#DefundNPR is trending on Twitter. The reason for this is that National Public Radio — you know, that sinkhole where your tax dollars go — issued a statement about why it is not covering the developing story about Hunter Biden’s overseas business deals and the potential implications for his father, Joe. Much like Twitter itself — which blocked circulation of the story along with Facebook, and which shut down the account of the New York Post, one of America’s longest-running papers, for days after the Hunter story broke — NPR has responded to charges of censorship with vague <a href="https://twitter.com/SpencerKlavan/status/1316759329383485441?s=20">grumblings</a> about the validity of the sources. These of course are concerns that NPR mysteriously never raised while pumping 24/7 coverage of the ludicrous Steele Dossier and its Russian collusion canard into our ears.
The reality is, as everyone knows, these rules are made up by big tech and legacy media as they go along in a desperate effort to shut conservatives out of the public square before they tell too much truth about Joe Biden and hurt his chances at the presidency. In this case it seems to have <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/16/1010644/twitter-ban-hunter-biden-emails-backfires/">backfired</a> by drawing more, rather than less, attention to the Hunter story. But there’s something more important going on, which merits attention for the long term — and it has to do with how Twitter itself is reporting the #DefundNPR hashtag.
Trends on Twitter come with little explanations, and here is the one for #DefundNPR: “A contingent of Republicans want to ‘defund NPR’ after the non-profit media organization defended its decision not to publish stories on the controversial NY Post article about Hunter Biden.”
Almost every word of this is dishonest. It’s not some marginal “contingent of Republicans” that is appalled at the partisanship of our digital forums — plenty of centrists are <a href="https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1319312843062218752?s=20">appalled</a> too. They have every reason to be. And the only reason the Post bombshell is “controversial” is because from the minute it broke, the clowns at NPR, Twitter, Facebook, the New York Times, and all the other dumpster fires we call media organizations have been fabricating ludicrous controversy about it precisely so they could discredit it.
So it’s not just the stories we’re reading online that are biased: it’s the way in which those stories are framed and presented to us.
Twitter knows what it’s doing when it swaddles a potentially explosive story in language designed to make it look like the fringe concern of partisan hacks. It’s shaping what we know and think by shaping the context in which we receive new information.
For my money, this completely explodes the naïve idea — which has long held Republicans back from legislating strongly on this issue — that human curators like Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey can run some sort of “neutral” public square. The comparison that is often made between Twitter and an internet or phone service provider is not just flawed: it’s a category error.
The reason for this is structural: when it comes to media venues, there is no such thing as a simple blank space into which all available opinions and facts are dumped equally without favor. There are human beings who build institutions, and those institutions make choices about what you will find out and how it will be framed. Some of them — like Twitter — lie about that and pretend to be neutral.
But in this case “neutral” is just another word for “my values are the ones which are non-negotiable because they don’t even count as values.”
Republicans need to wise up to this, and fast. If we are really going to have free speech in this country, we simply cannot allow platforms like Twitter to hold a functional monopoly on the attention of the American people. When conservative pundits make excuses for Twitter on the <a href="https://twitter.com/DavidAFrench/status/1316584400499421184?s=20">grounds</a> of shoddy First Amendment arguments, and when Republican lawmakers <a href="https://twitter.com/DavidAFrench/status/1265857184459612160?s=20">block</a> efforts to hold social media and search giants to account, they are being perilously naïve and playing with this country’s future.
Twitter isn’t some neutral platform: it’s a venue with a point of view, just like the Daily Wire or NPR. Only unlike the Daily Wire, Twitter gets to hide its values under the surface as if they were simply the rules of engagement. They aren’t, and they shouldn’t be—it’s high time Republicans figured that out.
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/">Young Heretics</a> podcast and assistant editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/">Claremont Review of</a> Booksand <a href="https://americanmind.org/">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan">@SpencerKlavan</a>.
More from Spencer Klavan: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/video-games-the-last-refuge-of-manhood">Video Games: The Last Refuge of Manhood</a>
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Twitter

Why It’s Absurd To Think Twitter Can Be Neutral

#DefundNPR is trending on Twitter. The reason for this is that National Public Radio — you know, that sinkhole where your tax dollars go — issued a

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One of my favorite video games — God of War III — includes a scene in which the player (as the fictional Greek warrior Kratos) must infiltrate the personal quarters of the god Poseidon and rescue a woman known as “Poseidon’s Princess.” The Princess is being held captive, one of her breasts exposed by an obscenely revealing garment. To beat the level, you have to free her, but then use her body to jam an enormous wheel that opens the gate by which you must exit. It’s an absolutely grotesque moment of gratuitous carnage.
What to do with a moment like that? The game is otherwise a masterpiece: it’s visually lush, narratively compelling, and a joy to play. Its controls — the designated system that translates the controller’s set number of buttons and joysticks into the character’s full range of motion — are fluid and elegant. And yet I can only describe the sacrifice of Poseidon’s Princess, an unavoidable part of God of War’s narrative, as appalling and immoral.
Typically, there are two conservative responses to violence in video games, especially among parents. One response is to condemn games outright as a corrupting influence on young children. This attitude has a respectable pedigree — as far back as the 4th century BC, the philosopher Plato was arguing in his Republic that stories which depict heroes acting immorally can’t be allowed to shape the psyche and emotional attitudes of impressionable children if they are to grow up into healthy, functional citizens.
But because sensitivity and delicacy have been carried to such terrible excess by the Left — and because harridans like the YouTuber Anita Sarkeesian try so constantly to ruin everyone’s fun by scolding gamers for their insufficiently enlightened attitudes — right-wingers sometimes respond by enthusiastically defending violence and sex in video games. It’s an odd position for conservatives to find themselves taking, but it does make sense. If the Left insists on shaming and browbeating us for liking a little red-blooded entertainment, we’ll push back by insisting on the most extravagant and outlandish forms of violence just to throw our freedom in their faces.
In my view, the truth about violence and sex in video games lies somewhere in between these two conservative attitudes. What really happened is this: one by one, all of our major cultural institutions became hostile to the vitality and enthusiasm that comes with men being men. The despicable accusation of “toxic masculinity” was successfully used to put moviemakers, schoolteachers, writers, and artists of all stripes on the defensive when it comes to male forms of expression and entertainment. 
The simple fact is, guys — tasked as they are with defending all that is good against danger — naturally have a taste for fighting and testing their strength against an opponent, and for all that is now condemned by Hollywood as sexist. But there’s an ancient piece of wisdom, expressed in the West as “chivalry,” which posits that the impulses and energies of young men must be honed and cultivated by experienced teachers. Otherwise, they’ll destroy the world. The animal energy of red-blooded males is what fuels the best kinds of civilization-building, but unless it’s directed that way it can just as easily express itself in the aggression and destructiveness that leftists have successfully labeled as “toxic.”
Video games, being a new and relatively unfiltered medium, have mostly escaped the fate of high culture and so become one of the last places where men can pursue and enjoy the kinds of stories they’re naturally interested in — stories of war, adventure, and heroism. But because all our usual modes of cultural transmission have descended into madness, a lot of the wisdom and cultivation is lacking in this new wild west of gaming. That’s why you get absurd and frankly degraded excesses like the one with Poseidon’s Princess in God of War III. Those kinds of moments are the fantasies of untutored boys making art without the guidance of wise men.
This is one of the many reasons why conservatives should express an interest in video games: they still provide an opportunity for uncensored storytelling that is mostly beyond the reach of the anti-human, de-gendered Left. But the writers and makers of games require guidance from that conservative moral spirit, the one that teaches young men how to channel their energies into more than just fart noises and crude drawings. 
In between the moral censure of Plato’s Republic and the insouciant shrug of our rebellion against wokeism, there’s a really valuable approach conservatives can take to gaming culture. We shouldn’t ignore them as being silly or beneath our attention — they’re some of the most popular and influential cultural products in America right now. Without rejecting or suppressing one ounce of the manly spirit that pervades video games, we can use them to teach our kids and remind ourselves what true, mature masculinity looks like: not unfettered violence, but disciplined courage. Not self-indulgent lust, but spirited courtship and procreativity. Not adolescent boyhood, but real manhood. Almost nothing is more important than that.
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/">Young Heretics</a> podcast and assistant editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/">Claremont Review of</a> Books and <a href="https://americanmind.org/">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan">@SpencerKlavan</a>.
More from Spencer Klavan: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/klavan-the-ancient-belief-that-drives-the-lefts-death-cult">The Ancient Belief That Drives The Left’s Death Cult</a>
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe"> member</a>.

God of War

Video Games: The Last Refuge of Manhood

Conservatism

video games

One of my favorite video games — God of War III — includes a scene in which the player (as the fictional Greek warrior Kratos) must infiltrate the

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This is not an “issues” election. As I write this, Hunter Biden’s leaked emails, if authentic, are revealing facts about his business in Ukraine that reveal his father’s flagrant dishonesty, at the very least. The potential implications of this utterly eclipse those of the inconsequential phone call over which Trump was impeached. But not only has the press downplayed the emails: the New York Post exposé that first broke the story has been blatantly censored by both Facebook and Twitter.
All this should matter much more than it does. But I suspect people are not paying attention to tech censorship, or Biden’s corruption, or really any individual bombshell or policy proposal. What we are fighting about right now is who we are. Each of the two presidential tickets represents a vision of American citizenship and national identity which goes far deeper than politics in the day-to-day sense of the word. The difference between Donald Trump and Joe Biden is political in a much more foundational way: it speaks to how we organize our shared life together, and on what grounds.
In Chapter 10 of his famous handbook on governance, The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli says this about contemporary Germany:
<blockquote>The cities of Germany are absolutely free. They own but little country around them, and they yield obedience to the emperor when it suits them, nor do they fear this or any other power they may have near them: they are fortified in such a way that every one thinks the taking of them by assault would be tedious and difficult, seeing they have proper ditches and walls and sufficient artillery, and they always keep in public depots enough for one year&#8217;s eating, drinking, and firing.</blockquote>
Things have changed since the 16th century when Machiavelli was writing only to this extent: it is now not cities but nation-states that must maintain their freedom. And it is not war that most threatens that freedom, but the prospect of total absorption into a global collective — into the kind of borderless world government of which the E.U. and the U.N. are only prototypes.
Since Brexit in 2016, we have seen how ferociously the oligarchs of global governance will fight to prevent states from reclaiming their autonomy once it has been surrendered to a supranational government. Increasingly, the result of integration into the new world order is turning out not to be greater peace and understanding, as was hoped, but subjugation to an entitled and destructive ruling class.
Donald Trump represents the same approach for America in the 21st century that Germany represented for Machiavelli: an insistence on national sovereignty, enforced by border walls and defended if need be at the cost of life and treasure. His insistence on “America first” is really an insistence simply on America, as distinct from other nations. His approach to immigration and global trade is of a piece with his unapologetic patriotism, his pride in the American Constitution and our traditions of personal liberty: all of them are ways of saying, this country is ours, and it is we the people — without exception — who direct our own affairs.
What Joe Biden wants, by contrast, is the kind of America that his old boss Barack Obama wanted: an America wracked with guilt over its past sins and fawningly deferent to global bureaucrats. The reason Biden wants us back in the Iran deal, why he wants us to follow Dr. Fauci’s instructions to the letter, why he wants us to confess and atone for the “systemic racism” which infects the basic foundations of our society and history, is because he thinks that’s who we ought to be: not a proud and independent people, but interchangeable members of a faceless and submissive global citizenry.
Biden wants Americans governed, not by our own heritage and traditions as a people, but by the dictates and whims of the bloodless aristocrats whose sensibilities are aligned with the progressive vision for a new world order.
The 2020 election, then, is not about whether America will enact this or that policy — it’s about whether America will really be America, or whether it will continue to let the corrosive acid of unfettered liberalism dissolve it and melt it away. I know what I’d prefer. I hope I’m not alone.
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/">Young Heretics</a> podcast and assistant editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/">Claremont Review of</a> Books and <a href="https://americanmind.org/">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan">@SpencerKlavan</a>.
More from Spencer Klavan: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/klavan-how-the-barrett-hearings-force-democrats-to-play-their-hand">How The Barrett Hearings Force Democrats To Play Their Hand</a>
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Trump Rally

