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?

Update: Stephen Kruiser is also frustrated, and asks:

How long do the mainstream media hacks have to keep exposing themselves as frothing-at-the-mouth haters of conservatives before conservatives get it?

Prager: The Numerous (and Sweeping) Anomalies Regarding the 2020 Election That Cannot Be Ignored

Two weeks after making some of the best remarks about the state of the nation following the November vote, Dennis Prager added a list of common-sense reasons why to be skeptical of the results of the 2020 Election, otherwise known as "an election that violated every anti-fraud protocol and that resulted in statistically impossible numbers".

Since the day after the 2020 presidential election, I have said I am agnostic with regard to whether the election was honestly or dishonestly decided.

The primary reasons for my agnosticism are the usual ones:

The anomalies:

In 132 years, no president has received more votes in his run for reelection and lost. Yet Donald Trump received 10 million more votes in 2020 than in 2016 -- and lost.

Trump won 18 of the 19 counties both Democrats and Republicans regard as the "bellwether" counties that virtually always go with the outcome of presidential elections. Yet he lost.

He won four bellwether states -- Florida, Ohio, Iowa and North Carolina. Yet he lost.

Republicans held onto all the House seats they were defending and gained another 13 seats. Yet, Trump lost.

Add the following to the anomalies:

Unprecedented efforts were made in some states to change election laws.

Mostly Democratic states sent out tens of millions of ballots or applications for absentee ballots to people who never requested them.

Voting began in some states six weeks before Election Day.

People have submitted sworn affidavits at great personal cost and with possible perjury charges that they witnessed ballot tampering on election night.

But all these things would matter little if Democrats involved in ballot-counting felt morally compelled to count votes honestly.

So, then, there is one question I have never heard posed that trumps all other considerations: Would moral considerations prevent Democrats from cheating to oust Trump? Or, to put the question in the positive: Would Democrats deem it morally obligatory to cheat on behalf of Joe Biden?

The answer to the first question is no: Moral considerations would not prevent decent Democrats from cheating to prevent Trump's reelection. The answer to the second question is yes: Decent Democrats would deem it morally obligatory to cheat on behalf of Biden.

For four years, the media and their party, the Democrats, told us every day that Trump is a fascist, a dictator, a racist and a white supremacist; that he was an agent of the Russian government -- a real-life Manchurian candidate. We were also repeatedly told by the lying media (Trump's accurate description of the mainstream media) that in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump said there are "very fine" Nazis (see the PragerU video, "The Charlottesville Lie"). Yes, the media told us with a straight face that a man with a Jewish daughter, Jewish son-in-law and Jewish grandchildren said there are fine Nazis. Biden said he decided to run for president because of this lie.

So, then, here is the question: Why would anyone who sincerely believed Trump is a white-supremacist fascist dictator not cheat if he or she could prevent such a person from becoming or remaining president of the United States?

Let me sharpen this question: Isn't someone who could prevent a fascist, white-supremacist, Nazi-defending dictator morally obligated to cheat if he or she could prevent such a person from becoming president?

I certainly would. If I were in a position to cheat in order to prevent a fascist from becoming president, why would I not cheat? I think of the most relevant example: the Nazis in the 1932 elections, Germany's last free election until after World War II. Though the Nazi Party did not receive a majority of votes, the Nazis held the most seats in the Reichstag, and the head of the party, Adolf Hitler, was named chancellor of Germany. If I were in a position to have prevented the Nazis from coming to power by cheating in the vote-count, wouldn't I have been morally obligated to do so -- and therefore done so? The answer is obvious.

To repeat, I have never said Biden did not win the election. And even if there was considerable fraud, that doesn't mean the election result would have been different.But there are consequences to beliefs. Unless Democrats knew they were lying for four years when they labelled Trump a fascist, racist, Nazi, dictator, etc., were they not duty-bound to cheat on Biden's behalf? So, then, when you have circumstantial evidence (not proof), combined with opportunity, desire, motive and, most important, no moral argument against cheating and a strong moral argument for cheating, it isn't a "lie," and it isn't a crackpot conspiracy theory, to wonder about the integrity of America's 2020 presidential election.

