No country for wise men

By Daniel B. Rundquist

Just calm down already. Really. Sit down and relax. Take a breath. Turn off your television. Americans today are so on edge and hypersensitive to every soundbite we hear these days. Don’t worry that you’ll miss anything; the media vomits out another breathless panic attack inciting soundbite about every four hours. You’ll be fine if you miss one or two of them. Let us take a few minutes to look around and see where we are.

It is clear that we have been driven to become a now hopelessly divided nation. Our issues continue to deepen and become more serious by the day, and these changes have nothing whatsoever to do with the Covid-19 virus or the so-called vaccines to treat them. Our issues are fundamental ones that one political party is driving. They are in fact, purposely pushing the nation over the metaphorical cliff into the political abyss of anarchy, which, they hope, will be followed by dictatorship.

It is, in fact, the Saul Alinsky program being executed flawlessly. The tools employed in this process are in fact anything that can cause fear or mistrust – that is because with either of these, especially fear, it is easy to manipulate an entire society in short order. Covid has worked beautifully as the latest of these tools–we have maskers against the non-maskers, vaccinated people against the “anti-vaxxers,” Covid believers and covid deniers, and so on. 

In the midst of all of this, we have lost many other things along the way; including our collective capability and for reason, logic, understanding, curiosity, accountability, compassion, scientific methodology, common sense, and wisdom. These things are all being made obsolete and by a large degree, outlawed by the party in control. Not only is this alarming and dangerous, it was also predictable by those who have bothered to study history. 

Do you perhaps think that this is a bit of drama and sensationalism on my part? I’m not alone in this line of thought, just ask any Russian over the age of 30. Abbot Tryphon (Parsons) of the monastery of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia in honor of the All-Merciful Savior in Washington state remarked in August, 2020 that:

“In my opinion, behind-the-scenes actors, who compelled people to take to the streets, are trying to start a revolution. What is happening now in the United States has a lot of signs similar to those that took place in Russia before the overthrow of the tsar … The United States has never been as divided as it is now – except during the Civil War of 1861-1865. But then there was a clear division between the North and the South, whereas now the differences are pushing the state boundaries. This occurs in the realm of consciousness and mentality.”

Conventional wisdom which has brought our nation out of so many hard times and crises prior, has been completely demonized. We have been told to substitute raw emotions and political narratives in its place. This is why we see rioting, looting, and civil unrest across the nation which of course helps the entire agenda of “transforming America” along. How can we restore conventional wisdom? First, we must understand what it is.

When people graduated from school we used to tell them that “the learning never stops.” It is still true. There are many things that we will need to learn both from school and outside the classroom. The sooner that we learn them the better off the remainder of our lives may be.

Lesson 1: Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom.

It is also true that we live in what is called today the “Information Age.” Anyone with a computer or a cell phone can access Google and find information about anything at any time. This, perhaps ironically, has worked against the effort to truly educate people properly.

Nowadays people really think they are intelligent because they can get an answer from the internet in seconds. Academia as a whole facilitates the perpetuation of this cruel myth by their continued and deliberate degradation of the type of learning material presented to students in classrooms, and the constant lowering of grading and testing standards, which is well documented and designed to support the Leftist political narrative.

We have these three things, information, knowledge, and wisdom, which are today commonly thought of and assumed to be the same things. They are certainly not the same and knowing the difference is a must. 

Information can be thought of as simple data. That’s all it is. It is not creative, intelligent, or active. It is more like a road sign that says, “Speed Limit 45 MPH.” This information neither drives the car nor makes the road safe. We are exposed to a lot of information every day.

Knowledge is rather more involved. My definition may differ with that found in a dictionary. Knowledge is a skill set that can use information to perform a task and create an outcome. So while “information” shows us what numbers are, your applied knowledge in arithmetic using those numbers will allow us to solve math problems or balance a checkbook.

Specifically you can apply this knowledge to learn that because you worked this month, you received four deposits of $1,000 dollars each on every Friday into your checking account totaling $4,000, for example. If you did not have basic information about real numbers then you would have no clue as to why you needed to work, and if you did work anyway, you would have no concept of what it meant to have deposits of money into the bank. Knowledge of basic arithmetic also leads to the conclusion that spending for the month should not exceed $4,000.

In the driving analogy, knowledge of how to drive a car puts you on the road, but the information about the speed limit posted on the sign lets you understand that the DOT does not consider that road to be safe above 45 MPH. 

Wisdom then requires both information and knowledge but with an added ingredient of experience. Wisdom sees beyond the present in many cases and is able to drive favorable results usually by capitalizing on some positive thing or at least avoiding or mitigating a negative.

At the bank again, while knowledge tells you how to manage your money and not overdraw your account, wisdom reminds you that there will be serious penalties from the bank and your creditors if you do so. Wisdom shows you the potential outcomes of actions based on information (ex. bank policy says you cannot overdraw, lays out penalties for doing it, and state law says you can be prosecuted for writing bad checks) and knowledge (ex. you have the skills to keep your spending under control and your account balanced). Experience, either your own or by the observed actions of others, is the catalyst that drives wisdom to be valuable (ex. you totally understand why not to overdraw your bank account and so you can react proactively to take measures not to do it).

Again with the driving analogy, you have the information of the speed limit being 45 MPH, you are knowledgeable to be able to drive the car on this road, but wisdom (using additional information of seeing a police officer ahead) reminds you that exceeding the speed limit may get you a speeding ticket from that police officer sitting in his car at the bottom of the hill.

In summary, most information we can source from the internet to be sure, but it also comes to us through observation of our own. Knowledge can be discovered in books, through personal instruction, or on the internet also – if we don’t know how to do something, usually there is some guy who made a YouTube video showing you how to do it. Wisdom, however, requires experience, memory, and critical thinking skills to be applied to the information and knowledge you acquire. 

When you are presented with any material at any time, we may think immediately to categorize it. This alone will help us in applying it correctly — or discarding it — but in either case NOT mistaking either for wisdom.

If we wanted to derive wisdom directly instead of having to learning it all from scratch, there is in fact a shortcut to in finding it. The best repositories for wisdom are our senior citizens and veterans of the Greatest Generation. They have seen it all, done it all, and often know it all. They seem to universally understand common sense and are happy to explain it to us and warn us about the problems associated with ignoring it. We are now losing them at an alarming rate.

The wisdom that the seniors know runs contrary to the current political climate in America and so it seems obvious why democrat run states placed Covid patients into nursing homes, infecting them with the virus. Some reports now show that 50% of the total reported Covid fatalities were patients in nursing homes. This of course, means that the survivability rate for the rest of the population outside of the nursing homes is actually double what is being reported. But let’s not allow the facts get in the way of the truth. This is no longer a country for wise men.

Source: Dissident Mama – No country for wise men

Globohomers gone wild, part 1

You’ve all had run-ins with ’em: the globohomers. This is a new breed of self-proclaimed know-it-alls who peddle the statist talking points despite the facts. Like Homer Simpson, they’re an uninquisitive lot who never look beyond mainstream opinion. Sure, puritanical-progressives have always fancied themselves as proponents of the just, despite evidence contrary to whatever is the high-time-preference, liberty-minimizing, immoral social-gooderism they’re pushing.

But what makes these snippy smarty-britches so unique is that the cult of covid has converted to its illogical religion a myriad of otherwise conservative and smart people, who default to Homer-like immaturity, instead of using their previously employed rhetorical and critical-thinking skills. Combine the ignorance and aggression of the famous Simpsons’ character with a tremendous amount of hubris, and there you have a globohomer, yet one who’s not nearly as lovable as is the TV Homer. They don’t even have the excuse of chugging one too many Duff beers, but they sure do love their doughnuts.

The weird thing about the globohomers is that many are otherwise intelligent people. Even Einstein, who said, “I don’t know anything about economics, but socialism is very good,” was swayed by the illogical and emotive fashions of his day.
“Fear is the mind-killer,” says Paul Atreides in Frank Herbert’s novel “Dune.” The hero repeats this mantra, willing himself to endure pain to pass a test. Globohomers are failing the test.
The Krispy Kreme covid marketing campaign exemplifies so perfectly the corporate-media-government cabal against true health. Just get the jab, just keep social distancing, just stay inside and limit your association with others, just wear two masks – or maybe 10! – and then you can go back to normal living. Hey, wait a minute …

What is globohomo?

Obviously, I’m playing on the term “globohomo,” which is a shorthand term used to describe “globalized homogenization,” meaning centralized control over people (that’s the globo) and the erasure of indigenous cultures, religions, borders, and languages in order to create sameness (that’s the homogenization). Think “Trotskyist internationalism” as Dr. Thomas Fleming has described the dogma of consumerist, universal democracy.

This ideology is pushed by those who wish to profit and wield power over the masses. They know it’s a much easier conquest if competing systems (most notably, faith and family) are destroyed and modern man is quelled into servility by goods and fake religions.

This is why it’s so shocking when, according to Pew Research, “Among U.S. Christians, about three-quarters say churches should be subject to the same [covid] rules as other businesses.” First of all, churches aren’t businesses, at least that’s not what they’re supposed to be according to Jesus’ teachings. Perhaps that’s part of problem with this weak-kneed 75%.

But what is evident is that the Ameridox masses have caved to a fiery fear. It’s one that’s part social pressure. After all, it is “religious gatherings” (not BLM riots) that are blamed for the “clusters” of alleged new covid cases. The globohomers seem to think that the accusation of being unloving and unneighborly is intolerable, yet they selfishly become “satisfied” with online church services and “express support for instituting a variety of restrictions and modifications at their own places of worship.”

It’s also part social conditioning. The psychosis of the maskholes has now been transferred to the “vaccine” true believers. So, every time there’s a supposed spike in cases or new variants and mutations form, the unvaccinated get blamed and judged fiercely with a religious zeal that should really be utilized for protecting the Church and perpetuating the faith. They in turn become part of the solution and are lauded for their compliance, while you are the problem, dissident! It’s all quite Soviet.

