Three Unrelated Posts

 Several unrelated, yet important articles today deserve to be highlighted by your humble servant.  

The first is by the inestimable Andrea Widburg at the American Thinker today entitled Canada is destroying its banking system. Banking systems started in the Middle Ages with the Knights Templar. Before that time, anyone traveling would have to take his wealth with him, and of course hire armed guards to guard it along the way. The Knights set up a system whereby you could deposit your wealth at the local Commandery, for which you received a letter of credit (sort of the first bank checks).  When you got to your destination, you could receive your wealth at another Commandery by presenting the letter of credit. The Knights had a reputation for being honest, which made placing your worldly possessions in their care seem worthwhile. Banking has come a long way since then, but one item necessary is still trust:

The financial world functions only if there is some element of trust. I must believe that if I deposit my money with Bank X, that Bank X will return those funds to me when I demand them. Moreover, I must believe that if the bank fails to do so because it doesn't like me or my politics, the government will side with me, not the bank.

And if neither the bank nor the government likes me, I must have the minimal assurance that there is a neutral process to determine whether their dislike trumps my rights in my own money. Without that trust, I'm going to keep my money under a mattress rather than deposit it with an arbitrary and capricious banking system.

Trudeau has just turned Canada's entire banking system into one that utterly lacks due process. It is, instead, arbitrary and capricious, depending entirely on the tyrant's whims. Even the money-launderers (and it turns out that Canada has been a money-laundering haven) will have no incentive to trust their ill-gotten gains to Canada's banks.

What Trudeau and Co. are doing is complete madness. Like many tyrants before them, their fanatical, unhinged efforts to protect their status and punish their enemies mean they are engaging in self-destructive acts that, sadly, will also destroy their country.

No doubt the American Left is looking to Canada for ideas. They should think twice though.

Next up is a piece by Josh Hammer at Townhall.com entitled The View From Budapest. Hammer has been to Budapest, has spoken to Victor Orban, and some of his associates, and comes away with a very different portrait of the man and his politics. Tucker Carlson did a similar look at Orban and his government, and came away with similar findings.

I'm writing from Budapest, the beautiful, Danube-bestriding Hungarian capital. Hungary, though a faraway land and modest in both size and population, has played an outsize role in the American conservative conscience for the past half-decade or so. After just a few days, it is not difficult to understand why. Hungary, under Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his ruling Fidesz party, is a real-life experiment in government under a framework of "national conservatism." Lessons for American conservatives are clear and legion.

Western media typically covers Orban in hysterical fashion, accusing him of autocracy, crypto-fascism or outright thuggery. It is difficult to believe that any of these left-wing keyboard warriors have ever met Orban, much less spent any time with him. I spent a couple hours standing directly next to him earlier this week, when he met with a small group of visiting media, think-tankers and other public figure types. That meeting was illuminating.

From firsthand experience, I can attest that the prime minister is nothing like the caricature the media portrays him as. He is personally quite funny, gregarious and engaging, and he handled even critical questions with aplomb. Perhaps most surprising for blue-checked Twitterati types who view him as a power-hungry, barbaric European dictator, he is also a genuine conservative intellectual. Orban spent time at Oxford, and he dedicates one day every week to reading up and immersing himself in substantive political reading material. To borrow a popular online phrase, he has "done the reading."

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Hungary under Orban rejects the illusion of liberal neutrality, recognizing, as this column has previously phrased it, "that values-neutral liberal order amounts to a one-way cultural ratchet" toward leftism and progressivism. As euroskeptical Hungary and other like-minded Central and Eastern European nations, such as Poland, have learned all too well, it is impotent to defensively plead "live and let live"-style tolerance from imperious liberal European Union overlords in Berlin and Brussels. Rather, the only way for traditionalist nations like Hungary and Poland to push back against the EU's progressive, globalist vision of the good, the true and the beautiful is by offering an affirmative counter in the form of its own conservative, nationalist vision of the good, the true and the beautiful.

That last is what too many Republicans don't get. They need to present a unified program in opposition to the Left. They cannot just be better caretakers of Democrats' hairbrained ideas. And even if a law lines up with God's word, it still might just be the right thing to do. After all, doesn't nearly everyone think that murder is a bad thing (except of course Planned Parenthood, who I suspect of being psychopaths murdering innocent babies right and left)? Perhaps we should try the other 9 Commandments as well, right?  What we are doing is not working.

Finally, we have William Barger at the American Thinker who outlines what he believes to be The Church's Role in COVID Recovery. Many people are scared out of their wits over a virus for which the overall survival rate is 99.8% I know on local news, fully half of the news program is devoted to COVID, case numbers, hospitalizations, and the latest gubernatorial diktats. The government and its media propagandists are creating a cult of Covidianism. The cult requires mask wearing at all times, lockdowns, and of course vaccination with a product proven not to work as advertised.  The Church needs to remind people that we have faced worse before, to place their trust not in men but in Christ the King.

Pandemic recovery is an excellent opportunity for the Church to remind us to place our hope not in earthly princes, but in Christ’s kingship and mercy. Public health technocrats and power-hungry officials relied upon an ambiguous definition of “safety” to demand that churches be closed, funerals eliminated, small businesses closed, and promoted the vaccination of every person. Churches shuttered for long periods, based upon the government’s edicts. When big box stores and liquor stores were allowed to reopen as “essential,” but churches were not, the clergy should have pushed back. Some did. Many did not. The U.S. Supreme Court had to alert the State of New York that they could not arbitrarily keep big box stores open while shuttering churches. This was a time when people truly needed access to services and sacraments, but they were not there.

The technocrats' obsession with control even has them demanding vaccination of our youngest children, who face miniscule risk from infection. We need reminders that virtues combat vice. Pride and greed can explain why public health experts demand compliance with a pandemic response that enriches pharmaceutical companies, and enables government officials to engage in crushing mandates, lockdowns, and diktats. Despite their methods being proven ineffective, again and again these “experts” continue to spew forth draconian mandates and advice to “defeat” the coronavirus. Marxism demands compliance, even when their demands became irrational. The Church has been a bulwark against Marxist ideologies before.

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The American Church, clergy as well as laity, must take back its moral authority and proclaim the dignity of human life. The Church is to be the guardian of conscience rights. Protecting religious liberty and dignity of the faithful can be accomplished by protecting its clergy, sacraments, and the right to worship freely, without limitation. Both clergy and laity must work to help others recognize that Caesar asks too much by demanding even children be vaccinated, that the ill be isolated in hospitals, and that our “safety” requires the elimination of sacraments and worship, including a Christian burial. The Church must restore the practice of adults withstanding short-term struggles for the protection of the children. Doing every act our idols demand for our “safety,” no matter how irrational, must be opposed, and be identified as a “science”-based cult. The Church must proclaim the spiritual purification that occurs in suffering for the defense of God’s truth. Believing our technocratic elites are capable of controlling God’s creation is a dangerous spiritual path. The Church needs to remember that it is in the business of saving souls. The Catholic Church, specifically, has been through these types of battles throughout its history. We are now at a time in history where future generations will hear of the courageous actions of faithful people that were effective in the protection of the Church and its teachings.