September 30, 2018

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

TWO ESSAYS PUBLISHED IN NATIONAL JOURNALS on the Kavanaugh Process – My Comments

Friends,

I pass on to you today copies of an earlier installment of MY CORNER, slightly edited, picked up, and published nationally both online and in a print edition by The Remnant, the very traditionalist national Catholic journal. The Remnant has for well over fifty years stood forthright against the disfiguring and destruction of Christianity, and in particular, against the infectious and fatal Modernist barbarity and evil that has flooded Western culture since Vatican Council II, and now in particular, with the occupation of Rome, itself, by forces that can in many ways be called “Anti-Christ.” And that, tragically, is no real exaggeration.

The online version, with its link, is attached to this short commentary. The number of readers is now approaching 5,000. I have written extensively for The Remnant—twenty-four published essays since September 2017.

Since the conclusion of the riveting “Kavanaugh Hearing” this past Thursday, September 27, the incredible has continued to be succeeded by the unthinkable, the disgusting by the despicable. There was the loathsome Never Trumper, Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, whose hatred for and outright jealousy of President Trump outweigh by far any modicum of rational judgment that may be left in his cowardly and bitter soul. Is it any wonder that his constituents in Arizona found him so unacceptable that he opted not to run for re-election in 2018?

But there he was, there was Flake after publicly pledging to vote “for” Judge Kavanaugh, caught in an elevator with a couple of literally screaming feminists, bawling with demonic anger, suggesting that it was the malleable Flake—no doubt because of his weak signal to vote “yes”—who was somehow, in some way the guilty party who had “raped them”! He couldn’t escape their mad clutches.  Of course, whether or not those wailing banshees, those Harpies from Hell, actually had experienced such abuse, no one knows. But there he was, and—overwhelmed and sucked in by their venomous tongues—he recanted, just like Jimmy Swaggart [remember him?] did back in 1988, exclaiming “I have sinned! What do you demonettes want me to do?”

And after his “Road to Gehenna” experience, he came back to the Senate Judiciary Committee and, all mentally disabused, he threw a monkey wrench into the proceedings: there would have to be another—the seventh—FBI investigation before he might vote for Kavanaugh in the full Senate. And given the narrowness of the pro-Kavanaugh majority that was that. Even the supposedly fearless Senator Lindsey Graham seemed to cave, giving in to the mania and the demands for MORE investigation, after having denounced such a continuation on Thursday.

Thus, the president was impelled to order another FBI probe.

But consider: the Democrats and the vile feminist revolutionaries already know what that will produce. A new short investigation will reveal nothing more, but only confirm what is already out there.

What this is all about, in reality the actual reason for this additional week after two earlier delays, is to have seven more days to enable the feminist fanatics and their luridly corrupt Democrat voices in the Senate to feverishly  “discover” at least one more “abuse victim” who will, as if on cue, come forward to denounce Kavanaugh and grind the process to a screeching halt: “Mr. Chairman, we cannot proceed because of this new charge, this new victim who has declared that judge touched her privates when she was on a church picnic when she was five!”

By now you know the routine, you know the praxis here, and everyone in Washington should know it, although too many Republicans apparently don’t (or simply don’t want to because of fear that somehow they will offend the feared feminists).  The objective is to continue to push these endless hearings and investigations out into October until right before the election. And then, well, all bets are off. “We can’t continue our investigations now! Elections are before us, so we must wait.” And, of course, the Democrats are still betting that those November elections will return Democrat majorities; then for certain Kavanaugh is dead, and endless FBI investigations are meaningless. No matter that he will be found clean and spotless; the utterly filthy work will have been completed, and one more nail in the decrepit coffin of the creaky American republic will have been secured. And the fetid odor of death will only intensify.

Talk about scorched earth! This makes the Mongol hoards seem like noble cavaliers or Franciscan friars!

That is the strategy, and it is a strategy that Republicans must understand if THEY are to be in any way credible.

Of course, the idea that just one more FBI investigation confirming what is already known—no corroborative evidence being found—would be fine, if that is all that happens.

But my view of human nature is far darker. For the intrinsically diabolical nature of those feminists drenched in pure Evil convinces me that this is not the final step, but rather their madness and demonically-inspired passion will not cease this week as the FBI completes its report. The stakes are far too high.

I may be wrong…I hope and pray that I am; but given the sheer frenzied lunacy which possesses them, I will not be surprised to see more of what we witnessed last week.

Like any demonic possession, the only cure is either to drive the demons out back into Hell, or, the victim eventually perishes. Those screaming feminists are not, in reality, the victims. We are. What is left of our Western Christian culture has been victimized for too long by their venomous lunacy.

They must be exorcized, driven out, and in the end banished from our civilization. No time for niceties—either that, or we perish.

Here is The Remnant essay (online version):

Thursday, September 27, 2018

Brett Kavanaugh, Feminism, and Modern Witchcraft

https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/4109-brett-kavanaugh-feminism-and-modern-witchcraft

[see also the September 30, 2018, print issue where this article also appears]

Written by  Dr. Boyd D. Cathey

 The new witch hunt has begun...

