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April 2022
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ERIN SPELLMAN
In the wake of the “Me Too” movement, a growing number of women have come forth to accuse New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) of sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior, prompting many calls for an investigation and the Governor’s resignation. To date, eight different women have courageously shared their stories of Cuomo’s unsolicited kissing, touching, and abhorrent behavior. Yet, the Democratic Party, the party that has attempted to lay claim to advocating for survivors and sexual harassment or violence, has dug in their heels to protect Cuomo, and to discredit and dismiss the allegations by these women. While we must continue to shed light on this growing scandal with a full investigation of these allegations, we must not allow the liberal media to ignore the elephant in the room: the New York nursing home scandal. After portraying Cuomo as the heroic figure to emerge from the pandemic, the media has continuously ignored his administration’s deadly nursing home policy. On March 25, 2020, Cuomo’s Health Department issued a mandate which required nursing home facilities to not turn away patients who were COVID-positive. Even though an association that represents medical directors warned against this, the state Department of Health, in conjunction with the Greater New York Hospital Association, the non-profit hospital association, pushed this mandate forward. As a result, nursing homes were unable to appropriately prepare to accommodate those who had tested positive, and hospitalizations and deaths in New York spiked. By February, 2021, 15,000 patients in nursing homes had died of COVID-19 . This staggering number of nursing home deaths was only revealed finally after the Cuomo administration was forced to acknowledge that they had deliberately reported an inaccurate and widely deflated number of 9,000 deaths. Michael Kraus claims that he and many of the nursing home executors in New York were “petrified, but they were more petrified of the Department of Health… once it was shot down, I never spoke about it again” after the March 25th order. Kraus stated that once his concerns about placing COVID-19 positive patients in residence with our most vulnerable citizens, the elderly, were shot down, “I never spoke about it again”. But why did Cuomo continue to enforce his Executive Order mandating New York’s nursing homes to accept COVID-19 positive patients when the numbers began to reflect that this was, in fact, a deadly policy? The Cuomo Administration has stated that their reasoning for enforcing this policy was concerns about hospital capacity. However, this reasoning is not sound. The emergency hospitals at the Javits Center and the USNS Comfort were supposed to serve as overflow hospitals and sat nearly empty in March and April of last year. The story of the most probable reason for Governor Andrew Cuomo’s deadly decision begins in 2018 when he received a generous donation of $1.25 million dollars from the Greater New York Hospital Association. In early January of 2020, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced a 1% drop in reimbursements that New York’s health care providers receive for government-funded Medicaid healthcare programs in order to reduce the state’s budget. It is very likely that hospitals and nursing homes were losing tremendous amounts of money or were barely breaking even at the onslaught of the pandemic. At this time, Cuomo updated the annual budget bill to create corporate immunity for healthcare facilities and officials in the healthcare industry. Since nursing homes work with thin profit margins and have been undercut by Medicaid reductions, they have been using their corporate immunity status to save their businesses. New York is not the only state that has enacted immunity to the healthcare industry. All of the 19 states that had enacted similar protections, including New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, prove to have the highest number of deaths in nursing homes. According to Congressman Ron Kim (D-NY), “people are 7.5 times more likely to die from COVID-19 in states with corporate legal immunity.” Without a doubt, Cuomo’s sexual harassment allegations deserve investigation and he deserves to be condemned for these actions, if proven to be true. However, the governor’s falsification of data and favors to corporate donors—which resulted in 15,000 deaths—should also be condemned. The majority of the media is only focusing on Cuomo’s sexual harassment claims and one must hope that the eight brave women that have come forth are being used as pawns in the political game of chess to cover up the nursing home scandal. This week marks the one-year anniversary of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s deadly COVID-19 nursing home mandate. He must be held responsible for his corrupt actions that resulted in so many deaths of our most vulnerable and devastated thousands of families forever.