Brick builders

There’s a reason behaviorist Ivan Pavlov is “the psychologist mentioned in every book by a Marxist,” noted economist Ludwig von Mises. They know that if they can alter the individual, they can alter society.

“If human nature is against socialism, then human nature will have to be changed,” noted Karl Krautsky. In 1952, Mises would categorize this Marxist theoritician as a “social engineer,” a then-new term meaning one who “deals with the social structure or with his fellowmen as the master builder deals with his bricks.”

Why the socialist connection when talking about vaccines? Because it is that positivist, reform-minded philosophy that is driving covid hysteria, and the same class of criminals who are at the wheel and who are on the same path in pursuit of power.

That’s why all the solutions of the “greater good” and “public health” cabal are simply a “proto-version of the Green New Deal … (and) climate-change fanaticism,” explains writer and radio host Steve Deace. Just like you’ll be maligned a “climate-denier” should you dare to question the “global warming” narrative, you’ll now be castigated a “covid-denier” if you challenge any shred of the covid belief system, especially vaccines, or you’ll be censored just like the climate scientists who dissent to the environmental spirit of the age.

What’s odd is that the intellectual schizophrenia has infected so many learned and traditional folks – many of whom distrust radical environmentalism because they see is for the anti-human, anti-freedom sham that it is, yet they possess nary a modicum of curiosity or skepticism when it comes to covid jabs. They rightly get that “science” is driven by government when the issue is “carbon credits” and “alternative energy,” but somehow you’re a “conspiracy theorist” if you point out that vaccines are being set up as social credits.

So why is there such an increase of conservative Christians who know that Jesus is the cornerstone, yet somehow have become bricks of the technocrats? And how do they not see that it is Christianity itself which is in covid cross hairs?

Media magic

According to Pew, only 13% of America’s religious “said their house of worship should be open to the public just as it was before the outbreak.” Why, that would be “reckless behavior,” says Joe Biden.

That leaves a whopping 87% of “New Normals” who, like Pavlov’s dog, have been conditioned to salivate for praise when they hear the bell of social media. So they post a picture of their vaccine card and are consequently rewarded with heart-emoji treats and conformist commentary for a virtue-signal well done.

“There is nothing more important in the world than ideas,” Mises stated. And Vladimir Lenin understood this, too, when he said, “You make revolution with the slogan of the day.”

We “covid-deniers” remember “15 days to flatten the curve,” yet here we are more than a year later; and “We’re all in this together,” yet it’s pro-science us way over here on the margins and pro-scientism them acting as if they’re so put upon simply by the existence of the small remnant who won’t get with the program. And program, it truly is, for the entire covid-1984 reset depends on a totality of compliance. Everyone must be a globohomer.

This is why the mass-media manipulation is so utterly inescapable. The other day I sat at a stop light facing a billboard which was promoting the “safe, effective and lifesaving protection for you and those you love” offered by those untrustworthy imperials over at the FEMA mass vaccination site in my city. Then a “public service” announcement came across the college-radio airwaves transmitting from my truck stereo.

Covid has “changed how we worship, how we pray, how we congregate,” opined the sympathetic-sounding voice actor. Nope. That’s only life for the globohomers. But, the audio hustler continued with the new-normal narrative and insisted that the vaccine is the “first step to getting back to the things we love.”

This 60-second spot is called “Worship” and is brought to us by the Ad Council, which states, “The COVID-19 vaccines have the potential to transform life as we know it today and save hundreds of thousands of lives – but they can only be successful if millions of Americans recognize the urgency, safety, and vital importance of getting vaccinated” … so “our goal is to shift the public mindset from vaccine concern to vaccine confidence.”

Just as the Ad Council was created “for the purpose of mobilizing the advertising industry in support of the war effort for the ongoing Second World War,” it’s now helping the US government increase the pressure on Americans to get the “vaccine.” And warfarsim is really the only other time when I think propaganda has been used to such an unremitting level and so effectively.

So instead of Rosie the Riveter’s “We Can Do It,” the postmodern poster reads: “It’s Up To You.” But with a $1.8 billion rolling in annually from media outlets alone, is it really?

It’s a “vaccine campaign” of epic proportions, with the feds pushing for and reaching 3 million jabs per day. As of April 6, “nearly one-third of Americans have received at least one shot. That’s more, on a per-capita basis, than in any other large country other than Britain.”


Only a globohomer would say the jab isn’t political, and then demand that “It’s science!” or claim that big media and big biz are neutral players in the skulduggery, or wouldn’t at least be skeptical of proven liars.

“Majorities are not godlike”

This factual Misesian quote is precisely why the peer pressure of cultural influencers from Dolly Parton to the Dalia Lama are broadcasting to the world that they got the jab and are now feeling “hopeful” and a sense of “relief.” That’s why “we’re going to need a lot of Elvises to make this work,” explains the Ad Council, harkening back to when the King of Rock & Roll helped the quasi-governmental org promote the polio vaccine. But today, they’re “armed with $50 million” for a blitz that’s an “air game and a ground game.”

Social media mercilessly wields its power, as was the case with my vaccine discussion with a learned holistic-health advocate, which was predictably banned from YouTube. “Remember when the omniscient fact checkers at Facebook banned posts that said that S@RZ-2 was made in the Wooo Han lab?” wrote scholar Michael Rectenwald. “Well, it’s pretty much the consensus now. What other truths and lies about this ‘pandemic’ will the omniscient Facebook ‘fact checkers’ be forced to admit?” The unfortunate answer is “none.”

Similar to FDR’s Second Bill of Rights and its “freedom from fear” plank put forth in the throes of WWII, covid’s industrial-capital consumerism is so effective due to its emotivism and scaremongering, deceptive data and ever-changing goalposts, and silencing of disagreement and do-or-die agitation. It’s political theater made more dramatic due to a crisis, whether real or perceived.

The “Big Tech overlords at Facebook are ‘fact-checking’ posts from people who are dying from the vaccine,” explains Gab CEO and devout Christian Andrew Torba. Mark Zuckerberg, who hasn’t even gotten the jab, “is also partnering with the government to socially shame those who decide to not get the experimental vaccine with ‘Vaccine Verified’ profiles. Since when is our medical history Facebook’s business?”

Well, ever since the globohomo goons realized that “40% of the general public falls into a movable middle — people who are hesitant to get the vaccine but are open to learning more,” describes the Ad Council. “They want to know the vaccines are safe and that the benefits outweigh the risks.”

Cost-benefit analysis

“As more people are vaccinated, we all need to continue wearing masks, social distancing and washing hands frequently,” pushes the Ad Council. “This is true whether you have been vaccinated or not.” The legacy media parrots these blatant contradictions and the globohomers seem not to care.

Even with vaccines, covid will always be with us” because it’s a “permanent pandemic.” And so goes the narrative. World elites even admit, “The vaccines we have, no one knows how long they last. We need to prepare for the worst scenario … that we have to vaccinate every half year,” but still “the fastest way to get back to a safe, mask-free life is for everyone to get a covid-19 vaccine.” It’s nonsensical.

I’m waiting for somebody to tell me one, single, solitary legitimate benefit of getting the “vaccine” that neither creates immunity nor stops the spread of a virus that happens to have a 99% survival rate. I see none, especially when the multifold and malevolent costs (both spiritual and political) are too damn high.

Using the pointless jab as the “ticket back to pre-pandemic life,” which will involve everything from employment to travel, is blackmail, not benevolence. It’s an instrument of infinite evil, yet the “digital certification of vaccination status” is possibly just around the corner, and the corporate media revels in it.

Klaus Schwab, the author of “The Great Reset” and the stakeholder capitalist who is founder and executive chairman of the dystopian World Economic Forum (WEF), preaches the gospel of “mutual interdependence … on a global level” and assures his disciples that “as long as not everybody’s vaccinated, nobody will be safe.”

Governors, like my own Kingpin Cooper, try to convince globohomers that “the vaccine is our path to recovery, it is the road to normalcy.” So if people are hesitant, those who are “taking this seriously … must convince them to do it.” Way to crank up the struggle sessions, guvnah!

The media malcontents concede that as states lessens or abolish covid mandates, the “very narrow window to tie reopening policy to vaccination status” is decreased. “If everything’s reopened, what’s the carrot going to be?” File this globohomo nugget under: The rare occasion when progressives are honest. After all, a data- and surveillance-tracking system is the agenda that hangs in the balance, and our overlords can’t have a bunch of covid-deniers mucking up the plan!

Some clear-eyed folks got push back for likening the “vaccine” passport to the yellow Stars of David Jews had to wear in Nazi Germany. If anything, that’s one holocaust reference I can get behind because it is precisely the same thing: a people group being marginalized for their deeply held beliefs, especially since the “vaccine” resistors are being tarred as “Christian nationalists” (which in pandemic parlance means “Nazi,” ironically) and the pro-faith stance of “white evangelicals” in particular is being pegged as an “obstacle” to the increased centralization and its coming caste system.

When choice becomes “a quaint concept in Covid-compliant America … could vaccine resistors be WACOed? asks my astute friend Ilana Mercer. All political and social evidence points to a resounding YES! If you can’t see that “white Christian nationalism” is being set up as the scapegoat for scientism’s failures and the springboard for the empire’s despotism, your globerhomer ranking just upped a notch.

Check out Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security’s “futuristic scenario” called The SPARS Pandemic, which was published in 2017. If reading the elites in their own words is a little too “conspiratorial” for you, then watch WEF’s recent “Davos Agenda 2021” talk entitled Vaccinating the World: From Mass Production to Last-Mile Delivery. It’s hellscape-level stuff, folks … kinda like the increasing totalitarianism we’re living through today.

So, to my fellow Christians who still have ears to hear and eyes to see, I leave you with a few useful resources in order to help you put down the doughnut and avoid or break free from the true sickness: that of the globohomer. And I urge you to read the forthcoming part 2, which is a close-to-home case study of the globohomer affliction.