KLAVAN: The Real Difference Between Donald Trump and Joe Biden

2020 Election

Donald Trump

Joe Biden

This is not an “issues” election. As I write this, Hunter Biden’s leaked emails, if authentic, are revealing facts about his business in Ukraine that

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This week’s hearings to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett as Supreme Court Justice haven’t inspired quite the same level of baseless hysteria that accompanied Brett Kavanaugh’s hearings in 2018. That’s not because Democrats have suddenly come down with a case of moral principle. It’s because our precarious moment finds them in a somewhat delicate position.
Their shamelessly theatrical, totally unsubstantiated accusations of sexual impropriety against Kavanaugh left them looking vindictive and unserious. Dems can’t afford another self-own of that magnitude just before an election — not when their target is a whip-smart femme fatale whose major prospective weak points aren’t weak points at all.
It’s true that there is now a dishearteningly large contingency of leftists who will foam at the mouth on cue when informed that Barrett has committed the sin of&#8230; interracial adoption and working motherhood. You really have to work to be that stupid, but there are plenty of people out there “doing the work,” as they say. Tweedy authoritarian wantwit Ibram X. Kendi did his best as always to excel in bigoted idiocy (it’s the only category in which he stands a chance, you see), <a href="https://twitter.com/DrIbram/status/1309916696296198146?s=20">suggesting</a> that ACB adopted children as “props” to illustrate her own virtue rather than, you know, to give them a future and a hope.
But the Democrats in the Senate, at least, are savvy enough to keep from saying the quiet part quite so loud. Senator Dianne Feinstein learned her lesson three years ago during Barrett’s federal circuit hearings. “The dogma lives loudly within you,” Feinstein proclaimed, and instantly became an object of contempt. The “dogma,” of course, is Catholicism, of which Barrett is an exemplary practitioner. What Democrats must do is insinuate that this makes her unsuited for public office (a claim as laughable as it is genuinely offensive) while not seeming to do so.
In other words: having finally learned their lesson from Kavanaugh (and before him Clarence Thomas, and before him Robert Bork), Republicans have strategically nominated someone whom the Left can’t smear without revealing the ugly implications of their nasty philosophy.
Trump and his team have outmaneuvered the Democrats on this at last. Having as usual no cogent arguments about why on earth we shouldn’t fill a vacant Supreme Court seat, the Left can only rely on slander and personal attacks. In this case, though, doing so cannot help but reveal them for the miserable cretins they are.
Because in fact, our ever-more radicalized progressives do on some level believe that interracial adoption is wrong, that Catholics are stone-age barbarians, and that women should either man up or shut up. Those aren’t outlandish exaggerations or straw men: they are necessary consequences of the Democrats’ explicit first principles.
It is of course amusing to see publications like Slate perform veritable backflips of hypocrisy, calling Barrett a “<a href="https://twitter.com/SpencerKlavan/status/1315704701678092288?s=20">shameless careerist</a>” for having the audacity to&#8230; work while a mom. But it’s far more telling that the Dems actually can’t attack ACB without being hypocritical, unless they want to give their own putrid game away.
If you <a href="https://twitter.com/SpencerKlavan/status/1308047806293184513?s=20">think</a> “building the kingdom of God” is an unacceptable aspiration for a person in American public life, then of course you’re going to find it inconceivable that a Catholic judge could rule impartially. If you hate the idea of a feminine woman prioritizing her family, then of course you’ll call her a “handmaid” (as if that’s a bad thing, and not the exalted title of the Virgin Mary herself). And if you’re incapable of seeing any human interaction in terms of anything other than race — if, in other words, you’re a racist — then of course you’ll be blind to the sacred tenderness of this elegant woman and her abounding family.
It’s delicious, I must confess, to watch Democrats tie themselves in knots to avoid saying what they really believe. I just hope the American people read between the lines. Because if a Left that looks like this gets the presidency, then unfortunately we won’t have to anymore.
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/">Young Heretics</a> podcast and assistant editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/">Claremont Review of</a> Booksand <a href="https://americanmind.org/">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan">@SpencerKlavan</a>.
More from Spencer Klavan: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/klavan-the-world-kamala-harris-wants">The World Kamala Harris Wants</a>
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe"> member</a>.

Dianne Feinstein

KLAVAN: How The Barrett Hearings Force Democrats To Play Their Hand

Abortion

Amy Coney Barrett

Brett Kavanaugh

Catholicism

Ibram X. Kendi

Supreme Court

This week’s hearings to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett as Supreme Court Justice haven’t inspired quite the same level of baseless hysteria that

KLAVAN: How The Barrett Hearings Force Democrats To Play Their Hand | The Daily Wire

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The minute Kamala Harris started losing the debate with Mike Pence last night, you could almost see the thought go through her head: “I need to make this about mansplaining.”
Mansplaining, as we have been forced to learn, is the phenomenon in which a man talks over a woman to explain something to her. The term became popular after a 2008 essay by feminist author Rebecca Solnit, “Men Explain Things to Me,” in which Solnit describes the experience of having her own book explained to her by a man.
Neither Solnit in her essay, nor Kamala in the debates, actually used the term “mansplain.” Neither of them had to: the press did it for them. Kamala knew they would, which is why she punctuated Pence’s devastating responses—many of which went over the allotted time—with little smirky interjections like “Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking.” She was laying the groundwork for girlbosses in newsrooms across the country to snap their fingers, cluck their tongues, and say “Kamala did such a great job standing up to that big mean mansplaining MAN.”
It’s literally all she has. Harris <a href="https://t.co/GtPk0WyyKr?amp=1">lied</a> again and again during the debate—about her position on fracking, about President Trump’s statements on coronavirus, about Biden’s plan to let Trump’s tax cuts sunset. She refused to answer whether Biden wants to pack the supreme court, because of course he does.
So she came across as what she is: an empty, vindictive scold with nothing to show for herself but smug self-satisfaction. Pence calmly and politely, but assertively, held her feet to the fire and insisted on the truth. Harris eventually positioned herself as a victim of sexism so her cronies in the media would have a way to excuse her miserable inadequacies.
But in the end, one of two things is true. Either, as the Left claims, women in general are just as good as men in general at everything, or they are not. If they are, then they should be able to hold their own in a debate, which always—especially in these tense times—involves talking over your opponent, shouldering your way in to get your points heard, and steamrolling over the moderator to make sure you land the message where it counts. In such a context there is no such thing as “mansplaining,” only two opponents duking it out—you know, a debate. To claim otherwise is contemptibly weak.
But there is another possibility. Maybe, in fact, women and men are different and tend to be good at different things. Maybe, you know, the way people have looked at the world for all of human existence is basically the right one. If so, then we actually can talk about mansplaining, because yeah, in reality, guys can get a little aggressive sometimes. Just like women can get a little scoldy sometimes. We all have our natures, and the two genders have different tendencies to excess that need to be tempered against one another. That used to be obvious, basic knowledge.
We can still live in that world. But if so, we need to concede that actually, maybe politics is basically guy stuff by and large. Maybe the person you want in the room with CCP strongman Xi Jinping isn’t someone who’s going to throw up her hands the minute he gets too mean. There will be exceptions, of course: no one would argue that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was too fragile to hold her own. But then, she would never have been caught dead whining about “mansplaining,” had the term existed at the time. She lived in the real world, the one in which men and women are generally quite different, but in which anyone can do anything if they live up to the same objective standard.
That world, by the way, is basically the West. Even as far back as the 5th century BC, the Greeks tipped their proverbial hats to women like Artemisia I of Caria, a naval leader who put men to shame on the high seas. Today, no conservative does so much as raise an eyebrow when a woman like Judge Amy Coney Barrett rises to a position of power and promise on the basis of her merits alone.
But that is not, in fact, the world the Democrats want to live in. They want a denatured world, one in which our natural gender differences make us foul and must be stamped out. There is a hideously dehumanized, endlessly miserable philosophy lurking just behind Kamala Harris and her petty complaints about Pence’s interruptions. It is a world of social engineering, forcible indoctrination, and painful alienation from one another.
We don’t have to live in that world. We can live in the world where men and women get along—indeed, where they even civilize each other and invite one another into the fullness of themselves. You know, the world God made. All we have to do to get there, is tell the truth.
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/">Young Heretics</a> podcast and assistant editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/">Claremont Review of</a> Books and <a href="https://americanmind.org/">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan">@SpencerKlavan</a>.
More from Spencer Klavan: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-leftist-philosophy-thats-even-older-than-joe-biden">The Leftist Philosophy That’s Even Older Than Joe Biden</a>
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe"> member</a>.

