Editor’s note: Join Liberty Nation each week to stay up to date on the nationwide ramifications of an open borders America.
Martha’s Vineyard Migrants May Get Visas
In 2022, Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, had 49 illegal
migrants sent to Martha’s Vineyard as part of a plan to fight against
illegal immigration while Democrats did nothing to help. He wasn’t the
only one, of course. The governors of both Texas and Arizona have also
sent thousands of border crosses to left-leaning cities such as New York
and Chicago. However, those sent to Martha’s Vineyard could very well
end up receiving work visas since they are being considered victims of a
crime.
A “U Visa” is one that is “set aside for victims of certain crimes
who have suffered mental or physical abuse and are helpful to law
enforcement or government officials in the investigation or prosecution
of criminal activity,” according to US Citizenship and Immigration
Services’ website. The alleged crime is that the migrants
were “exploited and hoodwinked into making this trip” as part of a
political stunt, according to Sheriff Javier Salazar. They were
reportedly promised jobs; however, DeSantis had said the illegals
boarded the flights “voluntarily.”
Congress only allows 10,000 of these types of visas a year, but
because the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office opened a probe into DeSantis’
decision to transport the immigrants to Massachusetts, these
undocumented people who came to the US illegally could become part of
the investigation, and, therefore, may be considered victims of a crime.
So far, three people have reportedly been given the U visas, but many
more have applied.
Haitian Nationals Found on Luxury Florida Yacht
In March, Republican Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida voiced concern that the US could see a surge of Haitian
migrants after the country was thrown into chaos when armed gangs
committed jailbreaks from two of the largest prisons. More than 4,500
inmates escaped and demanded Prime Minister Ariel Henry’s resignation.
Now, a month later, we are seeing Gaetz’ warnings coming true.
On
April 19, Miami-Dade officials stopped a 60-foot luxury yacht that held
30 migrants from Haiti, most of them men. They were reportedly put onto
another ship and sent back to their country, but officials warn this is
only the beginning. An estimated 360,000 people are displaced in the
country due to the gang takeover, Reuters explained.
Although Prime Minister Ariel Henry resigned March 11, the country
still doesn’t have a temporary government to replace him. Many of the
gangs in Haiti have combined under the name “Viv Ansanm,” or “living
together,” as a way to describe their takeover of the capitol. The
Haitian warlord Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier is currently the most
powerful person in the country and reportedly recently said on social
media, “burn every house you find.”
Immigration in the Polls
A new poll by Redfield & Wilton Strategies created exclusively for Newsweek
found that only 20% of Americans think the US has “control over its
borders.” In August 2023, it was 34%. Interestingly, those who answered
no to whether the US has control over its border included 53% of survey
takers who voted for President Joe Biden in 2020. This survey consisted
of 1,500 eligible voters and was conducted on April 11.
In an Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research
poll published earlier this month, 56% of respondents said the
president’s handling of immigration and border security either “hurt a
little” or “hurt a lot.” Furthermore, 46% said former President Donald
Trump’s policies had bolstered border security which gives him a
30-point edge over Biden. This survey was conducted between April 4-8
and polled 1,204 US adults.
By the Numbers
In fiscal year 2023, there were 2.5 million illegal immigrant
apprehensions, and December broke another record with nearly 302,000
stops. In January, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said
that more than 85% of migrants who were held for illegally crossing into
the US were released into the country. In November, that percentage was
74, and in October, it was 71%.
Notable Quotes
In response to the grand jury overruling a county judge who had
thrown out charges against migrants who reportedly caused a riot in El
Paso, Texas, County District Attorney Bill Hicks told reporters:
“If people believe that they can come to our country
knocking down barriers, endangering lives, causing our national
guardsmen to fear for their lives, having to back away and to have that
kind of mentality just so they can get up to a particular gate, they
can’t do that.”
What will next week bring us in Open Borders America?
We
are two years and spare change away from the American
semiquincentennial which will celebrate 250 years since some brave men
ratified the foundational document of our nation.
The
Declaration of Independence’s bold assertion that the people were
“endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” is all the
more relevant in the age of relativism where fewer people believe in a
‘Creator’ or in unalienable rights. That radical document is why America
remains the only place on the planet where freedom of speech is
absolute.
Other nations have their constitutions and human rights
charters which run longer than an old-fashioned telephone directory,
but their rights are granted by the government and then taken away by
the government. Under the guise of buzzwords like ‘stakeholders’ and
‘evolving social contracts’ your rights are constantly reevaluated by
committees according to leftist doctrine.
Unlike the absolute
rights of the Bill of Rights, the reevaluation of rights follows a
Marxist paradigm in which the existing state of rights is an imperfect
system imposed by the privileged on the underprivileged, and must be
constantly shaken up to liberate the new oppressed.
Your rights
are not absolute, they are relative to how oppressed the committee
thinks you are. And if you’re only as free as your oppression, then you
have to be oppressed to have rights.
These rights are not a gift
from the Creator, but from systemic racism, that you have rights is not
something to be proud of or grateful for, but a mark of shame that
indicts you for having benefited from whiteness, being adjacent to
whiteness, the patriarchy, heteropatriarchy or cisheteropatriarchy, and
the only way to atone is to cede your rights to the next group.
The
clash between traditional feminism and the transgender movement clearly
shows the difference between absolute and relative rights. In the
absolute rights model, equality for women would have been a permanent
victory, but in the relative rights model, by winning equal rights,
women stopped being the oppressed and instead became the oppressors of
transgender men.
Feminists have responded to the transgender
movement with both absolute and relative arguments. The absolute
argument is that womanhood is a fundamental biological reality and not a
relative state of mind that can be redistributed to anyone who comes
asking for it. The relative one is, like nearly all relative rights
arguments, an assertion of unique victimhood.
The Marxist
paradigm easily defeats past claims of victimhood. By the sixties, the
old class warfare model had evolved to adopt and dispose of such past
claims like an efficient factory, beginning with the original class of
victims, the white working class, once the vanguard of the revolution,
but quickly banished to the ranks of reactionaries and oppressors of the
oppressed.
