There’s a huge difference between Hoyt and Noonan. The latter sounded the trumpet in 2005 but she was putting her faith in the very “elites” tearing the nation (and world) apart. She joins a group, which includes the likes of Jonah Goldberg and David French, who are blindly obedient to our betters because of sinecures, ego, superiority complex, and/or naivete?
The photo is from a lockdown protest today in London. I think the image of Nipper (from RCA) with “His Master’s Voice” complements the post from Sarah Hoyt almost perfectly.
(1) INSTRUMENTS by Sarah Hoyt:
“He was betrayed by our deeply infiltrated governmental apparatus, reviled by all our organs of communication, survived two coup attempts, and over the last year has presided over a nation that the media and the left (but I repeat myself) have driven insane, deliberately and with malice aforethought. They’ve done this for the sake of no greater good than taking control of us, and our wealth, and hiding their own deep evil and shame. He’s survived at least two coup attempts engineered by his own government, and the deployment of Antifa, Obama’s own brown shirts, in an attempt to destroy everything he accomplished.”
(2) A Separate Peace by Peggy Noonan:
“Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and at Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the rich and accomplished and successful of Washington, and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they’re living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they’re going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley’s off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.”
(3) Donald Trump is a symptom of a new kind of class warfare raging at home and abroad by Glenn Reynolds:
“Around the world in the postwar era, power was taken up by unelected professional and managerial elites. To understand what’s going on with President Donald Trump and his opposition, and in other countries as diverse as France, Hungary, Italy and Brazil, it’s important to realize that the post-World War II institutional arrangements of the Western democracies are being renegotiated, and that those democracies’ professional and managerial elites don’t like that very much, because they have done very well under those arrangements. And, like all elites who are doing very well, they don’t want that to change.”
(4) Archbishop Viganò sees evidence ‘that the end times are now approaching before our eyes’ by Maike Hickson:
“Thus he can now say: ‘We now find ourselves in this doctrinal, moral, liturgical, and disciplinary cone of shadow.’ But, we are not yet at the end stage of this disastrous development. ‘It is not yet the total eclipse that we will see at the end of time, under the reign of the Antichrist,” the prelate adds. “But it is a partial eclipse, which lets us see the luminous crown of the sun encircling the black disk of the moon.'”
(5) Russell Kirk’s Conception of Decadence: Kirk Thought the Road to Avernus Captured America’s Downward Descent by Gleaves Whitney:
“Yet Kirk was not without hope. He used to quote a line from St. Gregory the Great, who lived in the wake of the collapse of the Western Empire. Rome lay about him in ruin. A dark age had descended upon the West. But Gregory, in one of his more famous sermons, said: See how the world now withers in itself; yet still flowers in our heart.”
“Oh, and while the king was looking down
The jester stole his thorny crown
The courtroom was adjourned
No verdict was returned
And while Lenin read a book on Marx
A quartet practiced in the park
And we sang dirges in the dark
The day the music died”
*Quote is from American Pie, Pt. 1 by Don McLean