By CHRISTOPHER MANION
For several years after George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, many conservative groups stayed as far away as they could from the issue. “It would cut our donor list right down the middle,” one prominent leader told me in 2004. Confronted with Iraq and “Big Government Conservatism,” the conservative movement was divided — and, frankly, confused. So was the Republican Party. When Pelosi, and then Obama, came to power, it almost seemed inevitable.
In 2016, Donald Trump didn’t deny those divisions — he made hay out of them. In the debates, Jeb Bush was forced to admit that the Iraq War was a “mistake,” but even that did not convince many of those who had supported his brother’s war most ardently. They just got madder. Thus was born the cadre of the “Never-Trumpers” who bitterly, and often spitefully, criticized the insufficiently perfect Trump as candidate and then as president.
Through a series of events that can only be called miraculous, Donald Trump has been able to bring the Republican Party to a measure of unity that rivals that of the Reagan years, just in time for the midterm elections.
In the “finest hour” of this effort, he didn’t have to work very hard: Dianne Feinstein and her Democrat colleagues did most of the dirty work. The series of mishaps and disasters that led up to the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Cavanaugh made believers of all but the most petulant naysayers.
Chaos Coming
To The Campus?
The widespread hysteria, ignorance, and violence spurred by the opponents of the Kavanaugh nomination is nothing new — but it is now seared in the public memory as never before. And that’s a good thing, because one must know the enemy. Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and his wife are hounded out of a Capitol Hill restaurant by screaming harridans. Sen. Cory Gardner (R., Colo.) receives death threats. The wife of Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.) laments that she must now sleep with a loaded gun (note: unloaded guns are not worth sleeping with).
Mrs. Paul speaks from experience: Her husband has already been the victim of one aggravated felony assault (his assailant, his next-door neighbor, was sentenced to prison).
And Cong. Steve Scalise still relies on a walker, after repeatedly being shot by a Bernie Sanders volunteer who came within seconds of massacring a couple of dozen Republican members of Congress last year.
We now see manifested in the public square the rage and hatred for all things good and holy that have already reigned for decades on thousands of college campuses throughout the country. The agitators funding and fomenting the screaming mobs do not want the chaos to subside, and the captive academic audience of snowflakes-in-training offer them a rich target of opportunity.
Soon, campuses across the country will become microcosms of this manic orchestration of androphobia. Alas, conservatives and believing Catholics on campuses have no bodyguards to protect them from the wannabe Antifa terrorists. In fact, university administrators often label as “hate speech” any views that conflict with the spirit of Culture of Death known as “dialogue.”
Consider Christine Fair, a “distinguished” associate professor at Georgetown in the School of Foreign Service. Fair was apparently upset about the Kavanaugh nomination, so she posted a public “tweet” which read, “Look at [this] chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlement. All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: We castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.” (Note: This woman teaches students studying to be diplomats.)
After a few days of the usual dithering and “academic freedom” blather, Georgetown’s administration finally announced that Ms. Fair was going to do some research “internationally.” The scandalous notion of feeding the corpses to pigs must have been a bridge too far — pigs are vegetarians, you understand.
Here’s a thought experiment: At Georgetown, active homosexuals are welcomed at the campus “LGBT Resource Center”; those who criticize homosexuality are routinely branded as “homophobes.” Students are browbeaten to bow to the goddess of “inclusiveness.” Gay is very OK.
So: Let’s imagine the properly catechized student who dares to stand on the sidewalk in front of Georgetown’s “LGBT-Only” dorm (no joke: there is one) declaring that “Sodomy Is A Deadly Sin.”
How long do you think he’d last?
Wanted: Real Education
A prediction: The heightened intensity of disregard for the law and civil discourse that propelled the protesters in Washington will spread quickly to college campuses nationwide. Rage is a passion. The flames of passion subside unless they are constantly rekindled.
On most college campuses today, professors have given up on teaching and the rational pursuit of truth; that requires the acceptance of a common language, where words mean the same to everyone involved. In today’s post-intellectual campus world, that is too much to ask. So passions and rage will prevail.
The primacy of inflamed sentiments will accompany the properly trained but intellectually impoverished student long after graduation. Burdened with debt but shorn of any fruits of a true education, her anger will only increase as she finds that, while her debt is very real, her prospects for meaningful employment are virtually nonexistent. If she was one of the rare students who kept her head down, chose her professors carefully, and worked to keep her debt under control, she will prosper.
But what will happen to all her classmates who graduate uneducated, but very angry?
One result that should not surprise: A recent study reveals that thirty-one percent of millennials polled identify as a “democratic socialist” or “socialist.” Why? As Thomas Sowell observes, they’ve never been forced to live under socialism, but it sounds nice. And they’ll find their heroine in Hillary.
“You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about,” says the loser who stands for eviscerating the Constitution. So rage and violence are the sole Democrat agenda, until “we are fortunate enough to win back the House and or the Senate,” as she puts it. So “civility” means “obedience to those in power,” and must be practiced only when Democrats rule.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Clinton coyly avoids mentioning Steve Scalise.
Credibility? The Bishops
Take A Pass
During the first week of the meeting of the Synod on Youth in Rome, Auxiliary Bishop Robert Barron of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles observed: “The Church is losing a lot of its credibility.”
Of course, he means the bishops — why blame the Church for episcopal malpractice? — and his colleagues in the USCCB acknowledge it. Since the McCarrick and Viganò revelations, their political bombast has shriveled to a sputter. They still beat an occasional drum for more immigration rules, since that brings them more federal funding.
But it seems like an eternity since they warned us of the dangers of Global Warming! And while they have promised increased measures to prevent sexual abuse in the future, Pope Francis has apparently doused any hopes of an accounting of U.S. clerical cover-ups in the past.
So the cred is indeed dead.
But never fear — the vacuum has been filled! The Nuns on the Bus have picked up the bishops’ fallen standard. Yes, they’re back on the road, cloaked in the authority of the Church — and who’s going to stop them? Why, even staunchly Catholic Nancy Pelosi has given them her blessing! So, lavishly funded by Catholic-hating pro-aborts and sporting not one habit between them, they’re crisscrossing the country, blowing their horn and crusading for Pelosi’s Party in anticipation of the elections.
In the meantime, America’s bishops are slouching toward Baltimore, where they will meet in November. In their September meeting with Pope Francis, their leaders asked him to conduct an Apostolic Visitation of the U.S. Church. The Pope reportedly refused, suggesting instead that they cancel their November meeting and spend a week in a closed retreat instead.
Unfortunately, Your Holiness, they’ve been in retreat for a long, long time.
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