Three-hundred and twenty-six years ago several towns in Massachusetts were beset by what some historians and observers have termed a form of mass hysteria: the 1692 Salem Witch Trials remain seared in our public consciousness, and, even more, have occupied a prominent place in our literature and popular culture. Some 200 people—mostly but not all women—were accused of necromancy and black magic, and nineteen were found guilty and hanged.

Those trials, so engraved in the popular imagination, are illustrative of what occurs when corrupted religious sentiment, faulty ethical and moral thinking, and the power of suggestion on a mass scale have free rein in society. 

We only need recall a few more recent examples—the infamous McMartin (in California) and Edenton (in North Carolina) day care “child abuse” cases of a few years back, when the constant coaxing and continued suggestion by so-called professional “child counselors” convinced not only some children—some as young as four or five—but also their gullible parents that their offspring had been, for instance, taken up in spaceships where they were sexually abused by day school faculty. And those accusations, firmly asserted as true by those same “counselors” at the time, made it to the courts where, initially, guilty verdicts were handed down…only to discover years later, after dozens of lives had been destroyed and ruined…that the tales of abuse and the accusations were fabrications, made up—largely due to the insinuations of counselors who wanted the charges to be true.

Another mass hysteria, mainly coming from the politically-driven Democrats and frenzied #MeToo movement feminists but also including some Republicans, has been evidently in full force in the imbroglio over the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

For the Left, the feminists, and the increasingly radicalized Democratic leadership, the present bitter, unleashed, and no-holds-barred opposition to the nomination is one more example of the growing extremism and lunacy of the Left in America. And, yes, too many Republicans—most of its leadership—are scared to death of the “R” word (“racist”) and, in this case, the “S” word (“sexist”).

This present situation did not just occur; its deeper and more profound roots stretch back into our history and society, and it can be traced linearly back to the early feminist movement in America, to women’s rights proponents, and to suffragettes in the nineteenth century—to zealots like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucrecia Mott—whose own religious and ethical formation owes much to the same intellectual framework that had produced the favorable environment for the Salem trials 150 years earlier: except that this time it was the fanatical “witches,” many possessed of equal religious fervor, who led the campaign for radical action.

It was the same ideological inheritance and social fanaticism from which issued other “reformist” movements, including Prohibitionism and Abolitionism—movements that sprung as bastard but entirely logical offspring of those seventeenth century Puritans, as both historian Paul Conkin (in Puritans & Pragmatists) and Perry Miller (The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century) have thoroughly documented in their impressive studies.

And in the twentieth century the virtual triumph of the so-called “women’s movement” gained almost irrepressible power, as influential and governing members of the opposite sex, brow-beaten and progressively convinced that the “god of equality”—the imperative to “make everyone equal,” supposedly contained in the Declaration of Independence and then proclaimed by that secular saint Abe Lincoln as a “new Founding” of the American republic—simply caved and gave way to the demands of feminism.

The present #MeToo movement has been viewed in various ways: most visibly it has gained substantial momentum since the election of that gate-crasher iconoclast Donald Trump who is seen by feminists as highly unsympathetic and contrary to their cause—that is, a type of man who cannot be manipulated or controlled by their siren song against “male supremacy” and of their having suffered from historic “male oppression.”

But, of course, President Trump is just the latest and most significant target and symbol who must be exposed, crushed, and expelled from any authority.

What is unfortunately lost and largely forgotten in the present hysteria is the undoubted fact that there are genuine cases of abuse committed against women, and, indeed, the Harvey Weinstein scandals serve as a poignant example. But there have always been such serial abusers in our midst, yet the frenzy surrounding the current situation betrays something missed by many observers and sorely lacking in the present discussion…and it demeans real instances of abuse.

Ironically, it has been the very progressivist demands—and the successes—by the feminist movement for the destruction of our inherited Christian standards of ethics and morality, the repeal of laws on the books, and the end of the kind of moral instruction once provided to our children, which have assisted tremendously in creating the fetid stew that we now find ourselves in.

How is it possible to educate a pubescent thirteen-year-old suffering through the public schools if that young man (or young women) is brow-beaten with an inflexible and ironclad normative view that traditional manliness is bad, that old-fashioned moral standards are passé—that sex is fine if it “feels good” and your partner agrees—or that transgenderism, same sex marriage, and “gender fluidity” are perfectly acceptable (and you’d better not be caught criticizing or making fun of such folks, lest you be suspended from school and ostracized by society).

Of course, sexual dalliances have always existed, as long as men and women have existed…but the difference between the past and present is that then we knew we were going against the moral law (even when we did), but now we are told there is no law, other than something elusively called “informed consent.”

I am put in mind of the English poet, the late Sir John Betjeman and his prophetic poem, “The Planster’s Vision,” written many decades ago (Collected Poems, 1958), but accurately predicting what we now behold before us and around us, and which threatens to drown us in its putrefaction:

I have a Vision of The Future, chum,
The worker's flats in fields of soya beans
Tower up like silver pencils, score on score:
And Surging Millions hear the Challenge come
From microphones in communal canteens
"No Right! No wrong! All's perfect, evermore."