Covid Charts CNN Forgot
The Charts That Tell the Covid Story
Kathryn Huwig Smashes Covid Pseudoscience at State House
Ivor Cummings Answers Forbidden Covid Questions
Virologist Geert Vanden Bossche, former vaccine expert for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, sounds a warning against ‘Immune Escape’
Dr. Ryan Cole: Covid Myths and Experimental Vaccines
Have You Actually Read a Covid Vaccine Consent Form?
• “Faucian Bargain: The Most Powerful and Dangerous Bureaucrat in American History
The Truth About “Vaccine Passports”
Katie Hopkins Reacts to Vaccine Passports

Source: Dissident Mama – Globohomers gone wild, part 1

Dissident Mama, episode 33 – Dr. Thomas Fleming

Dr. Thomas Fleming is president of the Fleming Foundation. He is the author of six books, including “The Morality of Everyday Life: Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative to the Liberal Tradition,” “The Politics of Human Nature,” and “The Conservative Movement” co-written with Paul Gottfried.

From 1984 to 2015, Fleming was editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, published by The Rockford Institute, where he served as president from 1997 to 2014. He was also the founding editor of Southern Partisan magazine.

As a prolific writer, speaker, and lecturer, Fleming’s essays on politics, culture, ethics, and classical subjects have appeared in many publications, such as The Washington Post, The Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The Chesterton Review, The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, and Classical Journal, as well as verse in journals like The New Oxford Review. His television appearances include PBS, The Today Show, and the BBC.

Fleming received a B.A. in Greek and French from the College of Charleston and a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. In a previous life, he taught classics at several colleges and served as a school headmaster in South Carolina.

Fleming and I discuss everything from Wisconsin, kinship, Rothbard, and Boethesius, to the Founders, the Straussians, the Endarkenment, and the Velvet Underground. He explains how to “cultivate your mind” while living in the “ruins of civilization,” and how true Christianity is the key to it all.

Download this podcast! Or check out our chat on YouTube.


A few choice Fleming lectures and essays:

Kith and Kin: The Enduring Ethic of the South
The Southern Genocide
Down With Seuss!
The South’s Gonna Do It Again
On Liberty
The Greek and Roman Agrarian Tradition
Loss of Southern Accents
Dueling and Southern Honor
Cicero Saves the Republic
The Other Jefferson
William Shakespeare, Christian Moralist: Love, Family, Justice, and Hamlet
• Fiddling While Rome Burns: Introduction, Part 2, Part 3, and Conclusion

Source: Dissident Mama – Dissident Mama, episode 33 – Dr. Thomas Fleming

I mourn for Richmond, part 1: Editorial

“This weekend’s desecration at Hollywood Cemetery is morally wrong,” Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney says regarding the March 12 vandalism. “Disturbing final resting places is contemptible, criminal and will not be tolerated.”

Huh. Those are some pretty disingenuous statements considering the caustic comments made by the duplicitous mayor about razing the city’s many Southern monuments which honor the dead.

The malevolent mayor

“We’re transforming the landscape, removing symbols of injustice,” Stoney tweeted. “Meanwhile, the work doesn’t stop to transform systems built on that same hateful foundation.” Couldn’t the Hollywood vandals claim they were following the mayor’s lead and simply “transforming the landscape”?

Well, he sure knows how to use his systemic power to build the hate in Virginia’s capital city (and beyond), strengthening the anti-Southern mobsters’ foundation of anarcho-tyranny. I mean, there ain’t nothing more systemically unjust than living in a society in which those that hate you hold all the power and seek to grow it through force.

As an acolyte of former Virginia governor and Clinton stooge Terry McAuliffe, who quipped “there is no place for you here” to the Unite the Right protesters defending the Lee monument in Charlottesville, you’d think that Stoney would include final resting in the whole cultural-genocide campaign he and his “social justice” buddies run. The equity sham is big business, after all.

And considering that Stoney calls the monuments “symbols of hate” and advises that Richmond should “tear down the system that those monuments symbolized,” aren’t those who wrecked the graveyard just following orders? Graves are memories of the dead, as are monuments.

Erroneous analogies

He continues, “Many onlookers have stated to me that it reminds them of when the Berlin Wall fell. You’re my age — I’m 39 — so images of the Berlin Wall for me are the graffitied wall fallen. We didn’t know what the words said at the time … [but] when we lifted those monuments off their pedestals, off of their platforms, it certainly felt like that moment when the Berlin Wall fell.”

Yes, folks: razing monuments to famous Virginians in her capital city is akin to tearing down the geopolitical barrier put up in a country conquered by foreigners. He’s actually asserting that the fall of communism is just like today’s invaders, traitors, and despots destroying the history and tradition of the homeland natives.

I can guaran-damn-tee-it that “Kill whitey,” “Racist traitor,” “KKKcops,” “Protect black trans women,” or even “Black lives matter” were nowhere to be found on the Soviet-built structure. Is Stoney’s mind so logically starved and fed with agitprop that he cannot see that he is the Soviet-style aggressor? That he himself created the climate for Hollywood’s unholy ravaging? Hell, maybe he should read my essay, “Russian lessons for Dixie.”

“Failing to remove the statues now poses a severe, immediate and growing threat to public safety,” Stoney proclaimed in a statement. “As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to surge, and protesters attempt to take down Confederate statues themselves … the risk grows for serious illness, injury, or death.”

Y’all, he’s seriously saying that Richmond must cave to the violent iconoclasts in order to protect people from violence and the less than 1% mortality rate of the coof. Seems Stoney is just a self-serving man who will use any excuse to feed the neo-Bolshevik beast? Who da thunk?

It’s been a long time comin’

Man, how I yearn for the days of yore when Richmond wasn’t a totalitarian train wreck. In my essays “Rebel with a cause” and “Richmond: Paradox & permanence,” I’ve discussed my dismay at what has become of the place where I born and lived for the first two-plus decades of my life.

Even in the ’90s, Virginia wasn’t the wretched hellscape that it is today. Although it was largely governed by Doug Wilder, the country’s first black mayor who claimed to be a moderate but was actually a progressive back then. His woke accomplishments include such gems as admitting women into the Virginia Military Institute, ridding the Battle Flag from the Virginia National Guard uniform, and removing “Carry Me Back to Old Virginia” as the state song. And he’s certainly not afraid to play the racism card when he doesn’t get his way today.

However, I think the 1992 Cowboy Junkies’ song “Oregon Hill” sums up the traditional/contemporary balance that Richmond used to possess. Although the band hails from Canada, the lead guitarist Michael Timmins penned the song when he was at the house of his then future wife, an alum of the city’s uber-artsy Virginia Commonwealth University and a resident of the bohemian neighborhood in which the 135-acre historic Hollywood is located.

The lyrics seem to encompass the end of an era in which opposing worldviews are constantly colliding yet somehow still exist peacefully among one another. Back then, you could make a day trip to visit the United Daughters of the Confederacy where Stonewall Jackson’s headquarters flag was housed or the Virginia Capitol to see the spot where Lee accepted command of the Army of Northern Virginia in defense of his home. And that night, you could catch a live performance by GWAR or wax philosophical with Dirt Woman.

But now, Jackson’s flag is gone, burned along with other historic artifacts during last summer’s riots, and Lee’s statue was removed by Yankee and scalawag political opportunists under the cover of night. Virginia’s once-unique capitol is no longer distinctive in its passion for the past and the peculiar present, but is now just generic in its iniquity and rootlessness. In his part-love-song/part-Richmond-ode, Timmins wrote:

“The hoods are up on Pine Street, rear ends lifted too. The great-grandsons of General Robert E. Lee
are making love with a little help from STP …Greasy eggs and bacon, bumper stickers aimed to start a fight,
full gun racks, Confederate caps … A river to the south to wash away all sins. A college to the east of us to learn where sin begins. A graveyard to the west of it all which I may soon be lying in.”

Hollywood’s equivocation

Established in 1847, Hollywood houses the final resting place of three American presidents, six Virginia governors, two Supreme Court justices, 25 Confederate generals (more than any other cemetery in the country), and other prominent figures who have “significantly influenced the course of history due to their actions or opinions.” The Hollywood website adds that the location “ranks as the second most-visited cemetery in the nation, right behind Arlington National Cemetery.”

There you will find a prominent 90-foot pyramid memorializing the 18,000 Confederate soldiers buried nearby. It’s made of stacked blocks of James River granite and is constructed without bonding, and was dedicated in 1869. Here’s what the cemetery has to say about the now-controversial architectural marvel:

“When the pyramid was erected, Southerners still called the Civil War ‘The Lost Cause.’ Now we know that the cause was not a lost one. These men’s lives, along with those of their northern counterparts, were given to forge a single and better nation. Their blood, shed in battle, gave birth to a new America, one that in another century would restore and protect freedom around the world.”

Just like Stoney, this kind of nation-statist, “America is an idea” narrative makes those who run the cemetery complicit in its destruction. Besides the imperial ideology, the mental gymnastics is ludicrous. Although they are right that it was pro-Confederate journalist Edward A. Pollard who coined the phrase in his 1866 book, “The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates,” we all know what it means now in postmodern times — slavery, oh, pardon me, “enslavement.” And those who honor their ancestors and their resistance to centralization are “lost causers,” i.e. white supremacists and Nazis.

The cemetery officials are obviously trying to walk the woke tight wire while also preserving their cemetery. Instead of participating in this futile effort, they should simply reiterate the concise and compassionate words delivered at the opening of the museum of the White House of the Confederacy in 1896:

“Our memorial will be here in Richmond, the heart and grave of the Confederacy, and around it hovers the immortal soul of love and of memory, which for all times will sanctify it to all true men and women.They will know that it is a memorial of no ‘Lost Cause.’ They will never believe that ‘we thought we were right,’ they will know, as we knew, that we were right, immortally right, and that the conqueror was wrong, eternally wrong.The great army of the dead is here, the sentiment of the living is here, the memories of the past are here, the monuments of the future will be here.