From the lofty progressive vantage point of the
current year, every domestic group on whose behalf the leftists of a
century ago had advocated, coal miners, factory workers, women, Italian
and Jewish immigrants, the rural poor, have now become the contemptible
enemies of mankind.
At the rapid pace of radicalization, everyone
from white gay men to black men to lesbians, are being prepped for the
social abattoir. By 2035, the only true victims may be groups so bizarre
and warped as to be barely conceivable today. Before they too are
exposed as the oppressors.
Under intersectionality, each right is
also a wrong, and each liberation conceals another oppression. The
process of liberation is a constant search for new wrongs, new
minorities to liberate and then denounce in a constant upheaval of
society that masks the oppressive transfer of power from the citizenry
to a revolutionary vanguard that also doubles as the true ruling class.
The
true oppression is a liberation movement that frees no one, only pits
people against one another, giving each grievance its hour in the sun,
before turning the aggrieved into the aggressors, so that only the
revolutionaries can ever wield any meaningful power by arbitrating who
the oppressors and the oppressed are at given moment.
And that is what relative rights look like.
When
rights are dependent on defining who the oppressed and the oppressors
are, then those rights are not truly inalienable rights given by the
Creator or by a foundational document, but by the constantly shifting
paradigms of academia and the accompanying leftist politics.
Who
the oppressed and the oppressors are can change overnight, as feminists
found out. Yesterday, women were the oppressed, today any man who puts
on a dress is oppressed.
The difference between your rights being
determined day to day by King George III or the editorial department of
the New York Times is a preference for one tyranny over another.
Absolute
rights, like those in the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution, build one achievement on top of another. And that is the
rights that most Americans, even most liberals, thought that they were
getting, but instead the oppressed groups of yesterday wonder why the
revolutionary moment seems to have passed them by leaving them with less
than they had.
What happened to the revolution, they wonder? What happened is that it’s a revolution.
A
revolution is a state of instability. Freedom doesn’t come from
revolutions, but from the order that emerges afterward. That’s why
Americans commemorate July 4th, 1776 as Independence Day. July 4th was
neither the first nor the final shot fired for independence. Like the
French, we could have made an original violent confrontation, the Boston
Massacre, into our Bastille Day. Or we could have made Evacuation Day, a
mostly forgotten holiday marking the British departure from New York
City and the end of British rule, into the date of our independence.
But
instead we chose to commemorate the aspirational vision of the
Declaration of Independence. Revolutions and battles come and go, but we
wanted to build our independence around a new order of liberty, not
around the perpetual revolution championed by some radicals.
“Eternal
providence called on you, you alone, since the world began, to
reestablish on earth the empire of justice and liberty,” Robespierre had
rhapsodized. During the Reign of Terror, the French leftist had assured
fellow radicals that it would all be worth it for, “by sealing our work
with our blood, we may witness at least the dawn of universal
happiness.”
Some American leftists plotted to topple George
Washington and the Constitution to pursue a French style perpetual
revolution that would, after enough bloodshed, offer universal
happiness.
Today the “dawn of universal happiness” has been
replaced by the “right side of history”, but both are revolutionary
movements of relative rights that are always incomplete and seeking
perfection. But human affairs are by definition imperfect. The American
experiment offered the security of absolute rights while the leftist
approach is to rob of everyone of their rights over and over in search
of the perfect state, the empire of justice and liberty, and the right
side of history.
The real struggle is still between the absolute
rights guaranteed nearly 250 years ago by the Declaration of
Independence, and the relative rights promised by the leftist
revolutions which are still going on today. And it is this clash of
rights that will determine the future of our rights.
It’s hard to imagine any job more excruciatingly dull than that of the Washington regulator. You beaver away for months on end generating 300 or 500 page documents justifying the latest the latest agency finaglings, all of which text needs to be cleared with scores of co-participants via endless meetings and by repeated circulation of marked-up drafts that draw hundreds of inconsistent edits from self-important functionaries. Ugh!
But then, into this miasma of infinite boredom, from time to time, there intrudes a frisson of great excitement. This happens when the agency decides to seize control and transform a large swath of the economy by its own edict. New people have arrived with a mission to save the world. Ancient statutes are re-analyzed, and vast new powers magically uncovered. The transformative edict goes out. The sense of exhilaration is overwhelming. Finally the evil corporate interests will be brought to heel. Wow, are we important people here! So what if we weren’t elected and have no legislative powers under the Constitution? This project is way too important to yield to such minor quibbles. And anyway, who’s going to stop us?
During the Biden years, most of this regulatory exhilaration has been reserved for the environmental bureaucracies that have been ordering up the transformation of the energy economy. But other bureaucracies are not about to let themselves get relegated to boring irrelevancy. They have a compelling institutional need to seize the moment.
The latest agency to make its grab for the excitement of the limelight is the FTC (Federal Trade Commission). On Tuesday the FTC announced the issuance of a Final Rule to ban what is known as “non-compete” agreements throughout the economy. According to the FTC’s Rule document (which is 570 pages long), the Rule takes effect in 120 days, which would mean August. The Rule does not just ban non-compete agreements going forward, but also purports to make existing non-compete agreements unenforceable, except for those involving a handful of the most senior executives.
Non-compete agreements have been a fixture of the American corporate world for many decades, undoubtedly well more than a century for at least some of them. They are agreements between employer and employee under which the employee agrees not to work for a competitor of the employer upon departure from employment. They come in near infinite variations of terms and conditions, on such things as how long the non-compete restriction persists, whether it only persists as long as the employer is paying severance, the geographic scope of the restriction, and many other things.
Prior to now, non-compete agreements have been heavily regulated, but only at the state level. The large majority of the states allow non-competes in many to most circumstances, but universally there are severe limits on what is allowed. Although many states have statutes regulating some or many aspects of non-competes, most of the rules have been developed via the common law, that is, via case by case adjudication in courts of the reasonableness of different sorts of non-compete agreements in different circumstances.
