"Kyle Rittenhouse - Hero And Martyr"

Kyle Rittenhouse - Hero And Martyr

Via Brother Nathaniel

Re-posting Posts

President Donald Trump toured damaged businesses
and met with law enforcement in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Tuesday.
[Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images]

I've decided to re-post the following posts from a couple of weeks ago (which I had saved in draft form):

- Trump and His Darth Vaders

- Trump is Getting Back on Track

I was never a follower of Trump the Politician. But, politicians are what they are, and it is up to the public, the ordinary citizens, to make sure that politicians honor their office. Trump is just one man, the American citizens are in the millions, including leaders, thinkers, and truth seekers.

Perhaps that is what Trump is reacting to in his recent comments: Trump in Kenosha (via The Thinking Housewife).

And also standing in the middle of the rubble caused by "domestic terror," as Trump says, must have a sobering effect.

The Roman Forum: "Why should lasting values tremble if transient things fall?” (Prosper of Aquitaine)

August 28, 2020: Feast of St. Augustine

“This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.”
(T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men)

“In the world you shall have distress. But have confidence. I have overcome the world.“
(John 16:33)
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Dear Friends of the Roman Forum,

“Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad”.

Our entire secularized but formerly glorious Christian civilization has gone stark raving mad, and deserves whatever fate lies in store for it for having abandoned God. Since it has lost its Faith it has also lost its Reason, proclaiming absolute nonsense as unquestionable, infallible, scientific wisdom.

At least we Catholics can take consolation in the fact that we have been provided by our robotic opponents with a “Galileo Case” that they will never be able to live down: when - and if - our brain dead civilization ever does regain its sanity. And Christ will, of course, triumph over an arrogant, modern, “enlightened” world, now seemingly ending with a pathetic whimper regarding not a Bubonic Plague but an admittedly tragic flu that nevertheless has mercifully left 99% of mankind quite intact.

Given everyone’s justifiable focus on the electoral drama, and given also the great uncertainty surrounding a crisis being manipulated by a variety of what I can only label terrorist organizations - whose crimes cry out to heaven for a new set of Nuremberg Trials to punish - this Roman Forum information letter will be very brief.

If the borders are reopened and conditions permit our proper use of the parish church of Gardone Riviera, our 28th Annual Summer Symposium dealing with The Traditionalist Movement: Its Origins, Its Manifold Ramifications, Its Divisions, and its Enemies, planned for 2020, will take place in the summer of 2021. Further information and exact dates will be provided as we become more secure about the future.

The last four years of our New York City Church History Lectures may be found for free on the Internet by calling up The Roman Forum at Sound Cloud. As already mentioned in the past, our hope is eventually to redo all of the previous lectures of this present cycle of the history program - some 450 conferences in total - and make them similarly available to interested listeners. Meanwhile, the tentative schedule for the 2020-2021 New York City Church History Lectures, The End of the Modern World: From the “Purifying War” to Danger on All Fronts (1914-1945), is pasted below.

We are obviously grateful to those still capable of offering us tax-deductible donations in these difficult days. Donations can be made either through PayPal on our website or by checks made out to the Roman Forum and mailed to the address indicated above. All donors are remembered in the monthly Traditional Mass said on their behalf, offered by our chaplain, Rev. Dr. Richard A. Munkelt. And all of you are always in our daily prayers.

Viva Cristo Rey!

John C. Rao (D.Phil., Oxford)
Chairman, Roman Forum
Associate Professor of History, St. John's University

SCHEDULE:

“Even if the wounds of this shattered world enmesh you, and the sea in turmoil bears you along in but one surviving ship, it would still befit you to maintain your enthusiasm for studies unimpaired. Why should lasting values tremble if transient things fall?” (Prosper of Aquitaine)

The Roman Forum

29th Annual New York City Church History Program (2020-2021)

The End of the Modern World:
From the "Purifying War" to Danger on All Fronts (1914-1945)

Lecturer: John C. Rao, D. Phil. (Oxford University)
Associate Professor of History, St. John's University

September 13: Benedict XV and the ”Purifying War”
September 27: One Man’s Purification is Another Man’s Chastisement
October 11: A Terribly Troubled Brave New World
October 18: Benedict XV, Pius XI, and the “Roman School” of Purification
November 1: “The Peace of Christ in the Reign of Christ” and the Occupation of International and National “Spaces”
November 15: A Formidable Competition for Control of the Ecumene
November 22: Multiple Ideological Bids for Occupation of National Spaces
December 6: A “Loyal Opposition” to the “Roman School”? Part One
December 20: A “Loyal Opposition” to the Roman School? Part Two
January 10: Salve, Popolo D’Eroi! The Popolari, the Clerico-Moderates, the Victory of the Fascisti, and the Lateran Accords
January 24: Viva Cristo Rey! Revolutionary Mexico, the Cristeros, and Friends Perhaps Worse Than Enemies
February 7: The Third Republic, the Action Française, and “the Revenge of the Sillon”
February 21: The Crises of Liberal Europe and the Stalinist Red Menace
March 7: Es Zittert Die Morschen Knochen: Germany Between a Rock and a Hard Place
March 21: A “Third Way” Free for All?
March 28: Popular Fronts and the Spanish Kaleidoscope
April 11: Pius XII: Taking Arms Against a Sea of Troubles
April 25: Danger on All Fronts: A New World Order?
May 2: Danger on All Fronts: International Communism or International Americanism?

Sundays at 2:30 P.M. Wine & Cheese Reception

N.B.---The live sessions are now organized as a private seminar. Those wishing to attend must contact Dr. John Rao drjcrao@aol.com to indicate their desire to attend. Once again, audiotapes of all lectures will be posted on SoundCloud.

"personal bravery in the face of threats"

Via The Thinking Housefwife:

Young Woman Refuses Communist Salute
August 26, 2020



A WOMAN in a D.C. restaurant was reportedly taunted by (paid?) mob for refusing to show the Communist fist and to shout “White silence is violence” slogan.

A great example of personal bravery in the face of threats.

By the way, have you noticed, masks make it easier for people to become thuggish or just plain rude? Duh! Masks are meant for outlaws!

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The Healthy American (and Canadian)

"Most Officers Reach Excellence Every Single Day"

Below is the transcript of a five minute video that David Clarke, former Milwaukee County Sheriff, recorded after his "interview" with CNN's Don Lemon.

The transcript to Clarke's post-CNN video is here (also in full below the dotted line), and the video here.

Below is Clarke's CNN interview with Lemon:



Watch the now matter-of-fact bully tactics reporters use to intimidate, and silence-through-interruptions, their interviewees.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Former Sheriff David Clarke:

"Cops are not perfect.


That’s not a news flash. But this might be: They don’t have to be perfect. They have to be excellent."

[Transcript]

For over 39 years, I was a police officer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. For 15 of those years, I was the Sheriff of Milwaukee County. I’ve done everything you can do as cop—from walking the beat, to investigating murder, to running the agency. I’ve met a lot of cops—of every race, ethnicity and background.

Here’s what I can tell you:

Cops are not perfect.

That’s not a news flash. But this might be: They don’t have to be perfect. They have to be excellent.

And most officers reach excellence every single day, and often under very difficult circumstances—circumstances you can’t imagine, and wouldn’t want to if you could.

Perfection is an unattainable goal. Cops are ordinary human beings. Like everyone else—lawyers, surgeons and baseball players—they make mistakes. But no profession works harder to correct its mistakes. You can mark social progress by the improvements made by police departments over the last 50 years. Today, police are more professional, better educated, and better trained than at any time in their history.

You wouldn’t know it, though, if you listened to self-serving, self-righteous politicians and activists. In their version of history, the police are the villains of the story, not its heroes. Like everything else this crowd does, they’ve got it all backwards.

The police aren’t the problem. The politicians and activists are.

The police didn’t create the failed urban policies that have locked people into generational poverty.

The police aren’t responsible for fatherless homes, failing schools, and bad lifestyle choices.

And they sure as hell aren’t responsible for the lack of respect shown to police officers. It is this lack of respect for authority, fostered over decades by the progressive left and its fear-the-police narrative, that has led to the needless deaths of so many young black men.

When Officer Darren Wilson told Michael Brown to get out of the middle of the street in Ferguson, Missouri, did Brown comply? No. When officers in Baltimore told Freddie Gray to stop resisting arrest, did he comply? No. When officers in New York City told Eric Garner to stop resisting arrest, did he comply? No.

Here’s a useful tip—if you want avoid a bad outcome with a police officer, follow this simple rule:

When a cop gives you a lawful command, obey it—even if you disagree. Whatever problem you are experiencing is not going to be settled on the street. People with complaints need to use the process established for that purpose. Though cops don’t have the final say, they do in that moment. How you react can be a matter of life or death.