As all roads lead to Rome, so in the ages to come all ties of memory, of sentiment, of heart, and of feeling, will vibrate from Richmond. As every follower of the prophet at sunset turns his face to Mecca, and sends up a prayer for the dead and the living, so everywhere in this great South Land, which was the Confederacy, whenever the trumpet call of duty sounds, when the call to do right without regard to consequence rings over the woods and the meadows, the mountains and the valleys, the spirit of the Confederacy will rise, the dead of Hollywood and of Oakwood will stand in ranks, and their eternal memory will inspire their descendants to do right whatever it cost of life or fortune, of danger and disaster.”


Check out part 2, which is a photo essay of my family’s July 2017 trip to Hollywood Cemetery. Besides some stunning images, the post includes a lot of fascinating history and a little commentary, as well.

Source: Dissident Mama – I mourn for Richmond, part 1: Editorial

I mourn for Richmond, part 2: Images

The above feature photo (taken when visiting Hollywood Cemetery in July 2017), I think captures the irony of Richmond’s continual and nearly complete reconstruction. It’s a city in a state that depended upon the James River as a lifeline for establishing and building American civilization. Yet, the river seems not to “wash away all sins,” as the song “Oregon Hill” lyrically expresses (see part 1), but is instead today the conduit “where sin begins,” offering little to no hope of redemption. Lest we forget, godless shall we become.


Hollywood Cemetery

Designed by Charles Henry Dimmock, this 90-foot pyramid stands as a monument to the 18,000 Confederate soldiers (11,000 remain unidentified) buried at Hollywood. The Latin inscription on its other side, “Numini et patriae asto,” means “They stood for their God and their country.”

I wish my road was called Confederate Avenue. Maybe one day for me, or at least for my children or grandchildren.

The final resting place of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America. His wife, Varina, decided to relocate her late husband’s remains from Metairie, Louisiana, to Richmond some three and a half years after his death. One of the pallbearers on the trip, Patrick Henry of Brandon, Mississippi, wrote that he told a reporter who was mystified by the reverence shown to Davis by so many people encountered en route to Richmond, that he’d “take him down to the James River, and baptize him in the waters of Democracy.” But, he “never saw him, after reaching the city, but it was his loss.”

Born in Kentucky, Davis was a Mexican War hero, U.S. senator from Mississippi, U.S. secretary of War and one of three American presidents buried at Hollywood. The Confederate Blood-Stained Banner waves atop the memorial statue just behind both Jefferson and Varina Davis’ grave.

So much can be said about Davis, whose real history is way more interesting than is the mainstream drivel. I mean, what other American president can say he’s been imprisoned and tortured by federals yet never bent his principles of states’ rights and decentralization. “Let us alone!” was indeed his rallying cry.

“While Jefferson Davis never sought a pardon, and never apologized … he did, in the twilight of his life, urge the Southern people to put aside any lingering animosity left over from” the War Between the States. Some of the country’s most ardent reconciliation proponents were former Confederates.

John Tyler, historian Brion McClanahan’s favorite commander in-chief, is interred with his second wife Julia Gardner Tyler beneath this monument. In addition to being 10th president of these United States, Tyler was an ardent constitutionalist, advocate for states’ rights, political peacemaker, representative of Virginia at the Provisional Congress of the Confederacy, and a member-elect of the CSA’s House of Representatives. Tyler was such a bulwark against federal tyranny and for limiting the size and scope of government that his fellow Whigs kicked him out of the political party — while he was president!

Known as “The Birdcage,” this is the final resting place of statesman and diplomat James Monroe, 12th and 16th governor of Virginia, and 5th president of these United States. This Founding Father was the last in what is sometimes referred to as the Virginia Dynasty. As a delegate to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, Monroe opposed the ratification of the US Constitution. Articles of Confederation for the win, Mr. President!

Here is the grave of John Randolph of Roanoke: the son of Virginia’s famous Bland family and a direct descendant of Pocahontas, a trusted advisor of Jefferson, and a longtime US congressman. “There is no more singular statesman or person in the history of American politics than John Randolph of Roanoke,” remarks Dr. John Devanny, who calls him the “Saint Michael of the South.” It is said that this Burkean conservative was buried facing West so that he could keep an eye on archrival and centralizer Henry Clay.

Oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury, known as the “Pathfinder of the Seas,” helped the Confederacy acquire the CSS Georgia. He was a US Naval Superintendent before resigning his post in order to become a commander for the Confederate Navy. Considered one of the founders of modern oceanography and a pioneer hydrographer, in 1862, the respected scientist and innovator was “sent to Europe to lobby foreign governments and procure vessels and supplies for the Confederate navy.” He even played a part in the short-lived idea of Confederate resettlement in Mexico.

The grave of Fitzhugh Lee, Confederate cavalry general and 40th governor of Virginia, was grandson of Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, a nephew of Robert E. Lee, and great-grandson of George Mason. He was also consul-general of Havana under presidents Cleveland and McKinley, military governor of Havana and Pinar del Río, a brigadier general in the US Army, and a historical writer.

William Key Howard was a proud Confederate officer and grandson of Francis Scott Key, author of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I’ve written previously about how Howard was arrested and jailed by the feds due to an essay he’d written criticizing Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Ironic, eh? When noticing the US flag fly over an attacked Fort McHenry and an invaded and captive Baltimore, Howard said, ““The flag which then [Key] so proudly hailed, I saw waving at the same place over the victims as vulgar and brutal a despotism as modern times have witnessed.”

Here lies James Ewell Brown “J.E.B.” Stuart: Confederate major general, the eyes and ears of Robert E. Lee, and a true Virginia cavalier. As a cavalry commander, this “Knight of the Golden Spurs” was known for his mastery of reconnaissance and implementation of offensive tactics. This Virginia native was mortally wounded at the Battle of Yellow Tavern during the Overland Campaign. Also nicknamed “Beauty,” Stuart’s famous ostrich-plume hat, which he always wore cocked, is preserved at the nearby White House of the Confederacy.

The grave of Richmond native Major General George Pickett, who’s best known for the famous and bloody Pickett’s Charge during the Battle of Gettysburg. After the War, Pickett faced prosecution for his alleged execution of Confederate deserters, so he and his wife fled to Canada and even Egypt for a while. Pickett ended up returning to Virginia and received a full pardon by Act of Congress about a year before his death.

Brigadier General Garnett rallied the rebels in the infantry assault that came to be known as Pickett’s Charge.

The vast majority of Confederates killed at the ghastly Gettysburg battles are buried at Hollywood. (My eldest son edited this pic for effect.)

Another view of the many fearless fallen who now reside at Hollywood.

The Jewish Confederate Monument, memorializing the Jewish soldiers who perished fighting for Virginia during the War Between the States. It’s estimated that “10,000 Jews served in the Confederate government and military, and a number of all-Jewish companies were raised,” including one in Virginia.

The graves of Douglas Southall Freeman — Southern historian and the person for whom my high school was named — and his wife Inez. In my essay “Strip Freeman High School of a name it doesn’t deserve,” I write about the Pulitzer-prize-winning man of letters, as well as the “hollowed out shell” into which Richmond has devolved.

Buried on the right is Confederate Brigadier General John Pegram. Born in nearby Petersburg died, he was married at Richmond’s St. John’s Church, where Patrick Henry gave his famous “Liberty or death” speech. The happy event was even attended by Jefferson and Varina Davis. Just three weeks later, Pegram was mortally wounded at the Battle of Hatcher’s Run while defending his city during the lengthy Siege of Petersburg. Pegram’s funeral was held at the very same church “with most of his wedding guests returning as mourners.”

This moniker is as unique as Confederate General Simone Bolivar Buckner. Southerners had (and often still do have) the most fascinating names.

The resting place of the very first Confederate veteran, a Carolina volunteer named Pvt. Henry L. Wyatt.

In 1877, Southern writer Albert Taylor Bledsoe asked, “Has it not been made plain, that the women of the late Confederacy were in no whit behind their noble predecessors of Revolutionary fame, in piety, patriotism, heroism and long-suffering?” Southern women, many of whom were widowed, raped, lost sons and grandsons and their homes and family heirlooms during the War, were tough as nails. God sure broke the mold when He made those resilient Southern ladies.

Many ornate Battle Flags and other Confederate imagery embellish tombstones around Hollywood. Here’s a little info I found on Capt. Skinker.

The family burial spot of C.F. Sauer, the distributor who put on the map the greatest condiment known to all of mankind: Duke’s Mayonnaise!

Lewis Ginter, prominent businessman was a native New Yorker but loved Richmond. Known as “The Fighting Commissary,” he joined the Confederate army and served under General A.P. Hill. In fact, it was Ginter who spearheaded the idea that Hill should have a monument in Richmond, so his real estate development company donated the land for Hill’s memorial statue and grave, which is located on Laburnum Avenue in the north side. Due to his philanthropy and warm embrace of his adoptive city, you can often spot the Ginter name around town, harkening back to a time when good people built their homes up, not tore them down.

Monument Avenue: Then & now

After visiting Hollywood, we swung by the 60-foot Lee on Traveler statue on Richmond’s Monument Avenue, the famous street whose very existence was conceived during a site search for the general’s memorial. We visited the now-infamous avenue again in December 2017 to snap photos in front of Stonewall Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart. Contrasting with these images is what they look like today: monuments to nihilism, mass democracy, and despotism, just like our Confederate ancestors warned us about.

Source: Dissident Mama – I mourn for Richmond, part 2: Images

Dissident Mama, episode 32 – Betsy Ball Clark

Today my guest is Betsy Ball Clark, who is a natural, holistic-health entrepreneur and advocate. She owns Betsy’s Botanicals, which sells handcrafted elderberry syrup and other products for good health and flourishing. She is also secretary of Heal NC, the Health Empowerment Action League of North Carolina. This organization aims to strengthen regional communities by connecting grassroots groups and taking targeted action in order to preserve and promote true health in North Carolina.

