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Be A Protestant But Not a NUT!
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Friday, August 11, 2023
Be a Protestant BUT NOT A NUT!
I have borrowed the title of this essay, mutatis mutandis, from that of the fourth chapter in Dr. John R. Rice’s book I Am a Fundamentalist (1975). Dr. Rice wrote that book in the midst of the “second-degree separation” controversy that was dividing fundamentalist against fundamentalist in the 1970s. It was his answer to those fundamentalists who were on the side of “second-degree separation”. The chapter in question addresses the issue of riding hobby-horses. To give an example, he wrote “Some people are strong against apostasy and modernism, but they think a man a modernist if he gives a Christmas present or sends a Christmas greeting card, or observes Easter Sunday and preaches on the resurrection”. I know just such a nut, although he probably considers himself a charismatic rather than a fundamentalist. Another example was “There are others who think one is a modernist if he doesn’t drink carrot juice, eat whole wheat bread and wheat germ, if he doesn’t abstain from pork and coffee”. Personally, I’d be more inclined to think someone a modernist if he did those things, rather than didn’t do them. At any rate, I describe my position as orthodox rather than fundamentalist. Doctrinally, the ancient Creeds are the litmus test of orthodoxy, rather than a list of five fundamentals drawn up in the last century. Since all the fundamentals of fundamentalism are included in the Creeds, orthodoxy can be said to be more than fundamentalism, not less. With regards to practice, the biggest distinction between orthodoxy and fundamentalism is that orthodoxy rejects the idea of withdrawing from the Church because of error, doctrinal or moral, which idea is historically associated with the heresies of Novatianism and Donatism. In orthodoxy, separation from heresy and apostasy takes the form of excommunicating the heretics and apostates and the right way of dealing with institutional error is that of a reconquista rather than an exodus. That having been said, I think the distinction Dr. Rice made between his brand of fundamentalism – I would say that if all fundamentalist Baptists were like him it would be a much better movement except that the biggest problem with Baptist fundamentalism is that most fundamental Baptist preachers are would-be John R. Rices who are pale imitations at best – almost caricatures – and the kooks, can be applied to Protestants and Hyper-Protestants.
On the one hand there is Protestantism. On the other hand there is Hyper-Protestantism. Protestantism is good. Hyper-Protestantism is bad. The word “Catholic” is a useful shibboleth for distinguishing between a Protestant and a Hyper-Protestant. “Catholic” is a bad word to the Hyper-Protestant who uses it to mean everything he thinks Protestantism opposes. The English and Lutheran Reformers never used “Catholic” in this way. They referred to the errors against which they “protested” as “Romish” or “popish” to indicate that these were recent errors and errors which belonged to a particular Church, the Church governed by the Patriarch of Rome, rather than the Catholic Church, the whole of the Christian Church including all Churches governed by Apostolic bishops. Indeed, the Patriarch of Rome’s claim to have the supreme governorship over the entire Church, a claim rejected by the Churches under the other Patriarchs since Patristic days, is one of the errors of Rome against which the Reformers protested. Calling the Roman Church the Catholic Church is tantamount to accepting that error. Some Protestants today have fallen into the habit of using Catholic for the Roman Church and its members, not out of Hyper-Protestantism but out of the idea that it is respectful to call people what they call themselves. This is the same flawed reasoning that some use to justify using a person’s stated preference in pronouns rather than those which correspond to that person’s biological sex. In both cases truth is what one ends up sacrificing in the name of being polite. Protestants who use Catholic to mean “Roman Catholic” for this reason can usually be distinguished from Hyper-Protestants in that they do not speak the word as if it were a swear word in the way Hyper-Protestants do.
Catholic, an intensified compound version of the Greek word for “whole” has been used since at least the beginning of the second century when St. Ignatius of Antioch used it in his Epistle to the Smyrnaeans, to mean the Church in its entirety, the Church everywhere as opposed to the Church in just one location, the Church in Rome, for example, or the Church in Smyrna. The Catholic faith is the faith confessed by all orthodox Christians, in all orthodox Churches, everywhere, the faith confessed in the Creed. The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed has the best right to be called the Catholic Creed in that it was accepted by all the ancient Churches before there was any break in fellowship between them and is still accepted by them today, the dispute over the wording that divided East from West notwithstanding. This Creed was developed by the first two Ecumenical Councils – Councils to which the government of the entire Church, everywhere was invited to participate – in the fourth century, taking an earlier, local form of the Creed, as its template. The shorter but similarly worded Apostles’ Creed, developed out of the form of the Creed used by the Church in Rome in baptisms at least as early as the second century. The similarity between the two suggests that the forms out of which both were developed were themselves versions of an earlier template that most likely goes back to the Apostles. Hints of such a form that pre-dated the writing of the New Testament are dropped from time to time by St. Paul in his epistles and this would explain the antiquity of the origin story from which the Apostles’ Creed derives its name, the origin story being basically true, but referring to the earliest form of the Creed, from which multiple local versions were derived, two of which eventually became the Apostles’ and Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creeds. In the fifth century, after the third Ecumenical Council but before the fourth, in the period when the fellowship of the ancient Churches was first broken, St. Vincent, a monk in Lerins Abbey on one of the islands of the same name off the coast of the French Riviera, wrote his Commonitorium under the pseudonym “Peregrinus” in which he explored the question of how to distinguish true Catholic doctrine from heresy, famously stating that in the Catholic Church care must be taken to “hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, and by all”. He is often said to have proposed three tests of Catholicity, but in actuality he proposed four. The first test is that the doctrine must be derived from the Holy Scriptures. This first Catholic principle of St. Vincent is identical to the first principle of Protestantism. The other three tests pertain to the interpretation of Scripture and they are universality (an interpretation is not Catholic if it is only found in one region of the Church), antiquity (an interpretation is not Catholic if it does not go back to the earliest centuries of the Church but is instead of late origin and contained within a particular timespan rather than being taught in all times of the Church) and consent (formal acknowledgement by the authorities of the Church, preferably at the Ecumenical level).
None of the doctrines that the early Reformers, English and Lutheran, protested against in the teachings of the Church of Rome are affirmed as articles of faith in the Creed, Apostles’ or Nicene-Constantinopolitan. With one possible exception, none of the practices of the Roman Church that these Reformers objected to can withstand the Vincentian tests.
We shall return to that possible exception momentarily. First I wish to observe that Hyper-Protestantism gets the word Protestant as wrong as it gets the word Catholic. Most Hyper-Protestants use the word Protestant as if the word were synonymous with “Calvinist”. This is true even of many Hyper-Protestants who would object to being called Calvinists themselves on the grounds that they are Arminians. Arminianism is to Calvinism what heresy is to orthodox Christianity in general, a defective form. Of course, what I am calling Calvinism here is not actually Calvinism in the sense of “the teachings of John Calvin”. John Calvin himself was closer to Lutheranism than to what has been called Calvinism since the seventeenth century. Dr. Luther would not appreciate hearing that not only because he regarded Calvin’s view of the Eucharist as rank heresy but also because he objected to a movement being named after him in the first place. Calvin, however, as is clear from his writings, was Lutheran in his views of the extent of the Atonement and assurance of salvation, rather than Calvinist. John Calvin was to Lutheranism, what Jacob Arminius and his followers were to Calvinism, which ought to be called either Bezism or Dortism, after its true fathers, Theodore Beza and the Reformed Synod of Dort. Protestant, however, is the general term for all the Christians who threw off the usurped supremacy of the Patriarch of Rome in the sixteenth century. In the best sense of the word, it is defined only by the doctrines that set the earliest and most conservative of the Reformers apart from Rome rather than by doctrines distinctive of any of the more specific traditions that emerged from the Reformation. If we have to define Protestantism by the doctrines of a specific tradition, Lutheranism has a better claim to being that tradition than Calvinism, being the original Protestant tradition of which John Calvin’s Calvinism was a deviation, from which deviation Theodore Beza and the Synod of Dort further deviated with their “Calvinism”, of which Arminianism is a yet further deviation.
The doctrines of the general Reformation, that is to say what the Reformers positively affirmed rather than merely what they denied in Rome’s teachings, are today commonly summed up in the five solae – sola Scriptura, sola gratia, sola fide, solus Christus, soli Deo Gloria. This is not the best formulation, in my opinion. It does not date to the Reformation itself, but only to the last century. It is a Calvinist formulation. One of the most important teachings of the Reformers is missing from it. Sola Scriptura can be easily misinterpreted to mean something that Dr. Luther and the English Reformers would have found abhorrent, i.e., the idea that the Bible can and should be privately interpreted in isolation from tradition and the Church. The other solas can be summed up in a single doctrine – the freeness of salvation as the gift of God. If I were to come up with a formula summarizing the doctrines of the general Reformation it would be:
– The supremacy of Scripture as the written Word of God
– The freeness of salvation as the gift of God
– The Gospel is the assurance of salvation to all who believe it
The last of these was absolutely essential to the Reformation. It was the search for such that led Dr. Luther to the Pauline epistles on justification and to oppose the carrot-on-a-stick approach coupled with the outright sale of salvation to which Rome had stooped at that point in time. John Calvin was as one with Dr. Luther on this. Those who would later call themselves “Calvinists” were and are not in accord with either Luther or Calvin but actually offend against this truth worse than Rome. In their theology the Gospel cannot assure anyone of salvation because Jesus came only to save a handful of pre-selected individuals. Nobody can really know that he is among the chosen few. He must constantly look for evidence of his regeneration in his own works, but can draw no lasting comfort, because if he falls away it will demonstrate he was not really regenerate, which remains a possibility until the very end of his life. Consider what such “Calvinists” as John Piper and John F. MacArthur Jr. have to say about assurance of salvation today. Both take the position that the Gospel cannot fully assure those who believe it of their own salvation because they must prove their faith to be real to themselves by finding evidence of it in their works, a position explicitly condemned by both Dr. Luther and John Calvin, and solidly rejected in the Lutheran tradition to this day. MacArthur, who has been unsound on all sorts of other matters, including at one point a key element of Nicene Christology, wrote not one, not two, but three books arguing this point, proving only that he wouldn’t be able to tell the Law from the Gospel if the difference between the two were to take anthropomorphic form and walk up and smack him upside the head. Piper is more subtle, like the serpent in the Garden. He merely slips nuggets of the faith-based-on-works error such as “assurance is partially based on objective evidences for Christian truth” into presentations that contain a lot of sounder statements. The Reformation truth is that while faith is accompanied by the repentance that the Law works in us by convicting us of our sin and by the works that spring from the Christian love worked in us by the love of God received through faith, these accompanying things are not part of the basis of faith which rests on nothing but the Gospel, the objective message that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, has saved all who believe in Him by dying for their sins on the Cross and rising from the dead, which message is proclaimed both in Word and Sacrament, and that the faith that rests on that objective Truth is itself the subjective experience of assurance of salvation. The subjective experience, faith which is assurance (Heb. 11:1), must rest entirely on the solid rock of what is objective, the Gospel, for if it rests partly on that solid rock, and partly on grounds that are themselves subjective, our experiences and works, it will be most unstable indeed. The Hyper-Protestant Puritanism, that in addition to being regicidal, tyrannical, and opposed to all joy, defected from Calvin’s teachings in precisely this way, and one of its fruit, alongside the evils of the Modern Age – liberalism, Communism, and Americanism – was a psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually crippling dearth of assurance and plague of despair.
Nothing in these basic truths of the Reformation conflicts with anything in the Creed. Nor do they conflict with the teachings, practices, and forms of worship common to all the ancient Churches, i.e., the Catholic tradition. They place Protestantism in opposition to such late Medieval Roman doctrines as human merit, supererogatory works (the idea that someone other than Jesus can do works over and above what is required of him and so contribute to someone else’s salvation), and the whole general impression Rome was giving that salvation was a reward for dotting all your is and crossing all your ts, but not with the Catholic faith held throughout the Church everywhere, in all ages, since the Apostles. Basic Protestantism, therefore, is in conflict with Romanism not Catholicism, and since the Catholic faith of the Creed is the basic Christian faith, to be a good Protestant, one must first be a Catholic. The essential distinction between Hyper-Protestantism and Protestantism is that Hyper-Protestantism opposes what is Catholic and not merely Roman.