This is one of the areas that I practiced in during my legal career, and I know a lot about it. No two states have identical rules, but there are many common themes that run through the approaches taken by the different states. For example, all states that allow non-competes at all place limits of “reasonableness” on the length of non-competes that will be allowed, with maximum allowable periods ranging from as short as a few months to as long as three years in special circumstances (and even unlimited time periods in the case of non-competes associated with sale of a business).
Shorter allowed periods are the rule for lower-level employees, while longer allowed periods often apply to higher-level employees, particularly when there is compensation that is specifically tied to the non-compete. Some states follow the “blue pencil” rule, where a court that finds a non-compete unreasonable will modify it to be reasonable; while other states follow the rule that any non-compete found unreasonable will be stricken entirely, thus incentivizing employers not to overreach.
So here we have a detailed body of state law, developed over a period of a century and more, with careful consideration by thousands of state legislators and judges of rules appropriate to infinitely varied factual circumstances. And now today, the FTC has decided to step in with its big foot and just outlaw all of it at the federal level.
So what has changed suddenly to make this a matter of urgent federal interest? Perhaps there might be a new statute enacted by Congress?
Not at all. The FTC claims to find its authority for the new Rule in Section 5 of the FTC Act. That statute was enacted in 1914, the time when the agency was created during the administration of Woodrow Wilson. Indeed the creation of the FTC was a signature achievement of Wilson in his effort to “modernize” the federal government to enable replacement of the constitutional balance-of-powers order with rule by “expert” bureaucracies. The wording of the statute has not changed in the intervening 110 years. Here is the relevant text of Section 5:
Unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce, and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce, are hereby declared unlawful.
Has anything happened in the last 110 years to make non-competes any more “unfair” than they were back in 1914? Of course not. Indeed, up until now Section 5 has been thought to relate to the FTC’s mission as an enforcer of anti-trust law, rather than granting it infinite authority to micro-manage anything that might be “unfair” in the entire economy. But the current Democratic FTC commissioners, and particularly the Chair (Lina Khan), do not like non-competes and think that they can get away with this gigantic power grab. They claim to rely on some “new research” that, they say, shows that non-competes harm employees throughout the economy, even those not subject to them. Sure. Really, what they want is that regulator’s exhilaration. And they are not going to be denied.
The FTC’s action is on absurdly shaky legal ground. Yesterday — one day after the FTC’s announcement of its Final Rule — business groups including the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable had already filed lawsuits to have the Rule overturned. I find it hard to believe that the Supreme Court will allow this kind of naked power grab by a regulatory agency, purportedly under a 110 year old statute that doesn’t mention anything about the entire area of law suddenly being pre-empted.
But while we wait a few years for the case to reach that forum, there are tens of thousands of businesses that have negotiated and paid for non-competes that are suddenly illegal, at least for now; and the FTC will have the sadistic fun of watching those businesses squirm. It can be so much fun to be a regulator. When the Rule gets overturned a few years from now, no FTC commissioner or other employee involved in this gambit will face any consequences.
Meanwhile, not to be outdone, the environmental regulators are out showing the pipsqueak FTC who the real big fish are in this pond. Just today, EPA finalized a rule requiring coal power plants to cut emissions by 90% by 2039 or else close. That could only conceivably be done with carbon capture technology that does not exist today in any form that can be deployed economically. And yesterday, the White House announced a national goal to cut emissions from freight shipping down to zero by 2050. Electrify all trucks, freight trains, and ocean shipping — nothing to it! It’s complete fantasy, but oh what exhilaration you can feel as a regulator announcing such edicts.
Most important, at least for purposes of today’s column, I also told the BBC that a corporate tax cartel would be very dangerous since politicians would quickly try to apply the same approach to other types of taxes.
Well, I was right.
As reported in Barron‘s,
some of the world’s greediest governments are now pushing a global
wealth tax cartel. Here are some excerpts from the story by Daniel Avis.
Brazil, which is chairing the G20 this year, has been
pushing for the group of nations which together account for 80 percent
of the world’s economy to adopt a shared stance…
“Fair
international taxation is not just a topic of choice for progressive
economists, but a key concern at the very heart of macroeconomic
management today,” Brazilian finance minister Fernando Haddad said
during an IMF event in Washington. “Without international cooperation,
there is a limit to what states can do, both rich and developing ones,”
he added.
…Sitting alongside Haddad at the IMF event, French finance
minister Bruno Le Maire renewed his calls for a global minimum tax… “The
future of the world cannot be a race to the bottom,” Le Maire said.
Haddad seems like a not-very-good person. He’s been a political science professor, according to Wikipedia, and he’s authored some publications that suggest he’s a leftist ideologue.
In Defense of Socialism
Theses on Karl Marx
Work and Language for the Renewal of Socialism
This crank is now trying to set tax policy for the entire world!
Marcela Ayres and Andrea Shalal of Reuters also reported on Haddad’s iniiative, and their article noted the predictably pernicious role of the International Monetary Fund.
Brazil’s proposal to tax the super-rich globally gained
momentum among Group of Twenty members…with France’s finance minister
and the head of the International Monetary Fund backing a coordinated
push to generate new revenue…
IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva said…ensuring that the richest paid
their fair share would mobilize funds… She said IMF research…also
estimated that setting a minimum floor for carbon pricing could boost
revenue by $1.4 trillion a year. …Gabriel Zucman, director of the
European Tax Observatory, …has proposed that very-high-net-worth
individuals…pay at least the equivalent of 2% of their wealth in income
tax each year. That would generate $250 billion per year.
I can’t resist pointing out that Ms. Georgieva (like all IMF bureaucrats) gets a very lavish salary that is exempt from taxation. Yet this hypocritical parasite agitates for higher taxes on everyone else.
Fortunately, at least one major government is skeptical of this money grab.
In a separate report from Reuters, Christian Kraemer and Maria Martinez note that Germany’s Finance Minister is not a fan.
German Finance Minister Christian Lindner rejected on
Thursday Brazil’s proposal to tax the super-rich, indicating a
challenging path for it to gain widespread G20 support. …Speaking after
meeting U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders on Thursday, Brazil’s
Finance Minister Fernando Haddad said of Lindner’s opposition to the
proposal: “He will change (his mind).” Sanders said he “strongly”
supports the proposal… But the Brazilian government is aware that other
countries like Japan and Italy have shown resistance to the initiative,
added the source. …Le Maire said that moving to tax the rich was the
logical next step for a series of global taxation reforms launched in
2017, including agreement on a global corporate minimum tax.
