What I'm Reading: Canada

 Life is about patterns and circles. Patterns of behavior, and the social circles prompting that behavior.

 By Rich Kozlovich

We don't hear nearly enough about what's going on in Canada, and given the long term relationship between Canada and America, I think it's important to start paying closer attention as Canada is turning into a tyrannous Marxist/Muslim nation.  You doubt that?  Well, I subscribe to the Canada Free Press (It's free so you may wish to subscribe) and the picture they're painting isn't attractive.  

1. Hubris Sinks Canada - Welfare queen Canada can’t survive without handouts...........  Perhaps that’s why 42% of Canadian manufacturing companies are considering moving their businesses to the United States.  A KPMG survey of Canadian producers shows that 77% of those Canadian companies considering a move plan to do so within the next two years.  Furthermore, 57% of Canadian manufacturers have paused, reduced, or cancelled capital investment projects.  Companies cited Canada’s expensive “green energy” regulations, burdensome corporate taxes, and government restrictions on capital investment as major reasons for fleeing Canada’s centrally controlled economy.  As Canada embraces a system of “climate change” communism that has more in common with China’s politburo-managed economy than with that of the United States, manufacturers are abandoning the wintry ideological prison up North that has survived only by behaving as a blood tick sucking up Americans’ charity...........
2. PM Mark Carney Leading The Charge For The Descent of Canada Into Godless Communism
3. Canada Was a Liberal Paradise . . . Until the Liberals Took Over 
4. WEF’er Mark Carney Turns To Praise Rather Than Derision of Trump at NATO Summit
5. The Long Road To Canadian Communism Getting Shorter By Day
6. Top 20% of Canadian income-earning families pay more than half of all taxes
7. They told you the biggest threat to Canada was coming from Trump
8. Carney & Zelenskyy Announce Creation of New Canadian Bank for NATO/Climate Money Laundering, with $900 Million Seed Money from Canadian Taxpayers
9. Carney has committed $900 million more, to Ukraine. The total contribution by Canadian taxpayers? Over $26 billion
10. Starmer & Carney as far away from Trump as possible, they seem almost disconnected from the group
11. This is the most corrupt government in Canada’s history
12.  Exclusive Analysis: U.S. Indictment Alleges Canada Border Agency Insider Sold Inspection Schedules to Indo-Mexican Cartel Network
13. Terror Comes North  The deadly cost of Canada’s refusal to confront jihadist reality. 

 

This is Your Brain on Marxism

By Rich Kozlovich

I'm posting this cartoon for three reasons.  First, Hillary is among the most despicable human beings on the planet.   Secondly, because Hillary just can't keep her mouth shut, and third, because the media panders to her hypocrisy. 

For years the meme of the Democrats was "character doesn't count".  Now, all of a sudden....watch out now, here is comes..... Hillary, in her attempt to demean Republicans, and Trump specifically, rants that character counts.  

However, as with the case of most of the philosophical flavors of the day embraced by Democrats..... that didn't last long.  Why?  

Because "Democrats have reduced their constituents to pavlovian conditioned mind numbed, emotionally triggerable zombie-like beer hall putsch hysterical hooligans and tantrum throwing kidults just at the mere utterance of the word ‘trump’. “The Manchurian Candidate” has spawned the Democrat Party-wide “Manchurian Constituency”'.

Democrats, being paragons of virtue and morally high minded as they are, have decided they were going full boat and support a confirmed, self admitted Nazi and Communist.   A man with what appears to be some sexual issues and may even be abusive to women, to run as their candidate for Senator from Maine.   Totally supported by Bernie Sanders, AOC, Schumer and a host of other radical left wing Democrats who rant unendingly about morality,  None of which they really believe in, including the loud mouth pontificating no nothing Hollywood celebrities.  

Ya just can't make this stuff up, but watch out now,...... here it comes...... there are those who actually think prison is the best place for certain prominent Democrats?  And it gets worse: Democrat crimes need to be prosecuted, pronto!  Wow! What heresy!  How dare these right wing nut extremists demand Democrats live up to their meme; "no one is above the law".  That's only for non Democrats.  Be assured, you will not hear those five words uttered by any leftist for the rest of Trump's term, and if Vance is elected followed by Rubio, you won't hear it for many years hereafter. 

Are you old enough to remember the TV Public Service Announcement about what illegal drugs do to your brain saying:

"This is your brain, this is your brain on drugs".

Now, I really thought that was profound.  Yet it didn't work.  Illegal drugs are ubiquitous in America and at least 70,000 people die from their use every year, and I'm sure that number is low.  Either way, that doesn't account for the many more thousands who are taking these compounds daily and are surviving marginally.  People whose lives have been functionally destroyed.  When you look at all those homeless you find drugs are a major component in their predicament.  When I see this I can't help but think these were all precious babies at one time.  What waste!

It seems clear to me millions are being negatively impacted by these drugs and the nation suffers as a consequence.   Everyone knows and understands that .....Right?   Apparently not since people, including prominent people, are still using them.  

So, what's my point?  Truth and reality are so very often valueless to vast numbers of people.   The world is in what's called a historical end crisis.  The Marxist mentality promotes all things that are antithetical to stable societies.  Stable societies based on western Judaic/Christian values.   Remember these are the same people who think China is representative of the ideal government, a radical irrational, morally defective, misanthropic tyranny.   We have all the evidence we need to know all that's true about China and yet western nations are part to this insanity by embracing their promotion of multiculturalism and globalism.  A suicide pact for western culture.

•  Illegals Are Killing America
•  How the West’s Rejection of Biblical Christianity Fuels a Surge in Occult Practices in the Spiritual Vacuum

My friend Tom Harris co-authored this piece on June 15th,  Are our immigration policies based on suicidal empathy? saying;

 It is all very well to want to help the poor and less fortunate of the world by welcoming them into our nations. Canada and the U.S. were, after all, built by mass immigration in the first place. But should we let people in today who do not share some of our basic core values, such as respect for and equal treatment of women? And, if they get in anyway, legally or not, should we allow them to stay if they attempt to change our society in such a way as to violate the fundamental cultural standards of the West?

Case in point: many Islamic immigrants from the Middle East have a lifelong hatred of Jews, lesbians, and gays. Many of them do not respect women as equals. And many want to change our society to more closely mirror the archaic standards of the countries they left..........