But the idea that a law-abiding citizen has to fear the police is a terrible and destructive lie. Let’s get some perspective.

In 2014, 990 people were killed in police use-of-force incidents. Does that sound like a lot? Did you know that, according to a Johns Hopkins study, that same year, medical errors killed 250,000 people? Yet activists aren’t marching in the streets, demanding that the medical profession be reformed. Why not?

Why is it that the people who protect you from the bad guys—and I’ve seen these bad guys close up—are the subject of distrust and anger?

Why is it that groups like Black Lives Matter—I call them Black Lies Matter because it’s based on the falsehood that police represent a danger to black people—are celebrated by the media and politicians?

All this is taking its toll on cops and, even more tragically, on the law-abiding citizens in the neighborhoods that most need a strong police presence. The murder rates in these neighborhoods are going up because lawful, aggressive policing is going down.

Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has explained why. She calls it “The Ferguson Effect.” And it’s real. It’s also common sense. Why, police officers reason, put your career at risk, if 30 seconds of smartphone video taken out of context can destroy it?

Here’s the truth: Police aren’t afraid of walking the streets or being shot by random criminals. They’re afraid of being involved in an incident that would label them forever as trigger-happy racists.

Are there bad cops? I know first-hand that there are—I’ve had to fire them.

But the overwhelming majority are good, decent men and women, concerned about the law-abiding citizens in the communities they serve and are willing to put their lives on the line to protect them.

Those who try to convince you, either out of ignorance or out of some ideological agenda, that the police are the enemy—those are the people you should fear.

Run from them.

Not the cops.

I’m Sheriff David Clarke for Prager University.

Fauci Unmasked

Fauci Unmasked

Who's That Masked Man?

Article at the Ron Paul Institute: Who's That Masked Man
Reprinted with permission from David Stockman's Contra Corner
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

July 22, 2020
Who's That Masked Man
By David Stockman

It should be evident by now that the Donald’s one and only north star is his own glorification and self-aggrandizement. That’s why he’s totally flat-footed at this crucial moment in the pandemic saga.

What he needs to be doing is taking off the gloves for a bare-knuckled counter-attack against the Virus Patrol, which is ruining America’s economic and fiscal future.

Instead, yesterday he put on the Mask and the tweeted a juvenile boast that he’s the most patriotic muzzle-wearer in the land. Apparently, there is no place the Donald won’t go to reverse his sagging poll results:

We are United in our effort to defeat the Invisible China Virus, and many people say that it is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance. There is nobody more Patriotic than me, your favorite President!

But no, Donald, you ain’t no favorite among lovers of liberty, capitalist prosperity, free market opportunity and the constitutional fettering of state power.

After all, you said you came to Washington to drain the Swamp, yet there is no more odious set of Swamp Creatures than the camarilla of NIH/CDC/FDA doctors and apparatchiks, along with their Big Pharma and Gates Vaccine lobby allies, who bamboozled you into the folly of Lockdown Nation last March.

But now—when its way past time to reverse course and repudiate your malpracticing doctors— you actually genuflect to their Mask Totem, when you should be declaring loudly and unequivocally the opposite: Namely, that the the coronavirus has meet it match in the immune systems of the overwhelming share of Americans, and that it’s beating a fast retreat into the archives of still another infectious winter virus that passed through the population and moved on.

On the one hand, the Grim Reaper of Covid has long since vacated the epicenter of its brief rampage in New York, where the foolish actions of Gauleiter Cuomo caused a surge in nursing home infections, sickness and death, which accounts almost entirely for the four week surge in the state’s WITH-Covid death count during April.

By contrast, during the current month thru July 20, New York has tested like crazy, but has come up with no cigar with respect to new Covid cases. Compared to a total of 1,250,000 tests during that 20-day period, only 13,872 have tested positive, and many of those are surely the same people taking and re-taking their PCP swab in order to gain license to go back to work.

In any event, the gross positive rate is just 1.1 percent and would probably well less than that if the data were de-duped.

Likewise, there have been an average of just 10 WITH-Covid deaths reported during the first three weeks of July, which self-evidently is a tiny fraction of 500-800 deaths per day—heavily in the nursing homes—reported during April. Moreover, there is no real mystery as to why the curve is (thankfully) plunging to the lower right of the chart and heading right off the page. This virus like other virulent influenza’s strikes the weakest and most vulnerable population first, and thereafter tends to meet its match as the immune systems of the healthier parts of the population join the battle.


What that natural progression of the contagion means, of course, is that Governor Cuomo’s economically destructive lockdown orders had virtually nothing to do with the coronavirus’ welcome retreat.

That’s evident by comparison with Sweden, which had virtually no lockdowns at all. As of yesterday, however, the WITH-Covid death rate was 130 per 100,000 persons for New York state overall, and 235, 223 and 200 per 100,000, respectively, in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn.

By contrast, the mortality rate in Sweden has been about 55 per 100,000, and the preponderant share of those have been people over 70 years, heavily institutionalized in care facilities. In any event, the chart below says it all. Governor Cuomo’s boot heels did not “flatten the curve” relative to the open social and economic regime in Sweden, and also resulted in a 2.5X higher mortality rate on a cumulative basis.



By the same token, there is no “second wave” crisis in the so-called hot spot areas of the Sunbelt, either. Like in the case of New York, the virus is simply moving through the population in a time frame that is a month or two lagged relative to the original contagion’s spread in the Northeast; and, again, it is meeting its match in the immune systems of the healthier parts of the population.

The proof for that is straight-forward and is measured by the hospitalization rate per new case. The latter has plunged from 15-20 percent in the early days of the contagion in these new so-called hot spot states, but is now in the low single digits. The data for new cases, hospitalizations and the hospitalization ratio for the first 20 days of July includes the following:

· Florida: 207,960 new cases, 6,726 additional hospitalizations=3.2 percent;

· Arizona: 65,968 new cases, 1,962 additional hospitalizations=3.0 percent;

· Tennessee: 36,245 new cases, 1,047 additional hospitalizations=2.9 percent;

· Georgia: 64,284 new cases, 3,996 additional hospitalizations=6.2 percent;

· Arkansas: 13,150 new cases, 883 additional hospitalizations=6.0 percent;

· South Carolina: 35,046 new cases, 1,328 additional hospitalizations=3.8 percent;

· Mississippi: 21,642 new cases, 610 additional hospitalizations=2.8 percent

In a word, hospitalization rates of 3-6 percent are not indicative of a public health crisis or a dread disease laying waste to the population. In fact, they are only slightly above the hospitalization rates for normal winter influenza.

The chart below is the CDC’s assessment for the 2010-2018 seasons, and shows that the hospitalization rate per infected case has averaged 1.5 percent-2.0 percent over that eight year period; and that’s against a generous guesstimate of total influenza illnesses, not lab confirmed cases as with the current Covid stats.

Still, the point hardly needs saying. We do not close the bars, restaurants, gyms, hair salons, movies, malls etc. every winter owing to the flu. Yet that’s exactly what the Donald’ camarilla of malpracticing doctors are now urging for the states listed above in the face of a virus that is only slightly more severe than normal.

Stated differently, even now 94-97 percent of the ballyhooed “new cases” in the so-called Red Zone states are either asymptomatic or result in mild illness and recovery at home. The fact that what the Donald mistakenly thought was the Greatest Economy Ever is now swamped in unemployment, business failures, payment delinquencies and a fearful, muzzle-ridden public is ultimately the doing of the Masked Man above.

Harry Truman was right. The buck stops in the Oval Office.

At the end of the day, it was the Donald who empowered Dr. Fauci, who, in turn, paved the way for the governors, public health departments, mayors and lesser officials to attack the livelihoods and well-being of their own constituents in their tens of millions.



To add insult to injury, however, you can leave it to Dr. Fauci. The man had the gall to offer New York state as a shinning example to the rest of the nation when, in fact, it’s governor is damn near criminally negligent on the state’s nursing home death tsunami alone.

The fact is, New York’s mortality rate per 100,000 is well more than 2X greater than the European basket cases of Italy, Spain and the UK, and is actually more than 4.5X higher than Florida’s and 9.5X higher than that of Texas.

In the face of such abysmal judgement, the Donald’s trademark “you’re fired” would be the least that might be expected. But what we got was not just the ostentatious tweet of POTUS in a muzzle, but a renewed signal for the power-grabbing, Trump-hating local Dem officialdom to intensify their attacks on the main street economy.

The Dem rulers of Broward County, Florida, for example, have just now issued an order requiring homeowners to enforce the mask rule against visitors in their own homes-–upon penalty of fine or jail and subject to county inspector surveillance.

