If you asked people what the tallest mountain on Earth is, most would respond with Mount Everest, which is on the border of Nepal and Tibet. Everest is the highest peak in the Himalayan mountain range, rising 8,849 meters (29,032 feet) above sea level.Everest is also commonly seen as one of the high points of human conquest. Scaling the mountain and reaching its peak was once known as one of the most significant challenges a human could undertake. However, according to Joe Hanson, PhD, host of PBS’s “Be Smart,” Everest may not be the tallest mountain on Earth. In a video called “Why No One Can Agree on What's REALLY the Tallest Mountain,” he shows that height is in the eyes of the beholder when it comes to mountains.Hanson is a science writer, biologist, and educator whose work has been published in WIRED, Nautilus, Scientific American, Texas Monthly, and other publications.“Everest checks in at 8,848.86 meters tall today. But we still don't really know if that's right. Because on a planet that isn't perfectly round wrapped in a crust that keeps moving, measuring a mountain turns out to be way harder than you think,” Hanson opens the video. - YouTube youtu.be Hanson says that the title of tallest mountain on Earth has changed more than a few times over the last 300 years. In the 18th century, Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador was considered the tallest, but in 1908, that honor switched to Dhaulagiri in Nepal. Thirty-nine years later, that honor was taken by Kangchenjunga on the border of Nepal and India, until Everest usurped it just five years later.There are two major problems with definitively ranking the tallest mountains on Earth. First, there is no universally accepted rule on what a mountain is or how one is defined. Second, mountains aren't the massive unchanging things that they appear to be.What is the tallest mountain on Earth?If you count the submerged part beneath the water, Hawaii's Mauna Kea is 20% taller than Everest. If you just measure base-to-summit, then Denali in Alaska is the tallest. "Everest only takes the title because most of the time, we measure mountains from sea level," Hanson says. Everest is considered the tallest mountain because we measure from sea level, but that’s not the most reliable place to start. Due to Earth's gravity and shape, sea level varies across the globe, creating different elevations across the various oceans and seas. Scientists average these variations to create a “mean” sea level, the baseline for measuring mountain heights.“But these days, the commonly accepted view is to measure a mountain's height above mean sea level. So Everest gets the title of tallest, despite other mountains having pretty strong claims to the throne,” Hanson says. “So, to summit all up, it's pretty easy to figure out where a mountain ends, but not everyone agrees on where a mountain starts. So when it comes to figuring out what's really the tallest mountain, maybe first we should get to the bottom of that.”The funny thing is that even if Everest is the tallest mountain on Earth, it may not be that way forever; according to Hanson, Nanga Parbat in Pakistan is growing faster than Everest and could eclipse its famous neighbor in the next couple hundred thousand years. So, enjoy your time in the spotlight, Everest. In a few hundred thousand years, you may be downgraded to number two.

By now, since it’s made the rounds on the internet, you’ve likely seen the clip of Kamala Harris going on the awful, sexualized leftist podcast called Call Me Daddy, hosted by a woman named Alex Cooper, and engaging in her classic brand of misandrist sophistry. What’s that? Here’s a quick refresher: This was in 2018, when Harris was a senator and not yet the vice president. This was seen as something of a “gotcha” moment, though it was hardly what you’d call substantive. But Cooper, looking for some achievement that she could use to glorify her guest, dredged it back up. Here’s how that went, along with some extremely incisive commentary to follow: Is anyone surprised? pic.twitter.com/LuHqkQfAG2 — Michelle Maxwell (@MichelleMaxwell) October 7, 2024 Yes, the correct answer is the Selective Service Act, which makes men and not women eligible for the draft. And that is a much more invasive government claim on a male body than any abortion bans are on a female body. After all, an abortion ban, in truth, keeps inviolate not the body of an adult female but rather that of a fetus, which, left to nature, is intended to leave the womb as a living, breathing human being. An abortion ban tells a female who has conceived that fetus that she must do no harm. Whereas the draft, if activated, tells an adult male, “You must do harm.” The last war our government fought under color of an active draft killed some 55,000 of our young men. That was the Vietnam War, which was ginned up through dishonesty on the part of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration and was fought under catastrophically terrible rules of engagement. And then our government, led at the time by a Congress dominated by Johnson’s own political party, simply gave away an honorable peace that would have preserved the South Vietnamese state those 55,000 