I do not mean that Hyper-Protestantism rejects the Creed, necessarily, although Hyper-Protestants generally do not hold to the necessity of organizational and organic continuity with the Apostolic Church in Jerusalem, making it rather difficult for them to confess the ninth Article about the “Holy Catholick Church”, at least with a sense that would have been recognized by any Christian anywhere prior to the Reformation. What I mean is that Hyper-Protestants reject the Catholic tradition wholesale except for elements that they cannot deny are Scriptural. If there is a traditional practice of the Roman Church that the Hyper-Protestant cannot find a Scriptural text that says you must do it this way, the Hyper-Protestant will say that you must not do it that way, even if there is no Scriptural text forbidding it, and every other ancient Church does it that way, not just the Roman. This is called the regulative principle. Although it appears in most of the important Calvinist confessions, it was actually far more typical of Zwingli’s approach than of Calvin’s. Indeed, while Zwingli had already been practicing it in Zurich for about half a decade before the rise of Anabaptism, the movement of Continental Hyper-Protestant schismatics who took their cue from Zwingli rather than Luther and Calvin but whose radicalism brought about a break with all of the Magisterial Reformers including Zwingli himself, it was the Anabaptists who first articulated it as a stated principle. It was Conrad Grebel, the founder of the Swiss Brethren, an Anabaptist sect who raised it in arguing for the Anabaptist position on baptism, the argument going that because there is no specific command to baptize infants in the New Testament it must therefore be prohibited. Grebel pointed to Tertullian, the second to third century apologist, as having taught the regulative principle. Since it only appeared in Tertullian’s writings after he joined the ultra-rigid Montanists towards the end of his life, this was not exactly a good argument for the principle. Especially since it is impossible to reconcile that principle with the doctrine of Christian liberty taught by St. Paul in his epistles.
The opposite of the regulative principle it the normative principle. In its simplest, this is the idea that if the Scripture does not forbid you to do something, you are permitted to do it. There is obviously no conflict between this principle and the Pauline doctrine of Christian liberty. It can, however, depending upon how it is interpreted in its implications, conflict with the Pauline doctrine of orderly worship and conduct in the Church. One version of the normative principle, primarily associated with evangelical and especially charismatic worship in the twentieth century, is the idea of eliminating all or almost all formal structure and allowing everyone from the preacher to those providing the music to the congregants in the pew to each do his own thing as he thinks the Holy Ghost is leading. This sounds like a recipe of chaos and in some instances this is exactly what it produces. More often, however, the result in practice is that the worship service ends up resembling a performance at a theatre, an evening in a night club, or some other secular activity that in no way resembles a Church service.
By contrast there is the version of the normative principle employed by Dr. Luther and the English Reformers. In this version, the normative principle was applied to the pre-Reformation tradition of the Church and whatever in that tradition was not found to be prohibited by Scripture or to otherwise contradict Scripture was maintained. This is what is most consistent with both the Pauline doctrine of Christian liberty and the Pauline doctrine of orderly worship and conduct. In the Anglican Church’s Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (1571) it is spelled out in Article XX “Of the Authority of the Church” which reads:
The Church hath power to decree Rites or Ceremonies, and authority in Controversies of Faith: And yet it is not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary to God’s Word written, neither may it so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another. Wherefore, although the Church be a witness and a keeper of holy Writ, yet, as it ought not to decree any thing against the same, so besides the same ought it not to enforce any thing to be believed for necessity of Salvation.
In the Lutheran Book of Concord it is found in Lutheranism’s Augsburg Confession (1530) in Article XV “Of Ecclesiastical Usages” in the first section of the Article:
Of Usages in the Church they teach that those ought to be observed which may be observed without sin, and which are profitable unto tranquillity and good order in the Church, as particular holy days, festivals, and the like.
Put into practice, the result was that those things which the Anglican Church and the Lutherans rejected were Roman, that is to say, distinctive of the Roman Church after the Great Schism and often quite later than that, whereas those things which were retained were Catholic, that is, common to all the ancient Church – the Church of Rome, the other four ancient Patriarchates in the Eastern Orthodox Church, and even the Assyrian and Oriental Orthodox Churches the fellowship of which with the larger Church was broken beginning in the fifth century AD. In the Lutheran and Anglican traditions, Protestantism is a Reformed Catholicism, not the wholesale rejection of Catholicism except for everything that cannot be jettisoned on account of its being undeniably Scriptural that is Hyper-Protestantism.
In the Anglican Church there are those who bristle at the thought of our Church being Catholic, despite Catholic being used in only a positive sense in all of the Anglican formularies, including the Book of Common Prayer. I do not say that these are Hyper-Protestants, although they have several of the traits of Hyper-Protestantism. They often try to claim that the Articles of Religion can only be read rightly in accordance with as Calvinist interpretation as possible, despite the fact that when the Articles touch on issues where there is a difference of opinion between the continental Protestant traditions, such as Predestination and Election in Article XVII, they are written in such a way that either Lutherans or Calvinists could affirm them (there is no mention of Reprobation, which Calvinists accept and Lutherans reject, in the Article). The Articles of Religion, like the Anglican Formularies in general, were irenicons, drafted so as to minimize conflict among members of the Church of England, whether it be conflict between those who see the Church as Catholic first and Protestant second and those who see it the other way around, or between those whose Protestantism was more Lutheran and those whose Protestantism was more Calvinist. The Anglicans who want the Anglican Church to be only Protestant often make arguments that seemingly presuppose the regulative principle, despite the Articles’ affirmation of the normative. This past weekend I engaged in an online discussion with them on a matter that might seem to be an exception to the rule that the English Reformers rejected only what was Roman and kept all that is Catholic.
That matter occurs in Article XXII of the Articles of Religion. I am not referring to the main subject of that Article which is Purgatory. Purgatory is a Roman doctrine, not a Catholic doctrine. While some of the ideas associated with it go back much further, Purgatory itself dates to the end of the twelfth century, the century after the Great Schism, and is not an official doctrine of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Indeed, the Eastern Orthodox opposed the doctrine following the attempt at reunification in the Second Council of Lyon (1272-1274). There have been and are different schools within Eastern Orthodoxy that have held different views on the matter. The ones who came closest to Rome were the seventeenth century prelates such as Peter of Moghilia and Dositheus of Jerusalem who reacted against the “Calvinist” Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Cyril Lucaris, and in doing so produced Confessions that affirmed Purgatory in all but name. The rejection of the name is more significant than the affirmation of the doctrine as these men were representative only of their own time in this. Most Eastern Orthodox schools of thought reject the doctrine as well as the name, and interestingly enough there has been a heated on-and-off controversy in the Eastern Church over “Aerial Toll Houses”, a different concept of an intermediate state from that of Purgatory, the most recent flare up in the controversy being in the last century. The Armenian Apostolic and Coptic Orthodox Churches both reject Purgatory and I suspect this is true of the other Non-Chalcedonian Churches. Thus, Purgatory does not pass the Vincentian tests of Catholicity and is a distinctly Roman error. The matter in question is found among those tucked in with Purgatory in this Article. Here is Article XXII in full:
The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping and Adoration, as well of Images as of Reliques, and also invocation of Saints, is a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.
Note in passing the use of the word “Romish” rather than “Catholic”.
The discussion began with someone sharing the quotation “If you think you need a mediator with Jesus; you don’t know Jesus”. Now, there is nothing wrong with these words taken in their plain, ordinary, sense. There is One God, St. Paul declares, and One Mediator between God and man, the Man Christ Jesus (1 Tim. 2:5). You do not need a mediator between yourself and the Mediator. The man being quoted, however, was James R. White, a Reformed Baptist minister and the director of Alpha and Omega Ministries. This is a man who never misses an opportunity to throw the Catholic baby out with the Roman bathwater. A few years ago I thoroughly rebutted his attempt to have it both ways on Nestorianism and “the Mother of God”, something not uncommon among Calvinists, as well as his embrace of “scientific” textual criticism as applied to the New Testament, the gateway drug to “higher criticism” an error he could easily have avoided had he applied the Vincentian Catholic principle to textual criticism and adopted the position that the true text of the New Testament is the text received by the Church everywhere, always, and by all, with the recognition that in areas of the Church where another language predominates that text may find representation in a “Vulgate” of the dominant language, such as the Latin Vulgate in the Roman Church, and the Authorized Bible in the English Church. I observed the possibility that by “mediator” White might actually have meant “intermediary”. Hyper-Protestants reject the Apostolic priesthood of the Church, despite its being there in the New Testament, because they reject the idea of intermediaries between Jesus and the individual believer, condemning themselves in the process because they accept the necessity of preaching, and preachers are intermediaries between Jesus and the individual believer in precisely the same way that Apostolic priests are, not gatekeepers who decide who gets to see Jesus, but stewards appointed to bring Jesus to each individual through their dual ministry of Word and Sacrament.
As it turned out, however, the discussion went down a different road than that. What the person who posted the quote from James White and those who agreed with him were interested in condemning was the practice of asking the saints to pray for them.
Now this is not something that I do myself. I have never had any interest in doing this, much less a compelling urge to do so. It is, however, something that is done in all the ancient Churches – Roman, Eastern Orthodox, Non-Chalcedonian, and Assyrian – and so cannot be said to be a distinctly Roman practice. The only case that can be made against it being Catholic is that it can only be traced back for certain to the third century. In St. Clement of Rome’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, written before the end of the first century, around the time St. John was writing the Book of Revelation, this early Roman bishop and companion of St. Paul talks in what is usually numbered as the fifty sixth chapter about remembering those who, having fallen into sin, had submitted in meekness and humility to the will of God, to God and the saints. The wording is ambiguous and the saints mentioned here could be the living members of the Church, but especially since everywhere else in the epistle St. Clement refers to these as brethren, this could also be the earliest reference to the practice in question, in which case it most decidedly is Catholic, this earliest of the writings of the Apostolic Fathers having been regularly read in the Churches along with the Sacred texts in the early centuries and considered, although ultimately rejected, for canonical status. Even if St. Clement is not a first century witness to the practice, the third century predates both the first Ecumenical Council and the rise of Emperor Constantine who is usually regarded as the founder of “Catholicism” by the restorationist type of Hyper-Protestant, the historical illiterate who thinks that the Church apostatized the moment Christianity was legalized (a view these type of Hyper-Protestants share with all the heretical sects they call cults) . It is recommended by both St. John Chrysostom and St. Augustine in the fourth century, neither of whom was known as an innovator and both of whom would have staunchly rejected it had it been inconsistent with orthodox Christianity as it had come down to them. Indeed, the idea of the Intercession of the Saints – that the faithful who have gone on to the next life are praying for us in Heaven – that is associated with the practice, and often but not always denied by those who reject it, can be traced back with certainty much earlier than the practice, being frequently mentioned in the Apostolic Fathers. For that matter, it appears in the Bible itself in Revelation 5:8 where the twenty-four elders are depicted as holding golden vials, filled with odours that are the “prayers of the saints” (if the “saints” here are taken to be the saints on Earth, the image is even stronger, for it suggests that it is the saints in Heaven who bring before the Throne the prayers of the saints on Earth), which raises a few questions about the Scriptural literacy of those who loudly trumpet their belief in “Sola Scriptura” while denying that the faithful departed pray for us. An even more important doctrine is at stake in this dispute, however, the doctrine of “The Communion of the Saints” that is indisputably Catholic, confessed in the Apostles’ version of the Creed, and held even by those ancient Churches that use only the Nicene and not the Apostles’ Creed. It was for the sake of this Truth, not the practice itself per se, that when I realized what was being argued, I joined in the argument on the side of the defenders of the practice.
