MASSACHUSETTS MADNESS

How the mighty have fallen.  Massachusetts, once the home of John Adams, the “Atlas of American independence” and future President of the United States, is now led by Maura Healey, the state’s first lesbian governor and the chief executive who recently signed a bill protecting a woman’s right to abort her baby up to the point of birth.  At the signing ceremony a gaggle of females standing behind her desk applauded enthusiastically.  Meanwhile in Plymouth, Massachusetts, a crowd of ladies in pink voiced their enthusiastic support for Lindsay Clancy, who was on trial for strangling the life out of her three children -- Cora, Dawson, and Callan.   

Thirty years earlier the distinguished Democrat New York Senator and former Harvard Professor Patrick Moynihan, who was not a pro-life warrior, compared partial birth abortion to infanticide.  One can only imagine Abigail Adams cringing at the thought of her “remember the ladies” request to John being invoked by twenty-first century feminists to cheer unrestricted abortion as health care and to invoke inadequate medical treatment plus postpartum psychosis as a legal excuse for a mom carefully planning and carrying out the extermination of her three children over the span of eighteen minutes.

It at least makes sense that the same state that elected a governor who supports unrestricted abortion also devised an insanity defense putting the burden of proof on the prosecution rather than the defense.  In addition, Bay State prosecutors must prove not only that defendants know the difference between right and wrong but also that they can control their actions.  This virtually insuperable standard unique to Massachusetts resembles the obligation to prove a negative, to prove it twice, and to prove it “beyond a reasonable doubt.”  She’s “not” cognitively unaware of standards of right and wrong, and she’s “not” unable to control her actions.  Throw in the fact that the criminal act concerns killing three kids, and the prosecution’s task becomes akin to climbing Mt. Everest.

Governor Healey also recently signed the mendaciously labeled “Protect Act,” a law that further limits the sanctuary state’s cooperation with ICE and guarantees that illegal aliens are protected, as much as reasonably possible, from deportation.  Even before Healey’s new law the police department of Boston’s super-Woke Mayor Michelle Wu, the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, ignored ICE detainers on scores of illegals, among them aliens accused of arson, child abuse, assault, and drug dealing. 

Then there’s Ed Markey, the state’s octogenarian senator who proclaimed his support for a transgender bill of rights after easily defeating his forty-seven-year-old primary opponent with similar leftist credentials.  This eccentric topic became a campaign issue for Democrats thanks to Congressman Moulton’s ill-advised statement in 2024, "I have two little girls. I don't want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.”  He added that “as a Democrat I'm supposed to be afraid to say that.”  Even after offering a groveling apology of sorts, the former marine would discover that fear was, indeed, warranted for his perfectly sensible statement in madly blue Massachusetts, a locale where “gender-affirming care” for minors is already a state constitutional right that extends to youngsters from other states who seek to cure their anxieties by mutilating their bodies.

One should remember that Massachusetts is also the state that continued to reelect Ted Kennedy to the Senate seven times even after the senator abandoned a car he had driven off a bridge at Chappaquiddick Island, a car that still contained a woman who was not his then-pregnant wife.  Mary Jo Kopechne likely died of suffocation while Kennedy returned to the party cottage from which the two had left late that night.  The police were contacted approximately ten hours later, giving Kennedy time, if needed, to sober up, though he was never given an alcohol test.  The judicial slap on the wrist that followed for abandoning the scene of the accident didn’t deter the state’s highly educated residents from sending Ted back to the Senate a year later in 1970 with 62% of the vote.  A blow by blow recounting of the incident can be found in this 2018 Politico review of the film “Chappaquiddick.” 

Massachusetts lawmakers are currently considering a bill that would give Muslims a greater voice in state government and address areas of discrimination presumably perpetrated against that community.  The bill would create an eleven-member commission to work with state officials on areas of concern to Muslims such as education, civil rights, health care, employment, and, of course, Islamophobia.   When those familiar topics inevitably morph into madrasa lessons, community cutouts for sharia law, and employment standards  that reflect Muslim mores vis-à-vis pork, dogs, female attire, and the like, one wonders if even inveterate Bay State virtue signalers might find such concessions to “an oppressed minority” a “bridge too far.”

