"With law our land shall rise"

From Mr. Scheuer:

Overall, the British people have given themselves a chance to again be themselves, respecters of the rule of their laws, English-speaking, self-reliant, predominately Protestant, and traders, bankers, and businessmen extraordinaire. Britons again can be quietly proud but stubborn nationalists, men and women who can now speak about their ancestors, men who were the authors of the freedom that has emanated from the precious commodity — now widely attacked and subverted – that America’s Founders called “English liberties”. These liberties graced and soundly governed life in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States until the ahistorical multiculturalists and diversity-hounds emerged from the cesspool that is the West’s academy and media to wreak havoc on commonsense, Christianity, societal cohesion, and history. Britons may well have a tough economic row to hoe for a while – and so may we, as a result — but they have acted manfully to regain their self-respect, independence, and sovereignty, as well as full control of their budget, society, and destiny. Well done. Now, it is time for Britain’s four children-nations in the English-speaking world to follow suit.

The rise of something new

From Jim's Blog:

The Altright is the Dark Enlightenment manifesting as a mob, and Trump is the altright manifesting as electoral politics. Brexit is also the altright manifesting as electoral politics.

A key point of the Dark Enlightenment is that mobs are not the solution to the problem and electoral politics are not the solution to the problem – but they are a manifestation that people are thinking about the problem and thinking of solving it. Even if Trump becomes president, his greatest accomplishment will remain that Trump set free dangerous thoughts. Ideas are far more powerful than guns, for someone has to aim the guns. The mob, and the electoral politics, are not power, but are echoes of power, they are the thunder that tells us the lightning has already struck.

Malign

Our malign institutions. How did it happen?

• The party -- malign
• The church -- malign
• The university -- malign

Fewer and fewer men are going to college, especially as college becomes more and more like school (i.e., Grades 13-16). It's much too prissy, too structured, too paternalistic, filled with Stalinist re-education (e.g., "multiculturalism"), and too damn expensive. Girls love it. Guys -- not so much.

Well, now the last shoe has fallen because It’s Becoming Too Dangerous For College Males To Date Girls On Campus:

The truth is the vast majority of men look forward to college as a place to me[e]t and bang chicks. I would honestly assess that for the majority of them, their degree is a close …. or perhaps maybe distant … second reason they attend college. Additionally, for biological and marketing reasons, women and college are hyped up to be the most important thing in every high school boy’s life. So not only do they have hormones driving them to chase tail on college campuses, but all of the movies, shows, and media point to college as one huge parentless orgy of loose women with big tatas and poor decision making skills. And while most men’s college experiences fell drastically short of this, this dream that every high school boy has, will be completely destroyed if the threat of false rape or harassment makes dating women on campus too risky.

Prognostication

From The Z Man:

On Thursday, which I think the EU requires the Brits to call quartidi, the subjects of England vote on whether or not to remain in Europe. The vote to leave, in theory, will compel the British government to negotiate an exit from the EU and paddle the island further into the Atlantic. The timing of the exit and the terms of the deal are not contemplated in the text of the referendum. There may be something in British law that determines these things, but I can find nothing to support that claim.

That’s not an unimportant bit in this discussion. It is no secret that the ruling class of England not only wants to remain in the EU, but they dream of a day when Britain is just another administrative zone of Europe, sort of like how the Romans treated Britannia. It’s not just that the idea of separate countries has become a heresy. The ruling elite seems to think the time has come to exterminate the British people entirely, at least as an identifiable tribe. As former Lord Chancellor Jack Straw put it, “the English as a race are not worth saving.”

Looking at the polling, the way to bet is that Brexit falls short. There has been a surge in support for leaving and English nationalism bubbling under the surface often goes unnoticed in polls. On the other hand, vote fixing and browbeating don’t always show up in the polls either. There’s also the fact that people perceive the status quo as the the safe choice. Humans are funny that way. Any change meets some natural resistance, even when there is no logic to resistance. Roll it all up and Remain most likely carries the day.

"Friends"

From Mr. Wood:

The Trap of Global Citizenship

Williams’ strictures on this provide a new way to look at higher education’s strange new emphasis on the imaginary category of “global citizenship.” As she points out, the term doesn’t stand for “any particular knowledge about the world,” but rather “changes in students’ attitudes” mostly in the form of rejection of “national identity.” Global citizenship “connects private feeling and qualities such as care, empathy and awareness, with the global issues of the day.” It thus “places whole areas of knowledge beyond debate.” The “homogeneity of political views” on campus is thus driven as much by efforts to manipulate the psychological vulnerabilities of students as it is by the effort of faculty members to steer away from the hard task of attempting to sort truth from opinion.