Let’s hope Germany holds firm, and that Japan and Italy also are on the right side.
But I worry because the statist countries will be relentless.
Remember, the corporate tax cartel seemed crazy when it was first
proposed about 10 years ago. But the left kept pushing and now it’s in
the process of being implemented.
I worry the same thing will now happen with a global wealth tax cartel.
P.P.S. It was nice of Monsieur Le Maire to confirm what I told the BBC about the corporate tax cartel being the first step on the path to other tax cartels.
P.P.P.S. I have not bothered to make the economic case against the wealth tax in this column, but feel free to click here, here, here, and here for that type of analysis.
I
don’t have the time to do a lot of reading, so am quite selective. One
publication I like and usually read cover-to-cover is the quarterly Academic Questions (AQ) a journal from the National Association of Scholars (NAS). FYI, NAS is involved with other good efforts — like promoting Critical Thinking in K-12 schools — so check them out.
As you know, societal discord is well on its way to tear America apart. I found one essay in the Winter 2023 Edition of AQ
particularly insightful, in that it emphasizes a different perspective
from what we are ordinarily presented: Whites against minorities. This
is an article by Dr. Lawrence M Mead. You can read the whole thing here, but here is an extraction (with minor edits — like I put some text in bold):
In a recent book (Burdens of Freedom), I argued that America is culturally divided. Most Americans who descend from Europe display an individualist temperament.
That is, they chiefly seek their own goals but are also restrained by
moralistic notions of right and wrong that they internalize in
childhood.
Minority groups, however, all descend from the
more cautious non-West, where most people adjust to their environment
rather than seeking change, and right and wrong are shaped more by the
expectations of other people than by internalized standards. Many
scholars of world cultural differences have said this.
That
might seem like a merely academic idea, but the establishment reacted to
my book with little short of panic. I had written several earlier books
on poverty and welfare, all of which easily found publishers and
reviewers. But all my former publishers declined Burdens of Freedom,
as did several other prominent houses. Fortunately, Encounter Books
accepted it. But then, in the four years since the book came out, it
received only three reviews—all favorable—and no university or think
tank has allowed me so much as to give a public talk about it.
What is so frightening about cultural difference?
In this paper I will try to explain. Cultural difference does arouse
political objections, but above all it questions something never before
doubted in American commentary—that the United States is a universal nation that is open to anyone, from anywhere, who seeks a life of freedom.
That vision, it turns out, presumes an individualist culture, which is
found only in the West. We have never admitted the problems that
non-Western peoples pose for us, as they also do for Europe. We think
our problem is only racism. But culture, not race, is the true limitation to the American vision.
Rejecting Racism
Burdens’
most immediate offense was that it redefined our social problems in
terms of culture rather than race. In the orthodox view, America suffers
from poverty and inequality mainly because whites refuse to treat
non-whites as equals, especially blacks. On the evidence, however, the
great majority of whites gave up racism decades ago. They no longer view
blacks as inferior. Their objection today is far more to cultural difference:
many minorities do not function well in an individualist society. Many
fail to get ahead, and many display unusually high levels of crime and
other social problems, so they do not inspire the same trust as whites.
Nor is cultural difference merely a euphemism for race. Scholars of
world cultures make quite clear that culture has no necessary connection
to race. This great problem would remain even if whites suddenly became
completely colorblind about race, or if all blacks became white. The
solution is for blacks to assimilate to mainstream society.
The
antiracism movement blames all black problems entirely on white racism.
White elites do not dispute that idea, but few can really believe it. The hard truth is that minorities must adopt an individualist way of life if integration is ever to succeed. That is far tougher than to harass our white upper class over racism.
Rejecting Sameness
Besides redefining race as a cultural problem, Burdens
called for limits on immigration. In this connection, as with race, the
establishment refuses to discuss cultural difference. Rather, it
trumpets sameness—the conviction that newcomers from anywhere in the
world are no different from the native born and should be accepted as
such. Thus, we should have no fear of opening our borders to the
multitudes now fleeing collapsing countries in the Middle East, Latin
America, etc..
A cultural analysis, however, calls for caution.
The vast influx of immigrants during the Progressive era, a century
ago, is fondly remembered as having assimilated well. The difference was
that the earlier waves nearly all came from Europe,
many from countries that today are nearly as modern as America. So
these newcomers were largely attuned to individualism coming in. Today’s
immigrants, however, nearly all come from the non-West, where countries
of origin are far poorer and less developed. Migrants come here mainly to escape adversity, not to seek freedom and its obligations (and those demands often defeat them).
Without
cutting immigration sharply, America would inevitably become a
non-Western country. It would lose the dynamic and civic qualities that
come from an individualist culture, and which have empowered it to lead
the world…
I think that this perspective has a lot of
merit — so why isn’t it being widely discussed? Yes, cultural
differences do not explain everything (and neither do racial
differences), but shouldn't we be considering this when trying to work
things out?
Evidently, the culture part is not discussed because
the anti-American cabal feels that the racism narrative will give them
more leverage to impose draconian measures on Americans. Note that the
racial focus also subtly shifts the responsibility (and blame) about any
divide to white Americans, as vs minorities.
I encourage you to support NAS and subscribe to AQ, as there are other thought-provoking commentaries.
Here are other materials from this scientist that you might find interesting:
Media Balance Newsletter:
a free, twice-a-month newsletter that covers what the mainstream media
does not do, on issues from COVID to climate, elections to education,
renewables to religion, etc. Here are the Newsletter’s 2023 Archives. Please send me an email to get your free copy. When emailing me, please make sure to include your full name and the state where you live. (Of course, you can cancel the Media Balance Newsletter at any time - but why would you?
Thanks for reading Critically Thinking About Select Societal Issues! Please pass a link to this article on to other associates who might benefit. They can subscribe for FREE to receive new posts (typically about once a week).