In reality, it is not some egalitarian Utopia we strive for and approach in the United States circa 2018—not some afterbirth of that “shining city on a hill” of Puritan dreams which were but nightmares that have infected our politics, our culture, and have rotted our educational system at its core. But, rather, that vision was and is one of fanaticism, and it is a secularist fanaticism that fuels the feminist and #MeToo movement (and scares the Hell out of pusillanimous politicians), and which is in open rebellion not only against 2,000 years of Western and Christian civilization, but against both the Natural Law—the laws of nature, itself—and the wise teachings of traditional Christianity and Divine Positive Law.

What is feminism and, in fact, virtually every “reform movement” which posits across-the-board equality, an abnormal and unnatural condition for humanity, as its objective? What are such examples of mass hysteria other than radical attempts to violate and undo those God-given laws, and blur and destroy those differences ingrained in and between each of us?

Recall the teaching of St. Paul in various epistles of the New Testament:

Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them. Children, obey your parents in everything, for this is pleasing to the Lord. [Colossians 3: 18-20]

Wives, in the same way, submit yourselves to your husbands, so that even if they refuse to believe the word, they will be won over without words by the behavior of their wives when they see your pure and reverent demeanor. Your beauty should not come from outward adornment such as braided hair or gold jewelry or fine clothes, but from the inner disposition of your heart, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is precious in God’s sight. Husbands, in the same way, treat your wives with consideration as a delicate vessel, and with honor as fellow heirs of the gracious gift of life, so that your prayers will not be hindered. [I Peter 3: 1-4, 7]

And, lastly, most tellingly, from the First Book of Corinthians:

As in all the congregations of the saints, women are to be silent in the churches. They are not permitted to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says.  If they wish to inquire about something, they are to ask their own husbands at home; for it is dishonorable for a woman to speak in the church. [I Corinthian 14: 33-35]

It is not my point to enter into Biblical exegesis here, nor to advocate that the solution to our contemporary malady is to lock women away or imprison them necessarily in what the older German Lutherans called “kinder, kuche, und kirche”— “children, kitchen, and church”: a return to complete and subservient roles of domesticity. I don’t believe that is the essential message of St. Paul.

But what nature demands, and the Church and our civilization have wisely understood, is this: women and men are not only physiologically different, but functionally so, as well.  And there is a definite psychological differentiation between the sexes which exists in the entirety of our human species. That differentiation does not signify that men are “better” than women, but rather that there is a special difference in historic roles and duties, all of which are estimable and honorable. This is not only completely natural but affirmed and held up and glorified by historic Christianity.

This article appears in the September 30th Print Edition of The Remnant Newspaper. Preview the issue HERE.
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Indeed, in the history of Christendom it has been the Blessed Virgin, that unique example of spotless purity and holiness, of obedience to the Will of God and of incredible power both symbolically and actually as Mediatrix, who, because of the Incarnation and as Mother of Our Lord, must serve as our model and the model for women.

The incapacity of—the fear by—the so-called “conservative movement” to manfully meet head on the outrageous demands and unhinged assaults of feminism have much to do, certainly, with the triumphant and largely unopposed advance of cultural Marxism in our culture. That present-day triumph began its march through our institutions more than a century ago—a slow but constant march which has never veered from its objectives and its utilization of race and gender as the Hydra-headed Trojan Horse in subverting our civilization.

On several occasions I have quoted the Southern Post-War Between the States critic Robert Lewis Dabney’s superb characterization from 130 years past of the kind of weak-kneed and cowardly “conservative” opposition to feminism back then, and it is even more applicable today:

"It may be inferred again that the present movement for women's rights, will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent, Northern conservatism. This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is to-day one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will to-morrow be forced upon its timidity, and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it he salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious, for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always—when about to enter a protest—very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its "bark is worse than its bite," and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent rôle of resistance. The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it "in wind," and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy from having nothing to whip. No doubt, after a few years, when women's suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position." [Secular Discussion, vol. IV, pp. 491-493]

I don’t know if Dabney believed in witches or not. But like most traditional Christians he understood the concept and historic reality of a society where Christianity was in disastrous retreat. And he understood that ideology abhors a vacuum, and that evil quickly enters when good departs.

T. S. Eliot’s much quoted aphorism never ceases currency: “If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.”

I am certain that neither Eliot nor Dabney would have accused the fanatics involved in smearing Judge Kavanaugh of anything approaching demonic possession. But there is indeed a lesser state, a condition where the Good and Ethical have been driven out…and there is only room for malevolent ideology, for Evil, and for its dominance and its frenetic ravaging of the souls who exhibit it.

As I saw being interviewed on air Debra Katz, the attorney for Judge Kavanaugh’s feminist accuser, the first thing I noticed were her eyes. Forgive me if I make a personal observation: they were beady and striking, fierce and gleaming, seeming to hide behind them a ferocious passion and uncontrolled anger. There, it seemed to me, was an apt metaphor of the #MeToo movement, a movement that G. K. Chesterton would have most assuredly identified as trafficking in lunacy, cut off from rationality and nature, and, most critically, in rebellion against the Creator Himself.