Kamala Harris

KLAVAN: The World Kamala Harris Wants

Feminism

Gender

Mike Pence

The minute Kamala Harris started losing the debate with Mike Pence last night, you could almost see the thought go through her head: “I need to make this

KLAVAN: The World Kamala Harris Wants | The Daily Wire

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If you scroll through reams of text on the CDC page entitled “COVID-19 Pandemic Planning Scenarios” (and hoo boy, you really do have to scroll), you will find that the novel coronavirus kills those whom it infects at the following rates (the Infection Fatality Ratio):
19 years of age or younger: 0.003% chance of death
20-49 years of age: 0.02% chance of death
50-69 years of age: 0.5% chance of death
70 years of age or older: 5.4% chance of death
By contrast, if you do a Google image search for “<a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=COVID+transmission&amp;tbm=isch&amp;ved=2ahUKEwiXqq7B2qDsAhXH654KHUhQBP8Q2-cCegQIABAA&amp;oq=COVID+transmission&amp;gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQAzIECAAQQzICCAAyAggAMgIIADICCAAyAggAMgIIADICCAAyAggAMgIIADoECCMQJzoHCAAQsQMQQzoFCAAQsQNQ1jJYo0Bg7UBoAHAAeACAAYEBiAGbDZIBBDEyLjWYAQCgAQGqAQtnd3Mtd2l6LWltZ8ABAQ&amp;sclient=img&amp;ei=QcZ8X9eFOcfX-wTIoJH4Dw&amp;bih=837&amp;biw=1440&amp;client=safari">COVID transmission</a>,” you will easily and immediately find page after page of nightmare cartoons in which apparently normal people spew poisonous particles from their filthy mouths in a manner that looks liable to choke anyone in the vicinity immediately upon contact. Perhaps you have seen some of these graphics yourself: it’s hard to miss them, plastered as they are all over public spaces in our new lockdown regime.
Now, of course, those graphics are not explicitly false: they usually include text describing how the virus is transmitted. But ask yourself: if this virus turns out to kill a vanishingly small percentage of those it infects, why is it so easy to find images of it that make it look like a cross between the Bubonic Plague and a weapon of domestic terrorism? Why is it so maddeningly difficult to find the data which tells you that, actually, it’s only a relatively minor threat?
There is one simple answer to this question: narrative. The menacing infographics and their threatening depictions aren’t works of science. They’re works of art, meant to depict COVID as some kind of apocalyptic fume that might lurk cunningly in the very innards of anybody on the streets. It’s a message, designed not to communicate the facts but to obscure them: Don’t let go of your fear. Stay submissive. Stay desperate. Stay down.
I&#8217;ve experienced this myself. When people go maskless in public, others initially recoil, but gradually relax the more they interact. Why should that be? Objectively, rationally, they haven’t learned anything new about the virus. But emotionally, on a subconscious level, they are having their real fear assuaged — the fear instilled in them by months of lockdown messaging, that visceral, pre-rational, emotional expectation that noxious gases are going to spill out of people&#8217;s mouths and choke them like in the infographics.
Over this past week, however, we have seen the most visible public figure in the country defy the COVID narrative. Donald Trump — overweight, 74-year-old Donald Trump — emerged from the hospital on Monday and defiantly took off his mask at the White House, after curb-stomping coronavirus with the help of his doctors. “Don’t be afraid of Covid,” he <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1313186529058136070?s=20">tweeted</a>. “Don’t let it dominate your life.”
This simple, visible, emotional display of strength and courage in the face of risk is the counter-narrative to the Left’s campaign of fear. Bear in mind: We know nothing new now that we didn’t know before Trump got sick — at least, not in terms of scientific fact. But this hasn’t been about scientific fact for a long time. It’s about a studious campaign of false claims, promulgated by Joe Biden and his fellow travelers in the administrative state, designed to pump the chill of fear into America’s veins.
Joseph Campbell, the scholar of comparative mythology, said in The Power of Myth that “mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth — penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words.” From the Greek historian Herodotus to the English author J.R.R. Tolkien, the greatest tellers of tales have always known that stories exist to communicate some emotional truth, something that can’t be grasped with facts or figures.
America has now been presented with two starkly different myths about how deadly the virus is and how free men and women should react to it. The Joe Biden myth — the CDC story — is that our fellow man is poisonous and we should cower in fear from him under the direction of unelected expert autocrats. The Donald Trump story — the true story — is that fear should be no match for this great nation.
Those are the two options on the table this November. I hope America chooses wisely.
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/">Young Heretics</a> podcast and assistant editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/">Claremont Review of</a> Booksand <a href="https://americanmind.org/">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan">@SpencerKlavan</a>.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe"> member</a>.

KLAVAN: Trump Diagnosis, Recovery Reveals America’s Two Competing Covid Myths

COVID-19

If you scroll through reams of text on the CDC page entitled “COVID-19 Pandemic Planning Scenarios” (and hoo boy, you really do have to scroll), you will

KLAVAN: Trump Diagnosis, Recovery Reveals America’s Two Competing Covid Myths | The Daily Wire

https://editorial.dailywire.com/news/klavan-trump-diagnosis-recovery-reveals-americas-two-competing-covid-myths/

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If you’re on Twitter, you’ll probably have seen a tweet that went viral recently — it featured a picture of an, *ahem*, bombshell mom with her nine kids, and a tenth on the way. The caption read, “this is environmental terrorism” — and then, further down, “In the year 2020 literally no one should have ten kids,”
I wish I could say the tweet was ratioed (the universal sign of Twitter condemnation in which a tweet receives more angry replies than likes or retweets). Instead, as of this writing, user “kai choyce” has 14,100 likes and only 7,400 replies. This, like so much on Twitter, is a small fact with big implications. There actually are masses of people out there who have been persuaded that big families are evil because they harm the earth.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
this is environmental terrorism <a href="https://t.co/dtvv2FqaJF">pic.twitter.com/dtvv2FqaJF</a>
&mdash; kai choyce (@kaichoyce) <a href="https://twitter.com/kaichoyce/status/1305776845053280257?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 15, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
This, I hardly need note, is a leftist philosophy. It was expressed in perhaps its boldest form recently in <a href="https://twitter.com/LeahLibresco/status/1309550517744472064?s=20">Vancouver</a>, where a billboard campaign stated that “the most loving gift you can give your first child is not to have another.”
As a side note, there is something hideously grim about suggesting that the best thing you can do for a kid is make sure he grows up alone. But on a deeper level, the basic premise of this philosophy — that more humans mean more problems — is the basic premise of a death cult. It is also, not unrelatedly, a basic premise of the Democratic Party in 2020.
As is made relatively clear by his (admittedly self-contradictory and fumbling) statements at the first debate, and still more clear <a href="https://joebiden.com/climate-plan/">on his website</a>, Presidential Candidate Joe Biden has accepted the framework of the Green New Deal, according to which “there is no greater challenge facing our country and our world” than to unmake industrial society and so restore the pristine purity of nature.
If there is “no greater challenge” than to clean the earth, and if cleaning the earth means ridding it of human influence to the fullest extent possible, then it will follow logically that keeping population low is the only ethical choice.
What neither Joe Biden nor any of his bug-eyed apparatchiks realize, however, is that this approach is the furthest thing possible from forward-thinking. The conviction underlying it all — that humans shouldn’t procreate because human life is bad — was precisely the conviction of Manichaeism, the dualist philosophy that Saint Augustine rejected en route to becoming one of the greatest Christian theologians of the 4th and 5th centuries A.D.
In his <a href="https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1402.htm">essay</a> On the Morals of the Manichaeans, Augustine wrote that “whoever makes the procreation of children a greater sin than copulation, forbids marriage, and makes the woman not a wife, but a mistress.” In other words, to deplore the birth of children is to undermine the foundations of human life and turn creation on its head.
This foundational question — is the profusion of human life fundamentally good, or fundamentally bad? — stands starkly before the American people in this election. President Trump has made clear which side he’s on. The <a href="https://americanmind.org/post/rnc-night-3/">Republican National Convention</a>, with its <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=2ahUKEwjHqpLHgZTsAhXjK30KHUy9AdoQwqsBMAJ6BAgKEA8&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D8Pl7yWDxpDg&amp;usg=AOvVaw3KmLpjQfQ7A66VPgCGvYt6">fiery</a> <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=2ahUKEwjH15PJgZTsAhXFIDQIHbsYC0wQwqsBMAB6BAgJEAU&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DWZrlXvNO9VQ&amp;usg=AOvVaw0YwKikc5wfTs9oGwMK-h-i">speeches</a> against abortion and its veritable parade of joyously strong mothers, embodied the Right’s commitment to affirming the superabundance of life and love that comes with childbirth.
As environmental policy activist Michael Shellenberger and host Will Witt make clear in the new documentary <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=2ahUKEwiBmZbwgZTsAhXDHjQIHdJYAxQQwqsBMAJ6BAgLEAU&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DUTgNtvTuYRU&amp;usg=AOvVaw3XcIkh2MFKOmofblz-jgYs">Religion of Green</a>, the Left has set itself in stark opposition to the conservative culture of life.
Fanatical devotion to Mother Earth is no less a religious stance than fanatical devotion to the God of Abraham and of life. One god demands that we be fruitful and multiply, filling the world with creativity and love in the unfolding of fruitful human life.
The other god — the god of apocalyptic environmentalism — demands that we sacrifice the old and stifle the birth of the young, piling up corpse after corpse on the altar of a poorly understood and ultimately quite primitive idea about what nature is and how it thrives.
The two parties have each made a choice concerning which god to serve. In November, so must Americans.
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/">Young Heretics</a> podcast and assistant editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/">Claremont Review of</a> Booksand <a href="https://americanmind.org/">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan">@SpencerKlavan</a>.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe"> member</a>.

Environmentalist Protest

KLAVAN: The Ancient Belief That Drives The Left’s Death Cult

Environmentalism

If you’re on Twitter, you’ll probably have seen a tweet that went viral recently — it featured a picture of an, *ahem*, bombshell mom with her nine kids,