young American men died to save. Kamala Harris doesn’t give a damn about any of those 55,000 dead Americans. She doesn’t give much of a damn about the 330 million current live Americans. And she certainly doesn’t give a damn about the male subset of that population. How could she? Nothing in Kamala Harris’ political background shows that she has any respect for, or appreciation of, masculinity. Without delving too deeply into her background, because certainly most of our readers know well what we would find there, it’s very fair to note that Kamala Harris has been and almost unquestionably still is a user of men. She certainly used Willie Brown, California’s greatest political fixer of the late 20th century, to create for herself a career in law and politics that she certainly did not merit. Harris’ meager academic achievements, having graduated from Howard University and the University of California Hastings law school, led to her failing the bar exam in California on her first try. Nonetheless she trafficked with TV host Montel Williams and Brown, which led to various government jobs and an elevation to district attorney in San Francisco, attorney general in California, and the U.S. Senate. Then Harris ran for president and was utterly eviscerated by her own party’s voters, but nonetheless elevated to vice president by Joe Biden, a man she had tarred as a racist. Kamala paid off Biden’s magnanimity by participating in a coup that robbed Biden of a nomination that he earned in the 2024 Democrat primary field. This is someone who has used and climbed over practically every man in her life. Many of those men, of course, deserve zero sympathy. Did you notice that Harris’ father, an 82-year-old Jamaican native and Marxist law professor who is still around, was not on hand in Chicago for her acceptance of the Democrat Party’s nomination? That seems peculiar, does it not? Harris has made almost no mention of Donald Harris, and in fact the personal narrative her campaign touts acts as if he doesn’t exist. Harris speaks ad nauseam about living in a little house in a “middle-class neighborhood” in Oakland, when in fact she spent more time as a child living in an exclusive neighborhood in Montreal where the average house these days sells for $2.7 million. Donald Harris has nothing to do with that, of course. It’s very suggestive of an ugly relationship between the two. It’s hard to imagine a bigger moment in anyone’s life than accepting a nomination for president by a major political party, and yet she obviously didn’t want him there and she refuses to talk about him. Perhaps that’s Donald Harris’ fault. And frankly, my experience with Marxist academicians makes it seem very plausible that he’s an entirely unsavory SOB nobody would want to claim. Which is also almost certainly true of Willie Brown. Brown’s influence on Harris’ life might well have been a positive one for her career. But making her into a side piece meant she therefore wasn’t the kind of woman a respectable man might consider as a wife, and it’s Willie Brown’s contribution that her story never included any biological children of her own. Brown was willing to sleep with Harris, and to inflict her on the public of San Francisco and California with increasingly elevating positions for which she was far below sufficient competence, but he certainly wasn’t willing to leave his own wife to make an honest woman of Kamala. Which is contemptible on his part. And on hers, but Brown was the senior in that relationship and therefore owns the bulk of the responsibility for it. If Alex Cooper was a real interviewer and she wanted to generate some news about Harris, she could have asked Kamala if she’s ever conceived a child. Oh, but that’s far too invasive a question, isn’t it? The public surely doesn’t have a right to know whether Harris got pregnant by Brown or some other man with whom she carried on an affair during her early-adult years. None of our business, right? What if Kamala Harris was a Republican with that personal history? Do you think she would be entitled to so much privacy? Seeing as abortion is the apparent centerpiece of Harris’ campaign, and seeing as though her running mate can’t stop lying about his own abortion policy in Minnesota, shouldn’t we Americans have a right to know how personally she actually does take this issue? If Harris did have an abortion at some point, how did that affect her life? Was she changed psychologically by it as many women are? Did it have anything to do with Harris’ abominable decision to prosecute journalist David Daleiden for the latter’s having compiled video proof that Planned Parenthood is profiting off the body parts of aborted fetuses, something that has certainly not gotten enough attention in this campaign? She ended up marrying Doug Emhoff, who we’re told is “redefining masculinity,” in the words of the horrific Jen Psaki. That’s another way to say that Doug Emhoff is no male that any real man would respect, seeing as Emhoff, a beta male by any regard who jokes about his status as a “man-wife” or some other such demeaning title in his relationship with her, has with women routinely behaved in a manner unworthy of high male status. We know that Emhoff