A word here about, well, words, is in order. Those on the other side of the debate consistently spoke of the practice of asking the faithful departed for their prayers as “praying to the saints”. I consistently referred to it as asking for their prayers. I would not have been comfortable making the arguments I made, even in defence of the Truth confessed in the Creed, using the same language as the other side. The English word “pray”, comes to us through French, from a Latin word meaning “ask, beg, request, entreat” and in earlier centuries was used in a more general sense. “I pray thee”, contracted to “prithee” used to be a common synonym for “please” and was used with requests made of other people. For most people, however, “pray” has long ceased to be a synonym for “ask” in general, and is now limited to requests made as acts of worship. This being the case, I would say that the word should be reserved for requests made directly to God, and not used of the act of requesting that others pray for you. There are two entirely different arguments here depending upon whether we follow that rule or not. One is an argument about whether we should make the same kind of requests of the faithful departed that we make of God, in which case the right is on the side of those who say no, we should not. The other is an argument about whether we should make the same kind of requests of the faithful departed that we make of other living Christians. It is in regards to this second argument that I would say that since the practice is Catholic and not just Roman and based on “the Communion of the Saints” confessed in the Creed a strong burden of proof must be placed on those who say it isn’t allowed to prove their case from the Scriptures, which I do not think they can do. I will note that the language of “praying to the saints” is sometimes used by defenders of the practice among those Churches who practice it, undermining their own position in my opinion. It has been my observation, however, that this language is far more likely to be used by less-informed lay people in these Churches than in official ecclesiastical statements. On a related note, the frequent heard accusation by Hyper-Protestants against the Roman Church, and sometimes the other ancient Churches, that they pray more to Mary and the saints than to God, has no validity with regards to prayers used in public worship, although it may sometimes be warranted in the case of private practice, just as private Protestants may distort things in private in a way unsanctioned by their Church or sect. In Eastern Orthodoxy, one of the most popular prayers, if not the most popular, is a prayer addressed to Jesus – it is actually called “The Jesus Prayer” – and virtually indistinguishable from the one that in evangelical circles is often substituted for “believe” in presentations of the Gospel and treated as if it were a magical incantation the reciting of which mechanically transforms one into a Christian. The act of asking the Saints or Mary to grant something in their own power is not sanctioned by any Church and is, of course, idolatry. This is not to say that it is not superstitiously done by the ignorant, but the only requests directed towards anyone other than God in the liturgies of any of the ancient Churches are requests for prayer.
When I raised the point of the difference between praying to someone and asking them to pray for you in the debate someone pointed out that Article XXII speaks of “invocation of Saints” and argued that “invocation” is a broader term and includes all forms of address not just prayer. My response was to point out that in that case technically the Article forbids asking living Christians to pray for us as well. For, as the type of Hyper-Protestant who does not understand how language works and that a word can have a narrower as well as a wider meaning and so condemns the use of “Saint” as a title likes to point out, all Christians are Saints in the most basic sense of the word.
So what about Article XXII? Do the Articles of Religion depart from the normative principle affirmed in Article XXII by condemning a practice “invocation of Saints” that is truly Catholic rather than merely Roman?
As the saying goes “it’s complicated”. The Articles affirm the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds as well as the Athanasian (more an annotated version of the Apostles’ than a distinct Creed in its own right) in Article VIII saying these are “proved by most certain warrants of Holy Scripture”. Thus, they cannot mean in Article XXII that the doctrine of the “Communion of the Saints” confessed in the Apostles’ Creed is “grounded upon no warranty of Scripture” when they seemingly impugn the practice based on this doctrine. This raises the question of whether the practice and the doctrine can be so separated that one can affirm one without the other. If they cannot, then either the Articles contradict themselves, a possibility as they, not being Holy Scripture, are not infallible, something those Anglicans which insist so strongly on their Protestantism might try to remember, or, as the wording of the Article allows, the “fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God” is not “invocation of Saints” per se but the “Romish doctrine” concerning it. John Henry Newman tried to make this last argument with regards to the main subject of the Article, Purgatory, in the last of the Tracts for the Times before he crossed the Tiber. His argument was not particularly convincing, although it could possibly be made more strongly for “invocation of Saints” than for Purgatory based on invocation being Catholic and Purgatory distinctly Roman, potentially allowing for “the Romish doctrine” about “invocation of Saints” being asking them to intercede for those in Purgatory. I’m not going to press that interpretation as it seems highly unlikely that this is what was meant in the days of the Elizabethan Settlement by those who came up with the final draft of the Articles. Historically it was not until the Tractarians that High Churchmen thought to understand the Article in any way other than as completely forbidding the practice as demonstrated by it being a point of contention between the Non-Jurors and the Eastern Orthodox in the unsuccessful attempt to bring the two into communion in the early eighteenth century, about a century before the Oxford Movement. Neither, however, am I going to say that the Articles do contradict themselves. Rather, I am going to take the position that Article XXII as an exercise of that “power to decree Rites or Ceremonies” affirmed of the Church in the same Article that affirms the Normative Principle and as thus binding upon the province of the Holy Catholic Church that is the Anglican Church in terms of practice and not an authoritative statement dictating what we are to think about the practice, a position quite in keeping with the spirit of the court of Elizabeth I, who understood well that her God-given authority to regulate the Church for the sake of the peace of her realm was limited to the public exercise of religion and did not extend to the private consciences of men, something monarchs reigning by divine right understand a lot better than politicians elected by the mob. In keeping with this position on Article XXII which is in accordance with my own non-participation in this practice as a member of the Anglican Church, I shall now discuss the matter of whether or not the practice violates Scriptural prohibitions and/or principles. My position is that it does not.
Now, in the debate last weekend, those on the other side were arguing for something and not just against something. What they were arguing for was that Jesus Christ is the only Mediator, that His One Sacrifice is sufficient and that nothing anyone else does can add anything to it, that He is accessible through prayer to all believers and that we don’t need to go through anyone else to get to Him, and that we should not direct towards creatures that which belongs to God alone. With none of this, did I, or anyone else on my side of the debate, disagree, and indeed, I, and I would assume everyone on both sides, would affirm all of this. Those on my side were also arguing for something, and not just the practice of asking the faithful in Heaven to pray for you, but a truth we confess every time we confess the Apostles’ Creed.
Before I even entered this conversation, others on the side that I took had already asked the other side whether or not they ever asked members of their parishes to pray for them. The point of the question, of course, was that if asking the faithful departed to pray for you somehow takes away from Christ’s sole Mediatorship, implies a deficiency in His Sacrifice, or suggest the idea that we need to go through someone else to get to Jesus, then this is also true of asking living believers to pray for us. This point is entirely valid, and I further observed that it cuts both ways. If in asking another Christian for prayer we do so in a way that transgresses by inappropriately offering to our fellow Christian the prayer that we should be addressing to God alone we have transgressed regardless of whether that fellow Christian is alive or dead. If, on the other hand, we ask other Christians for their prayers in accordance with the Scriptures, then it is Scriptural regardless of whether the other Christians are part of the Church Militant – the Church on earth – or the Church Triumphant – the Church in Heaven.
The other side always answered the question with yes. They justified the inconsistency in their position by saying that the New Testament tells us as Christians to ask our living brethren for their prayers. This, while not wrong exactly, is a bit misleading. In the New Testament you find St. Paul requesting the prayers of the Roman Christians (Rom. 15:30), the Colossians (Col. 4:3), and the Thessalonians (1 Thess. 5:25, 2 Thess. 3:1). You find him telling several different groups of Christians that they are always in his prayers (Rom. 1:8-9, Col. 1:9-10, Phil. 1:3-4). There is St. James’ instructions to pray for one another (Jas. 5:16). There are also general instructions to pray for all Christians (Eph. 6:18) or even more generally, all people of all sorts (1 Tim. 2:1) as well as instructions to bear one another’s burdens (Gal. 6:2) and to encourage and build one another up (1 Thess. 5:11). Those opposed to asking the faithful departed for their prayers say that nowhere in all of these passages is there an example of someone asking the departed for their prayers or an instruction to ask the departed specifically for their prayers. With regards to the second point, however, nowhere are we told not to ask the departed faithful for their prayers. With regards to the first, while obviously those to whom St. Paul wrote requesting prayer were living at the time, he did not tell them to stop praying for him when their earthly sojourn was over and they departed to be with Christ. No, I am being neither facetious nor flippant. Those who are opposed to asking the faithful departed for their prayers are generally also opposed to praying for the faithful departed. Praying for the faithful departed is another practice that is Catholic – shared by all the ancient Churches, not just Rome. St. James’ instructions to pray for one another can be reasonably taken to exclude the departed as those for whom the prayer is to be offered because he is not talking about prayers in general but specifically about prayer for healing. However, prayers for the faithful departed are clearly not prohibited in the New Testament because St. Paul offers up just such a prayer for Onesiphorus in 2 Tim. 1:18. For that matter, every prayer in the New Testament that resulted in a resurrection was obviously a prayer for the departed. If this aspect of Catholic practice, prayers for the faithful departed, can be proven by the New Testament, and in case you failed to notice I just proved it from the New Testament, then the other side of the same coin, asking the faithful departed for their prayers can hardly be excluded simply because there is neither example nor instructions for it specifically can be found. I emphasize the word specifically because the burden on those opposed to asking the departed for their prayers is actually heavier than that which the normative principle implies. Their burden is to prove that the faithful departed, the Church Militant, are excluded from the general instructions to bear one another’s burdens, encourage, and build one another up, in all of which praying for one another in a more general sense than in James is included.
This is a burden of proof they cannot meet. Indeed, their assumption that the faithful departed are automatically excluded from the New Testament’s instructions to Christians to pray for one another and bear their burdens, is an assumption that contradicts the entire New Testament on the subject of the union between believers with Christ and through Christ each other in the Church, a union that cannot be broken by death. The faithful departed, including the Old Testament saints, are depicted by St. Paul in Hebrews 12 as “so great a cloud of witnesses” on account of which we should “lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us” so that we may “run with patience the race that is set before us”. Later in the same chapter when the Apostle uses Mt. Sinai and Mt. Zion as symbols of the Law and Gospel covenants respectively, he tells his Hebrew Christian readers “ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, To the general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect” (vv. 22-23) which would be an incredibly strange way of wording it if he thought death to be an impassible barrier between the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant. Not only are the faithful departed depicted as a “cloud of witnesses” encompassing us, but believers in their earthly sojourn are depicted as having already joined them in Heaven, “And hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:6)
The New Testament teaches that on the first Whitsunday (the Christian Pentecost), the Holy Ghost came down from Heaven and united the disciples with Jesus Christ, Who had died, descended as Conqueror into Hell (the Kingdom of death), rose again from the dead, and ascended to Heaven where He sat down at the right hand of God the Father. This union formed the Church, a united body in which Jesus Christ is Head, and all who are baptized into the Christian faith are members. In the establishment of the Church the Old Testament saints, that is, those in the Old Testament who were not just members of the Covenant nation of Israel physically, but were also members of the spiritual Congregation of the Lord, who had been awaiting their redemption in the Kingdom of death, were released by Jesus Christ, and taken up to Heaven with Him when He returned there, were also joined that all of God’s saints in all ages would be part of the one Body of Christ. In the Church, each individual Christian is united with Jesus Christ, and through Jesus Christ with each other. Jesus Christ having already conquered death, believers being described as having “passed from death unto life” (past tense) and having “everlasting life” (present tense) in this life (Jn. 5:24), death cannot break this union and divide those who have departed this world from those who remain. In Jesus Christ and to Jesus Christ, all believers are alive eternally:
I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. (Jn. 11:25-26)
After all, as He said to the Sadducees in rebuking their denial of the resurrection, “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living” (Mk. 12:27).
This is what the Communion of the Saints that we confess in the Apostles’ Creed is all about.
Those who condemn the practice of asking the Church Triumphant to pray with you and for you just as you might ask the person sitting in the pew next to you to do so seem to have a much harder time in affirming this New Testament truth as those of us who do not wish to throw the Catholic baby out with the Roman bathwater have in affirming the truth of Jesus’ sole Mediatorship – even Rome affirms this – which they think, mistakenly, they are safeguarding. That is a pretty strong indicator that they are the ones in error here.
Another such indicator is how quickly they descend into vulgar abuse when they cannot answer questions. Unable to answer how their position is consistent with the New Testament teaching that all believers are one in Him to Whom there is no living and dead, they resort to accusations of occult superstition. Asking the departed faithful to pray for you, they say, violates the Old Testament prohibitions against such things as necromancy, witchcraft, séances and the like. Anybody who knows anything about these practices knows that they are worlds removed from asking the faithful departed for their prayers. The practices condemned in the Old Testament involve summoning the spirits of the dead as if they were your personal slaves, either to obtain information from them, use them to manipulate the natural world in a supernatural way, or both. There is no acknowledgement of God in these practices, the spirits of the dead qua spirits of the dead are invoked, the power to summon them is thought to be inherent in either the ritual used or the summonor, and the power to do what the summonor wants or tell him what he wants is thought to belong to the spirit. Suggesting that the Catholic practice falls into this category is just a cheap insult. The type one would expect from the sort of person who speaks of ecclesiastical bodies which confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, in the words of the ancient Creeds, as possessing the “spirit of Antichrist”.