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OPAL POLYNICE
Possibly one of the most bizarre events to emerge from Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court Justice hearings was the hexing of Kavanaugh, organized by Catland’s Books in Brooklyn, New York. The event, which was also streamed online, was attended by dozens. While they withheld from publicizing the contents of the spell they used to hex Justice Kavanaugh, organizer and co-founder Dakota Braccielle told the BBC that the hex was “aimed at exposing Brett Kavanaugh for what he truly is, to cause him harm and see him undone.” This was not the bookstore’s first time hosting an event of this kind. The previous year, they organized three hexing rituals designed to target President Trump, under similar intentions, with tickets reportedly selling out at each event according to owners. Many found this strange, and even amusing, as pictures of witches hexing Kavanaugh quickly circulated around social media. But it is only affirmation that occultic practices have regained salience in pop-culture. Why is it that, despite a declining religious population, religion never seems to die? In fact, data suggests that the dying Christian population is only being replaced by pagan practicing religions. The occult seems to be a trend that always dies and re-emerges every generation or so. Perhaps it is our natural human curiosity that inclines us to explore spiritual practices, leading it to be always rediscovered, rebranded, and returned for another generation to utilize. In order to explain this phenomenon, some theologians have offered an explanation of natural law, which I think some readers might find useful. Natural law is a philosophy that has been formulated to explain the rule of conduct intuitive in all human beings. There is no specific date of progression for this philosophical thought, though we know it was the subject of much consideration for the Greek philosopher Aristotle, and later popularized by the Catholic theologian St. Thomas Aquinas. The essence of the natural law is that there are manifested moral truths which direct the reason of rational creatures and which every rational creature is capable of accessing, permitted they have the full use of their intellectual faculties. We know, for example, that lying, cheating, stealing, killing, and other similar acts are fundamentally wrong. We know them to be wrong because our reason can distinguish that these are harmful acts which cause injury to other persons. Because we are sentimental beings— meaning we are capable of registering and reflecting on emotional experiences in complex and multifaceted ways— we are capable of comprehending the pain of other creatures and ourselves, and coming to the conclusion that pain is a disordered state we are not comfortable existing in. Discourse on natural law gets incredibly convoluted and complicated, and so for the sake of clarity, I will limit our definition to what we have described above. The concept of natural law may help to explain why human beings are inclined to conceive or internalize a belief system; we are literally wired to. If you are skeptical of such a characteristic existing preternaturally in all rational beings, I also took the liberty of defending this concept scientifically. In his article “Do Humans Have A ‘Religious Instinct?”, Brandon Ambrosino explores the rationale behind the conception and proliferation of religion in an attempt to understand the basic primal necessity humans have for a system that organizes and simplifies complex ideas in more accessible ways. In it, he observes what leading neuroscientist Andrew Newberg says about the human brain. Newberg says that “If you contemplate God long enough, something surprising happens in the brain. Neural functioning begins to change. Different circuits become activated, while others become deactivated. New dendrites are formed, new synaptic connections are made, and the brain becomes more sensitive to subtle realms of experience. Perceptions alter, beliefs begin to change, and if God has meaning for you, then God becomes neurologically real.” (qtd. How God Changes Your Brain). Further, the neurologist says that “[religious experiences] satisfy two basic functions of the brain: self-maintenance (“How do we survive as individuals and as a species?”) and self-transcendence (“How do we continue to evolve and change ourselves as people?”).” In other words, there is a biological necessity for religion, or at least similarly organized institutions. Not only normative truths indicate inherent religiosity, but empirical evidence suggests a similar conclusion: we are wired to be spiritual beings. So, why is this important? Is this an op-ed trying to get you to go to church? Not necessarily. This is important because, despite a decline in populations that identify as Christian, religious practices themselves have not declined in the same way. In the absence of Christianity, other spiritual practices have occupied the vacuum left by organized religion. Take, for example, the Satanic Panic. In the 60s and 70s, an explosion of occultic practices resurfaced and made their way into mainstream media to be consumed by a rebellious younger generation and become the face of the ‘counterculture’. A proliferation of rock bands and music revived occultic obsession, with bands such as the Rolling Stones, AC DC, Led Zeppelin, Floyd Pink, and others famously intertwining their arts with occult symbolism and ritualism. Even the Beatles made uncanny references to occult figures such as magician and occultist Aleister Crowley, infamously called “The Wickedest Man in the World.” Movies such as “Rosemary’s Baby”, “The Exorcist”, and “The Amityville Horror” became massively popular, and around the same time we witnessed a rise in the popularity of Eastern meditative practices such as yoga, mindfulness, reiki, new thought, as well as western esotericism. Average millennials