Likewise, County mayor Dale Holness’ announced a curfew and criminal penalties for having more than 10 people in your own home, or being part of a gathering of more than 10 people inside a PRIVATE RESIDENCE.

Of course, Broward County is just a microcosm of the economy-crushing mayhem that has been unleashed by the Donald’s own presumptive subordinates. This is no longer just a few aggressive governors like those of New York, New Jersey and Michigan in the early days of the pandemic: What you have now is a veritable army of petty officialdom, enforcers and self-appointed snitches literally tearing apart the fabric of economic and social life in much of America.

Of course, the Donald is clueless about this because the retainers and sycophants who surround him insure he doesn’t grasp the enormity of the economic collapse that has been triggered, and which shows no sign of some kind of miraculous “V”-shaped rebound.

Nor does he realize that the pre-Covid economy was a fragile tinder-box of debt, speculation and malinvestment that was stumbling forward on cyclical fumes and the residual growth momentum of capitalism—even in the face of the giant obstacles to sustainable prosperity stood up by the state and especially its central banking branch.

So any old Black Swan could have triggered the deep recession now underway. But owing to the sudden, concentrated blunderbuss attacks of Lockdown Nation, this one will prove to be the blackist avian visitor of all.

For instance, nothing like this chart has ever been seen before in the annals of modern history. Compared to a peak of 6.6 million UI beneficiaries at the bottom of the Great Recession (May 2009), there are now upwards of 32 million workers drawing state and Federal UI benefits. That’s more than 20 percent of the 158 million employed workers as of February.



Ordinarily, the jolt to income and spending from a 32 million person army of the unemployed would have sent the US economy reeling months ago because in the hand-to-mouth world that the Donald inherited, 80 percent of the households have no meaningful financial cushion or rainy day funds.

Of course, that unemployment based income and spending plunge is now being temporarily cushioned by the unprecedented eruption of free stuff from Uncle Sam that was packed into the Everything Bailouts three months ago. That includes upwards of $500 billion of wage support via the PPP program at the SBA, the $1,200 helicopter checks which went out to 160 million citizens and especially the $600 per week Federal “top-up” on UI benefits.

The impact of the latter in disguising the economic pain implicit in the UI chart above cannot be over-emphasized. On a nationwide average basis, the regular state UI program pays about $500 per week or an annualized rate of $26,000 to covered workers.

In the middle of the night during the frenzied legislative sessions of late March, however, Congress upped the ante to $1,100 per week, which annualizes to $57,200.

Them there is different kettles of fish entirely!

But the Federal top-up also costs $75 billion per month and has put nearly two-thirds of unemployed recipients in a higher income bracket than when they were on the job drawing a paycheck; and, also, by the way, producing output of goods and services which are the real building blocks of the macro-economy.

It now comes to pass that at least some of the sleep-walking GOP senators have figured out that you can’t shell out a $75 billion per month dole for unemployment and expect the engines of economic life to restart or the tattered remains of Washington’s fiscal accounts to ever be repaired.

So there is a rather considerable chance that the battle over the impending Everything Bailout 4.0 will be prolonged, and that the giant air-cushion of transfer payments which has disguised the Lockdown Nation disaster will be abruptly deflated in August.

The chart below, in fact, shows how the phantasmagoria of free stuff from Washington since March has tuned upside down the traditional notion of a recession, and especially one where one-fifth of the labor force is unemployed. The chart shows total monthly household personal income—including dividends, interest and proprietors profits which mostly goes to the top 10 percent—-since January.

Incredibly, during April when the bottom literally dropped out of industries ranging from air travel to neighborhood restaurants and bars, total household income was actually 5 percent higher than it was during January—a time when both Wall Street and the Donald claimed the US economy was booming like never before.

Since then, household income has managed to stay right at the pre-Covid January level, notwithstanding a loss of wage and salary disbursements that is still running at a negative $850 billion annual rate.

What portends for August and many months to come, therefore, is the delayed income and spending contraction of a battered economy which has already experienced a double-digit plunge in the actual production of goods and services.

Needless to say, that’s going to shock both Wall Street and the Masked Man alike.

And it will be enough of a blow to voter confidence—even in the Trumpite precincts of Flyover America—so as to insure that the best outcome possible on November 3 will be the Mother-of-All-Hanging Chad battles at the Electoral College and Supreme Court, while the likely outcome is a return of the vengeful coalition of Clintonista poltroons and Progressive-Left ideologues to the seats of power on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.




In either contingency, today’s lagging indicators of the underlying economic distress generated by Lockdown nation will be aggravated enormously. These charts on failing rent collections and small business closures are, in fact, just the tip of the iceberg—and will continue to worsen even if some gussied-up Everything Bailout 4.0 is cobbled together on Capitol Hill before the real election season blood-lettings get underway.


Indeed, on any number of high-frequency variables, the data has already plateaued and that’s before the August plunge and the most vicious election battle in modern history have taken their toll.

And now with the new lockdown orders and a renewed MSM campaign of Covid-Hysteria in the Sunbelt, there is indeed a “second wave” coming—that is, more hemorrhaging of jobs, incomes, defaults and business failures across the length and breath of main street America.





As we said, anyone who actually believed the Donald had any semblance of a plan for MAGA should now be asking “Who’s that Masked Man”?

We’re not.

"What a Sleazeball": My Original Take on Trump

Via The Thinking Housewife:

Trump, Melania, Jeffrey Epstein and Maxwell in 2000

TRUMP sent good wishes yesterday to Ghislaine Maxwell, awaiting trial in New York for sex crimes against minors:

Donald Trump has sent a message of support to Ghislaine Maxwell as pedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein’s accused madam awaits her trial for sex trafficking minors.

The president admitted meeting Maxwell ‘numerous times’ over the years and wished her well in his Tuesday White House press conference – his first since vowing to return to coronavirus news briefings as cases soar across the US.

Trump’s connections to Epstein and Maxwell have long come under scrutiny as they mixed in the same wealthy circles for decades, with Trump once describing the convicted pedophile as a ‘terrific guy’.

What a sleazeball.

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I never liked, or followed Trump. I wrote about him in a June 2016 post:

Trump is a media guy. He knows how to handle those "fake newsers."

I blogged on my original thoughts of Trump several years ago, where I focused on his pornographic life, and wife Melania, who posed nude for various magazines, arguing that America doesn't want such a man for president.

What a sleazeball!

Trump and His Darth Vaders

US President Donald Trump wears a mask as he visits Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland on July 11, 2020 [Image Source]

President Trump appears to be backtracking from his statements during his recent Fox News interview with Chris Wallace this past Sunday, July 21, but I don't think so.

I wrote about the interview here: Trump is Getting Back on Track.

Trump vacillates often, and I think he is reined in by forces we don't understand, primarily originating from his son-in-law Jared Kushner.

But Trump has sharp instincts, and his vacillations are a way of gauging the political atmosphere, as he showed during the Chris Wallace interview. He cannot afford to alienate important segments of the American population, and cannot go back to the days when he called various politicians "liars." Remember the "Lyin' Ted" days?

And his statement after his mask-wearing visit to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center shows that:

“When you’re in a hospital, especially ... I think it’s expected to wear a mask.”[Source]

Expected, is what he said, rather than "mandatory." And he never said "everywhere."

During his July 21 interview, Wallace asked him about mandating mask-wearing:

Wallace: Question, the CDC says if everybody wore a mask for 4-6 weeks, we could get this under control. Do you regret not wearing a mask in public from the start, and would you consider – will you consider a national mandate that people need to wear masks?

Trump: No I want people to have a certain freedom, and I don’t believe in that. No, and I don’t agree with the statement that if everybody wear a mask everything disappears. Hey, Dr. Fauci said don’t wear a mask. Our Surgeon General – terrific guy – said don’t wear a mask.

Everybody who is saying don’t wear a mask – all of sudden everybody’s got to wear a mask, and as you know masks cause problems, too. With that being said, I’m a believer in masks. I think masks are good.

But I leave it up to the governors. Many of the governors are changing. They’re more mask into – they like the concept of masks, but some of them don’t agree.[Source]

"No, I want people to have a certain freedom, and I don't believe in [a national mandate], no."

And if ever he was to go public wearing a mask it would be surrounded by tough military men in full regalia, as during his recent visit to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland. They came out looking like a Darth Vader troop. And their masks have the White House insignia on them!