KLAVAN: The Ancient Belief That Drives The Left’s Death Cult | The Daily Wire

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If you’ve been punishing yourself by following the rare public statements of Joe Biden (those few of them coherent enough to be “followed”), you may have noticed an intriguing emphasis on such words as truth and transparency. “The American people deserve transparency from their leaders,” said Biden after releasing his tax returns. And again: “it’s about electing leaders who tell the truth,” he said after Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson endorsed his candidacy.
If you are wondering how Joe can talk about such things as “transparency” when he has spent a good chunk of this month <a href="https://twitter.com/alec_sears/status/1308408738315931658?s=20">simply refusing</a> to talk to the public, you are not alone. What does it even mean to “tell the truth” if you’re <a href="https://twitter.com/WardDPatrick/status/1310579433212870656?s=20">not speaking</a> to anybody after 10 A.M.?
We’ll find out in the debates how much of this has to do with Biden’s increasing struggle to deliver coherent sentences, but there’s something deeper going on here too. To insist on every available media channel that Democrats are the Party of Truth, while simultaneously obscuring from view the most important aspects of your candidacy, is to reveal something important about the modern American Left.
Long before this election, the Left became enamored of a philosophy called “postmodernism.” The most relevant postmodern thinker for our purposes is Michel Foucault, a Frenchman who argued throughout the second half of the 20th century that language is more about power than it is about truth. Or rather, as he wrote in Discipline and Punish, Foucault believed that in modern society “the deployment of force and the establishment of truth” are one and the same thing.
What this means is that “truth” isn’t the objective world outside of us — it’s not something we experience and describe. It’s the decisions strong people make and back up with violence — it’s something we create and enforce.
These ideas have helped give a veneer of academic legitimacy to every major progressive excess since the ’70s.
That is why the Left can claim, unblushingly and in the teeth of all empirical evidence to the contrary, that if someone claims forcefully enough to be the opposite sex, they will in fact become the opposite sex, and must be viewed as such.
It is why Joe Biden can insist that he is the candidate of transparency even as he hides in his basement.
It is why the New York Times feels perfectly comfortable calling for news outlets to <a href="https://twitter.com/PoliticalShort/status/1310747472537542657?s=20">censor</a> Trump if he thinks he’s won the election.
Note the connection between postmodern “truth,” which is fungible, and political power, which is hard and fast: if they can muzzle you, threaten you with violent riots, and force you to comply, then the imaginary world they demand will have been summoned magically into being. This philosophy allows the Democrats currently seeking election to run on platforms that have almost nothing to do with reality and everything to do with the threat of force.
Like Foucault, the rioters and agitators of the Left present these ideas as radically new. They are not. They are the oldest intellectual tricks in the book, protozoan holdovers from before Socrates enlightened the ancient Greek world. Back then, wandering gurus like Heraclitus <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heraclitus/">insisted</a> that “all things are in flux,” so that no stable truth could be known or counted on.
Thrasymachus, who famously argued with Socrates in a conversation Plato portrays in his Republic, took this pre-truth philosophy one step further when he <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/callicles-thrasymachus/">asserted</a> that “justice is simply the will of the stronger.” If you don’t believe in objective truth, that’s the natural conclusion.
It’s old and atavistic nonsense, dredged up from the backwaters of intellectual prehistory where it should have stayed. This zombie philosophy is the one currently animating our withered husk of a Democratic candidate. If he wins it will be that philosophy — not Joe Biden, really — that takes power. It will be the equivalent of a new dark ages. It can’t be allowed to happen.
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/">Young Heretics</a> podcast and assistant editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/">Claremont Review of</a> Books and <a href="https://americanmind.org/">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan">@SpencerKlavan</a>.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily reflect those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

The Leftist Philosophy That’s Even Older Than Joe Biden

If you’ve been punishing yourself by following the rare public statements of Joe Biden (those few of them coherent enough to be “followed”), you may have

The Leftist Philosophy That’s Even Older Than Joe Biden | The Daily Wire

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In the wake of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death on September 18, Kamala Harris — Senator, Democratic vice presidential candidate, and very possibly the next president of the United States if Joe Biden keels over as imminently as he seems poised to do — wrote the following tweet: “‘My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.’ – Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her final moments before passing. We must honor that wish and fight for her legacy.”
Democrats have seized upon Ginsburg’s dying wish as reason to delay the nomination of a new justice until after the presidential election. This is not simply a flawed argument: it is also a revealing one. It shows quite precisely what the Party of Biden and Harris, of BLM and Antifa, believes.
Granted: in our age of legislative deadlock and judicial supremacy, court confirmations are bound to be high-stakes, down-and-dirty things. The Democrats took this to unconscionable extremes last time, provoking what can only be described as a moral panic by slandering Brett Kavanaugh as a rapist on the basis of flimsy anecdotes about his youth in an attempt to prop up uncorroborated allegations.
But as a rule, folks on both sides will say just about whatever they have to in order to get the right guy in. That’s not news: it’s just politics, and I wish the Right had wised up to it sooner. So no Republicans should be losing a minute’s sleep, for example, over the fact that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is taking a different position on Ginsburg’s replacement than he did on Antonin Scalia’s when Obama, not Trump, was nearing the end of his term. The issue is not the integrity of Mitch McConnell, it&#8217;s the trajectory of America. The soul of the country and the lives of the unborn are at stake in the potential overturn of Roe v. Wade, we we&#8217;ve got bigger concerns than whether Cocaine Mitch plays nice.
The significance of the Ginsburg’s-dying-wish meme isn’t that it’s a shamelessly desperate leftist power play. The real issue is that Democrats thought to use the tactic at all, presumably because they believe some portion of the American electorate will imagine that the final wishes of a dying woman — however esteemed she was — carry any weight whatsoever in the American system.
They don’t. None. Zip. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dying wishes — objects of interest and concern for her admirers though they may be — are profoundly irrelevant in determining who should pick the next Supreme Court Justice. The only relevant constraints and directives in that process are those outlined in the United States Constitution.
To suggest otherwise is to imply that Americans no longer wish to operate within their own republican system, or that they simply do not understand what that system entails. Since antiquity, anyone who has ever wanted to be politically free has had to commit to obeying laws only, and not the whims of any one human being.
When the Persian tyrant Xerxes was marching his massive army into Greece to conquer it, he asked the exiled Spartan king Demaratus why the Greeks dared resist him. The Greek historian Herodotus records Demaratus’ answer: Xerxes’ soldiers fought for him because they feared his punishment if they disobeyed. But the Spartans, said Demaratus, “are free, but not entirely so: their master is the law. They fear it far more than your men, Xerxes fear you.” Spartans would fight until every last one of them was dead in the ground rather than submit to rule by any man.
After Herodotus, this central idea was developed by countless other theorists of freedom — from Plato and Cicero to James Madison and John Adams. The logic of liberty demands that we tremble before the law, but fear no man. If we obey any human being, it is because that human being is an agent of the law.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was such an agent, but it was not in that capacity that she made her dying wish. It was in her capacity as a private citizen that Ginsburg made the request which Kamala Harris asks us to hear and obey. That is not the logic of liberty: it is the logic of hero-worship, tyranny, and slavery.
That logic is now the governing logic of the American Left. It is a logic of terrorism and mob rule, a logic that demands we bend the knee to certain revered figures — to George Floyd and the hateful campaigns of racialist violence that have been carried out in his name, for instance — rather than to our laws.
The Democrats claim it is Trump who threatens to destroy our institutions. But to anyone with eyes to see, it is clear who threatens the very foundations of our regime. Americans should vote accordingly.
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/">Young Heretics</a> podcast and assistant editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/">Claremont Review of</a> Booksand <a href="https://americanmind.org/">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan">@SpencerKlavan</a>.
More from Spencer Klavan: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/klavan-the-two-competing-philosophies-of-election-2020">The Two Competing Philosophies of Election 2020</a>
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

KLAVAN: Democrats Demand We Obey RBG’s Dying Wish. Here’s What That Reveals.

Democratic Party

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

In the wake of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death on September 18, Kamala Harris — Senator, Democratic vice presidential candidate, and

KLAVAN: Democrats Demand We Obey RBG’s Dying Wish. Here’s What That Reveals. | The Daily Wire

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America is in the grips of more than an election. This is not simply a contest between two competing plans for life within the American system. It is a clash between two opposing philosophies — one of them friendly toward America and nationhood generally, another hostile toward America and the West. Republicans believe that America is the latest in a proud line of great Western civilizations, from Athens and Israel to Rome and the Europe of the Renaissance — each of them flawed but all of them fundamentally good. Democrats believe that this whole outlook is a lie — that the civilizations of the West are “systemically” oppressive of minorities and designed to hide that fact. They have articulated these beliefs not only in the New York Times’s 1619 Project but in the riots of summer 2020, which tore apart the cities and tore down the statues that represent America’s present, past, and future.
In this new series of articles, I’ll be arguing that these two philosophies — the philosophy of Trump’s Right and the philosophy of BLM’s Left — both have long histories, much longer even than the history of this nation.
The conservative philosophy is the philosophy of realism, a philosophy which affirms the basic experiences of ordinary men and women and celebrates the achievements in art, culture, and politics which have improved those experiences. Its natural products are freedom and prosperity.
The leftist philosophy, though it presents itself as a forward-thinking innovation, is really an amalgam of the oldest and most instinctive forms of tribalism and relativism. Its natural products are resentment, poverty, and social crackup.
Trump’s candidacy already revealed this contrast back in 2016, when he unveiled his signature campaign promise and primary philosophical demand: Build the wall! The Left and the international community went nuts: Walls, they claimed, are <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/01/10/donald-trump-border-wall-birtherism-racial-resentment-column/2526917002/">racist</a>. The proposal to build one is <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mexicos-top-diplomat-calls-trumps-policies-ignorant-and-racist/2016/02/27/fabbb5f0-dd65-11e5-925f-1d10062cc82d_story.html">ignorant</a>. Nations that have them are <a href="https://time.com/4509501/donald-trumps-border-wall/">backwards and outdated</a>.
Meanwhile Trump and his base in the heartland insisted there will be a wall. It will be “impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful,” and “beautiful.” The elites of our ruling classes thought they were being sophisticated and forward-thinking by recoiling in horror from the idea that nations should be so defensive and suspicious as to have walls.
In fact, they were only raising objections that had been answered thousands of years ago, by Aristotle in his <a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0058%3Abook%3D7%3Asection%3D1330b">Politics</a>. “Some people say city-states which are trying to be virtuous shouldn’t have walls, <a href="https://pjmedia.com/andrewklavan/2018/06/22/aristotle-build-the-wall-n181087">wrote</a> the philosopher in the 4th century B.C., “but those people’s beliefs are out-of-date — they can see proof of that for themselves by looking at what happens to other city-states that put on that kind of display.”
In other words, societies pay a heavy cost when they virtue signal by making a show of forgoing border protection. Every community depends on boundaries to define itself and protect its citizenry — and Aristotle adds that for the sake of civic pride, the walls should be “as beautiful as the city-state deserves.”
The reasons for this are clear: even if you believe in national generosity and shelter for the outcast, you have to make sure that there is a you around to offer that generosity and shelter. Nations that don’t protect their borders — that hate themselves for even contemplating the idea — are nations which effectively concede to their own enemies that they shouldn’t exist.
Conservatives like Ann Coulter rightly <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-case-for-trump/">lament</a> Trump’s failure to have the wall, or much of it, built by now. This, along with a host of other disappointments, can be chalked up at least in part to the relentless opposition Trump has received from the establishmentarians of America’s federal bureaucracy.
But the point here is more about the principle of the thing. The electorate responded viscerally in 2016 to a candidate who dared to affirm, without apology, that America is a place and a country which deserves to exist, whose citizens deserve protections and privileges unique to them.
In their furious opposition to that claim, Democrats already revealed the belief which they have now made explicit: that America should not exist, and should have no right to determine who does and does not occupy its land. In November, we will find out how many people agree with them.
More from Spencer Klavan: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/klavan-why-commies-get-everything-wrong">Why Marxists Get Everything Wrong</a>
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/">Young Heretics</a> podcast and assistant editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/">Claremont Review of</a> Booksand <a href="https://americanmind.org/">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan">@SpencerKlavan</a>.

