove tampering, they should be examined, investigated and dissected. Which always happened till 2020. In 2020 the results were untouchable because they couldn’t stand examination. In the same way her opponent seems to only know the “made for TV” bs about January 6th. Taking a guided tour of the capitol is no insurrection, and no one should feel they have to bow to little Nancy’s insanity on that.
• Expanded from American Thinker's Let's Stop Using the Words "Trump Tried to Overturn the 2020 Election":
When describing the 2020 election, all the left is doing is repeat incessantly — they don't even bother using
their usual weasel tactic of referring to (unnamed) experts, although
that is implicit — that Trump's claim are "baseless" or "unfounded", if
not an outright lie (or "the big lie"), all the while calling us
skeptics "conspiracy theorists", without ever giving, at least once in a
while, some evidence thereof.
Just presenting one in-depth single article or news story in which every one of Trump's claims is meticulously picked apart and debunked might be enough, and the New York Times and the Washington Post could refer to it by linking the word "baseless" or "lie" in every every other subsequent news story to it. But that "ur-article" does not seem to exist in any editorial office.
As Dennis Prager puts it, in today's America (and world),
all you have to say to people who went to college is "Experts say" … As I've said for years, for the secular college graduate, "Experts say" is what "Thus sayeth the Lord" has been to religious people for thousands of years. They have just exchanged authority from the Lord to "the experts"…
In this case, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN don't even use "experts say", knowing that that would sound ridiculous (who on Earth — what individual — can be called an unassailable expert on the matter of election results if there have been shenanigans which by definition are stealthy and which the so-called expert cannot possibly know anything about) while betting — incredibly, with no lack of success — on nobody challenging their basic gaslighting about Trump's "baseless" claims and his desire to "overturn" an election and, indeed, democracy itself.
I'm not very religious myself, but if you read the books in Dennis Prager's Rational Bible series ("The title of [these five commentaries] is “The Rational Bible” because its
approach is entirely reason-based … The reader is never asked to accept
anything on faith alone"), you will get an idea of the real
reason why religion has such a bad reputation. What does it mean to be
religious? Does it mean believing in (alleged) fairy tales or going to
Church/Synagogue with foolish believers with silly smiles on their
faces?
It means nothing but this, says Dennis Prager: live and work (and… govern) while trying to integrate the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments
into your life. Now, before you protest that you don't want, or need, a
religious lesson: think of "do not steal" and "do not kill" (do not murder
in the original Hebrew); isn't that pretty good governance for a
society that even an atheist can, without renouncing his atheism or
agnosticism and without joining any religion, subscribe to?!
Ah, but there's the rub: to the leftist, actually, the 10 Commandments turn out to be one heck of a major problem.
Leftists at the head of a nanny government obviously don't think you are their equals, socialists do not believe in "do not covet" (taxes), communists do not believe in "do not kill", nanny governments do not believe in "honoring your father and mother" (your family) — certainly not above Big Brother — and above all, all of the above do not believe in "Do not bear false witness."
(If you protest, "Let's not get carried away, Erik, surely you
cannot deny that some amount of taxes are necessary in life?!" provides the answer: "Those who live under the law have an equal right in the making of
the law, [while] those who make the law have a corresponding duty to live
under the law." Incidentally, this also pertains to the January 6 kerfuffle…)
Bearing false witness: leftists allow themselves to lie to others, and
they allow themselves to lie to themselves — all to bask in their own
valor and glory, as these knights in shining armor turn everything
upside down.
Because they are Drama Queens, leftists allow themselves to wield double standards and to lie about global warming, about the rise of the oceans, about Republicans being Hitler, about leftist riots versus right-wing protests, about illegal immigrants and how they have no papers, about racism, about COVID, about 1776 replaced with 1619, about American culture (structural racism), about sexism, about rape culture, about men identifying as girls participating in women's sports, about suicide being a benevolent thing ("Do not kill" applies also to yourself), about the horrendous (Bible-based) Western civilization, about the ghastly sins of despicable Republicans like Donald Trump, George W Bush, and Ronald Reagan vs the "ho-hum" at-best-insignificant lapses of valorous Democrats like Joe Biden, Barack Obama and the Clintons, about how the MAGA movement is traitorous, about how the January 6 protesters deserve up to two dozen years in prison while releasing true criminals onto the streets, about how the communists were honorable ("sure they killed millions of people, but, hey, they had good intentions"), and about wokeness uncovering a true picture of society.
In short, they can lie about how despicable their neighbors are and
how valorous they themselves are to attack said neighbors, aka their
(non-threatening) adversaries.
Speaking of the Bible, incidentally, does it not mention false pride as the cardinal sin? Wouldn't that cover yourself self-describing as valorous for "saving the planet" and "saving democracy"?
No wonder leftists praise l'état laïc and want the Judeo-Christian religion to have nothing to do with politics…
It also explains the antisemitism and anti-Americanism through the centuries and the millennia, Israel and the United States being the two nations that have most followed the precepts of the Judeo-Christian Bible, not least the Golden Rule (and have prospered as a consequence) — and thus at least tried to prevent politicians and citizens alike from lying to others as well as to themselves. This brings us, full circle, back to Dennis Prager, writing (in Whites Aren't Hated for Slavery but for Making America and the West),
the left … hates America, which it regards as the paragon of capitalism. By becoming the most successful country in history, America, the quintessential capitalist country, remains a living rebuke to everything the left stands for. If America can be brought down, every left-wing egalitarian dream can be realized. … What the left does very much seek is to destroy America as we have known it -- the capitalist and Judeo-Christian enclave of personal freedom.
Mark Levin's latest book is called The Democrat Party Hates America. The truth, as we have seen with the Woke movement, is that leftist scholars and
activists hate American institutions, the Left hates American values, leftists hate American history, leftists hate American liberty, leftists abhor the Judeo-Christian religion (because of its Golden Rule and its Ten Commandments), and Democrats have hated Republicans since the movement was born in 1854.
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