And Trump ditched his mask as soon as he left the hospital:

Trump was wearing a mask in Walter Reed’s hallway as he began his visit. He was not wearing one when he stepped off the helicopter at the facility, and also during his press brief after his visit. [Source]

At that press brief, he answered a heckling reporter, who was fully masked and socially distancing asking him why he removed his mask later after the press briefing:


Masked and Heckling Female Reporter in Lilac [Note KPA: I searched for this woman's name and her news media affiliation, but nothing]

Trump replies, in his signature manner, which people mock frequently, but which shows his particular way of covering his perspective:

If you can, use the mask. When you can, use the mask. If you're close to each other, if you're in a group, I would put it on, when I'm in a group. If I'm in a elevator and there are other people with me, including, like, security people, it's not their fault, they have to be in the elevator. I want to protect them also. I put on a mask.

I have no problem with the masks. I view it this way: anything that potentially...In theory you don't need the mask. I'm getting used to the mask.

And the reason is, think about patriotism. Maybe it is. It helps. It helps. Now we've had experts that said in the recent past that masks aren't necessarily good to wear...But now they've changed their mind. If they change their mind, that's good enough for me, so I wear it when appropriate.

Good. Why should Trump get into arguments with hostile media? He is right, when close to people, just wear the mask. It actually makes people around him feel better. They have been fed the fake news media harassment on the COVID-Scam, and may turn belligerent, or just simply get nervous and agitated, if you walk in with your unbridled face.

Let's wait and see what Trump does. I think he will be clever and alert, and return to his mission of "Make America Great Again." Hopefully, it will be soon. And hopefully, he will get rid of his son-in-law, and those strings that pull at American politics.

Trump knows ALL about the mafia, and their tactics and strategies.

Trump is Getting Back on Track

Here is the full transcript for: Fox News Sunday interview with President Trump, if the video is no longer available.

Below, I have posted what I think are the important points.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

President Trump refused to be bullied by fake-new Fox reporter Chris Wallace, who questioned him on the new book out about his family, by his niece, who went on a mission to destroy Trump, and especially Trump's father.

Here is the telling part during the interview, around 31 minutes:

My father liked to win. My father was a very good man, he was a strong man. It's disgraceful that she said that. She was not exactly a family favorite...She writes a book that so stupid and so vicious. And it's a lie.

My father was a great wonderful man.

It hurts me more about attacking my father [than attacking me], not being kind to my mother. I have a mother who was like a saint. She was incredible. She was an incredible woman. And she [...] was nasty even to my mother.

[...]

She [the author] was not much of a family person.

[...]

My father was...I think he was the most solid person I have ever met. And he was a very good person. He was a very very. good person. He was strong, but he was good. For her to say that kind of things. A psychopath? That he was a psychopath? Anybody who knew Fred Trump would call him a psychopath?! And you know what? If he was, I would tell you.

[...]

My father, he was tough. He was tough for me. He was tough on all of the kids. But tough in a solid sense. In a really good sense.

[...]

That book is a LIE!

And Trump and his take on Fox News:

I'm not a big fan of Fox, I'll be honest with you. They've changed a lot since Roger Ailes.

[...]

Look, I know you very well. I know your father very well [referring to Mike Wallace]. He was one of the most talented journalists there are. And you likewise are a very talented person.

I do think this. I think you are a very, uh. I think you are toward the Democrat side. Which is ok...

[KPA Note: Which Chris Wallace of course denies, with "footage" to prove, which he shows]

It just seems to me that you are very prone to be with the Democrats, and maybe I'm wrong about that Chris. But it's an honor to be with you.

[KPA Note: Regarding the elections]

Trump: I don't think I'm going to lose at all.

Wallace: But if you did, how crushing would it be?

Trump: First of all, let me tell you something. I know everyone wants to know that because they'd LOVE to see me lose...Do you know how many times I've been written off?...

[KPA Note: Wallace persists with the "lose" question. And Trump doesn't take the bait]

And you know why I won't lose? Because the country in the end, they're not going to have a man whose shot. He's shot.

[KPA Note: Trump points to his head indicating that Biden is not right in the head]

Trump: He's mentally shot.

Let him come out of his basement and go around. I'll make four five speeches a day. I'll be interviewed by you. I'll be interviewed by the worst killers that hate my guts. They hate my guts. There's nothing they can ask me I that won't give a proper answer to. Some people will like it, some people won't like it.

Wallace: I agree with that.

Trump: But look. Let Biden sit through an interview like this. He'll be on the ground crying for Mommy. He'll say "Mommy, Mommy! Please take me home!"

Wallace: We've asked him for an interview, sir.

Trump: He can't do an interview. He's incompetent.

There's a number you haven't mentioned. It's the "enthusiasm number." The enthusiasm for Trump is through the roof. Even higher than last time. The enthusiasm for Biden in non-existent. Everyone knows he's shot.

Wallace: But the enthusiasm AGAINST YOU is high.

Trump: Well, that's OK. That's his only shot.

Wallace: Right.

Trump: That's his only shot. I agree. And those people know I'm doing a good job. But there's something in my personality that they don't like.

Because look. Nobody's done what I've done!

Biden wants to come in and ruin our country.

[...]

He will destroy this country.

But. It won't be him. It will be the radical left. The same type of ideology that took over Venezuela, one of the richest countries in the world. They now have no water. They've not food. And they have no medicine.

That's gonna happen here if he wins.

[KPA Note: The devious Wallace asks this as his "final" questions]:

Wallace: Are you a good loser?

Trump: I'm not a good loser. I don't like to lose. I don't lose too often. I don't like to lose.

Wallace: But are you gracious?

Trump: You don't know until you see. It depends.

I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election. I really do.

[...]

Wallace: Whether it's in 2021 or 2025, how will you regard your years as President of the United States?

Trump: I think I was very unfairly treated. From before I even won, I was under investigation by a bunch of thieves, crooks. It was an illegal investigation.

Wallace: But what about the good parts, sir?

Trump: No, no. I want to say this. I have done more than any President in US history in the first three and a half years, and I have done it suffering through an investigations

[...]

The Russia Hoax, it was all a hoax. The Muller Scam, it was all a scam. It was all false.

I made a bad decision. One bad decision: Jeff Sessions. Now I feel good because he lost overwhelmingly in the great state of Alabama.

Here's the bottom line. I've been very unfairly treated. And I don't say that as paranoid. Everybody says it. It's going to be interesting to see what happens. But there was tremendous evidence right now as to how unfairly treated I was.

[...]

Let’s see what happens. Despite that, I did more than any president in history in the first three and a half years.

How the Devil Plays the Game

VDare, about whom I've recently written here, has finally decided to put some Christian, spiritual article on its website, other than as a "War on Christmas" tag (without the Christ and the Christian).

In the article Is It Time For Americans To Start Talking About The Devil? Matthew Richer does an extensive expose on the Devil, and why we should acknowledge his presence.

But confronting the Devil becomes the final frontier in saving America, not presenting the grace of God. To my knowledge, and I've searched through the extensive articles written for/by/against VDare, there is no article that is exclusive to the praises of God's excellent hand in this American Nation.

Rather, we now have a full expose on the Devil himself.

America-Destroying Entities

More posts and analyses at The Thinking Housewife on the "riots." The most recent are here and here.

And perhaps the most revelatory are here and here.

Once again, it is revealing that the "America" websites and bloggers like VDare ("We inform the fight to keep America American") and the Canadian Faith Goldy ("For Christ the King & Country") do not address the issue of the sabotaged blacks, whose criminal members are the front men for larger America-destroying entities.

VDare continues with its vicious "portraits" of black thugs, which ordinary blacks do not support in any manner, and who are in fact, as this black woman points out, its primary victims (pregnant women - think about that).

There is no attempt by VDare et al., and Faith Goldy, who has regular video posts on Vdare, to delve into the underlying causes of black thuggery. E.g., who exactly is it that funds the "movement?" How do other blacks, and especially the poorest (pregnant women living alone!), fare under the fear of this black underworld of crime and murder?



Nestride Yumga, Miss Cameroon America, 2016
The immigrant nurse who dared voice the truth

The Globalists Inc.

The biggest mistake of Trudeau and the Globalists Inc. going down in the socio-political history of the 21st century is that they thought they could re-structure the world.

I still believe the response to COVID ought to be a spiritual one, with the admittance that we ALL made mistakes in our heathen atheism, and where we ask for forgiveness, and redirection by our almighty God.

Still, revolutions are fomenting everywhere, one individual at a time. Throughout the planet.

This blogger agrees with me (or I agree with him):

It's totally counterintuitive to everything they do, they rule with an iron fist and fear. To defeat them we have to do the opposite of their tactics -- promote beauty and love. We have to promote things that truly mean a lot to us and shine our light while we can. And if we set an intention to do this, I know that God will help us.

The Truth Shall Be Revealed (Hopefully)

Michelle Obama has written her memoir. I won't buy it, but I will certainly read/watch the commentary around it. And there is plenty of that!