On June 12th, Lars Møller posted this American Thinker article, The Hollow Laurels Of Angela Merkel saying:

After resisting the military invasions of the Caliphate for centuries, Europe, led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, decided to open its borders wide to migrants with entrenched supremacist beliefs  .On May 19, 2026, the European Parliament inducted Angela Merkel into the inaugural European Order of Merit as a “Distinguished Member.”  ................ The honor bestowed on Merkel is politically tone-deaf, reflecting an equally arrogant and grotesque inversion of reality........

One reader posted this comment:

The awarding of the European Order of Merit to Merkel is akin to the Nobel Peace Prize given to the Lightbringer. Both of them responsible for the demise of Germany and America respectively, yet rewarded for their incompetence and perfidy.

One more demonstration of just how insane Europe’s leadership really is. Europe is doomed and I applaud his comment.  These international awards have not only become meaningless; they’re an embarrassment flying in face of reality or even common sense. They gave an unwarranted award of praise to a leader who has been instrumental in promoting what can't be called anything less than western civilizations suicide. It appears they believe suicide is sane. 

• Europe’s Suicide Pact: Citizens Double-Victimised by Savage Migrants AND a Traitor State That Protects the Butchers
•  Britain’s Rape Gang Scandal Inquiry Report: A National Reckoning and Warning for America

Victor Davis Hanson discusses the mass migration the left is promoting for America as an example of how destructive it is in the video:

The fact of the matter is the only thing that can save Europe now… is violence…. and it’s starting with protests in Ireland, England, Scotland, and Australia. Even France, who still suffers from the same kind of arrogant, self delusional stupidity that Charles De Gaulle embraced, is starting to question the destructive consequences of this Muslim invasion.  These are the same nitwits who are sanctioning Israel and welcoming the Taliban. How long will Europe’s leaders be allowed to continue letting these Muslims butcher, rape and rob their people? 

This is what happens when you fry your brain on Marxism.  That's history, and that history is incontestable.  Why is that so hard to get? 

Where Does Kamala Stand?

By Francis Menton, September 13, 2024  @ Manhattan Contrarian

In the aftermath of Tuesday’s debate, it’s appropriate to try to figure out where the candidates stand on some of the important issues. With Trump, that’s not very hard: he has a limited number of themes that are mostly quite specific, and he repeats them endlessly. But with Harris, it’s remarkably difficult. Many of her positions today seem to be different from, if not the opposite of, where she stood when last she articulated a list of positions, which was during her brief campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2019. In the current campaign, she rarely addresses a significant issue directly. During the debate, when asked to address some issues, she resorted to carefully scripted talking points that could be subject to multiple interpretations.

But then we have the actual record of the Biden/Harris administration to use to interpret any intentionally ambiguous statements. Actions speak much louder than words.

So let’s consider some of her statements during the debate, in the context of the actions of the administration of which she is a part, or of her own prior actions. For these purposes, I have found a transcript of the debate to get her exact words.

Energy Policy

In my post of September 3, I took note of Harris’s apparent recent flip-flop on the issue of “fracking.” That post had a quote from Harris from 2019 that was completely definitive on the issue: "“[T]here’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.” But in her one press interview since being nominated, the CNN interview of August 29, she had said “we can grow and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking.”

But “fracking” is only a piece of energy policy, and “banning” fracking is only one of many possible approaches. Short of banning fracking, there could be restricting it, obstructing it, hindering it in every way possible, and banishing it from federal lands. And then there are all the other pieces of energy policy, like drilling generally (on federal lands and offshore), pipelines, power plants, electric versus combustion vehicles, subsidies for alternative energy, and so on and on and on. In light of all these things, in the September 3 post I called the fracking issue a “distraction.”

Naturally, the moderators of the debate addressed only what I had called the “distraction.” Here is the exchange:

LINSEY DAVIS: Vice President Harris, in your last run for president you said you wanted to ban fracking. . . . I know you say that your values have not changed. So then why have so many of your policy positions changed?

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: So my values have not changed. . . . Let's talk about fracking because we're here in Pennsylvania. I made that very clear in 2020. I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as Vice President of the United States. And, in fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking. My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil. We have had the largest increase in domestic oil production in history because of an approach that recognizes that we cannot over rely on foreign oil.

The key line is “I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as Vice President.” Well, neither the Vice President nor the President has the power to ban fracking, at least on private lands and without a specific statute from the Congress. 

But that is a small part of the issue of energy policy, and completely misses the main point, which is that the Biden/Harris administration has done everything in its power to hinder, obstruct, and delay the development of hydrocarbon fuel resources and related infrastructure, whether that be oil and gas wells, pipelines, power plants, combustion vehicles, or anything else. In the September 3 post I had a list of some of the major administration initiatives, including regulations to force the closure of coal and natural gas power plants, restricting drilling (particularly fracking) on federal lands, canceling pipelines, harassing refineries, outlawing combustion vehicles, and more. 

Here from Thomas Pyle at the Institute for Energy Research is a compilation of no fewer than 250 different “ways the Biden-Harris Administration, and their allies, have made it harder to produce oil & gas.” In light of this blizzard of initiatives, the question of “banning fracking” fades to insignificance. These are the initiatives of the Biden/Harris administration, and clearly Harris supports them.

There is no question that Harris is a zero-carbon green radical. Nothing about her carefully scripted statement in the debate about fracking changes that.

The Border

Similarly as with the fracking issue, Harris made statements at the debate about the border situation that cannot be reconciled with the record of the administration. Here is the exchange at the debate:

DAVID MUIR: We're going to turn now to immigration and border security. . . . Vice President Harris, you were tasked by President Biden with getting to the root causes of migration from Central America. We know that illegal border crossings reached a record high in the Biden administration. This past June, President Biden imposed tough new asylum restrictions. We know the numbers since then have dropped significantly. But my question to you tonight is why did the administration wait until six months before the election to act and would you have done anything differently from President Biden on this?

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: . . . [L]et me say that the United States Congress, including some of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, came up with a border security bill which I supported. And that bill would have put 1,500 more border agents on the border to help those folks who are working there right now over time trying to do their job. It would have allowed us to stem the flow of fentanyl coming into the United States. . . .

Again, I would call the bill in question — an early 2024 effort that failed in the Senate — a distraction. When Trump was in office, he had the border largely closed, and when Biden and Harris came in, they threw it open. Nothing about the statutes had changed, and therefore it is clear that no new statute was required to re-instate the Trump policies that had previously mostly closed the border. The Biden/Harris change of policy was a completely intentional effort to bring in as many illegal immigrants as possible. There is no reason to think that if suddenly 1500 additional border agents were available that the Biden/Harris administration would have used them to restrict entry at the border in some fashion. Harris’s debate statement therefore is completely contrary to the administration’s own policies.