Paganism: Traditional Christians and Jews are now automatically considered to be far-right extremists and, especially, white supremacists

The West is reverting to paganism warns Bookworm, whose motto is "Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts." His article 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. (No wonder that Clarice Feldman writes that You Will Be Made to Believe Implausible Things (obrigado to Sarah Hoyt)).

It is in that perspective that I am shocked at conservatives like Jonah Goldberg going ballistic on one single solitary Republican and devout Christians like Sunday Bible Study teacher (and CPAC attendee) Myra Adams asking "Where do people like me go, when both parties are extreme?", both of whom do nothing but regurgitate mainstream (and deeply anti-Christian and anti-Jewish) media focal points. What in God's name is it about perspective that they do not understand?! 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 Tyranny of Clichés — once bring extreme focus to the problem by writing Liberal Fascism? (The book's most important single paragraph described "how liberals cheat in the war of ideas":

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 I wrote in my book, it is akin to refusing to see the beam in your brother's eye, because of your focus, indeed your obsession, on the mote in your own eye. But back to Bookworm:

The Biden administration is accelerating the leftist
abandonment of Biblical values and the return to paganism.

The term “pagan” developed as a way for the West to describe pre-Christian religion. Aside from meaning religions without Christ, “pagan” also described a world without Biblical values. When I think of Biblical values, I think of: a belief in an abstract divinity untethered to nature, monogamy within the context of marriage, two sexes, the end of human sacrifice, and a reliable justice system tempered as appropriate by mercy. Beginning in the 1960s at a covert level, fairly openly in the last 12 years, and with accelerating speed in the last 11 days, the left has used education, entertainment, social media, politics, the courts, and the police state to do away with every one of those Judeo-Christian, Biblically-based rules.

In lieu of an abstract divinity untethered to nature, we have open Gaia-worship. Even the Pope, who is supposed to the keeper of the Christian tradition, has anthropomorphized the Earth, elevating it to a divine state akin to God. In March, of the Wuhan virus, he said “Fires, earthquakes … nature is throwing a tantrum so that we will take care of her.” Breitbart noted that this was not the only time the Pope, inside of talking about “God’s creation,” talked about the earth as an entity …

[Pope Francis's] statements are pure paganism. Pre-Christian faiths viewed earth in exactly the same light. The movie Frozen II was a textbook for children about earth worship, even providing them with an Aryan earth goddess.

The Biden administration is accelerating this viewpoint with its fanatic emphasis on climate change — aka Gaia worship.

In lieu of monogamy without the context of marriage — and marriage representing the union of two biological sexes — leftism gave us no-fault divorce, polyamory, societally-sanctioned threesomes, hook-up culture, same-sex marriage and the notion that “gender” is separate from biological sex. The latter means that little Jimmy/Jenny can have two adults in his life who rotate on a daily basis between self-identified “gender.” The Biblical God is male and he created two sexes — male and female. In this regard, as Fay Voshell  wrote at American Thinker in 2015, this fluidity is purely pagan:

Paganism believes in metamorphosis by an act of will, human or divine. Transformation from one form to another is a constant theme in Greek mythology. The gods could become whatever or whomever they wished, often because they wished to have sex with humans who were unaware they were about to be raped by a god who had chosen the disguise of an animal. Zeus became a bull in order to seduce Europa. Once she was captured, Zeus returned to human form and raped her. The gods could also transform humans into flowers and trees. Ovid wrote that Apollo changed the nymph Daphne, with whom he wanted to have sex, into a laurel tree. Hyacinth suffered a similar fate. He was turned into a flower by the god Apollo, who fell in love with the youth’s beauty. The enchanting Leda was seduced by Zeus, who took the form of a swan.

In brief, pagan mythology is characterized by the extreme malleability of material reality, including the malleability of human beings and animals. It is anti-Christian and anti-science.