Everything the left is doing is an obvious effort to destroy the Judaic/Christian foundations of western civilization. Definition leads to clarity, and that's a good start.
Recently I've watched a 2023 PBS three part series on Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator and
I wondered if PBS actually realized what they did. While I'm inclined to believe they had Trump in mind, in reality, intentionally or not, they demonstrated
all the things these left wing fanatics are doing to destroy stable western societies in order
to attain power is exactly the same fascist tactics used by Julius Caesar, and for the same reason.
All of
Caesar's destructive maneuvers were so obviously dangerous to the Roman
Republic, and were also obvious to many of Rome's leaders. But only a few of
Rome's leaders would listen, and fewer yet were willing to be rock's
in the
current standing against the go along to get along crowd. By the time
they realized their folly, it was too late, Caesar was to be dictator
for life, which the sycophants in the Roman Senate begged him to
become. Then Caesar was murdered, civil war followed for thirteen years
and Rome's republican days were over forever.
I find it disturbing more and more writers are talking about another American civil war, and I don't see anyone laughing, and the reason why is we're seeing a real revolution taking place in America, and it's
being conducted by the Biden Administration and the traitorous myrmidons of the Deep State. It's called unbridled illegal immigration, which is going to cause massive public health issues. As Mike McDaniel notes in his article, Disease is diverse and inclusive too, saying:
The flood of illegal
immigrants has brought with it human trafficking, rampant crime, known
terrorists, sexual slavery, pedophilia, the drug deaths of hundreds of
thousands of Americans, has enriched cartels beyond their wildest dreams
and oh-so-much more. Another diverse and inclusive import is
third-world diseases once all but eradicated in America. It’s becoming rather noticeable:... tuberculosis.....polio.....shigella......
Public health is being seriously undermined and the current administration knows it and doesn't care, and there's a reason for that.
The left plays the long game, and a major issue over all this illegal
immigration isn't just the Balkanizing impact it's having on America.
It's a numbers game! There will be another census in 2o3o, just six
years away, and all these illegal immigrants will be counted adding
significantly to the number of people in the Congress. And let's not be
delusional, they will not be conservatives. They will not be
pro-American. Many of them will be Muslims. And a large number of them
will work to destroy America.
Have you ever wondered what's really going on in Georgia? Daniel Greenfield just published this piece, The Real ‘Civil War’, and he states, "Muslims make up 10% of the Georgia State Senate delegation. Everything is diverse and in a state of perpetual war." And that's just ten percent, what happens when that number gets higher? It gets worse, a lot worse, and it seems that's where the nation, and the entire western world is heading.
Those who study and write about historical cycles all agree on three things. The world is in an end cycle period, and all end cycles have massive economic downturns, and are filled with violence.
2024: Do We Hit the Iceberg or Finally Change Course?- January 2, 2024By J.B. Shurk - It is difficult for any
American who loves this country to watch its political, economic, and
military “leaders” destroy it. Part of the political theater propping
up the illusion of electoral choice in this Kabuki dance that the
State-controlled press calls “democracy” is the lie that officeholders
from different parties are at each other’s throats. More Americans than
ever finally see through this convenient fiction and understand that a
single Uniparty acts as a guild of political thespians who are the face
of a permanently entrenched national security Deep State that runs the
show. .....
Cheaters Shouldn’t Win and Winners Shouldn’t Cheat - January 2, 2024 By
Jack Gleason - I
remember watching the election returns in 2016 as liberal pundits
followed the counting and gradually realized that Donald Trump was going
to defeat Hillary Clinton. The next day, supporters cried and howled in despair. The
tables were turned in 2020 when Joe Biden, a candidate who couldn’t
attract more than 30 people to attend a rally, “defeated” President
Trump. The fact that six states simultaneously stopped counting early
the next morning and later showed statistically impossible jumps in votes for Biden has led me to an ongoing study of election fraud – vote-count manipulations, dropbox stuffing, and mail-in ballot fraud -- almost all perpetrated by Democrat operatives working in concert across the country. A new poll by Rasmussen Reports added a new dimension -- rampant cheating by individual American voters.
“More than 20% of voters who used mail-in ballots in 2020 admit they participated in at least one form of election fraud…..."
Impending political divorce: irreconcilable differences- January 2, 2024 By Mike McDaniel - Among the most compelling drivers of our impending, national, “irreconcilable differences” divorce is the way we view politicians. Nowhere is this chasm wider than in considerations of Donald Trump, whose mere existence has spawned a deadly contagion: Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). Pausing to consider these approaches may be instructive............Americans don’t like criminals, but they recognize the charges
against Trump are political, not criminal, and they like that even less.
They know most of the charges in the non-insurrection of January 6 are
also political, and they’re looking forward to Trump making that right.
They’re also looking forward to Trump draining the swamp more
effectively than he did the first time. This time he knows who to
target: the Deep State targeting Normal Americans.
Flashpoints of a second civil war? - By Mike McDaniel - The fuse is burning ever closer to a catastrophic detonation in 2024: President Joe Biden’s Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) has confirmed that the agency is developing a
program that will provide border crossers and illegal aliens released
into the United States with photo ID cards. For more than a year, Breitbart News has chronicled how DHS is planning to roll out a pilot program that will give border crossers and illegal aliens photo ID cards, similar to a driver’s license, upon their release into the United States interior from the southern border. This, knowing there is no way to confirm the identity of
most, if not all, illegal immigrants. They’ll be giving official
government ID to military-aged males from enemy countries, establishing
false identities for them. Unless government can be certain of the
identification of these cardholders, data entry, storage and retrieval
will be chaotic at best. We’ll be storing false, misdirecting data on
ghosts, criminals, terrorists and spies. These will be alternate social security numbers, rendering the real thing essentially meaningless......
Will our military fight for Joe Biden? - By Mike McDaniel January 2, 2024 - It’s late 2024, and
Democrats/socialists/communists (D/s/cs) are getting desperate. Maybe
it’s clear Trump is going to win beyond any imaginable margin of
election fraud. Maybe they realize when 140% of registered voters cast
ballots nationwide, Americans are going to make the French Revolution’s
Reign of Terror look like a Girl Scout picnic. Maybe all those dead
voters are ready to turn state’s evidence. Either way, they’re certain
they’re going to jail—or worse--and not on trumped-up political charges.