Williams herself doesn’t flinch in that effort. Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity is a short (198 page) book written in lively English and rich with examples, but it is thick with thought-provoking arguments on exactly how the “benign institution” of the university somersaulted to the frequently malign institution we have today. She finds some of impetus in what happened in the academic disciplines, and more of it in the pernicious influence of academic feminism. These are compellingly presented, but American readers will note that Williams has next to nothing to say about “diversity,” race, and multiculturalism as the anvils on which academic freedom in our universities has frequently been crushed.

The absence of these topics from a book about enforced conformity on campus is arresting, and serves perhaps as testimony to the “exceptional” character of America’s descent into leftist intolerance. Our campuses share with Britain and the rest of the English-speaking world an invasive new hatred of intellectual freedom. But we have added to it our own homebrew of racial grievance and identity politics. Britain certainly has experienced the woeful side of multiculturalism as well, but Williams treats it as secondary thread. For us, in the Age of Click, it is primary.

Britain’s example shows that the intolerance endangering academic freedom is not tied to a particular grievance, but has become a force in its own right.

The Green Zone

Why was it impossible for orthodox Anglicans to get their act together? Why did so few bishops lead their flock out of Babylon? What should we do now? What can we do?

From Touchstone (my emphases):

For more than thirty years now I have been an observer and sometime participant in what I will here call the conservative Episcopalian mess. The departure of more orthodox Episcopalians from an apostatizing mainstream headed by weak and clownish English archbishops and astoundingly aggressive heretics in North America, contained no real surprises, for this is the predictable fruit of religious liberalism hatched upon an ignorant, passive, and venal laity, that we have seen in other major Protestant churches, and from which modern Roman Catholicism, especially under a Nice Pope, is unlikely to be much of a refuge.

What I have found somewhat surprising, I suppose because my knowledge of the ecclesial geography was not very deep early on, was what a hard time conservative Anglicans have had getting their act (literally) together. Now to be sure, my “geographical” knowledge has increased over the years, so that I understand quite well that “conservative” applies to a number of incompatible or barely compatible attitudes. It covers the traditionalist for whom a charge of heresy applies to any change from the 1928 Prayer Book (even though that Prayer Book is a liberalization of older ones—it leaves out, for example, the bride’s charge to “obey”), to the dotty eccentrics of many varieties for which this Church is so famous, to those who reject women’s ordination principally because they are homosexual misogynists, to the odd clerical ducks for whom departure from the Episcopal Church gave them the chance to become bishops (the Volo Episcoparis and their numerous episcopi vagantes), to sober, reasonable, and catholic-minded Christians who loved the beauties of the most liturgically traditional, least sectarian-minded, and most cultured of Protestant churches.

And now ... the bitter (albeit predictable) fruit.

From Mr. Esolen:

The new odium Christi is a hatred of the moral teachings of Jesus, hatred preached in the name of Jesus himself, sometimes by preachers in churches riddled with termites, and sometimes by licentious scoundrels who want what they want, and there's an end on it. A sinner with a bad conscience might glance up from his sty should he hear the Lord say, "If a man but look upon a woman with lust, he has already committed adultery with her in his heart." So instead we give him Jesus the Anti-Christ, who resolutely never said a thing about sins of the flesh.

Renaissance

We don't need a new religion; we need a new religio:

The Romans of its golden age often said that the secret of Roman success was its religio, by which they mean their piousness, how their discipline was so tight they followed the old religious practices of paganism to the letter, no matter how useless they might have seemed.

For the alternate, Houellebecqian view, follow the link.

Disinformation

From Anglican Curmudgeon:

The rifle he used was not an AR-15.

In a moment of 'wild psychoanalysis', there appear to be grounds for thinking that this may have been a crime of self-hate. (In classic paranoid fashion, I may effectively strike out at myself by going after the (horrible) others. For, I am another.)

And, besides ...

"The Most Magical Place On Earth"

... credited with igniting a national conversation on gun control and hate crimes.

A national conversation on mental illness and radical ideology (and the possible interconnections thereof)? Meh. Not so much. Move along people. Move along.