The Woke Culture War is Making Americans Socially Conservative

Daniel Greenfield June 15, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog

Wokeness rules America. In the last three years every element of public life from governments to corporations has been conditioned to impose a radical social agenda on the nation. Women have ceased to exist and the government is forcing schools to sexually indoctrinate children.

A new Gallup poll suggests that this culture war has backfired. Badly. This year the largest number of Americans has come out of the closet as social conservatives since 2012.

Biden has taken us back to Obama’s first term in more ways than one.

That’s all the more remarkable because even last year the country was nearly tied between social conservatives and the socially liberal. This year the number of socially conservative Americans shot up from 33% to 38% while the socially liberal fell from 34% to 29%.

That’s a massive inversion from 2021 when 34% claimed to be socially liberal and only 30% were socially conservative, and the end of American values seemed to be here.

The shift is driven by Republicans. By 2021, only 60% of Republicans described themselves as socially conservative while a third identified as moderate. This matched declines in religious belief and values recorded in other polls: some of which showed barely half of Republicans describing religion as being important to them. But what a faltering religiosity in a nation losing its values could not accomplish, the woke culture war did.

74% of Republicans now identify as socially conservative. What drove a 14% increase in a few years? Perhaps seeing the alternative socially leftist dystopia made up their minds.

Democrats met declining religiosity and values with a kulturkampf that was not satisfied with adult sexual license but became perversely obsessed with sexualizing children. The electoral consequences of that toppled Democrat rule in a number of statues. And as the Biden administration doubles down on sexualizing children, threatening to investigate schools that don’t serve pornographic materials to children, Republicans are realizing what they believe.

The growth among independents, a majority of whom identify as social moderates has been marked, but limited, with social conservatives rising from 24% to 29%. Equally importantly, the number of social liberals among independents has fallen from 27% to 23%.

More independents, by a narrow margin, are now socially conservative than socially liberal.

This has not only significant cultural, but political consequences. Democrats and Republicans attributed their performance in the midterms to blowback over abortion. It’s become accepted wisdom that the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision was an electoral disaster that turned the country against Republicans. And yet there’s no sign of that in the Gallup poll numbers.

If the Dobbs decision had led to any significant shift then more people would be identifying as socially liberal and fewer as socially conservative. Instead the country has gone the other way.

There is a passionate ‘Abortion Uber Alles’ demographic and its impact shouldn’t be discounted, but the nation as a whole is trending more socially conservative and, even among Democrats, there’s been no growth in the socially liberal and a slight growth among the socially moderate and even a tiny bit among socially conservative. Abortion has not radicalized the Democrats.

And if it hasn’t radicalized the rank-and-file Democrats, it certainly hasn’t radicalized Americans.

The abortion obsessives have not been able to persuade anyone outside their ranks of the importance of their cause. The country is not revolting against social conservatism, on the contrary it is drifting toward social conservatism.

Democrats embraced sexual identity politics in order to shift voter demographics, but even among young adults, the majority group likely to identify as LGBTQ, Gallup is forced to admit, have instead benefited from a “modest increase in conservative social ideology”.

The Gallup poll is one of a series of blows to the vision of a demographic leftist majority. First, Latinos have shown that they cannot be counted on as a stable Dem bloc. That has forced Democrats to double down on black nationalism after having alienated virtually every other class of voters except the all-important drag queen base they hope to ride to victory in 2024.

Generational demographic change is also faltering. Democrats were promised that the younger generations were going to give them a permanent majority. But that isn’t happening either.

Nate Cohn, the New York Times‘ chief political analyst, delivered the bad news to its readers in an article headlined, “Millennials Are Not an Exception. They’ve Moved to the Right.”

The new millennial era, Cohn found, was based on misleading numbers that grouped millennials together. Like every previous generation, older millennials are becoming more conservative while younger millennials are still leftist. If this pattern holds up, older voters will still be conservative, no matter what generation they belong to. The question is how we define conservatism? The Gallup poll shows that conservatism can be profoundly defined and redefined when conservatives and ordinary people fight back against leftists on key issues.

The backlash against the culture war is not a permanent solution, but it is an opening.

Republican history has been marked by episodes of squishy elected officials and electorates ceding massive amounts of cultural, institutional and economic territory to leftists only for a conservative resurgence to push back and revive the movement, the party and the nation.

Over the generations, Republicans ceded to socialism, big government, illegal migration, Communism and social liberalism only to be dragged back by a reaction to leftist extremism.

Had the American Left been willing to settle for a gradual modus vivendi that hollowed out the nation and put it on a leftist trajectory, the nation would have been lost long ago. Instead, leftists treated Republican fecklessness as a weakness, trampled more sensible liberals, and overreached the national tolerance level for their insanity and their totalitarian abuses.

Never before has the Left been as arrogant, as confident and as certain of total victory as it is now. And in the face of victory it has once again badly overreached, stirring up an uprising.

The resistance is not just manifest at school board meetings or in elections, but in a larger invisible shift of worldviews.

The wokes believe that they’re the only ones who are truly ‘awake’, but more and more Americans are waking up. Against wokeness, a moral awakening is rising.

And once awake, the truly woke will not easily go to sleep again. 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

The Publisher Censoring Roald Dahl is Suing Florida Schools for ‘Banning Books’

By Daniel Greenfield June 11, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog

Bertelsmann has been censoring and rewriting children’s books by Roald Dahl and altering the “unacceptable prose” of P.G. Wodehouse in the Jeeves and Wooster books.

The ex-Nazi publishing giant which operates under such names as Penguin Random House and Puffin Books, took a red pencil to Roald Dahl long after the author’s death, cut any references to “fat”, “ugly” or “crazy”, along with “mothers and fathers” and other un-woke terms.

It is the publisher for Dr. Seuss books, a number of which were banned and are being replaced with new “inclusive” books by “diverse” authors that Theodor Geisel never actually wrote.

Jeeves and Wooster books now come with “trigger warnings” cautioning readers that

“language, themes and characterisations” are “outdated” and some have been edited out.

But while Bertelsmann is purging classic adult and children’s literature, it’s waging a war on parents trying to keep graphic pornographic content out of schools and away from their children.

Penguin Random House’s former CEO Markus Dohle announced a $500,000 fund to fight censorship, not by ending the company’s purge of classic literature, but by fighting parents in court over efforts to keep graphic hate and sex out of schools. Now the ex-Nazi company has come after the parents and children of the Escambia County School District in Pensacola.

Schools already struggling to budget for education are now faced with lawfare from a massive publishing monopoly with billions in revenues fighting to inflict sexual content on their kids.

The Bertelsmann federal lawsuit complains that the school board decided to pull “All Boys Aren’t Blue” which contains graphic sections such as, “He reached his hand down and pulled out my d____. He quickly went to giving me h___.”

The lawsuit misleadingly describes the book merely as “a series of coming-of-age essays”.

The Ex-Nazi corporation also objects that its own book, “Too Bright to See” depicting a “transgender boy” aimed at 5th graders is still restricted pending review. Let’s review it.

A section of “Too Bright to See” reads, “Uncle Roderick was a drag queen, meaning he dressed up in dresses, makeup, and jewelry as part of a performance or show. Bug says it’s easier to think about putting on makeup and dresses if he thinks of himself as a drag queen.”

Bertelsmann’s teacher’s guide for the book encourages teachers to ask children, “Why do you think he didn’t realize he was a boy earlier? Have there been times when you have felt unsure of yourself, and then suddenly felt very sure of yourself?”

The lawsuit objects to the removal of “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” which contains lines like, ”They did it doggie-style with one of the sandwich bags!” and “Sam used to be a ‘blow queen.'” There’s also an extended sexual encounter graphically described from a child’s perspective.

