K.I.S.S.
“For although the act condemns the doer, the end may justify him…”
— Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses: I, 9
It’s Easter, a time for God. In the spirit of “K.I.S.S.” (“Keep It Simple Stupid”), let’s agree unbelievers dominate one party, dominate the elite, and dominate our culture. Following Machiavelli, they practice a flexible morality that buries the Supreme Court’s “Equal Justice Under Law” motto (pictured).
Humanism’s Morality
According to Wikipedia’s entry on “Morality”:
religious value systems co-exist with contemporary secular frameworks such as . . . humanism, . . Modern monotheistic religions, such as Islam, Judaism, Christianity. . . define right and wrong by the laws and rules set forth by their respective scriptures and as interpreted by religious leaders within the respective faith.
“The ends justify the means.” What then, prevents a humanist from committing any act if it’s in pursuit of a perceived moral outcome? The (God given) laws that stand behind monotheistic religious practitioners can check bad behavior. But what checks a humanist?
Wikipedia’s “morality” grants no special standing to Christianity. Wikipedia quotes Elizabeth Anderson writing that "the Bible contains both good and evil teachings", and it is "morally inconsistent. ” Wikipedia also draws from Gregory S. Paul's 2005 study in the Journal of Religion and Society, which informs us that:
In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies, [and] In all secular developing democracies a centuries long-term trend has seen homicide rates drop to historical lows.
As for Humanists, Wikipedia leads us to Paul Kurtz, who believes that we can identify moral values across cultures without appealing to any supernatural principles. The Kurtz morality list includes integrity, trustworthiness, benevolence, and fairness. Kurtz says these values demonstrate common ground between believers and nonbelievers.
Kurtz mentions integrity, defined in the Oxford Dictionary as “the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness.”
Find the “moral uprightness” in this statement from Mark McKinnon, former chief media adviser to George W. Bush and John McCain: “If you don’t take the talk about Trump’s dismantling of democracy with utter seriousness, then just fuck around and find out.”
We do appreciate the honesty of Heidi Przybyla in Politico, who debunks Christian nationalists for believing that “our rights as Americans, as all human beings, do not come from Congress, from the Supreme Court, they come from God.” Does Kurtz’s “common ground” cover those who think Congress or the Supreme Court can — by vote — change integrity’s meaning?
Machiavelli Lives
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
— Declaration of Independence (1776)
Humanists place human above divine matters, allowing for dishonesty. The New York Times reported that in 2022:
while the president has never communicated his frustrations directly to Mr. Garland, he has said privately that he wanted Mr. Garland to act less like a ponderous judge and more like a prosecutor who is willing to take decisive action over the events of Jan. 6. [emphasis added]
The Washington Examiner’s Byron York just noticed the President, in a similar vein at the Gridiron Club, joked about Trump’s need to raise funds to appeal a New York court’s punitive judgment against him. Said Biden:
Our big plan to cancel student debt doesn’t apply to everyone. Just yesterday, a defeated-looking man came up to me and said, “I’m being crushed by debt. I’m completely wiped out.”And I said, “Sorry, Donald, I can’t help you.”
To York, Biden’s joke recognizes the work his party’s lawfare warriors have done to bankrupt Trump, and the joke expresses Biden’s approval.
Where’s the morality in a President using his leverage over our legal system to go after his political opponent? As York’s fellow journalist Mollie Hemingway wrote, Democrats have “made it a campaign to create lawsuits up and down the eastern seaboard to go after [Trump] in an attempt to bankrupt and imprison him. That is Stalinist behavior.”
Similarly, the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger warns us:
The hyperpoliticization of [law] is being carried out by people once known as the best and the brightest. It reflects a steady moral corruption of crucial institutions. It normalizes the hypocrisy of standing on the moral high ground to deploy the lowest political means. [emphasis added]
Marc Elias is a high-powered attorney who has pushed hundreds of lawsuits seeking to make it easier to vote and undo Republican efforts to make elections more secure.
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| Marc Elias |
In 2020, Elias used the COVID-19 pandemic to change election laws in key states, including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona, all of which shifted Republican to Democratic. He expanded voter access using ballot drop-boxes, mail-in voting and early voting, decreasing protections for honest voting.
In 2016, as Hillary Clinton’s chief campaign attorney, Elias was responsible for sending Clinton-controlled money to Christopher Steele for the infamous dossier that provided the FBI permission to bug the Trump campaign. Elias just skated by an obvious perjury indictment during the follow-up investigation.
Elias has predicted that Republicans will in 2024 watch the rug be pulled out from underneath them and suffer the same fate as in 2020.
In a California surprise reported by George Washington law professor Jonathan Turley, U.S. District Court Judge Cormac J. Carney documented selective prosecution of conservatives. Examining a far-right group, Carney said the Justice Department presented sharply different approaches based on the defendants’ political views. Antifa and other leftist groups often saw charges dropped, even as federal prosecutors sought draconian sentences against conservatives. Said Carney:
Such selective prosecution leaves the troubling impression that the government believes speech on the left more deserving of protection than speech on the right. The government remains free to prosecute those, like Defendants, who allegedly use violence to suppress First Amendment rights. But it cannot ignore others, equally culpable, because Defendants’ speech and beliefs are more offensive. The Constitution forbids such selective prosecution.