Decriminalizing border crossings; mandatory gun buy-backs

Here are two question posed by moderator Linsey Davis that Vice President Harris completely failed to answer:

LINSEY DAVIS: Vice President Harris, in your last run for president you said . . . [y]ou wanted mandatory government buyback programs for assault weapons. Now your campaign says you don't. You supported decriminalizing border crossings. Now you're taking a harder line. I know you say that your values have not changed. So then why have so many of your policy positions changed?

This is the same question from Davis where the subject of fracking was broached. In her answer, Harris addressed fracking, but not these other two subjects.

On the issue of decriminalizing border crossings, has there been a single criminal prosecution for crossing the border illegally? Not that I’ve heard of. The administration’s policy could not be clearer.

“Mandatory buyback programs” for guns is another distraction from the moderators. Much more relevant is that, as District Attorney of San Francisco in 2008, Harris signed an amicus brief in the Heller case in the Supreme Court in which she advocated that there is no individual right under the Second Amendment to keep and bear arms.

In short, if you watched the debate or reviewed it afterward, you could easily have gotten impressions of Harris’s positions on critical policy issues that are exactly the opposite of where she really stands, as revealed by her own actions and those of the Biden/Harris administration.

Venezuela Timeline to Marxism

By Robin Itzler

Editor's Note:  This is one of the commentaries selected from Robin's weekly newsletter Patriot Neighbors. Any cartoons appearing will have been added by me.  If you wish to get the full edition, E-mail her at PatriotNeighbors@yahoo.com to get on her list, it's free. RK 

 

Decades ago, Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) leader Alexander Trachtenberg (1884 - 1966) wrote to fellow CPUSA activist Bella Dodd (1904 - 1969) that:

“when communism came to America, it would come under the label of ‘progressive democracy.’ Today, the Democrat party uses the term “democratic socialism.”

Several days before his 2009 inauguration Barack Obama declared:

“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

Today, Obama plays golf with former presidents Bill Clinton (Democrat) and George W. Bush (Republican). The happy threesome is united in their desire to stop the America First movement. And what do America First Patriots want to stop? We want to stop America’s march toward communism/socialism/Marxism (whatever you want to call the destruction of our Constitutional Republic).

If you think “it” can’t happen here, put down your remote and consider how much has changed in our once great nation in less than four years of the damaging Harris/Biden administration. Didn’t you just see the coup that ousted Joe Biden, who won 14+ MILLION primary votes, and give it to a cackling’ ignoramus who never won a single primary vote?

Look how fast it happened in Venezuela:

1992 - Venezuela became third richest nation in Hemisphere
1997 - Venezuela became second largest purchaser of F-150
2001 - Venezuela voted for a Socialist president—“Income Inequality”
2004 - Venezuela’s private healthcare is completely socialized
2007 - Venezuela’s higher education becomes free to all citizens
2009 - Venezuela’s socialist government bans private ownership of guns
2012 - Vermont’s Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders praises Venezuela’s version of the “American Dream”
2014 - Venezuela’s opposition leaders are imprisoned
2016 - Food and healthcare shortages in Venezuela become widespread
2017 - Venezuela suspends its Constitution and elections are suspended
2019 - Unarmed citizens are massacred by the Venezuelan government

In recent weeks, we have witnessed Venezuela dictator Nicolás Maduro steal the July 28 presidential election, as his government-controlled National Electorate Council announced that Maduro had won reelection with almost 52% of the vote. (Just like Joe Biden won with 81 million votes.)

It didn’t take long before the Venezuelan government started arresting protesting citizens (just like January 6). And seek the arrest of his leading opponent María Corina Machado (just like lawfare against Donald Trump). Pictured: A small Venezuelan grocer—before and after socialism.

On August 16, Kamala Harris endorsed PRICE CONTROLS to reduce inflation. (Hellooo Kamala, you are already in office and can do something NOW to reduce the inflation that you and Joey caused!) Let’s see who else embraced price controls:

Soviet Union’s Stalin … millions starved to death
Cuba’s Fidel Castro … millions starved to death
Communist China’s Mao …. millions starved to death
Maduro’s Venezuela … millions are starving to death

Ronald Reagan warned us:

“Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It’s not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. And those who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.”

The Establishment Ensures That Gaslighting Paves The Way To Marxism

August 3, 2024 By Robin M. Itzler @ American Thinker

Are you ready for three months of leftist rumors, innuendos, and gaslighting? The left knows that repeating horrendous falsehoods is how the gullible public accepts lies at face value. Nazi Joseph Goebbels often comes to mind as the propaganda minister was an expert at understanding the principle of selling lies:

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

Back in the day, socialists of all stripes (i.e., Nazis, communists, and Italian fascists) repeatedly told bald-faced lies, ad nauseum, in their speeches, newspapers and news reels. Today, that still holds true with left-leaning “news” networks such as MSNBC, CNN, and countless print and online sources. Today, they’ve added some new tricks to manipulate the truth, which is to put out lies and then withdraw them after they’ve gained traction.

Image: Kamala Harris (edited). YouTube screen grab.

The Associate Press FactCheck put out a seemingly pro-JD Vance fact-check identifying as false an obscure charge that Vance had sex with a couch. Then, AP deleted its fact check, saying the article did not meet its standards. By then, though, the falsehood had taken hold, which probably was AP’s plan all along.

During a House Judiciary Committee hearing two weeks after the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that “with respect to former President Trump, there’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that, you know, that hit his ear.” Of course, Wray knew it was a bullet that injured Trump. The next day, the FBI released a statement that it definitely was a bullet. However, the aroma of maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t, had already filled Marxist-Democrat talking points.

It’s common now for search engines take you to the wrong site or provide misleading information. When people search for “Donald Trump” information, they’ll only get articles about Kamala Harris:

Wow, this is crazy! https://t.co/8WW942IB8a

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 29, 2024

Unlike misleading rumors, gaslighting is when the person knows (or should know) the truth but purposely fabricates a different scenario. For instance, on April 21, actor Michael Douglas insisted that Joe Biden “is as sharp as a tack” on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS.” That comment went viral. Douglas also said, “His entire Cabinet, including his vice president, everybody that’s in his Cabinet would be more than happy to work with him again on a next term.”

Do you think Biden was as sharp as a tack in April but suddenly came down with advanced mental acuity issues a few months later when he attended the G7 Summit, celebrated Juneteenth at the White House, or participated in the June 27 debate? Of course not, and the left knew it. But the facts aren’t the point. The point is political power.