Recently a woman in Illinois who closely followed the Clancy trial has allegedly killed her two-year-old child by ligature compression of the neck in her basement, the same method and location of Clancy’s acknowledged victims.  Following the homicide the accused killer also inflicted on herself some perfunctory suicide cuts.  Fortunately, Illinois doesn’t require the state to prove what should be the defense’s burden, though the defense only needs “clear and convincing” evidence, not evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt” that a perpetrator doesn’t know right from wrong.  While Massachusetts boasts that almost half its adults have college degrees and likely takes pride in the fact that it’s the most secular state in the union, perhaps a less ideologically enthralled and more religiously grounded jury pool in the Midwest might find it possible to believe a mother can actually be held legally culpable for strangling her child to death.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California.  His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge.

 

Is Anyone Really Guilty Anymore?

“Justice delayed is justice denied.”  “The wheels of justice grind slowly but ever so fine.”  “Better that one-hundred guilty persons go free than one innocent person should suffer.”  These are incompatible aphorisms that at various times have been asserted about the American justice system.  

The first was clearly employed when William McKinley was assassinated in 1901.  The President died on September 14, and his killer was executed a month and a half later.  As a Facebook contributor noted, “If the justice system worked the way it did for McKinley, [Tyler] Robinson would have been dead by December, 2025.”  More accurately, Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer would have exited this life by Halloween last year.  

The assertion that “justice delayed is justice denied,” despite its frequent repetition, is a concept honored more in the breach than in the observance.  Tyler Robinson’s preliminary hearing, for example, won’t be concluded until September, almost a year after Kirk’s murder.  Karmelo Anthony’s trial took over fourteen months after the knife-totting youngster stabbed and killed Austin Metcalf at a high school track meet.  Recently Anthony’s hearing for a retrial was denied.  Appeals will doubtless follow.    

That the wheels of modern American justice “grind slowly” is obvious, but the “ever so fine” conclusion is risible.  Jury or judge politicization is clear in cases involving, for example, O.J. Simpson, Donald Trump, and thousands of January 6 defendants.  Meanwhile, we wait without much hope for justice to be “ground out” for the high-profile criminals involved in Crossfire Hurricane and Arctic Frost. 

Surprisingly, Benjamin Franklin embraced the hundred-to-one, guilty-to-innocent cliché, an exaggeration of the figure previously articulated by England’s PM William Blackstone who put the ratio at a more modest ten to one.  Practically speaking, anyone who touts Franklin’s formula effectively washes his hands of blood shed on the streets by the scores of criminals who evade punishment for the sake of an unreasonable legal scorecard.  Moreover, since criminals tend to reoffend and do so more frequently if the odds of being punished are slight, the number of innocent victims quickly grows to multiples of the initial figure.  In short, the assertion of a hundred to one standard is a form of “suicidal empathy” or, more accurately, “narcissistic empathy”-- i.e. a statement that flatters the speaker’s ego and overlooks victims actually sacrificed for the sake of a rhetorical yardstick.   

Of course law enforcement and the system of justice should be structured to avoid sending innocent people to prison, but the modern fixation on one side of the judicial and law enforcement equation has devastating consequences.  Here’s an alternate aphorism that should gain traction:  “The fewer criminals caught and expeditiously punished, the more innocents will be harmed by criminals.”  Conversely, the more criminals caught and swiftly punished, the fewer innocent victims will be harmed.  This inverse correlation is all the more relevant since it’s widely conceded that crime, especially violent crime, is largely concentrated in a small portion of the population, typically estimated at five percent or less.  El Salvador’s President Bukele, much vilified abroad but adored at home, totally transformed his country from a gang-ruled hellhole to a playground sanctuary for children by imprisoning one percent of the population.     

So why has our judicial system changed so much from the days of McKinley’s assassination when swift justice was the order of the day to the present where a plethora of “safeguards” have been placed on law enforcement and within the judicial system to prevent innocent individuals from being falsely convicted of a crime and guilty persons from being convicted based on faulty procedures?   The “not one innocent” mentality is largely the product, I believe, of a therapeutic culture in which the idea of personal responsibility has been drastically attenuated.  Villainy has been scaled down to reduced mental capacity or unfortunate environmental circumstances as the psychiatrist Karl Menninger noted a half-century ago in his book Whatever Happened to Sin.  

