IN his short story, “The Maypole of Merry Mount,” published in 1832, Nathanael Hawthorne described the conflict between Puritan settlers of New England and those settlers, established at Mount Wollaston, also known as Merry Mount, who retained the ways of old England with its festivals and feasts.

Unfortunately, the culture of the Puritans, who sent the Merry Mounters packing, would ultimately triumph in New England, leading to the grim political creeds we see today, at their core Puritanical even though they reject many of the traditional mores of the actual Puritans

From the story:

All the hereditary pastimes of Old England were transplanted hither [to Merry Mount.] The King of Christmas was duly crowned, and the Lord of Misrule bore potent sway. On the Eve of St. John, they felled whole acres of the forest to make bonfires, and danced by the blaze all night, crowned with garlands, and throwing flowers into the flame. At harvest time, though their crop was of the smallest, they made an image with the sheaves of Indian corn, and wreathed it with autumnal garlands, and bore it home triumphantly. But what chiefly characterized the colonists of Merry Mount was their veneration for the Maypole. It has made their true history a poet’s tale. Spring decked the hallowed emblem with young blossoms and fresh green boughs; Summer brought roses of the deepest blush, and the perfected foliage of the forest; Autumn enriched it with that red and yellow gorgeousness which converts each wildwood leaf into a painted flower; and Winter silvered it with sleet, and hung it round with icicles, till it flashed in the cold sunshine, itself a frozen sunbeam. Thus each alternate season did homage to the Maypole, and paid it a tribute of its own richest splendor. Its votaries danced round it, once, at least, in every month; sometimes they called it their religion, or their altar; but always, it was the banner staff of Merry Mount. (more…)

FROM an interview with Stephen Baskerville, author of The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of  Government Power:

Now, after decades of serving as the intellectual apologists for this crass culture, those same radical ideologues have found that they can further increase their influence and power from the chaos they helped create by turning the resulting unpleasantness into newfangled quasi-crimes that no one fully understands and which permit no defense. Having ridiculed not only the Christians themselves into silence but also their annoying, old-fashioned vocabulary of ‘sin,’ ‘immorality,’ ‘fornication,’ and ‘adultery,’ the radicals have substituted jargon that instead condemns ideological unorthodoxy (‘sexism,’ ‘misogyny’) and implies criminality: ‘sexual harassment,’ ‘sexual abuse,’ ‘sexual misconduct,’ ‘sexual assault,’ sexual this and sexual that.

Radicals and revolutionaries always promise us a new world of freedom where we do not have to obey the rules that mankind has had to accept in order to build a stable civilization.  (And the basic rules are universal, though how they are administered vary significantly, usually according to religion, which can make a huge difference in the nature of the civilization.)  But the rules they throw out the front door always re-enter through the back door, often in a grotesque form that is more authoritarian and terrifying.  We found this with Stalinism and Maoism, and now we see it with sexual radicalism. (more…)

Source

  THE supposedly spontaneous wedding ceremony conducted on a plane last week by "Pope" Francis appears to have been a publicity stunt prepared in advance. Was it an attempt to show how much Francis values marriage in the wake of Amoris Laetitia? His unorthodox action opens up many possibilities, writes Novus Ordo Bishop Rene Henry Gracida: Imagine if you lived in theatreland in London or New York and had priests competing with jugglers and street magicians, offering free marriages whilst people waited for tickets. Imagine the Marriage of Figaro with real Marriages! Imagine, Romeo and Juliet actually getting married! Imagine, a two for one offer at your local supermarket! Two couples at one go. Imagine the possibilities for an airport chaplain, you could marry people as they waited to check-in, or as they wait for luggage at the carousel. Imagine the mass weddings that could take place at the next Glastonbury Rock Festival. Imagine, in my diocese, a traffic jam on the M25 near Gatwick, a priest wandering up and down in cope and a high viz jacket offering weddings to all and sundry. None are more difficult to imagine than a non-Catholic acting as pope. Fake news, fake wedding, fake pope.

ANN CORCORAN at Refugee Resettlement Watch reports on the drop in refugee admissions under Trump. Federal contractors, however, have made this into a self-perpetuating business. She writes: Sorry to say it for the umpteenth time, but, at minimum, if these nine federal contractors (acting as community agitators and activists while living off taxpayer dollars) are not removed from the system there will not be a long term fix.