Clark is not a doctor, an epidemiologist, or what the scientism apparatchiks refer to as a “vaccine expert.” Rather, she’s a wife, mother, and Christian who does her own research and grows her knowledge base as to get at the truth about vaccines, and counter the misinformation and tyranny pushed by the pharmaceutical-industrial complex and their plutocrat enablers in media, government, and corporate America.

In this informative interview on the covid “vaccines,” we talk about “fear porn,” spike proteins, gene technology, consensus science, informed consent, pathogenic priming, experimental emergency use authorization, vaccine injury, aborted fetal tissue, Clark’s “hippie arsenal” of alternatives, and much more.

Here’s some information mentioned during or related to our discussion:
• Former president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons Dr. Lee Merritt on The New American
A Shot in the Dark with Dr. Sherri Tenpenny
Mass Vaccination will Breed Dangerous Variants & Destroy Our Immunity with Geert Vanden Bossche, PhD, and with Dr. Philip McMillan
Informed Consent Action NetworkThe Highwire with Del Bigtree
The CDC Pinkbook Excipients List
The Stand with Dr. Simone Gold
How Can We Still Use a Fetal Cell Line from the 1960s to Make Vaccines Today? with Dr. Stanley Plotkin
Dr. Sharon Kroner regarding personal freedom on vaccination
A Holistic Approach to Viruses by Dr. David Brownstein
Children’s Health Defense
Open VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System)
Do Mandatory Masks & Vaccines Break the 10 Points of the Nuremburg Code?
Children of God for Life
Orders of Magnitude Higher Deaths in the Vaccinated
The Other Side of Vaccines
COVID-19 ‘Vaccines’ Are Gene Therapy
Pathogenic priming and antibody immune enhancement response with Robert F. Kennedy
Pharmaceutical Companies Immune From COVID-19 Vaccine Lawsuit
Covid-19 Vaccines Are Weapons of Mass Destruction with Dr. Vernon Coleman


Download this podcast!

Source: Dissident Mama – Dissident Mama, episode 32 – Betsy Ball Clark

Learning from Lee

Robert E. Lee wanted to make “the struggling Washington College [now Washington & Lee University] … a place for young Southerners to learn and to become good citizens,” wrote Anne Wilson Smith in her new book, “Robert E. Lee: A History Book for Kids.”

Yet, real education and civic responsibility are under attack like never before. Lee embodied those traits, which is why he’s smack dab in the cultural-Marxist cross hairs. That is precisely why Smith’s work is so essential; it is both timely and timeless.

Timely because the assault on General Lee the man is so palpable that you could cut it with a hammer and sickle. W&L reprobates wanting to remove Lee’s name from the college where he nobly served as president after the War Between the States is but one example of the continued reconstruction and devolution of the Southern spirit.

Others include the removal of Lee’s statues from public spaces in New Orleans to Dallas to Durham, the renaming schools and streets and highways chosen to honor him, the razing of his memorials in both the US and Virginia capitols, and possibly striking his name from Arlington House (the Lee family home, whose image may even be taken from the Arlington County seal since it’s deemed by some as a “symbol of slavery”). Cultural genocide is on the march, and Smith’s book is a necessary counteroffensive.

It’s also timeless because Lee the symbol actually is some thing – something tangible, something real, something eternal. I mean, what could be anymore vital a topic than home? It’s the same thing that we Southerners fight for today and yesterday. Nothing has changed. And nothing could be more relevant than resisting invaders, thieves, and tyrants and defending your people. These are subjects that even children can understand.

As Smith’s bio rightly states, the “fair treatment of Southern history, especially the Confederate era, can instill pride and a natural affection in Southern youth for their ancestors and affirm their sense of identity.” This is why government schools foster self-hatred among Southern youth, but Southernness as represented in Lee is about love and hope.

After all, Lee’s cause is not a lost one at all. This is why the reprobates don’t want boys and girls to know about the intellect, courage, faith, and loyalty that he embodied. They don’t want young people, who are inquisitive by nature, to ask questions about the fascinating life of the famous soldier.

Smith wants kids to ask.

The social-justice scoundrels are scared that when presented with the true story of Lee’s hardship and humility, children even in our postmodern era will intuitively recognize that he is a role model who should be emulated, not a traitor or a monster who should be erased from our collective consciousness. They’re scared that Lee’s gentlemanly ethos, masculine honor, and virtuous soldiering will spark something in our youth, especially boys, who are so desperate for real heroes, not a “covid warriors.”

Smith’s not scared. She wants kids to know. She wants them to think and to be proud.

The first-time-published author pulls off that arduous task with aplomb. In the 32-page full-color book, Smith rejects the deep-seated indoctrination of the Northern school-teacher intelligentsia and simply but boldly proclaims that Lee is admirable in both character and ability. This was a given, 50, heck, even 15 years ago. But today, that kind of unapologetic discourse is revolutionary.

Of course, even the most compelling subject’s tale cannot be conveyed without an engaging narrative. Smith breathes fresh life into the story that so many battle-worn rebels can recite from memory. But even they can become complacent to the human behind the grand saga.

Smith also includes some not oft-talked-about gems, such as Lee as army engineer, brave captain in the Mexican War, superintendent at West Point, and grantor of amnesty to Nellie the chicken. Her punchy, propitious prose threads the needle of a tapestry that is both past and present.

The illustrations, created by artist Gregory G. Newson, accentuate this idea of the permanence and progress of Lee’s story. The bright and captivating images blend old and new, and reinforce the ideas that sacrifice and self-determination, loyalty and leadership, duty and diligence never go out of style.

Honor like Lee’s is not a given and must not be taken for granted. It’s an inheritance that must be passed down, just as Smith’s father, historian Dr. Clyde N. Wilson, taught her. This is probably why she so effectively conveys the concept to readers young and old.

While Lee’s duty was to defend his land and his people, ours is to impart that history to our children. By keeping alive those memories, we can counter the anti-Southern hatred and transmit to boys and girls an understanding of what it was that Confederates battled so courageously for. Independence.

As history is torn down all around us, Smith’s work builds up and builds upon the moral framework of a great Virginian, a true American. This beautiful little book is a big reminder that we can all learn from Lee and must train up the smart citizens and heroes of tomorrow.

Robert E. Lee: A History Book for Kids,” by Anne Wilson Smith, produced in the Republic of South Carolina by Shotwell Publishing, $19.95.

Source: Dissident Mama – Learning from Lee

Roe v. Wade – a mere nullity

By Jake Starbuck

“Acts of congress, to be binding, must be made pursuant to the constitution; otherwise they are not laws, but a mere nullity.” St. George Tucker

“There is no danger I apprehend so much as the consolidation of our government by the noiseless, and therefore unalarming instrumentality of the Supreme Court.” Thomas Jefferson

As a pro-life Jeffersonian, I am constantly frustrated by the endless line of pro-life activists who talk about the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. There are multiple reasons this irks me. For one thing, the Supreme Court will never overturn Roe because its members are dedicated to the preservation of precedent. Add on top of that the absurd kangaroo courts that Senate confirmation hearings have become, with their character assassinations and incessant prattling about the vital importance of Roe, and it’s clear that the potential Justices are being reminded not to tread on that particular landmine if they wish to be confirmed. The brutal character assassination of Robert Bork is ample evidence of this, as are the farcical witch-hunts against Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh.

My other objections to this pro-life reliance on Federal Courts are constitutional and practical. To begin with, accepting the Incorporation Doctrine (the legal justification for Roe and its descendants) means accepting the idea that the 14th Amendment incorporates the Bill of Rights against the State governments, including the implied right to privacy and the subsequent right to obtain an abortion. The legal and historical problem with this is that the Bill of Rights was never intended by the Founding Fathers to be applied to the States. There were two primary arguments against the Bill of Rights. The first of these (advanced by men like Roger Sherman, Hugh Williamson, and Theophilus Parsons) was that, since the States already had their declarations/bills of Rights, and since Congress had been given no authority to infringe upon them, a Federal Bill of Rights would be redundant and unnecessary, and might even undermine the sovereignty and authority of the States.

The second reason for objecting to the Bill of Rights had to do with its length and scope. Enumerating all of the rights protected would be impossible, and therefore would result in an implied surrender of whichever rights they forgot to explicitly protect in the Bill of Rights. Moreover, why say that the government can’t do something (like restrict freedom of speech or the press) if the government hasn’t been granted that power to begin with? (James Wilson and Alexander Hamilton presented these arguments; Hamilton’s is easily found in Federalist Essay #84). This second argument was the reason for the addition of the Ninth Amendment, which reads as follows:

“The enumeration in this Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

James Madison actually proposed an amendment incorporating the Bill of Rights against the States; the amendment was voted down. The original preamble to the Bill of Rights also makes it clear that the Bill was intended to apply solely to the U.S. government, not to the States:

“The Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution.”

In what was arguably the only Supreme Court ruling he ever got right (Barron v. Baltimore 1833), Chief Justice John Marshall admitted that the Bill of Rights did not apply to the States.

Additionally, accepting the Incorporation Doctrine means accepting the authority of Federal courts to overturn State laws. This is not an Originalist position and is really the heart of the problem; the Incorporation Doctrine would be a moot point were it not for the doctrine of Judicial Review. None of the men who ratified the Constitution believed the Supreme Court would have such a power, because the proponents of the Constitution promised it would not. Even John Marshall promised as much at the Virginia ratifying convention. Of course, he changed his tune once he became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Constitution was ratified, the legal contract was entered into, with the understanding that the Court could not strike down State law. Either that was the truth, or the Constitution was ratified under false pretenses, in which case it is a fraudulent contract, making it null and void.

Thomas Jefferson was vehemently opposed to the idea of Judicial Review. He so detested Judicial Review that he refused to admit that the Federal courts could strike down Federal laws, let alone State laws. As Jefferson wrote to Spencer Roane in September of 1819:

“The Constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they may please.”

Jefferson also hammered Judicial Review when writing to William Charles Jarvis in September of 1820:

“You seem to consider the judges the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy … The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal.” 

Writing on Christmas Day of 1820, Jefferson told Thomas Ritchie that:

“The Judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers & miners constantly working underground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric.”