That’s not to say that such factors are totally irrelevant, but our obsessive desire for non-volitional explanations arises alongside an even deeper desire to deny the reality of evil.  Accordingly, those hundred guilty persons theoretically going free are vaguely felt to be victims of biology or society.  More specifically, for many females demonstrating outside the Clancy trial in Massachusetts it’s inconceivable that a woman would knowingly strangle her three young children.  It’s just too evil.  Thus, the heinous act becomes itself an argument against her criminal culpability and diffuse responsibility falls instead on medical practitioners and the pharmaceutical industry.  

In short, according to this perspective evil doesn’t really exist in individuals but rather in institutions and persons directing those institutions.  It’s a fantasy touted by Rousseau who claimed people are born good but are corrupted by society, a belief that leaves hanging a basic question:  How does a corrupt society arise from naturally good humans?  That’s not a problem faced by those who believe evil lies within the human heart and that, as Immanuel Kant asserted (albeit in German), “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”  It’s a thought that at least helps explain the legal and human foibles discussed above. 

 Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California.  His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge.

Blame Truth for Jason Arday’s Death

One of Seinfeld’s poignant scenes revolved around the ambiguous pigment of Elaine’s latest boyfriend.  Was he or was he not black?  Jerry, Elaine, and George are pondering the question and wondering if they should be doing so.  George says flatly that the discussion is not ok.  Finally, when a black waitress arrives at the trio’s booth to deliver checks, all three frantically toss bills toward her in a visual demonstration of liberal guilt.

Something similar is now transpiring in the case of Jason Arday, a Cambridge Professor who recently committed suicide following exposure of his academic plagiarism and wildly fictitious life story.  That story included, among other imagined hurdles and accomplishments, early autism, muteness till age eleven, illiteracy prior to age eighteen, teenage epilepsy spawned by a physical attack, a brain tumor experienced while writing his dissertation, a coma triggered by a car accident, a mini-stroke, a fractured fibula suffered on one of the thirty-five marathons that he ran in thirty days (nine of which were done with the injury), and a six-hundred mile run between London and Edinburgh accomplished in six days (later amended to twelve days). Those athletic feats were said to have raised £5.5 million for eighty charities.

On the academic front, Arday’s plagiarism was extensive.  Not only was his dissertation lifted inordinately from a thesis written six years earlier, his work was also filled with grammatical errors that even extended to its title: “An exploration of peer-mentoring among student teachers’ to inform reflective practice within the context of action research.” The dissertation whose work was stolen had a similar title with an appropriate apostrophe following the word “teachers”:  “An analysis of the concept reflective practice and an investigation into the development of student teachers’ reflective practice within the context of action research.”

Apparently neither Arday’s diploma-awarding institution in Liverpool nor Cambridge University did any digging into his implausible background story or Arday’s clearly purloined and unscholarly dissertation.  All they cared about was his DEI credentials. The same ideological criteria apply to the post mortems that blame not Arday but rather the “racists” and “fascists” who exposed his lies. 

Arday himself employed similar words to vilify truth tellers looking into his mendacity.  He even used his keynote address to the British Sociological Association last April to excoriate white conservatives and right-wing activists for using a “playbook” to target black academics like Harvard’s Claudine Gay and, implicitly, himself.  Prior to his resignation Arday had even engaged law enforcement and later the defamation law firm Carter-Ruck to threaten critics with financially ruinous and possibly career-ending charges of racism.

A vigil of thousands in Trafalgar Square including the U.K.’s first black MP echoed Arday’s BSA address by blaming his death on a vicious and racist media campaign.  Arday’s own family blamed a “campaign of sustained abuse.”  A similar song was sung by London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan who denounced “a pernicious public shaming.”  Another prominent Arday supporter referred to a “racist witch hunt” while others called on Prime Minister Burnham to “commission a public inquiry into the role of the press in Arday’s death.”  Cambridge itself, prior to Arday’s resignation, called the plagiarism allegations against the sociology professor “a vile campaign” but since his death have focused primarily on the resources it offered their former “best in the world” race and education scholar, an obvious CYA tack.  

Somewhat surprisingly, an article in The Atlantic by Graeme Wood places significant blame on Arday himself but reserves his most creative criticism for Arday’s enablers, especially Cambridge University, which utilized his fantastic life story and academic status for its own purposes. “They may as well have taken a skin-and-bones Make-A-Wish kid, told him that he could fly, and shot him out of a cannon.”  Graeme also notes that “journalists were not the ones who stuffed Arday into the cannon and lit the fuse,” conveniently overlooking the years of press stuffing for the sake of a great, though unscrutinized, DEI story line.