MEDIA coverage of civil unrest in Tunisia and Iran reveals a political agenda. See a report by Whitney Webb at Mint Press News.

  "THE chief concern of the American people, even above the bread-and-butter question, was politics. They were incessantly hag-ridden by political difficulties, both internal and external, of an inordinant complexity, and these occupied all the leisure they could steal from the sordid work of everyday. More, their new and troubled political ideas tended to absorb all the rancorous certainty of their fading religious ideas, so that devotion to a theory or candidate became translated into devotion to a revelation, and the game of politics turned itself into a holy war. The custom of connecting purely political doctrines with pietistic concepts of an inflammable nature, then firmly set up by skillful persuaders of the mob, has never quite died out in the United States. There has not been a presidential contest since Jackson’s day without its Armageddons, its marching of Christian soldiers, its crosses of gold, its crowns of thorns. The most successful American politicians, beginning with the antislavery agitators, have been those most adept at twisting the ancient gauds and shibboleths of Puritanism to partisan uses. Every campaign that we have seen for eighty years has been, on each side, a pursuit of bugaboos, a denunciation of heresies, a snouting up of immoralities... " [emphasis added] --- H.L. Mencken, "Puritanism as a Literary Force," A Book of Prefaces, 1917

LAURA R. writes: My country Panama is about to surrender to disgusting sexual ideologies this very year, just like Australia, Colombia, Uruguay, Argentina, and Mexico recently did. So far only China, Singapore, Japan, Russia, Romania and Greece have resisted. In the end, Japan and Singapore, I believe, will be the only countries in the world that will still retain a normal human society while the rest of the Western world will fall in the evil heterophobia and anti-biology ideologies!

ALAN writes:

Kyle mentioned the incident in 1977 when Anita Bryant was hit by a pie thrown by an advocate for queerdom. I agree with the essence of what he wrote, but  something has been left unsaid regarding the significance of that incident.  I would like to say it.

In 1960, Anita Bryant recorded two love songs that became popular: “Paper Roses” and “My Little Corner of the World.” I remember listening to her recording of “Strangers on the Shore” on a St. Louis radio station in the wee small hours on nights in 1968 and thinking how beautiful it was.  She was a lovely, talented woman. She became a member of Bob Hope’s troupe who entertained American soldiers overseas. She was widely admired by Americans, and rightly so.

Less than ten years later, she was assaulted, insulted, and portrayed as a villainess by American “journalists.”

That fact alone proved that a Cultural Revolution had taken place between those years, a revolution in response to which the older generation, who should have known better, offered little or no opposition. (more…)

JEFF BEZOS, the billionaire owner of Amazon, has pledged $33 million in scholarships for illegal immigrants to study at American colleges — a much applauded act of treason. (The entrepreneur, who has received millions in corporate welfare, could have given scholarships for immigrants to study in their home countries or, even better, given scholarships to Americans.)

Meanwhile, a reported 700 Amazon employees need food stamps to survive. (more…)

JUDITH SHARPE of “In the Spirit of Chartres” (ISOC) interviewed me last week. Mrs. Sharpe, whom I have long admired for her common sense, talked with me about the vocation of housewife and “The Feminist War on Marriage.” The interview can be downloaded and listened to for no charge for a few weeks here.

I am truly honored to be among the authors and speakers who have been featured at ISOC. They include E. Michael Jones, Cornelia Ferreira, Hugh Akins, John Sharpe, Dr. Robert Sungenis and many more. Check out the terrific talks there on a wide range of subjects, from the state of the Church to economics to various aspects of the culture war.

In the interview, I mentioned the paradox of feminist opposition to the institution of marriage. As I said, most women want marriage and highly value it. Why then have feminists for hundreds of years opposed marriage in various ways and sought to undermine it? Does that make sense? If women continued to devote their hopes and dreams to marriage they would not devote them to Revolution. Feminism has consistently sought a transfer of power. The family must give charge over its essential functions to government, business interests and social engineers. Only impersonal forces can be trusted to bring about the utopian society, so radically opposed to human nature, that revolutionaries seek.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the bossy, 19th-century leader of the women’s suffrage movement, so elevated to the status of secular sainthood that I can find a long list of children’s books about her in my local library system, called marriage “a rite of barbarism.” She wrote in 1871: (more…)

  IT WAS once common for women to display charm, grace and athletic skill as figure skaters -- without dressing in skimpy outfits. See more on the subject by Dr. Marian T. Horvat.  

