1918 Finally Ended

Eugyppius suggests an interesting hypothesis about the disappearance of the remnants of the Spanish Flu and the advent of a new seasonal flu virus based on Corona

The flu is gone. This is not an illusion. It’s not down to the wilful or mistaken misdiagnosis of Corona or anything like that. Most countries have long-standing influenza surveillance programs, entire offices of people whose job it is to find and track the flu. These programs are still running, and influenza tests are still widely administered across the world. Despite all of this searching, nobody can find anything but a few outliers. As a seasonal phenomenon in the northern and southern hemispheres, influenza has disappeared….

A lot of basic matters are poorly understood in the field of virology, and one of them is why waves of infection seem to spontaneously collapse, rather than continuing indefinitely until all susceptible have been taken ill. One reason seems to be that some viruses interfere with other viruses, such that the rise of one compels the decline of another. Plainly, not all pathogens are at odds with each other. Co-infections are common among the overlapping deep-winter viruses. Some viruses, however, definitely seem to exclude others, at least some of the time and in certain places. Influenza and Corona are two of these mutually exclusive viruses. Since it has killed the flu, Corona can operate both in the vacant flu season and in its own natively preferred dark winter months.

Some months ago, I suggested that Corona’s victory over influenza could well represent a permanent change in the order of respiratory viruses – a revolution, perhaps a very rare one. The only conceivable historical precedent would be the Spanish Flu of 1918. While we have historical reports of influenza-like illness going back centuries, we don’t have any sequenced viruses predating the second wave of this great 1918 pandemic. Before 1918, we can’t be sure that seasonal flu-like illnesses were caused by influenza viruses at all. For all we know, coronaviruses were the dominant scourge prior to 1918, and their centuries-long reign was interrupted by the anomalous and highly destructive avian influenza that entered humans in that year. Perhaps the ensuing century of influenza was an unstable equilibrium, an anomaly, and Corona has restored a prior, more ordinary world.

All that’s speculation, but we do know that the ensuing seasonal flus for decades afterwards were descended, directly or indirectly, from that first 1918 strain. What happened in 1918 was certainly a viral revolution, on the order of the upset Corona achieved in 2019. Much of virology, as a field, grew up in the shadow of 1918, as an attempt to understand the pandemic of that year and the obviously related seasonal infections to which it gave birth.

I thought the reports of the flu vanishing were total nonsense, nothing more than a propagandistic attempt to report flu cases as cases of Covid-19. But if it’s true that the seasonal flu as we’ve known it for the past 100 years didn’t even exist before the Spanish Flu, then it’s conceivable that the coronavirus of 2019 has simply replaced it as the seasonal flu virus.

In which case, the flu vaccines are even more worthless than before, and worse, those vaccinated against Covid-19, whose immune systems have been trained to permit variants of the coronavirus to enter and wreak havoc without meeting much resistance, will likely face regular periodic episodes of new flu without enjoying the benefit of the usual reduction in severity.

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The Good Immigrants

On last night’s Darkstream, I was asked if I could think of a single group of immigrants who genuinely made their new residence a better place for the previous residents. And the only group of whom I could think that truly fit the description was the Conquistadors:

These men stepped off their wooden sailing vessels, accompanied by warhorses and armoured war mastiffs, clad in steel breastplates, armed with sword, axe, dirk, arquebus, and cannon, and ventured into an unknown land inhabited by an alien people speaking an incomprehensible tongue, whose nobles sported head-dresses of brilliant quetzal feathers, whose warriors clad themselves in jaguar skins and painted skulls on their faces, whose men and women pierced and tattooed the flesh of their faces, elongated their skulls, and whose smiles showed teeth filed to a point and replaced with jade and turquoise.

