Don Pesci: In Connecticut (!) at a glorious center of conservatism on the Glorious Fourth
“Writing the Declaration of Independence, 1776,” a 1900 painting by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris depicting Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson working on the document.
SOMERS, Conn.
The Fourth of July this year, as everyone in Connecticut who has tolerated the weather the past few days well knows, was wet. The weather, along with fidgety concerns about the effect of fireworks displays on an apparently violated environment, have thrown cold water on John Adams’s view of a proper celebration of independence.
“The Second Day of July 1776,” Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, on the occasion of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, “will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival [of Independence] …It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”
The official celebration of Independence on July 4, pedants will note, is off by two days.
The weather did not matter on this July 4, as the Blake Center for Faith and Freedom, an offshoot of Hillsdale College, in the city of the same name in Michigan, celebrated the real founding in 1776 of the United States of America. All the fireworks were inside the center in Somers.
My wife, Andree, and I were in attendance and found the building itself, a brick-by-brick recreation of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, astonishing, along with the company in attendance, a crowd who draw comfort and illumination from the Founding Fathers of the country; the Blake Center’s executive director, Labin Duke, and the two speakers – Hillsdale Professors Thomas West and David Azerrad, – who shed illumination, if not pomp, on the subjects they chose to present.
The first speaker, West, the author of The Political Theory of the American Founding; Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom, limited his remarks to a discussion of the foundational understanding of modern views concerning the odd shape of our post-liberal foreign and domestic policy. What would the Founders, for instance, have thought of an interventionist foreign policy – that is, an activist foreign policy in which one nation imposes its political views upon another?
Most of them would have felt, as John Adams did, that “America is the friend of liberty everywhere, but the custodian only of our own.” And then, too, there is Washington, the weld of the American Revolution, warning his fellows to avoid “entangling alliances.”
The second speaker, David Azerrad, ventured into our current Marxist-inflected mare’s nest – are we all racists?
The short answer, although there continues to exist in our relatively racist-free society some real racists who continue by their morally offensive and unorthodox behavior to prove the rule that the United States has left racism behind us. Such obnoxious idiots might well profit from a Hillsdale education and a careful reading of the Declaration of Independence, written chiefly by Thomas Jefferson -- “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” -- himself a slave owner.
That declaratory bit concerning “natural rights” having been authored by the Christian God who endowed mankind with “certain unalienable Rights,” among which are “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…” is the wooden stake thrust into the heart of a vampire-like slavery, done to death in a Union-shattering Civil War watered with the blood of patriots at Shiloh and Gettysburg.
The founder of the Friendly’s restaurant chain, S. Prestley Blake, and his wife, Helen, at first sold the property to one buyer, later repurchased it and then more or less gifted it to Hillsdale, in 2019.
In four short years, The Blake Center for Faith and Freedom has become, its patrons realize, an inestimable pearl of wisdom located providentially on the border of Connecticut and Massachusetts.
We should count ourselves lucky – though the center itself regards such “luck” as providential – to have in our presence such a pearl buried deep in an ocean of muddy neo-progressive nonsense. And all of us know for a certainty that no one may reach the pearl without a deep personal dive into history, the U.S. Constitution, the deposit of Christian faith and morals, and the luminous writings of honored precursors of the American experiment in ordered liberty.
Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.
#Blake Center for Faith and Freedom
Don Pesci: On transactional journalism
An anti-Adams screed by James Callendar in the vicious presidential campaign of 1800.
VERNON, Conn.
Journalism, we are told, is suffering from two ailments: Fake news – some of the boys and girls are just pestiferous ideologues – and transactional journalism. Of the two, the more fatal is transactional journalism, because it perverts the very purpose of honest reporting, which is to tell the truth and shame the Devil.
Reporters who engage in transactional journalism are the Donald Trumps of the reportorial world. Journalism is, among other things, a business, and business orbits around access to a product. When he was attorney general of Connecticut for more than 20 years, Dick Blumenthal was a master at putting his product before the television cameras, so much so that it was said of him -- by journalists weary of having to make his frequent media releases into reportorial foie gras -- that there was no more dangerous place in Connecticut than the space between Blumenthal and a television camera.