The Biden administration is accelerating this viewpoint with its emphasis on elevating so-called transgenderism to a dominant right within society, despite the fact that it is a tragic mental illness afflicting a minute percentage of the American population. And are you as incapable as I am of understanding why an old dude like ostensibly Catholic Joe Biden is so obsessed with transgenderism? It’s not just his puppetmasters. As he showed during his lone town hall, he’s given this thought and desperately wants to help 8-year-old children experiment with finding their true gender.

Leftists have completely embraced human sacrifice. In paganism, human sacrifice was used to appease the gods for the benefit of humankind. In America, almost 62,000,000 babies were killed in what ostensibly Catholic Nancy Pelosi calls the “sacred” right (or do I mean “rite”) of abortion. Leftists have appeased human sacrifice at the other end of life too. Socialized medicine invariably means rationing, and rationing means that your 80-year-old grandmother, who has a zest for life and is in great condition, will get palliative care rather than cancer treatment because the economics of treating an old lady for cancer just don’t make sense.

England’s Liverpool Care Pathway, which provided a glide path to death for elderly patients, comes to mind. (Wikipedia’s entry, by the way, has been rewritten to make it all sound like people were just confused about over 1,000 elderly people being hastened to their death under a government care program.) Euthanasia is also a thing wherever socialized medicine is put into place. It starts with terminal patients, then moves to unhappy patients, and eventually sweeps in young patients. Kurt Vonnegut was a lot more prescient than he realized when he wrote “Welcome to the Monkey House,” which advocated for birth control as an alternative to euthanasia when everyone was worried about “the population bomb.”

Perhaps I’m unduly cynical, but I don’t think that it was just a mistake when leftist governors such as Cuomo and Whitmer herded patients who had the Wuhan virus into old age homes, turning those homes into abattoirs. Cuomo was unrepentant when confronted with the fact that he killed 50% more elderly people than his office had originally admitted because they hadn’t bothered to count those who got infected in death-trap care facilities but died in hospitals. “Who cares [where they died]?” he asked rhetorically. “They died.”

That’s really the point, in a socialized system that has no reverence for life, old people are (pardon the pun) dead weight. They’re no longer contributing to the system. They just take out of it. The fact that the once put into it is irrelevant. Socialists have no past, the future is infinitely malleable, and the needs of the present are all the matters. If you need old people dead now, kill ’em — but blame Trump for it because if there’s one thing narcissists don’t do, whether as individuals or political movements, is take responsibility for things.

And again, with its demand that Americans once again fund abortion around the world, the Biden administration is doubling down on this purely pagan value.

When it comes to the “reliable justice system,” that’s also out the window. It’s become patently clear that there are different rules for different people. Once upon a time, Democrat-run American states based the different justice rules on race, disfavoring blacks. Now, they have different justice rules based on race (disfavoring whites) and on political ideology. We’ve seen in the past two decades that, if you’re a Republican who breaks the law or violates a leftist shibboleth (gay marriage), you will be harassed from pillar to post, and either end up in jail or financially destroyed. However, if you’re a Democrat / leftist / progressive who breaks the law, absolutely nothing will happen to you. Well, nothing bad. You’ll get well-paid TV gigs and book deals. Plus, Joe Biden’s administration will put you right back into government if that’s where you want to be.

There is nothing to distinguish this system from any “justice” system that existed in pagan communities or in any pre-modern community. Justice is not blind and balanced. Instead, she’s a vengeful goddess who rewards those who worship her correctly and destroys those who don’t.

To wrap the above thoughts into a tidy package, don’t forget the Democrat / leftist / progressive hostility to traditional religion. Traditional Christians and Jews are now automatically considered to be far-right extremists and, especially, white supremacists. Please ignore the fact that people who are devoutly religious believe that all people were made by God and are therefore equal before God. Meanwhile, the Democrats are busy dishing out to whites the same racist crap that Democrats once dished out to blacks. But this time around, the new element is that leftists also dislike blacks, whom they insist on treating as incompetent and stupid, rather than as people who make rational choices in their own self-interest and who, when relieved of the burden of government’s heavy hand, can step up and be as accomplished in all areas as people of other races.