  OUR LADY'S SALUTATION --- St. Robert Southwell (1561-1595) Spell “Eva” back and “Ave" you shall find, The first began, the last reversed our harms; An angel’s witching words did Eva blind, An angel’s “Ave” disenchants the charms. Death first by woman’s weakness entered in; In woman’s virtue life doth now begin. O Virgin’s breast, the heavens to thee incline, In thee they joy and sovereign they agnize; Too mean their glory is to match with thine, Whose chaste receipt God more than heaven did prize. Hail, fairest heaven, that heaven and earth do bless, Where virtue’s star, God’s sun of justice, is. With haughty mind to godhead man aspired, And was by pride from place of pleasure chased; With loving mind our manhood God desired, And us by love in greater pleasure placed. Man, laboring to ascend, procured our fall; God, yielding to descend, cut off our thrall.

FROM The National Center for Constitutional Studies:

The whole purpose of establishing the Federal Reserve System was to prevent depressions, stabilize the currency, and protect the savings and checking deposits of the people in the custody of the banks.

However, there are three things that the Founding Fathers identified as outright enemies to any sound money system, and the Federal Reserve contains all three of them.

The first thing they said the nation should avoid is turning over to a group of private bankers the right to print the official currency of the nation. They said this right is inherent in the people and belongs to the people’s government. Whenever this right has been delegated to private bankers, they have always used it to abuse the people and gradually devour the wealth of the nation. It will be recalled that Jefferson wrote:

If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.

Abraham Lincoln also warned about possible abuses by private bankers. After the National Bank Act was passed in 1863, he wrote:

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations [of banking] have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people, until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic destroyed.

***

The second deception in the whole Federal Reserve System is the fact that the private banks which own the stock in the Federal Reserve System charge the United States interest for borrowing the country’s own currency!

The Federal Reserve scheme provides not only that all U.S. currency shall be printed as Federal Reserve notes, but that if the government wants to use these notes it must give the Federal Reserve IOUs in the form of government bonds on which interest will be paid until the bonds have been redeemed.

The question immediately arises, “Well, what did the banks loan to the government in exchange for these bonds?” The answer is, “Nothing, absolutely nothing.” The banks paid for the printing of their Federal Reserve notes and gave them to us, but they are not redeemable in gold, silver, or anything else of value. They are just paper, backed by virtually nothing. The question next arises, “Then why are they able to charge us interest when all they are doing is printing our own currency?”

The answer is that in 1913 the Congress gave the Federal Reserve the legal “right” to print our money, and that right is “as good as gold.” Therefore, if we want to use the Fed’s money, we have to borrow it and give them federal IOUs for the amount obtained. And, of course, each IOU (government bond) is something on which interest must be paid. (more…)

WHERE was The New York Times’s impassioned defense of Haiti, when the Clintons were stealing from it? (more…)

  HOLLYWOOD award shows, like the Oscars and the Emmys, are forms of psychological warfare. Here's an irreverent review of this week's Golden Globe Awards, in which all the women dressed in black to protest .... masculinity. The lust for power -- in this case feminist power -- is like the lust for sex. If not checked, it grows ever more insatiable.

KYLE writes:

As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children.

American country-singer and former Miss Oklahoma, Anita Bryant, made the above comment sometime during her anti-“gay rights” campaign in the 1970’s. Bryant spearheaded fundamentalist Christian anxiety over the homosexual rights advocacy groups emerging in the wake of Roe v. Wade and the Sexual Revolution. Bryant fell on the field of cultural battle; her efforts have proven to be a pyrrhic victory in light of recent developments in public education curriculum that plants the LGBTQ seed in the heads of children.

Bryant’s first foray into challenging social degeneracy was on March 23, 1969 when she participated in the Rally For Decency at the Orange Bowl to protest The Doors’ lead-singer, Jim Morrison–who had just made headlines by pulling his penis out on stage during a live performance in Miami. After some courtroom hoopla and protests from the older generation, Morrison, a known drug addict, would die over two years later at the age of 27 in France. (more…)