Bertelsmann’s lawsuit complains that ‘Push’ is no longer available. The book repeatedly describes a child being sexually abused by parents in the most graphic language imaginable along with racist rants like, “Do all white people look like pictures? No, ’cause the white people at school is fat and cruel.”

The same company that is busy censoring Roald Dahl and P.G. Wodehouse for “unacceptable” language is going to court and objecting that schools are keeping, “My c___ swell up think Daddy. Daddy sick me, disgust me, but still he sex me up. I nawshus in my stomach but hot tight in my t___” away from kids. And that may be one of the least objectionable lines in the book.

Bertelsmann thinks that language like “mothers and fathers” or “fat” is wrong and needs to be censored, but schools should be sued if they try to keep graphic sex scenes away from kids.

What kind of twisted book publisher would pursue such a campaign?

Before Bertelsmann had gobbled up classic American and English publishers like Random House, Penguin, Crown, Viking, Putnam, Bantam, Del Rey, Golden Books, it was serving the Third Reich by putting out “The Christmas Book of the Hitler Youth”.

Under Hitler, Heinrich Mohn, the head of the family business, was a member of the SS Sponsors Circle, and Bertelsmann became the largest supplier of books to the German Army. (The company is currently headed by his grandson, Christoph.) Printers churning out its books used Jewish slave labor from the ghetto. Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels had even intervened to aid Bertelsmann employees.

Following in the footsteps of its Nazi past, Bertelsmann continues to churn out the vilest racism. Its famously hateful offerings include Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist”, Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility”, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me”.

Bertelsmann’s Penguin Random House, which has taken the lead in censoring classic literature, created a “banned books resources” site The site promotes a webinar with Ibram X. Kendi and the 1619 Project’s Nikola Nannah-Jones on “threats of censorship”. The actual censorship isn’t being faced by these bestselling bigots, but by the classic authors unfortunate enough to be trapped in the Bertelsmann book dungeon.

The former Nazi publisher has switched from one kind of racism to another, just as it switched from one kind of censorship to another. Bertelsmann is playing both censor and anti-censor, but what it censors is classical literature and what it calls censorship is just basic right and wrong.

Bertelsmann depicts the classics in its library as obscene and “unacceptable”, while pushing the worst kinds of racism and pornographic materials not just on the public, but on children.

“Banned books” is a Big Lie and it’s appropriately being peddled by an ex-Nazi firm whose employees were shielded by Goebbels. Books, including the racism and filth that Bertelsmann pushes, are not “banned” when they are not included in a school library or curriculum.

However when Dr. Seuss books were pulled from publication and even used copies were prevented from being sold, that is an actual book ban. When P.G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming’s James Bond books, not to mention Roald Dahl and many others, are rewritten because their prose is considered “insensitive”, that is actual censorship.

Book bans and book censorship are conducted by the wokes who cry the loudest that literature is being banned and censored by the right. If you want to find the most ruthless book banners and censors, just look to those organizing “banned book weeks” and championing “banned books” that no one has banned and that are actually being pushed in every school.

And if you want to find actual banned books, look to the classics which are being bowdlerized and expurgated by “sensitivity readers” who think children should be taught about every sexual act, but believe that the words “fat” or “ugly” in a book amount to a hate crime.

The Nazis, like the Communists, were masters at inverting what was true and false. Bertelsmann went from pushing Nazi propaganda to reinventing itself as anti-Nazi. It pushes racism in the guise of anti-racism and censors books while campaigning against book censorship.

Now the ex-Nazi corporation, once associated with Hitler and Goebbels, has declared war on Florida parents, and on organizations like Moms for Liberty, claiming that it stands for freedom and they are the ones who are banning books. Leftists, who claim to be anti-corporate, now cheer corporations like Disney and Bertelsmann goosestepping over schools and families.

The media agrees that an ex-Nazi corporation that used to publish Hitler Youth propaganda should decide what books are in schools, not parents. And those schools who resist having its hate and filth in schools should be sued until they surrender. Who are the real Nazis now?

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles.  And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

Daniel Greenfield Unleashed

By Sheer Coincidence, Biden’s DOJ Goes After Likely Senate Candidate - If you thought election interference was bad in 2016 and 2020, just wait.   In free societies, you just read the newspaper. In unfree ones, you understand that the meaning of one story can only be found by cross-cutting it with a seemingly unrelated story.............Sheer coincidence. And if you think it’s not, you’re a conspiracy theorist, election denier, DOJ denier and a spreader of disinformation who also needs to be investigated by the DOJ. While the Biden admin and the Dems have mixed feelings about Manchin, they really don’t want to lose the WV Senate seat especially since, unlike Georgia, they’re not just going to be able to get it back by focusing on demographics and minority voter turnout. And that seat would prove to be quite crucial in holding on to the Senate..........If you thought election interference was bad in 2016 and 2020, hang on to your horses, this is going to be the big one. .................

Cancel Culture Means Every Org Has Its Own Secret Police -  “We have an anonymous complaint we have to ask you about” Every now and then some lefty culture warrior will announce to the sound of terrified clapter that “cancel culture is just accountability.” Well yeah, so were the Spanish Inquisition, the Cheka, and the Gestapo. If you want to live in a system of political terror in which you constantly have to account to somebody… enjoy. Here’s the New York Times pondering that perhaps embedding a cancel culture secret police squad inside every single organization may not be as much fun as it sounds...........

Senator Tom Cotton, Mike Pompeo Respond to FrontPageMag Expose of Anti-Israel Activist on Holocaust Museum Board  - “No one leading a group that wants to destroy the one Jewish state should be on the board of the Holocaust Museum.”...........Human Rights Watch has repeatedly and falsely accused Israel of “apartheid”. Its personnel have advocated for terrorists and for the murder of Jews, and even spread traditional blood libels. Senator Cotton responded to the FrontPageMag expose by tweeting that, “No one leading a group that wants to destroy the one Jewish state should be on the board of the Holocaust Museum. Another terrible pick from President Biden.”..............

 

The Second Irish Famine Will Be ‘Green’ - With kids going hungry, Gov wants to cull 10% of Ireland’s cattle for ‘climate targets’.  Environmentalism is just genocide misspelled. For Nuala O’Connor, a chef at a Barnardos centre in Dublin, food poverty in a young child is sometimes less about what they look like, and more about what they do. “Sometimes you just know by looking at them, that they are not getting what they need,” she said. “Then we have had children over time [who are] literally ravenous, literally taking it with their hands, they can’t get enough of it into their mouths and can’t get it in quick enough." Children are hungry. Time to get rid of the meat. Maybe if they’re hungry enough, they’ll eat more environmentally friendly bugs..................

Biden Admin Threatens North Korea: “The Door has Not Closed on Diplomacy” Kim is shaking in his boots.    I don’t know if the Biden administration set out to recreate that scene from Team America World Police, but it could hardly have done better with this ridiculous message to North Korea.............Really? The door has not closed on diplomacy..........

Cuomo Began Work on How He Beat Pandemic Book as the Dying Began “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic”.  I have always said that the former New York governor was a stone-cold sociopath, but this is still really something. And since Cuomo is trying to relaunch his career, it’s still unfortunately relevant.............If two pros were working on it on March 30, 2020, it would have gotten started earlier. How much earlier? Who knows. But Cuomo would have run it by his staff, by an agent and probably by a publisher or two...............

Half of All New German Citizens are Muslims There will not be a Germany in a generation.  This is what national suicide looks like...............  A rough calculation pegs the number of new citizens from Muslim countries at around 80,000 or half the 168,500 number of total citizens. This is fairly consistent with the 2021 numbers................

