Wickedness afoot in post-America

Longtime LITD readers know that it is this blog's contention that our nation's - and indeed Western civilization's - primary problems - crises - are not about allocation of resources or the systems for addressing that, but are the myriad ways in which the spiritual war for its soul is playing out.

Quite frankly, Satan is far along in his quest to devour that soul.

We live in a land in which a celebrity forthrightly speaks of killing two of her own children and how it freed her up to live a more fulfilling life:

She claimed that her two abortions led to joy later in life, including from the two children whom she now parents.

“Fifteen years after that first love had fizzled, my life would be completely lacking all its great joys,” she said. “I would never had been free to be myself — and that’s what this fight is all about: freedom.”

Two kids never got the chance to be free to be themselves, though.

Satan is of course the father of lies and there are lies aplenty in his current machinations.

Consider the premise behind the New York Times's 1619 project:

The inmates have taken over the asylum and those inmates are re-writing American history to make everything about race, racism, and slavery.

At the outset, I should note there are some worthwhile reads. But the paper starts out with this:

No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed. n the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.

[Emphasis added]

And then states this:

It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.

The Times has set about inserting race into everything and demanding we all see race in everything. 1619 is our “true founding.” No, actually, historically that is not true in any way shape or form.

In fact, the House of Burgesses convened in Jamestown, Virginia on July 30, 1619, before any African had set foot on the North American continent. The Mayflower pilgrims landed in New England in 1620, completely separated from those in Jamestown, with different goals, views, values, and priorities. It is also worth noting that white indentured servants outnumbered slaves and arrived before slaves. Quibble all you want with the distinctions, but in 1619 they were roughly treated the same — terribly on all counts.

To make it all about slavery is to ignore that there were already Europeans in North America before the first slave arrived and there were Europeans arriving in America in different locations quite apart from where slavery was. For a project that claims truth for itself, it is deeply untrue to truth and reality. The pilgrims in Massachusetts in 1620 were not exactly a group of slave holders as they were setting up shop, forming modes of government, and adopting private property and capitalist meta-structures to avoid failures from collective farming.

In fact, in 1623, still well before slavery made it into pilgrim settlements, the Plymouth Plantation abandoned communal property rights in favor of private property rights and a system of free enterprise. (See William Bradford’s On Plymouth Plantation”)

The 1619 Project by the New York Times is as flawed as it would have you believe the country’s founding was. It seeks to divide, not heal. It seeks to give power and primacy to those who think the nation’s founding was premised on evil and demands that those who disagree be silent. It seeks to embrace the Neo-Confederate world view of a South that actually won the Civil War by weaving itself into the fabric of post war society so it can then discredit the entire American enterprise.

Capitalism itself comes under assault with claims that “in order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.” Read the essay and you too will be left wondering just where the person comes up with these skewed interpretations.

This may be an even worse lie:

Its first essay, from Nikole Hannah-Jones, is here and contains an outright falsehood.

Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South. The wealth and prominence that allowed Jefferson, at just 33, and the other founding fathers to believe they could successfully break off from one of the mightiest empires in the world came from the dizzying profits generated by chattel slavery. In other words, we may never have revolted against Britain if the founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue. It is not incidental that 10 of this nation’s first 12 presidents were enslavers, and some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy.

The problem with this is first factual — the abolitionist movement in London did not take off in any meaningful way until after 1776 and it still dragged out well into the new century. In fact, Massachusetts’ began considerations on abolishing the slave trade in 1767 and voted again in both 1771 and 1774 to end its practice altogether, though both times were overriden by the British governor’s veto.

Second is the statement about “one of the primary reasons.” Hannah-Jones claims preserving slavery was a primary reason for the revolution and that is a lie. Don’t take my word for it. The Continental Congress, in 1774, pledged to end the slave trade and in 1776 even southern states had agreed to abide by nonimportation of slaves from abroad. Take it also from the founders on words, who were writing before 1776 about slavery and the need to end it.

Few even of the most enlightened Virginians were willing to declare, as Jefferson did in the instructions he wrote for his colony’s delegation to the first Continental Congress, that “the rights of human nature [are] deeply wounded by this infamous practice” and that “the abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state” — Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

[I]n 1766, the Reverend Stephen Johnson of Lyme, Connecticut, preaching on “the general nature and consequences of enslaving measures” and dilating on the iniquity of slavery and on its “shocking ill effects and terrible consequences” to both enslavers and enslaved. — Id.

Samuel Cooke, in his Massachusetts election sermon of 1770, argued that in tolerating Negro slavery “we, the patrons of liberty, have dishonored the Christian name, and degraded human nature nearly to a level with the beasts that perish,” and he devoted most of his text to “the cause of our African slaves.” –Id.