The truth seems clear to me.  Arday would never have received a Ph.D., much less a distinguished Professorship at Cambridge, were it not for his race and a  desperate desire for DEI credentials on the part of universities corrupted by that ideology.  His back story made the exchange of integrity for “equity credit” all the more enticing, especially since integrity in the humanities has long since been compromised in the service of postmodernism and political clout.  For ideologues of that stripe traditional standards of right and wrong are merely instruments created to support entrenched power.  Given that perspective, any equity-based excuse will serve to absolve a comrade from punishment for purloined scholarship and a blizzard of biographical lies.

You almost have to give Arday credit for playing the academic establishment for the frauds they are by showing just how much he could get away with.  His own willingness to use racist smears and legal goons to intimidate and destroy critics, however, reveals a viciousness as despicable as that of the morally and intellectually vacuous universities he conned.  And now we learn that the academic, Nathan Cofnas, who clearly exposed Arday’s plagiarism, has been suspended by Ghent University.

While a waitress receiving inordinate tips from the Seinfeld crew for an innocent conversation is humorous, there’s nothing funny about the political and cultural weaponization of race for the sake of an ideology that has largely ruined higher education and filled society with individuals and institutions willing to destroy anyone possessing the audacity to tell the truth.                                                           

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California.  His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge.

The Lockdown Dissidents Vindicated - Why is Fauci not in Jail?

Senator Rand Paul says his wife regularly greets him at home with this question, “Why is Tony Fauci not yet in jail?” That peculiar welcome suggests she knows what many folks know but not enough powerful government and media figures who are willing to follow the evidence to its logical conclusion.

Several prosecutorial points were included in Jenner Furst’s documentary, Thank You, Dr. Fauci, a late 2024 film focused on the doctor’s decades-long obsession with gain-of-function research, the gene-splicing technique that almost certainly led to the creation of the Wuhan virus and to a pandemic that caused a large number of excess deaths worldwide, perhaps mounting to the millions. A recently released Wall Street Journal documentary written and directed by Michael Pack focuses on the central role played by Fauci in pushing the counterproductive COVID lockdowns and in vilifying health experts who opposed those draconian measures. Its title: The Lockdown Dissidents.

Furst’s film showed Fauci using his influence to squelch prominent scientific voices that saw the new virus as a gain-of-function lab creation, not a bat-mediated wet market disease. The latter documentary fits the same manipulative profile. First, Fauci made himself the lead health official on the pandemic response team, to the amazement of CDC Head Dr. Robert Redfield. Then Fauci pushed a nationwide 15-day lockdown that was soon extended indefinitely, a pandemic response at odds with accepted quarantine protocols. Finally, he prescribed absurd masking and distancing measures designed to scare the public into submission. Inspired by the ruthless Communist Chinese response to the pandemic, Fauci advised the public, “If it looks like you’re overreacting, you’re probably doing the right thing.”

Fauci continued to push the fear button in a meeting of the pandemic response group to which an outside voice, Dr. Scott Atlas, had been added by President Trump. When Fauci observed that people weren’t sufficiently afraid to listen to the group’s directives, Atlas couldn’t believe his ears and objected that increasing public fear was totally unethical. That reply ended whatever influence Atlas might have had within the group, especially since he favored a traditional public health response to COVID.

Atlas then looked for allies outside the group that was officially led by Fauci-mentored Dr. Deborah Birx. One of those allies was the current head of the National Institute of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. Bhattacharya had conducted his own study in Santa Clara, California, and it showed that COVID-19 was already sufficiently widespread to make societal lockdowns meaningless. In addition, his findings revealed a mortality rate of .2% or less with fatalities concentrated in older individuals and virtually nonexistent in school children. Similar studies led most European countries to reopen their schools in the fall of 2020. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s attempt to “follow the science,” however, was opposed not only by Fauci’s group guidance but also, with extreme vitriol, by teachers union president Randi Weingarten.

