Sometimes, I think the west of England dialect got it right, taking “to be” as a regular verb. I be, you be, he be, we be, they be… it couldn’t get simpler than that. (And FWIW the past tense in that dialect is “were” not “was”).
Vaughan Schlepp, I totally agree with your pronoun example, and no doubt with many others. (I recently retired from decades of correcting students’ papers, among other things.) But that’s really not a parallel with the “none” case, which has a more varied history. I just pulled my Garner usage guide off the shelf, and although he doesn’t list it among the top “superstitions” (split infinitives and sentence-ending prepositions, among several others), he does say in its own entry that it takes a singular or plural verb depending on the sentence structure. He puts it in his Stage 5, “fully accepted.”