And Benjamin Rush, in a sweeping condemnation of slavery, “On Slave-Keeping” (1773), begged “Ye advocates for American liberty” to rouse themselves and “espouse the cause of humanity and general liberty.” Bear a testimony, he wrote in the language of the Quakers, “against a vice which degrades human nature… The plant of liberty is of so tender a nature that it cannot thrive long in the neighborhood of slavery. Remember, the eyes of all Europe are fixed upon you, to preserve an asylum for freedom in this country after the last pillars of it are fallen in every other quarter of the globe.” –Id.

By 1774 this cry had become a commonplace in the pamphlet literature of the northern and middle colonies. How can we “reconcile the exercise of SLAVERY with our professions of freedom,” Richard Wells, “a citizen of Philadelphia,” demanded to know. There was no possible justification for the institution, he said. If, as some claimed, the slaves were bought from those who had a right to sell them, where are the titles to prove it? –Id.

Even Patrick Henry, while admitting the colonists could not immediately eradicate slavery, said he hoped “an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil.”

Samuel Hopkins, in 1776, authored A Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of Africans; Shewing It To Be the Duty and Interest of the American Colonies To Emancipate All the African Slaves, which was widely circulated among those who attended the Continental Congress.

We all know of the situation in which Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib were denied entry into Israel. That country took note of the fact that they pointedly declined to be part of a 70-plus Congressional delegation the previous week, that the blood-libel-dispensing organization Miftah was going to sponsor their trip, and that they didn't intend to meet with any government officials. Still, Israel did change course to the degree that it was going to let Tlaib in to visit her grandmother on humanitarian grounds, a gesture to which Tlaib responded with brazen snot-nosedness, citing "oppressive conditions" under which the visit would be taking place. Her little indulgence in grandstanding included the assertion that her grandmother is being deprived of her dignity. Here's the real context of her grandmother's situation:

if the congresswoman wants to know why her Sity can’t easily go to a hospital in Jerusalem, well, it’s because ambulances and medical service trucks have been used to hide suicide bombers and weapons.  Why aren’t there quality hospitals in the West Bank? Because corrupt Palestinian leaders, who have been given widespread autonomy and huge amounts of international aid, don’t build them for her.

The idea that Israel erected walls out of an innate racist desire to punish Muslims (millions of whom live peacefully, vote, and freely express themselves in Israel in ways they can’t anywhere in the Islamic world), is a vacuous leftist fairy tale.

There is no doubt that checkpoints and walls inconvenience many Arabs—although far fewer than Tlaib insinuates—but they also save lives. That’s not only the lives of Israelis but also the lives of those who would die in the retaliatory strikes against terror organizations that often hide behind women and children.

If Tlaib’s grandmother has had her dignity denied someone, it’s by a government that refuses to engage in good-faith peace efforts for the past 55 years to help its own people. Tlaib can blame the Palestinian Authority for Sity’s troubles.

There is the hiring by the Victoria's Secret lingerie brand of its first transgender model . What Satan would like us to say about that is this: "The brand's sales had been declining some time anyway. This is just going to finish it off, much like the transgender Playmate was Playboy's decisive jump-the-shark moment. I'd think you social conservatives would be pleased about this."

But it's not just the cheesecake industry in which this has insinuated itself. Far more formerly wholesome arenas of our collective life have drastically mutated as a result of perversity's relentless march. Men claiming to be women are now routinely winning athletic competitions. Cities are enacting municipal ordinances enforcing the use of pronouns made up five minutes ago out of whole cloth when addressing these badly confused individuals. And we all know about drag-queen story hours at public libraries. And those libraries - in the sections for the youngest students - are putting the likes of this on their shelves:

A pro-LGBT book released in 2014 that includes a lewd sexual descriptions is allegedly being promoted in the youth sections at Australian libraries.

“Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out,” which includes the story of a 6-year-old enjoying oral sex, is being promoted in the youth sections of at least 60 Australian libraries, according to Binary Australia, an organization that says it affirms “the fact that gender is binary.”

“From six up, I used to kiss other guys in my neighbourhood, make out with them, and perform oral sex on them. I liked it. I used to love oral,” reads an except from the book shared by Binary Australia. “And I touched their you-know-whats. We were really young but that’s what we did.”

Kirralie Smith, director of Binary Australia, told the Daily Caller, “The book is in approximately 60 libraries in Australia. I found the book in my local library: Greater Taree Library — two copies in Taree and Wingham.” 

I realize various forms of extreme evil have overtaken Western societies before, but this is unprecedented. Even in Vlad the Impaler's Wallachia or the Nazi or Soviet empires, the assumption was that the human race consisted of males and females.

There is no organization or initiative adequate to address this. This isn't like pushing for a lower tax rate or deregulating the energy industry. We must all put on the full armor of God and bring the full force of our prayer against what we face.

Holy Spirit, come and vanquish the enemy! In the name of the precious son, we beseech you! Amen.