destroyed his first marriage by conducting an affair with his children’s nanny and got the woman pregnant; she claims to have had a miscarriage, but there are suspicions of a different, if similar, outcome. And now we learn that Emhoff allegedly hit another woman that he was dating so hard that she physically spun around. That’s a charge that should disqualify him as the second gentleman, much less the first. And Kamala Harris chose him. We can see from her rhetoric and her actions she has little to no respect for men. Perhaps that record also explains why, as Kamala Harris doesn’t seem to associate with any men worth respecting. MORE from Scott McKay: Aftershocks: From Hellmarsh With Love Ep. 5 The Spectacle Ep. 152: Why We Love HBO’s The Penguin Five Quick Things: Joe And Kamala Don’t Give a Damn About You, America The post Of Course Kamala Hates Men. It’s Understandable. appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Leftism is a complex beast — far more intricate and sinister than many realize. Conservatives speak often of communism and Marxism, but leftism is unlike either of these evils. After all, both communism and Marxism have end goals that many could or would agree are good, even though the means they propose to achieve these goods are deeply flawed at best and outright evil in most cases. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our fall 2024 print magazine, which includes this article and others like it. Equality sounds like a grand goal to fight for, but it is not worth the cost of destroying the differences that contribute to the unique dignity inherent in each of us and, indeed, in our nations and cultures. Equality of income is an appealing thought when one is salivating over the vast fortunes of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, but it is far less enticing when the breadline is long and the sun is setting. The erasure of class distinctions may sound noble enough to some, but one might sour on the notion upon realizing that it does not mean every pauper is treated as a prince, but rather that every prince is spurned as a pauper. This article is taken from The American Spectator’s fall 2024 print magazine. Subscribe to receive the entire magazine. Even such ideological evils as moral relativism and the New Atheism of the early 2000s were mere forerunners to the behemoth of leftism. Moral relativism, of course, proclaimed that nothing is evil, which effectively means either that nothing is good or that everything is good. New Atheism, in its arrogant hatred for God, derided spiritual realities and the rituals by which the spiritual and corporeal are united. Although conservatism has opposed each of these epochs of evil at one time or another, leftism seems today to be the greatest threat that it has yet faced. Indeed, it is an existential threat, for if leftism achieves dominance, as it sometimes seems poised to do, then Western Civilization will fall into chaos and decay, and with it will fall conservatism. Unlike its predecessors, leftism is not merely political or ideological, nor is it an amalgamation of the two. No, leftism incorporates a third aspect, one that atheistic communism tried to crush, moral relativism tried to ignore to the point of annihilation, and New Atheism tried to ridicule into submission: the reality of the spiritual world. Leftism does not simply propose alternative or radical methods for achieving commonly accepted goods; instead, it presents its own set of values that is divorced entirely from thousands of years of carefully curated principles and passionately defended moral truths. In fact, leftism establishes itself as an alternative to religion by proclaiming a new spiritual reality that directly opposes the spiritual truths safeguarded and preached by Christianity for two thousand years. Art by Bill Wilson The natural law, long adhered to by pre-Christian pagans (at least those in what is today called Europe), was a sort of moral code inherent in the hearts of men across varying and multitudinous cultures, customs, and religions. The basis of natural law, as the author C. S. Lewis explains in his perennially insightful The Abolition of Man, is essentially spiritual. It does not originate from mere fleshly desires or urges but acknowledges a plane of spiritual reality and demands that the body act in accordance with what is good for the soul. Natural law thus found a warm and welcoming home in Christianity, which offered a ferocious intellectual defense of natural law and, in a sense, completed it by uniting body and soul even more intimately, as the 13th-century Dominican philosopher Thomas Aquinas clarified in his Summa Theologiae. Even in the throes of modern liberalism, Christian morality has been nearly impossible to escape, as it underpins the whole of Western Civilization. The Soviet Union frowned upon divorce, pornography, and homosexuality. New Atheism may hate Christianity but, as its “high priest” Richard Dawkins recently admitted, it cannot abide a culture divorced from Christian morality. In years past, even the atrocity of abortion was not labeled an unequivocal good but was defended by its advocates as an unfortunate necessity that ought to be, in