What I could glean from an interview I watched is that MO had a miscarriage then the two Obama girls were obtained through IVF

Here's what I wrote to a correspondent:

Have you heard about Michelle Obama's memoir that just came out? The fascinating thing is that their (hers and Barack's) two daughters were born via IVF. Remember Larry's theory that Michelle was some kind of transvestite/transgender male with a sex change to be female? And the running story that Obama is gay?

Michelle, in a recent interview I watched (I saw her memoir in the bookstore), talks about her "miscarriage" before having the two daughters. She can say whatever she wants and there are enough (paid and implicated) people who will corroborate with this story. But the IVF part is fascinating. You can't hide that, especially with TWO results.

And here's a funny (and at times tongue in cheek) post on MO at Larry Auster's View from the Right (I've posted the article and the dialogue below).

---

Looking at that photo of Michelle (from the website StyleList), I’m reminded of a line from Bernard Shaw’s one-act play about Shakespeare, The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, in which Shakespeare says, “There are two sorts of women—those with excellent voices, sweet and low, and cackling hens that cannot make me dream.”
Well, Michelle in that photo not only cannot make me dream, she’s like a figure in a nightmare—or a horror movie, Michelle, Part VI.

View From the Right - end of initial entry -

Comments:

Roger G. writes:

What do you have against vicious, hulking, Marxist monsters?

LA replies:

They scare me, man.

Roger replies:

You’re just jealous of her delts.

Daniel H. writes:

I don’t find Michelle Obama unattractive at all. For her age, she looks pretty good. Correct, she is a bit muscular about the shoulders and neck, but she has a pleasant mien and is not grossly overweight. And she dresses well. More importantly, by all appearances she is a dutiful, faithful wife and mother. If she were not a leftist with racial grievances she would make a fine first lady.

LA replies:

A bit muscular around the shoulders and neck? She has the musculature of a male body builder.
And what about that powerful right hip and thigh, lurching forward menacingly in that tight skirt? She looks like Yeats’s rough beast, moving its slow thighs, slouching toward Bethlehem, while all about it reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

She has this large, disconcertingly masculine body, but instead of covering it up with feminine clothes, she wears tight outfits that bring out her oversized musculature. It’s unnatural and freaky. She is to womanhood what her husband’s presidency is to America.

Patrick H. writes:

I agree with Daniel H. that Michelle O. is not unattractive or ugly in any obvious sense. But she is a great big hulking muscular being, really quite imposing in some ways, and in no way feminine. What troubles me about Michelle O. is that she is so graceless and clumsy-looking, with a kind of heavy, intrusive, arm-swinging massiveness about her. Since I am a fascistic global-warming-denying racist sexist homophobic conservative, I can say that black women, while usually far too large for my tastes, can sometimes exhibit a kind of feline lightness in their movements, a graceful sensuous presence in the way they hold themselves. But Michelle O is utterly lacking in lightness, grace or poise and seems to me curiously sexless and physically unappealing. She deserves to be called a “handsome woman,” not a beautiful one.

And surly looking or what? Man … she seems ready to tackle you, or maybe knee you in the groin. One expects the next words out of her mouth to be, “Hey, whachoo lookinat?”

In an earlier communication with you, I called her the First Linebacker, and shared an anticipatory wince with you at the prospect of four years of having her hyped as a new ideal of beauty, Michelle O. to replace our old ideal First Lady Jackie (later O.). I can say that Michelle seems to have been downgraded in the glamour sweepstakes, perhaps because of the emergence of Carla Bruni, whom Michelle seems to detest and fear and envy. In any case, no one seems any more to be hammering at us that we have to think that Michelle is beautiful and desirable and feminine or else be considered hopelessly racist. Perhaps there’s hope for us yet. Perhaps the reign of plasticized fake-breasted porno-chicks on the one hand and over-exercised muscular Amazonian behemoths on the other is finally, blessedly coming to an end.

Maybe we’ll be able to say again, “Cherchez la femme!” without laughing. I have a dream!

LA replies:

For this great comment, you get a standing “O.” (pun intended).

Michael Mc writes:

I must say that I find your denunciation of Michelle Obama’s appearance spectacularly ugly and untraditional.

Would this have appeared in an Edwardian paper? In an American paper from 1950?

LA replies:

I’m doing what I always do, which is try to find words to convey the truth of things as I see them, within the bounds of decency. Do you seriously expect me in the year 2010, responding to the spectacle of weird hostile aliens in the White House and the government, to write about it as would an Edwardian in 1910 or an American newspaper in 1950? I’m not in general an admirer of the journalism of invective, but anything I write along those lines at this site is extremely mild compared to styles of invective that have been common in the West for centuries.

LA continues:

Also, there is a place in traditionalism for the vigorous and the rude, as long as it’s kept in its place. How did comedy begin in ancient Athens, but as pretty raw stuff? And that’s part of our tradition too. (Not that VFR does anything raw—this is not a Game site, after all.) But there is a place for the expression of such emotions as disgust and ridicule, especially when directed at “leaders” who are involved in a hostile takeover of this country. The Psalms have every kind of emotion including hatred and hoping for the ruin of enemies. Those are not the most elevated emotions, but they are part of what we are, and there is a place for them to be expressed, within bounds.

Michael Mc replies:

I did think for a minute, before writing what I did, that the western tradition of political invective is far more developed than the current cries for “bipartisanship” let on—but I stuck with my criticism because of the following suspicion:

As the culture continues to coarsen and decline, as the murky water sinks, let us say, dragging the fronds and foam down with it, one island that will begin appear more prominent will be that of the traditionalists, and one of our most conspicuous qualities will be a comparative lack of sexual coarseness, or rather, of coarseness between the sexes.

While your comments are nothing compared to current standards, neither do they make this difference as conspicuous as I might prefer.

LA replies:

Interesting point, but, just to make sure we’re on the same page, how have I expressed sexual coarseness in the Michelle discussion?

Michael Mc replies:

You wrote:

Also, there is a place in traditionalism for the vigorous and the rude, as long as it’s kept in its place. How did comedy begin in ancient Athens, but as pretty raw stuff? And that’s part of our tradition too.

Point taken—one mustn’t mistake traditionalism for mere fussiness. I still, however, think that commenting on this woman’s appearance in this manner doesn’t make much of a point, at least when considered next to the possible charges it opens us up to.

LA replies:

This is an issue that has come up from time to time. While some people disagree with me on this, I and others think that commenting on the physical appearance of public figures is legitimate. A society expresses itself through the personae, the manners, the dress, of its members, particularly its leading public figures who are the models that others follow. A conservatism that declines to comment on that dimension of human society is not looking at the whole. A major problem with American conservatism is its abstractness, treating society as though it were a collection of principles. But a society is a living, organic thing, and right now the living organic thing that is our society is very sick and distorted, but conservatives are largely blind to this cultural and life-style dimension of liberal society because they themselves are a part of it.

Gary Moe writes:

Michelle Obama as one of the “Three First Ladies of the West?” More like the third Williams sister (as in Venus and Serena), if you ask me.

Michael Mc replies:

You wrote:

“how have I expressed sexual coarseness in the Michelle discussion?”

The idea that Michelle is too masculine or unattractive to be considered a “First Lady” in the sense of Carla or Samantha, and must rather be treated as an abberant form relating to cultural collapse (as the Yeats quote implies) is, to my eyes, an over-the-bounds speculation into the sexual and married life of the current President.

LA replies:

I did not intend any speculation into the private married life of the president and his wife. That wasn’t part of my thought. I was commenting on the public persona and the physicality of Michelle O., and particularly on its impact on me, not on the impact of her private persona and physicality on her husband, which is something I would rather not think about.

Michael Mc replies:

Fair enough. This is certainly one of the more interesting boundaries and discussions that a traditional stance will introduce and engender.

Roger G. writes:

My apology to Michael Mc - I’m sorry that Michelle Obama is a vicious, hulking, Marxist monster.

Roger G. writes:

And if I’m going to keep reading your site, you’ll have to censor all hints of the Obamas’ sexual activity. The flapping ears, the trapezius rhythmically flexing and unflexing - it’s like contemplating Charles Johnson’s modern art.

LA replies:

Roger is referring to this entry: The profound thought process of Charles Johnson; and a discussion of H.R. Giger

Richard O. writes:

I just don’t see what someone’s appearance has to do with anything. To me, Michele looks quite elegant and has nice lines and a nice smile. Chacun a son gout, and all that.
I have my doubts about where her and her husband’s hearts lie and long for the day for them to be gone but I think a simple line to draw is between public conduct and speech one side and appearance and private life on the other.