The New Testament tells us who “Antichrist” is. “Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ?” St. John writes in 1 John 2:22, “He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son.” The Patriarch of Rome has been guilty of overstepping the boundaries of his jurisdiction, usurping a supremacy over the entire Church, and teaching various errors, among them his own infallibility, but as someone who confesses the faith of Jesus Christ in the orthodox form of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and governs a Church that confesses this, the Apostles’ and the Athanasian Creeds, he cannot be the Antichrist. What does it say about Hyper-Protestants that whenever they use the word “Antichrist” it is in association with the Roman Patriarch and his Church?
Indeed, there is another type of Hyper-Protestant than the Calvinist type I have been addressing. In addition to identifying the Patriarch of Rome as the “Antichrist” and the Church he governs as “Mystery Babylon”, this type insists that that adherents of another world religion that literally fits the description of the Antichrist in 1 John 2:22 in that it, like Christianity, claims to have inherited the mantle of the Old Testament religion but departs from Christianity on precisely the point that it denies “that Jesus is the Christ”, cannot be criticized without incurring the curse of Genesis 12:3, as if St. Paul had not identified for Christians once and for all Who the Seed of Abraham is in Galatians 3:16. I know Hyper-Protestants of this type who cannot stand to hear anything negative, no matter how true, said about this other world religion and its adherents, but who believe and regurgitate every last piece of conspiratorial drivel they hear, not only about the Patriarch of Rome and his Church, but about all the ancient Churches so that basically, while believing nothing but good about people who deny that Jesus is the Christ, they write off the vast majority of people in the world today and who have ever lived who confess that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God, their Lord and Saviour, since the majority of people in the world today and who have ever lived who confess Jesus as Christ, Son of God, Lord and Saviour, have belonged to the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and other ancient Churches. These same Hyper-Protestants claim to be Spirit-filled and Spirit-led Christians. One would think that if the Spirit that filled and led them were the Holy Ghost, He would convict them of the sin of participating in the last socially acceptable bigotry (except the genocidal anti-white racial hatred currently being displayed by “anti-racist” academics and activists), anti-Catholic bigotry.
Be a Protestant, but don’t be a Hyper-Protestant nut! — Gerry T. Neal
Social Media Erupts After Skittles’ ‘Black Trans Lives Matter’ Packaging Goes Viral
Social Media Erupts After Skittles’ ‘Black Trans Lives Matter’ Packaging Goes Viral
ByZach Jewell•Aug 12, 2023 DailyWire.com•
Skittles is facing backlash after images of its “Pride” packaging, featuring pro-trans statements, went viral on social media Friday.
The candy packaging that Skittles advertises on its website features slogans such as “Joy Is Resistance” and “Black Trans Lives Matter.” Skittles, which is owned by Mars, partnered with GLAAD, a media monitoring organization that espouses radical gender theory, to reveal the packaging for Pride Month earlier this year.
This past June was the fourth year Skittles partnered with GLAAD “to support the LGBTQ+ community by amplifying and celebrating their stories,” according to its website. Skittles said it will “donate $1 for every Skittles Pride pack sold to GLAAD in support of their ongoing efforts to work through media to combat anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination.”
On its website, Skittles also promoted a podcast called “Queery” hosted by Cameron Esposito, who focuses on LGBTQ topics and activism.
“Stay tuned for a special Pride-themed miniseries of Queery where we dive deeper into queer storytelling and the artists that designed this year’s SKITTLES Pride Packs,” the candy brand says. https://339c8f3d452ce84a85201d7cd1d1f076.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-40/html/container.htmlhttps://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-0
For a short time in 2020, Skittles “gave up” the rainbow that famously dons its colorful packaging for a black and white package to “give the rainbow back” to the LGBTQ community for Pride Month. https://339c8f3d452ce84a85201d7cd1d1f076.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-40/html/container.html
Conservatives ripped Skittles after images of packaging went viral on social media, saying the candy brand is targeting children with a pro-trans agenda. Skittles is a favorite brand among children and young adults, with over 75% of Gen Z adults holding a favorable impression of the brand, according to a Morning Consult survey released last year.
“[Skittles] is trying to turn your kids into BLM & LGBTQ+ activists,” popular account Libs of TikTok wrote on X. “Their packaging also features a drag queen. Skittles have gone completely woke.”
“WTH? Skittles is Now Marketing Woke Idiocy To Children On Their Candy Wrappers!” another person said. “This isn’t an Adult Beverage, Like Bud Light They Warned us They Were Coming After Our Kids- Let’s Make Sure They Hear Our Response Loud and Clear On This One Skittles- And
Others said Mars, Skittles’ parent company, will get “the Bud Light treatment” after pushing radical gender theory on its customers. Bud Light’s maker Anheuser-Busch lost billions in market value after partnering with trans activist Dylan Mulvaney, who showcased a can with his face on it in a viral video.
Mars isn’t the first candy company to face backlash this year for pushing radical gender theory. In March, Hershey’s faced a boycott after featuring Fae Johnstone, a man who identifies as transgender, as part of its International Women’s Day promotion. In response, Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing launched Jeremy’s Chocolate, featuring He/Him and She/Her chocolate bars.
Gus Stefanis Speaks on Protesting Drag Queen Library Readings for Children
CAFE Activists At Toronto Freedom RALLY
Barbenheimer Meets the Terminator
Throne, Altar, Liberty
The Canadian Red Ensign
![The Canadian Red Ensign](https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ShJ56ncRijQ/Vic7ppYOalI/AAAAAAAAABc/d3gWM-vfhbM/s1600-r/red%2Bensign.jpg)
Friday, August 4, 2023
Barbenheimer Meets the Terminator
Just when everyone thought that the combination of two and a half years of bat flu paranoia, online streaming services, and new film releases consisting mostly of the double digit latest instalments in series that everyone had grown tired of at least a decade ago had finally killed off the cinema, Barbenheimer – the simultaneous release of the films Barbie and Oppenheimer -brought the teetering industry back from the brink of bankruptcy, as both films broke box office records their opening weekend. The meme itself, which encouraged people to watch both as a double feature, probably had something to do with it. I don’t know who exactly came up with it. There is a well-known phenomenon in which rival film studies release similar films around the same time – think Deep Impact and Armageddon in 1998, for one example. This is obviously the exact opposite of that, two movies that could hardly be more different from each other being released at the same. Of course this is not exactly an unusual phenomenon. Arguably, it occurs every weekend. In this case, however, the difference between the two seems to have struck someone, or rather a whole lot of someones as the popularity of the meme attests, as being much larger than is usual. Or maybe it was just the catchiness of the portmanteau. The first is a live action comedy featuring Margot Robbie as the fashion doll upon which Mattel built its toy empire. The second is a three hour biopic starring Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist from Berkeley who was led the Manhattan Project in uncorking the bottle and releasing the genie of nuclear weapons into the world. With Barbie being only an hour shorter than Oppenheimer, bringing the total running time of the two to five hours, it would have been a long night at the movies for anyone who took the meme literally. Not, “watch the entire Ring cycle in one sitting” long, but a step in that direction.
Barbie proved to be the bigger hit of the two, taking in almost twice as much as Oppenheimer. Since it is a highly politicized movie, a fact the filmmakers made no attempt to hide prior to release, some have jumped on this as debunking the maxim “go woke, go broke”. An op-ed cartoon in the Baltimore Sun, for example, depicts Ron DeSantis as saying “go woke go broke” as he is trampled by a mob rushing into a theatre showing Barbie. Tori Otten wrote an editorial for The New Republic maintaining that the Barbie opening weekend sales debunk the saying that she dubs “far right”. Perhaps she has never heard of the other saying “the exception that proves the rule”. That might be what we are seeing here. Then again, the rule may simply not apply. The implications of “go woke go broke” are that companies that were originally apolitical and sold their products to a general consumer base will lose a lot of customers if they start injecting politics, especially of the obnoxious, preachy, ultra-left kind that is now called “woke”, into their brand. What happened with Bud Light earlier this year is the textbook example. Or, and this is particularly the case when it comes to pop culture, if a story or character originally created to appeal to the kinds of people the woke hate is suddenly given a woke makeover, it is not likely to go over well. If someone were to film a remake of Dirty Harry, for example, telling the story from the perspective of the liberal mayor and police commissioner, with Inspector Callahan breaking down into tears, coming around to their point of view, throwing away his .44 Magnum instead of his star, and hugging Scorpio and begging his forgiveness, then I would expect that movie to do exceptionally poorly in the box office. A movie, on the other hand, about the doll that has been associated with the Helen Gurley Brown “you can have it all, girl” type feminism from pretty much the day Ruth Handler ripped her off from a more risqué German doll marketed for adult males and repackaged her in a pink box for girls, is not likely to be harmed at the box office by its having a feminist message.
Amusingly, the film preaches feminism in such a way as to completely undermine its message. *spoiler alert* The title character, a feminist of the Cosmo type her brand has long represented, lives in a world inhabited by her multiple versions, and the other characters of the franchise. That world is a complete gynocracy. Most people would probably call it a matriarchy but none of the females who rule the place seem to have any maternal instincts – except discontinued pregnant Midge – so gynocracy makes more sense. To “stereotypical Barbie” this is a utopia. It is also a mirror-image parody of what feminists think the world looked like before feminism and would still look like without feminism. Barbie thinks that due to her influence the real world is like hers. Then she has to visit it and discovers that it is not. In the real world she is verbally dressed down by a young girl who spouts the extra crazy version of feminism that thinks that women are all oppressed “A Handmaid’s Tale” style in the Western world today and that Barbie is the “fascist” enabler of said oppression. This girl and her mother end up going back with Barbie to Barbieland, where they discover that it has been taken over by Ryan Gosling’s Ken, who had gone to the real world with Barbie, read about “patriarchy” in a library, went home and easily replaced the gynocracy with what he thought “patriarchy” was. Note that patriarchy is the term feminists use for a society ruled by men qua men, who oppress women qua women, basically the Marxist concept of haves oppressing have nots, with the sexes taking the place of the economic classes. The same objection that I made to matriarchy earlier apply to this usage of patriarchy. The term logically suggests the traditional authority belonging to fathers which is a good thing not a bad thing. Androcracy would be a better word for what the feminists are talking about. It is not likely to catch on, but then as the thing it would denote only exists – and only ever has existed – in the fevered brains of feminists, it is not really needed.
Now, and this is the point, nobody with an IQ over ten who watches this movie is going to think that the actual world around them either a) resembles Barbieland with the sex/gender roles reversed or b) resembles Kendom, the weird caricature that the idea of “patriarchy” inspired Ken to create. Especially since in the movie, Barbie herself, after restoring her world to the way it was, sort of, opts to leave Barbieland for the real world and become a real girl with the help of the ghost of Ruth Handler, played by Rhea Perlman, who for some unexplained reason has the same powers as the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio.
Something similar can be said about the movie’s man-bashing, which Piers Morgan and others have criticized. (1) Yes, the movie does depict its male characters as stupid, incompetent, clumsy and boorish. I can’t imagine anyone, however, who has not already been thoroughly brainwashed by feminism, watching the movie, and thinking that this is an accurate depiction of men. Nor, I suspect, are many likely to be persuaded to think that the film’s portrayal of men accurately depicts how men see women, which is obviously the point it is, at least on the surface, trying to make. It is simply too much of a caricature to be taken seriously. The film comes across as pretending to promote feminism while actually satirizing it. Except that this does not mesh well with anything else I have ever heard about filmmaker Greta Gerwig, I would be inclined to say this must be intentional.
Many have criticized Barbie as being far too political for a children’s movie and this criticism would be accurate regardless of whether it is the woke, feminist, propaganda that on the surface it can be read as or whether it is actually the most brilliant, satirical, takedown of the same ever made. Except, of course, that it is obviously not a children’s movie as ought to be evident from the rating. Like G. I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009) and its sequel, and the more successful Transformers film series, also based on children’s toys, this film’s target audience is not children playing with the toys today, but the children who played with the toys decades ago and are today adults, if only in the sense of having passed the age of majority.
Oppenheimer seems set to become Christopher Nolan’s most successful film yet. It would probably have done even better if he had not insisted on shooting it only in IMAX, forcing moviegoers to either pay the steep price of an IMAX ticket or watch it in a theatre for which it is not really formatted. It is a very timely film. I suspect that a lot of people would agree with that statement because, due to the war between Russia and Ukraine and NATO’s involvement in said conflict on Ukraine’s side, we are closer to nuclear war than we have been since the Cold War ended. That is certainly a valid reason for thinking the film to be timely It is not the reason behind my statement, however. Before looking at that reason a few remarks about the movie are in order.