As they made their way into the heart of this land they found themselves standing beside racks of skulls at the bases of vast stepped pyramids, watching as waterfalls of blood cascaded down the steps from priests wearing the flayed skins of victims offering up beating hearts torn from the chests of butchered men to the stone idols of savage gods whose fangs and claws glared out across the arid landscape. Surrounding them was a city of unparalleled magnificence, larger in scale than anything these men had ever beheld, of smooth white adobe walls shining in the merciless irradiance of the tropical sun, wide canals carrying the canoes of trade and strange tribute from every corner of the empire, its avenues thronged with richly attired citizens.

To be in the midst of such power and beauty, while to be confronted with such an incomprehensible scale of cruelty and bloodlust, led these men to come to the only possible conclusion: where their homeland was the land of God and His people, this, surely, must be the earthly domain of His adversary. The people around them were in thrall to Satan and his demons, and had constructed about them all the terrors and tortures of Hell.

And so those hard men from a hard people responded as such men must respond, when cut off from home, surrounded and outnumbered, exposed and alone in the heart of an evil the depth of which even their darkest nightmares and ugliest legends had never hinted might exist. They did the only thing they knew how to do.

They fought.

For gold, yes. For riches and for land and for glory. These were adventurers seeking fortune, after all.

But they also fought for souls.

They fought, desperately, to kill all they must, in order to save who they could, and wipe an abomination from the face of God’s Earth.

What people tend to forget is that the Conquistadors didn’t defeat the ruling Mexica tribe and wipe out its Aztec Empire by themselves. In fact, they were merely the iron core around which the native tribes who were savagely oppressed for over 100 years by the Mexica used to free themselves. It’s worth noting that the Mexica – a Nahuatl-speaking tribe – were themselves immigrants to the region.

Nahua peoples were not originally indigenous to central Mexico, but are instead descended from Chichimec peoples who migrated into the region from the north in the early 13th century.

Of course, given that most history is written by servants of the very Empire That Never Ended that was defeated at Tenochtitlan, it should not be surprising that they are now regarded as the villains of the piece.

UPDATE: One cannot truly grasp the extent of Aztec evil, or the extent to which the Conquistadors benefitted humanity, without learning about the philosophy and theology that underpinned Aztec society.

The Nahautl Weltanschauung was not a mindless or unreflective cruelty, but a sophisticated body of ideas and axioms, developed over centuries of debate and discord. In this way, we can approach the Aztec ‘mindset’ on its own terms and attempt to understand the metaphysical logic behind their civilisation.

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The Importance of Maneuver

And perhaps even more significant, as demonstrated by this excellent piece on military history, is the importance of tactical flexibility:

Few ancient warriors have amassed such an enduring and widely known legacy as the Spartans. From the cinematic reimagining, to the science fiction super soldiers of the Halo series, to the use of the word Spartan itself as a synonym for arduous and ascetic ruggedness – Spartans are, for many, the archetypical warrior. Most with at least a cursory knowledge of ancient history know the Spartans by acclaim to be the best warriors of all the Greeks.

It is true that the Spartans fielded notably competent and powerful armies. This, of course, had less to do with some sort of genetic predisposition for combat, and more to do with the structure of Spartan society. In the classical era, most Greek city-states fielded citizen armies – quite literally the adult male population under arms, with farmers and craftsman mobilizing into a militia. In contrast, Spartan society was decidedly more martial, even in peacetime. Sparta had a large workforce of slaves (helots) who comprised the majority of the population – Herodotus claimed that there were something like seven helots for each Spartan. The presence of such a large, servile labor force enabled Spartan men to participate in rigorous military-social institutions, including regular training in arms and a military academy for young men. So while the average Athenian soldier was likely to be a farmer who grabbed the family shield, spear, and helmet when he was called up, a Spartan was more like a professional soldier who had helots to do the farming for him.

Sparta’s peculiar social structure and martial institutions bore their intended fruit. From roughly 431 to 404 BC, the Spartans fought a protracted conflict with Athens (the Peloponnesian War) which shattered Athenian preeminence in southern Greece and established Sparta as the dominant Greek power. This struggle witnessed many decisive Spartan victories, including the famous Battle of Syracuse, which saw an Athenian army entirely crushed by Sparta and her proxies.

