How could the people be so wrong

as to consistently support Donald Trump for President?

But this is where American politics - not the politics of a Laurus or a Putin, but American politics - separates itself from religion.

With religion, the people are either right or wrong with respect to an absolute revealed Truth. In American politics - as opposed to the politics implicit within the hypothetical Benedict Option - the right of the people to decide for themselves what is right for them is the persisting political Truth, regardless of whether that decision ultimately proves to be for good or ill.

In the wake of the passing of Justice Scalia, this irony becomes poignantly salient, that Justice Scalia's entire legacy was one of preventing him and his fellow justices from intervening in the form of what Andrew McCarthy and others before him have referred to as an elite super-legislature to prevent Americans from freely deciding how they would be governed, no matter how right or wrong others, judicial elites in particular, might view such decisions.

Because of Scalia, we still have the right to choose a Trump, or, hopefully, better, and, because of Scalia we still no longer live in a romantically imagined Middle Age, where we might dream like school girls of life under a kindly and wise paternal czar but, for our dreaming, find ourselves saddled by a Stalin instead.

The premise of the Benedict Option

Today Dreher asks (via an alleged Muslim commenter):

... when you ask Muslim immigrants to integrate, what do you mean? Integrate into what?

Dreher has no answer -- other than this:

... I'm not sure how I would answer it. I've never thought about it before, and am embarrassed to realize that. 

... I think when Europe asks them to integrate, it's asking them pretty much to quit being Muslim. When America does, I think it's more or less asking them, "Will you please not act in ways that make us feel afraid?"

I guess the only way one can think like this is because one thinks like this:

.... Post-Obergefell, to what extent should Christians remain engaged with and willing to defined the America we have? .... 

.... I no longer hold the view that America is a nearly unambiguous force for good in the world. In fact, I think American culture is in many ways poisonous, and a force for evil....

.... I believe that there is a meaningful difference between being a good Christian and a good American ....

 
This is the premise of the Benedict Option. When one believes that the "Enlightenment project" has failed, then one cannot answer that simple question of "what does it mean to integrate" with the obvious answer that "to integrate" means to accept the founding ideas of the Nation:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed....

Despotism awaits those who follow the path of the Benedict Option.

New Movie "2081" Based on Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron

Via Kathleen...

Whoa -- Tammy Bruce as Diana Moon Glampers? She'll hit that out of the park.

I never saw the other version. I heard negative things about it, for example I guess Sean Astin ironically turned in a performance far below his talent level as the main character.

"A place of honor with all that is good."

A few of George Washington's quotes on the place of guns in our society:

The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference -- they deserve a place of honor with all that's good.

Firearms are second only to the Constitution in importance; they are the peoples' liberty's teeth.