It’s time for martial law! The question is, will our military fight
for Joe Biden, or whichever D/s/c wants them to imprison, torture and
kill Normal Americans? Higher Ranking Officers: ......Mid-Ranking
Officers (Majors and Lt. Colonels):......Lower Ranking Officers (Lieutenants and
Captains):......Senior NCOs:.......Lower-Ranking NCOs: .......Enlisted:
.......The National Guard: Forget it.........
Democrats Have Deliberately Shattered The Ties Binding America - April 26, 2024 By
Allan J. Feifer - There has never been a more dangerous time in the world than right now. Moreover, great empires can end quickly, as the Soviet Union’s abrupt collapse
showed. The lesson we should take away from this monumental historical
moment is that nothing is assured and countries must be held together by
more than the brute force of government power. In America, under
Democrat leadership, we are intentionally splinter ourselves along
artificially created fault lines, whether cultural or financial. That
must change if we are to survive.......
Democrats Need To Be Held To Account For Denying Trump’s Due Process Rights.- By
Wolf Howling - Due process of law, or
at least its absence, is the heart of the unconstitutional lawfare aimed
at Donald Trump this week in a New York courtroom, ostensibly for hush
money payments to Stormy Daniels. This is a crossing of the Rubicon
moment for our Republic. “Due process” is ancient shorthand for the sum of all the procedures
the government must comply with and honor before it may take a person’s
life, liberty, or property. The right to due process is over 1,000 years
old in English jurisprudence. It is a right of every citizen and a duty
of every government.......
We Won't Live By Your Wokeness- April 26, 2024 By
Patty Knap - A young woman who came
to the pregnancy center where I work shared this story with me. She had a
pediatrician appointment for her baby girl last week. She brought her
infant, dressed all in pink, into the doctor's office. After stating the
baby's female name, the doctor asked, "So, have you decided what gender
you're assigning to this child?" She was stunned. She said she just stood there until the word "female" came out of her mouth. This wasn't the first time I've heard this line of questioning in a
pediatrician's office. A friend told me her daughter was asked the same
thing on her first visit to the doctor's office with their infant son. The question, "gender assigned at birth" is now on many medical
forms. A man I know was at a new doctors' office and the paperwork
included an entire page on "gender identity." He wrote male, crossed off
everything else on the page and wrote "I don't participate in the
gender craze.".....
I’ll preface my commentary with the obvious: All
of the “mostly peaceful” protests by our “college educated” on campuses
nationwide that are clearly pro-Hamas and aimed at Jewish students are wrong,
illegal, and all involved should either go back to the classes their
parents and taxpayers are funding or be arrested and prosecuted to the
fullest extent of the law.
He went on to describe the unruly mob activity these leftist misfits have perpetrated, all of which has been tolerated by the rich, famous, powerful, and wealthy, because it's they're right to "free speech"! So we had to "suck it up"!
But now we're seeing moral outrage because their ox is being gored. Just like the antisemitic outrage at Harvard and Claudine Gay, triggered a series of events and the discovery of Gay's plagiarism, which based on my experience in life, I believe to be endemic throughout the academic world.
Let's
make sure this is clear as a mountain stream. He didn't give two
squats about all the corruption and plagiarism going on in academia
until his wife was attacked for her plagiarism, of which from all
indications, she is apparently guilty......
It's
revenge for exposing his wife's perfidy. So, I think it's
appropriate to ask this. If his wife hadn't been attacked, would he be
launching this crusade? And if wouldn't why not, since it seems clear
to me he must have already known this corruption was pandemic in
academic and scientific circles........
But
where was he and all the other prominent, wealthy, Harvard graduated
American Jews, and conservatives in general, before this? They were
giving money to Harvard, all playing the game, and yet this attitude and
mentality didn't exist in a vacuum! It was well known.
So, now some months have gone by, and what has Ackman produced? Nothing
I've seen of any consequence. The fact is Ackman will do nothing
because he's part of the culture, culture is king, and heterodoxy isn't
for the faint of heart. It takes guts and the willingness to suffer the
slings and arrows of your peers to stand against the group, and it
seems clear to me, that's not him, and when it comes to Democrats, Bill Ackman still doesn’t get it.
Well, I have the same view about the wealthy men mentioned in Parks' article, "Cooperman, Blavatnik, and Kraft, who've donated nearly $100 million in
total to Columbia", as I do about Ackman. Where were all these prominent, wealthy, American Jews, and wealthy conservatives in general who've been throwing away hundreds of million of dollars to these destructive academic fever swamps before this?
They were all playing the game, all being lauded and praised, and yet this attitude and
mentality they're so upset about didn't exist in a vacuum! It was well known. Academia is a fever swamp of cultural, intellectual, and morally corrupt inbreeding. They knew this crap was going on for years, and they deliberately ignored it.
These left wing fascist tactics aren't anything new. They've been used to destroy stable societies in order to attain power forever. Julius Caesar was a master of it. All of Caesar's destructive maneuvers were so obviously dangerous to the Roman
Republic, and obvious to many of Rome's leaders. But only a few of
Rome's leaders would listen, and fewer yet were unwilling to be rock's in the
current standing against the go along to get along crowd. By the time
they realized their folly, it was too late, Caesar was to be dictator
for life, which the sycophants in the Roman Senate begged him to
become. Then Caesar was murdered, civil war followed for thirteen years and Rome's republican days were over forever.
We're seeing this same gutlessness playing out now. The danger these leftist misfits represent is obvious to many in the nation, and many have spoken out, but there were very few in powerful positions who were willing to be rocks in the current and stand against the machinations of these vermin.
The corruption and cowardice they embraced has been mind boggling. But huzzah! Strike up the band! Now they've become enlightened, and have become vertebrates.
Unfortunately, it may be too late, and truth be told, just like Ackman, I doubt they really get it, and I doubt it will last. History is everything! The patterns of life play out over and over again, and culture is king.