And finally, Jefferson criticized Judicial Review in his letter to William Johnson in June of 1823:

“This case of Marbury and Madison is continually cited by bench and bar, as if it were settled law, without any animadversions on its being merely an obiter dissertation of the Chief Justice … But the Chief Justice says, ‘there must be an ultimate arbiter somewhere.’ True, there must; but … The ultimate arbiter is the people.”

Jefferson’s reference to “the people” as the “ultimate arbiter” of such questions is a reference to the State governments, State Constitutions, and, when it comes to Federal powers, the amendment process laid out in Article V of the U.S. Constitution. He clearly foresaw the tyrannical oligarchy the Court would become if it was left unchecked.

Furthermore, the men who wrote, argued for, and ratified the Constitution made it unequivocally clear that they believed the separate, sovereign States retained all powers not delegated to the Federal government, and that the States had both the right and the duty to rein in the Federal government when it usurped power or otherwise violated the Constitution:

“The state governments represent the wishes, and feelings, and local interests, of the people. They are the safeguard and ornament of the Constitution; they will protract the period of our liberties; they will afford a shelter against the abuse of power, and they will be the natural avengers of our violated rights.” Fisher Ames

“It has been well observed, that to coerce the States is one of the maddest projects that was ever devised.” Alexander Hamilton

“The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.”  James Madison 

“But it will not follow from this doctrine that acts of the large society which are NOT PURSUANT to its constitutional powers, but which are invasions of the residuary authorities of the smaller societies, will become the supreme law of the land. These will be merely acts of usurpation, and will deserve to be treated as such.” (original emphasis) Alexander Hamilton

The powers of Congress are all circumscribed, defined, and clearly laid down. So far they may go, but no farther. Samuel Johnston

“If the gentleman will attend, he will see this is a government for confederated states; that, consequently, it can never intermeddle where no power is given.” Archibald Maclaine

“The state governments possess inherent advantages, which … will forever preclude the possibility of federal encroachments. That their liberties, indeed, can be subverted by the federal head, is repugnant to every rule of political calculation.” Alexander Hamilton

“I conceive the state governments are necessary as the barrier between the people’s liberties and any invasion which may be attempted on them by the general [Federal] government.” Gilbert Livingston

“The Constitution effectually secures the states in their several rights. It must secure them for its own sake; for they are the pillars which uphold the general system.” Oliver Wolcott

“When a question arises with respect to the legality of any power, exercised or assumed by Congress, it is plain on the side of the governed: Is it enumerated in the Constitution?  If it be, it is legal and just.  It is otherwise arbitrary and unconstitutional.”  Henry Lee 

“The general government has no powers but what are expressly granted to it.” Charles Pinckney

“It [Federal authority] only extends to the general purposes of the Union.  It does not intermeddle with the local, particular affairs of the states.” Edmund Pendleton

“The powers of Congress are limited and enumerated … It is as plain a thing as can be, that Congress can have no power but what we expressly give them.” Richard Dobbs Spaight

“The laws of the United States are supreme, as to all their proper, constitutional objects: the laws of the states are supreme in the same way … it must be utterly repugnant to this Constitution to subvert the state governments.” Alexander Hamilton

“If Congress should make a law beyond the powers and the spirit of the Constitution, should we not say to Congress, ‘You have no authority to make this law. There are limits beyond which you cannot go. You cannot exceed the power prescribed by the Constitution. You are amenable to us for your conduct. This act is unconstitutional. We will disregard it, and punish you for the attempt.’” Archibald Maclaine

“There is no instance that can be pointed out wherein the internal policy of the state can be affected by the judiciary of the United States.” William Richardson Davie

“The state courts have exclusive jurisdiction over every other possible controversy that can arise between the inhabitants of their own states; nor can the federal courts intermeddle with such disputes, either originally or by appeal.” Archibald Maclaine

Clearly, these Founding Fathers did not view the Supreme Court as the sole arbiter or interpreter of the Constitution, but rather viewed the States as possessing the power to interpret and protect that document from Federal excesses, thereby shielding their people from the tyranny the Founders loathed and despised, regardless of which branch initiated the tyranny in question.

Moreover, the Supreme Court does not have authority to overturn State laws because the Supreme Court doesn’t have the authority to hear appeals cases from State courts under Article III or the Eleventh Amendment. What legal basis, then, did the Court have for hearing Roe? In 1789, Congress passed the first Judiciary Act, Section 25 of which states in relevant part:

“And be it further enacted, that a final judgment or decree in any suit, in the highest court of law or equity of a State in which a decision in the suit could be had … may be re-examined and reversed or affirmed in the Supreme Court of the United States.”

There’s just one problem with this: Congress has no Constitutional authority to expand the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. Congress’s authority over the judiciary is laid out in Article I, Section 8: “The Congress shall have power … To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court.” That is the whole of their authority. Moreover, Article III, Section 2 explicitly says:

“The judicial power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made, under their authority;to all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls; – to all cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction; – to controversies to which the United States shall be a party; to controversies between two or more states; between a state and citizens of another state; between citizens of different states; between citizens of the same state claiming lands under grants of different states, and between a state, or the citizens thereof, and foreign states, citizens or subjects.

In all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and those in which a state shall be party, the Supreme Court shall have original jurisdiction. In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.”

Nowhere does Article III grant the Supreme Court appellate jurisdiction over cases between citizens of the same State. Nor does it grant the Court or the Congress any leeway on the matter. It says “The judicial power shall extend …” and then proceeds to explicitly and precisely list the cases over which the Supreme Court has jurisdiction, even going so far as to differentiate between original and appellate jurisdiction. It must be noted that the Court’s appellate jurisdiction is explicitly limited to “all the other cases before mentioned,” meaning that Section 25 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 is unconstitutional not just because Congress has no authority to expand the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, but also because it explicitly contradicts Article III, Section 2. Roe v. Wade is unconstitutional because the Supreme Court had no jurisdiction in the case!

The Supreme Court has been exceeding its delegated authority since its 1793 ruling in Chisholm v. Georgia, in which the Court insisted, contrary to promises made at the ratifying conventions, that States had no sovereign immunity because they had no sovereignty, and therefore could be sued in Federal court against their will. The States responded with the 11th Amendment: “The judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by citizens of another state, or by citizens or subjects of any foreign state.”

Sadly, the Court’s usurpations did not stop there. Chief Justice John Marshall led the Court in a flurry of oligarchic power seizures. Despite the opposition of the Richmond Junto, the Court got away with its violations of the Constitution because Congress had demonstrated an unwillingness to employ the impeachment power to remove partisan Justices who legislated from the bench. Among the worst of these decisions was the Court’s 1810 ruling in Fletcher v. Peck, in which the Court simultaneously asserted its supposed authority to overturn State laws and also declared fraudulent, corrupt and bribery-riddled contracts to be protected by the “contracts clause” of the U.S. Constitution. Per John Marshall, who wrote the Court’s opinion, graft is a constitutional right. What sage wisdom! What sparkling integrity! Truly, if ever a man deserved to be one of America’s most respected, revered, and influential judges, it was John Marshall!

The history of the Incorporation Doctrine is lengthy and far too large to be discussed in detail here. Suffice it to say that the Supreme Court rejected the idea in 1873, then reversed course and adopted the idea either with its ruling in Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad Company v. Chicago or with its decision in Gitlow v. New York, depending on who you ask.

While the Supreme Court sadly had no qualms usurping powers from the very earliest days of the Union, the Incorporation Doctrine gave them a powerful new tool which allowed them to justify more and usurpations of power from the States and people. These tyrannical usurpations range from outright evil to patently absurd. Here are a few of the gems the oligarchic Supreme Court has foisted upon the American people via the Incorporation Doctrine:

• Public schools must fund the education of illegal immigrant children, despite the fact that they and their parents are not citizens and their parents pay no taxes into the system to fund said schools. (Plyler v. Doe)

• The Bill of Rights creates an implied right to privacy or “zone of privacy” which “emanates” from “penumbras” cast by the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments. The Court may therefore strike down any State law it believes violates that implied right to privacy. (Griswold v. Connecticut)

• Abortion on-demand for any reason through the ninth month of pregnancy. Virtually any regulation of abortion, even on the basis of sanitation and health concerns, violates the “right” discovered by the Court in 1973 by “creating an undue burden” on a woman’s ability to obtain an abortion. (Roe v. Wade, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt)

• Rapists cannot be executed because that’s “cruel and unusual punishment.” (Coker v. Georgia)

• Child-rapists cannot be executed unless the child dies as a result of the rape and it can be proven that the rapist intended to murder the child. (Kennedy v. Louisiana)

• Outlawed the execution of murderers for four years until the States came up with a trial process arbitrarily determined by the Court to be just. (Furman v. Georgia, Gregg v. Georgia)

• Fundamentally redefined the institution of marriage while simultaneously declaring it a human right. (Obergefell v. Hodges)

• Overturned State law setting different alcoholic drinking ages for men and women, because goodness knows, the Founding Fathers always intended for the Supreme Court to determine the legal drinking age. (Craig v. Boren)

In 1823, statesman, scholar, and former U.S. Senator John Taylor of Caroline pointed out that the Supreme Court’s claimed powers to overturn State laws violated the Constitutional guarantee that every State would have a republican form of government. After all, who ever heard of a republic whose laws could be arbitrarily overturned by some outside tribunal which was wholly unaccountable to the people of said republic? And what about the Tenth Amendment’s reservation of all undelegated powers to the State governments and people thereof? To quote Taylor:

“The constitution is susceptible of three distinct characters, which will shed much light on its construction. It ought to be considered as a compact, an organization of a government limited by the compact, and as a law in relation to individuals. Its essential stipulation as a compact, is the division of power between the state and federal governments. This feature is impressed upon it in the strongest lines, by the guarantee of a republican form of government to every state, and the reservation of undelegated powers. Can a government be called republican, or even be any government, if its powers may be taken away by another government, or if it is responsible, not to the people, but to a few judges, who are themselves responsible to another government? The argument used in the convention, now again advanced, that the states are subordinate corporations, is refuted by the constitution itself in its guarantee and reservation. Who are the guardians of the compact, the guarantee, and the reservation; the people of each state, or the supreme federal court? Is this court a state, a republican form of government for every state, and the receptacle of the reservation? Even a criminal is to be tried by his peers … the state governments, to be republican, must be regulated by the people of each state. How can they be republican, if they may be tried, their laws and judgments annulled, and their powers abridged, by a court, which is neither their peer, their master, nor their guarantee? To abridge the powers of the state governments, is equivalent to the suppression of the state legislatures. The constitution, in accordance with its character as a compact, composes a jury consisting of three-fourths of the contracting parties, for its own trial, because they were compeers; and neither subjected itself as a compact, nor these compeers and mutual guarantees, to the power of a few men only enabled to try cases in law and equity.”