The pagan era was not a good time for humanity. If you read Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, you will get a crash course in the horrors of the pre-modern, pagan world. Under Biden, the leftist rush to jettison once and for all the good Biblical values that got winnowed out after centuries of learning to leave paganism behind is a disaster in the making.

Inside of a month, Democrats have redefined riots and election challenges from the highest form of patriotism to an attack on democracy — And by “democracy”, they mean the Democrat Party

 
Unite and Heal With Show Trials and Fascist Purges is how Daniel Greenfield titles his latest
Front Page Mag piece, tongue firmly in cheek (thanks to Glenn Reynolds).

Joe Biden has called for “unity” and “healing”. 

 … "I think it has to happen," Biden said, mandating the show impeachment trial of his predecessor.

Once upon a time, impeachments were rare things. These days, Democrats aren’t considered truly progressive if they don’t impeach a Republican president twice in one term. President Trump is back in Florida, but that won’t stop the Democrats from impeaching him anyway before they move on to impeaching the presidents like Washington and Lincoln whose statues their insurrectionist mobs were toppling all summer and fall back when insurrection was still cool.

When asked how he defines unity, Joe Biden … explained that

“If you pass a piece of legislation that breaks down on party lines but it get passed, it doesn't means there wasn't unity -- it just means it wasn't bipartisan.”

Like most ideas that travel the circuitous route between his handlers, his brain, and his mouth, it may be impossible to understand what Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. said, but it’s pretty clear what the senile hack ruling a city under the shadow of military occupation and political terror meant.

Unity is when Democrats get their way. Unity is when no one opposes them. Unity is when they terrorize their political opposition into submitting and keeping their mouths shut.

Or as Speaker Pelosi put it, “I don't think it's very unifying to say, 'Oh, let's just forget it and move on.' That's not how you unify."

How do you unify? The same way every great democratic people’s regime did from France to Russia to China to San Francisco -- with show trials and purges of the enemies of the people.

Nothing says unity like a city full of barbed wire and soldiers. Not to mention a one-party system that is obsessed with criminalizing its political opposition using a fake state of emergency.

 … The only unity on display is the unity of “consistent Marxists” who claim to represent the will of the majority, or those parts of it willing to trade harvested ballots for a fruit basket and $25 gift cards, as they move to heal the country by eliminating women, suburbs, and the economy.

The show trial of President Trump and the city full of soldiers is just the opening act to the Great Purge of a domestic terrorism crackdown on anyone who ever retweeted the wrong meme.

Biden will embed a domestic terrorism office in the NSC, making the NSC's former abuses under Obama routine as a system meant to track foreign enemies is instead used to surveil domestic political opponents. Heading the effort will be Joshua Geltzman who had formerly falsely claimed, "No, Black Lives Matter is not a terrorist organization."

Inside of a month, Democrats had redefined riots and election challenges from the highest form of patriotism to an attack on democracy. And by “democracy”, they mean the Democrat Party.
[In a number of speeches, FYI, Abraham Lincoln referred to the Democrat Party as just that — "the democracy" — so back in the 19th century, the synonym seems to have been a common one.]

Popular leaders don’t take their false oaths of office in a deserted city surrounded by barbed wire and military checkpoints manned by 25,000 troops. Nor do they engage in show trials of their predecessors or unroll massive efforts to surveil, arrest, and silence their opponents.

That’s not the stuff of healing, but it is how you unite a country at gunpoint under your rule.

After four years of vowing to remove President Trump by any means from massive riots to illegal eavesdropping to coups, the Democrats declared an emergency because a few Republicans had done 10% of the things they had been doing, but without dressing up as human genitalia.