As leftists ramped up efforts to toss Biden out following his atrocious debate performance, many started publicly admitting that they recognized Biden had mental acuity issues many months or years before. They shared confidences from high-ranking administration officials or described what they had witnessed themselves.

Certainly, Vice President Kamala Harris knew Joe Biden was not fit to remain in office. Nor do voters believe she was too busy cackling through another incoherent speech to notice. According to a YouGov/Times of London poll taken after Biden announced he would not run for re-election, 92% of voters believe Vice President Harris knew about President Biden’s deteriorating health and that there was a cover-up.

Throughout Biden’s presidency, the leftist media gaslighted the American public by ignoring what all of us were regularly hearing and seeing. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre (DEI hire?) led the chorus, insisting that videos of Biden incoherently speaking or wandering around were “cheap fakes.”

At the same time, according to an Economist/YouGov poll, only 39 percent of registered independents view Vice President Kamala Harris as “qualified” to be president.

With Biden gone, the same people are gaslighting us about “Saint” Kamala during her “coronation.” If you call her incompetent, you’re a racist. If you mispronounce her name, you’re a racist. If you say she is a DEI hire, you’re a racist. Or maybe you’re both a racist and a misogynist.

Whether you are hiring at a fast-food restaurant or for the vice presidency, when you announce before interviews that you are solely looking at people who check certain boxes rather than based on ability or merit, that means the person is a DEI hire.

During a one-to-one 2020 primary debate with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Biden vowed to pick a woman vice president. This meant Biden was still open to a white, black, Hispanic, or Asian female.

By late April 2020, 200+ black women activists within the Democrat party signed an open letter demanding that Biden pick a black woman. By May, a dozen black women who had signed this letter personally met with Biden to insist that his running mate be a black woman.

Now, Biden had to omit all males, along with women who were Hispanic, Asian, or white. Of course, since Harris’ father is Jamaican and her mother is from India, some might say (as Trump did) that she wasn’t the black woman that the activists demanded.

Does it matter? The leftist-controlled media gaslight everything, not just Kamala’s race. Thus, they are gaslighting that Joe Biden named Kamala Harris Border Czar, responsible for 10 million unvetted illegal aliens who have waltzed into the United States.

And that Harris has said she wanted to defund the police.

And that Harris wants to ban fracking so that the United States is not energy independent.

And that Harris wants Medicare for All.

And that Harris compared ICE to the KKK.

And that Harris believes in gun confiscation.

And how Harris raised tons of money following Biden’s withdrawal from the race.

In the past four years, we’ve seen rumors, innuendos, cheap fakes, and gaslighting, along with the Democrat party’s favorite Olympic sport: ballot stuffing. This is how they are working to elect a Kamala “Cacklin’” Harris, a person not one primary voter ever voted for. Even the notorious Black Lives Matters is against Democrat delegates and donors anointing Harris as the nominee.

My guess is that Robert de Niro thinks Kamala Harris is as wise and wonderful as Joe Biden, and that Michael Douglas believes she is as sharp as a tack!

Robin M. Itzler is a regular contributor to American Thinker. She is the founder and editor of Patriot Neighbors, a free weekly national newsletter. Robin can be reached at PatriotNeighbors@yahoo.com.

Victimhood is an Oppressive System of Relative Rights

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog  

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.

In my book, Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against The Left, I described the radical American leftists who wanted to perpetuate the revolution and saw France as a model.

“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. 

 

 

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.

Maoist New York Goes to Pol Pot With Urban Agriculture

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

There’s a story about an old Marxist who would address leftist rallies in Union Square a century ago as, “Workers and Peasants of New York City”. Leftists eventually transform farce into fact and that’s why New York’s number two mayoral candidate is touting a “New Agrarian Economy”.

It’s time to farm one of the most expensive and densely populated cities in the country.

Mao had kicked off China’s worst famine by demanding that wheat be grown everywhere. And New York City’s Maoists are following in his footsteps by trying to farm rooftops and parking lots.

Urban agriculture is one of those obscure lefty ideas so insane that few even believe it exists.

But Mayor Bill de Blasio had already created an Office of Urban Agriculture and the New York City Council, which is so crazy that it makes De Blasio look sane, had declared war on "food inequity", by vowing to grow food in one of the most densely populated cities on earth.

If your city is going to pot anyway, why not go to Pol Pot?

Urban madness doesn’t stay in cities so the 2018 Farm Bill created an Office of Urban Agriculture inside the USDA and is doling out millions of dollars in grants for urban agriculture like the one that proposes to turn residents of housing projects in Camden, New Jersey from “resident, to gardener, to farmer, and eventually to community urban agriculture leader.”

Camden is one of the most polluted and violent cities in New Jersey, so assuming anyone manages to grow anything, it’s even odds whether they’ll be shot or die of food poisoning.

New York City isn’t about to let New Jersey steal its crown and so Mayor Eric Eric Adams promised go give everyone in the city healthy food by growing it in the city with rooftop farms over schools and hydroponic farms in buildings.

Considering the current state of New York City’s public schools, growing lettuce on top of them might not be the priority: getting their students to read and do simple math should be. And the city already has plenty of hydroponic agriculture, but it’s mostly used to illegally grow marijuana.

Less than half of New York City public school students are performing at grade level in Math and English. It might be a better idea to have schools actually educate students, if Randi Weingarten will allow them, than to enlist them in some Communist harvesting scheme.

It was the Soviet Union that was infamous for rushing students to the fields to harvest crops resulting in a whole lot of wasted crops and wasted time for the students. The Soviet Union might not be the best model for New York City, but finally the old Stalinists and Sandernistas who infest its school system will get to live out their collective farming dreams.

New York City is already one of the densest, and most expensive, both in terms of land value and average salary, places in the country. Growing food in the city, instead of importing it from economically depressed upstate areas, or other states, makes no sense whatsoever.

But Adams insists that urban agriculture will, "aid our economic recovery, providing a new source of tax revenue and employment for New Yorkers."

Saner heads might wonder where these bountiful crops of urban wheat will grow.

“Perhaps surprisingly to some, at the end of the 19th century, New York City was one of the nation’s leaders in agricultural production. The counties I call and have called home — Kings (Brooklyn) and Queens — were, I was proud to learn, agricultural powerhouses,” Adams’ New Agrarian Economy report declares.

Adams fails to mention that the population of New York City rose sharply from around 1 million to 2 million between 1860 and 1880.  Today it’s over 8 million.

Back then there were also farms in what is now uptown Manhattan. Today, 32,000 people live per square mile in Harlem. The country farms of uptown Manhattan went away with the end of the Civil War. Brooklyn and Queens, which had more space, took longer to be overpopulated.