More Israelis Have Been Killed in 5 Months of Biden Than 2 Years of Trump Biden and the Democrats are funding the murder of Jews.  The Muslim terrorist campaign, funded by foreign aid from the United States, continues. The latest casualty is Meir Tamari...............Meir Tamari is the 20th victim of Islamic terrorism in Israel so far this year. That tops the combined number of Israeli deaths in all of 2019 and 2020 under Trump. At this rate, there will likely be more Israelis killed in 2023 than during the entire Trump administration.  As I wrote earlier this year, this is due to the Biden administration’s decision to provide political support and funding for the terrorists.

The Life of Brian Used to Offend Christians, Now It Offends Wokes “I want to be a woman. … It’s my right as a man”   Comedians who used to be considered heroes by liberals for offending the religious feelings of conservatives, if they lived long enough have become woke villains..........There was a time when Life of Brian offended Christians and Jews. That time was 1979..............Fast forward to 2023 and Life of Brian has to be censored to avoid offending the wokes over a joke that was originally mocking male leftist feminists that accidentally ended up ruthlessly deconstructing the political embrace of the transgender.movement and its senseless fight for the right of men to be women..........

The IRS Went Down to Georgia to Steal an Election - The Democrats were in a bind, falling behind and looking to make a steal. An estimated 3.5 million people voted in the Georgia Senate runoff election. State Voices, a leftist nonprofit, claimed that it had made 3 million voter contacts for the runoff. ProGeorgia, the local partner for State Voices, bragged of having conducted “31,000 face-to-face conversations, 10 million texts, and 133,000 phone conversations” and of registering “tens of thousands for the midterm election” so that “voters of color turned out in early voting at higher levels than their white counterparts”. Such an outcome was inherently partisan and could and only did benefit one particular party: the Democrats............And it could not have happened without the complicity of the IRS.........

The CEO Behind Target’s Corporate Culture War - CEO Brian Cornell has turned over the chain to criminals and perverts. 

[Editor’s note: Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s masterpiece contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]  

Target projects over $1 billion in losses due in large part to shoplifting. And that is its own fault.  Target CEO Brian Cornell responded to the BLM race riots with a memo claiming that, “the murder of George Floyd has unleashed the pent-up pain of years, as have the killings of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor.” Much of that pain was directed at robbing Target.  After a massive wave of arson and looting, targeted its own chain stores, Target doubled down on its Racial Equity Action and Change strategy. The Target Foundation was one of the signatories of the Philanthropic Collective to Combat Anti-Blackness & Realize Racial Justice statement attacking the criminal justice system...........Target’s decision to put woke politics over its customers and shareholders has been disastrous. Cornell claimed that Target’s “focus on diversity and inclusion and equity has fueled much of our growth over the last nine years.” In reality, it’s lost the company billions of dollars............

Memorial Day in a Divided Nation - And once more, we called each other brothers. It has been over 150 years since our nation’s last civil war. Time enough has passed that we have come to associate the holiday once known as Decoration Day with the graves of soldiers fallen on other continents far from home. It is important to honor our wartime dead. But Memorial Day has a powerful meaning that we have forgotten. It was the holiday that reunited our country after the Civil War. It began when Americans, from the North and the South, entered the cold gray stone fields of the dead, and decorated the graves of the fallen from the Grand Army of the Republic and the Confederacy with freshly cut flowers.........

Like the Rest of Us, Sen. Feinstein Isn’t Sure What Kamala is Doing as VP  - “What is she doing here?” Feinstein asked, according to the report. Democrats and their media claim that Sen. Jon Fetterman (D – Psych Ward) is absolutely fit to be in the Senate despite not being able to understand what anyone is saying and having to occasionally be institutionalized. Sometimes his handlers have to electroshock him, but he’s completely qualified. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D – One Party State) on the other hand is being pressured to retire so Gov. Newsom can oversee a deathmatch between black, Latino and Asian groups over who gets appointed to the sinecure because she is reportedly “out of it”. Since the same is true of Joe Biden, who’s running for a second term, the party is being accused of sexism for demanding that Feinstein, but not Fetterman or Biden, retire. But the latest leaked rumor about Feinstein’s incapacity, spread by Dem operatives and their media, seems to suggest that she might be the sanest member of her party............ 

My Take - Chuckling, now that's rich.  Her wondering what Kamala is doing there makes her the sanest member of the party. Ya just gotta see the humor in that. 

Leftist Cancellation is the New Rite of Passage

By Tim O’Brien

If you’re on the Right and the Left cancels you, three things can happen.

The first is you lose your job, your platform, or your relevancy. The most striking examples are people who literally aren’t around to defend themselves. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and of course, Robert E. Lee. Or more recently, John Wayne and Dr. Seuss. Anyone could be a target. This is because their existence or their memory could commit the crime of reminding Americans of their traditional values or history............

The second thing that can happen is that when some try to appease the mob by apologizing or promising to “change my ways,” the Left still will double down to totally destroy them. By apologizing they aided in their own cancellation.  People most vulnerable to this are those dependent on one platform or job to maintain their relevancy.........

The third thing that can happen is relatively new. This is where people on the Right are targeted by the Left and for all intents are cancelled, but they re-emerge stronger than ever. One key to this is that they never apologized. ........To Read More...

 My Take - Leaders very often aren't usually real leaders.  They're just managers who are good at going along to get along and managing the direction that's been chosen by the group, which choice was molded by a handful of activists.  

Real leaders stand up and say, you're all wrong, we're going in the wrong direction, and I'm going to tell you why. Over the course of my life I've found a reality I think is great, and that is:

It isn't important whether or not others like me.  It's only important whether or not I like them.  

Anyone actively taking that view will be on the outside, which frees them from the lemming like thinking of the herd.  That makes it easier to do what you think is right, and reap the rewards or suffer the consequences of those decisions.   I like it there, and I'm more than happy to write those out of my life that have any issues with me or my positions.   If you know you're right, never back down, never give in, never apologize for standing up for what's right.

The desire to go along to get along is inherent in people, and that causes people to abandon views and values in order to fit in.   The choice?  To be or to do.  I fit in with a very small group of like minded people, whose integrity and honor have stood the test of time, and that's been personally rewarding and that small number is sufficient for me.

Prominent YouTuber slammed for ableism after an act of charity cured blindness

March 1, 2023 By Rajan Laad

The outrage industry is a lucrative business. You can launch a career as an activist by expressing outrage on social media. You don't even have to step out of the house, like in the old days, and engage in staged protests or tokenism by posing with the "persecuted." Social media posts will do it. All you need is the right hashtags, such as #BLM, and flags such as the rainbow LGBT+ banner, or perhaps the Ukraine flag.  You must assiduously follow groupthink.  A photo of George Floyd is mandatory.

If nothing works, you can resort to expletives to gain attention.  If questioned, you can claim that the circumstances of any "persecuted" group are so outrageous that polite words are not sufficient. The con works. You could become a social media influencer, and maybe there will be opportunities beyond social media..........To Read More....

Dangerous Thinking

Michael D. Shaw Nov 20, 2022 

 

It has long been observed that Americans have been losing critical thinking skills. Classically, “critical thinking” involves…

• Respecting evidence and reasoning 
• Being able to consider different perspectives and points of view: in other words, having cognitive flexibility 
• Skepticism 
• Clarity and precision 

But under the weight of cancel culture, none of these precepts can exist. Of course, a kind of evil twin of critical thinking can be taught, whereby a radical concept such as mutilation surgery to relieve gender dysphoria might be promoted and “critically analyzed” against a faux backdrop of civil rights, love, or even Christianity.

Cancel culture operates under an Inquisition-like atmosphere of the standard “appeal to authority,” in which the mere invocation of the authority is presumed to be an argument in itself. These days, though, such authority is based far more on social pressure, than actual demonstrated knowledge.