Democrats had been collecting bail fund donations for mass arrests in post-election protests and even a “separate fund to raise money for the families of anyone killed in violence on or around Election Day.” And then they pivoted from prepping body bags to declaring that insurrection was a national emergency which will require the National Guard to sleep in parking lots where they won’t annoy Democrat House members until Biden sees his own shadow.

That or the show trials wrap up before they get around to mandating that all future elections take place at Democrat campaign offices preceded by poll tests about equity and white privilege.

Meanwhile 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.

"Marxist philosophy holds that the law of the unity of opposites is the fundamental law of the universe," Mao had argued. "Under this system, the people enjoy extensive democracy and freedom, but at the same time they have to keep within the bounds of socialist discipline."

The bounds of socialist discipline, like a black hole, sucks things in without letting them out.

Democrats aren’t proposing that Americans unite under the Constitution. There’s no room in the Constitution for criminalizing political opposition or impeaching presidents after they leave office.

The Democrats want to make sure we stay within the shrinking bounds of socialist discipline.

Unity just means bringing the opposition into the dialectic and then making sure that it plays by the new rules of the game even if they were invented last week by way of convenience.

The new rules of unity are that no one may question an election that the Democrats claim to have won, no one may say anything that Big Tech doesn’t like, and no one may suggest that Biden’s Assistant Health Secretary is a middle-aged man in a dress and a flowing blonde wig.

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.

That and believing that his assistant health secretary is a woman.

Believing implausible things is the essence of party discipline. If you want to understand how hardened Communists could shout, “Long live Stalin” just before they were shot in the gulags, it’s because they had spent a generation being conditioned to believe whatever they were told.

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command,” George Orwell wrote in 1984.

When slavery is freedom, and ignorance is truth, then repression becomes healing. The dialectic unites opposites, turning lies into truth, and flattening all contradictions. The message of the party becomes a gnostic mystery whose paradoxes are overcome by political faith.

The evidence of our eyes and ears is more valuable than ever in an environment of lies.

And that ocular and aural testimony finds scant evidence of unity, but plenty of repression. Americans aren’t coming together, they’re being driven further apart under the guise of a manufactured emergency being declared by insurrectionist rioters suddenly turned patriots.

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. Only the unity that comes from eliminating the political opposition in your very own Bidenist banana republic.

"C'est nous les vrais républicains, les républicains restés fidèles à Lincoln qui disait qu'il fallait refuser tout compromis avec les esclavagistes du sud!"

Les contestations autour des résultats de la présidentielle, et surtout l'envahissement du Capitole le 6 janvier dernier à Washington, a exhibé les fractures idéologiques béantes au sein du Parti républicain. Les élus et un appareil militant toujours plus intransigeant incarnent deux droites irréconciliables... auxquelles les urnes interdisent de divorcer.

"Ça fait 40 ans qu'on entend ça. En fait, on entend ça à chaque victoire des démocrates. Il y a vraiment un grand sens du mélodrame chez eux".

Qu'on se le dise: interrogé par BFMTV.com, Erik Svane, membre des Republicans Overseas, ne croit pas à une explosion du Parti républicain entre pro et anti-Trump.

C'est ainsi que commence l'article de Robin Verner pour BFMTV.com, Entre Trump et les républicains, mariage invivable mais divorce impossible…

Dennis Prager on the Current State of the Nation

One of the best explanations the 2020 election is that of PragerU's Dennis Prager addressing the current state of the nation.