President Trump Hosts A ‘Great American Comeback’ Rally

KLAVAN: The Two Competing Philosophies of Election 2020

America is in the grips of more than an election. This is not simply a contest between two competing plans for life within the American system. It is a

KLAVAN: The Two Competing Philosophies of Election 2020 | The Daily Wire

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The thing about the commies currently rioting in our streets is that everything they believe is the opposite of the truth. No, really: that’s actually the case. At the heart of their General Misunderstanding of Everything is a dictum from Chapter 2 of Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto: “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”
When all property is held in common, Marx and Engels argued, property “loses its class character,” meaning essentially that the use of wealth to oppress certain underprivileged groups will cease and an age of universal brotherhood will begin. Just give everything to the state, and true equality will break forth like the dawn!
This is the theory currently motivating so many people to tear American cities apart. Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the New York Times’s 1619 Project, <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/06/03/ny-times-reporter-says-destroying-property-is-not-violence/">argued</a> on CBS that the destruction of private property is “not violence” but rather a means for BLM rioters to achieve justice. When a group of insurrectionists seized an “autonomous” portion of Seattle’s Capitol Hill and named it the CHAZ/CHOP, VOX breathlessly <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/06/03/ny-times-reporter-says-destroying-property-is-not-violence/">advertised</a> the program as one of “free political speech, co-ops, and community gardens.”
The people burning our cities down are all, however vaguely or subconsciously, seduced by the impossible Communist dream of a future in which everything belongs to everyone.
In fact, as has become readily apparent, the abolition of private property is not a precondition for the Age of Aquarius but a recipe for misery, resentment, and wanton violence. The reasons for this would already have been perfectly clear to our revolutionary knuckleheads if they had read their Aristotle.
When the ancient Greek philosopher Plato argued in his Republic that a perfectly just society should be one in which all things are owned in common, his student Aristotle took issue. He <a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0058%3Abook%3D2">wrote</a> in Book 2 of his Politics that
<blockquote>Property that is common to the greatest number of owners receives the least attention; men care most for their private possessions, and for what they own in common less, or only so far as it falls to their own individual share for in addition to the other reasons, they think less of it on the ground that someone else is thinking about it&#8230; [This] results in each citizen&#8217;s having a thousand sons, and these do not belong to them as individuals but any child is equally the son of anyone, so that all alike will regard them with indifference. </blockquote>
In this one paragraph, Aristotle destroyed Marx 2000 years before he was even born.
What the Greeks came to understand through their philosophical tradition is this: property isn’t just stuff. It’s part of who we are and how we express ourselves in the world. Making something our own — caring for it as our own responsibility and no one else’s — is an act of love. Give everything to everyone, and that love is stretched thin, diluted like a drop of wine in a vast ocean of water.
This observation was carried forward in the Western tradition and became a core part of the American founding. James Madison, in his essay on “<a href="https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch16s23.html">Property</a>,” would observe that only societies which allow individuals to keep what they own — their own land, their own wealth, their own opinions, their own relationships — can be truly just. Much later, in 1833, the economist William Forster Lloyd would observe what became known as the “tragedy of the commons”: all property held in common is doomed to mismanagement unless someone regulates it.
This of course is always the tortured punch line of the joke which is Communism: once we all own everything, we must submit in everything to the judgment of state overseers, or face lawlessness and disaster.
The BLM and Antifa mobs currently tearing down buildings and statues think they’ve come up with some new idea. In fact all they’ve come up with is an ancient and profound misunderstanding about how human life, labor, and affection work. This would be hilarious if it weren’t currently threatening to unmake everything that America is, and everything that the West holds dear.
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/">Young Heretics</a> podcast and assistant editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/">Claremont Review of</a> Booksand <a href="https://americanmind.org/">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan">@SpencerKlavan</a>.
More from Spencer Klavan: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/klavan-the-lockdown-left-has-no-idea-how-life-works">The Lockdown Left Has No Idea How Life Works</a>
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Kenosha Riot Fire

KLAVAN: Why Marxists Get Everything Wrong

Communism

Marxism

Riots

The thing about the commies currently rioting in our streets is that everything they believe is the opposite of the truth. No, really: that’s actually the

KLAVAN: Why Marxists Get Everything Wrong | The Daily Wire

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It happened so slowly — the masks and the social distancing and the economic wreckage were each gradually imposed upon us by slow degrees — that it’s easy to forget how oppressive the weight of our lockdown state has become. But the other day, as I stood masked in line at the grocery store, I looked at the beleaguered crowd of people trudging through their cramped existence and thought: what have we become? It got me thinking about how disconnected from reality our rhetoric has been these past few months.
We&#8217;ve lost all perspective. The black death, which ravaged Europe with repeated outbreaks of the bacterium yersinia pestis, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Black-Death/Effects-and-significance">killed</a> between 30 and 50 percent of the populations it infected — 25 million people in Europe — during the 14th century. That is a pandemic. It hung grimly over the lives and careers of Petrarch and Boccaccio, of John Wycliffe and Geoffrey Chaucer.
It’s astonishing to contemplate what magnificent achievements were made by people who were just fighting their way through life as this fatal shadow swept across the world. By contrast we, who saw about .058% of the American population die this summer, have ground our entire world <a href="https://americanmind.org/essays/the-covid-coup/">to a halt</a>. This suggests to me a deep unseriousness about what life is, and what can be expected of it.
In brief: we have no idea what it is to be alive on planet earth. This world — this broken, sad world — does not offer any promise or even possibility of perfection. In our lifetimes, most Americans have seen levels of comfort and security that would have been unthinkable for the vast majority of human beings throughout history. That is something to be celebrated, but it has also blinded us — made us vulnerable to the absurd expectation that this life can be made permanently comfortable, permanently safe. The lockdown extremists have shown the results of this blindness: they have no reasonable standard for disaster.
One writer who lived through the Black Death and wrote searingly about the perils of the world was Julian of Norwich, an anchoress who spent her life in quiet seclusion and prayer. In 1373 Julian prayed for, and received, sixteen “shewings” — mystical visions of God and his love for the world. It’s often overlooked, but Julian began her spiritual journey by asking to get deathly ill. She tells us in her <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Revelations-Divine-Dover-Value-Editions/dp/0486452441">record</a> of the experience that she prayed “freely desiring [her] sickness [to be] so hard as to death, that I might in that sickness receive all my rites of Holy Church, myself thinking that I should die, and that all creatures might suppose the same that saw me: for I would have no manner of comfort of earthly life.”
Julian asked to be so ill that she thought she would die, because only then would she understand what the lowly of the world were suffering at that time. In that way she hoped to approach the heart of Christ more nearly.
I make no claim to “understand” the kind of self-sacrificing ecstasy that drove Julian to pray in such a radical way. Speaking frankly, it seems insane to me. But if it is madness, it is the kind of madness that conceals a deep realism about what humanity is and how desperately in need we are. It was in the throes of her illness that Julian saw God, and it was God who led her at last to her famous proclamation that “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
Our ruling classes have disconnected themselves completely from the realities of life: death, sin, suffering, and God. Those things sound to our professors and our newscasters like quaint and outdated fantasies from a bygone era. But they remain the stuff of life, much as we might like to abandon them in favor of some imagined utopia.
If we allow them, our elites will disconnect us, too, from the realities of the world, seducing us with glamorous visions of a perfect future that can never be. But if we resist — if we accept the fact that death cannot be opted out of any more than life can be opted into — then we may find that indeed, in the face of everything, all shall be well.
More from Spencer Klavan: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/klavan-leftist-rioters-dont-understand-real-life">Leftist Rioters Don’t Understand Real Life</a>
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/">Young Heretics</a> podcast and assistant editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com">Claremont Review of Books</a> and <a href="https://americanmind.org/">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan">@SpencerKlavan</a>.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Governor Gavin Newsom Holds Coronavirus Briefing

KLAVAN: The Lockdown Left Has No Idea How Life Works

Coronavirus

It happened so slowly — the masks and the social distancing and the economic wreckage were each gradually imposed upon us by slow degrees — that it’s easy

KLAVAN: The Lockdown Left Has No Idea How Life Works | The Daily Wire

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After months of burning down American cities, beating innocent business owners half to death, and terrorizing private citizens in their suburban homes, the Marxist Left is shocked to find that such behavior might generate a violent response from some people. Kyle Rittenhouse, who traveled into Kenosha from his neighboring home city when riots threatened to level the Wisconsin town, is charged with killing two rioters after one pretty clearly <a href="https://twitter.com/KyleKashuv/status/1299106029830107138?s=20">pulled</a> a gun on him. No one of good will wants to see our cities devolve into mob rule and vigilante justice. But there are consequences for physical violence, and if the state won’t enforce those consequences then it’s a pretty sure bet that private citizens will start to do so.
If you brutalize people, things are going to get ugly. This should be “conflict 101” — heck, it should be “real life 101” — which tells you something about the wannabe mobsters currently parading our streets. They don’t actually have any idea what it is they’re asking for — they don’t live in the real world, where war, once it starts, has no rules.
Americans have lived so happily, so freely, so safely, for so long, that they have forgotten a few basic facts about reality. One of those basic facts is war, which is a human constant and not (as the present generation was implicitly raised to believe) a fairytale thing that happens in other less fortunate countries. In the last analysis, if you insist on breaking the social contract and threatening destruction, there aren’t actually any “authorities” to whom you can appeal to keep things neat and orderly. You can’t go crying to the police when you’re already crying to defund them.
We build societies to minimize the kind of disordered chaos that takes place in war — to resolve as many conflicts as possible without opening the lid of that Pandora’s box. That is the context which gives peace and civilization their value: we recognize them as gifts because we know that their alternatives are lawlessness, deprivation, and pain. In that sense, people who don’t understand war don’t understand any life at all.
This is actually the subject of the ancient Greece’s oldest epic poem, Homer’s <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/trailer-culture-without-the-culture-wars/id1513602173?i=1000474723200">Iliad</a> from the 8th century BC. It’s a song of rage and war — the story of how Achilles, hero of the Greeks (or, as they’re called in the poem, the Achaeans), refused to fight against Troy and so “cost the Achaeans countless lives.” The whole thing is pervaded with a sense of life’s fragility, with a melancholy awareness that men pass away as quickly and as inevitably as they are born.
“Like the generation of leaves, the lives of mortal men,” says the Trojan warrior Glaucus in Book 6, “Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth, now the living timber bursts with the new buds and spring comes round again. And so with men: as one generation comes to life, another dies away” (translated by <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Iliad-Homer/dp/0140275363">Robert Fagles</a>).
What’s profound about the poem is that though its subject is the carnage of war, it demonstrates a perfect understanding of how rich and good life at peace can be. In Book 18, when Achilles at last returns to the fight, he carries a shield carved with depictions not only of battle but also of weddings, courtroom dramas, and “girls and boys, their hearts leaping in innocence, bearing away the sweet ripe fruit” from the harvest. In some sense Achilles himself, who must choose whether to live in peace or die in war, is the embodiment of this understanding: his life, like all human life, derives its meaning from the costs of war and the longing for peace.
The mewling thugs currently tearing our streets apart have no idea how any of this works. They’re just LARPing at war, acting like they can rampage through American cities without consequence because they don’t realize what real fighting, or real life, actually is. The lamentable thing — and it is indeed lamentable — is that if they persist in their present course of action long enough, they will find out.
More from Spencer Klavan: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/klavan-what-antifa-wants-to-tear-down">What Antifa Wants To Tear Down</a>
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/">Young Heretics</a> podcast and assistant editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/">Claremont Review of</a> Books and <a href="https://americanmind.org/">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan">@SpencerKlavan</a>.

