Triad Conservative

A Well-Raised Young Girl Speaks to Raleigh City Council About Abortion

This girl did a great job. It is evident she was raised well from her remarks.

Local Judges: What to Do About "Our Babies" Getting Killed?

HT: Matt

Several days ago, a Guilford County Superior Court Judge-- Lora Cubbage-- was handling a murder case. A 21 year old male was responsible for shooting and killing a 16 year old female who had tried to steal marijuana. 

Cubbage became teary eyed and referred to both the murderer and the victim as "our babies". Cubbage is black.

Another article suggests that Cubbage had sharply reprimanded a 27 year old drug dealer for involving a 19 year old in the sale of marijuana to a 16 year old. It is unclear whether this is the same case.

Meanwhile, another Superior Court Judge, David Hall from Winston-Salem, was quoted indicating that something had to be done about all the violent crime in Guilford County. Of course, he was really referring to the violent crime in Greensboro.

But the question is precisely what can be done.  Referring to the perpetrator and the victim as "our babies" does not achieve anything. Instead, it reinforces the psychology that the reality of their behavior cannot be fully confronted, and that justice cannot be truly done.

Reprimanding people who get caught does not really achieve anything, either. Saying abstractly that something needs to be done, while true, also is ineffectual.

To confront crime in the black community, one must fix the cultural rot that produces it. That means restoring the black nuclear family, and placing strong, Godly black men at the center of it. That means reversing all the corrupted attitudes and behaviors that undermine that goal.

That also means God Himself needs to intervene, and that He needs to use a much higher quality of black leadership locally than we have typically seen in the past.

But to reduce crime, you also have to be willing to prosecute crime to the fullest. And you need to be willing to accept the preventive, proactive policing that drives down crime rates. That means accepting some of the inconveniences and downsides that might be associated with such policing. You can't truly want lesser crime if you are unwilling to accept a vigorous criminal justice system and conscientious policing.

To get to C, you must first do A and B. It does not happen overnight, but it can happen much quicker than anyone can imagine if people are truly committed to it, and get behind it.

More GOP U.S. District Court Judge Failures in NC

Item: Judge Thomas Schroeder is enforcing a consent degree agreement after the Cultural Marxists sued over HB 142, the much-watered-down replacement for HB 2. He had previously ruled that transgender individuals can use the rest room of their choice. Schroeder was nominated by George W. Bush when Elizabeth Dole and Richard Burr were helping him identify judicial nominees.

Item: Judge William Osteen overturned a ban on abortion after the 20th week of pregnancy that had been passed by the North Carolina General Assembly. Osteen was also nominated by Bush when Dole and Burr were providing input on potential nominees. (Osteen famously had dropped the ball when he was given the opportunity to issue a solid homosexual marriage ruling several years ago.)

We are often told that we must elect Republican presidents and United States Senators because of judicial nominations. But in North Carolina-- a state that used to be identified as part of the Bible Belt-- the party that appeals to Christian conservatives repeatedly refuses to deliver.

We later learned that Osteen is part of a liberal mainline Protestant denomination. You might think that such an individual should warrant a higher level of scrutiny because they might turn out to be... liberal.

The fundamental problem, of course, is that many Republicans themselves at the very highest levels are moderate-to-liberal on various important issues. And the party's conservative base is repeatedly, systematically deceived.

Trump's Engineered Failure

Thank the GOP and the democratic socialists-- both.

Wayne Allensworth, Chronicles:

Yes, there will be elections, and they may be worth voting in, but the disaster has already happened.  The Orange Man’s MAGA Show looks to be winding down after a somnambulant Donald Trump signed a spending bill that apparently undercuts any efforts to control our southern border.  The signal having been given, that border is now seeing levels of illegal immigration not experienced in years.  Forgive the cliché, but demography is, in fact, destiny, and Trump, in a bizarre display of bluster coupled with ignorance, seems to have frittered away what was likely our last chance to salvage the train wreck that is today’s U.S.A. by means of our moribund political system.  It was nice while it lasted.

Call them The Swamp or the Deep State, or what have you—the People Who Matter have worked hard at showing us that, despite Middle America’s naive faith in “our democracy,” they will do what they will, whatever the results of national elections may be.  Globalism is their aim, and they mean to achieve that aim come what may.  Middle America bet on a long shot, hoping to salvage our withered republic by electing Donald Trump, and he was, to the horror of complacent and overconfident Swamp denizens, miraculously elected, but the former reality-TV star proved to be an easy mark for the Swampsters and their executive arm in the Deep State.  It would have been a close call even if Trump had been competent, of course, but the Donald did not show up when he was most needed, and appears to have handed over his presidency to Javanka and a cabal of NeverTrumpers...