Turley also commented on Judge Scott McAfee’s statement during Fulton County District Attorney Attorney Fani Willis’ case against Trump and eight others accused of illegally trying to interfere in the 2020 Georgia election. After the hearings indicated that Prosecutor Nelson Wade may have committed perjury, and that both Willis and Wade were credibly accused of lying on the stand about when their relationship began, McAfee wrote that he had felt “an odor of mendacity” (or lies).
Turley connected McAfee’s words to “Big Daddy” Pollitt in Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Big Daddy said, “What’s that smell in this room? …Didn’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room? There ain’t nothin’ more powerful than the odor of mendacity.”
Besides their casual treatment of lies, integrity, and moral uprightness, Biden and Democrats are attacking religion through rule making. Federal government policy holds that “direct federal financial assistance” to faith-based services must be secular. But with “indirect aid” — federal funds via a private individual’s free choice — that money can support programs with religious content.
In the 2022 case Carson v. Makin, the Court ruled the Free Exercise Clause means government cannot exclude providers from public programs either because of their religious status or because their programing includes religious content. That freed religious groups from Washington’s prior policy that recipients of “direct aid” must offer only secular services.
The Biden administration has now countered by narrowing the definition of “indirect aid.” New regulations read “whether a program affords beneficiaries genuinely independent and private choices” — that is, whether it is “indirect aid”— depends in “significant” part on the “availability of adequate secular alternatives.” Without adequate secular alternatives, the religious group must “observe the same conditions [applied] to direct aid.” In other words, religious providers must secularize to gain aid. Thus, the new rule overturns previous guidance allowing religious participation.
Current administration rules also scale back faith-based groups’ freedom to hire employees sharing their religious views. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employers from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. But Title VII explicitly does not apply to a religious organization’s employment decisions about individuals who “perform work connected with the [organization’s] activities.” Nevertheless, faith-based organizations now find the new rules restrict their religious freedom.
Morality Survives
Another Biden administration rule change has drawn a sharp line between the elite and hoi polloi (masses). The Environmental Protection Agency’s tailpipe rule, in the words of Wall Street Journalist Kimberley Strassel, amounts to “an imminent ban on gasoline-powered cars, never mind the soothing language of ‘incentivizing’ a ‘transition’. . . Today’s Democratic Party is entirely dedicated to the proposition that all Americans should be told how to live.”
For unbelievers, basic law comes from humans not God, meaning people have the freedom to bend it toward their will. Legal scholar Turley describes how progressives plan to rework the U.S. Constitution. Turley writes that law professors Ryan Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale in a New York Times column called for the Constitution to be “radically" altered to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.” Turley adds that Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks on MSNBC warned citizens not to become “slaves to the Constitution,” a Constitution she calls “the problem for the country.” Additionally, Turley found that Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet and San Francisco State University political scientist Aaron Belkin had asked Biden to defy any Supreme Court rulings he considers “mistaken” in the name of so-called “popular constitutionalism.”
For those who believe in God-given rights and “Equal Justice Under Law,” these can seem dark times. But Peter Van Buren at the American Conservative feels in Trump’s classified documents case, perhaps the most serious one on Trump's docket, the government faces an uphill battle. Trump’s lawyers will ask how classified documents at the homes of Vice Presidents Mike Pence and Joe Biden himself did not bring on prosecutions while Trump faces a years-long struggle after having his home raided by the FBI.
Van Buren thinks in the case directed at Trump’s January 6 actions, Trump will lose on presidential immunity. But the actual trial is likelly to occur outside the upcoming election season. Van Buren points to the Justice Department’s internal rule barring prosecutors from “selecting the timing of any action…for the purpose of affecting any election.”
Unequal treatment under the law follows history. Elite power is tied to class, manners, and respectability. Daniel McCarthy in Spectator, however, tells us respectability itself, as philosophers and prophets have warned, is too often a form of untruthfulness that leaves hubris in place. Trump is the only available alternative to upper class lies, able to force the elite to confront realities it wants to ignore, and able to overcome today’s gulf between respectability and performance.
Matt Taibbi is a clear-eyed liberal, passionately committed to our 1st Amendment freedoms. He says:
As the Soviets proved, lies don’t have staying power, but even passed hand to hand, truth and good art do. [T]hose who would suppress speech have the real problem. Imagine [stopping] truth in the digital age? There will always be people who’ll try, but history shows — they never succeed for long.
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| Tucker Carlson |
this is a spiritual battle. When you’re honest, you are proud of yourself. When you’re honest, you are strong. When you lie, you become weak. Why do you lie? Because you’re hiding something—because you believe that if the people around you knew what you really thought or said or did, they would think less of you. That diminishes you. Your power ebbs when you lie. Tell the truth. Live like a decent person.
be virtuous. Live in a way that you’re proud of. The prouder you are of it, the less they’re going to mess with you. Strengthen the core, and the core is your family. It’s the orbit right around you. . . be brave. . . fear of death [] is inborn. . . you’re going to die anyway. . . Should[n't life] mean something?
The last 80 years in the Anglosphere and Western Europe is the only civilization in history that has proceeded on any other assumption but “there is a god.” We are gods—that’s a brand-new thing, and it turns out it doesn’t work. . . the atomic bomb going off, in my opinion, [] completely changed people’s assumptions.
This
is a brand-new world that we live in. Not just secular, but a
civilization [telling us humans are] the most powerful force in the
universe. [Still,] the overwhelming evidence lands on “There is a god,
and this is not the end.”
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