Feds Attempt To Intervene After Weeks Of Violent Protests In Portland

KLAVAN: Leftist Rioters Don’t Understand Real Life

Antifa

Kenosha

After months of burning down American cities, beating innocent business owners half to death, and terrorizing private citizens in their suburban homes,

KLAVAN: Leftist Rioters Don’t Understand Real Life | The Daily Wire

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The word of the day — of the year, really — is “deconstruction.” Have you noticed this? All our upper-class oligarchs want to “break down barriers,” to “disrupt” the evils of “systemic injustice.” Antifa, the anarcho-Communist organization whose various splinter cells are currently terrorizing cities across America, organizes “disruption events” on websites with names like “It’s Going Down.” The assumption behind all this rhetoric — from the C-suite virtue signaling to the street-level rioting — is that the “system” as currently constituted rests on intolerable injustice and must be “deconstructed” wholesale so we can begin from scratch.
The barriers that need breaking down vary depending on expediency and occasion. Sometimes it’s the barrier between male and female, which must be exploded for the sake of our genderless future. Sometimes it’s the barrier between public and private property, which cannot stand if we are to reach true Communist parity. And sometimes it’s the barrier between America and other countries — an inherently racist, xenophobic border which cannot, the radicals say, be allowed to remain intact.
One wonders what our new Marxist revolutionaries and their corporate backers intend to build or create once all the deconstructing is done. The answer is not forthcoming. And there’s a reason for that: all creation, all building, and all civilization depend upon erecting barriers.
This is an ancient and profound truth, reflected in God’s division of the night from the day in <a href="https://biblehub.com/genesis/1-4.htm">Genesis</a>. When you form an organized society, you make rules about what is what: what’s just and what’s unjust. What’s dark and what’s light. What’s allowed and what’s forbidden.
Postmodernism — the relativist philosophy upon which much identity politics <a href="https://americanmind.org/features/the-racial-marxism-of-blm/the-plot-to-change-america/">rests</a> — holds that all such boundaries are artificial and can be erased at will. If we just think hard enough about it, a man can be a woman — since neither category is “real” in any objective sense. The divisions between nations can be easily overlooked, since they’re really just lines someone drew on a map anyway.
And it’s true, some divisions in some societies have been unjustly drawn and enforced — the legal and social divisions between blacks and whites in the Jim Crow era spring immediately to mind. Our current revolutionaries feed off of this fact: they use our guilt at mistakenly drawn boundaries to convince us that all boundaries, and indeed our entire civilization, is a mistake.
And of course there’s something appealing about chaos. Because even good and just boundaries come with a cost. The institutions upon which all civilization rests — marriage, law, education — require us to draw lines in the sand against our own unrestrained impulses. To restrict ourselves from having everything we want in the interest of a better, higher way of life. To gain the joys of marriage, you have to give up the pleasures of unbridled sexuality.
Antifa and their supporters are inviting Americans to loosen those chains of civilization — to let their natural impulses run wild in a literally “counter-cultural” revolution.
But of course, that kind of revolution can only move in one direction. It’s a direction vividly illustrated by one of the greatest ancient Greek tragedies, the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-social-justice-endgame/">Bacchae</a> of Euripides.
In the play, Dionysus — god of madness and chaos — comes to the Greek city-state of Thebes with a vindictive plan to destroy its ruler, Pentheus. Dionysus is the God of breaking down boundaries — the male deity with the charms of a woman, the lord of loosened inhibitions and blurred perception. He seduces Pentheus with his strange anarchic charms, until Pentheus himself, dressed as a woman, tries to infiltrate the mad animal revels of Dionysus’ female followers. At the last minute, those followers — his mother among them — discover Pentheus and rip him limb from limb.
This is the ugly truth which lies beyond civilization’s boundaries. There is no Eden on the other side of those walls, no perfect harmony of man and nature to be had if they are broken down. Antifa depends on our yearning for that kind of primitive perfection, that primal longing for a world without rules.
But of course we are not angels, and what we will gain if we give up civilization is not paradise but misery, bestiality, and death. The invitation to “burn it all down” is tempting precisely because all societies — all systems — require that we give up some small part of our animal nature in exchange for order, peace, and justice. But in truth, of course, there is nothing to be gained by “deconstructing” the systems which produce those higher goods. If we follow the road Antifa currently proposes, we will trade away everything that makes us human, and receive nothing but sorrow in return.
More from Spencer Klavan: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/klavan-why-small-men-hate-churchill">Why Small Men Hate Churchill</a>
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

KENOSHA, WI – AUGUST 24: People watch a the American flag flies

KLAVAN: What Antifa Wants To Tear Down

The word of the day — of the year, really — is “deconstruction.” Have you noticed this? All our upper-class oligarchs want to “break down barriers,” to

KLAVAN: What Antifa Wants To Tear Down | The Daily Wire

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Jacobin, the American socialist quarterly magazine, published an article in 2018 defending protestors who had previously desecrated a statue of Winston Churchill. In the BLM insurrection of summer 2020, it has once again become fashionable to smear Churchill, the Prime Minister who brought Britain through World War II, with accusations of racism. And so Jacobin has re-upped its hit piece as a way of saying: we’re with the rioters.
The article is called “<a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2018/01/winston-churchill-british-empire-colonialism/">The Real Winston Churchill</a>,” and it faults the beloved British hero for any number of supposed sins, mostly having to do with racism and imperialism. Churchill was known for his loud mouth, it’s true, and some of his comments can seem off-color in hindsight. But that’s not what Jacobin really wants him taken down for: they’re upset that he relished victory in war.
“Everywhere one looks,” writes the author, Richard Seymour, “one finds Churchill dripping blood from his mouth. He was fanatical about violence.”
One might pause here to note that the violence about which Churchill was fanatical was against Hitler and his allies — i.e., the murderous, authoritarian, anti-Semitic scum of the earth. Jacobin: condemning antifascism to own the British aristocracy. Nice going, chuckleheads. But wait: there’s more!
Near the beginning of the article, the author quotes Richard Burton, an actor who played Churchill in the movie <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=2ahUKEwjh_Pmmhs7rAhVXJzQIHd2ABkgQFjAAegQIExAB&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FThe_Gathering_Storm_(2002_film)&amp;usg=AOvVaw0rMBk94C1DyuJM9zfF-wUC">The Gathering Storm</a> (2002). In preparing for the role, Burton became repulsed by Churchill’s entitlement and his vindictive fury against his enemies in war. “What man of sanity,” asked Burton, “would say on hearing of the atrocities committed by the Japanese against British and Anzac prisoners of war, ‘We shall wipe them out, every one of them, men, women, and children. There shall not be a Japanese left on the face of the earth’? Such simple-minded cravings for revenge leave me with a horrified but reluctant awe for such single-minded and merciless ferocity.”
Well, I never! Such simple-minded cravings for revenge! Just let me pour myself another glass of port as I sniff disapprovingly at Churchill’s primitive ferocity from the comfort of my dressing room. Quelle horreur! The man who saved the free world was not pristinely decorous in his sentiments toward a Japanese army that enslaved, starved, and beat its captives half to death! Read <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unbroken-World-Survival-Resilience-Redemption/dp/0812974492">Unbroken</a> (2010), the story of an American POW in Japanese captivity, if you want to hear about “merciless ferocity.” Imagine having the absolute gall to claim, from the safety of a Western world made free by none other than Churchill himself, that he should be faulted for having run his mouth.
Seymour’s list of Churchillian sins goes on: he was impressed with Mussolini and did not immediately condemn Italian fascism, for example. The same is <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-original-fascist/">true</a> of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, of course, and any number of other elegant Democrat intellectuals who fell all over themselves for il Duce. Not that you’ll read about that in Seymour’s article. “Mussolini has the same opponents as FDR,” said Roosevelt’s pet economist Rexford Tugwell, “but he controls the press, which prevents them from daily spreading their nonsense.” Everyone — leftists especially — was unsure about Mussolini at first, but of course, what’s a little nuance like that got to do with fighting for social justice?
In reality, of course, Winston Churchill did more good before breakfast at the age of 20 than all the BLM thugs, Antifa radicals, and Jacobin editors in the world could hope to do in 20 lifetimes. If you really want to feel unworthy, read Churchill’s 1930 memoir, <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/My-Early-Life/Winston-Churchill/9780684823454">My Early Life</a>, in which he explains how as a young man he fought courageously in the British army, made a daring escape from enemy captivity, and penned masterful book-length reports on his experiences all the while. “You have not an hour to lose,” writes Churchill to the young men of rising generations. “You must take your places in Life&#8217;s fighting line. Twenty to twenty-five! These are the years!” Rarely have I felt more inadequate than when reading those words at the (apparently) ripe old age of 28.
What is actually happening here is that the children of the West, grown fat and happy after long years of prosperity won for them by men like Churchill, have lost all taste for the derring-do that makes such men both toweringly great and yes, a little rough around the edges sometimes.
The name of Churchill will be emblazoned on the hearts of all free and good people long after the miserable scolds at Jacobin are done nitpicking at him and the sniveling little brownshirts of BLM are done tearing down his statues. These moral cowards cannot even begin to measure up to Churchill, and so they hate him — that is all their pitiful sputtering amounts to. They may be having their moment now. But to <a href="https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1940-the-finest-hour/we-shall-fight-on-the-beaches/">paraphrase</a> Churchill himself: for as long as we live, we will fight them, and we will never, never, never surrender.
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/">Young Heretics</a> podcast and assistant editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/">Claremont Review of</a> Books and <a href="https://americanmind.org/">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan">@SpencerKlavan</a>.