In other words, you have two options. Either you, the people of Vermont or California or Alabama or Tennessee, or whatever State you live in, write the laws by which you are governed (through your elected legislatures), or the Supreme Court writes your laws for you. Is that self-government? Is that liberty? The latter option sounds less like a representative republic and more like an unaccountable (and unconstitutional) oligarchy. If the Supreme Court can abolish State laws whenever they please, they effectively have the power to abolish the State governments, which the proponents of the Constitution swore would never happen, and the men who ratified the Constitution clearly believed those promises. Either those promises were true, or the Constitution was a scam and a fraud, and therefore utterly null, void, and of no force.

Even if one accepts the authority of the Supreme Court to overturn State laws (and I don’t), the Incorporation Doctrine still doesn’t pass constitutional muster for two reasons. Firstly, the Congress which passed the 14th Amendment and sent it to the States for ratification explicitly debated whether or not the amendment would incorporate the Bill of Rights to the States, and the Congressional majority said no. Therefore, Original Intent explicitly prohibits the Incorporation Doctrine. The Supreme Court even admitted as much in the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873). Interestingly, in 1875 Congress considered an amendment to apply the 1st Amendment to the States. It failed. If the 14th Amendment applied the Bill of Rights to the States, why was this potential amendment even considered? For full historical details on this, see The 14th Amendment and the Incorporation Doctrine by David Benner and Government by Judiciary by Raoul Berger. Secondly, according to several excellent historians, including the famed Forrest McDonald, the 14th Amendment was never properly ratified in the first place. (See McDonald’s A Constitutional History of the United States).

So, if Judicial Review and the Incorporation Doctrine are unconstitutional, what is the proper legal recourse? Nullification. The doctrine of nullification is the idea that when the Federal government exceeds its constitutional authority, the State governments possess both the right and the duty to interpose their power and authority between the people and the tyrannical usurpation of the Federal government. As sovereign and equal members of a compact, nullifying laws, rulings and edicts which exceed the delegated authority of the Federal government is one of those things sovereign States may of right do. Moreover, because all just powers are derived from the consent of the governed, the right of nullification is reserved to the sovereign States by Amendments Nine and Ten.

Contra my undergraduate political science professor, nullification is not “a theory dreamed up by John C. Calhoun to defend slavery.” It’s true that Calhoun advocated nullification, most famously during the Nullification Crisis of 1832-1833. But that particular dust-up had nothing to do with slavery and everything to do with unconstitutional federal taxation. Moreover, Calhoun didn’t invent the idea of nullification; the roots of nullification run deep, going back at least to 1765, when the colonies nullified the Stamp Act on the basis that it violated the British Constitution.

The most famous example of nullification is probably the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798, which were written in response to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. The Federalist Congress passed the Acts, and Federalist President John Adams signed them into law. Among other things, the Acts made it a crime punishable by fines and imprisonment, to criticize the President or any member of his cabinet (with the exception of Vice President Thomas Jefferson). Such a blatant violation of the First Amendment could not go unchallenged. James Madison responded with the Virginia Resolutions, while Thomas Jefferson authored the Kentucky Resolutions. Jefferson summed nullification up perfectly when he wrote: “whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.”

Even if the States were not sovereign (and they are), they would still possess the right and duty of nullification for two reasons. Firstly, that right is reserved to them under Amendments Nine and Ten, regardless of the garbled opinions of John Marshall and Joseph Story. Secondly, the right of nullification is simply a form of resistance to tyranny, and is therefore not merely a legal or constitutional right, but a natural right. At its most basic level, nullification is simply refusal to comply with unconstitutional laws, edicts, and rulings. All defiance to tyrants is rooted in the concept that governments have limits on their authority beyond which they may not tread because the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God do not allow them to. This was why Benjamin Franklin suggested “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God” as the motto of the United States; Thomas Jefferson liked the motto so well that he appropriated it for his own personal seal. Jealously and vigilantly guarded by the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, nullification is a constitutionally protected natural right, originating in the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. Even if the States were not sovereign (and they are), they would still possess the constitutional and natural right and duty of nullification.

Like secession, nullification is a vital and inherent part of the American political and legal traditions. The Judiciary exists to adjudicate. It doesn’t have the authority to legislate. If, as St. George Tucker wrote, unconstitutional laws passed by Congress are illegal, how much more illegal are unconstitutional laws pulled out of thin air by the judges sitting on the Supreme Court? The Pro-Life movement’s proper legal response to Roe v. Wade is to convince the State governments to nullify the unconstitutional and tyrannical edicts of the power-mad oligarchy known as the United States Supreme Court. God grant they will do so with all deliberate speed.


A native of East Tennessee, Jake Starbuck is an independent historian and a descendant of soldiers on both sides of The Late Unpleasantness and of Governor John Sevier. His father, who was a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, taught him to love history and the South. Starbuck holds a BA in History and Political Science from Carson-Newman University and an MA in History from Liberty University. He has no connection to the coffee company.

Source: Dissident Mama – Roe v. Wade – a mere nullity

Dissident Mama, episode 31- Walter B. Curry, Jr.

Walter B. Curry, Jr., is a native of Orangeburg, South Carolina. He received a bachelor’s degree in political science from South Carolina State University, and has earned several graduate degrees in education, which include a doctorate in Curriculum & Instruction from Argosy University. Curry is the founder of Renaissance Publications whose tagline is “Reviving authentic knowledge through genealogical scholarship.”

I talk with the Confederate descendant about some of his ancestors and how understanding the past helps shape who we are today. Some topics include demystifying black Confederates, holistic research and narratives, Black History vs. Southern History vs. American history, the traditional diversity of the South, cancel culture, resilience, and challenging the status quo. I think y’all will learn a lot, especially what it’s like for parents to do podcast interviews from home. Never a dull moment!

Listen to our conversation below, download the episode, or watch it on YouTube.

Source: Dissident Mama – Dissident Mama, episode 31- Walter B. Curry, Jr.

A “Christian” cosplay coup d’état

“I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.”

G.K. Chesteron

Lydia Bringerud may look like a homely trad girl, but she is one of the many faces of leftist subversion digging her way into the Orthodox Church. Those within this network may dress the part and speak the language, but only as rites used for undermining the Church and building their new progressive religion.

It’s a modern faith that co-opts the foundations of the ancient faith and is aimed wholly at reconstructing God, for its change agents find His statutes too tedious, His Word too confining, His Church’s traditions too hateful. And Orthodoxy, well, you know, it’s just so darn authoritarian and patriarchal and waaaay too white. Icky!

“White supremacists … may well be the number one threat to the Orthodox Church in the United States,” opined Bringerud in her most recent Orthodoxy in Dialogue essay “Michael Sisco, white supremacy, and loyalty in the Orthodox Church,” echoing the Department of Homeland Security’s lunatic claim that “white supremacists are the number one domestic terror threat” in America. Let us not forget that it was this very same federal agency that crafted the Russia-gate hoax to which all fashionable Russophobes subscribe.

I first stumbled upon Bringerud after publishing my recent exposé on Father Christopher Calin. Turns out, she co-moderates the Facebook page for OiD, which claims “to promote the free exchange of ideas.” Yeah, not so much.

Even though Bringerud doesn’t run the OiD Twitter page, I think it’s important to note that she and her comrades are most certainly opposed to freedom of conscience and legitimate dialogue.

Bringerud begins her hit piece by denigrating Saints Edward Media creator Michael Sisco as a “nationalist.” (Funny that he’s not the one citing the behemoth DHS bureaucracy whose main goal is domestic surveillance and curtailing the 4th Amendment all in the name of centralized expansion and furthering US hegemony. Talk about “extremist, national views” and an “enmeshment with nationalist regimes,” as she describes Sisco.

Sisco, who I interviewed back in the fall, simply wants to restore peace and order, but through a Christ-centered, communitarian approach, as well as through lawful political processes. Read for yourself what are his “extreme” beliefs or listen to him taking on Bringerud’s mischaracterizations, weak guilt-by-association attacks, and outright mistakes (such as the fact that Dr. Paul Gottfried coined the term “alt-right”).

Bringerud’s circular logic is mind-numbing, but it really shouldn’t be surprising since, just like their Evangeleftist counterparts, these Ameridox think logic is a tool of the patriarchy. Smash toxic masculinity, bash the fash, and punch a Nazi, and then you’re free and clear to abuse both rules of rhetoric and writing, not to mention biology and Church tradition. No wonder left-wingers embrace being woke. It’s so darn easy, especially if you’re cute.

“It’s an universal law: intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Bringerud’s emotional screed is a far cry from Journalism 101, much less her PhD (even it it was in folklore). And “emotion” certainly is the operative word here.

We’re living through an intellectual crisis based upon feelings, counter-factual responses, and lacking self-reflection, says Dr. John Devanny of the sad state of American miseducation and the prideful and pedantic borgs it creates. Unconditional loyalty to its dogma is realized through either victimology or virtue-signaling.