The witches of Salem have indeed returned, but this time they are very real and they are calling the shots and dominating our culture. Will they be opposed courageously by what remains of the guardians of our traditional civilization?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

September 28, 2018

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

The Kavanaugh Hearings and the Real Issues at Stake

Friends,

The Kavanaugh hearings have riveted America, and literally hundreds of observers and commentators have weighed in. Watching some of the unleashed leftist fanatics and feminist #MeToo-ers foaming at the mouth, ranting and raving on CNN and MSNBC, and in the US Senate—with my fear of losing my lunch—I was tempted to just tune out: the Far Left attempted coup d’etat against not just President Trump but against the American citizenry and what is left of the American constitutional system was in full display.

Let me say that I have never been a zealous Kavanaugh supporter; he seems to be someone I would term a “moderate conservative,” a solid and decent jurist, but not a towering iconoclast who would take the Supreme Court and American jurisprudence back towards our “stolen” Constitution. Yet, the very idea that such a “moderate conservative” who might conceivably dare to vote against the ongoing slide of our nation into something that the Framers never in their worst nightmares envisaged—the idea that he might become a deciding vote, has so enraged the demons of the Deep State, from its Congressional minions to its asexual women in the streets who have rejected femininity outright, acted to pour gasoline on a madness that was already near the boiling point.

Very simply what millions of viewers, glued to their television sets, witnessed on September 27 in the all-day testimony of Dr. Blasey Ford and Judge Brett Kavanaugh before the Senate Judiciary Committee was a very real, very palpable and very frightening reality: that we are living in a geographical entity called the United States with stark and unbridgeable differences that are as wide as those that existed in 1861, in fact, far wider. For at least in 1861 most Americans utilized a common and comprehensible language, a common means of expression; today that linguistic template, that commonality, no longer exists. It’s like perhaps 30% or 40% of our fellow citizens have arrived from Mars—or planet Mongo (remember Flash Gordon?)—and somehow we are all supposed live together in concord and harmony, and settle our spats using an inherited republican system which they not only do not recognize, but earnestly seek to overthrow and destroy.

I have never expressed any support for South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham; I find his globalism, his anti-Southern heritage views, and his support for immigration to be disastrous and despicable, and I have said so in various installments of My Corner. But I would be remiss if I did not admit that his vigorous comments made in the Thursday hearings were effective and well-spoken.

Yet, I do not believe Graham actually comprehends what is happening and has happened in the country, for, in large part, he has been an enabler for much of the rot.

I don’t much care for Abraham Lincoln, either; I consider him and his politics reasons why we have as a country reached this point. But one thing he declared is beyond dispute: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

My belief is that we are at that tipping point, and the Kavanaugh hearings, far and beyond the issue of whether the judge should sit on the Supreme Court, have opened a vista, a terrifying panorama that reveals as never before the dark and inherent evil, the outright malevolence of a large portion of our fellow citizens intent on extinguishing our beliefs…and us.

Their allegiance is, to continue the Flash Gordon analogy, to Ming the Merciless, ruler of planet Mongo, and not to the Christian God, the God of Israel, the Creator of heaven and earth, and that rocking Cradle in Bethlehem which 2,000 years ago brought redemption and salvation to the human race.

There can be no fiercer, no more severe a division than that. I may upset some readers by what I now write, but what we actually need today is a new Crusade and the gumption and boldness of the Cistercian Abbot Arnaud Amalric at the siege of Beziers (1209), during the Albigensian crusade, who supposedly (but probably apocryphally) said when asked about possible innocents who might lose their lives in the siege:

“Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius” - “Kill them [all]. For Our Lord knows who are His own.”

At the very least those minions of Evil, whether accosting and screaming profanities at Ted Cruz and his family in a restaurant in Washington, or standing up like that vile chanteuse-cum-political whore Madonna, or feverishly concocting the most vicious and filthy of attacks on Brett Kavanaugh, need to be driven back to the lower reaches of hell…where they belong.

No easy task—but in the final analysis, is there any other way?

Over the past few days several of my installments on the Kavanaugh process in the My Corner series have been picked up by national publications and journals, and I’ll be sending them out soon. Today I offer one that appeared yesterday (September 27) on the Web site of Chronicles magazine. Chronicles is probably the most respected and most recognized journal of the Old or traditional Right. It is an edited version of My Corner from September 22:

What Has Happened to Masculinity in the 21^st Century?

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/what-has-happened-to-masculinity-in-21st-century/

By: Boyd D. Cathey | September 27, 2018

On Saturday morning, September 22, I switched on Fox News and there witnessed a gaggle of five garrulous women, all talking at the same time, all vacuous and empty headed, and all saying basically nothing—a so-called “panel” discussing the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and the last-minute and largely-unfounded accusations hurled against him by radical feminists.