If Adams really wants a New Agrarian Economy, he needs to expel 80% of the city’s residents, tear down twenty thousand buildings, and then work to redevelop the land for cultivation.

Of course that massive effort to turn New York City into a postapocalyptic communal farm still wouldn’t work because one of the reasons that the city’s agriculture went away is that the land had been overexploited for centuries, and then tainted and polluted, until it was good for little more than paving it over, or hollowing it out as foundations for large buildings. A city.

There was a reason that the Indians let Manhattan go so cheaply and weren’t too picky about the other boroughs. The land wasn’t good for very much and the water was even worse.

The Dutch and then the English only found it useful as ports in a trading hub.

New Yorkers regularly died of disease because they were living on swampland and drinking polluted water. But it was all worth it so they could trade stocks and go out to the theater.

The great thing about ignorance is that you never realize when history is repeating itself.

New York City’s schoolchildren used to learn all this as basic history around the same time that the farms went away. Today they learn about equity and slavery while having absolutely no clue about the basic details that made the world they live in. That’s how you get urban agriculture.

Woke education and cultural illiteracy leads to stupendously stupid agricultural policy. Just as it did in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev and in Communist China under Mao. The New Agrarian Economy closely echoes Mao’s “Grow grain everywhere” policy. And is as equally ignorant about the basic realities of agriculture as Mao’s second-hand Lysenkoism. (Link added by me. RK)

With every terrible Communist idea making a woke comeback, why not universal peasantry?

“New York City is a center of innovation and commercialization of new agricultural technologies,” Adams’ report claims. “As its new technologies develop fast, it is crucial that this economy maintain a similarly furious commitment to social justice.”

There’s no idea so insane that a leftist won’t adopt it and taxpayers won’t pay for it.

“New York City is a veritable fertile ground for urban agricultural exploration purposes, with its roughly 1,000 acres of green space at developments under the purview of the New York City Housing Authority,” the report claims. Never mind that your average housing project’s land is already covered in human waste and cigarette butts. And is meant to be recreational.

Or that 1,000 acres gets you one farm. There’s a million acres of land being used to grow corn in the state alone. How many people does Adams expect to feed from 1,000 acres of projects?

Adams proposes to start out by basing school lunch menus on “what we can supply from local New York City urban agriculture”. Using public school students, many of them minorities, as guinea pigs for Maoist urban agriculture projects in a polluted city would alternately starve and poison those students. And since New York schools are also used as general soup kitchens, also the homeless, and welfare recipients, it would also serve as a kind of eugenics program.

New York City’s government runs a welfare state that is tasked with providing free and cheap food. Adams would like to take that food supply and make it dependent on growing food on rooftops and housing project yards by “minority and women-owned businesses”.

This is what happens when you don’t teach kids about Communism.

Between all the buzzwords like “equity” and “food apartheid” is yet another doomed program that only seems to exist to vacuum up cash and government grants before failing miserably.

Meanwhile New York City is becoming more of a hellhole than ever.

Adams might want to consider using that massive “5,000 acres of vacant lots” (Iowa has about 26 million of acres of farmland) not to grow corn (which Iowa is much better at), but to house the homeless whom the city is currently putting up in $200 a night hotels at taxpayer expense.

New York City doesn’t need urban agriculture: it needs basic public safety.

Massive numbers of companies have fled New York City during the pandemic. Even Goldman Sachs is considering getting out. Between the lockdowns, the race riots, and the taxes, the city is a horrible environment for business. Instead of raising taxes to pay for urban agriculture, Adams might want to consider how to cut taxes and bring jobs back to New York City.

Maoism didn’t work in China. It sure as hell won’t work in New York City.

But getting the workers back to the land has the same magnetic appeal for 21st century lefties as it did for Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot. One of the densest cities in America is pursuing a bizarre project out of the fevered dreams of Mao and Pol Pot. And Democrats in D.C. have been funding such ventures in urban areas around the country at the expense of farm country.

It’s not pure ideological fanaticism.

Urban farming is a great way to steal grants and funding from family farms who actually need it, while plowing the cash into the same failed urban areas whose broken schools, broken housing, broken families, and broken everything already consume much of the tax dollars of their states.

America’s farmers are already struggling. Democrats are happy to rob them to finance bizarre Maoist experiments in growing carrots in housing projects.

“We were an agrarian economy at one time,” Eric Adams mournfully declaims.

But if he wants to be part of an agrarian economy, he can head upstate. The trouble is that Adams doesn’t actually want to live in a low-density farming community. Nor does he want to do the hard work of actually farming. Like the USSR or Mao’s China, our economy is becoming a figment of someone’s ideological imagination in which nothing but buzzwords are really real.

“You’re going to teach my young children a nutritionally-based education so they can learn this multi-billion dollar industry of urban farming,” Adams argues.

There’s no multi-billion dollar industry of urban farming. Nor will there ever be. But in a political economy in which Democrats can falsely claim that everyone’s going to get jobs installing solar panels and de-icing wind turbines, in which money and art are imaginary digital commodities, and the government can turn carbon credits into big business, unreality is a minor detail.

Like Pol Pot, Adams is dreaming of a great return to nature in the concrete canyons of NYC.

“They’re going to be skillful in it,” Adams babbles, as he optimistically invokes New York’s children getting jobs as urban farmers in an industry which pays unskilled Mexican laborers 40 cents for picking a 40 pound bucket of produce. “And these are the jobs of the future, because 40 percent of the jobs we’re training our children for now won’t be available because of computer learning and artificial intelligence. But we’re always going to eat.”

The jobs of the future will be planting rotten carrots on rooftops to be sold to the government.

Forget all the real jobs. Computers will do them. Especially once the minimum wage hits forty bucks. But we’ll always need someone to work a hoe in the neo-medieval future of New York.

The Left has been claiming for some two centuries that it’s the ideology of the future. But its future is the past. All of its ideas come down to a return to the medieval world, the lord and his sharecroppers, the peace of a timeless world in which men rise at dawn and go to bed at dusk, in which there are no questions, only a dogma to learn and repeat, life is nasty, short, and brutish, and in which everyone knows their place. Welcome to the progressive future.

Here’s your bucket.

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.

Why Marxism/Communism Fails, Part One

“Marxism wasn’t a bad idea that went wrong.  It was a bad idea.”—Richard Pipes, Communism.