Winston Churchill

KLAVAN: Why Small Men Hate Churchill

Nazi Germany

World War II

Jacobin, the American socialist quarterly magazine, published an article in 2018 defending protestors who had previously desecrated a statue of Winston

KLAVAN: Why Small Men Hate Churchill | The Daily Wire

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A few years ago, the death toll of the Civil War was revised upward. The traditionally accepted number was 618,222 men dead: 360,222 from the North and 258,000 from the South. But one historian, J. David Hacker, used demographic data to estimate that the real total was closer to 750,000 — three quarters of a million Americans dead in the war that ended slavery.
I think about that every time one of our new racialists — <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/24/magazine/reparations-slavery.html">Nikole Hannah-Jones</a> of the New York Times, say, or National Book Award Winner <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/ibram-x-kendi-opposing-reparations-racist/592060/">Ibram X. Kendi</a>, or <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/">Ta-Nehisi Coates</a> — insists that white Americans must pay reparations for slavery. If there were any doubt that the demands made by our radicalized Left will never be satisfied, it is settled for me by that staggering number: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/science/civil-war-toll-up-by-20-percent-in-new-estimate.html">750,000 dead</a>. Americans have paid the price for slavery. We paid it in blood and treasure, in land laid waste and in blood spilled from the veins of patriots both black and white.
The man who lead us through all this — Abraham Lincoln, whose two terms as president spanned the entire war — said very explicitly that during those anguished years we were paying a devastating cost to make amends for our sins. Lincoln, a masterful rhetorician and a self-taught expert in the literary traditions of the West, wrestled grievously with what the ruinous war could mean theologically.
His conclusion was that only the mystery of God’s justice, that great and terrible arc of sin, judgment, and redemption which unfolds throughout the histories of the Old Testament, could make sense of it all. In March of 1865, just months before the end of the war, Lincoln delivered his <a href="https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&amp;doc=38&amp;page=transcript">second inaugural address</a>. It is one of the most striking and memorable passages of American oratory. Lincoln proclaimed:
<blockquote>If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope — fervently do we pray — that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man&#8217;s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said &#8220;the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.&#8221;</blockquote>
God, said Lincoln, was working out in his providence a sequence of events too vast and interlocking for the mind of man to comprehend. It is a dreadful thing that humankind, being in sin, cannot start from perfect beginnings. We must be gradually wrestled and shocked out of barbarism. But so it is: there was simply no way out of permitting slavery for the Founding Fathers if the country they founded was to survive. Yet once the time came, the blood toll for that injustice still came due.
Lincoln understood this, which is why he knew that only God could mete out the requisite punishment. Note his emphasis on God’s precision and control: his justice, says Lincoln, will continue until exactly the time that he has judged fit. No other person has anything like the kind of omniscience to make that determination.
And note, too, Lincoln’s conclusion: the minute the war was done, he said, “With malice toward none; with charity for all&#8230;let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation&#8217;s wounds.” Once the bloodletting was over, once the dust had settled, there was to be no more payment exacted. As God is sovereign to enact justice, so he is sovereign to put an end to suffering.
That is why reparations, besides being manifestly impracticable, strike me as an offense to God and man. They dishonor those 750,000 dead men, whose deaths paid dearly for the sin of slavery. They dishonor the words of Lincoln, who best of all understood how terribly the justice of God had been satisfied in the Civil War. And they dishonor God himself, whose right and power alone it is to mete out punishment, and peace.
More from Spencer Klavan: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/klavan-why-the-whole-premise-of-the-1619-project-is-absurd">Why The Whole Premise Of The 1619 Project Is Absurd</a>
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/">Young Heretics</a> podcast and assistant editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/">Claremont Review of</a> Books and <a href="https://americanmind.org/">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan">@SpencerKlavan</a>.

Lincoln Memorial

KLAVAN: The Anti-Reparation Theology of Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln

American History

Reparations

Slavery

A few years ago, the death toll of the Civil War was revised upward. The traditionally accepted number was 618,222 men dead: 360,222 from the North and

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It should not come as news to anybody that the history of America’s founding is under attack. More and more, the enemies of our regime tell us explicitly what they want: to defame, erase, and replace the heroes of our country’s origins. The most barefaced example of this is of course The New York Times’s 1619 Project, a series of essays on race in America whose architect, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/1619-project-founder-claims-her-project-is-simply-an-origin-story-not-history">made clear</a> that her work is “not a history. It is a work of journalism that explicitly seeks to challenge the national narrative and, therefore, the national memory. The project has always been as much about the present as it is the past.”
In other words, factual truth matters less to Hannah-Jones than hypnotizing the public, through artful rhetoric and ceaseless repetition, into <a href="https://dwswanson.com/2019/11/28/just-how-much-racism-is-in-our-dna/">believing</a> that “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA in this country.”
These efforts to unseat the American Founders, to make us ashamed of men like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, have been <a href="https://www.heritage.org/education/commentary/1619-pulitzer-will-boost-socialist-teaching-schools">amplified</a> by the Pulitzer Center and fed into the curricula of schools across the nation. The buildings burning in our cities, the <a href="https://www.heritage.org/education/commentary/1619-pulitzer-will-boost-socialist-teaching-schools">statues torn to the ground</a>, are a perfect illustration of what Hannah-Jones and the ruling classes who have empowered her want: to persuade our people to hate and destroy themselves and one another. Small wonder Hannah-Jones herself took <a href="https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/06/22/new-york-times-mum-on-1619-project-creator-calling-1619-riots-moniker-an-honor/">gleeful ownership</a> of the riots not long after they began.
Among the many bitter ironies in all this, it is particularly appalling to consider the premise of the 1619 Project, the reason why it is so supposedly “necessary.” The New York Times wants us to believe that without Nikole Hannah-Jones, our nation’s history classes and patriotic celebrations would involve nothing but senselessly jingoistic, uncritical and unmerited pride. As if all Americans did was gloss over the painful moments of their past and shrug off the injustices in their history.
In fact, our moments of greatest patriotism have often been moments of deep introspection and agonizing self-criticism. From Abraham Lincoln’s <a href="https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&amp;doc=38&amp;page=transcript">Second Inaugural</a> to Frederick Douglass’s <a href="https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/what-to-the-slave-is-the-fourth-of-july/">Fourth of July Oration</a>, the great men of America have always been quite ready to acknowledge the darker moments of our racial history — in terms far more searing and eloquent than Hannah-Jones could ever muster.
That did not stop them from celebrating the true greatness of the nation without fear or qualification.
Indeed, it is because they took a hard, clear look at the country’s shortcomings that our greatest statesmen could say, as Douglass did, that “The principles contained in [the Declaration of Independence] are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.”
It’s a childish fallacy to imagine that American patriotism comes at the cost of ignorance about our history.
There is an interesting moment in Beowulf, the great heroic poem of warriors and heroes, which speaks to these concerns. After the hero has slain Grendel, the shadowy ogre who was terrorizing the feasting-halls of the Danish king Hrothgar, there is a great feast of celebration. Hrothgar’s minstrel sings a song to accompany the merriment, and you might expect that what he would sing is a rollicking tale of Danish triumph. But instead, he sings a complex and tragic song of victory won at great cost, of Danes who rose up against the Frisian king Finn. Finn is married to a Danish woman, Hildeburg, and so every death on both sides is a misery to her — she loses not only her Frisian husband and son, but her Danish brother. &#8220;Flame devoured them all, hungriest of spirits, all that in that place war had taken of either people: their glory had passed away.”
Even the great war ballads of old were not thoughtlessly triumphalist. But the song of Finn isn’t meant to diminish the greatness of the Danes, the way the 1619 Project is meant to diminish the greatness of America. Instead, it shows that truly patriotic history can celebrate a people even as it acknowledges the difficult moments of the past.
Before Nikole Hannah-Jones ever put pen to paper, no patriotic American who has fully embraced our nation&#8217;s founding principles would deny that slavery was a moral atrocity. That’s because America at its core is not racist, and neither are the overwhelming majority of Americans. The whole idea that there is some vast conspiracy to paper over the sins of our history was ridiculous from the moment the Times published it. Our patriotism, and our country, are strong enough to take criticism. It’s propaganda we can’t take, and rioting, and gleeful desecration of our cherished founding.
There was never any need for the 1619 Project at all, and we will be better off the sooner we consign it to the ash heap of history where it belongs.
More from Spencer Klavan: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/cancel-culture-isnt-new-john-milton-saw-it-coming">Cancel Culture Isn’t New. John Milton Saw It Coming.</a>
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/">Young Heretics</a> podcast and assistant editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/">Claremont Review of</a> Books and <a href="https://americanmind.org/">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan">@SpencerKlavan</a>.

New York Times Headquarters

KLAVAN: Why The Whole Premise Of The 1619 Project Is Absurd

1619 Project

New York Times

It should not come as news to anybody that the history of America’s founding is under attack. More and more, the enemies of our regime tell us explicitly

KLAVAN: Why The Whole Premise Of The 1619 Project Is Absurd | The Daily Wire

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Last year, Disney Plus announced it would attach “content warnings” to old children’s programming which has been deemed racially offensive. In retrospect, that now looks like a precursor to this June, when HBO erased the Oscar-winning classic Gone with the Wind (1939) from its streaming service after a complaint about its supposed racism in the Los Angeles Times by screenwriter Jon Ridley. The movie can now be viewed once more on HBO Max, but only after a four-and-a-half-minute-long video introduction by an “African American cinema expert” to “contextualize” the racial attitudes portrayed in the film.
Other streaming services have affixed similar warnings to the movie so no one will have to experience the horror of consuming art with an open mind.
These are extravagant prostrations by major corporations to “cancel culture,” a racialist system of modern speech codes which make it increasingly difficult to say or publish anything in mainstream outlets without first ensuring it conforms to pre-approved leftist pieties. It all feels highly Soviet, and references to George Orwell’s 1984 have been thick on the ground among conservatives these days.
But cancel culture is older than Communism, and we in the West were warned of its dangers long ago by a writer who far predates Orwell: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Umcsy4Neczc">John Milton</a>. Milton, the greatest epic poet of the English language, dramatized the fall of man in his masterwork, Paradise Lost. But he began his career as a revolutionary and a pamphleteer. He lived through one of England’s most tumultuous eras, the civil wars of the 1600s in which Parliament seized power from King Charles I because of their rage at his excessive taxation and tyrannical overreach.
Milton was on parliament’s side, but he was disappointed to see some of his fellow revolutionaries becoming just as oppressive and autocratic as the king once they took power. In particular, Milton deplored a law passed in 1643, the Licensing Act, which required that every new publication should be read by the government before being printed.
This was an era of breakneck publication, a time in which new ideas were made suddenly possible by the invention of the printing press. It was the birth of newspapers, the heyday of firey political pamphlets and of Protestant reformation. Milton was appalled to imagine that the energy of this electric moment would be stifled by inept bureaucrats with illegitimate power over the free speech of the English people.
So in 1644, Milton wrote the Areopagitica, an impassioned address to Parliament which remains to this day one of the central arguments for freedom of speech and expression. It’s well worth <a href="https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/areopagitica/text.html">reading in full</a>, but one particular section merits our close attention today.
Even though licensing was mainly meant to constrain modern publication, Milton wrote, it wouldn’t stop there. Rather, “if the work of any deceased author, though never so famous in his life time, and even to this day, come to their hands for licence to be Printed, or Reprinted, if there be found in his book one sentence of a ventrous [daring or risky] edge, utter&#8217;d in the height of zeal&#8230;they will not pardon him.”
In other words, constraints on free speech, once allowed, will end up revising or silencing every idea — even the ideas of the past — to fit with the standards of the present. Nothing will ever be published except writing which conforms exactly to the morals of the current government and the ruling classes. And so the great writing of the past “shall to all posterity be lost,” and the government will perpetrate “a treacherous fraud against the orphan remainders of worthiest men after death.”
Already in the 17th century, Milton could see what we in the 21st are now learning the hard way: if your politicians and your cultural elite will not allow any dissenting ideas to be published, they will eventually reach back into the past to “contextualize” or simply silence great works which do not suit their hyper-modern ideas. And once that’s done, there’s no point in reading old books at all — why even study history anyway, if not to encounter a mindset that’s different than your own?
HBO, Disney, and the rest of the cancellation mob do not know the nature and the power of the fire with which they are playing. If left unchecked, it will go blazing through every great library, every major archive of the West, until nothing is left but dust and ashes. This hideous revisionism is now already threatening to deprive us of all our great literary and artistic heritage — as Milton knew it would.
More from Spencer Klavan: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/c-s-lewis-tyranny-for-your-own-good">‘Tyranny For Your Own Good’: C.S. Lewis On The Philosophy Behind COVID Lockdowns</a>
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/">Young Heretics</a> podcast and assistant editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/">Claremont Review of</a> Booksand <a href="https://americanmind.org/">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan">@SpencerKlavan</a>.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe"> member</a>.