have a hard time connecting with Christian doctrines, many of which they feel uphold patriarchal and heteronormative tenets and harmful constructions of gender roles. In turn, many have turned to New Age practices, which Burton describes in her article “The Rise of Progressive Occultism” as “a variety of anti-authoritarian spiritual practices that stressed the primacy of the self, the power of intuition, the untrustworthiness of orthodox institutions, and the spiritual potential of the ‘forgotten’—often women.” These types of practices are more accessible for a generation looking to include the intersectionality of race, gender, and sex in a more inclusive framework that at once allows them to express their identity and feel empowered by inclusive belief systems. It is no surprise, then, that as Western-normative religions decrease in popularity, and as generational changes in behavior accommodate a more liberal philosophy, we see likewise a shift in religious practices that affirm one’s identity and reinforce one’s moral convictions. As observed by many, fascination with eccentric spiritual devotions was a direct result of the rejection of Christianity. The rejection of institutionalized religion did not mean humans evolved past the need for religious experience. The rise of Satanism, Wicca, witchcraft, and other similar categorically defined ‘others’ has grown exponentially, especially since the early 2000s. The Satanic Temple, founded in 2012 by Lucien Greaves and Malcolm Jarry, has increased its membership from a few dozen to tens of thousands, with the organization having chapters nationwide. In her documentary Hail Satan?, director Penny Lane interviews temple directors and coordinators who explain that the Temple is not an organization dedicated to the worship of Satan, unlike the Church of Satan founded by Anton Levay; it is a self-described non-theistic religion that contains all the conditions of a ‘religion’ while distancing itself from any particular practice. Lane herself attributes the popularity of the Temple to the fact that “Religion provides a way of healing, meaning, and organization and narrative, coherent and community and ethical kind of standards or ways we consider difficult problems of how to live your life, that’s heavy stuff. So when you lose religion, you get a whole lot of people like myself who find themselves casting about for that kind of organizing principle.” Wiccanism similarly has grown in membership from 8,000 in 1998 to 340,000 in 2008, and again to 1.4 million in 2014. It is important to note that these figures, gathered by the Pew Research Religious Landscape study, only documented those who identified as Wiccan or pagan, and not necessarily all who ascribe to non-Christian, non-theistic, or polytheistic religions. The numbers may be even higher than reflected here. In fact, studies would suggest that those who dabble in the occult don’t always formally identify themselves as witches. There is increasing interest among millennials who dabble frequently in a mix of eastern and indigineous practices while not ascribing to any particular group. From yoga, to tarot card readings, to reiki, to crystals; interest in practices with mystical properties is trending with young adults. In September of 2018, Sephora attempted to sell a $42 ‘witch starter-kit’ to capitalize off the growing market, though backlash from actual witches forced them to pull their product before even leaving shelves. And then there are plenty of witches who sell their services, such as Juliet Diaz who lives in New Jersey. In an interview with The Atlantic, Diaz describes the work she does as a witch, which includes but is not limited to, doing magic on behalf of others who seek wealth and power but do not know how to perform the rituals themselves. Her most popular service is a $45 ritual for ‘manifesting intentions.’ She reportedly performs up to 100 candle services each month and sells out within a day of promoting her service. She can help manifest things such as job promotions, business startups, wedding proposals, and court wins. As young people grow more frustrated with institutional religion and become more distrustful of doctrinal teaching, they turn to more flexible spiritual practices that they can mix-and-match according to their needs, and prefer quick-fixes rather than relying on a God-like figure to solve their problems. Occult practices have also come to be a form of resistance for many who feel it is an effective way to fight against an ‘oppressive system’, a movement that has been termed ‘progressive occultism’. Burton mentions in her article that “The scholars Joshua Landry and Michael Saler call this [quintessential] phenomenon ‘re-enchantment.’ In their 2009 book “The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age,” they argue that we are seeing a resurgence in seemingly atheistic spaces of ‘a variety of secular and conscious strategies for re-enchantment, held together by their common aim of filling a God-shaped void.’ The contemporary millennial Left, increasingly alienated from a Christianity it sees as repressive, outmoded, and downright abusive, has used the language, the imagery, and the rituals of modern occultism to re-enchant its seeming secularism.” And that’s the point: at the root of it all, we are spiritual creatures searching for ways to rationalize the world around us. With Christianity on the decline, it has not made us any less spiritual, our attention has merely shifted to other mystical phenomena to satisfy our compulsion for ritual behavior. We are finite beings made with a capacity for the infinite; we look for a higher being to satisfy our natural desire for peace and stability, and to direct our conscience. This was, in earlier times, fulfilled by Christianity, but with an influx of alternative devotions, is steadily being replaced by the occult.
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THOMAS K. SARROUF, JR.
