By Rich Kozlovich
Let's start out with two thoughts I think absolutely represent insightful foundational thinking.
- You can't reform totalitarianism.
- Reform isn't a viable policy regarding Iran's current government.
Yet we have comments from former Secretary of State Pompeo making comments that are a study in antithetical thinking, and are representative the administration's current thinking, saying:
.........the United States does not support regime change in Iran, but rather a change in the behavior of the Iranian regime" and that "the United States supported Iranians, wherever they were, who were fighting for greater freedom, so long as they did not advocate an end to the Islamic regime itself"........"We don't want them advocating for regime change, either…We want them working on behalf of the Iranian people, ordinary Iranian citizens who want nothing more than to live their lives, to be able to take their hijab off, to be able to go to work and raise their families and worship in the way they want to worship."
The major problem with this policy is that totalitarian regimes, like the Islamic Republic of Iran, can’t be reformed. Remember “Communism with a human face”? We never saw it. Instead, we saw the Red Army crush Alexander Dubcek’s reformists in the streets of Czechoslovakia. Ditto for Mikhail Gorbachev, whose glasnost was widely believed to signal the transformation of Soviet Communism. It didn’t, and the Soviet system wasn’t transformed until Gorbachev was removed, and his successors abolished the Communist state. Italian fascism and German Nazism were both defeated on the battlefield, and abolished, not transformed.....
This take by Pompeo is interesting since Iran was plotting to kill him. Then there's Vance who clearly is on board with this foolish Iran Deal.
I have conservative friends, politically active friends, who point out Vance originally was an anti-Trumper who converted, and they simple didn’t trust that conversion, and while he’s been impressive in some scenarios, he’s not doing himself any favors with this lousy deal and his failure to disavow Tucker Carlson, who I think is either mentally disturbed or on the take….. maybe both…. and that includes Candace Owens, along with a number of well known writers, and politicos.
Disagreeing with Trump isn’t irrational. De Omnibus Dubitandum (everything is to be questioned) is the motto of science, which government grant money ended, however it’s my personal motto and is foundation thinking to the rational mind. But for these who go from being solid conservative voices to far left, anti-conservative, anti-Trump, anti-Republican, and antisemitic, Islamophalic ranters isn’t the least bit rational, and it should be troubling to sane minds. It appears this doesn't trouble Vance's mind.
Socialism
Socialism is the foundational philosophy for fascism and communism, and most of the other leftist isms, and are embraced with irrational enthusiasm. Every leftist controlled nation fails economically, philosophically, and are absolute disasters in human rights. As Winston Churchill noted in 1948, "Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy."
Yet with all that history of disaster we find these young and foolish radicals, many of them college graduates and/or students have been propagandized by far left leaning university leaders and professors to embrace insanity. All of whom suffer from preconceptualism. They reach a conclusion before doing any research, and then dismiss anything that refutes their preconceptual views, ergo, since they never see anything that refutes their preconceived notions, they must be right! What they are is certifiable and insufferable lunatics.
The Race Card
Let's take for example this issue over this book on slavery, The Grimkes, by a black Tufts professor, Kerri K. Greenidge. Initially it was a big hit and widely lauded. That was until historians started to take a good look at her book and found it to be:
"deeply flawed" and disputing Greenidge's accounts of key episodes and the location of certain letters the book cites."'
While denying these claims against her, she fails to refute them. Instead she cries it's those white racist men who are against her. Okay, well, maybe that's true, but that doesn't refute their claims. Are their claims just racist, or are they accurate? If she's playing the tiresome race card and not refuting those claims it's reasonable to assume their claims are accurate, and even if racism is behind their actions, which is a highly dubious claim, the real issue is for her to provably refute whether or not their claims are false. I think it's clear the publisher thinks that's the real issue also, since they've pulled her book.
The question that needs asked and answered is this. If she wasn't a black woman would her book have been published in the first place? Since it's been shown publishers are now giving precedence to black and female authors, I think the answer just might be.... NO!
Update, 7/13/26: Renowned Feminist Historian Loses Professorship as Experts Tear Apart Her So-Called Historical Finding. Here are five of the claims against her work.
- ‘Where is she getting this?’.............Boy, it became a major problem.”
- ...lacks the evidence to substantiate many of her major claims.
- Her work is also riddled with factual errors.
- ....repeatedly omits needed endnotes.
- “It seems well done, except when you look at the footnotes,” Fox said, noting that he could not find the material cited using the sources Greenidge listed
- ........ key letters she cited were held by the University of Michigan, they were not.
She 'was' a tenured professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University, which prepares students to do .... nothing.... except to be radicals, and at great expense. It's time to end this charade. Bye, Bye, Black Studies
Update, 7/21/26 5:07 AM:
- Trump Admin Applies Common Sense Test to Useless College Degrees - College enrollment is booming not because there’s any real need for it or any real value to it (just the opposite) but because there is the perception that college is the only viable path to a career and enough jobs are gated off behind college diplomas to create the pressure for massive student loans to finance a worthless woke degree to get a job that it turns out will pay less than anticipated. Then come the cries about student loans. The Trump administration is using a common sense test to try and break the cycle.......The other half of this needs to be a stronger push to end the practice gating off jobs that don’t require college degrees behind those degrees… a practice that the Supreme Court at one point found to be illegal and which drives massive debt and taxpayer spending on subsidies for colleges that benefit no one except the colleges and their deans and faculty members.......