I check your site five times a day to see what new insights you come up with. I just don’t think I learn anything useful from a discussion about appearance.

LA replies:

For the most part, we’re not talking here simply about a person’s physical features and body type, but the person, how that person is presenting herself to the world. Michelle doesn’t just happen to be disconcertingly large and muscular, she dresses and moves in a way that pushes those qualities forward. And because she is the most visible woman in America and setting trends and so on, that is a legitimate topic.

But even if we were talking only about physical appearance, people’s physical appearance is part of what they are, and is naturally of interest when we’re talking of public people who are being put before us every day.

At the same time, you are right. It’s subjective. Your reaction to Michelle—she’s elegant—will be different from my reaction—she’s threatening-looking—and therefore the meaning I find in that photo will not be the meaning that you find, and no argument can bridge that gap. So I acknowledge that this is a lower-level discussion than a purely intellectual discussion. However, those who have more or less the same subjective reaction to Michelle that I have will find my comments meaningful.

Richard O. replies:

Fair enough. She seems to have an odd walk, I admit. Merely to look at either of those freaks is to be reminded of the morons who voted them there.

"The Huge Stakes of Thursday's Confrontations"

[D]id an anti-Trump cabal inside the Department of Justice and the FBI conspire to block Trump's election, and having failed, plot to bring down his presidency in a "deep state" coup d'etat?

From Patrick Buchanan's September 24 article The Huge Stakes of Thursday's Confrontations on VDare

Walk Away From Mendacity

Below is an article from The Orthosphere written by J. M. Smith on July 4

---

Walk Away From Mendacity
By: J. M. Smith
July 4, 2018
The Orthosphere

We have returned to the sultry swelter of Texas, retracing the route by which we had, but a week before, escaped over the dusty rolling plains. Traveling in the homeward direction, I was not so impressed by visible signs of Christian faith (although the many white crosses in the town of Memphis were something to ponder). I was impressed by visible signs of mendacity.

Mendacity is not the simple act of lying, or even lying habitually. It is living a lie because one believes in “the salutary nature of falsehoods.” The phrase is from the last of Carlyle’s Latter Day Pamphlets, in which the great man also describes mendacity as “the universe of cant.” What he means is not only that lies are so common as to be virtually universal, but that, in “the universe of cant,” reality is conceived to be of so indefinite, elastic and manipulable a nature as to conform to anything we might say that it is. As Carlyle explains, the spiritual ground and first cause of “the universe of cant” is a conviction that

“the universe makes no immediate objection to be conceived

in any way.”

In the mouth of a modern savant, this principle would be expressed by the line,

“Reality is a social construct.”

When a liar lies, he knows his words are not true. The mendacious man does not care if words are true because truth has for him no value. If he has had the benefit of a university education, the mendacious man will say

“Everything is an interpretation.”

Because a liar knows that his falsehoods are untrue, he “lives by his lies” only insofar as he must to maintain his deception. But the mendacious man goes beyond this “voluntary spoken divergence from the fact as it stands” and assumes a voluntary “divergence in thought from what is the fact.” As Carlyle goes on to say,

“Alas, the palpable liar with his tongue does at least know that he is lying, and has or might have some faint vestige of remorse and chance of amendment; but the impalpable liar, whose tongue articulates mere accepted commonplaces, cants and babblement, which means only ‘Admire me . . .’ of him what hope is there?”

* * * * *

There are official signs along U.S. Highway 287 north of Amarillo indicating that this stretch of road is part of something called the “Plains to Ports Highway.” Reading these signs, an ingenuous motorist might form the belief that the enormous, thundering truck by which he is being crowded off the road is, at least, conveying the bounty of the plains to a saltwater port, from whence that bounty will be shipped across the sea. But in this belief the ingenuous motorist would be wrong, for, as you can see on this map, the “Plains to Ports Highway” is, in fact, a highway to Mexico.



Do not be deceived by the coastal town of Mazatlan, away down south by the mouth of the Gulf of California. Mazatlan is a tourist resort and port of call for cruise ships. If the farmers of the high plains actually wished to export their beefcakes to Australia or the Galapagos Islands, they would do so through, Manzanillo, the real port farther south.

The absence of any real ports on the “Plains to Ports Highway” may be a small thing in itself, but this false and misleading name is part of the pervasive mendacity that runs through all of our dealings Mexico.

We are not told the truth about Mexico and we do not wish to be told the truth.

* * * * *

If the “Plains to Ports Highway” was, in truth, a highway from the Plains to some Ports, it might have continued to follow Highway 287 southeast from Amarillo to its terminus, which happens to be a city called Port Arthur on the Gulf of Mexico. But as it is, the “Plains to Ports Highway” leaves Highway 287 at Amarillo and makes a beeline for the border.

Southeast of Amarillo, Highway 287 might be called the Colorado Trail, for it is by this route that thousands upon thousands of Texans make their annual hegira to the Rocky Mountains. Nowadays it might also be called the Cannabis Trail, for it is by this route that thousands upon thousands of pounds of marijuana are transported from the happy highlands to the great, sweltering, unhappy cities of Texas.

That this is so was evident in at least fifty large billboards along that highway, all hawking the services of lawyers who specialize in the defense of marijuana smugglers. “Got Pot?” read more than one of these.

Assuming that these lawyers know their market, quite a few of the drivers on that stretch of road nod their heads and answer, “you bet your sweet ass I do!”

Obviously, Colorado’s legalization of marijuana made Highway 287 into the Pot to Potheads Highway, but only lawyers specializing in the defense of marijuana smugglers act as if this is so. That the services of such lawyers are required suggests that the state occasionally manages to nab a car loaded with cannabis candy bars, but I nowhere saw evidence of any serious effort to curtail the Colorado cannabis trade.

Just as with our dealings with Mexico, our dealings with illegal drugs are shot through with mendacity. We are not told the truth about marijuana and we do not wish to be told the truth.

* * * * *

We left the Pot to Potheads Highway at Fort Worth, where the newspaper headlines blazoned the news that my employer is squirming in the face of awkward questions about its handling of sexual assaults by and of its students. I’ve written several posts about this problem, which is hardly unique to Texas A&M, and is probably insoluble without rolling back much of the sexual revolution.

The essential problem is how a university can prevent bad sex between its students without inconveniencing the students who wish to take a shot at good sex. That university students have a right to conveniently take a shot at good sex is never questioned. That the university has a responsibility to prevent this from going bad is, likewise, a foregone conclusion. Thus separation of good sex from bad sex is the Gordian knot that our president hopes to unravel with the help of a task force, panel of experts, firm of outside consultants, and, perhaps, Ouija board.

The big brains are being asked to furrow their brows and discover a way that Chad and Susie can lock themselves in Susie’s room, with no questions asked, notwithstanding that Chad and Susie are drunk and do not know each other’s names, and yet emerge the next morning with smiles on their faces and love in their hearts.

Furrow away, say I, because this is a puzzler that cannot be solved. And it cannot be solved because it drips with mendacity.

It cannot be solved because we are not told the truth about sex and we do not wish to be told the truth.

* * * * *

Mendacity is a resolution to permanently reside in a false and fictional world, in a pretend world of make-believe. It is a decision to take the plunge and really “live the lie.” We are, for instance, living the lie that Mexico is just a normal neighbor, and that our relations with that strange and unhappy country are not fundamentally different than our relations with, say, Canada or Italy.

We are living the lie that contraband will not cross an unregulated border, and that Colorado is not, therefore, supplying marijuana to all of the western states that are too uptight to supply themselves.

We are living the lie that Chad and Susie can always come out of Susie’s room smiling, if only Chad is sufficiently schooled, beforehand, in the precise protocols of prophylaxis and feminist sex, not to mention the fearsome penalties for sex crimes.

Or we could refuse to live by these lies and face the fact that countries, contraband, and young couples do have an “immediate objection to be conceived in any way.” We could accept the fact that they demand that we conceive them in just one way–and that is their way, not ours.

Because otherwise there will be pain!

* * * * *

In 1974 Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote a short and powerful essay called “Live Not By Lies.” He wrote the essay just before leaving the Soviet Union, and was, of course, writing in protest against the lies of the Soviet authorities and the mendacity of the Soviet citizens who lived by those lies (excusing themselves with the words, “It is all the same to me so long as I’m fed and warm”).

The dishonest authorities cared enough about the truth to suppress it. The mendacious citizens cared so little about the truth that they would not trouble themselves to demand it. And it was by their “daily participation in lies” that these mendacious citizens lost their souls.

At the heart of Solzhenitsyn’s great essay, there is a litany of the mendacities to which every one of us is prone, and of which almost every one of us is guilty. I suggest that this litany may make more suitable reading for Americans on this Independence Day than, say, the Declaration of Independence. And while you are at it, why not accept Solzhenitsyn’s challenge and commit yourself to “personal non-participation in lies.”