Indeed, in the matter of COVID and vaccines, formerly renowned figures including Peter McCullough and Robert Malone lose all authority, while repeatedly failed institutions such as the CDC, FDA, and NIH, are held to be unimpeachable, no matter what.

Which brings us to the curious matter of the suppression of inductive reasoning, the far less well-known cousin of deductive reasoning. Most of us are familiar with the typical deductive syllogism:

Police officers wear blue uniforms. Joe Jones is a police officer. Joe Jones wears a blue uniform.

Thus, deduction starts with a general premise, and ends in a specific conclusion. You might say that the end result of the deduction is a “smaller” or more granular point.

Inductive reasoning starts with a series of specific observations, leading to a more general conclusion:

I observe for many days or years that the sun rises in the morning every single day. I predict that the sun will rise tomorrow morning, and every successive morning.

You have now arrived at a fairly “large” general conclusion. Likewise, the same reasoning is used by children who burn themselves ONCE by touching a stove, and then conclude that they must never touch a hot stove again, lest they get burned.

In a sense, inductive reasoning is learning from experience. And, as long as it applies only to your personal situation, it is vastly helpful. But, when you expand it to the way you view things in a global sense, it can become quite dangerous—to those in charge.

In the case of of COVID, we were bombarded with official information from the get-go, nonstop. For those conditioned by the education system and peer pressure to always trust authority, their patterns of behavior would become predictable. They would keep a six-foot distance from others even though the virus is carried as an aerosol and is suspended in the air for some time before dispersing, no matter how far away you stand from others.

They would mask up, even after getting contradictory information from the same authorities. And, they would get vaccinated repeatedly, even though the ADMITTED initial side effects of the vaccine were worse than anything they had previously experienced.

The CDC would first say that the vaccines prevent infection and transmission, only to later say that they don’t. When the infection/transmission mantra disappeared, it was replaced with the never-proven notion that at least the vaccines would prevent serious illness. (None of the touted studies corrected for anything other than the age of the patients involved, There was no consideration of health histories.)

Dangerous inductive reasoning would eventually conclude that the authorities were repeatedly lying to us. Thus, why should we believe a single thing they say?

Finally, some will object that you can’t PROVE anything with inductive reasoning. In the sunrise example, I certainly can NOT prove that the sun will rise tomorrow; I can only predict this. However, it is also true that nothing can be proved, absent some assumptions, including the meaning of words and the Law of Identity.

Bear in mind that nothing can be proved with deduction, either, unless the premises can be independently demonstrated to be true, and the application of the deductive logic is shown to be sound. At any rate, since deductive conclusions are very specific, they will almost always be less profound or dangerous than inductive conclusions.

Namings!

By Rich Kozlovich

 

In recent years we've seen a plague on American society.   And unlike this faux pandemic, this is a plague called the "", with a huge demand America rename just about everything in order to appease....welll... just about everyone, just so long as they're not white, straight, conservatives with traditional values, especially males, all whom may be either Christians or Jews.  They don't count! 

The Cleveland Indians are now the Cleveland Guardians, and the Atlanta Braves are discussing changing their name.  Writers go on the describe the difficulties with all this renaming clabber, such as how the term Indian came into being and the new world, how there's the effort to have preferred terms such as “Native American”, and the resulting logical issues:  Such as, if someone was born in England are they "native English" or "native Mexican", or "Native Chinese", etc.?  In Canada it's "First Nations", but these tribes were never united into a nation, anywhere in North or South America, and they happily butchered each other considering themselves to be "the people" and everyone else, not people. 

There's a reason the Tower of Babel became the foundation for the word "babble", and that's what I think of all this.  Does anyone really believe any tribe that conquered any other tribe would have allowed this kind of coprolite to be espoused?  The fact is these are conquered peoples and they need to get over it and be glad they were conquered by Americans, because it's unlikely this would have been tolerated elsewhere.  They wouldn't have been spared, they wouldn't be living on reservations, and they wouldn't have had any rights at all. 

All this divisional clabber is just another leftist ploy to de-legitimize the European conquest of much of the world, presented as if this was done by "bad" people, AKA, white people.  In reality, no matter how bad they may have been, and in some cases very bad, in the vast majority of cases they were better than those they replaced, and the Aztec "civilization", and the others conquered by Spain are an excellent example.

Now if you wish to criticize them for being bad Christians, well, you would have a valid argument there.  The Frankish kings and all the other European Kings were great churchmen, but they were lousy Christians, and the American settlers practices would certainly have to be categorized as un-Christian.  But that's not the argument is it?

The foundational argument is they were bad people, but the fact is they were playing by the same rules everyone else in the world was playing by, but they were just better at it than the rest.  But that's not the accepted narrative, so now all they did and accomplished must be diminished until it's destroyed with multiculturalism, in order to impose globalism in the form of global governance predicated on socialist tyranny, and we know how disastrous that will be.  Between the leftist monsters of the 20th century, who murdered over 100 million people, and the environmental activists, a scion of leftism, they've easily murdered over another 100 million people and that's most likely a conservative number.  That's history and that history is incontestable. 

 

Definition leads to clarity and clarity leads to understanding, and all these writers have failed that test, because they fail to see this is a never ending story, as eventually the Cancel Culture cancels the Cancel Culture, and real history is lost in the melee to historical clabber such as is presented by Nikole Hannah-Jones and

 

Marxist mob out for blood at the American Historical Association

Editor's Note:  This post was one of twelve I linked as a singular post.  However Blogger decided that post met some "Community Standard" that offended them and "un-published" it.  So I'm posting them all separately and the cartoon will be the Cartoon of the Day.  RK

 By Olivia Murray August 23, 2022

 

Leftism is a discipline of doublethink, and nowhere is that more apparent than its approach towards morality. Moral relativism is the name of the game, until the ethic in question imperils the fragile architecture of the left’s inconsistent and collective mind. For many of the academicians at the American Historical Association, intellectual honesty and discourse makes you the chief among sinners. Six days ago, James H. Sweet, president of the AHA, published a written piece in the association’s editorial titled, “Is History History?” — and the ensuing fallout was described by one journalist as suicide......... Marxist mob out for blood at the American Historical Association

 

The left has an ego problem

January 22, 2022 By J.A. Frascino

In describing human behavior, Freud defined the id as the source of primal urges, the superego as the moral conscience, and the ego as the outwardly expressed mediator of the other two's interaction.  Woke progressive activists project an aura of superego.  They are the moral, virtuous seekers of diversity, equity, and inclusivity.  They passionately lash out at the oppressive forces of society to which they attribute our many intolerable social injustices.  When confronted with resistance to their agenda, they swing abruptly from self-righteous indignation to slander, character assassination (Kavanaugh), civil unrest (BLM, Antifa), witch hunts, identity politics, and cancel culture.  They preach superego but practice id, displaying little in the way of ego.

Social progress does not depend upon such gyrations.  When Rosa Parks sat in front of the bus, she was using her ego to trigger meaningful social reform.  She was not virtue-signaling, nor did she attack a white occupant with her umbrella.

But the left has grown far more radical over the years.  As social injustices progressively wane, the left waxes more passionate and hysterical for their resolution.  The venting of their innate discontent requires the unearthing of new dragons to slay.  America's founding, American imperialism, systemic racism, the Confederacy, offensive statuary, law enforcement, voter suppression, immigration control, etc. are irredeemable sins of the past, oppressive policies, or intolerable cultural inequities that must be overcome..........To Read More....

 

A New Civil War in a Time Capsule

Daniel Greenfield September 26, 2021 @ Sultan Knish Blog

“This is today’s Virginia, not yesterday’s. And one day, when future generations look back at this moment, they will be able to learn about the inclusive, welcoming Commonwealth," Governor Ralph Northam sourly declared as the statue of General Lee was pulled off its pedestal.