There for anyone to see . . . and more excruciatingly, to hear . . . were five salient illustrations why the 19th Amendment, the women’s suffrage amendment, has not only been a disaster of historic proportions for our culture, but needs to be repealed, and the sooner, the better.

I finally had had enough. I quickly switched my television dial to the Sirius XM Symphony Hall channel, there at least to find some relief. Anyone for Telemann or Vivaldi or Schubert? Ah, but I forget: they were white European Christian males (even if they and many others like them helped create and added to the richness of our Western culture).

The feminist movement has been and is, in effect, a rebellion against the laws of Nature and also against the very teachings and beliefs of historic Christianity. Whether it be the so-called modest reforms advocated in the 19th century—voting rights and property entailment and inheritance reform, or the more progressivist demands of the late twentieth century—military service equity, professional and job parity, unisex bathrooms, or the most recent insistence on same sex marriage, transgenderism, and gender fluidity, the movement is rubricked under the principle of “equality,” that is, its proclaimed objective is the overturning of “restraints” on women and the complete equality of the sexes.

Yet, in fact, equality as envisaged by the feminists does not exist and has never existed in nature.

For feminism “equality” is a slogan, in reality an exercise in subterfuge employed to shame weak-willed (and weak-brained) men and to eventually dissolve the traditional social bonds and inherited natural (and moral) laws that have governed our culture for two millennia.

Whether from the Prophets of the Old Testament, or from the incredibly rich inheritance of ancient philosophy, or from St. Paul and the consistent teachings of the Church, there has been an understanding that there are discernible “laws” in nature, the orderly functioning of which made society and social arrangements possible, even harmonious. What the Christian church did, following on the acute observations of the Ancients, was to confirm both spiritually and doctrinally the existence and appositeness of those laws, for they were integral to creation, itself.

Thus, it is no exaggeration to state that feminism is a rebellion against not just the Divine Positive Law—the laws and teachings of God and His Church—but against Nature, that is, against the way things are and function naturally in our world, those workings and that usual consistency observed as normative for thousands of years.

The genie of feminism, however, of rampant egalitarianism, is out of the magic lamp. And it is an egalitarianism and demand for “liberation” from all restraint that will continue until it has completely subjected men to its will and expelled anything redolent of masculinity from our midst. For its actual objective is domination, and for the logical feminists, that men must not only become unmanly and weaklings acceding to every recent feminist demand, but in so many words, disappear, except as the selective objects for breeding purposes, or for the occasional fling, always understanding that it is the non-male who chooses the time, place, manner, initiation, and who sets all the “rules of amour and engagement” (and to ignore or violate them will bring down the wrath of feminist society and eventually the legal opprobrium of our newly feminized legal framework).

The destruction of masculinity and emasculation of men has been perhaps the most grievous and disastrous consequence of the “women’s movement.” For centuries—indeed, not that long ago—an inherited code of honor, deference and respect, how to treat women, prevailed in Western society. While, it is true, certain functions and roles were generally not open to women historically, that in no way dimmed or lessened their critical importance and paramount position in society. Indeed, as child bearers and mothers it was they most uniquely who governed the essential running of the family and palpably were the primary and substantial foundation of society.

The Church understood that women were not the same as men, that women were different and that they had unique God-given roles. Like the Blessed Virgin in Bethlehem who cared for the Cradle in the Stable and nourished the Son of God who would bring grace and salvation to the world, the primary role of women was the nourishing of familial offspring and the continuation of the human race. There could be no more important role than this, and in that sense, women occupy in Christian teaching an exalted and unequalled position.

What folly then, to even discuss “equality” in a merely secular sense.

The potentially fatal demon, the monstrous and infectious evil in our culture, is the Hydra-headed movement to extirpate “racism” and end “sexism.” As increasingly independent from an historic cultural Marxism formulated decades ago and insinuated into our educational systems and entertainment industry, these demonic demiurges make the standards and praxis of the old Soviet Communists appear conservative. Josef Stalin would never have, and never did, put up with same sex marriage, transgenderism, or the kind of feminist domination we see around us today. True, the Soviets talked of equality and women occupied some professional positions, but for the Reds a strong family and observance of supposedly “outdated” traditional morality were still paramount. The Gulags contained dissenters.

Our present society is filled with malignant Harpies—many political, many academic, many in entertainment, many in media. They feast on the entrails of our once noble culture and scream bloodcurdling screams against anyone who would dare oppose or restrain their demands for liberation. In their unbridled frenzy loosed from any natural bounds and standards of behavior, they turn liberty on its head, invert rationality and enslave millions in unrequited passions and desire, unbound and unreasoned, cocooned in a pseudo-reality. It is, to paraphrase the great English essayist and poet G. K. Chesterton, the definition of real lunacy.

In his volume, The Poet and the Lunatics (1929), Chesterton’s character Gale asks the question: “What exactly is liberty?” He responds, in part:

“First and foremost, surely, it is the power of a thing to be itself. In some ways the yellow bird was free in the cage . . . We are limited by our brains and bodies; and if we break out, we cease to be ourselves, and, perhaps, to be anything.