A moronic liberal president opens up the borders to mass migration in order to change the nation’s demographics and win an election, but instead touches off a civil war when the governor of a conservative state refuses federal orders to let any more refugees inside.It’s not just the state of the Biden administration, but The Second Civil War, an HBO political satire from the era of the Clinton administration, that does what Civil War, a 2024 movie, won’t.
Civil War, currently number one at the box office, has a lot in common with its 1997 predecessor, both are civil war movies whose posters feature a battered Statue of Liberty and show the country being torn apart through the eyes of the media, but the difference between them is that The Second Civil War brought up issues while Civil War carefully avoids them.
In 1997 it was still possible for a prestige production to discuss issues like immigration from both sides, to take shots not only at the conservatives, caricatured predictably as hypocritical xenophobic buffoons, but also at an equally mindless liberal elite using immigration for political gain, while being blind to the economic and social damage that it’s inflicting on the country.
Such a position is inconceivable in 2024. That is why Civil War imagines California and Texas teaming up to topple an abusive president, but not the issues that would drive a civil war. The Western Forces militiamen are culturally coded as right-wing and xenophobic, and the reporters as liberals, but otherwise cannot touch on what would make Americans kill each other.
In The Second Civil War’s black comedy, the administration is importing millions of migrants “the lumps at the bottom of the melting pot” with the specific purposes of winning swing states. Faced with pushback from The Nation of Islam, representing black Muslims, who are fighting the Reconquista Latinos of California, the president plans to import millions of Koreans.
What was satire in 1997 is just politics in 2024. The nation’s foreign policy is being determined by a sizable Muslim minority in Dearborn, Michigan, which supports Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas. The implausible demographic transformation in 1997 is a reality now as Muslims make up 10% of the Georgia State Senate delegation. Everything is diverse and in a state of perpetual war.
The Second Civil War’s Republicans don’t actually oppose immigration, they just posture for political reasons but have no intention of actually closing the border. Neither side in this bleak farce believes in anything, but is just falling into a civil war to gain a political advantage. The only truly implausible thing in the movie is that it depicts media people fighting each other over political issues. The media of 2024 is far too much of a political monoculture to ever dissent.
And so is the entertainment industry.
Hollywood today operates under codes stricter than anything in the Hays era. Everything from the number of minorities to the depiction of other cultures, religions and countries (especially China) is closely governed and passes through multiple layers of censorship. Much like in China, the only acceptable position is advocacy and the lack of it is its own sort of protest.
If Civil War, like The Second Civil War, were to address immigration in the current cultural climate, it would be impossible for the movie to do anything except take a militant open borders position and to spend its entire running time denouncing and demonizing anything else. And the same would be true for any other political issue or position. The only safe way to tell a story about a civil war that isn’t just going to be non-stop political scolding is to suppress the politics.
And that negative space may be more revealing than anything that actually is in the movie.
Liberal critics are not wrong when they point out that Alex Garland, Civil War’s director, has done little more than transplant a conventional civil war narrative that could have just as easily been set in the former Yugoslavia to America, and that it offers little substance beyond the obligatory celebration of the heroism and horror of war journalism and the shock at a nation tearing itself apart, but what they miss is that they are the reason for the civil war.
And for the obligatory silence.
Nations tear themselves apart when they can no longer talk to each other or about the issues at issue. Cautionary warnings about a civil war do no good when the political atmosphere is so totalitarian and stifling that we can’t even discuss why we might end up fighting one another.
Talk isn’t a remedy for everything. The North and the South understood each other pretty well and there was plenty of vigorous discourse before the onset of hostilities. And sometimes differences are indeed irresolvable. Or unlikely to be resolved. But there were actual efforts to find a compromise, like the redemption of the slaves, or a third option such as expanding America into Canada or Mexico, but there are no longer any efforts at a middle ground now.
The Left refuses to accept limits on anything. Borders must be fully open and every migrant must be allowed to come and live here. The most graphic kinds of pornography must be forced on children in public schools. Men must be allowed to pretend to be women. Terrorists must be allowed to kill without resistance. Money must be spent by the government without limit. DEI racial quotas must be imposed everywhere. All reliable energy sources must be banned.
There is no middle ground to any of this. Every institution in our cultural, intellectual and political life has been ideologically compromised and broadcasts the same absolutist position while insisting that any dissent is a “threat to democracy” that must be urgently suppressed.
How does that trajectory end in anything other than a civil war?
There are already two Americas separated by culture into mutually exclusive echo chambers. In the nineties, there were still debates, but by the late oughts, an iron curtain had fallen over the culture. Conservatives exist in the liberal echo chamber only as broadly stereotyped caricatures, racist idiots in red hats carrying guns, with no awareness of what they actually believe.
In that blind spot, Civil War can only conceive of a civil war, but not what might bring it about.
Garland suggests that the absence of clear motives provides a space in which people can draw their own conclusions, rather than being told what to think about the war. There’s something praiseworthy about a movie asking the audience to make up its own mind, but it’s also a calculated evasion. Ambiguity is the cultural dissent most present in totalitarian systems.
It’s one thing to let people make up their minds, another to be afraid of saying what you think.
Say what you will about The Second Civil War, a lopsided and fumbling political satire that crammed in everyone from James Earl Jones, a badly miscast Phil Hartman (coming off his Saturday Night Live portray of Bill Clinton) as a moronic president, and Dennis Leary, from the director of Gremlins and Looney Tunes: Back in Action, but it wasn’t afraid to offend anyone.
(Can you imagine any contemporary movie showing an LA mayor laying claim to the city in Spanish before being shot and killed by the Nation of Islam without everyone getting canceled?)
And that was as typical of 90s culture as the total political monoculture is of the current age.
Civil War is a movie about a civil war that is careful not to offend anyone. And in doing so it already offended the same leftists who complained that Don’t Look Up was only metaphorically, not literally, about global warming, and every show isn’t sufficiently committed to the cause.
Silence and ambiguity are evasive and ineffectual responses to such a totalitarian movement.