The Battle of Leuctra brought a sudden, unexpected, and spectacular end to the era of Spartan hegemony.

Athens and Sparta are by far the two best known ancient Greek city states – Athens for its philosophers and Sparta for its warriors. Far less famous is Thebes – the third city of Greece. Yet it was this same uncelebrated Thebes that won a decisive victory against the Spartans, despite being heavily outnumbered, crushing the Spartan army and breaking its power….

At Leuctra, the Spartans arrayed in standard formation, with their battle lines formed up at 8 to 12 ranks deep. This was viewed as the correct formation to ensure both adequate depth and width. In short, the considered “best practice” was to maintain a properly balanced formation, with as little drift or dissipation as possible, to prevent the formation from breaking apart altogether. A broken formation was deadly. It is estimated that, in Greek hoplite battles, losing armies lost on average nearly three times as many men as winning armies. This was the price of a shattered phalanx.

At Leuctra, Epaminondas and the Thebans threw all the conventional wisdom out the window.

Instead of a balanced, rectangular formation, the Thebans assembled in a lopsided, weighted formation, with their left wing packed, both with far deeper ranks and their best troops. While the Spartans followed the conventional wisdom and lined up at a consistent depth all across the line, the Thebans assembled a massive package, fifty ranks deep, on the left (facing the Spartan right).

By forming up the vast bulk of their forces in the left wing (in a formation 4 to 5 times deeper than a traditional Hoplite mass), the Thebans had already deviated from one standard practice of the time. They abandoned a second standard operating procedure when they proceeded to advance that left wing far ahead of the remainder of their line. While the 50-deep left-hand mass smashed into the Spartan right, the Theban center and right lagged far behind. As a result, the mass of the overweight Theban left broke through the Spartan right wing and began to roll up the rear before the rest of the Spartan line even engaged in battle. Most of the Spartan army never got to join the battle before their formation was shattered from the rear. The Theban mass rolled into the rear, began concentric attacks on the Spartan army, and sparked a total rout in short order.

Leuctra was a titanic victory with massive geopolitical implications. The loss of an army to an outnumbered and underestimated foe rocked both Sparta’s material strength and its perception as the leading military power in Greece, and set in motion a strategic defeat that permanently relegated it to a second rate power within Greece.

The Battle of Leuctra also marked the beginning of the end of classical Greek hoplite warfare, with its focus on uniform, tactically simplified heavy infantry formations. To a modern reader, the strategy adopted by the Thebans at Leuctra, aimed at a decisive action to penetrate and exploit the enemy line, seems fairly obvious. Yet to accomplish this, the Thebans had to break a variety of “rules” for hoplite warfare, massing their forces into what the Spartans surely viewed as an unwieldy, imbalanced, and excessively deep left wing. Innovation rarely looks like innovation to those that have the benefit of hindsight, but the Thebans had, in a word, discovered the power of schwerpunkt. Thebes would itself soon be overwhelmed by another Greek power fielding similarly flexible, but even more powerful phalanx formations: Macedonia.

Epaminondas’ tactics at Leuctra marked one of the earliest documented examples of coordinated and planned battlefield maneuver.

The History of Battle: Maneuver, Part 1, 4 November 2022

Keep the Battle of Leuctra in mind whenever you’re tempted to “stick to the plan” in the face of a situation that has obviously departed from what was anticipated. If the Spartans had simply withdrawn in order to figure out the probable consequences of the anomaly they were witnessing at Leuctra, they might have been able to adapt to it and overcome it, thereby changing Greek history and preventing Sparta’s decline.

Mindless sticking to one’s pre-established position, either physically and conceptually, can be fatal.