In the face of such opposition unmoored to science, Atlas, Bhattacharya, Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, and Harvard’s Dr. Martin Kulldorff met in Great Barrington, Massachusetts early in October, 2020, and produced The Great Barrington Resolution, a document eventually endorsed by over sixty thousand medical scientists and practitioners plus nearly nine-hundred-thousand concerned citizens. The statement provided clear reasons for rejecting the prevailing lockdown procedures and for employing a “Focused Protection” strategy aimed at vulnerable groups, primarily the elderly. Among its concluding sentences was the following: “Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal.”

Fauci and his NIH accomplice, Francis Collins, couldn’t let this science stand. Almost immediately, Collins sent an email to Fauci demanding “a quick and devastating published take down” of the Resolution by falsely describing its authors as “fringe epidemiologists.” As Atlas and Bhattacharya attest, the “take down” was successful thanks to complicit scientists, intimidation tactics (including death threats), and outlandish media suppression of scientific discourse, a censorship regime put on steroids during the Biden Administration with its “epidemic of the unvaxxed” propaganda.

Consequently, Fauci’s recommended lockdowns that included schools, houses of worship, small businesses, and sporting events largely continued. In Gavin Newsom’s California, the destruction of freedom even extended to a lone surfer. Meanwhile, politicized and cowardly scientists were okay with massive BLM protests after the death of George Floyd.

The film concludes with a post-mortem vindication of the pandemic approach advocated by the Barrington Resolution. Florida was a state that remained largely open during the pandemic while California was among the most locked down. After evaluating total excess deaths, Florida came out better than the once Golden State. In Europe, the same result was obtained for non-lockdown Sweden vis-à-vis Germany. It should also be noted that these comparisons only measured excess deaths, not the economic, psychological, or educational damage of lockdowns.

People were regularly encouraged by Jewish leaders to “never forget” the Holocaust, a plea that’s becoming a faint echo nowadays. In similar fashion, we should resist the desire to forget the price paid for Dr. Fauci’s dream of creating novel vaccines for yet-to-appear superviruses -- a toll that includes not only millions of deaths but also the enduring aftereffects of the fear he stoked and the tyrannical lockdowns he promoted. Those disastrous results are why Rand Paul’s wife and many others believe Anthony Fauci deserves a “lockdown” of his own.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California. His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle, as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge.

Related Topics: COVID, Great Barrington Declaration, Anthony Fauci

Stop Praising All Our “Wonderful” Teachers

As a teacher for over two decades, I’m allowed to criticize people who regularly extol all the wonderful teachers in our country.  In any cohort numbering over five million, there are obviously many excellent teachers, but as a whole, educators are one of the nation’s least admirable professional cohorts and contain numerous individuals who shouldn’t be near children at all. 

Thomas Sowell has long noted that education majors represent the dregs of college and post-graduate applicants.  One study found only 7% of high school seniors with SAT scores in the top quintile chose education as a major, whereas more than half of those in the lowest quintile went into education.  What’s true of students is also true about their instructors and the quality of classes taught by these “doctors” who rank at the bottom of the academic totem pole in terms of collegial respect.  Little wonder that Jill Biden’s so-called dissertation  was in education and was accurately described in a 2020 Wall Street Journal column as emitting “so much noxious methane the EPA should regulate it.”

Given the paucity of significant content compared to disciplines like history or science, there is always the temptation, as Sowell again notes, to promote educational fads.  Some years ago, for example, the look-say method of reading replaced a long proven technique, phonics, doubtless to create some new-and-improved product.   As if depriving generations of children the ability to read effectively weren’t bad enough, schools of education (along with their 10 to 1 leftist scholastic mentors) also employ curricula designed to indoctrinate kids in perverse ideologies that have proliferated for decades at universities where former terrorists like Distinguished Professor of Education Bill Ayers and Northwestern Law’s Bernadine Dohrn found cushy employment.  

 I offer as one example of egregious educational malpractice this video of a Las Vegas "English" teacher who actively imposes his “everybody should be a little gay” philosophy on middle school students while hiding preferred pronoun interactions from parents.  This “educator” even involves his students in choosing the color of his makeup and eye shadow.  Unsurprisingly, critical race theory also finds its way into this “English” class as well as lessons about police brutality and racism via a book called Hush.  In this literary classic two white cops kill a black teenager leading to the inevitable anti-cop, white racism conclusion.  Needless to say, this shaper of young minds isn’t at all shy about confronting black students with MAGA sympathies or helping other students “come out” as gay.    