“Walk away,” he says, “from the gangrenous boundary.”

"Boo, white males!"

Below is the full speech by comedienne/actress/#metooer/Oprah-fan Mindy Kaling.

Kevin Michael Grace tweeted a link to at it his twitter page @KMGVictoria with the comment:

#MindyKaling's commencement address at her alma mater Dartmouth was rather good. I'm disappointed (but not surprised) to see her engaging in this reflexive "Boo, white males!" agitprop in response to the reviews of #Oceans8

A few comments:

1. Why is KMG surprised to see a brown woman diss white men? That is par for the course now as in "those racist, oppressive, anti-women" white men. The whole world is against white men, including a large percentage of white men themselves.

2. How does Kahling's "rather good" Dartmouth speech" exonerate her from "'Boo, white males' agitprop?" That's not what KMG means really and "excuse" might be a better word. But we're talking about big stakes here, as in the the future generation. "Good" at one point meant worthy and responsible and exemplary.

3. And how good really is Kaling's speech? She spends the better part talking about Dr. Seuss!!! How is Dr. Seuss showing these university graduates to be worthy and responsible and exemplary? Or did Mindy Kaling get the venue wrong and she's at a preschooler's graduation? So much for intellectual stimulation and words of wisdom to those 100+ students hanging on to the every world of this famous television personality!

But this is Dartmouth, and she chooses an alumni: "Poet" Dr. Seuss, of The Cat in the Hat fame is an alumni!. Well we can give her that bit of nostalgia.

But why not evoke (invoke) the spirits of another Dartmouthian poet, the deceased white male laureate and Pulitzer prize winner Robert Frost, who wrote "I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference," highlighting the adventurous character of (dead and alive) white men who take on those less travelled worlds out of CURIOSITY! To see where the adventure would lead them! Then they build things like universities.

Of course nothing is innocent when with adults, and I presume Kaling is on such. Seuss was a "reformed" racist who drew anti-black cartoons and was vocally anti-Japanese during the WWII years. Perhaps that is the morality in her speech: We may start out bad but we can all be reformed and redeemed.

And another poet from Dartmouth? "Robert Frost? Are you kidding?" would kid (half in jest) Ms. Kaling. "We cannot perpetuate the racist and oppressive America that was built on the backs of others [allusion to slavery and "globalism" here of course]. These riches should be meted out to the whole world [to these hypocritical globalists] to exonerate [there's that word again] those whom Americans exploited."

And I would retaliate:

The Western world built and elaborated by white men now is a refuge for people from all over the world who can take advantage of the structure and system. Kaling's comedy show and her other successful public projects are dependent on this success. She has talent. But so what? What would happen to her and her talent if she didn't have this set-up? What would happen to her back in India, which her parents - both with postgraduate degrees - fled for "a better life in America"? Actually they both went to Africa - to Nigeria - where they met and planned their migration and life n America. They abandoned TWO countries for a chance at the American Pie.

"My parents adopted a kind of Boston-by-way-of-India-by-way-of-Nigeria culture with some Indian flourishes" says Kaling.

No mention of why they abandoned their lucrative degrees (or not so lucrative back in their hometowns), but the prevailing word is "opportunity." Strange, I would think that people would prefer to build opportunities in their familiar places, their homes, where their ancestors have left a legacy.

I call it pure greed and envy, of the type where you say: "If they can have it why can't I/my family/my children?"

And here is some "factual" information:

[Kaling] was a classics major for much of college and studied Latin, a subject she has been learning since the seventh grade.
[Source: Kaling's (heavy edited and upgraded) Wikipedia page]

How does one go from studying Latin to giving a speech wth Dr. Seuss as the protagonist?

How many brown-skinned women do you see running TV shows? Whenever there is ONE successful minority, then he (she) represents hundreds of others. "Oh you know Mindy. She's Indian."

How many white men comedians are there? This is a rhetorical question.

I strongly believe that this is the kind of covert thought processes that lead "comedians of color" to hold deep-seated beliefs which are exposed in moments of seriousness. Like when giving speeches at graduation ceremonies.

The infantile examples of a dubious poet like Seuss come in handy at such critical moments of seriousness in a comedienne of color's juncture in public life.

Fire and Ice
BY Robert Frost

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

---

2018 Commencement Address by Mindy Kaling ’01

Good morning to the Class of 2018, the faculty, the parents, the grandparents, fellow honorees, and the paid laughers I have scattered throughout the audience.

It is an honor to join you this morning for this special occasion.

It is also an honor to speak to you today from behind this gigantic tree stump. Like some sort of female Lorax with an advanced degree. That’s right, you guys; I’m hitting Dr. Seuss hard and early in this speech. Because Dartmouth grads have a privilege unique among all the Ivy League: We will be forced to be mini-experts on Dr. Seuss for our entire lives.

On my deathbed, I’ll be saying, “Did you know that his real name was Theodor Geisel? Did you know he was editor of the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern?” And yes, while no U.S. Presidents have gone to Dartmouth, we can at least lay claim for the wonderful Dr. Seuss.

Another notable alumnus is Salmon P. Chase, the man on the $10,000 bill. A symbolically powerful piece of paper that’s largely useless in the real world. Like a degree in playwriting which I received from this very institution. Thank you for paying for that, Mom and Dad!

It’s a thrill to be back here in New Hampshire, the Granite State, known for two things: the place where you can legally not wear your seatbelt, and Adam Sandler’s birthplace.

New Hampshire has one of the best mottos of any state: “Live Free or Die.” For outsiders, it sounds like an exciting declaration of freedom; but when you’re here in January, “die” actually sounds like a pretty good option.

I remember the days when it was so cold your sneeze would become an ice sculpture before it hit the ground. In Los Angeles, where I live now, if I sneeze, I just call my doctor and have my blood replaced with that of a teenage track star. That’s normal there. I’m mostly track star right now.

Before I get any further, I should actually probably clarify who I am for the parents and grandparents in the audience who are thinking to themselves, “Who is this loud Indian woman? Is that the girl from Quantico? She looks so much worse in person.”

No, no, I’m not Priyanka Chopra, not even Padma Lakshmi. I’m the other Indian woman we have allowed to be on television, Mindy Kaling. Thank you, thank you.

You may remember me from my role on The Office as Kelly Kapoor, who internet commenters said was—quote—“shrill” and—quote—“took up valuable time that could have gone to Steve Carell.”

I then created and starred in my own TV show, The Mindy Project. Thank you, thank you very much. It was an uphill battle to get the show on the air, but it was worth it, because it enabled me to become Dartmouth’s most successful female minority show creator who has spoken at commencement!

Oh wait, no. Shonda Rhimes went here. Yup, and she’s created like 10 more shows than me, so great. No, cool. Cool, cool, cool, Shonda. Friggin’ role model, good for you.

But today is not about famous alumni. No, no. It’s about the men and women who have toiled in obscurity for years so that they might better our country. I speak, of course, of the 51 percent of Dartmouth grads who will go into finance—highest in the Ivy League! Look left. Look right. All three of you will be spending at least ten years in a white collar prison.

I know that going into the real world sounds scary, but it’s exciting too. Finally, you’ll be in control of your own lives. No longer will there be an irrational Board of Trustees telling you you can’t have hard liquor on campus, for the ridiculous reason that they don’t want you to die. Come tomorrow, no one can stop you from filling your apartment with $4.99 handles of Uncle Satan’s Unfiltered Potato Vodka. Go crazy.

It’s a real moment of reflection for me to be standing here speaking to all of you now, because it makes me harken back to my own time at my Dartmouth graduation. Madeleine Albright was my commencement speaker; and while I don’t remember any specific quotes she said, or even a general gist of what she was talking about, I do remember thinking: “I wonder what it will be like to have my own cell phone?”

How things have changed. For all I know, at this very moment, most of you are posting this speech on your Instagram stories with a GIF of Winnie the Pooh twerking. If you are, please at least use my official hashtag, MindyGoesBigGreenTwentyEighteen. Thank you.

I bet none of you remember a time before the internet. Hell, you probably don’t even remember a time before the Facebook page, “Dartmouth Memes for Cold AF Teens.” Yeah, yeah. I know about that. Made me feel like a real creep researching it. “Hello, I’m a 38‑year‑old woman who wants to join your teen Facebook group. It's for research, I swear!”

Meanwhile, when I was in college we didn’t even have Google. If you wanted to find out, say, how tall Ben Affleck was, you were out of luck. You just had to sit there, not knowing, and your entire day would be ruined.