Yesterday’s Virginia was fairly recent because Northam had been photographed dressed either as a Klansman or in blackface back in 1984. Future generations however probably won’t be invited to learn about the inclusive and welcoming state being built by a hypocritical racist.

Northam submitted pictures of his own press conference, his wife’s face mask, and an anti-American poem read at his Juneteenth commemoration to the time capsule, but neglected to include his awkward Klan blackface picture as a gift to the inclusive people of the future.

It’s a little awkward that Monument Avenue now has no monuments, except a statue of tennis player Arthur Ashe who left Richmond when he was in high school, but the barren avenue is what happens when you spend all your time destroying things, instead of creating them.

Northam’s big show at the General Lee monument, replacing a time capsule from 1887 with a new capsule featuring the newly woke Virginia, hit a snag when they couldn’t find the old one.

The Democrat leaders had gathered a perfect capsule of the sort of things a leftist would value, like a sticker from today's Klan, the Black Lives Matter movement, a face mask, and a magazine cover of the Lee monument graffitied with the face of George Floyd, a criminal who robbed a woman at gunpoint during a home invasion and died of a drug overdose triggering race riots.

But they couldn’t find the original 1887 time capsule.

After wrestling with the massive granite base for most of the day, and digging a hole, the woke vandals came up empty.

"After a couple of long hard days, it's clear the time capsule won't be found and Virginia is done with lost causes," Northam's spokesman snapped. "The search for this moldy Confederate box is over. We're moving on."

Were 21st century wokes outsmarted by 19th century southerners? Or did someone more modern figure out how to get at the time capsule before it could be ritually burned?

What is the new woke Virginia moving on to? As Governor Northam put it, “the capsule focuses on the story of race in Richmond”. Any future Virginians who open the time capsule will discover that the early 21st century was much more obsessed with race than the late 19th century.

The 1887 time capsule had plenty of Confederate materials: none of them dealing with race. It’s not the Virginians of 1887 who viewed the world purely in terms of race, but their modern descendants who are obsessed with race in the way that only obsessive racists are.

Like the sort of racists who dress up as klansmen before ushering in the new inclusive Virginia because they don’t actually believe in anything except tearing us apart to gain power.

The contrast between the 1887 and 2021 time capsules is revealing. The 1887 capsule contained plenty of Confederate, but also Masonic memorabilia. There were also a variety of coins, American, Confederate, and even British, city statistics, and commercial advertisements.

Along with a church history and a bible.

Bibles are notably absent from the 2021 time capsule which is dedicated to the new woke religion of leftist virtue signaling. The closest to any sort of religious content in the new woke capsule is a Presbyterian session on "dismantling racism" and a Zoom interfaith prayer featuring diverse clergy who, apart from the Muslim participants, almost certainly believe in nothing.

Northam and his cronies claim that the new time capsule represents a more welcoming Virginia, but it’s actually more parochial in its stifling ideological conformity. The 1887 capsule for all its championing of the Confederacy included a picture of Lincoln lying in his coffin. The men and women who assembled that capsule were capable of honoring the tragedy of Lincoln’s death.

There are no such concessions in the woke time capsule of 2021 to any other point of view.

“The creation of this new capsule is a response to the Virginia represented in the old capsule, which promoted Lost Cause mythology and only represented the stories and experiences of a small segment of society. It is also a representation of the Virginia of today, one rooted in our values of inclusion, equity, and diversity,” Governor Northam declared.

The stories and experiences in the woke capsule represent an even smaller tribal segment. If you’re not a black nationalist, politically gay or militantly feminist, there’s nothing there for you. The woke artifacts are concerned with tribal identity to a larger degree than the 1887 capsule. The archeologists of another century will see a self-conscious society of castes obsessed with its own conflicts while offering next to nothing in the way of unity or hope for the future.

A significant number of artifacts in the woke time capsule are concerned with the decision to vandalize and remove the General Lee statue. There are tributes to the Black Lives Matter race riots, to the bizarre efforts to revive the ERA, and fetishization of pandemic paraphernalia. What little art there is vulgar, tasteless, tribal, and predictably accuses America of racism.

The woke time capsule struggles to invent the last few years as a new era in history, a contemporary to the civil rights movement, but all it succeeds in doing is drawing a portrait of a broken age that is so obsessed with its momentary causes that it lacks all perspective.

The 1887 time capsule captured life decades after the end of the Civil War while the 2021 time capsule is a snapshot of a society on the verge of a new civil war. It’s easy to sneer at the reverence for Confederate history in the 1887 time capsule, but it’s far better than the mingled arrogance and rage of the 2021 time capsule which is entirely concerned with settling scores.

19th century Richmond was remembering the past while its 21st century counterparts are capable of nothing more than broadcasting war propaganda while celebrating their power. The men and women who hid the time capsule so well that the wokes have yet to find it did not expect that the future would recognize them as the winners. But Northam and his ilk are convinced that whoever opens this time capsule will cheer them on as crusading heroes.

The woke time capsule is the premature victory celebration of a civil war yet to come.

And yet there’s nothing in their time capsule that would convince any disinterested observer of the future that the woke cause deserves to win. The new inclusive Virginia, based on the contents of the capsule, has no art or music, is incapable of creating, only at best remixing, confuses vulgarity with creativity, and appears to have accomplished nothing in all this time.

Except to tear down a statue.

Even its radical causes, whether it’s Black Lives Matter, the ERA, or sexual politics, are always in motion, never actually fulfilled. These are the only things that the Democrats can think of to pass on to the future. It’s as if, given a chance to speak with our great-grandparents they would shout at us about bimetallism and railroad monopolies, or, as in Richmond, when speaking to our great-grandchildren, all we could do was shout “Stop Asian Hate” and “Black Lives Matter”.

What would any future Virginia think of people who would store Natalie Diaz's lesbian Post-Colonial Love Poem, "I am in the dirt for you. Your hips are quartz-light and dangerous", or photos of Northam’s own press conference on removing the General Lee statue for the ages?

They will rightly see them as feckless, inept, and decadent. A society that, like the declining days of ancient Rome and Egypt, whose caesars and pharaohs were obsessed with destroying the monuments of their predecessors, is destructive, and obsessed with power and pleasure.

And they won’t be far wrong.

We used to wonder what made the great empires and nations of the past fall so far from their glory days. Now all we need to do is pick through the trash that the incompetent master wokes deem worthy of showing off to the future to realize how far the nation has fallen into the gutter.

The woke time capsule was deliberately selected to replace the old Virginia with the new. Yet the woke vandals couldn’t even find the old time capsule and sneered that they didn’t need it anyway. Why bother searching for the past when all you want to do is destroy it anyway?

But what the men and women of Richmond understood in 1887 is that the past is built on the future. The past, like all things, is imperfect, but destroying it leaves us with nothing. Like the bare pedestals of Monument Avenue, the gutted storefronts, and a time capsule devoid of anything beautiful and constructive, what the Left has left is ruins, ugliness, and hate.

Inside the new woke time capsule is a snapshot of a nation on the verge of another civil war.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Thank you for reading.

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About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center

Practical Freedom: Chains upon the Mind

Wherever political passions dominate in a school or a classroom, the freedom necessary for the mind to think and for the heart to love is burnt away.

By Anthony Esolen July 4, 2021

  

“He’s still European,” said the young man.  I fell silent for a moment—stunned.

The situation was this: I was at Providence College, where I had taught for 27 years, most of them happy. But the college had allowed its signature program, what had been a four semester, 20-credit course in the development of Western Civilization once required of all freshmen and sophomores, to be severely curtailed—shrunk in time and in the subjects we could cover. But that was not enough for professors who hated that there was such a course. One of them, who to my knowledge never sat in on a single class, likened it to “cultural genocide.”