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The UFO Disclosure Campaign

Rumors are heating up that the US government is in the process of coming clean on the existence of extraterrestrial life and unidentified flying objects:

Dr. Garry Nolan, an immunologist at Stanford, who recently stepped into the ufological arena after claiming to have analyzed alleged UFO remains. As we reported not long ago, during an interview with Tucker Carlson Today, Dr. Nolan discussed his thoughts on the Unidentified Aerospace-Underwater Phenomena (UAPs) and whether or not the government possesses technology that originated from another planet. In addition, Dr. Nolan discussed his experiences working with the government and analyzing and studying people who came too close to UFOs.

He stated during the interview that individuals involved in the recovery of UFO debris and subsequent secret government programs would soon come forward to reveal what they know, putting an end to one of the biggest cover-ups in modern history.

When you say that the government has been involved in a cover-up, do you think they’ve been hiding it all this time?” Coulthart asked.

“Oh yes. I know it’s a fact because I’ve spoken to important people who are about to come out and whistleblow on it,” Nolan replied.

“And there has been an active cover-up. Just look at what the Department of Defense (DoD) recently announced. They announced an office to study the phenomenon. Putting money aside, they say they will start the study from 1947.”

“Which is incredible. That’s the date of Roswell,” the interviewer said.

“Yes, 1947. And we want a list of every operation they did to misinform and misinform the public,” Nolan said.

A recent law passed by the U.S. Congress may have influenced this statement by the Stanford professor. It grants a kind of amnesty to officials, military personnel, and government contractors to provide information on UFOs without fear of legal consequences or reprisals.

Whether these rumors are true or not, what will be will be. I don’t really care because it’s always been entirely obvious to me that extraterrestrial life exists due to a) the size of the known universe, b) the panoply of historical anomalies, and c) the interaction between the natural and the supernatural. I’m not going to bother to explain my thinking now because anyone who can’t follow the logic won’t follow the logic and I just don’t care what anyone else happens to think of my conclusions.

And that’s not the interesting aspect of this rumored disclosure of a decades-long – and probably centuries-long – coverup as far as I’m concerned anyway. For me, the more interesting aspect is the way in which it would conclusively disprove, yet again, the retarded, but commonly-held idea that conspiracies involving large numbers of people are impossible due to the inability of people to avoid inadvertent disclosure to the public.

One would have thought that the success of the Manhattan Project, which involved 130,000 people working in 30 different locations over four years without anyone learning about its purpose would suffice to disprove the Impossibility of Conspiratorial Secrecy argument, but since a) it lasted only four years and b) it took place during wartime, most people erroneously discount the obvious falsification. That will not be possible in the aftermath of the disclosure of a successful 75-year UFO coverup.

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How We Got Here

Don’t blame it on the goose, blame it on Big Ben Bernanke.

As the Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 2006-2014, he decided in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis that the banking system had to be saved, by any means necessary. To finance the massive losses – which were over $10 trillion in the U.S. alone – the world’s central banks began printing money and buying government bonds to finance massive bailouts.

Like squirrels watching a bank robbery, the members of the Nobel Committee – which recently awarded Bernanke the prize in economics – saw everything that happened and knew nothing about what it meant.

Printing money doesn’t cure economic problems: it simply skews who pays for them.

Printing trillions to paper over the financial system’s losses moved the egregious errors of Bank of America, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, General Electric, General Motors and others from their balance sheets, onto the balance sheet of the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve.

Morally these actions are repugnant – much like requiring that taxpayers finance hundreds of billions’ worth of second-rate college educations for 10 million lazy, underachieving students – but on a vastly bigger scale.

The real problem isn’t financial. Printing money changes societies by giving the government virtually unlimited amounts of power. That warps the ambitions of politicians and gives socialists unlimited budgets. People soon believe every problem can be solved by the government and the printing press. Trade-offs are no longer required. Costs are no longer relevant. In this kind of environment, no problem is too big to solve through politics and the central bank. And if there isn’t a crisis, then one will soon be invented.

And, sure enough, as soon as the U.S. central bank began to sell assets and return to “normal” policies in 2018 and 2019, a new, even bigger crisis was “found.”

