Author: Bill Vallicella

Two More on Politics

It may be a bit OTT in places, but I agree in the main with Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano's Open Letter to the American People on the eve of the 2024 presidential election. (HT: Catacomb Joe)

And here's Tucker Carlson to get your blood up. (HT: Vito Caiati)

WARNING:  Should our side win, expect violence from our political enemies. Never underestimate the depths of the Left's depravity. 

Trump softened his stance on abortion: so sit out the election?

Abstaining from voting would be consummately stupid and would amount to the old mistake of letting the best become the enemy of the good. I'll say it again: in the politics of the real world, the choice is between better versus worse, not perfect versus imperfect. 

A columnist at The Remnant gets it right (edits added by BV):

The basic (and fallacious) argument for why Catholics [and other Christians] should not vote for Trump is that he has softened his opposition to abortion. The stated principle [assumption] here is that a vote for Trump could [would] be wrong because it is [would be] a vote in favor of abortion. The proponents of this position know that a Harris presidency would mean countless more abortions, and likely many more late-term abortions, but this does not matter to them — all that matters [to them] is that Trump does not oppose abortion in some instances.

The folly of this position should be self-evident, but we can see its true wickedness if we apply the reasoning to an extreme fact pattern. On the one hand, we approve of Trump’s positions on many issues that Christians care about, including that he: supports families; wants to protect our rights to freely practice our religion (Catholicism); opposes crime; opposes the weaponization of the government against the American people; opposes globalism; opposes woke indoctrination in our schools; and wants to keep men out of women’s locker rooms.

Suppose, on the other hand, that Trump’s opponent is so terrible on all of these positions that she actually wants to do the opposite. Not only that, but she makes a virtue out of abortion, such that she champions it rather than simply condoning it in limited circumstances. Even worse, her dedicated opposition to Christian values would make it almost certain that she would persecute Christians like they have never been persecuted in America. America could feasibly become one of the most anti-Christian nations in the world outside of Muslim and Communist nations.

In such a case, it would be absolutely preposterous and wicked to argue that a Catholic should not vote for the only candidate who has a chance to beat the anti-Christian candidate. If anti-Christian persecution comes, then we hope God will provide what we need to persevere; but it seems that we cannot effectively petition God’s mercy if we do not do our part to oppose one of the most anti-Christian presidential candidates in history.

There is no such thing as neutrality at this phase of the battle over traditional morality and the rights of families. Those who oppose Trump are, as a matter of indisputable fact, making it more likely that Harris will be able to impose her anti-Christian views on America. Many of her supporters enthusiastically support this prospect of an anti-Christian president, and she has obviously not tried to do anything to meaningfully mitigate this reality. Those who detest Christianity should definitely support her; and those who do not want to increase the level of anti-Christian hostility in America should instead vote for her opponent. And even if we convinced ourselves that Trump would not win, we show God that we want to prevent a dramatic increase of anti-Christian evils in America if we vote for him as the only candidate who can defeat Harris.

With these considerations in mind, Catholics have a more compelling case to support Trump now than we did in 2016 or 2020. Of course we wish Trump would be more perfectly aligned with our interests, but his task at this moment is to try to win an election rather than try to be the ideal candidate for conservative Christians. Even so, he is arguably “more Catholic than the pope” and those who tell Catholics that we should not vote for him are either deluded or trying to manipulate us to serve Harris. 

RFK Jr. on WWIII

Pay attention to his endorsement of DJT.  I am assuming you want to live a few years longer.  

For historical context, listen to JFK's 22 October 1962 address to the nation on the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I shudder to think what might have happened if any of the following had been in charge in those dark days: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden.  Kamala Harris is worse than all of them put together. Vote wisely. It is not just our republic that hangs by a thread.

Legend has it that Dylan penned Hard Rain during (and because of the events of) those days.  I remember them well and still have the newspaper clippings from the hometown rag, The Post Advocate.