So I wrote in a Catholic magazine to defend the course, and called out its critics for their incoherence. When you are teaching material spanning 4,000 years, four or five disciplines, and several continents, coming from about 20 different cultures, with literature written originally in Babylonian, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Italian, English, French, Spanish, German, and any of a number of other languages for modern works, it is a little galling to hear that you are culturally “narrow,” and from people who teach only works written in English about what happened in New Jersey last week. About a hundred students responded with an angry public protest against me, spurred on by a couple of politically minded colleagues. The young man had taken part in it.........To Read More...

 

 

Wokism Hits Oxford

By Michael Curtis

The cult of woke is spreading like a contagious virus, misconstruing past and present at Oxford University and elsewhere. The members of the Middle Common Room  at Magdalen College, Oxford, passed a motion to take down an “unwelcoming” portrait, a print, of Queen Elizabeth II from the graduates’ common room because she “represents recent colonial history.” The portrait is of the Queen as a young woman, wearing a blue sash, symbolizing her role as a member of the Royal Victorian Order. The pretext for removing the portrait is supposed to be to create a welcoming, neutral place for all members of MCR, an organization of graduate students, regardless of background, demographic, or views. 

The motion to remove the portrait was moved, perhaps with feline charm, by MRC president Matthew Katzman, a 25-year-old American lecturer in computer science, who studied at Stanford University and whose father is a prominent American lawyer. His earlier schooling was in the elite and expensive Sidwell Friends School, which has been attended by the daughters of presidents Obama, Nixon, and Clinton.  Only 10 of the 250 members voted to remove the portrait.   .....To Read More......

 

Sad Francisco

The charming city by the Bay has some serious edu-warts that need to be excised.

By Larry Sand June 1, 2021

San Francisco is a magical city. My first visit there was in 1969 as a New York City college kid on winter break, and I was enthralled. I was there again in 1996 on my honeymoon, and several times since, and have always found the city to have an amazing vibrancy rivaled only by New York City and Paris. But now, the City by the Bay, notorious for its $61,000 a year tents for the homeless, its public display of syringes and human feces, can add its school system to the nightmare.

First off, the achievement gap. While 70 percent of white students are proficient in math, only 12 percent of black students are. For a city that wears its progressivism as a proud badge of honor, this is especially shameful.

The above statistics were released in 2020, so you'd think the powers that be would have jumped at the chance to correct the dismal disparity, but, no, the city's education establishment has involved itself in other matters.

On January 26, in a moment of monumental self-righteousness, the school board decided to rename 44 public schools because their namesakes were presumably more evil than Satan or even Republicans. Paul Revere, Thomas Edison, Daniel Webster, Abraham Lincoln, Francis Scott Key, et al. were accused of perpetrating anti-woke crimes and were canceled.

Malcolm X got a pass, however; the elementary school bearing his name will not undergo a change. Why would a one-time drug dealer, thief, and pimp be exempted? ............March blew in like a lion when it was revealed that San Francisco school board Vice President Allison Collins had made some rather nasty comments about Asian Americans on Twitter a few years ago. ...... they merely removed her as vice president, and stripped all of her committee assignments. But instead of apologizing and graciously accepting the demotion, Collins sued the school district. For $87 million. Among other things, her lawsuit alleges that the demotion caused her a significant loss of reputation, severe mental and emotional distress, loss of enjoyment of life, humiliation, and (my personal favorite) “spiritual injury to her soul.”..............

So let's see, the district has failed black kids miserably. The school board tried to rechristen 44 schools, many of which were named after iconic Americans. The city sued the school board to force schools to reopen. A school board member sued the school board for "spiritual injuries." The district tried to pull a fast one on taxpayers by kinda, sorta opening schools for a few days, and then announced strict rules for the Prom from Hell. Not convinced of the insanity yet?

OK, how about this . . .

The United Educators of San Francisco passed a resolution on May 19 "no, not about improving student outcomes or getting teachers raises" but rather in support of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement against Israel, becoming the first U.S. teachers union to officially support BDS. The resolution was passed by the historically illiterate or perhaps anti-Semitic teacher union leadership the day before Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire after 11 days of fighting.

The late Paul Kantner, the Jefferson Airplane co-founder and a San Francisco native, once said "San Francisco is 49 square miles surrounded by reality.".........To Read More...

 

The Uncancellable Left

Essay May 28, 2021 

 

'As someone who has a certain respect for what remains of the norms and implied rules of that ever-evolving language, American English, I try to keep up to date despite my advancing age. Despite this, the phrase “woke” grates the grammar fascist in me beyond explanation, so I have tried to soothe the tension by relying, respectfully but firmly, on the word “awake” to explain my commitment to helping purge society of all that is evil, wrong, and presumably “asleep.” I am desperately trying to become more awake.

In my quest to achieve a hyper-caffeinated version of being “awake” I am gratified to see the great movement forward has managed to cleanse such critical media outlets as Teen Vogue, the New York Times and children’s literature of racists, homophobes, and fascists. However, it seems to me that we have much bigger fish to fry. My awakened soul has called me to alert my comrades with the pitchforks, torches, and cancellation privileges to a number of unacceptably asleep individuals and historical movements that should be purged, cancelled, removed, and obliterated from our accepted discourse and intellectual lives. Out with discussion, pluralism, and context; in with the perfect amount of tolerance for the demands of purity.

Now, I don’t mean to cast aspersions upon my sleepless comrades who have focused rather narrowly on members of the American Founding, Dr. Seuss, Aristotle, and other unmistakably obvious candidates for expulsion from history, but we must face reality. 

A number of intellectual giants of the left must go. 

Karl Marx must be cancelled. This, of course, isn’t a secret to anyone who has actually bothered to read his historical theory, which has large sections focused on racial determinism............The same holds true for Rousseau..........It begins with one of the most widely recognized individuals among fashionably sensible awake people, Che Guevara. While Che’s face adorns countless t-shirts at elite universities and awake political gatherings in the understandable spirit of kinship with peasants wearing colorful clothing throughout South and Central America, he, along with his comrade Fidel Castro, also targeted and imprisoned gay people as well as engaged in racist activities in his lifetime. The Argentine author Guillermina Sutter Schneidner rightly describes him as a “Racist, Homophobe and Mass Murderer”...........Antonio Gramsci, made a fateful and regrettable decision to argue that heterosexual monogamy was essential to achieving Marxist hegemony. ...........Paul Moreno is one of many scholars who has shown quite clearly that the earlier labor movement actively viewed former slaves as nothing but strikebreakers............ 1619 Project has accomplished anything, we must likewise jettison any glorification of organized labor and its racist founding........... Jean Paul Sartre, who regrettably had quite a bit of sexist language and imagery in his writing.............revealed by one of his friends to have paid young Algerian boys to have sex with him in graveyards. ...........To Read More....

To Break a Nation, Try Saturation Mass-Marketing

Eric Rozenman Apr 18, 2021

To break a nation, one doesn’t need invading armies, nuclear missiles or even a cyber warfare attack that fries the electrical grid. An incessant marketing campaign will do. Rebranding the United States as “racist”—allegedly systemic, structural or some other impossible-to-pin-down modifier—advances a false narrative. The objective is to demoralize proud Americans. Historically, radicals have used self-justifying promotional techniques to seize power. Nazis rode their “stab-in-the-back” conspiracy explanation of Germany’s World War I defeat from obscurity to total control in just a few years. In the name of “the people,” a small Bolshevik party pursued elastically defined “class enemies”; success allowed them to impose Soviet tyranny..........To Read More....

Abuse Escalation

Robert E. Wright – April 17, 2021 

 

On 31 December 2020, AIER’s Lou Eastman and Micha Gartz published a smart piece warning that the behaviors of lockdown-happy governments parallel those of domestic abusers. From “dismissing your opinions” to punishing you for “breaking” unclear or ever-changing rules, the 15 signs that you might be in an abusive relationship published by the Workplace Mental Health Institute, they showed, tracked almost perfectly with various federal and state Covid policies.