The film does not just cover the period in which the atomic bomb was being developed. It also looks at Oppenheimer’s revulsion at the destructive fruit that his efforts produced, his unsuccessful attempts to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle and the ensuing falling away between him and his former colleagues. The movie zig-zags between this latter part of Oppenheimer’s life, the period in which he led the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory, and an even earlier, pre-war period of his career. In this earlier period he apparently identified as Snow White’s evil stepmother. Or, at any rate, he tried to dispatch his tutor, Lord Patrick Blackett, played in the film by James D’Arcy, in the same manner employed by the witch in her final attempt on Snow White’s life. Since the apple went uneaten, neither dwarves nor prince were needed. Pity. They would have been available for the movie since Disney kicked them out of its new ultra-woke live action remake of Snow White.
In the storyline about the post-war part of his life the dominant theme is the growing animosity between him and US Atomic Energy Commission chair Lewis Strauss, portrayed in the film by Robert Downey Jr. The film is shot partly in black and white, partly in colour, with the colour parts depicting when the story is told from Oppenheimer’s point of view, the black and white depicting when it is told from Strauss’ point of view. It is best to know that going into the theatre because otherwise the natural assumption would be to think it had something to do with the different timeframes the movie keeps switching between. The contest between Oppenheimer and Strauss culminated in the 1954 AEC hearings in which Oppenheimer was asked about his Communist associations (before the war his social circle included several Communists, including his pre-war girlfriend Jean Tatlock, portrayed by Florence Pugh in the movie, Katherine “Kitty” Puening, portrayed by Emily Blunt in the movie, who became his wife, and his younger brother Frank, portrayed by Dylan Arnold) and stripped of his security clearance. Strauss’s purpose in these hearings was more to publicly humiliate Oppenheimer than to harm him professionally – the clearance was set to expire the day after he was stripped of it. Ultimately, it cost Strauss his own appointment to Eisenhower’s cabinet as Secretary of Commerce when the US Senate voted against confirmation of the appointment in part because of the lobbying of scientists looking to avenge Oppenheimer. In depicting these events Nolan does not stray from the Hollywood party-line on “McCarthyism”, which is not surprising since if any film since John Wayne starred in Big Jim McLain in 1952, two years before the Oppenheimer hearings, has dared to tell the other side of the story I am not aware of it. Accordingly the film’s precise historical accuracy fails somewhat on this point. That Strauss in hauling Oppenheimer before the AEC’s Personnel Security Board was carrying out a personal vendetta is accurate enough. That the charges against him were bogus, well, that is not as clear as the film suggests and as many people think. That J. Brandon Magoo took it upon himself, last December, to indulge in the empty gesture of voiding the revocation of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance, suggests there might have been more to the charges than meets the eye.
The reason, however, that I said that Oppenheimer is a very timely film, is not the Russia-Ukrainian War and the renewed threat of nuclear annihilation that the repentant Oppenheimer felt to be the inevitable outcome of his work nor does it have anything to do with Communism. A notable moment in the film is when the title character quotes “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” upon his realization of just what he had unleashed, a line which earlier he had translated upon request from his pre-war Commie girlfriend during an, ahem, intimate moment. The classical Sanskrit original of the quote comes from the Bhagavad Gita, an important section of the sixth parva or book of the Mahabharata, the longest epic poem still extent and one of the principal Hindu scriptures. In its original context, the line is spoken by Krishna, avatar of the Hindu supreme deity Vishnu, to Prince Arjuna, the hero of the epic, and its intent is to convince Arjuna to go to war. When Oppenheimer took to quoting this line in his post-war life it was rather to the opposite effect of this. Another contrast, however, jumps out. Oppenheimer in his testimony before the USAEC Personnel Security Board in 1954 said:
When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.
George Grant, the greatest thinker my country, the Dominion of Canada, has ever produced, was as fond of quoting these words, especially the first part up to the words “do it”, as Oppenheimer himself was of quoting the line from the Gita. Grant believed that in these words Oppenheimer had captured the spirit that animates Modern technological progress and had also expressed in the same words, the very thing that was objectionable, or at the very least problematic from a Christian, ethical, and philosophical point of view, in said progress. The question of whether or not something should be done is made subordinate to the question of whether or not something can be done and postponed until it is too late to ask the question because the damage has already been done. Given what has already been noted about Oppenheimer’s thoughts, later in life, towards the atomic bomb, his words have the force of a mea maxima culpa.
As the trailers for Barbie and Oppenheimer were released and the hype for these movies grew we began to hear story after story about another technological genie in the process of being released from its bottle. That is the genie of artificial intelligence or AI.
That AI poses a threat to mankind as great or greater than that of the Manhattan Project’s invention is something that even Elon Musk, the last person on earth one would suspect harboured technoskeptical sentiments, suggested that the brakes be applied. Indeed, the man behind Tesla has been issuing these warnings for quite some time. The AI threat that he has been talking about is a lot more serious than the threat to their careers that the striking Hollywood actors began to perceive about the time AI channels began to flood Youtube offering us artificially generated covers of every song ever written by every artist that never covered it. About five years ago he warned that AI was like “summoning the devil”, that it needed to be proactively regulated, because “By the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it will be too late”, that it could produce an “immortal dictator from which we would never escape” and posed “a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization”.
Of course when it comes to warning about AI, Musk was beaten to the punch by decades by a film maker. As you have probably deduced from the title of this essay I am talking about James Cameron. In Ottawa a couple of weeks ago, when he was asked by CTV News Chief Political Correspondent Vassy Kapelos to comment about recent warnings regarding AI he said “I warned you guys in 1984, and you didn’t listen.”
1984, in addition to being the title of George Orwell’s novel warning about a totalitarian dystopia, was the year that Cameron released The Terminator. Directed and co-written by Cameron, this film starred Arnold Schwarzenegger in the title role as a cyborg assassin, sent back in time to assassinate Sarah Connor, the character played by Linda Hamilton. The Terminator was sent by Skynet, an Artificial Intelligence designed by Cyberdyne Systems and placed in charge of nuclear defences that would declare war on humanity in the future and eventually be defeated by a resistance led by Sarah Connor’s son John. The future John Connor, to protect his mother and his own existence from the Terminator, sends one of his men, Kyle Reese, portrayed by Michael Biehn back in time to protect Sarah. Reese, over the course of the movie, becomes John Connor’s father, and he and Sarah eventually defeat the Terminator at the cost of his own life. Before the Terminator is destroyed it loses an arm, however, which in the first of many sequels it is revealed falls into the hands of the creators of the future AI enemy of mankind, becoming the means by which they learn how to develop that technology in the first place.
Throughout the Terminator movie franchise both sides are constantly struggling to prevent an outcome that proves to be inevitable. Skynet is constantly fighting against its own future defeat at the hands of the resistance, the Connors and their allies are constantly trying to prevent the rise of Skynet. The fatality both are fighting a losing battle against arises out of the dilemma attached to the concept of time travel, that if you go back in time to change something, after having changed it you lose the motive to have gone back in time to begin with. The present attempt to prevent AI from becoming the threat already visible on the horizon of the future often seems similarly futile but it is not. The battle is not against a future that cannot be changed because it is the fixed reference point for everyone working to change it in the past as in the movies. It is against a future that is only inevitable if we continue to accept the idea that when it comes to science and technology, we must first find out if something can be done, and, after having done it, only then ask the question whether we should have done it or not. We must reject, in other words, the Oppenheimer ethic, and in its place firmly establish – or re-establish – the idea that we must first ask the question of whether or not something should be done, and not bother at all with the question of whether it can be done unless the answer to the first question is firmly determined to be yes.
If we don’t, we are at risk of unleashing a technological threat that would render the “battle of the sexes” type controversy surrounding the first of the movies discussed here moot. For if soulless, sexless, machines take over the world, this would indeed be an end to any sort of “patriarchy”, real or imagined, but it would also be “Hasta la vista, Barbie”.
(1) I find it hilarious that Piers Morgan has been taking this both personally and far more seriously than I have. Morgan is liberal on most social and moral issues, albeit liberal in the sense of thirty years ago rather than today. Indeed, the question he posed in ranting about Barbie’s man-bashing was “why does empowering women have to be about trashing men?” He framed it in that way to indicate his support for “empowering women”. Frankly, I think there is far too much “empowering” going on in this day and age. While people who talk about empowerment generally conceive of it in terms of self-fulfillment, in reality power is the ability to coerce others to do your will. It is something that is very dangerous and needs to be constantly held in check and under control. What is sorely needed today is not for more people of more types to have more power, as the left thinks, but a restoration and revival of authority, the respected right to lead, vested by prescription – the quality of having been tested and proven since time immemorial – in traditional institutions, the only thing capable of containing power and bending it to serve the ends of civilization, rather than unleashing it in a destructive manner. The terms “patriarchy” and “matriarchy” if they were used to mean what their component parts suggest, which neither of them is, would denote fatherly and motherly authority respectively, both good things, -archy being the suffix corresponding to authority as –cracy is the suffix corresponding to power. As far as “empowering women” specifically goes, I am unapologetically of the same mind as Dr. Johnson, “nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little”, and Stephen Leacock, “women need not more freedom but less”, and think that every wave of feminism, including the first, was based on a fundamentally erroneous miscalculation of how little power women already had in the world, but did not take offense at this movie the way Morgan did. — Gerry T. Neal
Labels: AI, Barbie, Christopher Nolan, Cilian Murphy, Dr. Johnson, Elon Musk, George Grant, Greta Gerwig, J. Robert Oppenheimer, James Cameron, Lewis Strauss, Margot Robbie, Piers Morgan, Stephen Leacock, The Terminator
TAMARA LICH IS COMING! FREEDOM EVENTS IN THE OKANAGAN, August 5-11
TAMARA LICH IS COMING! FREEDOM EVENTS IN THE OKANAGAN, August 5-11 Penticton4 Freedom | Aug 4, 2023, 3:50 PM (15 hours ago) |
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Penticton 4 Freedom Weekly Newsletter
WHAT’S IN THIS ISSUE:
– Rallies and local events
– Tamara Lich Summer Book Tour
– Saturday, August 5 Kelowna Rally 12:00 Stuart Park, Kelowna
– Mama Bears Project update – video and resources for pregnant and nursing moms
– Smart Cities
– Freedom Rising Newsletter –Issue 53 – Support Pastor Artur Pawlowski
– Support NHPPA’s Say Goodbye! Campaign locally
– Druthers The June and July editions at our rallies! Donations are always appreciated.
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In case you missed events this past week …
We had the full set of the elementary Tuttle Twins books there to continue our discussion of the law and economies represented in these books. We looked at the concept of “spontaneous order” through a story about the simple pencil – a product that could never be made by any single person, but which involves the collaboration of thousands of people in the production chain, each of whom may not even know any of the others.
Just as we were setting up, a gentleman came by who raised goats as workers (not for food but for lawn mowing). That attracted more than half a dozen families with children wanting to pet the goats. Mary Lou invited a couple of them over to look at the Tuttle Twins, and one six-year-old was enthusiastic about having The Miraculous Pencil read to her while we were waiting for the late arrivals.
Afterwards, we sat and discussed some of the concepts in the books and the original sources on which they were based. There was some interest shown in restarting a book club like the one we held in 2021 about the classic book The Law by Frederic Bastiat. If interested, you can find a pdf download of the book at https://cdn.mises.org/thelaw.pdf and on many other sites, as well as purchase your own hard copy through Amazon and others. News of any book club will be posted as we learn about it.
Once all the latecomers had arrived, we had our usual open mic with updates from Kevin and others. Upcoming events are also listed below.
FAMILY FREEDOM EVENTS – Penticton4Freedom – every Sunday from 1 to 3 p.m.
COMING UP THIS SUNDAY
Continuing the Law and Economics discussion, this Sunday we’ll share a bit of how our current monetary system got started and why it’s so corrupt. Anyone who has read even a summary of The Creature from Jekyll Island, is most welcome to take the mic and share with us. And as always – an open mic.