Mark Lewis  |  Nov 18, 2023 

Communism failed everywhere, and oceans of blood were the result.  Though dozens of attempts worldwide were made to establish societies and governments based on the ideas of the 19th-century German economist/philosopher Karl Marx, they all went down in flames.  Only four such societies survive—China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba—and all of them (except North Korea) exist solely because they made significant compromises with capitalism.  And North Korea is probably the number one hellhole on earth today.  There is no such thing as “communism” now, even in “communist” countries.   

It is also interesting to note that nearly every Marxist-based country in the past 100 years has ended up with a dictator or some kind of one-man despotism.  This is the very antithesis of Marx’s theory, which saw communism as driven by impersonal economic forces, with the end being the ultimate abolition of government and boundless freedom for all.  When I recently asked a CCP member in China if he could possibly even imagine the CCP voluntarily giving up power as Marx predicted, he kinda chuckled and said, “Maybe in 500 years.”  Yeah.  When none of us will be around to see it.  Well, given enough time, anything is supposed to be able to happen............To Read More....

Post-Postmodern America

Victor Davis Hanson Sep 15, 2023 @ Townhall.com

When the progressive woke revolution took over traditional America, matters soon reached the level of the ridiculous.

Take the following examples of woke craziness and hypocrisy, perhaps the last best witnessed during Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution.

The Biden administration, from its outset, wished to neuter immigration law. It sought to radically alter the demography of the U.S. by stopping the border wall and allowing anyone who could walk across the southern border into the United States.

Over seven million did just that. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden ignored the role of the Mexican cartels in causing nearly 100,000 ANNUAL American fentanyl deaths.

Then, border states finally wised up.

They grasped that the entire open-borders, "new Democratic majority" leftwing braggadocio was predicated on its hypocritical architects staying as far away as possible from their new constituents.

So, cash-strapped border states started busing their illegal aliens to sanctuary blue-state jurisdictions.

Almost immediately, once magnanimous liberals, whether in Martha's Vineyard, Chicago, or Manhattan, stopped virtue-signaling their support for open borders.

Instead, soon, they went berserk over the influx.

So now an embarrassed Biden administration still wishes illegal aliens to keep coming but to stay far away from their advocates -- by forcing them to remain in Texas.

That means the president has redefined the U.S. border. It rests now apparently north of Texas, as Biden cedes sovereignty to Mexico.

Pre-civilizational greens in California prefer blowing up dams to building them.

They couldn't care less that their targeted reservoirs help store water in drought, prevent flooding, enhance irrigation, offer recreation, and generate clean hydroelectric power.

An absurdly green California is currently destroying four dams on the Klamath River. In adding insult to injury, it is paying the half-billion dollar demolition cost in part through a water bond that state voters once thought would build new -- not explode existing -- dams.

The Biden administration is mandating new dates when electric vehicles will be all but mandatory.

To prove their current viability, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm led a performance art EV caravan on a long road trip.

When she found insufficient charging stations to continue her media stunt, she sent a gas-powered car ahead to block open charging stations and deny them to other EVs ahead in line.

Only that way could Granholm ensure that her arriving energy-starved motorcade might find rare empty charger stalls.

In some California charging stations, diesel generators are needed to produce enough "clean" electricity to power the stalls.

The state has steadily dismantled many of its nuclear, oil, and coal power plants. It refuses to build new natural gas generation plants.

Naturally, California's heavily subsidized solar and wind plants now produce too much energy during the day and almost nothing at night.

So, the state now begs residents to charge their EVs only during the day. Then, at night, Californians may soon be asked to plug them in again to transfer what is left in their batteries into the state grid.

Apparently, only that way will there be enough expropriated "green" electricity for 41 million state residents after dark.

One of the loudest leftist voices to defund the police and decriminalize violent crimes in the post-George Floyd era was Shivanthi Sathanandan, the 2nd vice chairwoman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

She was recently not shy about defunding: "We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. Say it with me. DISMANTLE."

But recently, the loud Sathanandan was a victim of the very crime wave she helped to spawn.

Last week, four armed thugs carjacked her automobile. They beat her up in front of her children at her own home and sped off without fear of arrest.

The reaction of the arch-police dismantler and decriminalizer on her road to Damascus?

For the first time, the now bruised and bleeding activist became livid that criminals had taken over her Minneapolis: "Look at my face. REMEMBER ME when you are thinking about supporting letting juveniles and young people out of custody roam our streets instead of HOLDING THEM ACCOUNTABLE FOR THEIR ACTIONS."

Andrea Smith was an ethnic studies professor at the University of California, Riverside. But now she has been forced out after getting caught lying that she was Native American.

Prior to her outing, she was well known for damning "white women" (like herself) who opted to "become Indians" out of guilt and (like her) for careerist advantage.

The common theme of these absurdities is how contrary to human nature, impractical and destructive utopian wokeism, whether in matters of energy, race, crime, or illegal immigration.

There are two other characteristics of the Woke Revolution.

One, it depends solely on its advocates, never having to experience firsthand any of the nonsense they inflict on others.

And two, dangerous zealots with titles before and letters after, their names prove to be quite stupid -- and dangerous.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished Center for American Greatness fellow. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of "The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won" from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.

 

American Unreality

By Daniel Greenfield August 17, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog 

 Ersatz or artificial substitutes for products used to be a wartime necessity. Americans and other westerners have long since accepted the ubiquity of ersatz products for real ones. Everything from butter to maple syrup to meat is replaced with substitutes for dietary or economic reasons.

The ‘ersatzization’ of food has been more than overmatched by the same phenomenon in our culture. Artificially generated images and essays are treated as if they were the work of some higher artificial intelligence rather than just the digitally remixed work of actual humans.

And men are treated as women as long as they insist that they really are women.

Objective measures of reality have fallen by the wayside in favor of a subjective materialism in which it matters only what something appears to be or what we think it is, not what it really is.

The consensual illusion of ersatz foods in which we all know what we’re eating even if we occasionally pretend it’s the real thing has made way for ersatz money, ersatz art, ersatz science, ersatz politics and even ersatz women. With the latter the right to pretend, to pose as something you are not, has evolved into a civil right. To lie and be believed has eclipsed freedom of speech and the traditional rights of women, not to mention science and reality.

Illusion became delusion along a road that began with mass communications and ended with emulation in the entertainment and technology industries as the highest form of art. Emulation, like most subversive arts, required deconstruction. To duplicate a thing, whether it was a scream, a sentence or a human body, we had to deconstruct it into its components and, once deconstructed, it was all too easy to confuse the components and the illusion with the whole.