the words of then-President Bill Clinton, “rare.” Western Civilization cannot be sustained without Christian morality. Leftism, though, does not seek to preserve Western Civilization. Like communism and New Atheism, it abhors God; but while those two prior ideologies sought to preserve at least some facets of the West, leftism seeks to burn it all to the ground in order to replace it with a new civilization. Leftism does not aspire to annihilate three-quarters of Christian morality but maintain the rest: its ambition is to replace Christian morality altogether. Abortion is no longer an unfortunate necessity but an absolute right — even an absolute good. Devotees of the barbaric practice chug bottles of abortion pills on the steps outside the Supreme Court and boast of the number of unborn children that they have slaughtered. Homosexuality is not some matter of equal rights or freedom to lead a different kind of private life. Obeisance to the rainbow is now demanded in the public square, perversion is regularly paraded through cities and towns both big and small, and debauchery and degeneracy are increasingly enshrined in everything from books, films, and television shows to advertising, sports, and children’s clothing brands. Opposition to racism is no longer a matter of treating all men with equal dignity, regardless of the color of their skin, but of worshiping minority groups due to the perceived victim status of their ancestors, while simultaneously denigrating the majority of the nation’s population on trumped-up charges of historic oppression and cruelty. Perhaps the most revealing of the new moral tenets advocated by leftism is transgenderism. This practice of renouncing one’s old self, being “reborn” with a new name, and leaving behind one’s former identity definitively marks leftism as a religion rather than just another political movement. Leftism upholds abortion as an absolute good because it proclaims a spiritual reality in which the sacrifice of a child is a good. An entire month is set aside for the ritualistic worship of homosexuality because leftism believes that there is a spiritual reality that demands it. Ancestral victimhood (whether exaggerated or not) is worthy of praise because leftism holds that victims are spiritually superior to non-victims. And gender transitions resemble a sort of twisted version of the Christian sacrament of Baptism. In fact, all of the practices of leftism appear to be diabolical inversions of Christian sacraments. The philosopher Peter Kreeft once wisely observed: “Abortion is the Antichrist’s demonic parody of the Eucharist. That’s why it uses the same holy words, ‘This is my body,’ with the blasphemous opposite meaning.” Leftism is not just the next wave of communism. It is a religious cult, both a political and a spiritual force, animated by Hell’s hatred for Heaven. What then can conservatives do to stand against the servants (whether wittingly or unwittingly) of Satan himself? Economic reforms and mass deportations, while a political necessity at present, will not be enough to halt the march of Hell. If leftism is truly recognized for the demoniac onslaught that it is, then conservatism has no choice but to root itself in Christianity. In recent decades, conservatism has taken a somewhat agnostic approach to the dangers facing the West, seeking to conserve a “status quo.” But which status quo? The social and cultural makeup of the world has shifted rapidly and repeatedly. Is the world of 2010 to be conserved? Of 2008? Perhaps that of September 10, 2001? The West has strayed far from its foundation in Christian morality, though it has not yet succeeded in escaping that morality. If conservatism wishes to effectively conserve anything at all, it must root itself firmly in Christianity, or else it will perish along with Western Civilization. Christianity alone offers that which will survive the onslaught of leftism: eternity. Christian morality does not change with the times or shift according to consensus surveys. It is eternal, decreed by God Himself, who alone existed before all else. Conservatism must broaden its scope, recognize the plight of the West, and take up the banner of Christian morality. Open war is upon us. We must choose now whether we will try to preserve a moral no-man’s-land or adhere to the moral truths preserved throughout the centuries by Christianity. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our fall 2024 print magazine. The post The Case for Christian Conservatism appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