The Swamp, however, is impatient and wishes to hasten the demise of the old American remnant...

Any measure that hastens permanent leftist political rule will be considered.  So as not to be shown up by the looney left, a number of ever-unreliable Republicans representing Congress’s nominal right joined in with the Dems to overturn Trump’s declaration of a National Emergency on the border crisis.  Message received, and understood.

The use of police-state “investigations,” bureaucratic stonewalling, and “fake news”; the suppression of dissent by the tech totalitarians at Google, Facebook, and Twitter; and the refusal of other corporate giants to serve anyone with heretical views have moved this country a long way down the path to a banana republic.  If the People Who Matter don’t like the looks of a winning candidate, the Deep State can roll into action, as it did after the 2016 presidential election.  The postelection coup hasn’t quite come off, but hemming in an ineffectual president will suffice.

Following banana-republic logic, the political game should be tit-for-tat.  The losers in an election expect to be in jeopardy of losing all in a zero-sum game, so they might consider mounting a countercoup.  As it stands, however, the GOP’s “beautiful losers” don’t appear actually to want to win, even after Trump showed them how to do so in 2016.  They are for the most part content to take their lumps while maintaining their Beltway sinecures.  The transformation of the Republican Party into a populist vehicle aimed at defending Middle America appears to have stalled, at least at the national level.

How Many Will Oppose Tillis in the GOP Primary?

A post by Carter Wrenn, who is working for Garland Tucker, discusses some polling results that ordinarily would indicate Thom Tillis is highly vulnerable in the GOP primary next year. (HT: JH)

And Tillis ought to be vulnerable. He has done absolutely nothing of value since arriving in Washington four years ago except voting to confirm judges Trump has nominated. Otherwise, nothing... nada.

Of course, he was quick to ingratiate himself with Mitch McConnell as soon as he got there. In fact, it is reasonable to assume he brown-nosed McConnnell even before he arrived in D.C.

And remain mindful that McConnell has actively stymied the presidency of Donald Trump by controlling which administration nominees will be confirmed; by helping instigate the Mueller investigation; and by assuring Trump's favored legislation will not pass. Tillis is part of that crowd, and part of that mindset.

So who will oppose Tillis in the GOP primary?

1. We have previously discussed Garland Tucker who is likely more conservative than Tillis; but who still has a content-free website;
2. The Club for Growth is apparently urging Mark Walker to run, but Walker has an issue that might hinder him in a statewide campaign, about which the Daily Haymaker has written. Walker would otherwise be at least somewhat of an improvement over Tillis;
3. I received a mail piece from a lady in eastern North Carolina named Sandy Smith who says she is running. Her website policy positions are more substantial than those found on Tucker's website, although she mentions "comprehensive immigration reform" which is often code for amnesty. It is quite expensive to do general mailings statewide, so Ms. Smith apparently has some money at her disposal.

Of course, there may be others that become apparent over the next several months.

As more candidates throw their respective hats in the ring, they will split the anti-Tillis vote. In fact, that is one of the GOP establishment's key strategies to protect incumbents. Tillis becomes more likely to survive the primary as additional candidates run. We already have at least two running against Tillis. Neither Tucker nor Smith have a solid, deep base of support; but Tucker's candidacy is attracting some level of interest.

Running statewide is very challenging. It obviously helps to have money as well as name recognition. The establishment GOP fights conservatives with much more ferocity than it fights the left.

There is one other issue, however. The GOP primary electorate itself is not uniformly conservative. It has many moderates... and some liberals... and a fair number who align mostly with the establishment GOP. 

Will any of Tillis' challengers be able to run the gauntlet? This will be interesting to watch.

American Evil

Anthony Esolen, Touchstone:

While the nation includes many citizens seeking justice and doing good, in its legislation and court rulings, we discern what can only be called great evil deliberately committed by the state. Our nation's evil still may be masked at times by good deeds and by the residue of what the nation once was and is no longer...

In the matters of abortion, protecting the innocence of children, the very definition of marriage, and those laws and customs that promote and protect the natural family, Christians have on their side not only the word of God, but ordinary biology, anthropology readily observable by people of ordinary intelligence and no advanced education, logic, moral axioms common to every human civilization, and the thought of men of letters of the West for more than two thousand years.