The 15 signs, though, are only potential indicators. How do you know when someone is definitely in an abusive relationship, be it with a lover or a government?

Researchers have identified behaviors that abused people use to try to cope with their abuse. They are definitive signs that abuse is occurring and many Americans exhibit all six of them:

1. Tiptoeing: Many Americans no longer behave as they wish but rather self-censor to avoid the wrath of government or its minions. That might mean wearing a mask even though they know that it doesn’t help to slow the spread of Covid and may even be harmful. Or it may mean telling a political pollster that they are undecided even when they know they will support a controversial candidate or position.
2. Excessive apologizing: Abused Americans say they are sorry for sundry policies past and present even though they may know nothing about the policies, which may have been implemented before they were born or remained so arcane they are virtually unknown to anyone, even inside the government. A few even support a second round of slavery reparations (the first being LBJ’s Great Society) even though their ancestors came to America after passage of the 13th Amendment.
3. Clamming up: Abused Americans do not vigorously or even vociferously oppose even obviously flawed or partisan policies like DC statehood or court packing, in part because they are unsure what to believe in a world where rioting becomes “mostly peaceful protests” and a mostly peaceful protest becomes an “insurrection.” They have little self-confidence and reflexively do as authorities dictate out of fear of retribution.
4. Abuse of others: Americans abused by their governments even become abusers themselves, trying to enforce social distancing mandates on mountain hiking trails, beaches, and other places where the enforcement attempts actually defeat the putative goal of limiting social interaction. They also viciously “cancel” anyone who doesn’t follow the latest “Woke” mandate.
5. Defense of abuser: Those abused often defend their abuser, or even in extreme cases come to identify with him or her. Only the Stockholm Syndrome explains how anyone still listens to Dr. Fauci. Although The Faucian Bargain is a bestseller, and many people have read Phil Magness’s careful deconstruction of Fauci’s self-serving lies and half-truths, too many other Americans have coped with Fauci’s abuse by lionizing him.
6. Profession of continued love: Abused Ameicans blare “God Bless America” and otherwise behave with patriotic zeal partly due to the Stockholm Syndrome but also partly because they feel they must justify continuing their abusive relationship with the government, which has convinced them that they cannot possibly live without it. The abused must really love America to have stayed with it this long, they “reason.”

But that last justification is really just an expression of the sunk cost fallacy. Most relationships that have progressed through the 15 signs discussed by Lou and Micha and the 6 behaviors described above will escalate into physical violence and, indeed, this already happened on 6 January 2021 when an American citizen was shot and killed during the Capitol riot. The name of the shooter has not been released and neither have the precise circumstances under which she was killed, although the investigation has been closed with assurances that her civil rights were not violated. Abusers are, of course, always in the right.

The abuser claims that the abused are a threat and, in a sense, they are. Enslavers quivered in fear at the thought that those enslaved would one day say enough and end their abuse by ending their abuser. But just as slaveholders held most of the power, so, too, does the federal government now hold most of the power in their relationship with the American people.

Nevertheless, the party in power feels vulnerable and hence attempts to consolidate its abusive control through pending federal voting and zoning laws, SCOTUS reform, and further restrictions on firearms ownership. Like an abusive lover, it isn’t honest about its motivations (or it is incredibly stupid) and when it meets resistance it doesn’t compromise but rather finds new levers of control.

The most important of those new levers are corporations. As noted elsewhere, corporate regulations and taxes have grown so abusive that the federal government can now bend corporations to its will. Corporations are now akin to powerful in-laws who always take the side of the abuser, further isolating the abused. That is why hundreds of corporations recently attacked Georgia’s new voting law, which neutral observers believe is necessary to promote confidence in election integrity but which the Biden administration labelled a 21st century Jim Crow law. Apparently, President Biden has learned to stop calling his constituents Neanderthals but a Democrat with a spotty record on race shouldn’t be invoking Jim Crow voting restrictions.

Speaking of voting restrictions, even if stockholders want their corporations to desist (which isn’t likely given the cost-imposing tools at the government’s disposal), they cannot force a leadership change because, ironically enough, corporate voting is far from democratic. It isn’t just that votes are weighted by shares owned, it’s that managers automatically receive the votes of shareholders who choose not to vote, which entrenches them in power. Were that not enough, most corporate elections are not secret, so managers know who voted against them, virtually ensuring that all employee-owned shares are cast in their favor. Little wonder that corporations eagerly kowtow to the authoritarian regimes of certain large, modestly wealthy nations while using their money muscles to influence legislation that is, frankly, none of their business.

One hopes that Americans can pull themselves back from the brink of a fatally abusive relationship but the fact that under the current system Democrats will almost certainly lose control of the House and Senate in early 2023 means that they have an incentive to strike hard and fast. Unlike in a marriage, which can follow long “cycles” of rising tensions, incidences of physical abuse, reconciliations, and periods of calm, the political cycle is short, and the abuser knows it. It must prevail completely or risk permanent divorce, or at least a long period of political losses, like that which occurred the last time the Democratic Party tried, and failed, to dominate part of the country. (Republicans controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress most years from the Civil War until the New Deal.) 

The difficulties of Democrats at the polls during their long hiatus from power were, of course, a leading cause of the party’s efforts to suppress Republican voters, black and white. They have since learned that it sounds better to support voting access than to seem to restrict it but of course every illegal vote cast by a dead person, a non-citizen, or a vote harvester essentially negates the vote of a legal voter. Balance is needed so that all who may legally vote can do so at the lowest possible cost consistent with a rapid and accurate tally. Most Americans are probably smart enough to realize that, but they may be too cowed by their abuser and its numerous and powerful minions to resist.

READ MORE

Robert E. Wright

Robert E. Wright is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research.

He is the (co)author or (co)editor of over two dozen major books, book series, and edited collections, including AIER’s The Best of Thomas Paine (2021) and Financial Exclusion (2019).

Robert has taught business, economics, and policy courses at Augustana University, NYU’s Stern School of Business, Temple University, the University of Virginia, and elsewhere since taking his Ph.D. in History from SUNY Buffalo in 1997.

Books by Robert E. Wright

 

Augusta National panders to Cancel Culture

April 9, 2021 By Liam Brooks The manufactured hysteria over Georgia's totally reasonable voting law has, as usual, prompted numerous major corporations to bow to the fascists at Cancel Culture. Genuflecting at the latest Altar of Woke are Major League Baseball, United Airlines, American Airlines and Coca-Cola, just to name a few. Also on the mob's hit list in the Peach State is Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters, considered by many to be the crown jewel of golf's four major championships. Legendary golfer Bobby Jones, who owned the property and codesigned the original course layout, founded the Masters in 1934. Augusta National and the Masters are synonymous. The tournament has never been played anywhere else.

But history and tradition didn't stop the lunatics from Cancel Culture! After all, they successfully harassed Major League Baseball into pulling the all-star game from Atlanta, so why not try to shame those evil white men at Augusta into moving the Masters out of Georgia? They knew it wouldn't work, but the publicity would be priceless. It would nakedly expose more of the systemic racism that permeates every element of white culture, exemplified by the filthy rich capitalists who manage Augusta National Golf Club............To Read More....

Cancel Culture Is Just the Beginning

Robert E. Wright – April 1, 2021 @ American Institute for Economic Research

 

 

 

Imagine the jackboots kick in your door at midnight and haul you off to a reeducation camp because of that tweet. (Which one? Does it matter?) You think about resisting but then you realize that your assailants are not government employees but rather the hired henchmen of MegaX corporation, so you relent. The right of MegaX to forcibly reeducate you was probably in your user agreement, so it’s all good. Right?