What’s driving us toward a civil war are not vague concepts like “divisiveness” and “polarization”, it’s that we have no hope of resolving conflicts that we can’t even talk about. One of the few relics of the vigorous debates of the 90s is Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect. And even it has been ghettoized as “right wing” because its liberal host sometimes dissents from the Left.
That’s why the civil war we’re in is mostly silent. At least to the Left which is incapable of even seeing the other side and is convinced that with enough pressure and open borders, it will disappear. The numbers, whether Biden’s poll numbers or national polls, show otherwise.
Faced with pushback, the Left embraces state repression and political violence, whether it’s the Trump trials or the rioting mobs in the street who alternate between terrorizing cities for BLM, abortion or Hamas, rigs elections and centralizes its authority all to “save democracy”.
But what is it saving democracy from except the other half of the country? Or democracy itself.
A generation later, The Second Civil War, can appear prescient about what is actually happening and more importantly about how we stopped being able to talk to each other. Its sendup of the follies of the media is in stark contrast to the humorless journalists of Civil War who are willing to die to report on what is going on for no other purpose than to bear witness.
The Second Civil War allowed us to laugh at each other which is about the best possible counter to a civil war. In the era of Civil War, satire like the rest of comedy is dead because it’s been replaced by partisan mockery aimed squarely at the other side. When there are no other perspectives, all that remains is a sanctimonious seriousness with no vision or imagination.
Civil War’s journalist protagonists travel the country to Washington D.C. to report back that war is violent. This kind of reductive narrative is what happens when we don’t talk about what’s actually going on and out of that silence, a civil war that will tear us apart really can come.
Regarding
a successful technique to solve major societal problems, I could speak
in generalities, but I think it will be more interesting (and
informative) to be more specific. I’ve written about our education
crisis multiple times, as that is the largest threat to America and its
values. So, I’ll pick an example in that field.
Specifically:
Education —> K-12 —> Subject area of Science —> State Science
Standards. To a concerned citizen, here are the basic facts for this
scenario:
FACT #1: Your State is one of 49 that has largely adopted the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). [Florida is the lone holdout.]
FACT #2:
The NGSS is a Progressive set of standards that has numerous major
flaws (e.g., it doesn’t teach Critical Thinking, it has scrapped the
Scientific Method, etc., etc.) [See here, page six, for ten major issues.]
FACT #3:
Let’s assume that you (and allies) are requesting that your State
correct at least two of these serious NGSS errors — Critical Thinking and the Scientific Method omissions.
Unfortunately (but not surprisingly), the State’s K-12 Department of Public Instruction (DPI) is not receptive, and pushes back with a litany of excuses, like:
EXCUSE #1: The NGSS has been adopted by some 49 states — so how can they all be wrong?
EXCUSE #2: The NGSS was written by some academic experts.
EXCUSE #3: The NGSS has the support of important scientists (NAS), business people (Achieve), and teachers (NSTA).
EXCUSE #4: Your State’s academic experts support the NGSS.
EXCUSE #5: Their State Science Standards are better than some other states’ (as their DPI has made some improvements over the base NGSS).
EXCUSE #6: Making the changes you are advocating will require that teachers will have to attend Professional Development classes.
EXCUSE #7: Making the changes you are advocating will require that some textbooks be changed.
EXCUSE #8: Your State’s DPI has too much on its plate to be able to consider the changes you are recommending.
EXCUSE #9:
The State has been following the NGSS for 10± years now, and few
teachers, parents, citizens, or watchdog organizations have complained.
EXCUSE #10: The State Board of Education (SBOE) oversees DPI, and there has been no SBOE directive for DPI to fix any of the NGSS errors.
EXCUSE #11: The State Legislature has the authority to pass education bills, and no legislation has directed DPI to fix any NGSS errors.
EXCUSE #12: The State’s DPI has a schedule to review the Science standards every six years, and the next review is not until 2027.
Even the most ardent education reform advocates will likely capitulate when facing this daunting list of excuses. But, does Critical Thinking help here?
YES!
You could probably eventually win by arguing each and every excuse
listed above, but having twelve different fights is exhausting and
time-consuming. Further, by the time you’re done, everyone will have
forgotten what this war was about.
The Critical Thinking solution is to change the battlefield.
DPI is giving you bureaucratic answers. Bureaucratic arguments are based on: what makes them look good, what expands their power, what justifies a larger budget, etc., etc. It’s unlikely that you can change that mentality, as it is baked in.
On the other hand, there is something also baked into bureaucracies that is in your favor: they are employees of the public. If there is public disapproval of their job performance, they: will not look good, will not be able to expand their power, will not be able to have a larger budget, etc. In other words, this is a Public Relations (PR) war.
One of the most powerful PR tools that exists, is to CHANGE PERSPECTIVE. The problem is the same, but we look at it differently.
For this education issue, we are at a fork in the road, and the choices are: a) do we continue with second-rate State Science Standards, or b) do we quickly make some meaningful improvements? The bureaucratic response from DPI is “a”, turn Left.
A suggested different perspective for turning Right, is this:
PERSPECTIVE #1: Which option is in the best interest of the K-12 children?
PERSPECTIVE #2: Which option is in the best long-range interest of the State?
PERSPECTIVE #3: Which option is in the best long-range interest of America?
In
other words, every time one of the twelve excuses above is put forward,
the appropriate response is: “Yes, I understand what you are saying,
but which option is best for our children, state, and country?”
If that does not result in action on DPI’s part, then it may be necessary to go public, as the public will know which direction is best for our children, state, and country.
So the takeaway here is: don’t get tricked into responding to bureaucratic excuses. Move the fight to a winning battlefield.
In
this example, correcting consequential K-12 state education subject
standards’ errors quickly is indisputably in the best interest of
students, and ultimately the state and our country — so none of the 12
excuses have any merit…
Here are other materials from this scientist that you might find interesting:
Media Balance Newsletter:
a free, twice-a-month newsletter that covers what the mainstream media
does not do, on issues from COVID to climate, elections to education,
renewables to religion, etc. Here are the Newsletter’s 2023 Archives. Please send me an email to get your free copy. When emailing me, please make sure to include your full name and the state where you live. (Of course, you can cancel the Media Balance Newsletter at any time - but why would you?
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