The very fact that someone like that was hired to teach at Gunderson Middle School says something unflattering about school administrators.  As of this writing the school principal only confirms that a “massive investigation” is under way, not that the teacher pushing a totally unethical sexual and political agenda on captive kids has been fired.   At least in the Vegas case what the teacher did was a violation of the school’s policy vis-à-vis parents.  In California the benighted legislature actually passed a law in 2024 (AB 1955) forbidding school districts from requiring parental notification about gender identification.  That law was tossed 6-3 by the Supreme Court earlier this year, but in the words of Grok, “As of June 2026, California public schools operate in a state of legal tension and partial limbo on parental notification for students’ gender identity or pronoun usage.”  That statement means teachers can’t be required to withhold information but are likely free to do so if not directly asked by parents.

 The overwhelming alignment of educators with the Democrat Party and its now-bizarre policies was made clear as long ago as 1980 when at least fifteen percent of DNC Presidential delegates were affiliated with education, most of them members of unions like the National Education Association or the American Federation of Teachers.  The latter organization’s current president, Randi Weingarten, provides a visible symbol of education’s decline, a shrieking harridan for whom reasoned discourse is as foreign as particle physics to a preschooler.  This incestuous collaboration of teacher unions and Democrat politicians has created a scenario in which favors benefitting the union (not students) are traded in exchange for contributions and votes.

Finally, consider teachers leading a flock of elementary school students on a “No Kings” march with prepared signs that confront motorists on a busy street just a few yards away.  This outrageous manipulation of kids barely able to read, much less grasp the intricacies of political issues, happened in my still marginally conservative Southern California city.  I don’t doubt that other teachers took liberties with their students thanks to this “No Kings” communications toolkit distributed to NEA members. 

Several years ago I reviewed a CBEST math test for California public school teachers that was so risibly simple I could hardly believe any qualified applicant would fail to pass it.  Here was one question:  “Seven more than two times a number is 35.  What is the number?”  Slightly challenging perhaps, but not if it’s a multiple choice question:  A.42   B.28  C.21  D.14  E. 5.  Yet lawsuits were filed about how such tests unfairly excluded otherwise “qualified” minority teachers, and even now the education establishment pushes to eliminate these minimal competency tests.  So please spare me encomiums about great teachers unless you’re speaking about the distinct minority who didn’t major in education, know their subject matter, aren’t active union members, and don’t dehumanize students through indoctrination, grooming, or using them as political props.   

    
 Richard Kirk is a freelance writer and retired teacher living in Southern California.  His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge. 

REVOLUTION: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World

 A Patriot’s Take on the American Revolution  

History isn’t written by “the winners.”  It’s written by historians and persons of letters.  Thus, what we know about the past depends on the interests and biases of those who compose treatises about the subject.  Eric Metaxas’s number one best seller, Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World provides in its subtitle an unambiguous declaration of the author’s conclusion about events in colonial America that are covered in this scrupulously researched book.  Upon finishing its nearly 600 densely packed pages most readers will likely wonder why so many things delineated therein were neglected or distorted by prior historians.

 

Foremost among those distortions is the assertion that most of America’s founders were deists who rejected the idea of God’s post-creation activity in human affairs.  As Metaxas clearly shows via the words of various patriots, especially John Adams and George Washington, the notion of God’s “providential” acts on behalf of the emergent nation was ubiquitous, a faith indissolubly linked to its adherence to biblical principles as articulated by ministers like George Whitefield.  These “no King but Jesus” convictions spread by the ministerial “Black Robe Regiment” were often derided by British elites who denigrated colonials as, in today’s parlance, bible-bangers.  A practical consequence of this gulf between British and colonial morals is illustrated by the humane treatment Americans typically provided captured troops versus the wretched fate most  patriot soldiers faced who fell into British hands, an estimated 10,000 of whom died in captivity, outpacing the “less than 7,000” killed in combat.

 

Metaxas further illustrates the decadence of Britain’s leadership under George III by providing detailed descriptions of gatherings in England by prominent members of the Hellfire Club who not only embraced hedonism but even mocked Christian beliefs.  Later the author devotes several pages to General William Howe’s lavish farewell party in Philadelphia.  By contrast, Washington is shown stressing the importance of discipline and moral conduct for himself and his troops in view of their “sacred” cause, a cause for which colonials officially beseeched God’s help by declaring days of fasting, prayer, and thanksgiving.