A novel coronavirus. Never mind that coronaviruses appear all the time and that most people will get and survive the flu a half dozen times in their lives… this time the world went completely nuts.

Everything was shut down for two years – except politics. Trillions were spent on vaccines – vaccines that don’t prevent you from getting Covid or from transmitting Covid. It was definitely a government vaccine: it cost trillions, everyone was forced to use it, and it didn’t work.

Nothing else worked during the Covid lockdown either. Kids don’t learn at home. Employees don’t work at home. Flimsy surgical masks don’t prevent you from contracting or spreading Covid – they don’t work, but they were required too. Fauci wore two masks, everywhere. He received four different shots of the “vaccine.” Guess who got Covid anyway?

Worst of all, the government spent unlimited sums of money on things like the ridiculous “paycheck protection program,” which might as well have been called “Fraud on a Federal Scale For You.”

The lie that we could print over the mortgage losses led directly to the lie that wearing a paper mask can stop a virus. Or that a vaccine created in a few weeks and tested only on a handful of people could stop a coronavirus that constantly mutates. With a printing press, there’s no problem that appears too big for the government to handle.

But, much like the “vaccine” and the paper masks, the printing press is just a lie too.

Altogether, the world’s central banks have printed over $25 trillion over the last 12 years.

In the United States, the printing was equal to more than 30% of our GDP. In the Eurozone, the printing was twice as large – over 60% of GDP. In Japan, the printing has been equal to over 100% of GDP.

You can think of these figures as being the size of the mirage we’ve been living in.

Reality looms.

This is why the Sino-Russian alliance is going to win WWIII. They not only have the advantages of population, territory, social stability, and manufacturing capacity, but they also have the advantage of not being hamstrung by completely screwed-up economic systems.

Capitalism has completely and utterly failed, as what presently passes for capitalism is nothing more than a massive credit-fueled Ponzi scheme.

One of the most important historical lessons of warfare: he who can pay his troops wins.

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When Dialectic Exceeds Rhetoric

It renders the rhetoric toothless and useless:

Liberal MSNBC hosts and pundits worried about potential Democratic losses in the upcoming midterm elections, took to Twitter this week to stoke fears of “fascism” if voters supported Republican Party candidates.

The liberal anchors were largely reacting to a New York Times poll that found independent voters were turning to the GOP over concerns about the economy.

In a melodramatic tweet, MSNBC’s Joy Reid bashed anyone who voted Republican as choosing “literal fascism.” “It’s terrifying how many Americans will choose literal fascism, female serfdom, climate collapse and the reversal of everything from Social Security & Medicare to student loan relief bc they think giving Republicans the power to investigate Hunter Biden will bring down gas prices,” she tweeted.

I’m neither a fascist nor a communist, but I would absolutely, one hundred percent, vote for a literal Italian fascist, a Chinese neo-communist or a medieval Norman aristocrat over the global satanists who presently rule the West. Even the literal German National Socialist Workers Party was less evil, less wicked, and less murderous than the global satanists.

That is not a defense of any of those evil historical ideologies and organizations. To the contrary, it is an indictment of the current global elite, who might – perhaps – be ever so slightly less awful and wicked than the elites of the Aztec and Carthaginian empires. Possibly.

And given how compromised the corrupt and corpocratic Republicans are themselves, literal fascists are probably to be preferred to them too.

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Elizabeth the Catastrophic

Ann Barnhardt’s indictment of the late Queen Elizabeth II is as savage, and as accurate, as one might expect.