Now being held at Lakawanna Park during the summer months
Moving to Lakawanna Park for the summer gives our events a more family-friendly name and environment as part of reaching out to the community around us. Lots of families at the beach. Lots of folks are out strolling.
Laureen’s table with important information and a petition to end BCs Bill 36.
Elsie’s table with Druthers newspapers, Vaccine Choice Canada handouts and more, for parents and curious others.
Local speakers always, and Surprise Guest Speakers frequently!
And sometimes… wait for it… Derrick’s mobile freedom billboard!
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Please arrive early (12:30) to help set up the stage and the tables, and to invite passers-by to join us.
Miss a week and you miss a lot! Fighting for freedom is more fun with friends. Bring a few. Suggest a topic or a speaker, and we’ll be happy to find someone to share their knowledge with us. ——————————- o0o————————————- OTHERS’ EVENTS · Kelowna CLEAR Rallies – 1st Saturday of each month at noon – Stuart Park, Kelowna · Oliver Rally – in front of city hall – Saturdays at 12:30 p.m. · Local A4C – Every Tuesday at Noon Protesting with Purpose: Richard Cannings 301 Main Street Penticton – Next Planning Meeting August 15th at 4:30 p.m. – Winepress Church ~ · Check online for school board meetings and city council meetings in your area. They’ve been changing dates lately. ——————————————- o0o————————————————- EVENTS HOLD THE LINE Tamara Lich Summer Book Tour Check out: https://www.theconvoybook.com/ For tour dates in B.C. Surrey event is sold |
More info on other dates, including Kelowna, shortly! ——————————- o0o————————————- Saturday, August 5, 2023, Kelowna Rally 12:00 Stuart Park, Kelowna Erica and Nadia will be discussing the new Kelowna chapter to deal with 15 min prison cities, how and what Kelowna is actually doing, and how YOU can participate!! |
More info on Smart Cities further along in this email.
WORTH A LOOK Mama Bears Update – Protecting Pregnant and Nursing Mothers https://mamabearsproject.com/protect-pregnancy-campaign/ While there, check out the Mental Health Program The introductory video is two hours long but filled with information and the page has multiple resources available as well. https://mamabearsproject.com/mental-health-program/ The Mama Bears Project was originally all about COVID-19, and the group has taken on a new focus – to become a complete resource for Canadian parents. Their new website is a great start and worth a look. https://mamabearsproject.com/ Their process includes a call-out to other child-focused organizations to reach out and provide links to their materials as well. As well, they are engaging in a number of major campaigns through collaboration with those other groups, in particular, partnering with the Canadian Covid Care Alliance as the research arm to provide science-based evidence. https://www.canadiancovidcarealliance.org/ It’s All About the Children It’s Okay to Wait Education is the first step before meaningful action can be taken ——————————- o0o————————————- The description of Smart Cities below comes from New Zealand, the first country with all of their municipalities on side with the agenda. We post it here as a fuller look at what’s happening The video will take just over an hour and a half to listen to and is very well done. CLOSER TO HOME: An active group in the Central Kootenays has booked a series of 21 Town Hall meetings where they plan to be present in numbers. Their latest newsletter is here: https://conta.cc/43Pey9K including their contact information. Teri is already connected with this network so you might want to talk with her about any plans for the Penticton area. Smart Cities First, they will promote them as being convenient. Then they will promote them as supporting the environment. Then they will promote them as being voluntary. Then they will become mandatory with fines. Then you will be prohibited from traveling unless you comply with gov’t legislation and orders. Then you’ll be prohibited from traveling unless you are part of the gov’t. Even your dogs will not be allowed more than 15 min from home https://madmaxworld.tv/watch?id=643260a279a0486afc3f5ac6 Samantha Edwards Report – Unmasking the Smart City Agenda —-o0o—- Penticton’s own North Gateway Plan https://www.penticton.ca/business-building/planning-land-use/neighbourhood-plans/north-gateway-plan Other items to check out: https://t.me/thetrutherist/639 https://globalnews.ca/news/9483836/15-minute-city-edmonton-canada/ ——————————- o0o————————————- Action-Packed Freedom Rising Newsletter Issue 53 – Support Pastor Artur Pawlowski HERE This newsletter is now delivered only every 2 weeks~ Life is meant to be enjoyed and summer is the time to do it! Of Special Note in this latest Freedom Rising newsletter is the NHPPA’s Say Goodbye! Campaign https://nhppa.org/?p=23427 Next time you drop by your local health food/supplements store, please encourage them to participate in this campaign. The SOS postcard campaign put out by their membership association was steering them in the wrong direction – simply asking for a lowering of fines, rather than the deregulation of the entire industry, which is the ultimate goal of the NHPPA. ——————————- o0o————————————- |
My friends, it has been an incredible journey so far with this grass roots, people powered project called Druthers. With your help, we have printed & distributed an astounding ~ 8 MILLION Druthers Newspapers ~ all across Canada since this all began back in December 2020! DONATE HERE: donorbox.org/druthers With 8 million of these papers planting seeds of mind opening thoughts into our communities all over Canada, (distributed by 1000’s of passionate readers) you know we are having a tremendous impact in a few different ways. 1. Sharing honest news & information helps more people recognize a bigger agenda. And when enough people see, WE WILL MAKE CHANGES for the better. 2. For those who do already see, Druthers papers provide a powerful, FREE TOOL which they can use directly in their own local communities. 3. For many people receiving the paper, IT GIVES HOPE to know they are not alone in their ways of thinking and seeing the world. 4. It empowers everyone to be wisdom & STRENGTH TO SAY NO when things are being pushed upon them which they do not agree with. 5. A wonderful, VIBRANT COMMUNITY of freedom-minded people from all walks of life has formed around this project, all across Canada, and beyond. Almost 3 years and we’re still cranking them out at just 10 CENTS per paper! It is important that we keep this project going and your support truly is the only way we are able to keep putting out 250,000 Druthers papers each month. DONATE HERE – LAST DAY – PLEASE HELP It costs $25k per month to keep 250,000 papers flowing freely, so please give generously, or whatever you are able. Every dime you contribute means 1 Druthers newspaper gets printed and then placed in someone’s hands or mailbox here in Canada. How many dimes can you pitch in this month? Much love, Shawn Jason >> GO TO FUNDRAISING PAGE Read August Issue Online. Pick up the July edition Covering news and information that mainstream media won’t. The online edition appears before the print edition and the printed version of the August issue will not likely arrive in the Okanagan until mid-August. The link above is for the September edition. As a former newsletter publisher, I am very familiar with production cycles and the need to finance each production before you hit the presses. Our contribution from funds raised at our rallies for the August issue was only $100. We urge you to drop a few dollars in the Druthers box at our rallies each week. The price of a Tim’s or Starbuck’s take-out latte each week would make a huge difference to the number of copies that can be printed. DRUTHERS was able to print an extra 5,000 copies for the Okanagan because of our Penticton4Freedom donations to the June edition ($500), but continuing support is needed to keep the paper coming. Thank you for being an everyday hero by donating, reading, sharing and distributing Druthers copies in your area. Mary Lou Read DRUTHERS |
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JOIN THE TEAM!
Want to join the fun in one of these initiatives or suggest another more important to you?
Just reply to this email or call 780-908-0309 to offer your help and suggestions.
Better yet, show up at our rallies, meet some fellow freedom lovers, and pitch in where your interests lead you.
And receive lots of ((( FREEDOM HUGS! ))) (if you want them)
A Huge Thank You goes out to Gina, for putting together the weekly P4F newsletter and making sure it shows up in your inbox every week.
Remember that Freedom Hugs are available at ALL our Penticton4Freedom events!
Let’s make this weekend AMAZING!!
~ Mary Lou Gutscher
780-908-0309
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Crime And No Punishment
Throne, Altar, Liberty
The Canadian Red Ensign
![The Canadian Red Ensign](https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ShJ56ncRijQ/Vic7ppYOalI/AAAAAAAAABc/d3gWM-vfhbM/s1600-r/red%2Bensign.jpg)
Wednesday, July 26, 2023
Crime And No Punishment
I recently returned to Winnipeg after visiting my father on his farm where the radio is constantly tuned to 880 CKLQ the country and western station out of Brandon. On the morning of the day I drove back they played a familiar classic by Merle Haggard, “Mama Tried”. The song is semi-autobiographical, written in reflection on the time the to-be country star served in San Quentin for an attempted robbery in Bakersfield. I say semi-autobiographical for while Haggard did indeed reach the age of majority in prison the sentence he was serving was nowhere near as severe as the lyrics suggest:
And I turned twenty-one in prison doin’ life without parole
No one could steer me right but Mama tried, Mama tried
Mama tried to raise me better, but her pleading, I denied
That leaves only me to blame ’cause Mama tried
When I listened to these familiar words again this time it occurred to me to wonder what on earth someone would actually have to do to be sentenced to life in prison without parole while still a minor. Even in 1957 when Haggard was convicted it would have had to have been a lot more than what he did. California was not as crime-friendly then as it is today but they would not have locked a minor up and thrown away the key for an unsuccessful break and entry in which no one was hurt, not even with all of his priors. His actual sentence was fifteen years of which he served three. Today, it is highly unlikely that anyone in any jurisdiction outside of Texas would receive such a sentence for a similar crime.
All across North America today, both in the United States and in my country, the Dominion of Canada, major cities have seen a massive rise in violent crime especially in, but by no means limited to, their downtown, core, neighbourhoods. More than one factor has contributed to this urban crime crisis, of course. One of the disturbing aspects about the crisis is that “unprovoked random attacks” by strangers, i.e., when someone you don’t know from Adam comes up to you and assaults you for no discernable reason, which were previously very rare, have spiked and account for a huge percentage of the crime wave. Two explanations for this jump to mind. The first is the vast increase in mental illness over the last three years induced by idiotic governments forcing people into social isolation for long periods of time in a failed and absurd attempt to protect them from a respiratory disease that in most cases had only mild symptoms and from which the vast majority fully recovered. The second is the increase in drug abuse, particularly of paranoia-inducing substances like crystal meth, which is partly due to the same thing that caused the uptick in mental illness, but which is also the result of stupid politicians having prioritized in their drug policy the making drug use safe for users over the safety of others who might be harmed by drug-induced violence.
These factors, while they help account for random stranger attacks, do not in themselves explain the larger urban crime crisis. Another factor that significantly contributes to the overall rise in urban crime is the soft-on-crime attitude promoted by the sort of people who like to think that being forward-minded, progressive, and liberal amounts to being enlightened and that they are therefore more enlightened than others. This attitude has in recent years been translated into various sorts of bad policies that are often described as “catch and release” or “revolving door”. These include sentences that are too short or too soft, parole being too easily obtained and too early, and, more recently, pretrial release being too easily obtained even with multiple prior convictions. This latter, due no doubt to its relative novelty, is the most discussed at the moment. In several American jurisdictions liberals have demanded and sometimes obtained the elimination of cash bail either entirely, as in Illinois as of New Year’s Day this year, or for all but the most heinous of crimes, as in New York four years ago. In Canada, criminal law falls under the jurisdiction of the Dominion government, even though in practice its day to day administration is carried out by the provinces, and so provincial premiers and legislatures cannot enact such policies within their own provinces the way American state governments can. Not that any of the current provincial premiers would want to do so. In January of this year all provincial and territory premiers signed a letter unanimously calling on the Dominion government to enact bail reform of the opposite sort to that of the just mentioned Illinois and New York examples, the toughening of bail laws to make it much harder for a repeat offender or one likely to repeat, to be released back into the public. Unfortunately, the Canadian politicians most in sync with American liberals in their thinking on this matter happen to be the ones in power at the Dominion level.