Transactional journalism, as the name implies, involves a mutually beneficial arrangement – or a Faustian bargain, depending on your point of view -- between a politician and a journalist: The journalist will give the politician the kind of coverage he wants, and the politician will return the favor by giving the journalist the kind of access he needs; both are frauds parading as saints.
Investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson discussed transactional journalism at the Hillsdale College (in Iliinois) National Leadership Seminar in 2018. She was presenting to the faculty and students of the college a modern iteration of an arrangement that is as old as the country.
The Adams-Jefferson campaign of 1800, truly vicious, was prosecuted by proxies; gentlemen of the time did not engage publicy in three ring campaign circuses. Jefferson, according to one surrogate defamer, president of Yale College at the time, presented a danger to virtuous wives and daughters. Should Jefferson become president, “we would see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution.” A Connecticut newspaper warned that electing Jefferson would create a nation where “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will openly be taught and practiced.”
Jefferson, for his part, found James Callender, an influential journalist of the day, a useful tool. Callender specialized in incendiary pamphleteering. Pulling out all the stops on his media organ, Callender, a satirist born in Scotland, wrote that Adams was a “rageful, lying, warmongering fellow,” a “repulsive pedant” and “gross hypocrite” who “behaved neither like a man nor like a woman but instead possessed a hideous hermaphroditical character.”
Callender had a private beef with Adams. He had been prosecuted and imprisoned by the Adams administration for violating the execrable Alien and Sedition Acts and was receiving payments for his seemingly objective journalism from Jefferson. To his credit, Callender later turned on Jefferson, authoring a series of newspaper articles alleging that Jefferson had sired children with Sally Hemings, one of his slaves.
Stumbling out of a bar in 1803, Callender drowned in the James River; so it was reported. However, there were doubters. Federalists suspected skullduggery since Callender was due to testify in a much publicized trial, The People vs. Croswell, involving charges against publisher Harry Croswell for having reprinted claims that Jefferson paid Callender to defame George Washington.
Two morals may be drawn from all this reportorial perfidy: 1) If you are a seasoned politician and want a good press, you should buy a sympathetic reporter; 2) If you are a bought reporter, stay bought, and avoid bars and rivers.
American campaigning and American political journalism were born in the same crib. In the good old days, newspapers were little more than party organs. Honest Abe Lincoln wrote editorials for a sympathetic paper under a pseudonym. The notion that the press is and ought to be non-partisan and objective is a modern aspiration, sometimes attained, sometimes not.
Attkisson sees transactional journalism as a noxious practice, fatal to honest journalism. The coin of the realm in transactional journalism is not money, but favorable news in return for access, which is corrupting on both ends; the reporter becomes a conveyance of partisan news, and the politician’s messaging is dishonestly sold as objective reporting. In biblical terms, the bought reporter sells his birthright of honest journalism for a mess of political pottage.
Attkisson’s book The Smear offers some timely advice followed by a warning: “One smear artist I interviewed said nearly every image you run across in daily life, whether it’s on the news, a comedian’s joke, a meme on social media or a comment on the Internet, was put there for a reason. It’s like scenes in a movie, he said. Nothing happens by accident. Sometimes people have paid a great deal of money to put those images before you. What you need to ask yourself isn’t so much ‘is it true,’ but ‘who wants me to believe it and why?’”
She warns that the firewall between political reporting and propaganda may easily be breached: “We are not keeping an adequate firewall, giving the very people access to the newsroom who are trying to sway our opinion and shape news coverage. I am often not sure what these pundits on both sides add, besides propaganda talking points. This is part of what I call the soft ‘infiltration’ of the news media. We haven’t done a good job at staying at arm’s length from the interests that seek to use us as tools.”
Don Pesci is a Vernon-based essayist.
Labels: Adams, Attkisson, Callender, Croswell, Hillsdale, Jefferson, Lincoln, The Smear, Trump