This semester at Thales College, I am teaching a survey course focusing on literature, most of it English poetry, from the Renaissance to the 20th century. I have two auditors in the class. One of them is still in high school, taught at home, and he, as I have been used for 30 years in homeschoolers, beams with delight at all that he finds well done or wondrous, and since our first authors have been Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton, there have been many opportunities for wonder. The other is a Thales student whom I have had in another class, who is sitting in this one for the most obvious reason, which is that he wants to learn things. These auditors never miss a single class, they are obviously doing all the reading (right now, that means the entirety of Paradise Lost), and they participate as fully as the others do. I have never had that experience before. But the most surprising thing is simply that this should be a surprise. Let me explain. Suppose you were to wake up one sunny day and find yourself in the Piazza di San Marco, in Venice. The golden-domed cathedral stands before you, with open doors. No one stands guard. Thousands of pigeons are gathered on the pavement, cooing and pecking about, and from a side alley far off you hear what sounds like a street singer, playing on a mandolin. In the air is the faint sharp smell of the sea. Do you not think you would get up, and go into the church, where you may find some of the most brilliant and mysterious mosaic art that man has ever crafted? Or stand gazing up at the bell tower in its gleaming white marble? Or find that singer with the mandolin? Or explore the winding streets, crossing by one small bridge or another the maze of canals, with their water lapping against the foundations of buildings that seem to be perched on the sea? Or would you bury your head in the latest issue of The International Tribune, to follow the interminable labyrinth of the politics of your nation, whichever that happens to be? And this, which you are free to do at any time, begins like mold to spread its fur over your entire brain, so that even if you were face to face with magnificence, you would not so much as raise your eyes. The great heritage of English literature is right here, a few feet away, but it seems that for most of our teachers in the public schools, and in many a private school also, it may as well be in an alternate universe. When it came to literature, the Common Core was well-named in one regard. It kept the inedible core of the apple and threw the fruit away. Its view of English was utilitarian in the extreme; hence its focus on “informational texts,” which meant, in practice, political editorials masking as reportage. It sliced and diced a few genuinely great literary works into convenient little pieces, and its dismissed almost all poetry, and most especially poetry written before 1900, which could not be dragooned into utilitarian or political service. But what the Core really did was to give us a clear picture of what the schools were already doing to literature, because, apart from any political use to which it might be put, many of our English teachers do not actually like English literature, and most of the rest are not well-versed in it. Their students pick up on the disdain or the indifference and bring it with them into college. There they are likeliest to fall in love with that literature if they happen upon some oddball in the English department, despised or mistrusted by his or her colleagues, or if they avoid the department entirely and happen to pick up a book of old poetry someday and read it. And this consideration brings me back to Paradise Lost. Milton takes for granted that all rational beings are attracted by beauty, and that whenever they have the chance, unless they are given over to sloth, they will want, as even the devils in hell want, “to raise magnificence.” It is true that the great hall the devils build in hell, Pandemonium (Milton’s coinage, that), is overwrought, and is meant in part to satirize something like St. Peter’s Basilica, but the problem is not the desire to create something of beauty and wonder, but the disjunction of that desire from spiritual insight and goodness. Thus Pandemonium, for all its flash and its naphthalene light and its immense interior space, is a place where almost all the devils themselves must be humiliated, “reduced to smallest forms,” if they would walk at large within. But the blissful bower that is the inner abode of Adam and Eve, a bower prepared by the hand of God, is like a small cathedral of nature in its walls and its roof and its floor of many colors: It was a place Chosen by the sovereign Planter, when he framed All things to man’s delightful use; the roof Of thickest covert was inwoven shade Laurel and myrtle, and what higher grew Of limb or fragrant leaf; on either side Acanthus, and each odorous bushy shrub Fenced up the verdant wall; each beauteous flower, Iris all hues, roses, and jessamine Reared high their flourished heads between, and wrought Mosaic; underfoot the violet, Crocus, and hyacinth with rich inlay Broidered the ground, more colored than with stone Of costliest emblem; other creature here, Beast, bird, insect, or worm, durst enter none, Such was their awe of man. This beauty is not something merely to consume, as a list-checking tourist might. It enters and forms the soul. Here is Eve, conversing at ease with Adam as evening falls. Her words are a kind of spontaneous poem, a love song that extends to all the world, but that places all the world as not so beloved as the man at whose side she reclines: Conversing with thee I forget all times; All seasons and their change, all please alike. Sweet is the breath of morn when he ascends With charm of earliest birds; pleasant the sun When first on this delightful land he spreads