Update: The Numerous (and Sweeping) Anomalies Regarding the 2020 Election That Cannot Be Ignored

LCI's Brunch de l'Actu: "99% of the Capitol Protestors Were Entirely Peaceful, as Were 99% of the Group Which Entered the Premises"

Sur le Brunch de l'Actu à LCI, un intervenant pro-Républicain a essayé de mettre fin à l'outrage et aux jérémiades des journalistes par rapport à "l'assaut" donné au Congrès : 

99% des protestataires devant le Congrès étaient paisibles et 99% de ceux qui sont entrés dans le Congrès se sont comportés comme dans un musée — respectant même les cordes de velours dans la salle statuaire…

 

Voter Fraud: The Journalists' Guide to Reporting on Politicians

Among this week's collection of Powerline memes (hat tip to Instapundit) — related to this blog's previous two posts on Voter Fraud (A Note to Leftists Who Claim that "Not a shred of hard evidence has been produced" and How Would Reagan React to the November Election's Voter Fraud and the Riots of 2020? How About Abe Lincoln?) — is the Journalists' Guide to Reporting on Politicians:

Voter Fraud: A Note to Leftists Who Claim that "Not a shred of hard evidence has been produced"

A cranky reader advises me to "let it go," claiming that "There was no voter fraud, Eric. Not a shred of hard evidence has been produced."

Remember George W Bush being lampooned mercilessly for twangs and goofs (real or alleged), such as the way he pronounced "nuclear"? Then came Obama who spoke of the nation's 57 states, mentioned the "Austrian" language, and confused the Malvinas (more about the Falklands below) with the Maldives. 

Oh, that? said the country's — and the planet's — journalists. No big deal… And so those goofs were not, or barely, reported…  Not that I disagree, mind you (that they were/are no big deal). I just think if you refrain from making a big deal about the Maldives (about as far away from the Malvinas on this planet as you can get), then you refrain from making a big deal about "nuclear"; if you make a big deal about Dubya's goofs, then you make an equally big deal about Obama's goofs. It ain't complicated…

I don't think that the filter of the media's double standards is conducive to a neutral and objective citizenry or to their, i.e., to the nation's, well-being…

Leftists claim that "Not a shred of hard evidence has been produced" — this, after the MSM that you read and watch along with the social media companies, like Twitter and Facebook, that you perhaps follow have made a conscious and deliberate decision to refrain from reporting on that very subject; a subject that is remarkably uncontroversial.

It is not Holocaust denial, after all, is it? In that case, refusal to report on that subject makes more sense. No, it is more like saying that Obama made such wonderful speeches; never a single goof in any of them. How do we know? Well, that is what the MSM reported, never mentioning a single goof.

What is also amazing about the Left — not least the  very "objective" and "neutral" "seekers of truth" and "investigative" journalists in the mainstream media that we have been speaking about so far — is their utter lack of a single ounce of curiosity in the matter — simple, human curiosity.

There is absolutely no controversy whatsoever to say that corruption can be found in large cities, and — as I have been repeating on French radio and TV shows this past month or two — it is no more controversial to say that voter fraud exists in Philadelphia and Chicago than to say that it exists in Marseille and Nice (Nice is especially conducive to comparisons with Chicago since the latter's father-son tag team (the Daleys) can be compared to Nice's Médecin family.)

Lately, moreover, it has emerged that the narrative that existed for the Falklands War for 30 to 40 years is false, and that contrary to 1982 media reports — repeated for over three decades — that British soldiers stationed on the island had surrendered almost immediately to Argentina's invaders, they had in fact put up quite a long (and lethal) fight.

Many many years after World War II, it emerged that the British had uncovered the German secret codes, and rather than have the Germans figure that out, Churchill (far from wrongly) let an English city be bombed (Coventry?) instead of warning its inhabitants.

More to the point, perhaps, is Eisenhower's suggestion to his vice-president that Nixon challenge the 1960 election's results; because there had definitely been fraud in Illinois (see Chicago above) and in (LBJ's) Texas.

And yet, both in Europe and in America, we are told from the get-go that no fraud whatsoever took place in 2020; belief in voter fraud is proof of absolute insanity or conspiracy theory and must be dismissed out of hand. As if it were akin to suggesting that the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico were built by ancient extraterrestrials with the help of their spaceships…

And yet: Even with the pyramids, there is no attempt to silence the news… Leading to the question, "What are they scared of?"