This rich deposit of truth and wisdom all seems to count for nothing. You cannot use reason to defeat people who deny what reason is. You cannot remind people of the wisdom of the past when they neither know the past nor care to know. You cannot cite authority when your opponent's principle is that of the serpent: "You shall be as gods." You cannot appeal to nature to reach the soul of someone committed to perversion. You cannot show the beauty of male and female to people of ressentiment who desire that the family should sicken and die...

Church bells toll believers to prayer, but devils to the gnashing of teeth—and stratagems and spoils. Devils are loose in the land. I am not speaking about bad people, whereof we will always have plenty. My sins are enough to trouble me till my death. I am speaking about the real item, devils, and their malign possession of a nation's soul...

Should we in the United States be so characterized? What affection we may have for democracy is severely tested by an ideology of radical egalitarian individualism. This ideology sacrifices duty to will, excellence to mediocrity, and a complex order to a simplistic egalitarianism that masks a staggering inequality between the state and every other association of a once free people.

That ideology has made the word hierarchy a slur, even while the people submit supinely to the most arrogant and meddlesome laws reaching into every feature of what once was the liberty of ordinary people in the ordinary duties of life.

It has made patriarchy a slur, even while millions of children grow up without fathers in the home, too many churches are staffed by feminists and sodomites, and innumerable boys grow up without the slightest direction or encouragement or even sympathy on their wayward journey to manhood, if they should manage to embark upon the journey at all.

It promises that we shall all be the gods of our personal and fantastical universes, meaning that we shall all be as ants in an anthill, grains of sand in a desert, atoms in a chaos.

This ideology, or idolatry, of individualistic, egalitarian "democracy" has given us now the worst of all worlds: puritanism without purity; censoriousness built upon evil standards, or delusional standards, or no standards at all; a First Commandment against making judgments that imply inequalities; and the coarsening and slow demise of high culture, with no vital folk culture to bring a new high culture to birth.

It has given us infanticide: butchering a baby alive and kicking. It has rejoiced in murdering the innocence of children. Even some churches chant happily along, Arch-High Songsters of the First Church of Ba'al...

Other than bare existence, justice is the only good left for God to grant to the self-determinedly wicked. The fire of charity is agony to them. Evidence is not far to seek. When you meet someone who celebrates the death of a baby, or who scowls and sulks to see a pure young man and woman in love, you see someone treading close to the brink of a cliff—the same over which plunged the swine, filled and maddened by a legion of devils.

My God, let it not be so for the country we still love, not yet. But if it must come, let it come swiftly. Let us pray for mercy for all persons. For nations—up to a point. But let God's justice storm as he wills.

Tucker vs.Tillis

Ben Shapiro on Jesus Christ, and Chuck Baldwin's Response

Aaron Wolf: One of His Last Pieces Was Among the Best

Aaron Wolf had been a prolific columnist and editor with Chronicles Magazine. He died one month ago, leaving behind a wife and six children.

One of his last pieces comments on the failure to pass an "infant born alive" Act in Washington. We are now in the midst of a similar failure to override Governor Cooper's veto of comparable legislation in Raleigh.

Here are Wolf's prescient observations:

The bitter irony of the failure of the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act of 2019 is that pro-life Republicans brought their bill to the floor in the hope that they would highlight this monstrous incongruity, and Democrats simply stood their ground with no fear of electoral penalty because everyone, deep down, already knows exactly what is going on when an abortion occurs.

Everyone knows that abortion means killing a human being.  Those who support “abortion rights” simply justify it.  They play games with semantics because they do not wish to think about the bloody results of abortion or speak about them publicly.  They are horrified at hidden-camera videos that show Planned Parenthood selling baby livers and brains to biomedical researchers not because they have learned something new by viewing them, but because they believe it is a human right not to have to think about that which they find unpleasant.  In fact, they are perfectly content with the principle behind everything revealed in those videos: If abortions are going to occur, and the babies will be dead anyway, why should the living not benefit?...

What the War Between the States had left in place of our constitutional order has been eroded by the incorporation of the Constitution into the states.  Stripped of the context of tradition, “Due Process” and “Equal Protection” become cute, vague terms that fit whatever agenda the left wishes to push, and it remains only for the idea to occur to someone in Hollywood or at the New York Times to devise a new right that must be defended at all costs and ultimately incorporated into the laws of every state.  This modus vivendi can go only in one direction: leftward...

