"Trump forms 'alliance' with ISIS, Nazis, to usher in new Dark Age"

Clickbait? Maybe, but there is nothing "untrue" about the title of this post.

It weaponizes quotes as a fog machine. Double quotes: who said it? Maybe I did, maybe I didn't; who's going to bother to find out? What about the "alliance"? ("Hey, Bannon, this guy has single quotes inside of double quotes. Can I do that with 'Wire Tapping'?") Doesn't it announce figurative language? Didn't we learn that from "President" Donald J. Trump?

So, here's the "alliance" in three easy links:

• Nazi pogrom against "Jewish Science." Skip past the review of "Congenital Syphilis" (if you can) and go to "Destruction of Science." (From the British Medical Journal, Jan. 31, 1942.)
• ISIS pogrom against "un-Islamic" manuscripts, including Islamic texts. A Benedictine monastic library in Minnesota is working to preserve them, just like they did in the last Dark Age.
• Trump pogrom against Arctic science. Just the tip of the, ahem, iceberg, when it comes to trying to "correct" the record. 

How now, "correct"? Those pesky quotes again. As any archivist knows, when it comes to records, there is no correctness and incorrectness. Records are records, and they should be left inviolate in whatever state they come, however imperfect. They should be left alone, preserved, and made available for anyone to determine how they fit or don't fit into whatever interpretive scheme, whether it's "dinosaurs were on the Ark" or "I'm the lust child of Ted Nugent and an Alpha Centaurian." The real irony here is that the very people who inveigh against "political correctness" are now trying to establish "correctness" in the scientific realm by deleting datasets they don't like.

This is the work of people blinded by ideology and perverted by power, with the collusion--if not outright support--of silent supporters who fail to see the harm because they have no interest in expanding the fund of human knowledge and no real allegiance to the "freedom" they loudly proclaim.

In the article about ISIS above, when asked how he feels about the destruction that has necessitated his salvific work, Father Columba Stewart invokes the Rule of Benedict: he gets up every day and tries not to be paralyzed by all the threats abroad in the world. "We have our little corner, and we choose to do what we can."

I never would've pegged the anti-clerical French philosophe Voltaire together with St. Benedict, but wasn't it Voltaire's character Candide who said that "we must cultivate our own garden"? With such allies as these, combining the enlightened and the spiritual, how can Trump, ISIS, and the Nazis stand a chance?

Sadly, come to think of it, all Trump has to do is keep moving the flock to where the phat grass is. Meet the new Mongolian Horde.