The Journals of John Cheever

Arrived yesterday. I open to any page and find good writing. How can such a decadent booze hound write so well? And why is the sauce ink to so many literary pens? One of the mysteries of life, like why so many Jews are leftists. Whole books have been written about this. Prager wrote one. Podhoretz wrote one.

Cheever lets it all hang out with brutal honesty. Auto-paralysis through self-analysis  on the rocks of self-loathing. I open at random to p. 96:

I am a solitary drunkard. I take a little painkiller before lunch but I really don't get to work until late afternoon. At four or half past four or sometimes five  I stir up a Martini, thinking that a great many men who can't write as well as I can will already have set themselves down at bar stools.  [. . .]

He's thinking about Kerouac, I'll guess. The entry is dated  1957, the year On the Road was published. Two pages later, Cheever lays into Jack in a long entry which begins, "My first feelings about Kerouac's book were: that it was not good . . . ."

Who is the better writer? Cheever. Who cuts closer to the bone of life and left more of a cultural mark (for good or ill)? Kerouac.  

Too much of the preciosity of the Eastern Establishment attaches to such  superb literary craftsmen as Cheever, Updike, and Yates, phenomenologists of suburban hanky-panky, auto dealerships, and such.  Social climbers like Cheever look down on regional writers such as Edward Abbey, whose journal is entitled Confessions of a Barbarian.

I read 'em all, even boozer Bukowski whose novels I consider trash. Some of his poetry, though, I think is good; Bluebird for example.

Rights and Needs

You can have a right to a thing whether or not you have or will have a need for it. So the best response to the leftist who asks, "Why do you need a gun?" is wrong question! Stop the pointless conversation right there. "The question is not whether I need one; the question is whether I have a right to one."

Then explain that the right to appropriate means of self-defense follows from the right to self-defense which in turn follows from the right to life.

Depending on the sort of leftist you are dealing with you could then go on to explain why you do need a gun. But the wisest policy is not to debate leftists. Leftists need to be defeated not debated. 

Vote, vote early, and vote against the tyrants and the projectionist liars and language abusers of the Kamalist Left. I am assuming that you understand what is in your own long-term best self-interest. Go to GunVote.org to register.

No Complacency! All Hands on Deck!

The Republic hangs by a thread. We must defeat the Kamalists* and do so decisively.  They need not just defeat but demoralization. Unfortunately, too many 'influencers' are predicting a Trump victory.  Not wise.  We must not wax complacent. Our political enemies will do anything to win. No moral or legal considerations constrain them. We know a priori (in Kant's relative sense of the term) that they will cheat their posteriors  off — get the pun? –and then lie their heads off about their cheating. Why shouldn't they lie and cheat? We let them get away with it. Like Bret Baier, we conservatives are hobbled by our virtues, our civility for example. 

Roger Kimball the other day, and now Piers Morgan may be doing more harm than good. 

Morgan:

“Even if you flippin’ fries at McDonald’s,” Oprah Winfrey once said, “if you are excellent, everybody wants to be in your line.”

I thought of this quote when Donald Trump turned up yesterday at a McDonald’s restaurant in suburban Philadelphia to work a shift making French fries, then handing bags of food to drive-through customers.

As political stunts go, this might have been the best I’ve ever seen, because it served two very powerful purposes in the presidential race.

First, it reminded voters that his rival, Kamala Harris, has repeatedly boasted about having a summer job at McDonald’s to make her sound more relatable to her fellow Americans, but to date, not a single person has been able to verify this.

This is quite extraordinary given how specific she has been, with her campaign team stating that she worked at McDonald’s on Central Avenue in Alameda, Calif., in 1983 after her freshman year at Howard University, working on the cash register, french fries station and ice cream machine.

Read it all.

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*My astute readers of course know not to confuse Kamalism (a coinage I borrow from Thomas Klingenstein) and Kemalism.