In 2018, while they still had a majority government, the Liberals introduced Bill C-75 which passed Parliament the following year. Bill C-75 contained a number of amendments to the Criminal Code and related legislation such as the Youth Criminal Justice Act. While I consider most, if not all, of these amendments to be bad, they fall into three categories. The first is those which are bad for reasons that are not germane to what we are discussing here, such as the lowering of the age of consent for anal sex. The second consists of amendments that limit the traditional rights of Canadians when accused of crimes. Examples include the near-elimination of preliminary inquiries (intended to speed cases through the court system this has the opposite effect and so infringes on the right to a speedy trial), the abolition of peremptory challenge in juror selection (this infringes as it was intended to do on the defense’s right to exclude those prejudiced against the accused from the jury system), and allowing police to testify via affidavit (this infringes on the right of the accused to confront and cross-examine his accuser). What needs to be said about these amendments is that while they do not err in the direction of being soft-on-crime in the sense we have been discussing (1) they are not legitimate steps in the opposite direction either. There are a lot of people who confuse the rights of the accused with soft-on-crime but they are very different. The rights of the accused are there to protect the innocent from the abuse of the criminal justice system. They may, at times, result in a guilty person getting off, but they are based on the traditional conviction that for justice to fail in this manner is to be preferred over it failing by punishing the innocent, a conviction that is right and Scriptural (see Genesis 18). Soft-on-crime policies do not protect the innocent from wrongful accusation but are rather about lighter sentences for criminals that disregard the safety of the public. The third category consists of amendments of the soft-on-crime type. Examples of this include the hybridization of offences and the related reduction of sentences and, most relevantly, the amendments to the bail provisions of the Criminal Code. The stated purpose of the bail amendments was to make the earliest possible release the default outcome of an arraignment rather than detention, with fewer conditions and less requirements of cash, bond, or other surety. In other words it was very similar in intent to Cuomo’s experiment in bail elimination in New York around the same time.
It was similar in effect too and one consequence of that was the aforementioned unanimous letter by the premiers demanding that the Dominion government walk this back and make bail harder for repeat violent offenders. In May, David Lametti, who lamentably holds the portfolio of Minister of Justice and Attorney General in His Majesty’s government – lamentably because he has shown in numerous ways, the most recent being his favourable attitude towards criminalizing disagreement with the obviously distorted and easily debunked false official narrative about the Indian Residential Schools, that he ought not to be put in charge of the penalty box at a hockey game, much less the Ministry of Justice – responded to the premiers’ demands with Bill C-48 which proposed further amendments to the bail system. Unfortunately, but sadly not unpredictably, the “reform” that stands out the most is itself an egregious error of the sort contained in the second category of bad amendments in Bill C-75. This is the proposed reverse onus for repeat violent offenders. In other words, someone previously convicted of a violent offence, arrested a second time, would have to prove that he should be granted bail, rather than the Crown having to prove that it should be denied him. This is something that all the Justice and Public Safety Ministers – Dominion, provincial, territorial – called for when they met in Ottawa in March. Admittedly, this is a lesser offense against the principle of the presumption of innocence than reversing the burden of proof when it comes to guilt in an actual trial would be, but it still offends against the principle, opening the door for worse such offences. Indeed, an examination of Bill C-48 demonstrates that most of the proposed amendments are merely different variations on the idea of reverse onus. With all the possible ways out there of toughening up our policies towards crime without violating even in minor ways the ancient and sacred principles like the presumption of innocence that protect us all from abuse of the criminal justice system, this was the best the provincial governments could recommend and the federal government could come up with?
What is behind this push to implement policies that turn dangerous criminals back out into the streets as quickly as possible and to meet complaints about how this undermines public safety not by walking back said policies but by eroding the rights of the accused and the principles that underlie them?
We might say that it is an inversion in the priority of sympathies in which some people sympathize more with those who commit crime than with those who are its victims. This inversion manifests itself in a number of different ways. One of these is the liberal’s refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy and right of defending one’s self, one’s loved ones, and one’s property from criminals. Look at the current uproar over country and western singer Jason Aldean’s song “Try That in a Small Town” and the accompanying video. The song’s lyrics talk about violent urban crime such as sidewalk assaults, carjacking, liquor store robbery, etc. and challenges the thugs who do these sort of things to “try that in a small town”. Sniveling idiots like Sheryl Crow have accused Aldean of “promoting violence” in the song and worse idiots have accused him of promoting “lynching” on the flimsy grounds that one had apparently taken place a century ago on the popular filming location where he shot the video. To normal people, the person who sucker punches someone on the sidewalk, the carjacker, and the liquor store robber are guilty of criminal violence, and someone fighting back in defense of himself and his community is using legitimate force. The distinction is lost on liberals – and people who whatever their politics have had their minds and souls destroyed by being brainwashed with human resources and public relations “education” – who use the word violence to describe people who exercise their God-given right of self-defense to repel criminal assaults with force but avoid using this word for the criminal assaults themselves. While this inversion would not be a wrong answer to the question, it is a description of the problem rather than an explanation for it.
We could say that it is a result, intended or otherwise, of sixty to seventy years of liberal and progressive crusading against discrimination. The population of prison inmates looks very different from the general population. This may be true of economic status. The imprisoned are far more likely to come from poverty than from wealth. Note, however, that the poorer outnumber the richer in the general population in any society. It is certainly true of race. In the United States the black percentage of the prison population is far higher than the black percentage of the general population. In Canada this same disparity exists between the representation of North American Indians in the prison population and the general population. By contrast, in both countries, the percentage of Asians in gaol is far lower than in the general population. It is also true of sex. Indeed, here the greatest disparity is to be found. In Canada, women represent on average about five percent of the incarcerated. In the United States it is higher, about eight to ten percent. In both countries, however, men are vastly overrepresented in the prison population if the basis of the comparison is their representation in the general population. Even though the disparity with regards to sex is much, much, greater than the disparity with regards to race, and greater still than the disparity with regards to economic status, it is never alluded to by those who demand the criminal justice system be reformed in a softer-on-crime way because it is unfair. Neither do they reference Asian underrepresentation. This is because both of these facts go against their narrative in which society and its structures are biased against women rather than against men and in favour of whites against all other races. Indeed, when it comes to the huge disparity with regards to sex, this not only goes against the narrative it rebuts it entirely. The reason men comprise ninety percent or higher of the prison population is because men commit ninety percent or higher of the crimes that land one in gaol. There is not really much of a dispute about this. Discrimination in the system, therefore, is not the cause of male overrepresentation in the prison population which is not really overrepresentation when the basis of comparison is what it should be, the percentage of males in the general population who commit crime. This suggests that something similar could be argued for the overrepresentation of blacks in the American prison population and of Indians in the Canadian prison population, a suggestion supported by the underrepresentation of Asians in the prisons of both countries, which can hardly be explained by a racial bias that favours whites against all others, and by statistics gleaned from the victims of crime as to the race of the perpetrator. Liberals and progressives treat any suggestion that the races overrepresented in the prison populations of Canada and the United States are not overrepresented when contrasted with the percentages of each race among the criminal perpetrator population rather than the general population, no matter how backed by facts and data that suggestion may be, as arising out of racism. Their actions, however, and the policies they support demonstrate that they do not really believe this, that on an unspoken level they acknowledge it, but in their need to be seen and to see themselves as sympathetic with American blacks, Canadian Indians, and, to switch to the economic status category, the poor, they blame the larger society for this. This makes them, of course, vulnerable to all the ugly accusations they hurl against others. Blaming the larger society for the overrepresentation of American blacks, Canadian Indians, and the poor is to deny agency to blacks, Indians, and the poor. Furthermore, justifying being soft-on-crime in the name of being fair to these groups, overlooks the fact that they are also overrepresented among the victims of crime. This is a fact that goes hand-in-glove with these same groups being overrepresented among the perpetrators of crime because the majority of crimes are in-group rather than perpetrated by members of one racial or socioeconomic group against members of another. Therefore, it is favouring soft-on-crime policies that is discriminatory against these groups, because even if American blacks and Canadian Indians are represented among perpetrators of crime at a higher percentage than they are represented among the general population, the majority of these groups are not criminals and all members of these groups, here including the poor, are at a higher risk of being the victims of violent crime than the general population, and so need the protection of hard-on-crime policies more. However, liberalism and progressivism’s misguided, ill-informed, and myopic crusade against discrimination, while it may explain the shape of the arguments currently used by soft-on-crime liberals and the policies they currently support, it does not explain the origin of their way of thinking.
This is so because liberals have been soft-on-crime for a lot longer than they have been obsessed with discrimination. In the “Enlightenment”, the seventeenth and eighteenth century movement away from the light of orthodox Christianity into the darkness of the superstitious idolatry of science and materialistic reason that took Puritanism, the anal retentive form of Calvinism and transformed it into liberalism, the anal retentive form of secular agnosticism, the early liberals decided that traditional criminal justice was barbaric and cruel both in its penalties – death for capital crimes like murder, corporal punishment, fines, public humiliation, exile and such for lesser crimes – and its underlying theory – that by breaking the law, criminals incurred a debt to society which they had had to pay. In place of the older penalties the early liberals wanted incarceration to become the default penalty for crime which they achieved in the nineteenth century. In the traditional system gaol was merely for holding the accused until trial, long term imprisonment was reserved for political prisoners. Punishing people for their crimes, the liberals said, was not justice but revenge. This is nonsense. In all the ancient accounts of the origins of the traditional criminal justice system, from Aeschylus’ tragedic account of the origins of jury trials in his retelling of the myths of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Orestes in the Oresteia to the account of the establishment of refugee cities in ancient Israel in sacred Scripture, the criminal justice system was not based on revenge but implemented to curb the lust for revenge and protect societies from out of control cycles of vengeance. Although obviously, for criminal justice to do this, it must legitimately satisfy the need which blood vengeance seeks to satisfy in an illegitimate manner – unsuccessfully as its tendency to get out of control indicates – there is a careful and clear distinction between the two. In revenge, a wrong doer’s debt is owed to the victim or his kin, and they exact it from him to the extent that they are able and that they themselves see fit. Under justice, the debt is owed to the laws of society, it is not exacted by those with a personal stake in the case but by the lawfully appointed court and its officers, guilt has to be investigated and established and the accused has the right to present his own case, and the law places limits on the penalties that can be exacted. The Lex Talionis – “an eye for an eye” – whether enshrined in the Code of Hammurabi or the Law of Moses is in its fundamental nature, a limit on the penalty someone can be made to pay for injury to another. The principle underlying it is that expressed by Cicero in De Legibus III.4, noxiae poena par esto, more commonly remembered as the Roman legal maxim culpae poena par esto which means “let the punishment fit the crime” (or “offense” in Tully’s wording). By treating the traditional system of criminal justice as being the very thing it was designed to limit, prevent, and replace the liberals committed a most impious injustice against multiple generations of their ancestors stretching back to antiquity. They argued that making a criminal pay for his offence must not be the goal of the criminal justice system, that the only acceptable goals were deterring others from committing similar crimes and reforming or rehabilitating the criminal. This was the original liberal soft-on-crime attitude.
C. S. Lewis answered this earlier version of the liberal soft-on-crime attitude in an essay entitled “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” that was originally published in The Twentieth Century in 1949 and later included in the collection of his essays posthumously edited and published by William Hooper as God in the Dock in 1976. Lewis clearly felt very strongly on the matter – he alluded to it in later essays, asked T. S. Eliot to write an essay about it in a letter in 1962, and included a discussion of it in his novel That Hideous Strength. What made Lewis’ response so interesting is that he based his case against the progressive view to which he gave the name found in the title of his essay and his defense of the traditional view on the argument that the progressives’ humanitarian theory failed on the very point on which it claimed superiority over the traditional view, that is, treating offenders in a humane, dignified manner. Its advocates think it “mild and merciful” but in reality it “disguises the possibility of cruelty and injustice without end”. Removing the concept of “desert”, i.e., the offender getting what he deserves as punishment for his crime from the picture, removes “the only connecting link between punishment and justice” so that without retributive justice, rehabilitative justice is not justice at all. By treating crime as essentially pathological and the courts and prison system as essentially therapeutic, the progressive humanitarian theory opens the door to excessive punishment by transferring the decision as to the fate of the convicted into the hands of “technical experts” trained in “special sciences “which “do not even employ such categories as rights and justice”. These, since they are operating under the idea that they are curing the criminal rather than punishing him, are not bound by the limits which justice places on what punishment can be exacted from a criminal and will keep on until they are convinced he is cured. Lewis argued that this theory made it possible for good men to act “as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants” or “even worse” because “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive” since “those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience” and while they “may be more likely to go to Heaven” they are also “likelier to make a Hell of earth”. Lewis argued that far from being “humane” the system advocated by the progressives in the name of humanitarianism treated law breakers as less than human. This seems indisputable. The traditional system treated the criminal as responsible for his actions and so owing a debt the payment of which squared the criminal with the law and society. The progressive humanitarian system denies responsibility to the criminal and keeps his crime dangling above his head forever as the experts who “cured” him keep perennial watch lest he have a “relapse”.