Queen Elizabeth II, already being called “Elizabeth the Great”, presided as monarch over the most rapid and profound societal, cultural, religious and imperial collapse in human history, it seems to me. Any historians that would like to chime in on this question, please email me. I truly can’t think of another example in history that was as severe and as rapid as what has happened in Battenburgian Britain. Consider what the both the British Empire AND the British culture were in ARSH 1952, and what they are today. When Elizabeth took the throne, it was literally true that “the sun never set” on the British Empire. They had already lost India just five years earlier in ARSH 1947, but in ARSH 1952 the U.K. had real, legitimate control of massive swaths of Africa, a huge presence in SE Asia, Hong Kong, the entirety of Oceania and the South Pacific, the Falklands, a large presence in the West Indies and the Caribbean, and, of course, nearly half of North America. Today, almost every colony and territory has declared total independence, and the so-called “Commonwealth” nations are IN NAME ONLY. The United Kingdom has ZERO authority in say, Canada. Or Australia. Or New Zealand. None. And everyone knows it. And the only thing keeping Argentina from invading and taking the Falklands is the fact that Argentina is such a broke, incompetent kakistocracy that they can’t. But the Royal Navy today could NOT defend the Falklands, and everyone knows it.

But more importantly, as “Head of State and Head of Nation”, Queen Elizabeth signed off on the largest race-replacement scheme in human history. Today, the city of London IS LESS THAN HALF WHITE – not merely “British”, but WHITE. It was in the high 90 percentile BRITISH when she took the throne. The City of Leicester is a fully-conquered territory of the Caliphate. Non-musloids basically can’t walk the streets of Leicester without risking their lives. Many cities in the U.K. have surpassed the percentage musloid from which only hot war can reclaim the territory. Queen Elizabeth SIGNED OFF ON ALL OF THIS.

Queen Elizabeth bestowed countless honors and knighthoods on the most open, disgusting sodomites and moral monstrosities, and British culture went from what we see depicted in “All Creatures Great and Small” to the totally degenerate, revolting Brit culture we see today ON HER WATCH. So when I saw people immediately beating the drum that Queen Elizabeth “reigned over the greatest advancement in British culture in history”, I just sat there shaking my head thinking, “How is it possible to be so utterly detached from reality?” Her reign was the most catastrophic civilizational collapse perhaps in human history.

The point is not that the queen was in full control of events, or that she was the primary architect of “the most castastrophic civilizational collapse,” which is still very far from complete. The point is that she was in a powerful position to resist the collapse of her realm and her society, but instead of living up to her duty to do so, chose to embrace it instead.

Far from being the glorious figure of history that some would paint her, she will instead be remembered as a sad and ineffectual creature who presided over the precipitous decline of the United Kingdom. And, of course, given the inversion being presented here, we know perfectly well precisely what is behind this attempted lionization.

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A Belated Peace

Japan wants to end its long-standing war with Russia. But it doesn’t appear that Russia is interested now.

ITEM: Tokyo, 3 October. The Japanese government will continue to adhere to the course aimed at concluding a peace treaty with Russia, despite the deterioration of bilateral relations, said Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in a keynote address at the opening of the extraordinary parliamentary session. Relationships between Russia and Japan has been overshadowed by the absence of a peace treaty for many years, which countries have not signed after World War II.

ITEM: Moscow, 3 October. Dmitry Peskov, Press Secretary for President Putin, ruled out the possibility of negotiations on a peace treaty with Japan. “Of course, in such conditions, negotiating a peace treaty is not possible,” Peskov told reporters. He added that Japan took a place among other Western countries and itself turned into an unfriendly country for Russia, which does not allow for negotiations.

So it doesn’t appear that Russia is going to be inclined to overlook the behavior of all of the unfriendly countries who stood with Ukraine in the future. But that’s not the interesting question here. That is: why Japan is so concerned about belatedly making peace with Russia at this particular moment in time?

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God Withdraws His Hand

Rod Dreher believes that God withdrew His hand of protection from the United States on September 11, 2002. And, let’s face it, subsequent events do tend to support his contention.

On this morning in 2002, I woke up before daylight to join a journalist friend in Brooklyn, where we both lived, and to follow a NYPD bagpipe band down to Ground Zero. The NYPD arranged for one of its piper bands to begin marching from each of the five boroughs, all to converge simultaneously at Ground Zero, where the memorial service was to begin.