Or, say I wanted to meet up with a friend—I couldn’t just text her. I had to walk outside and hope I accidentally bumped into her. Or, I “blitzed” her. Ah, BlitzMail. You know that feeling you have when you tell your friends that you “blitz” and they don’t get it and you roll your eyes all smug like “Oh, it’s a Dartmouth thing.” That ends today. You try to say “blitz” one hundred yards east of White River Junction and you will get laughed back to your one-room triple in the Choates.

Fun fact: In 2001, the year I graduated, a pinkeye epidemic broke out amongst my classmates because we were all using public BlitzMail iMac terminals and not washing our hands. Those are just the kind of the sexy stories indicative of my time at Dartmouth.

You have so many cool new things here now. Like, look at the new logo, the D-Pine. It’s beautiful. It reminds me of what college-aged Mindy thought a marijuana leaf might look like but I was too scared to actually find out. And this new House System sounds really cool! It's so Hogwarts-y! You know, you're sorted into your little Gryffindors and Ravenclaws, except they’re called … South House. West House. School House.

Okay, come on guys. School House? Really? We’re just saying what we see? That’s the laziest name I’ve ever heard in my life, and I've spent over a decade working on shows called The Office and The Mindy Project.

Still, I remember sitting where you’re sitting. I was so full of questions like, “When is this thing going to end?” and “How many friends can I invite to dinner and still have mom and dad pay?” And, most importantly, “Why didn’t I wear any clothes underneath my gown?”

Now we’re reaching the part of the speech where I am supposed to tell you something uplifting like “follow your dreams.”

In general, advice isn’t actually an effective way to change your life. If all it took to make your life great was hearing amazing advice, then everyone who watched TED Talks would be a millionaire.

So don’t trust any one story of how how to become successful. As Madeline Albright said at my Commencement—see, I don’t remember anything. And I did just fine.

So here is some practical advice that you may or may not remember at the end of this speech because, hey, that’s the gig:

1. First off, remove “Proficient at Word” from your resume. That is ridiculous. You’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel of competency there. This is how you become proficient at Word: You open Word on your computer.

2. Most of your post-college life is simply filling out forms. Car insurance, health insurance, W-2s. W-4s, 1099s. Guess what? None of us know what any of those forms mean, but you will fill out a hundred of them before you die.

3. You never need more than one pancake. Trust me on this. Cartoons have trained us to want a giant stack of those bad boys, but order one first and then just see how you feel later.

4. This one is just for guys: When you go on dates, act as if every woman you’re talking to is a reporter for an online publication that you are scared of. One shouldn’t need the threat of public exposure and scorn to treat women well; but if that’s what it’s gonna take, fine. Date like everyone’s watching, because we are.

5. And this might be the most important—buy a toilet plunger. Trust me on this. Don’t wait until you need a plunger to buy a plunger.

Commencement is a time of transition for parents, too. That empty nest you were enjoying these past four years? Gone as soon as this speech is over. I hope you like full‑time lodgers who don’t pay rent, don’t do laundry, eat all the food in your fridge, and binge Family Guy on your sofa for weeks. That is your life now.

Although some of your graduates will be making more money than you—51% to be exact. And to the parents of those investment bankers, consultants, and hedge fund analysts—congratulations. Your kids will be fabulously wealthy but still somehow sharing your cell phone plan because it—quote—“saves everybody money.”

Okay, now let’s get real. Let me rip off the Band-Aid for all you, the ’18s. Next year, the next year of your life is going to be bad. You have been in the comfortable fleece-lined womb of mother Dartmouth for four years now, and you’re gonna go out in the cold, hard world.

Out there in the real world, there will be a target on your back. People will want to confirm their expectations of Ivy League graduates—that you’re a jerk, that you’re spoiled, that you use the word “summer” as a verb. Those stereotypes exist for a reason. I mean come on, the guy from the ten-thousand-dollar bill went to this school.

You’re graduating into a world where it seems like everything is falling apart. Trust in institutions are at a record low; the truth doesn’t seem to matter anymore; and for all I know, the president just tweeted us into a war with Wakanda, a country that doesn’t exist.

So, Class of 2018, you are entering a world that we have toppled—we have toppled—like a Jenga tower, and we are relying on you to rebuild it.

But how can you do that with the knowledge that things are so unstable out there? I’ll tell you my secret, the one thing that has kept me going through the years, my superpower: delusion.

This is something I may share with our president, a fact that is both horrifying and interesting. Two years in, I think we can pretty safely say that he’s not getting carved onto Mount Rushmore; but damn if that isn’t a testament to how far you can get just by believing you’re the smartest, most successful person in the world.

My point is, you have to have insane confidence in yourself, even if it’s not real. You need to be your own cheerleader now, because there isn’t a room full of people waiting with pom‑poms to tell you, “You did it! We’ve been waiting all this time for you to succeed!”

So, I’m giving you permission to root for yourself. And while you’re at it, root for those around you, too. It took me a long time to realize that success isn’t a zero-sum game. Which leads me to the next part of my remarks.

I thought I might take a second to speak to the ladies in the audience. (Guys, take a break; you don’t have to pay attention during this part. Maybe spend the next 30 seconds thinking about all the extra money you’ll make in your life for doing the same job as a woman. Pretty sweet.)

Hey girls, we need to do a better job of supporting each other. I know that I am guilty of it too. We live in a world where it seems like there’s only room for one of us at the table. So when another woman shows up, we think, “Oh my god, she’s going to take the one woman spot! That was supposed to be mine!”

But that’s just what certain people want us to do! Wouldn’t it be better if we worked together to dismantle a system that makes us feel like there’s limited room for us? Because when women work together, we can accomplish anything. Even stealing the world’s most expensive diamond necklace from the Met Gala, like in Ocean’s 8, a movie starring me, which opens in theaters June 8th. And to that end, women, don’t be ashamed to toot your own horn like I just did.

Okay, guys, you can listen again. You didn’t miss much. Just remember to see Ocean’s 8, now playing in theaters nationwide. Ocean’s 8: Every con has its pros.

Now I wanted to share a little bit about me, Mindy Kaling, the Dartmouth student. When I came to Hanover in the fall of 1997, I was, as many of you were: driven, bright, ambitious, and really, really into The Black Eyed Peas.

I arrived here as a 17-year-old, took the lay of the land, and immediately began making a checklist of everything I wanted to accomplish. I told myself that by the time I graduated in 2001, I would have checked them all off.

And here was my freshman fall checklist: be on Hanover crew, on Lodge crew, be in an a cappella group, be in an improv troupe, write a play that’s performed at the Bentley, do a cartoon for the D, and try to be in a cool senior society. And guess what? I completed that checklist. But before you think: “Wait, why is this woman just bragging about her accomplishments from 17 years ago?”—keep listening.

Then, I graduated. And I made a new checklist for my twenties: get married by 27, have kids at 30, win an Oscar, be the star of my own TV show, host the MTV Music Awards (this was 2001, guys; it made more sense then), and do it all while being a size 2.

Well, spoiler alert: I’ve only done one of those things, and I’m not sure I will ever do the others. And that is a really scary feeling. Knowing how far that I’ve strayed from the person that I was hoping to be when I was 21.

I will tell you a personal story. After my daughter was born in December, I remember bringing her home and being in my house with her for the first time and thinking, “Huh. According to movies and TV, this is traditionally the time when my mother and spouse are supposed to be here, sharing this experience with me.” And I looked around, and I had neither. And for a moment, it was kind of scary. Like, “Can I do this by myself?”

But then, that feeling went away, because the reality is, I’m not doing it by myself. I’m surrounded by family and friends who love and support me. And the joy I feel from being with my daughter Katherine eclipses anything from any crazy checklist.

So I just want to tell you guys, don’t be scared if you don’t do things in the right order, or if you don’t do some things at all. I didn’t think I’d have a child before I got married, but hey, it turned out that way, and I wouldn’t change a thing. I didn’t think I’d have dessert before breakfast today, but hey, it turned out that way and I wouldn’t change a thing.

So if I could impart any advice, it’s this: If you have a checklist, good for you. Structured ambition can sometimes be motivating. But also, feel free to let it go. Yes, my culminating advice from my speech is a song from the Disney animated movie, Frozen.

I’ve covered a lot of ground today, not all of it was serious, but I wanted to leave you with this: I was not someone who should have the life I have now, and yet I do. I was sitting in the chair you are literally sitting in right now and I just whispered, “Why not me?” And I kept whispering it for seventeen years; and here I am, someone that this school deemed worthy enough to speak to you at your Commencement.

Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do something, but especially not yourself. Go conquer the world. Just remember this: Why not you? You made it this far.

Thank you very much, and congratulations to the Class of 2018.