Transgender activists claim that they’re women because they wear makeup, put on dresses, adopt feminine mannerisms, and, in some cases, take hormones and get castrated. It is significant that the latter are not even real requirements. The only real requirements for transgender status are external imitation and internal conviction. In an artificial age, what we believe and what we pretend to be is what we are. Those who do this are the children of a world where fortunes, stock value, political office and academic credentials are built on illusions.

The dark side of the scientific pursuit of truth was the conviction that by understanding how things in the natural world were made, we could duplicate them and become gods. Our belief that we have achieved this has vastly outstripped the reality where our limited successes stalled early on in the atomic age. The triumph and horror of the detonation of the atomic bomb remains a compelling subject because it appeared to open a new age when it actually closed it. The everyday hard technologies that underpin modern civilization already existed then. All we have succeeded in doing since is to make them cheaper, more efficient and more accessible.

It took the evolution of computer technology for us to enter a world that seemed in line with our inflated sense of our capabilities. Within those systems, programmers appeared able to create worlds and rewrite the rules of reality. Outside them, radicals who had soured on the old socialist vision of industrial progress turned to romanticism and manufactured the myth that human technology, nuclear and industrial, was on the verge of destroying the world.

The myth of man as the destroyer of worlds, propounded by Oppenheimer, a weak man pretending to be terrified of his own strength, was not a response to technological potency, but impotence. Environmentalism was not a reaction to the accelerating speed of technological change, which was actually slowing down, but to a cultural response to the death of progress.

The atomic age’s conviction that experts and scientists would be able to solve all our problems and usher in a better world had faltered and that opened the way for the counterculture to make its case that technological progress was not the solution. While America had sharply reduced poverty, spread prosperity and increased lifespans, these great achievements in daily life had not fulfilled the promise of a future that would sweep away all the social problems of the world.

The promise of omnipotent technological man was replaced with the myths of omnipotent man who could change the world, not through actual accomplishments, but through conviction. Like the Communist dictatorships they were on the verge of defeating, Americans were persuaded through mass communications and educational indoctrination that it was more important to believe the right things than to do them because conviction could transform reality.

Every leftist revolution, beginning with the French Revolution, had begun with the slogan that will mattered more than any real world prerequisite when it came to changing the world. Leni Riefenstahl’s ‘Triumph of the Will’ condensed that central idea into its name. That reality could be overcome through the assertion of the correct principles took us from the horrors of the guillotine, the mass starvations of the Soviet Union and Communist China, and refracted through the advertising and entertainment industries, along with social media, into an American unreality where people can change their sex if done in line with identity politics principles.

Marxism had never been anything more than a 19th century crank’s pseudoscience wrapped in bad history and worse theory. Karl Marx had been a miserable student and never had any patience for learning anything. The genius of Marxism was that it asserted that the only way to understand anything was to do it. Instead of testing theories against practice, practice had to validate theory. Soviet agriculture was a miserable failure, but that was put down not to the failures of the underlying theory, but to the decadence and corruption of the peasants.

When reality failed theory, mass murder swiftly followed. Socialist theories were all big lies that were upheld with misery and censorship, at best, and with terror and murder at their worst. The intellectuals who studied Marxism either learned to kill or were replaced by those like Stalin whose understanding of theory might be poor, but who excelled at implementing it by redirecting blame for its failures through a French revolutionary drama of purges and random butchery.

In America, the lies still reign supreme from global warming to gender change. The varied lies have at their core the myth that man is omnipotent in both destructive and constructive realms. If man is not restrained, he will destroy the world, but if he is restrained through the right ideology, there is nothing that he cannot accomplish. The good kind of omnipotence comes from adopting a political dogma which when properly implemented can make anything possible.

Overcoming reality by embracing illusion is the test of faith of the dogma. Like the ancient pagans who castrated themselves and then threw the parts into the fire before worshiping the goddess, their modern counterparts embark on pretending to be women as an act of faith. To disbelieve is not just a hate crime: it questions the magical thinking at the heart of the Left.

Ersatz food, once a wartime necessity, becomes ‘sacred’ when eaten to overcome ‘climate change’. Reality becomes illusion and becomes reality again when imbued with virtue. The break between the Marxists and the Wokes over whether virtue signaling matters is emblematic of the larger conflict between industrial and post-industrial social media collectivism.

To ‘live my truth’ rather than the truth is a pivotal decision to change the world through delusion. The old school Marxists may decry a neo-liberalism of bumper stickers and hashtag activism, but it was the 60s radicals who failed at public activism and went into the system, became wealthy and successful, who claimed that they sold out externally, but not internally, who gave us the schizoid state of the postmodern western leftist and he/them fantasy collectivism.

Radical ad execs, coked out screenwriters, and fringe academics ushered in the exciting unreality all around us. Then, financed by Silicon Valley techtopians, social media offered a terrible version of the old vision of creating worlds within the old green and black CRT monitors. The world inside the now 4K monitors is not the same as the real world outside, but even before the arrival of everyday augmented reality wearables people have been conditioned to compare reality against the unreal world of social media, and to find reality, in which the people aren’t as attractive, wealth doesn’t come from imaginary currency and fringe sexuality just leads to unhappiness, as wanting. We live in utopia now and the real world is collapsing around us.

External reality is depressing. It kills dreams. Like the dream of having total power over ourselves and the world around us. The man who believes he is really a woman doesn’t want to be told otherwise. Neither does the politician who just proposed spending another trillion dollars because modern monetary theory tells him that government spending can be virtually infinite.

Children live in a magical world in which dreams mingle seamlessly with reality. Adulthood appears to be a distant mirage of unlimited freedom. The traditional process of growing up was the realization of the limitations and responsibilities of adulthood. Each generation of children has become slower to come to terms with these limitations and responsibilities. For as long as possible they inhabit a childish world in which they can do anything and may not be denied.

The unreal world, enhanced by pharmaceuticals, fantasies and entertainment, offers not freedom through responsibility, but freedom from responsibility by exchanging subjective reality and external mimicry for the basic truths of economics, biology and human nature.

The world around us appears insane because it has left behind reality for fantasy. Sanity can only come from coming to grips with the painful truths of reality all over 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 Left Has A Dream. I Call it a Nightmare! Chicago, Part III

By Rich Kozlovich

As we watch the insanity going on in America's cities it's important to define how this occurred, and who's responsible.  First, let's cut to the chase.  America's major cities are crime infested sewers, and the Democrats own that completely.  So, I've now given you the answer, here's the evidence, and we're going to view the evidence one city at at time, starting with Chicago.  