Big government is, quite simply, the fulfillment of the promise of liberal democracy.  We literally can’t shake it.  The illusion of self-government that accompanies any democracy causes men to develop an acute awareness of the inequalities that all people face because of unchanging human nature; and thus comes an obsession with individual rights.  This obsession grows in accordance with the size of the group of individuals—neatly organized for us by poll—against which any one individual may compare himself.  And so the consolidation of the American nation under a national government and by means of a national media culture that follows us wherever we go via ironically named smart phones causes jealousy and resentment to be ever-present hindrances in time of trouble.  Local, state, and regional identities, and those vital mediating institutions mentioned so favorably by Burke and Tocqueville, once quelled resentments and fostered duty and loyalty.  They have been neutralized.

A base as massive as ours will always tend toward baseness—unless it has a profound religious sensibility to keep it in check.  And Christianity, being the one true Faith, cannot be replaced by a mere civic religion, neopaganism, nationalism, racialism (white or nonwhite), or citizenism; God is not mocked.  Yet Christianity does not know how to operate apart from those mediating institutions which it instinctively creates and inspires: The Church must create culture, for She seeks to cultivate saints.

Conversely, the death of America’s mediating institutions—of family, school, university, neighborhood, community, local government, arts and letters—is the direct result of the Church’s failure to uphold the natural order, to cultivate virtue, to create culture.  Cultural Marxists cannot march through Christian institutions.

Today, “conservative” Church leaders seek shelter under the wings of liberal democracy, repeating the bromides of the Enlightenment, touting abstract “religious freedom” as if it were written by the finger of God on tablets of stone.  Instead of saying “Thus saith the Lord,” they apologize for the Church’s failure to defend human rights.  They speak not as prophets but as Jacobins.

Infants—whether they wait unaware of the uncertainty of their fate in the warmth of the womb of women zealous of individual rights, or whether they lie helpless on a clinic table while mothers and doctors have “meaningful discussions”—should not be bit players in political theater.  That they are tells us something about the wretchedness of our “sacred” political theories and the composition of this thing we call the American nation.

Democrats and Republicans, liberals and “conservatives”—all talk about the importance of our American democracy, and each accuses the other side of threatening it.  But what if democracy is our problem?

What if our infanticide-friendly national culture is the inevitable result of the individualism and atomistic isolation that democracy fosters?  “[N]ot only does democracy make each man forget his ancestors,” wrote Tocqueville,

but it hides his descendants from him and separates him from his contemporaries; it constantly leads him back toward himself alone and threatens finally to enclose him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.

Clearly, there is no better way to escape into the solitude of one’s own heart than to hide one’s descendant from oneself by killing him in utero—or even on the clinic table when he no longer poses any threat to the “health” of his mother.  Or does he still, even after he has been successfully “born alive”?  Does a breathing child not serve as a living testament to undeniable and unavoidable hierarchy and duty, subverting the sovereign self and his “individual rights”?   

Red Light Cameras: Just When You Thought They Were Gone for Good

More than a decade ago, the city of Greensboro had a red light camera program. Many citizens doubtless felt this was a highly inappropriate effort.

Of course, Greensboro is a progressive/socialist "paradise", so its leaders and bureaucrats probably thought this was a great idea. However, they ran into a problem with state law. Apparently, the legal framework is that the vast majority of the revenues must be redirected to the county school system. When this requirement was imposed, Greensboro quickly walked away from the program.

Now, Bob Grenier and Roch Smith are telling us that the city's bureaucrats and city council members are eager to reinstitute the program. 

But there are several dynamics of which to be aware:

1. As noted above, the county school system gets most of the money. That has apparently not changed.
2. Cities typically contract with a vendor to run the program; and that vendor might get as much as one-third of the revenue.
3. Traffic fatalities are likely multifactorial, and red light cameras will not necessarily correct the issues that lead to many traffic fatalities-- alcohol abuse; inexperienced, young drivers; and otherwise impaired drivers, for instance. The cameras therefore are mostly a revenue-generating scheme for the school system and the outside vendors.

So why are they doing this? They want to monitor us, record our habits, and punish us if we transgress. They want to control our behavior, and take our money.

It is interesting that during recent years we have seen a glorification of the relatively new phenomena of craft beer and local brewing and small distilleries. Greensboro has amply celebrated this trend. Of course, the media glorification tends to deliberately overlook the fact that many of the customers will exit these establishments, and proceed to drive their vehicles elsewhere. It is hard to see how red light cameras will reliably prevent incidents associated with these customers getting inebriated. 

Ask Tiger Woods' girlfriend.

Citizens in the city ought to revolt against this effort.