Indeed, how can journalists in Paris or New York or even Milwaukee or Atlanta state that no fraud took place in, say, Wisconsin or Georgia? Without any attempt at investigation? And that within a week of the election? In Paris I was interrupted — almost shouted down — by, among others, a historian (!) (see three historical examples above) — all of whom (religiously) repeated the same phrase: "Il n'y a aucune preuve!"

In America, they feel a need to call the charges "baseless" again and again — even in New York Times headlines. There is no way that cheating can have occurred in 2020 and there is no way that the results of the election can be disbelieved. Although that is the exact same accusation that Democrats have been bringing for the past four years. And, indeed, bring every time a Republican emerges as the winner.

2016 was the Republican cheating with help from Russia's leader, 2000 was the Republican cheating with help from Florida's governor, and (way back) 1980 was the Republican cheating with the help of Iran's ayatollahs.

Where are the media reports (rightly) calling (at the time or in the years or decades following) Trump's Russian conspiracy a "baseless" hoax or the so-called Iranian deal with Ronald Reagan "baseless"?

Double standards, Crank. Double standards.

My all-time favorite Tea Party sign featured this message:

"It doesn't matter what this sign says, it will be called racist."

Likewise, it doesn't matter what evidence (or, rather, proof) we come up with.
We will be told that "Not a shred of hard evidence has been produced"… 

Update via Instapundit — Among this week's collection of Powerline memes
is the Journalists' Guide to Reporting on Politicians:

How Would Reagan React to the November Election's Voter Fraud and the Riots of 2020? How About Abe Lincoln?

What would Ronald Reagan say about how Americans should react to the riots of the summer of 2020 and to the November election's innumerable instances of outright voter fraud?

We have the answer to that question, thankfully, thanks to one of his best speeches ever.

In his A Time for Choosing address for the Goldwater Presidential Campaign in 1964, the Gipper said that

there is only one guaranteed way you can have peace — and you can have it in the next second: surrender 

Although the quote about peace is (hardly wrongly) taken in the context (indeed, in its intended context) of the Cold War, people do not realize that the sentiment about surrender and apologizing and submitting does not apply only to a foreign adversary — the communists of the Soviet Union — it also applies to domestic issues (and even within one's family — although when dealing with a wife, wise husbands might do well to learn the phrase "you're right, dear"). 

Indeed, the oath of officeholders is to

support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic

In that perspective, we should remember one of Abraham Lincoln's earliest speeches, his 1838 warning against domestic foes. (Strangely, I thought as a teen visiting Walt Disney World in the 1970s, why would that speech be the one that the Imagineers — obviously, long before the Disney Studios became "woke" — chose for their Audio-Animatronic Lincoln in the Hall of Presidents?) 

At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? — Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! — All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

Brought forward 180 years, Honest Abe's message becomes, do not seek peace with members of the Democrat Party on basic issues of policy, domestic or otherwise, or regarding their swindle in elections, or concerning the suicide of your Grand Old Party or the suicide of (y)our republic and of (y)our (common) nation.

Needless to say, conservatives who surrender, who submit, and who apologize — from John McCain to Mitt Romney through John Roberts — are lionized in the press. 

Members of the Supreme Court as well as officials from various local stateside Republican Parties, from Wisconsin to Georgia, have surrendered and submitted, for ostensibly good reasons, in their minds — to prevent further riots. And apparently because of, yes, precedent.

Conservative leaders have sought out "peace" with the Democrat Party and with its "dreamers", its drama queens, and its mobs, rioters, and arsonists, and have engaged in virtue signalling, i.e., have striven to appear gentlemanly. Gentlemanly in the eyes of the Democrats, who have not an ounce of reciprocal courtesy to offer to Republicans. 

Indeed, the very fact that the Left commits voter fraud and uses "worse than savage mobs" as a bludgeon to get their way is the very proof of their lack of reciprocal civility that they demand from Republicans. More to the point, it is not the path along which a republic can continue to follow if it wishes to survive rather than committing suicide.