Lewis’ answer to the humanitarian theory, since it addresses it on the level of its fundamental injustice, is an answer that would stand even if the experiment in “curing” criminals had been one hundred percent successful. The experiment has not been successful. It has rather proven to be a colossal failure. Yes, people have gone to prison and come out reformed. Merle Haggard, referred to at the beginning of this essay, is an example. His reformation in San Quentin, however, had less to do with the prison’s rehabilitation system working than with its retaining part of the older retributive system. California did not abolish the death penalty until 1972. Haggard was sent to San Quentin while Caryl Chessman was serving his last days on death row there before his execution in 1960. Chessman’s early life, with the experience of being in and out of detention, initially for petty crimes, later for more serious ones, mirrored Haggard’s in some ways. Later, however, he had been convicted of the “Red Light Bandit” crimes, a series of robberies and rapes that had taken place in the Los Angeles area in 1948, and sentenced to death. By Haggard’s own testimony it was the experience of being caught brewing liquor in San Quentin and sent to “the shelf” – a row of solitary confinement cells in the same part of the prison as death row – where he saw Chessman, awaiting his execution, and this scared him straight. He was rehabilitated in prison, but not by the prison, at least not in the direct sense that liberal supporters of the rehabilitation theory had in mind. Others have entered prison and for various reasons – being further corrupted by worse criminals themselves, being hardened by prison culture and as a necessity for survival, etc. – have ended up worse than when they went in. According to a research summary entitled “The effect of prison on criminal behaviour” published by Public Safety Canada in November 1999 which looked at 50 studies involving 300 000 offenders “None of the analyses found imprisonment to reduce recidivism”.
The liberal and progressive attitude towards how society should deal with crime and criminals has consistently been based on the conceit that their ideas are more “humane”, “enlightened”, “kind”, “compassionate”, et cetera ad nauseam than anything that preceded them no matter how ancient and time-tested-and-proven. Initially, this manifested itself as the idea that it is more “humane” to treat criminals as rats in a social experiment in rehabilitation in prison laboratories than to treat them as men, responsible for their actions, who owe a debt to society and society’s laws. Later, as the progressive conceit evolved from an attitude of superiority to the past and the civilization we have inherited from it to one of hatred for said past and civilization, it manifested itself in the idea that the criminal is the true victim, the real blame belongs to civilized society, and so civilized society must be made to pay rather than the criminal, who should be released into the rest of society as soon as possible with as few conditions as possible. The progressive mind has proven remarkably resistant to the abundance of evidence demonstrating these ideas to be the very opposite of “humane” and “enlightened”. For people who are always shooting their mouths off about their “compassion” and demanding that various groups be made “safe” from words and ideas that offend them they are extremely blithe about how their absurd policies make everyday life less safe from the threat of actual physical harm due to violent crime in our cities.
Ultimately, the liberal and progressive conceit goes back to the superstition they imbibed during the period that would more appropriately called the Darkening rather than the Enlightenment. Having transferred their faith from the True and Living God to the idol of science, they no longer recognized that the True and Living God, in Whom both Perfect Justice and Perfect Mercy are untied without compromise, has delegated authority to two earthly institutions, to one of which He gave a sword and charged it with the exercising of Justice, to the other of which He gave a pulpit and an altar and charged it with bringing His Mercy and Grace to people all of whom are offenders under Divine Law. The State, consisting of the king and his ministers, an earthly depiction of the government of the Universe, God as King of Kings, served by His ministers in Heaven, for which reason king-headed government is the only legitimate form of the State, was given the sword of Justice, but Justice that was to be tempered with Mercy, for which reason kings and the courts that act in their name have always had the power of clemency and pardon. The Church, consisting of the Apostolic priesthood and the congregations of baptized Christians they shepherd, brings God’s Mercy and Grace to the sinful world by preaching the Gospel and administering the Sacraments. While the Church’s ministry is primarily one of Mercy and Grace, as the State’s ministry is primarily one of Justice, just as the State must temper the Justice it exercises with Mercy, so the Church’s Apostolic leadership has been given the keys – the power of excommunication – to exclude from the ministration of Grace those who defiantly persist in rebellious and open sin until such time as they repent. No longer recognizing the God from Whom the authority of Church and State alike are derived, liberals and progressives reject the Church and have replaced divine Mercy and Grace with inferior human substitutes the burden of distributing which they have placed on the State, the divine authority of which they have sought to replace with democratic power, the power of the mob. Idols always fail those who worship them, however, and it has become abundantly clear that liberalism’s efforts to create a new justice superior to the old and more merciful after cutting itself off from the Source of true Justice and Mercy have failed and unleashed upon our civilization the opposite of both Justice and Mercy.
It is about time that we as a civilization turned our backs on liberalism forever and returned to the True and Living God, Who is Merciful and Gracious to all who turn to Him in repentance and faith, but has given to the State the sword to punish crime and expects it to be used for the safety of us all.
POISONOUS WHITE-HATING “ANTI-RACISM” — School principal’s death is a stain on the conscience of this nation http://cafe.nfshost.com/?p=8886
[Note: ” Meanwhile, other actors in this appalling tragedy thrive. The KOJO Institute appears to have received at least $100,000 from the federal government for offering three courses. But its list of clients reveals its reach to be long and extensive in Canada: TD Bank, the National Ballet School, Loblaws, the Ontario government, the RCMP, the CBC, Rogers, school boards across Ontario, and many others.” These organizations have subjected their employees to this White-hating hate propaganda. — Paul Fromm.]
Michael Higgins: School principal’s death is a stain on the conscience of this nation
It’s time to stand up against the woke zealots who destroyed Richard Bilkszto Author of the article: Michael Higgins Published Jul 25, 2023 • Last updated 5 days ago • 4 minute read 688 Comments
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The suicide of former school principal Richard Bilkszto is an appalling tragedy and a warning that unless we stand up to woke, moralizing, antagonistic bullies who seek to shame Canadians then we are all complicit in such deaths. Advertisement 2 Story continues below
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It is regrettable that the majority of sensible, pragmatic and well-meaning people in this country have been cowed into silence by the vocal, angry, shrill hectoring of ideologues who preach nothing but destruction: destruction of institutions, society, history and people. Read the conversation Have your say Leave a comment and share your thoughts with our community. Read All 688 Comments
All in the name of what? What vision do they offer? What better world do they proclaim? What glorious future awaits us once our guilt has been cleansed, our penance done? Except for the woke lecturers, our guilt can never be forgiven, our repentance never done and our remorse never enough.
Stand up to these people and you will be shamed, singled out and bullied. It happened to Richard Bilkszto, and if you take a stand it will almost certainly happen to you. Be aware of that and be prepared. Because the alternative to not taking a stand is terrifying and is already happening. We have become a nation where good people are afraid to speak their mind; where silence is chosen when colleagues are savagely abused by these hostile fanatics, and where people avert their gaze so they do not have to see what is happening before their very eyes. Advertisement 3 Story continues below
What happened to Richard Bilkszto is a stain on the conscience of this nation.
Bilkszto had been a principal for 24 years, previously taught at an inner-city Buffalo school, was said to be an exemplary teacher, and was working as a contract principal for the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) when he underwent a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) course in April 2021.
As described by journalist Jamie Sarkonak, Bilkszto had the courage and temerity to question DEI trainer Kike Ojo-Thompson, CEO of the KOJO Institute, over a claim that Canada was, in essence, a racist hellhole.
According to a lawsuit by Bilkszto, Ojo-Thompson described Canada as a “bastion of white supremacy and colonialism” where capitalism and the patriarchy were killing people. Canada was more racist that the U.S., she said.
It was all too much for Bilkszto, who spoke up. “To sit here and talk about facts and figures and then walk into the classroom tomorrow and say ‘Canada is just as bad as the United States,’ I think we are doing an incredible disservice to our learners,” he told the class.
According to the lawsuit, that’s when the shaming started.
That’s when the shaming started
“We are here to talk about anti-Black racism, but you in your whiteness think that you can tell me what’s really going on for Black people?” the lawsuit alleges Ojo-Thompson said.
In your whiteness?
Another KOJO training facilitator told Bilkszto, “If you want to be an apologist for the U.S. or Canada, this is really not the forum for that.”
Ojo-Thompson added, according to the lawsuit, that “your job in this work as white people is to believe” — not to question claims of racism.
When did it become acceptable practice to pay DEI facilitators tens of thousands of dollars for sessions where they tell people: Shut up you racist?
But another disturbing aspect of Sarkonak’s reporting is this: “Nobody from TDSB interjected at any point to defend Bilkszto and stop the DEI trainers from berating a staff member, according to the court filing.”
Worse, Sarkonak reports, “After the class, a TDSB superintendent even thanked the KOJO Institute in a tweet for ‘modelling the discomfort administrators may need to experience in order to disrupt (anti-Black racism).’”
As if that wasn’t enough, Bilkszto was then harangued by superiors for his “white male privilege.”
Not surprisingly, considering he stood alone, was belittled by the moralists and betrayed by his bosses, Bilkszto went on sick leave. But the events plagued him, said his family.
“Unfortunately, the stress and effects of these incidents continued to plague Richard. Last week he succumbed to this distress,” read a statement by the family released last Thursday by Lisa Bildy, his lawyer.
Recommended from Editorial
- Jamie Sarkonak: Toronto principal bullied over false charge of racism dies from suicide
- Michael Higgins: ‘A lot of reason to be afraid,’ says censured teacher critical of the woke revolution in classrooms
Corporate Canada and many civil institutions pay out millions to get someone to tell their employees how racist they are. And, unless you are Richard Bilkszto, employees sit there and take it.
Meanwhile, other actors in this appalling tragedy thrive. The KOJO Institute appears to have received at least $100,000 from the federal government for offering three courses. But its list of clients reveals its reach to be long and extensive in Canada: TD Bank, the National Ballet School, Loblaws, the Ontario government, the RCMP, the CBC, Rogers, school boards across Ontario, and many others.
Sheryl Robinson Petrazzini, the TDSB superintendent who thanked KOJO for “modelling discomfort,” has since gone on to join Ontario’s Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board as director of education.
The woke agitators might say that one man’s death means nothing when you are dismantling white supremacy and the patriarchy. But don’t listen to them.
Poet and cleric John Donne wrote in the 17th century that no man is an island.
“Any man’s death diminishes me/because I am involved in mankind./And therefore never send to know for whom/the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
Richard Bilkszto stood alone. And in the end he couldn’t endure. But what might have happened if one person had stood with him? Just one?
It is to be hoped that Bilkszto’s sacrifice serves as an example to others. And if we find ourselves not brave enough like Richard Bilkszto to stand up to the woke zealots, then let us pray we at least find the courage to stand next to people like him.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls.
Smashing Lockdown Dissent in New Zealand: He’s probably going to jail for 3 months for daring to talk about the lockdowns in public
Here’s what happened, in Vinny’s own words:
Vinny Eastwood and Billy TK were New Zealand’s #1 freedom fighter team during COVID, and stood up to lockdowns on August 18, 2021, in response to a snap lockdown called by the then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
Police arrest anti-lockdown protester Vincent Eastwood
They got arrested, held for 28 hours in solitary confinement, denied the right to make a phone call, denied the right to stay silent, charged with up to $4,000 in fines and 6 months prison for organizing and attending an outdoor gathering, with a further possible 3 months prison for failing to provide their phone passwords.
Bailed to their homes under house arrest, they could not leave the house, access the Internet, have a mobile phone, or contact each other. Those bail conditions stayed in place for 6 weeks, and they were only able to contact each other over a year later.
Auckland District Court Judge Peter Winter sentenced Billy TK to 5 months in jail and Vinny Eastwood to 4 months, subtracting 1 month for the time they already spent under house arrest.
On July 31, they appear at the High Court in Auckland to appeal the outrageous conviction and sentence.
If ultimately sent to prison, it will send a message around the world that New Zealanders have no rights to freedom of speech or assembly, damaging its international reputation and hopefully wake up New Zealanders and the world—who are on the fence—to how bad things are going to get for all those who speak up worldwide. For if it happens here, it will happen elsewhere, if it hasn’t already.
Please show your support for freedom by spreading the word and donating to help Vinny’s family.
Thanks so much!
If I go away, my partner Rebecca will need help with our newborn son, and all the things that go with that.
You can contact her here: wewantmorevikings@gmail.com
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Again, thank you so much for your support in these tough times.
Love,
Vinny Eastwood
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