I’ve heard people from historian Dr. Tom Woods to writer Nero Augustus refer to these self-proclaimed elitists as “midwits.” They’re not dimwits, since they’re often book-smart, but they undoubtedly consider themselves your betters, hence, the reason they must incessantly lecture you about your backwardness and unenlightened beliefs. Economist Ludwig von Mises called these peevish puritanical-progressives “muddle-headed babblers” and historian Clyde Wilson pegged ’em the “Kevins.”

Instead of debating this satirical and spot-on analysis, my guess is that Ameridox will insist I’m acting like a Protestant by even quoting the Bee. They’ll probably call me “anti-intellectual” while they’re at it. They do fancy themselves the smartest people in the room.

Meddling midwits dwell within what Curtis Yarvin has coined “the Cathedral.” I don’t love the label, since as a Christian I believe a cathedral to be a Holy space. (Why not a mosque or a synagogue, right?)

But because a cathedral is a church with a bishop’s seat (thus, implying hierarchy), I do get the use of the word. And in this case, Bringerud sees herself and her co-religionists as people in this high position who are asserting authority over others, and even dominion over Church tradition and dogma.

The Cathedral is comprised of “intelligent people whose role it is to train genpop to believe and more importantly repeat things in violation of reality,” explains author Michael Malice. This would include apparatchiks from corporate media, academia, and government, as well as the priesthood from the legal, business, and acceptable-opinion social classes.

So Bringerud pushes the consumption of Marxist-Leninist literature at the public library, but pooh-poohs Putin and pedals paranoia. Talk about blind loyalty.

“There are few things more Russian than an entire media apparatus dedicated to training the populace to disbelieve what is profoundly evident to everyone,” Jewish-American Malice, who was born in Soviet Ukraine in the 1970s, notes of the USSR’s agitprop. This is why a chick with a fancy doctorate uses command language to purposefully confuse and obfuscate, not elucidate, to agitate and propagandize, influence and mobilize.

“More often than not, Cathedral operatives are completely unexceptional people,” Malice remarks. “The reason they fight to maintain its cultural dominance … is quite simply because it is the entire source of their power. Without it they would be utterly obscure and irrelevant.”

Thus, they castigate as “extremist” any person who repels their malleable edicts. This is nothing shocking for anyone who has even a cursory knowledge of the intelligentsia, who have historically been a vanguard of political, social, or artistic elites who have a penchant for caustic close-mindedness all while claiming they’re the free-thinkers.

“We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.”

Vladimir Lenin

Bringerud feigns fairness and charity in parts of her essay, never even outright calling Sisco a “white supremacist.” She implies that. His name and that ad hom are in her headline. She says he’s been “flagged” as such, but by whom, we do not know. She alleges that his “rhetoric is reminiscent of Corneliu Codreanu” and that he “allowed white nationalist Michael Fuentes to speak.”

Sure, Bringerud misidentified Nick Fuentes, which to me, means she only just recently heard of him by her fellow Cathedralists at Salon or The Atlantic, and has never actually heard him. Lame, I know, but certainly not a smoking gun since leftists are well-programmed and most don’t have an original thought, relying solely on platitudes.

I think he would say, “Hey, white folks. Please stop patronizing me with your pseudo-scholastics.”

But more importantly, Bringerud’s duplicitous style sometimes seems to give her plausible deniability when it comes to reconstructing Orthodoxy. For example, in her dissertation, she wrote, “Despite the illusion of theology as the exclusive purview of clergy, laypeople exercise interpretive agency to creatively adapt doctrine to their individual life circumstances.”

But don’t be fooled by her word salad. None of this quote is Orthodox. We are not papists and our dogma is not fluid or intersectional. Whereas clergy are the sacred priesthood, laity are the royal priesthood, and we work in concert together for the good of the Holy, Apostolic Church.

Nevertheless, adapting doctrine is a heretical belief. There is no wiggle room in Orthodoxy when it comes to such foundational big-T traditions. After all, the definition of the word “orthodox” is “beliefs conforming to what is generally or traditionally accepted as right or true; established and approved … strictly keeping to traditional doctrine and ritual.”

This is why Bringerud offers “a theory of vernacular feminisms, in which women create strategies of empowerment within a patriarchal system. By creating these choices for themselves, they simultaneously subvert and support a system that limits them on the basis of gender.”

Subversion, for sure; support, not so much. Like Father John Whiteford so pointedly surmises, “It is a betrayal of the Orthodox Faith to suggest that our moral tradition is on a different footing than the dogmatic tradition of the Church.”

Bringerud’s academic works set the egalitarian stage for her OiD articles, in which she doesn’t just chip away at the system, but instead, takes a sledgehammer to it. In her essay “On being Orthodox and genderqueer,” “She invites her subject to share their experience of being Orthodox and a seminarian while not identifying as male or female.”

David therealMedWhite breaks down the disturbing justification of voluntary transgressions and perversion of God’s law within this piece. This includes not only trans acceptance, but also the promotion of porn, masturbation, non-monogamy, and “dramatically re-evaluat[ing] the concept of sin and sins.” Anaxios! You cannot barter with the devil.

Similarly, Bringerud penned a glowing review of the documentary Circus of Books which she says is about “a wholesome, friendly straight couple who have made a career out of selling hard-core gay porn.” She preens that it speaks to the “dynamics of love, family, and faith in an unexpected place.”

Please do, Lydia. 2021’s your year, grrrrl. Goddess speed.

In “Plague: Untold stories of AIDS and the Catholic Church,” she wrote, “I was struck with the deep resonances between the AIDS crisis and our current political climate with COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement.” She sets up a straw-man in order to paint the Orthodox Church as hateful and intolerant. How vernacular.

“Churches do not die because of an absence of belief. They die when they become gated communities, excluding those who can’t afford to get in.” What a self-defeating pretext that is. Belief is by virtue not inclusive to those who don’t believe. What could be any more exclusive than repent and sin no more? It is the wide-open gates (i.e. the wide path) that kills a church and kills God’s children.

“It’s this weird, American, evangelical, or pseudo-scholastic Western view that has been dressed up in a cassock and incense,” Lindsey, the trans in Bringerud’s genderqueer article, quipped about traditional Orthodox Christians. Of course, we know that nothing could be more post-modern, self-help gobbledygook than what Bringerud and her ilk are selling. Seems her theology is way more Beth Moore than St. Basil the Great, way more Jen Hatmaker than St. John Chrysostom.

“I questioned whether I was the only person who was bothered by patriarchy in Orthodox Christianity,” Bringerud admitted in her doctoral thesis. Well, okay, perhaps she wasn’t a feminist when she converted to Orthodoxy at age 14 (you can hear her conversion story on the Bad Orthodox Podcast from 1:22-5:46). But she sure is now, so one wonders why a grrrrrrl would remain so long in a faith that’s counter to her entire worldview. Seriously, why not just go join the “evolving faith” of Sarah Bessey and her Jesus Feminists?

Seems Bringerud has been bred in hubris, not humility.

What we have here, folks, is a good ol’ Hegelian dialectic.

• The agenda? Subvert the Church.
• The thesis? Manufacture the fictional crisis of white supremacy and assert the equally false claim that the traditional religion and its hierarchical system is inherently bad.
• The anti-thesis? Create division and try to institute purges of those with wrongthink.
• The synthesis? Removal of Church hierarchy, traditional gender roles, and biblical doctrine regarding homosexuality and other sins while transferring power from conservative Orthodox to the totalitarian Cathedralists.

It’s destructionism, a Misesian term that had been coined in explaining socialist schemes in terms of economics. Here’s my tweak of Mises’ quote: “Leftism produces nothing; it only consumes social order. Each step leading towards cultural Marxism must exhaust itself in the destruction of what already exists,” namely, the Church – the Bride of Christ.

The saddest part is not that these infiltrators exist. The Bible does warn us to be wary of such wolves. Rather, it’s that these change agents use the goodwill and love embedded within the Christianity in order to play the part of the sheep and twist the Gospel for their own worldly ends. The shepherds must be on guard.

It’s only because of pro-Antifa-BLM Russophobes like Bringerud that this satire is so brilliantly on point.

The Cathedralists co-opt Christian language by saying it is we traditionalists who need a moral awakening, while they simultaneously tout immorality. They claim it is Orthodoxy that needs healing, not sinners who need the life-giving care of the Holy Church. They don’t necessarily want to change the faith but simply seek to adjust its application, to “save the Church from itself,” as Father Whiteford says.

The Ameridox “try to reconcile our Orthodox faith with all the pathological teachings and philosophies that are current in our culture, many of them are even openly Marxist.” These Chekists in cassocks will deflect, of course, putting “communist” in quotes when mocking those who call them out for being such.

Predictably, they’ll anoint themselves as victim-martyrs and malign as “white supremacist” anyone who tries to crush opposition to progressive proliferation, but this shouldn’t discourage us in this righteous battle. Jesus says we who stand firm will be hated for His name’s sake. But as guardians of piety, we must “follow the path of the martyrs and not the path of the Judases,” preaches Father Whiteford.

“What Orthodox Christians need to decide for themselves is what the Church is. What behaviors will (and won’t) believers tolerate in their communities, and how will they resolve these conflicts?” Bringerud concludes in her current article. “How do believers reconcile inconvenient facts and intense feelings?”

“Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded.”

James 4:8

This is actually excellent advice. Like my friend Mike said about my recent 2-part series “Where’s the clerical consistency?” it “drew much-needed lines in the sand.” This is war, not just cultural, political, and spiritual, but existential. It’s time to pick a side and stop being so nice. Let’s clean house and reclaim our Cathedral.

Such rhetoric is not sowing discord. It’s unapologetically standing for unchanging truth. Honestly, there should be nothing more unifying than that.

As St. Paul says, “Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of devils; ye cannot be partakers of the Lord’s table and of the table of devils.”

Therefore, I’m raising the black flag in resistance to the cosplay creepers and their corrupt coup d’état. Let’s pray against the demons who surround these cultists of death and for victory of Orthodox Christians over their adversaries.

Source: Dissident Mama – A “Christian” cosplay coup d’état