Stephan Moore in his April 11th article, The left has killed our great cities, points out:

Tuesday, April 4, as the night Chicago died.That's when we learned that Second City voters narrowly elected Brandon Johnson as their next mayor. This is a city that was flattened during the reign of Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who lost in the first round of voting for Chicago mayor because she didn't finish in one of the top two spots. Lightfoot, elected in 2019 after a career as a federal prosecutor who then held several appointed positions in Chicago, shut down the city for more than a year during COVID-19. She also bankrupted small businesses, allowed rioters to burn down whole neighborhoods, presided over the worst crime wave in 50 years and let the schools go to hell............Now, the voters have selected Johnson..........The incoming mayor may turn out to be a worse mayor than Lightfoot...........The fact that Chicagoans have elected not a reformer, but a deformer, suggests that inner-city residents still don't get it -- or they don't care. Or they are all on the payroll of the city governments that are going bankrupt. Alas, our cities can't be saved if the voters in these metropolises don't want to be saved.

Well, it turns out Brandon Johnson is most likely going to be far worse than Lightfoot.  Last week rioting broke out, vehicles were burned, people were beaten, and had their lives threatened, and the police did nothing, and made it clear as long as Johnson was mayor, that was the way it was going to be.  The police are sworn to protect, but the left sent a message long ago, if they do what needs to be done, they're going to be prosecuted and possibly sent to prison.  In Seattle they've been told they have to offer a "sincere apology" for enforcing the law.  They're left with crossroads decisions daily; "to be or to do".  Guess which one they've chosen?  

Mayor Johnson's response to all this?  

In no way do I condone the destructive activity we saw in the Loop and lakefront this weekend.  It is unacceptable and has no place in our city.

Okay, that makes sense, and it sounds like responsible thinking, but is it reality, or just nice sounding talking points?   Then he goes on to demonstrate what he really thinks by babbling irrationally saying:

However, it is not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.  Our communities must work together to create spaces for youth to gather safely and responsible, under adult guidance and supervision, to ensure that every part of our city remains welcome for both residents and visitors.  This is one aspect of my comprehensive approach to improve public safety and make Chicago livable for everyone.

He continued to blather this same nonsense, "In on-camera comments that Julio covered yesterday, the incoming mayor doubled down" saying:

Demonizing children is wrong.....they're children, and children sometimes make silly decisions...."

• Starved of opportunities?  Really?  What opportunities have been denied them and if so, who's responsible?  Democrat mayors have run Chicago for as long as I've been alive and longer (1931 the last Republican mayor left office) and Democrats have ruled Illinois for decades, so who is responsible for this alleged starvation of opportunities? 
  
• Silly decisions?  Really?  Choosing to commit violent crimes are "silly decisions"?  These aren't children, they're violent criminals and thugs, I don't care what their chronological age may be.  They are what they do.   Law enforcement in Chicago is expecting a lot more "silly" decisions as the weather warms, and yes it is right to demonize those who riot and commit crimes of property destruction, violent harm to others, and theft.
• Because of leftist insanity these aren't criminals, "they're misunderstood victims of an impoverished society", and people on the left, just like Mayor Johnson, are responsible for promoting this "entitlement" mentality, and are even pushing to legalize their criminal behavior.  

Here was another "silly decision" by a "mob" of thugs who violently beat a helpless woman in Chicago.  The video of this has been taken down, I wonder why?   Here's another piece about Johnson's "children", hundreds of them, making "silly decisions" as Violence Erupts in Chicago as Hundreds of Thugs Destroy Parts of the City:

 ..........smashing car windows.......at least one person in a car was attacked. Shots were fired near the corner of Madison and Michigan, and FOX 32 Chicago decided that it was unsafe to keep our news crew on the scene. A woman whose car was smashed by people jumping on the windshield said her husband was beaten as he sat in the driver’s seat.............Video posted on social media shows people standing on top of a CTA bus and dancing. The CTA said that some service through the downtown area was disrupted on Saturday night because of police activity........... a 14-year-old was shot.............

There are consequences for all this.  Migration, closed businesses, and a dropping tax base.  This is the starvation of opportunities Johnson blathers about, and his party is to blame.   Corporate America is leaving, even after so many of them grovelled in the sewer with Antifa, BLM, and totally embraced this insane Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Marxist economic suicide pact.  

As Silvio Canto, Jr. points out in his shoplifting article, with just the right amount of snarc:

Who knew that uncontrolled shoplifting and allowing criminals to run out of stores with jewelry and whiskey bottles would eventually translate into stores closing their doors for good?  Where did we hear that before? Of course, it's more than closing stores to shoppers.  A retail store hires people and pays taxes.  In many locations, it may be the only drugstore around. There are broad consequences to shoplifting.  As stores close in our cities, local governments will lose the tax base that pays for a lot of social services.  The bottom line is that the community will lose.  Are you listening, Democrats?

No, they're not because leftist ideology means you never have to apologize or change, it's always someone else's fault.  Well, Walmart has had it and is closing stores all over the country, including 4 Chicago Stores, because they've lost tens of millions of dollars, and the Democrats are outraged.

How dare they put their profits over the need of these Marxists have for their tax dollars?  Dollars they need to fulfill leftist demands and redistribute that money in order to keep being elected, in order to ultimately put them out of business.  Imagine that!

Well, Walmart isn't the only one seeing this insanity for what it is, as Dan Mitchell points out in his January 2022 piece, Chicago’s Downward Spiral:

The Chicago area saw an exodus of corporate headquarters in 2022, including investment firm Citadel, which moved to Miami along with its billionaire founder, Ken Griffin; Caterpillar, which relocated from north suburban Deerfield to Irving, Texas; and aerospace giant Boeing, which moved to Arlington, Virginia, after more than 20 years in the West Loop. The most recent high-profile departure was announced in November, when Lake Forest-based auto parts manufacturer Tenneco said it was shifting its headquarters to Michigan. …vacancy rates in the central business district rose to 19.6%, while the Chicago metro ticked up to 21.8%… Meanwhile, Citadel principals and employees generated billions of dollars in tax revenue for the city and state over the past decade, according to the firm, money that has also headed south.And why are businesses escaping?

The economic mismanagement of Chicago, and the entire state of Illinois, is getting worse, and this was before Johnson was elected.  The real hidden economic viper in the fruit basket?  Pensions!

Pension costs will consume more than $2.3 billion of the city’s budget, or 21.4 percent of its own source revenue, excluding state and federal grants. That’s more than a $967 million increase in pension spending since Lightfoot became mayor and $461 million more than last year alone.............To make matters worse, Chicago still has major problems with corruption.

• The Left Has A Dream. I Call it a Nightmare, Part I
• The Left Has A Dream. I Call it a Nightmare! California, Part II