His orient beam, on herb, tree, fruit, and flower Glistering with dew; fragrant the fertile earth After soft showers, and sweet the coming on Of grateful evening mild, and silent night With this her solemn bird, and this fair moon, And these the gems of heaven, her starry train; But neither breath of morn when he ascends With charm of earliest birds, nor rising sun On this delightful land, nor herb, fruit, flower Glistering with dew, nor fragrance after showers, Nor grateful evening mild, nor silent night With this her solemn bird, nor walk by moon Or glittering starlight without thee is sweet. If you ask, “What is the value in reading such a work as Paradise Lost?”, I might reply by mentioning that Milton opens up the mind to many of the most influential and powerful poets and men of letters in the centuries to come: Pope, Blake, Shelley, Byron, Goethe, Melville, and many more. I might also mention that Milton sheds light backward also upon the many authors and artists whose work he revisits: Homer and Virgil and all the great poets of ancient Greece and Rome; Augustine and John Chrysostom and the Church Fathers; philosophers from Plato to the schoolmen to the Platonists of his own beloved Cambridge; to read Milton closely is to bring into play 2,000 years of learning and artistic achievement, with a guide whose mind was highly original and whose engagement with his predecessors was organic and active, not mechanical or passive. I could say these things, and they still would miss the main point, one which I ardently hope my students will grasp, and I will do all I can to help them. The splendor of a work of titanic artistic and intellectual achievement is its own justification, not only as something to enjoy, but as something to encounter, sometimes even with awe, as it works toward forming the soul. Many a Venice is at hand. Our young people need only set aside the distractions, and find someone who can take them there. READ MORE from Anthony Esolen: We Seek the Truth Get Lost, Kid Noise in the Classroom The post Common Core Undermines the Search for Beauty appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War By Erik Larson (Crown, 592 pages, $35) The saga of Fort Sumter in the lead-up to the American Civil War is familiar territory for historians. Erik Larson, the acclaimed author of In the Garden of Beasts and The Splendid and the Vile, provides a fast-paced narrative of the time period between Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860 and the “first shots” of the Civil War in Charleston’s harbor in April 1861, in his new book, The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War. But Larson’s book is marred by its introduction, where he compares the events of Jan. 6, 2021, to the assault on Fort Sumter, and by his selective bibliography, which excludes the two best descriptions of the immediate origins of the Civil War: Shelby Foote’s brilliant narrative of those events in his masterful trilogy of the Civil War, and Richard Current’s indispensable Lincoln and the First Shot.  The notion that the events of Jan. 6, 2021, were comparable to the shelling of Fort Sumter, the latter of which resulted in a war that produced more than 700,000 American deaths, is ridiculous. Here, Larson is magnifying both the events and consequences of Jan. 6, which corresponds, however, to the political narrative pushed by one side in the current political battles in our country.  And it is curious that Larson apparently failed to consult either Foote’s or Current’s narratives of the attack on Fort Sumter. Neither author is mentioned in his “Sources and Acknowledgments” nor in his bibliography. Perhaps that is because both Foote and Current concluded that Lincoln deftly maneuvered the Confederacy to fire the first shot of the war. Neither Foote or Current absolved Jefferson Davis, the “fire eaters” of secession, and the Confederate commanders in South Carolina of responsibility for starting the most deadly war in American history. But Lincoln knew what he was doing by informing South Carolina authorities that he was going to reprovision Sumter but not militarily reinforce the fort. If there was going to be a war, Lincoln wanted the Confederates to fire the first shot. After all, in his inaugural address, Lincoln told the secessionists, “You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors.” Indeed, three months after the attack on Sumter, a friend of Lincoln recorded in his diary that Lincoln told him that he “himself conceived the idea, and proposed sending supplies, without attempting to reinforce, giving notice of the fact to Gov. Pickins [sic] of S.C. The plan succeeded. They attacked Sumter — it fell, and thus did more service than it otherwise could.”  