2020 was the most consequential set of elections in U.S. history, with the only exceptions being 1788 (the first one), and 1860, which saw our great nation divide in an unprecedented (and God willing, never to be repeated) way: secession and bloody civil war. Last year marked not only the most contested presidential election in American history, but also the most significant Senate run-off elections to date. This year, election season is early: Boston College Republicans is holding its elections this week for the upcoming school year. And this year, I am announcing my candidacy for President of Boston College Republicans for the 2021-2022 academic year. For those who are unaware of my experience with this club, I will briefly share. I have been a loyal member of College Republicans for the past three years. I was involved with BCR right away, and participated in a debate against the College Democrats during my freshman fall; despite what The Heights says, we walloped them, and in one case, they walloped themselves. More recently, it has been my honor to serve as the Chief of Staff this year, where I have led the reading group; secured Hadley Arkes to come speak to the club in a couple of weeks; co-authored the condemnation of the online COVID reporting system; led meetings; have written many of the founding documents and articles for the new conservative newspaper, The Free Press, and led the charge in The Free Press to fight against the sham impeachment of UGBC President Christian Guma. But that is what I have done. What I plan to do next year is a much taller order, but one I am fully equipped and eager to fulfill. I have long been a family man. If the individual is the nucleus of Western civilization, then the family is the cell—the fundamental unit of society. I want College Republicans to grow into a conservative family. We have long been the party of the “big tent,” where we tolerate diverse and disagreeing views within our own movement; in the aftermath of the abomination that occurred in the U.S. Capitol last month, the party stands split over the path forward. But I would like to say that you are all brothers and sisters regardless of where you stand on that. I feel like I know almost everyone in the club, at least as well as I possibly could over Zoom, but what I mean by family is a genuine community, rooted in shared values, principles, and a shared vision of the future. To that end, I propose a reincarnation of the social groups, which we have tried in the past, to no avail. But in the name of solidarity, we must come together and back each other the way a family does. I believe strongly that together, we can make it work, and I intend to do just that. As I make this bid for the Presidency, I think about my friends. I have always been gung ho on this campus that I am a conservative Republican; in classrooms, on social media, and everywhere in between, I will chime in and give an opinion during a political discussion, the personal consequences be damned. Just this past summer, as the online public square was being weaponized by progressives to malign Republicans and American patriots who are rightly proud of our rich heritage, I shared my views and arguments at length against them. I received much praise by friends who are conservative, but dare not share their views. We all know these people: the meek conservative who loves the country and wants to continue our tradition of building upon our Republic, but does not want to lose friends, be censured by classmates, or run the risk of having a reduced grade for holding different views than their professor. These claims are perhaps over exaggerated, but can you blame them for not wanting to risk it? I do not blame anyone for keeping their mouth shut; not everyone has the luxury to not care what people think of their political affiliation. But this way of being? IT ENDS NOW. The Left claims to want unity, healing, truth, and reconciliation, but we will never have any of those things if one side is politically repressed; that will only breed resentment. It ends now. So we will create a conservative family, one that backs each other up when the scrutiny is strong against us. We will stand up straight with our shoulders back, firm in our convictions, confident in the efficacy and rightness of our beliefs. If elected, my administration will hold to this principle: an attack against one of us is an attack against all of us, and I will bring the full force of Boston College Republicans to fight back against repression of right-wing views. But we will do even more than this. From this family will emerge a sweeping conservative movement that takes the campus by storm. We have read Yuval Levin; we have a systematic and mature way of conceptualizing and participating in the campus culture war; and it is about damn time to enter forthright into the marketplace of ideas. Our movement will take the activist administrators to task for employing, aiding, and abetting the leftist pariah that consumes this great University. We will push back (figuratively) against professors who are receptacles of radicalism, pumping us up with intellectual poison and pseudo-moralistic sophistries; they are making us all dumber, and we deserve better. And we will stand up in front of our peers and engage strongly, disagree vociferously, and advocate for a University, and an America we can proudly believe in. How will we achieve this lofty goal? We will erect tables on the campus lawns and invite people to dialogue, “change my mind” style. We will continue to discuss amongst ourselves the values and policies that will help America remain at the forefront of human civilization, and then spread those messages throughout the campus. We will disseminate our young newspaper, The Free Press, throughout the campus, spreading our cherished values and bright ideas. We will bring an onslaught of speakers to this campus; they can protest, kick, scream, chant ludicrous slanders and epithets at us, but if we persist—and we will persist—our classmates will have no choice but to concede: we exist. If they protest everything, they end up protesting nothing. And it is my intention to form a strong network of all of the