Wrong! Especially if you understand what the members of the Founding generation had in mind when they used the term “phalanx.” The reference was as familiar to them as “flash mob” is to us, though a phalanx, a tight formation of ancient Greek infantry with overlapping shields, was much more disciplined than any flash mob. While individual infantry men were relatively easily dispatched, when arranged in a phalanx they became formidable, even to cavalry, and phalanxes won many battles, including at Marathon.

America’s Founders used the term phalanx metaphorically to signify any powerful combination of forces allied to achieve some (usually nefarious) goal. Powerful individuals, especially ones concentrated in moneyed corporations, could defeat a divided government but of course a tyrannical government could form a phalanx against the people.

In the Constitutional Convention, for example, some delegates feared that the three largest states, then Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia would “carry every thing before them.” If power were partitioned solely by population, as in one early draft of the Constitution, Virginia with “her sixteen votes will be a solid column indeed, a formidable phalanx.”

In early 1791, House Rep. Josiah Parker of Virginia predicted that an excise tax on whiskey would “let loose a swarm of harpies, who, under the denomination of revenue officers will range through the country, prying into every man’s house and affairs, and like a Macedonian phalanx bear down on all of them.”

In late 1803, President Thomas Jefferson feared that the Bank of the United States, a by then completely privately owned joint stock corporation with branches spread across the country, posed an existential threat to the federal government. “Suppose a series of untoward events should occur sufficient to bring into doubt the competency of a republican government to meet a crisis of great danger, or to unhinge the confidence of the people in the public functionaries,” he wrote to Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin. “An institution like this, penetrating by its branches every part of the union, acting by command and in phalanx may, in a critical moment, upset the government.”

The Bank of the United States never did “upset the government” and financial historians like Richard Sylla believe that the nation would have done better in the War of 1812 had its charter been renewed in 1811. But arguably America is under threat from tax-collecting harpies and big states. Instead of “upsetting” the government, big banks and other large corporations have joined with it in a fascist phalanx depriving Americans of liberty.

For too long, Americans have divided into tribes Left and Right. The former fulminates against big business and the latter against big government. Busy jostling against each other, they have missed the big problem, that it’s the combination of big government and big business that has proven formidable to liberty, the right of every human being to do what they want within the confines of constitutional and just laws, lawfully promulgated.

I invoke fascism knowing full well the dangers of reductio ad Hitlerum. So let me be explicit: Biden (Trump) is not Hitler, the non-crisis crisis at our Southern border is not another Holocaust, and so forth. All Nazis are fascist but not all fascists are Nazis. One need not claim racial and cultural superiority to fuse big government and big business into a single force aimed at the authoritarian domination of all major aspects of life.

“If the power to tax involves the power to destroy” as SCOTUS Chief Justice John Marshall argued in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), then the power to tax and regulate is the power to dominate. Big businesses stand to make or lose billions based on policy decisions, some conspicuous like bailouts or large government contracts but most innocuous lines thrown into multi-thousand page laws or negotiated understandings with administrative agencies like the EPA, IRS, or SEC. 

Many economists fear that businesses might “capture” their regulators but few worry about regulators capturing businesses although only the government can wield the legitimate use of violence to enforce its claims. Essentially, big business and big government have become codependent, merging in an informal but very real sense into a single entity with the single goal of maximizing the utility (income, power, safety) of those on both sides of the nominal public/private divide. They did not capture each other so much as they captured liberty.

Nothing but the merger of big government and business can readily explain some of the crazy Covid restrictions like those of many U.S. states and other fascistic nations, including Australia. As you watch this funny video and this one, note how business interests have clearly influenced what the government has deemed “safe,” watching commercial sporting events, flying, and eating and drinking, and what it deems a public health risk, non-commercial entertainment.

But Covid restrictions are only the most salient aspect of the emerging fascist phalanx. If some part of the U.S. government wants to censor somebody, it doesn’t have to pass embarrassing laws like the 1798 Alien and Sedition acts, it can backchannel Twitbook into doing its dirty work, like suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story just before the 2020 election or silencing famed scientists all while claiming to follow “the” science.

Similarly, if some inconvenient fool demolishes plans for a national mask mandate, the government can induce big corporations with market power to enforce its immoral and unconstitutional whims using the carrot of tax inducements and/or the stick of regulations, both of which abound. Many people will acquiesce because a private business mandates it, and a business is not the government, except when it essentially is.

All fascists must be resisted, like the too-little-known White Rose movement that opposed Hitler and the Holocaust. The question is how. One big part of the answer, in the present case, appears to be federalism, or, as critics will surely tar it, States’ Rights. Federalism, or the division of power between the federal and state governments, was once the illiberal tool of slaveholders. Their “slavocracy” controlled local and state governments in the South but as their slower growing section lost representation in Washington, DC they increasingly jealously guarded the power of state governments from federal encroachments.

For some time, though, federalism has stood more as a bulwark of freedom than a bastion of slavery, as shown in books like A Less Perfect Union: The Case for States’ Rights by Adam Freedman, a Dickensian name if there ever was one. States filed 156 multi-state lawsuits against the Trump administration, about twice the number filed against the two-term Obama and George W. Bush administrations, which doubled the number filed against Clinton, which doubled the number filed against the one-term Bush administration, or just ten fewer than filed during the two-term Reagan administration (30). Recently, states like Texas and Alaska have sued the federal government over border control issues and federal energy policies, while Florida has been outright defiant over federal Covid restrictions and Big Tech rules.

It’s possible that the increasingly obvious existence of a fascist phalanx is spurring the formation of a liberty-loving phalanx consisting of “Red” state governments like that of South Dakota, what is left of the commonsensical, largely centrist small business sector, pro-liberty nonprofits, like AIER, the Center for American Liberty, FEE, the Independent Institute, and Judicial Watch, and civil/economic/human rights activists fleeing former affiliations.

The outcome of any nonviolent struggle pitting the federal against a subset of state governments may well hinge upon another concept well understood by the Founders, the power of the purse. Right now, the bulk of Americans’ taxes go to their local governments and the federal government, which then doles out funds back to the states, often with strings of dubious constitutionality attached. 

In fact, the current arrangement defies the revolutionary credo that there should be no taxation without representation. The notion was that instead of taxing the people directly, large, distant governments, like those in London and later Washington, should tax only indirectly, like with tariffs or imposts, lest the harpies feared by Jefferson, Parker, and the other Founders multiply and eat out the people’s substance. 

Distant imperial governments, the Founders believed, should receive requisitions from colonial (later state) governments. That way, taxes were raised locally, according to local economic conditions and traditions. In addition, the requisition system gave colonial and state governments the power of the purse by allowing them to withhold taxes from corrupt or incompetent imperial governments, as many did from both the Mother Country and a bungling Congress during the Revolution.

Perhaps we should consider returning to a system where state governments operate revenue systems designed to pay requisitions to the federal government to fund the constitutional core (basically courts, national defense, and some international trade infrastructure and border controls) while leaving the provision of other government services to the wisdom of the voters of each state? 

Once states face hard budget constraints — they cannot print money and hence cannot borrow as much or as cheaply as the federal government and of course will no longer be subsidized by other states as they are now — they will have to pay for their own foibles. Presumably then they will look to successful states for better policy ideas.

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Robert E. Wright

Robert E. Wright is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research.

He is the (co)author or (co)editor of over two dozen major books, book series, and edited collections, including AIER’s The Best of Thomas Paine (2021) and Financial Exclusion (2019).

Robert has taught business, economics, and policy courses at Augustana University, NYU’s Stern School of Business, Temple University, the University of Virginia, and elsewhere since taking his Ph.D. in History from SUNY Buffalo in 1997.

Books by Robert E. Wright