Richard Current shied away from accusing Lincoln of deliberately provoking the attack on Sumter, but he concluded that Lincoln likely thought that hostilities would result from his announced attempt to re-provision the fort and “he was determined that, if they should … they must clearly be initiated by the Confederates.” Similarly, Shelby Foote wrote that Lincoln shrewdly maneuvered Confederate leaders into a Hobson’s choice of either “back[ing] down on their threats or else to fire the first shots of the war.” Larson has literally nothing to say on this topic. Instead, Larson’s focus is on the South Carolina aristocrats — the planter, slaveholder class — that fell prey to a “demon of unrest” that propelled the country to civil war. They called themselves “the chivalry,” and Larson writes that they “retreated into [their] own world of indolence and myth.” These were men like Robert Rhett, Edmund Ruffin, James Henry Hammond, David Jamison, and James Chestnut (diarist Mary Chestnut’s husband). To them, slavery was a positive good, and they feared that a Lincoln presidency would lead to slave rebellions that would bring ruin upon the South’s “peculiar institution.” Larson shows how that “demon of unrest” was allowed to grow by the ineffectual response to secession by lame duck President James Buchanan. This, too, is a familiar story. Buchanan sympathized with the South, and while he refused to surrender to Confederate demands to abandon Sumter, he did nothing to strengthen the North’s position there. Buchanan simply waited on events in the hope that the new president would deal with the growing crisis. Lincoln, on the other hand, was frustrated as he observed the Union falling apart without any means to do anything as president-elect.  Larson’s narrative is mostly chronological, highlighting in short, crisply written chapters the major events leading up to the attack on Sumter. The political chasm between North and South, Larson believes, was unbridgeable, yet he portrays Lincoln as being bewildered that Southern sentiments were so pro-secession. Why, then, did Lincoln say shortly before leaving for Washington that he faced a task “more difficult” than that faced by General Washington? Other federal forts and property had been taken over by Confederate forces, so what was so special about Sumter? Why did Lincoln make a “stand” there? South Carolina — Charleston in particular — was the “cradle of secession,” the state that was driving all the others toward disunion.  Lincoln received advice both from military leaders (including Gen. Winfield Scott) and Cabinet officials (including Secretary of State William Seward) to abandon Sumter because it was indefensible. In fact, unbeknownst to Lincoln, Seward and presidential envoy Ward Lamon told Confederate officials that Sumter would be evacuated, and when it wasn’t, those Confederate officials who had deferred attacking the fort based on those representations, felt that Lincoln had deceived them. In reality, Lincoln had already launched plans to reprovision the fort.  Why did it matter to Lincoln who fired the first shot? Lincoln had been a chief critic of President James Polk’s provocative efforts to start a war with Mexico in the mid-1840s. He viewed Polk as the aggressor in that war. Richard Current believed Lincoln was determined to maneuver the South to be the aggressor. In doing so, Lincoln also ensured that sufficient men would volunteer to fight to preserve the Union. As Lincoln said in his second inaugural address, “Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.”  Larson’s epilogue fast forwards to the Union recapture of Fort Sumter in April 1865. General Robert Anderson, who as a major commanded Sumter during the original crisis, was on hand on April 14 to once again raise the Stars and Stripes over the fort he had surrendered exactly four years before. Anderson, a Kentuckian and former slaveholder himself, is one of the heroes of Larson’s narrative for his courageous defense of Sumter and his loyalty to the Union. That evening at dinner at the Charleston Hotel, Gen. Anderson made a toast to “the good, the great, the honest man, Abraham Lincoln.” Ironically, that same evening at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., Lincoln lay dying from a gunshot wound. The last gasp of the “demon of unrest.”     The post <i>The Demon of Unrest</i> Is Marred by Comparison of Jan. 6 to Attack on Fort Sumter appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

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by Joseph P. Farrell, Giza Death Star: You might have noticed the world gets crazier by the week. For example, I used to joke that “when you’re dealing with Martin Bormann, you’re dealing with Dick Cheney… but without the warmth and charm.” Under the current cultural “climate”, I probably should reverse those roles to read “When […]

Remember when they ran a Covid-19 plandemic simulation called Event 201? They just did the same thing for Hurricane Milton. In the simulation it’s called “Hurricane Phoenix” and it’s a CAT 5 that directly hits Tampa Bay. pic.twitter.com/ltQcWiNcQV — Stew Peters (@realstewpeters) October 7, 2024

MAYORKAS is literally at war with the American people. The democrats do not want republican areas of the south reopened. https://t.co/blZz4A9vHH — Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) October 8, 2024

STORM ALERT: Hurricane Milton is now being reported by NOAA as 180 mph winds, with gusts over 200 mph. And it's headed for a direct impact on Tampa with a storm surge up to 18' of water, up to 1 mile inland, varying by geography. This is looking absolutely catastrophic, and it is… pic.twitter.com/OHiEn4WghS — […]