conservative groups on campus, and with our combined efforts, we will force the University to protect us from harassment, censorship, and reprisal, including the heinous politically motivated hate crime that occurred to one of our own this past Fall, the infamous “egg” incident. Students should not be subject to political persecution, and school rules and policies must be uniformly enforced on this campus. I will do everything in my power, using the full institutional power of Boston College Republicans, to make sure this happens, and together, we will “secure the Blessings of Liberty for ourselves and our Posterity.” Like I said, this way of being ends now. But we also must think of the bigger picture. This University does not exist in a vacuum. We are a small node in a network that has a reach far and wide throughout the country, the West, and the wider world. As Charles Malik writes: “What is at stake is not this or that political interest, nor this or that government, nor even the security of the United States alone; what is at stake is the totality of Western civilization with its tested and wonderful values which have been cumulatively handed down for thousands of years. One can no longer think of himself or his interests or his country or his party or this or that superficial improvement or the span of a year or two when this is the issue.” My friends, this is the issue: our campus issues are both reflections and premonitions of what is and will be when we leave this beautiful campus. The whole of Western civilization has been infiltrated by a fifth column of ideas and actors that are committing treason against the Western heritage; these are the ideas we see in the lecture halls of our University, the frames of the arguments of the pundits on TV, and in the language and beliefs of many philosophers, public intellectuals, and “community organizers.” We are being branded as radicals for being conservative. AOC and others are pushing for making “Trump supporter lists.” That isn’t fascistic at all! Robert Reich and Liz Warren, backed by NPR and other media organizations, are pushing “truth and reconciliation councils” to rehash the past 4 years, outing every Trump supporter, and “seeking the truth” about his wrongs and all of his “enablers.” And in the aftermath of an attempted coup that threatened the Constitution that we cherish, the same powers that be wrongly spread the scope of their scorn to all conservatives, giving us no out, stoking the same tensions that they accuse Trump of stoking, which will lead to our collective ruin. My friends, we are staring into the void. We are looking at political repression the likes of which we have never seen; they are so radical that they are trying to shut the Overton window on mainstream conservatism! That’s unacceptable, and we have to be a part of the solution to that on a wider scale. The fight for the campus is more than just the campus. We are fighting for the future of this country. And the fight for this country is about stopping the assault on the entire Western Spirit of Being. Think about our classmates; they are growing increasingly stupid, opposed to free speech and free expression for ideas with which they disagree, increasingly in favor of socialism, opposed to the West, opposed to Thanksgiving, in need of safe spaces, soft, believing in infinitely evolving conceptions of gender. They impeached Christian Guma over a typo! Simply put, our peers, who I sincerely believe mean well, are learning to attack Truth itself. That’s where we are headed, and it’s all being led by an activist administration. Again, Charles Malik has the perfect line when he says, “more potently than by any other means, change the university, and you change the world.” Taking back the campus from the excesses of the Left is about more than just winning a spot where we can belong without repression or discrimination. It’s not merely about being represented in the student body; it is about participating in the body politic. I believe strongly that what we accomplish next year under my administration can be a template for conservative thought to flourish once again, here and everywhere. I want to thank all of you who support this vision. When I say that we are going public, I do not mean to say that we are going to fight the culture war rampantly, eristicly, and by embracing the scourges of radicalism; in short, we will not sink to the slander that we regularly face. We will commit to our values, and by doing so, and by having the courage and mutual support to stand strong together, we will spread a strong message that I believe will cut through the typical noise of our campus political culture, and make new waves that allow us to speak our minds and be heard, whether the opposition likes it or not. In closing, I also want to take this opportunity to endorse the current members of the executive board and our freshman representatives for their respective positions: Ian Gallaugher for Vice President, Emma Story for Treasurer, Dougie Neviera for Director of Political Affairs, Morgan Hunt for Secretary, and Charlie Wolther for Event Planner. My friends share this same vision as me, and have a number of their own gifts, talents, and perspectives that College Republicans need in our leadership for this momentous year ahead of us. Over this past year, I have come to know these friends of mine, and we have worked side-by-side to make this past year a success in spite of the tumultuous circumstances. And I am hopeful that we can do great things together with all of you, for all of you, for Boston College, and our beloved America. And so I ask for your vote. We need strong leadership, a bold vision, and someone with the ambition and energy to execute it, and that’s who I am, full stop. And I strongly encourage you to re-elect the current members of the executive board so we can continue the work we started this year. Thank you for your vote, I look forward to leading this organization to a new chapter in the school’s history as we do our part in the fight to save Western civilization and our beloved way of life. God bless. In patriotism, Tom Sarrouf, Chief of Staff Candidate for President of Boston College Republicans |