In the Lyceum address, Lincoln goes on to say that

I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts [the courts in the real sense; not the cowardly courts in the Progressive era almost two centuries later]; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice. This disposition is awfully fearful in any community; and that it now exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit, it would be a violation of truth, and an insult to our intelligence, to deny. Accounts of outrages committed by mobs, form the every-day news of the times. They have pervaded the country, from New England to Louisiana

Nay: suicide — of one's party, of one's republic, on one's nation — is not gentlemanly.

To return to Reagan's speech, the one thing I would have added would be the following:

You can have peace in a second — surrender. To make the ignominious taste of surrender palatable, our friends on the Left would rewrite the history of the United States and of the West to make us feel ashamed, to make us the guilty party in all disputes imaginable, and to make us believe that we are the cause of all the evil and all the sins in the world.

• Related: Stare Decisis — The Areas that Precedent Is Not Supposed to Include and Be Concerned With • How Come So Much of What Honest Abe Spoke of 150 Years Ago Seems Relevant Today?

Read the rest of Lincoln's 1838 speech (remember, Honest Abe was only 28 at the time, which says something for not finishing school and educating oneself at home) — especially, as you remember the riots of 2020, the following part:

But you are, perhaps, ready to ask, "What has this to do with the perpetuation of our political institutions?" I answer, it has much to do with it. Its direct consequences are, comparatively speaking, but a small evil; and much of its danger consists, in the proneness of our minds, to regard its direct, as its only consequences. Abstractly considered, the hanging of the gamblers at Vicksburg, was of but little consequence. 

 … But the example in either case, was fearful. —When men take it in their heads to day, to hang gamblers, or burn murderers, they should recollect, that, in the confusion usually attending such transactions, they will be as likely to hang or burn some one who is neither a gambler nor a murderer as one who is; and that, acting upon the example they set, the mob of to-morrow, may, and probably will, hang or burn some of them by the very same mistake. And not only so; the innocent, those who have ever set their faces against violations of law in every shape, alike with the guilty, fall victims to the ravages of mob law; and thus it goes on, step by step, till all the walls erected for the defense of the persons and property of individuals, are trodden down, and disregarded. 

But all this even, is not the full extent of the evil. —By such examples, by instances of the perpetrators of such acts going unpunished, the lawless in spirit, are encouraged to become lawless in practice; and having been used to no restraint, but dread of punishment, they thus become, absolutely unrestrained. —Having ever regarded Government as their deadliest bane, they make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations; and pray for nothing so much, as its total annihilation. 

While, on the other hand, good men, men who love tranquility, who desire to abide by the laws, and enjoy their benefits, who would gladly spill their blood in the defense of their country; seeing their property destroyed; their families insulted, and their lives endangered; their persons injured; and seeing nothing in prospect that forebodes a change for the better; become tired of, and disgusted with, a Government that offers them no protection; and are not much averse to a change in which they imagine they have nothing to lose. 

Thus, then, by the operation of this mobocractic spirit, which all must admit, is now abroad in the land, the strongest bulwark of any Government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectually be broken down and destroyed —I mean the attachment of the People. Whenever this effect shall be produced among us; whenever the vicious portion of population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision-stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure, and with impunity; depend on it, this Government cannot last. 

By such things, the feelings of the best citizens will become more or less alienated from it; and thus it will be left without friends, or with too few, and those few too weak, to make their friendship effectual. At such a time and under such circumstances, men of sufficient talent and ambition will not be wanting to seize the opportunity, strike the blow, and overturn that fair fabric, which for the last half century, has been the fondest hope, of the lovers of freedom, throughout the world.

I know the American People are much attached to their Government; —I know they would suffer much for its sake; —I know they would endure evils long and patiently, before they would ever think of exchanging it for another. Yet, notwithstanding all this, if the laws be continually despised and disregarded, if their rights to be secure in their persons and property, are held by no better tenure than the caprice of a mob, the alienation of their affections from the Government is the natural consequence; and to that, sooner or later, it must come.