The only people who had access to Ground Zero were family members of victims, and officials. But when we arrived there, a huge crowd had massed outside the perimeter. I said goodbye to my friend, and melted into the crowd to gather material for the piece I was writing for National Review (I had gone to work there that previous January). I remember standing there at the edge of Ground Zero, looking at my watch, waiting for the minute when, one year earlier, the first plane struck the north tower. That was also to be the signal for the start of the memorial service at Ground Zero.

At that moment — at that precise moment — a ferocious wind blew in from the same direction that the plane had taken. It was uncanny. There was a hurricane far offshore, and this was its outermost fringe. Still, the timing was eerie. That wind blew like something biblical, all morning. Signs, chairs, anything not tied down was blowing around. I walked around in that for hours, watching and talking to people.

After a while, I made it to the other side of Ground Zero, and took refuge from the wind in Trinity Church Wall Street, the old Episcopal church next door to the Twin Towers. The Archbishop of Canterbury had come over to preside over a memorial service there. I stayed for that. At some point towards the end of that service, we all heard the bells toll from Ground Zero next door, signaling the end of the reading of the names, and that service. When I emerged out onto the street a few minutes later, the wind had stopped. I don’t know what time it ceased to blow, but I would bet it was when the last name was read. In all these years since then, I’ve never seen anything online remarking about it one way or the other.

I walked back home to Brooklyn, wrote a piece for NR, filed it, then relaxed. The phone rang. It was my journalist friend, slightly freaking out. “Come over,” she said. I took off.

At her apartment, she led me into her home office, and pointed to something hanging on a wall. It was a small American flag, almost paper-thin, and very old. Judging from the number of stars on its field, I would say from the Revolutionary War era. It was mounted and framed under glass.

And it was torn from top to bottom, right down the middle.

“What am I looking at?” I asked.

She explained that someone had given her that antique flag many years earlier. She had it framed, and it had hung on the wall of every home office she had had since then, wherever she lived. Every day she was home, for years, she had looked at it.

On this day, however, when she returned from Ground Zero, she noticed that it had been torn right down the middle.

Nobody else had been home, and if they had been, they would have had to have torn the paper on the back of the frame to get to the flag. It was untouched.

Both of us were, and are, Christian. The significance of this sign was not lost on us.

The curtain of the Temple separated the Holy of Holies from the rest of the Temple. Traditionally, Christianity interprets this sign as indicating God’s judgment on the religion of His people, the Jews. I can’t speak for my friend, with whom I lost touch after I left New York, but I immediately interpreted the torn flag as a sign that God had withdrawn his protection from America, in judgment.

The USA observably ceased to be either a Christian or an American nation after its leaders surrendered to decades of tireless blandishments by judeochristians, led by Emmanuel Cellar, in 1965. But it wasn’t until 2001 that it became undeniable the US government was being ruled by a foreign elite, as the intentional sacrifice of thousands of US citizens for the purpose of engaging in imperialist warfare and eradicating historical American liberties sufficed to demonstrate.

If Dreher’s instincts are correct, then America was judged for its excessive tolerance, for committing the sins of Jeroboam and for its submission to evil, and was given over to the wicked to rule. And so long as the wicked rule, the suffering of Americans and those who live in US satrapies will continue, and most likely, will continue to increase.

What do Jeroboam’s sins have to do with us today? More than one would think, because the root cause of his sins is a temptation faced by most Christians today. Tolerance is a byword for virtue these days, but it was Jeroboam’s tolerance for that which was wrong which led to his disobedience, and ultimately culminated in the kingdom’s full-blown rejection of the Lord God of Israel. The Israelites did not immediately turn to Baal and Asherah, indeed, it took them many years to reach that state of apostasy. But the seeds of evil had already been sown by Jeroboam, in his willingness to tolerate forms of worship that God had expressly forbidden.

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