 

Though John Adams is invariably included in any worthy account of America’s founding, the lasting memory history has bequeathed us often features slurs directed toward a “blind, bald, crippled, and querulous” Adams who as President had backed the Alien and Sedition Acts.  Metaxas focuses instead on the biblically schooled, anti-slavery patriot hailed as the “Atlas of American Independence” by contemporaries.  Indeed, Metaxas notes that Thomas Jefferson thought authorship of the Declaration should be given to the indispensable early promoter of American liberty and only agreed to compose the document himself at Adams’s insistence.

 

Metaxas’s total narrative focuses on important players and crucial events from the death of George II in 1760 to the agreement ending the revolution in 1783.  In that effort he employs materials mostly derived from original sources and numerous scholarly works.  His extended description of the Boston Massacre is particularly compelling and makes clear that the colonies had their own share of less-than-pious rowdies.  When perusing the author’s account of this event, one’s sympathy likely falls more with the handful of trapped British soldiers than with the unrelenting mob, including Crispus Attucks, that pelted the longsuffering troops with projectiles – a scene bearing no resemblance to the inaccurate etching of the “massacre” distributed by Paul Revere for propagandistic purposes.  How the scrupulously principled John Adams managed to provide those British soldiers with a partially successful legal defense while still maintaining his strong opposition to their being stationed in Boston is another significant story.  

 

If Adams is Metaxas’s political hero, Washington is his military Cincinnatus. The general’s many challenges are covered extensively, as are battlefield maneuvers that should resonate with aficionados of military strategy.  During those fateful years Washington endured defeats, wretched fighting conditions, assassination attempts, rivalries from within the officer corps, and bleak prospects of success, all with a steadfast equanimity that bore witness to his character and leadership ability.  Following this magnificent and grueling service to the fledgling country, Washington, like Cincinnatus, relinquished power.  

                                                                                     

Metaxas also provides rich portraits of other important individuals including John Hancock, Nathan Hale, Henry Knox, and Samuel Adams.  Among those additional portraits is that of Abigail Adams, whose letters to her husband reveal a strong, biblically grounded spouse who stoically endured the vicissitudes of war for the sake of “justice, truth, and righteousness” -- an image more complete than that of a woman whose primary contribution to history were the words, “Remember the ladies.”  Metaxas’s rendering of General Benedict Arnold also fleshes out what for most folks is an incomplete picture.  Arnold served heroically in the crucial battle of Saratoga during which he suffered a painful injury that doubtless contributed, alongside unquenched ambition, to his act of treachery that could have changed the course of history.  Finally, incidental accounts of the savage treatment meted out by tribal warriors to combat enemies should cause a reassessment of any Disneyesque images of largely civilized and pacific “Native Americans.”           

 

Metaxas’s fine book, I must note, occasionally employs words and foreign phrases that are beyond the vocabulary of average readers who may have to keep a translating computer at hand or guess at meanings.  Also, at times I wished an editor had excised some of the details Metaxas provides that aren’t as critical as those happily included in his account of the Boston Massacre.  For example, Henry Knox’s heroic effort to bring cannons and other weaponry in Fort Ticonderoga to General Washington in Boston was recounted so thoroughly that a reader might feel he was enduring the icy, mountainous 300-mile trek himself, alongside the horses and oxen.

 

That said, those complaints are miniscule compared to the insight achieved by looking at the American Revolution, as Metaxas does, through the eyes of patriots like Washington and John Adams and not through the eyes of a Marxist like Howard Zinn whose People’s History of the United States has sold well over two million copies.      

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer and retired teacher living in Southern California.  His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge.

   

SUICIDAL EMPATHY: Dying to be Kind

Rhamell Burke had been arrested four times since February 2^nd for assault, burglary, drugs, and weapons charges.  On May 7^th he was released from New York’s Bellevue Hospital psychiatric facility, and a few hours later he allegedly shoved seventy-six year old Ross Falzone down a flight of subway stairs, resulting in Falzone’s death.  One of the prior assault charges involved a young woman who declined to press charges.  The 23-year-old lady later said, “Maybe a part of me was just like, I don’t want to put another black man in jail.”  Reportedly, she now regrets her choice whose tragic consequence has been cited as an instance of suicidal empathy, or more accurately in this case, homicidal empathy.