“The lunatic is he who loses his way and cannot return. Now, almost before my eyes, this man had made a great stride from liberty to lunacy. The man who opened the bird-cage loved freedom; possibly too much . . . But the man who broke the bowl merely because he thought it a prison for the fish, when it was their only possible house of life—that man was already outside the world of reason, raging with a desire to be outside of everything.”

Our modern feminist revolutionaries, whether out in the streets demonstrating like wailing banshees, or broadcasting nightly ideological pablum they call news, or parading before a Senate committee (or on a committee), or indoctrinating gullible, nearly soul-less students in supposed “centers of higher education,” are, to use Chesterton’s parable, certifiably insane: women (and men) “already outside the world of reason,” whose unrestrained rage to destroy is only matched by their profound inability to create anything of real and lasting value.

The nightmare scenario painted by Chesterton in society ninety years ago is with us today with a vengeance, it surrounds us, it cajoles us, it demands total subservience . . . especially if you are a man with the slightest inclination to think for yourself, to doubt the new dogmatic and constantly advancing template of feminism. What was perhaps tolerable five years ago is now met with demands for the application of a “social and political death sentence,” and what may be tolerable today will soon be seen as a sin against the triumphant and ever-evolving feminist mantra of truth.

That is, until men . . . and women, too . . . stand and forcefully oppose this lunacy, completely, honestly, rationally, and without hesitation. 

September 25, 2018

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Kavanaugh, Tucker Carlson, and the End of America?

Friends,

The unleashed ideological charade surrounding the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court continues with energized momentum. Now every few days feminist fanatics all of a sudden “discover” a new “victim” of sexual abuse committed by the judge, a victim who cannot at first remember really anything, but whose memory is miraculously “recovered” after a week or two of intensive pscyho-therapy administered by tendentious pseudo-scientific practitioners of what can only be described as a modern (and far less respectable) version of black magic and after continuous and intensive “counseling” and suggestion by frenzied #MeToo activist attorneys, intent on shaping the narrative to effect a defined and discernible political (and cultural) outcome.

And each time a new “victim” suddenly emerges, so too will come the demands for postponement of a Senate vote on the nomination, a new FBI investigation, and the refrain in all mock seriousness: “We cannot possibly proceed until ALL such claims have been thoroughly investigated.”

In other words, at this rate—as newly groomed and coached women appear, abused supposedly in the first grade by Kavanaugh when he was just six, maybe because he tickled her underarm “against her will”—as those “new” women come forward as choreographed by the feminist #MeToo-ers, this process could well last for—years. That is, until the administration finally gives in, or, more likely, the Senate Republicans simply throw in the towel. Or, as the best hope of the Democrats, that the November election will result in a majority for them in the Senate.

At that point, again miraculously, ALL accusations will suddenly and abruptly cease, no further victims will appear, and Brett Kavanaugh, an honorable and upright judge with not a hint of scandal, will have had his life ruined forever, his reputation besmirched. And with unconscionable glee and contentment, the feminist movement will move on eagerly to its next target…whichever man might stand in their way and in the way of their complete domination of our society, our politics, and our culture.

The Democratic party leadership, now under the sway of these zealots, pushes this template, basks and revels in it, boasts of its success and inevitability, while too many Republican leaders slink away to the “tall grass,” fearful that someone, somewhere, will whisper those fatal words: “Senator X (who is, of course, a white male!) is a sexist, is enabling sexual abuse, and is anti-woman!”—or worse.

In two previous installments in this series [see My Corner columns for September 19 and 22, 2018: http://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/2018/09/september-19-2018-my-corner-by.html  and http://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/2018/09/september-22-2018-my-corner-by.html],  I have termed this process the recrudescence of a modern form of witchcraft, with the difference that this is indeed the real thing, that what we are witnessing is a form of demonic possession, not so much of the traditional theological kind, but certainly a modern variation thereof.

In the theology and teaching of the Church, demonic possession exists on several levels, the most famous and noted being possession itself. The well-known film, “The Exorcist” (1973), presented in Hollywood’s own exaggerated cinematic and amplified way, brought demonic possession back into the public eye; that film was indeed based on a real case that occurred several decades ago, and, despite Hollywoodization, it remains a fascinating topic, as it reminded skeptics that there is a real history of such unexplained instances in human history.

As the old Rituale Romanum, the text utilized for exorcisms, indicates, the cases of demonic possession are quite rare. However, as I said, there are levels, including subjection, infestation, and, notably, obsession which incorporates sudden attacks of irrational and obsessive thoughts, perhaps culminating in a death wish, and typically influencing dreams and visions.

In our age of widespread unbelief, such terminologies may well fall on deaf ears, may well be passe’ and unpalatable to modern thinking. But whether or not one accepts the traditional theological precisions, or if the consideration be merely based on a close and measured analysis of what is occurring, employing insights of mass psychology and the understanding of the power and use of suggestion, the eventual diagnosis and result amount to the same thing.

“Feminism,” along with “Anti-racism,” is a weaponized cudgel employed by what we have termed “cultural Marxism” to essentially undermine, dissolve, and transform Western Christian culture and society. But, in fact, feminism is antecedent to and predates historically and ideologically all forms of Marxism. Latter day Marxists have, indeed, included it in their quiver of poisonous arrows, but for them, it is only one means to an end, and not the end in itself. For them it is a tactic and a strategy.

Feminism, in fact, as we witness its present operation, is far more insidious and actually more within the realm of an understanding of Western religious and social history. Again, as I have stated previously in these columns, in that sense its typology partakes of defined and discernible Christian heresy, and as in all heresies, its basis is essentially a rebellion against God and His created natural order.

Certainly, such a description will find few votaries in contemporary society. How dare I even mention such “superstition” and unreality! We are conditioned and trained from early age to accept “science” as our new god, and scientific explanations (and huge doses of pseudo-science) have become the deified replacements for traditional religious explanations for anything smacking of mystery or the unexplained.

But who among rational observers, the as yet uninfected, can deny what we are witnessing and seeing transpire on our television sets or in the pages of such virulently feminist publications like The New Yorker, The Washington Post, or The New York Times?

Is this not some form of, at the very least, obsession? Or, what G. K. Chesterton called “lunacy?” Or, to be more modern and contemporary about it, the power and use of intense and continued hyper-suggestion and a kind of nationalized and ideological psycho-therapy, applied society-wide? Are we not, indeed, witnessing the emergence, full-blown, of an infernal “beast of inversion,” a total and complete uprooting of the way things have operated and been for thousands of years, the defiance and denial of Nature and Nature’s laws, in favor of what I would term demonic demiurges—minions of Evil who will not cease their machinations until either they have destroyed our culture and civilization, or, until they themselves are repulsed and destroyed.

There can be no truce with them; there can be no compromise with them. Their madness drives them onward either to their final noxious triumph on earth, or until they are driven back into the feculent reaches of Hell, itself.

Last night [September 24, 2018], as I usually do, I tuned into the Tucker Carlson Tonight program, which now is about the only program on Fox News that I can force myself to watch regularly. And for the first thirteen minutes, Carlson—more than any observer on this topic I have heard—stated the practical and real issues in the Kavanaugh case in the starkest of terms, but with absolute and very precise realism. It was a veritable tour de force, and, I pass on a Youtube version (link below) and urge you to see and hear it, even if you heard it earlier.

This, in fact, is where we are in our country—on the precipice, on the edge of succumbing to a very real and severe totalitarianism that despite the election of Donald Trump in 2016, we stare at squarely in the face and which literally threatens to take control of our politics, our culture, and our very lives.

Maybe it is time—maybe beyond time—that we began frequenting the firing ranges. Maybe that is where we should be headed, and far sooner than we imagined.

Here is Tucker:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WLDBxdbnE4

September 22, 2018

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

What has Happened to Masculinity and the Sexes in 21^st Century?

Friends,

This morning watching a gaggle of garrulous women, all talking at the same time, all  vacuous and empty headed, and all saying basically nothing—a so-called “panel” on Fox News discussing the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and the last-minute and largely-unfounded accusations hurled against him by radical feminists—I finally had had enough.

There for anyone to see…and mostly excruciatingly, to hear…were five salient humanoid illustrations why the 19^th Amendment, the women’s suffrage amendment, has not only been a disaster of historic proportions for our culture, but needs to be repealed, and the sooner, the better.

I quickly switched my television dial to the Sirius Symphony Hall channel (#76), there at least to find some solace! Anyone for Telemann or Vivaldi or Schubert? Ah, but I forget: they were white European Christian males (even if they and many others like them helped create and added to the richness of our Western culture).

As I attempted to chronicle in MY CORNER on September 19 (“Brett Kavanaugh, Feminism, and Modern Witchcraft,” at: http://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/2018/09/september-19-2018-my-corner-by.html ), the feminist movement has been and is, in effect, a rebellion against the laws of Nature and also against the very teachings and beliefs of historic Christianity. Whether it be the so-called “modest” reforms advocated in the 19^th century—voting rights and property entailment and inheritance reform, or the more progressivist demands of the late twentieth century—military service, professional and job parity, unisex bathrooms, or the most recent insistence on same sex marriage, transgenderism, and gender fluidity, the movement is rubricked under the principle of “equality,” that is, its proclaimed objective is the complete equality of the sexes.

Yet, in fact, equality as envisaged by the feminists does not exist and has never existed in nature.

For feminism “equality” is a slogan, in reality an exercise in guile and subterfuge employed to shame weak-willed (and weak-brained) men and to eventually dissolve the traditional social bonds and inherited natural (and moral) laws that have governed our culture for two millennia.

Whether from the Prophets of the Old Testament, or from the incredibly rich inheritance of ancient philosophy, or from St. Paul and the consistent teachings of the Church, there has been an understanding that there are discernible “laws” in nature, the orderly functioning of which made society and social arrangements possible, even harmonious.  What the Christian church did, following on the acute observations of the Ancients, was to confirm both spiritually and doctrinally the existence and appositeness of those laws, for they were integral to creation, itself.

Thus, it is no exaggeration to state that feminism is both a rebellion against not just the Divine Positive Law—the laws and teachings of God and His Church—but against Nature, that is, against the way things are and function naturally in our world, those workings and that usual consistency observed as laws for thousands of years.

The genie of feminism, of rampant egalitarianism, however, is out of the magic lamp. And it is an egalitarianism and demand for “equality” that will continue until it has completely subjected men to its will and expelled anything redolent of masculinity from our midst. For its actual objective is domination, and for the logical feminists, that men must not only become unmanly and weaklings acceding to every recent feminist demand, but in so many words, disappear, except as the selective objects for breeding purposes, or for the occasional fling, always understanding that it is the non-male who chooses the time, place, manner, initiation, and who sets all the “rules of amour and engagement” (and to ignore or violate them will bring down the wrath of feminist society and eventually the legal opprobrium of our newly feminized legal framework).

The destruction of masculinity and emasculation of men has been perhaps the most grievous and disastrous consequence of the “women’s movement.” For centuries—indeed, not that long ago—an inherited code of honor, deference and respect, how to treat women, prevailed in Western society. While, it is true, certain functions and roles were generally not open to women historically, that in no way dimmed or lessened their critical importance and paramount position in society. Indeed, as child bearers and mothers it was they most uniquely who governed the essential running of the family and palpably were the primary and substantial foundation of society.

The Church understood that women were not the same as men, that women were different and that they had unique God-given roles. Like the Blessed Virgin in Bethlehem who cared for the Cradle in the Stable and nourished the Son of God who would bring grace and salvation to the world, the primary special role of women was the nourishing of familial offspring and the continuation of the human race. There could be no more important role than this, and in that sense, women occupy in Christian teaching an exalted and unequalled position.

What folly then, to even discuss “equality” in a merely secular sense.

The potentially fatal error, the monstrous and infectious evil in our culture, is the Hydra-headed movement to extirpate “racism” and end “sexism.” As increasingly independent outgrowths of an historic cultural Marxism formulated decades ago and insinuated into our educational systems and entertainment industry, these demonic demiurges make the standards and praxis of the old Soviet Communists appear conservative. Josef Stalin would never have, and never did, put up with same sex marriage, transgenderism, or the kind of feminist domination we see around us today. True, the Soviets talked of equality and women occupied some professional positions, but for the Reds a strong family and observance of supposedly “outdated” traditional morality were still paramount. The Gulags contained dissenters.

Our present culture is filled with malignant Harpies—many political, many academic, many in entertainment, many in media. They feast on the entrails of our once noble culture and scream bloodcurdling screams against anyone who would dare oppose them.

As I have written before, in their unbridled frenzy loosed from any natural bounds and standards of behavior, they qualify as what the great English writer G. K. Chesterton called “lunatics.”

Here is what I wrote back on June 10, 2017:

“The Revolutionaries tell us that they strive for “equality,” “liberation from restraints.” But their program—their revolution—turns liberty on its head, inverts rationality, and enslaves millions in unrequited passions and desire, unbound and unreasoned, cocooned in a pseudo-reality. It is, to paraphrase the great English essayist and poet G. K. Chesterton, the definition of real lunacy. 

In his fine volume, The Poet and the Lunatics (1929), Chesterton’s character Gale asks the question: “What exactly is liberty?” He responds, in part:

“First and foremost, surely, it is the power of a thing to be itself. In some ways the yellow bird was free in the cage…We are limited by our brains and bodies; and if we break out, we cease to be ourselves, and, perhaps, to be anything.

“The lunatic is he who loses his way and cannot return. Now, almost before my eyes, this man had made a great stride from liberty to lunacy. The man who opened the bird-cage loved freedom; possibly too much... But the man who broke the bowl merely because he thought it a prison for the fish, when it was their only possible house of life—that man was already outside the world of reason, raging with a desire to be outside of everything.” [Italics added]

Our modern revolutionaries, whether out in the streets demonstrating like wailing banshees, or broadcasting nightly ideological pablum they call news, or parading before a Senate committee (or on that committee!), or indoctrinating gullible, nearly soul-less students in supposed “centers of higher education,” are, to use Chesterton’s parable, certifiably insane: men [and women] “already outside the world of reason,” whose unrestrained rage to destroy is only matched by their profound inability to create anything of real and lasting value.”

The nightmare scenario painted by Chesterton in society ninety years ago is with us today with a vengeance, it surrounds us, it cajoles us, it demands total subservience…especially if you are a man with the slightest inclination to think for yourself, to doubt the new dogmatic and constantly advancing template of feminism. What was perhaps tolerable five years ago is now met with demands for the application of a “social and political death sentence,” and what may be tolerable today will soon be seen as a sin against the triumphant and ever-evolving feminist mantra of truth.

That is, until men…and women, too…stand and forcefully oppose this lunacy, completely, honestly, rationally, and without hesitation.