Gone With The Wind

Cancel Culture Isn’t New. John Milton Saw It Coming.

Cancel culture

Disney

Last year, Disney Plus announced it would attach “content warnings” to old children’s programming which has been deemed racially offensive. In retrospect,

Cancel Culture Isn’t New. John Milton Saw It Coming. | The Daily Wire

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The city of Kenosha, Wisconsin has been the latest to burn. After another harrowing but inconclusive video depicting a police shooting — and after Democrats, in what has become their standard practice, did everything in their power to stoke racial tension — violent “protests” broke out once again. All week, the country has watched rioters <a href="https://twitter.com/Rhamenator/status/1298212561930911744?s=20">burn cars</a> and beat their opponents <a href="https://twitter.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1298293310734376960?s=20">senseless</a>.
In Washington, D.C., screaming mobs <a href="https://twitter.com/rawsmedia/status/1298078919527202816?s=20">demanded</a> that diners raise their fists in the black power sign or face vituperative abuse. It’s encouraging to see that some brave patriots are defying these demands. But to look in the deadened eyes of those who acquiesce is to feel their helplessness and know how it is that mobs and tyrants win.
Christians often find themselves in a curious position when the bad guys take to the streets. On the one hand, we are told to “turn the other cheek.” There are those who think this means we should forego violent resistance and live as pacifists. Others can’t imagine that the Christian thing to do is to let the most aggressive criminals overrun society for lack of physical opposition.
That was C.S. Lewis’s position. In his day, Christ’s injunctions to love the enemy and turn the other cheek weighed heavily on the two generations of British men who were forced in the World Wars to slaughter or be slaughtered.
But Lewis argued that to refrain from fighting against Hitler would be to pervert the relevant commandments. In a 1944 interview, he said:
<blockquote>You are told to love your neighbour as yourself. How do you love yourself?&#8230; I do not think that I love myself because I am particularly good, but just because I am myself&#8230;. You [may] dislike what you have done, but you don&#8217;t cease to love yourself&#8230;. You may even think that you ought to go to the Police and own up and be hanged. Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person&#8217;s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.</blockquote>
There is no good for criminals — no love — in letting them continue to terrorize others and mutilate their own souls. Certainly it is not love to leave the innocent at the mercy of strong and violent men.
Lewis made this argument most forcefully in 1940, in front of a society of pacifists in a speech called “Why I Am Not a Pacifist.” He pointed out that pure nonviolence, if carried to its logical conclusion by all men of fighting age, would leave the pacifist nations defenseless and the world at the mercy of totalitarians and Nazis.
Lewis hoped that the prospect of world domination by the Third Reich would make clear his point that to refrain from violence is hardly the most loving approach in every instance.
He knew his opponents would counter that pacifism, idealist though it was, represented humanity’s only shot at a world without war. But that notion, he responded, “belongs to a mode of thought which I find quite alien to me. It consists in assuming that the great permanent miseries in human life might be curable if only we can find the right cure.”
Another Christian teaching — that sin and misery are permanent fixtures of a fallen world, capable of being alleviated but never escaped — warned Lewis against the alluring but disastrous temptation to cleanse the world of its imperfections.
Lewis did not imagine that the war he was urging upon the young men of Britain was anything other than an unspeakable horror. He had seen the war himself, and described it with ruthless detail in The Screwtape Letters, his fanciful rendering of Hell’s attempts to capture a human soul. The devils in Screwtape relish “the scream of bombs, the fall of houses, the stink and taste of high explosives on the lips and in the lungs, the feet burning with weariness, the heart cold with horrors, the brain reeling, the legs aching.”
No one should imagine that fighting comes without a terrible cost. No one should take lightly the need for self-defense on our city streets. And none of this justifies vigilantism — it’s self-defeating to fight lawlessness with lawlessness. But self-defense and the rule of law are hallmarks of a free society and perfectly consonant with Christian teaching.
No Christian should consider it his duty to roll over and die. “Love” is not another word for “nicety” or “passivity.” It is as fiercely aggressive as it is aggressively selfless — and sometimes, it means taking up arms.
More from Spencer Klavan: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/c-s-lewis-on-what-to-teach-your-kids">C.S. Lewis On What To Teach Your Kids</a>
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/">Young Heretics</a> podcast and assistant editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/">Claremont Review of Books</a> and <a href="https://americanmind.org/">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan">@SpencerKlavan</a>.

C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis On Why Christians Can’t Be Pacifists

Guns

Second Amendment

The city of Kenosha, Wisconsin has been the latest to burn. After another harrowing but inconclusive video depicting a police shooting — and after

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COVID-19 has hurt public schools in America terribly, and that is a good thing. Not everyone realizes this because, as usual at this point, our media is hell-bent on reporting anything but the truth. But the truth is: remote learning was thoughtlessly implemented during the lockdowns and is now being maddeningly extended well past its sell-by date as a result of senseless keening from Teachers’ Unions and insane posturing by Democrats. This has gutted public schools, whose enrollment numbers (as policy analyst Inez Stepman <a href="https://americanmind.org/essays/get-your-kids-out-of-public-school/">reports</a>) are plummeting.
Good riddance. Our public school system was long ago <a href="https://americanmind.org/features/american-education/what-will-become-of-our-schools/">hollowed out</a> by leftist ideologues the likes of revisionist historian Howard Zinn and New York Times race-baiter Nikole Hannah-Jones. Many of our public schools have become government-sponsored machines for pushing the <a href="https://americanmind.org/essays/children-and-transgenderism/">worst kinds</a> of abuse onto the children of unwilling parents. This system is a major engine of our national deformity and now is as good a time as any to grind its zombie corpse into the ground.
What will come in its place? That’s the question conservatives need to be asking right now — we can home-school, advocate for school choice and vouchers, form pods in which multiple families learn from one teacher — but what will we teach our kids?
C.S. Lewis had some answers.
I wrote in my <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/c-s-lewis-on-why-the-left-is-coming-for-your-children">last piece</a> about Lewis’s philosophy of education, which was classical in the deepest sense of the word. For Lewis — as for Plato, Aristotle, Boethius, and Aquinas before him — education was not just about memorizing facts but about shaping the soul.
In The Abolition of Man, Lewis deplored the relativist materialism which had become par for the course in early education. Students were being taught to discount such words as “sublime” and “beautiful” when they read them in works of literature, because all judgments of the merely aesthetic kind were considered “subjective,” by which was really meant “arbitrary.”
In Lewis’s view this was a travesty: it taught students to misunderstand and “debunk” everything that is of value in literature and indeed in life. “That is their day’s lesson in English,” concluded Lewis, “though of English they have learned nothing. Another little portion of the human heritage has been quietly taken from them before they were old enough to understand.”
But if this is the case, then the reverse must also be true: there must be a kind of education which bestows the human heritage upon kids. This is the kind of education that was prescribed in classical antiquity: Plato advocated “gymnastics for the body, and music [meaning arts and sciences such as mathematics more generally] for the soul.”
After the classical era and during the medieval period this was developed into the “trivium” — the three basic subjects of grammar, logic, and rhetoric — followed by the “quadrivium”—the four advanced mathematical subjects of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.
Lewis knew that this kind of discipline was not an imposition but a gift, a way to usher kids into the full inheritance of their humanity.
In his fiction and nonfiction, Lewis constantly returned to the idea that God communicates with us most intimately, most secretly, in the stories we’re taught as children. Over and over, his characters who make it to heaven find themselves surrounded by half-forgotten figures and stories from their earliest life.
When the main human character in The Screwtape Letters finally dies, for example, he is greeted by the angels of God who have accompanied him secretly “at many an hour in his life when he had supposed himself alone.” In that bliss of recognition, “the dim consciousness of friends about him which had haunted his solitudes from infancy was now at last explained.”
Those childhood friends — the characters of nursery rhymes and fairy tales — had expressed to the boy, before he could have known it, all the majesty of heaven which he would one day see face-to-face. Like Lewis’s own Aslan, the great heroes of childhood legends enshrine in the backs of our minds the truths we will spend our whole lives trying to recover.
There are <a href="https://americanmind.org/post/to-save-america-reclaim-civics/">schools</a> out there — the Great Hearts academies, for example, and other schools in the classical education movement — which are working to shape kids’ souls to the good in the classical way. In the years to come, it will be more important than we can even realize to throw our whole efforts behind supporting these promising fledgling efforts. The time is now and the stakes are high — our lives on earth, and our communion with heaven, may depend on it.
More from Spencer Klavan: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/c-s-lewis-on-social-engineering-the-leftist-effort-to-reprogram-your-mind">C.S. Lewis On The Leftist Effort To ‘Reprogram’ People’s Minds</a>
 Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/">Young Heretics</a> podcast and assistant editor of the <a href="http://claremontreviewofbooks.com/">Claremont Review of Books</a> and <a href="http://americanmind.org/">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan">@spencerklavan</a>.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Homeschooling

C.S. Lewis On What To Teach Your Kids

Education

COVID-19 has hurt public schools in America terribly, and that is a good thing. Not everyone realizes this because, as usual at this point, our media is

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