The term “suicidal empathy” was coined by Professor Gad Saad, and his new book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to be Kind, revolves around the concept.  Rhamell Burke’s repeated low- or no-consequence legal encounters and the young woman’s confession about her mental disposition constitute two prime examples of the psychic malady in which compassion for ostensibly victimized groups is so overblown that it outweighs social well being.  Saad provides a plethora of additional examples including attitudes toward illegal aliens, drug users, the homeless, transgenders, Hamas terrorists, and even socialism.  These feelings are connected to destructive policies such as open borders, massive benefits for illegals, absurd indulgences for criminals, men in women’s sports, anti-merit DEI programs, and numerous redistribution efforts that reward failure and punish success.    

Saad’s work is a valuable resource for identifying areas where empathy has been weaponized with palpably destructive results.  Billed as an “evolutionary psychologist,” Saad is less focused when it comes to explaining the reasons behind what he frequently calls the “misfiring” (or even “orgiastic misfiring”) of the emotional system, thus linguistically linking suicidal empathy to a cerebral malfunction.  Elsewhere in the book Saad points to a highly theoretical cognitive function:  “The West’s lack of a cultural theory of mind is destroying our societies.”  His primary focus, however, when it comes to the etiology of the affective malady, centers on academic institutions that spawned theories such as cultural relativism and deconstructionism, philosophical perspectives that undermine traditional ideas about truth and natural law.  With intellectuals freed from the pursuit of truth, their endeavors moved toward emotionally driven projects as opposed to rational analysis of moral principles and hard evidence, especially in Saad’s case hard evidence grounded in evolutionary development.   (C.S. Lewis came to a similar conclusion in The Abolition of Man based on the modern rejection of objective truth.)

Thus, it isn’t surprising that Saad cites with approval Thomas Sowell’s idea in The Vision of the Anointed about the intelligentsia espousing “policies that make them feel virtuous for their unlimited compassion while being decoupled from the actual consequences of their policies.”  Unlike Las Vegas, ideas that originate in academia don’t stay there.  The attitude of suicidal empathy, Saad observes, spreads like a contagion, as illustrated by the head-turning pace with which transgenderism infected the whole country bringing with it biological absurdities, the invasion of girls’ sports, and even the mutilation of children’s bodies for the sake of “gender affirmation.”  Of course this contagion wasn’t spread by germs floating in the air; it was spread by educational and media institutions controlled by Democrats, Socialists, and Marxists -- a sociological and political point obscured by Saad’s overreliance on biological and psychological perspectives.

My own term for the largely unscrutinized compassion associated with suicidal empathy is “utopian narcissism.” The policy of unlimited empathy is impractical and thus utopian, but the true reason for demanding compassion toward presumably victimized groups is, as Sowell observes, self-congratulation and not empathy.  Thus, being ignorant of a policy’s negative consequences is essential to bolster one’s sense of moral superiority.  In this regard physical separation from those consequences, combined with political insularity, conspire with media complicity to enforce ignorance of rapes, murders, human trafficking, and drug deaths attributable, for instance, to Biden’s open border policy.  Indeed, in California identifying a criminal as an illegal alien by law enforcement or the media carries a professional stigma akin to use of the n-word.  Better to hide the truth from Hollywood stars and a general public infected with suicidal (or narcissistic) empathy than to risk the discomfort of cognitive dissonance.    

Another explanation I would propose for unlimited compassion is even crasser than the aforementioned ego-inflating rationale, namely, power.  Political players often feign empathy as a cynical tool to gain support from various groups.  In the case of the Southern Poverty Law Center their “empathy” secretly funded enemies of “victimized” groups to make it clear how important it was for likeminded folks to support their organization.  If one wishes to add a Messianic savior complex to this cynical power play, that oxymoronic combo can’t be excluded.

In short, Saad is to be commended for delineating the large number of cases where empathy for supposedly victimized groups has suicidal consequences.  His diagnosis of the academic origin of the contagion also has merit, though additional and simpler explanations are available as well.  Saad’s heavy reliance on biological and psychiatric analytical tools, however, sometimes obscures motives that aren’t all that murky -- self-aggrandizement, cynical manipulation, self-hatred, power, and even the thrill (and benefits) of blindly identifying with an elite in-group under the guise of compassion.  

 Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California.  His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge