Free people can do whatever they like with other people in private. There is no reasonable moral argument against any sort of consensual sex, as long as no children are brought into it and no crime is committed. And if some men want to pretend they are women and vice versa, privately and publicly, all happiness to them.

But to pretend that a man can be a woman or vice versa, is absurd. Yet the Democrats think they can legislate that pretense into reality. That’s what their Equality Act just passed in the House is intended to do.

Lawrence Meyers writes at Townhall:

In George Orwell’s 1984, everyman Winston Smith is tortured and brainwashed into truly believing that 2+2=5. Orwell’s message was that an unfettered State would eventually maintain the population in such propaganda-induced fear of its power that people would deny objective reality.

Such was the power of the Party and doublethink – it weakened individual liberty. Conform or else. By instilling fear in its subjects, the State crushes the intellectual notion of objective reality.

So it goes with the Democrat’s passage of The Equality Act last week. The legislation adds “gender identity” to the list of protected classes under federal civil rights law.

“Gender identity” is that bizarre concept in which one must now be treated as whatever gender one wishes to be known as, regardless of what reality dictates. Under the Democratic vision of the United States, you can no longer be discriminated against if you are a man who just happens to decide that today he feels like a woman, or vice versa.

Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect, told the Nuremberg Tribunal that “what distinguished the Third Reich from all previous dictatorships was its use of all the means of communication to sustain itself and to deprive its objects of the power of independent thought.”

Or as the torturer O’Brien [in 1984] says, “Sometimes 2+2 are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy becoming sane.” 

Sound familiar?

The Democratic Party says that if you have XX chromosomes you are a man, if you choose to believe you are a man. If you have XY chromosomes you are a woman, if you choose to believe you are a woman.   

If you believe you are a woman, even when you are genetically a man, you can enter women’s athletic competitions and win fair-and-square. …

In the most recent edition of the Leftist Newspeak dictionary, if one claims that a genetic male who believes himself to be a woman is actually a man, then one is referred to as “unscientific”…

The Equality Act is nothing more than 1984’s infamous Party rewriting books to obliterate the past, just as they did in psychiatry.  Leftists pressured the medical community into rewriting the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Believing one to be the opposite gender that one actually is no longer is classified as a mental disorder.

It eerily aligns with Orwell’s description of how the Party destroys all that is not in alignment with what it chooses:  “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” …

There is some upside to all this activity, though.  It provides yet another opportunity to demonstrate that it is the Left that are the Fascists.  It is the Left that uses the hammer of government to force others to believe as they do.  It is the Left that demands the rights of others be subordinated to a class of State-designated victims.  It is the Left that will call you a “transphobe”, and render judgment upon you for insisting that two plus two does equal four.

In a free society, if a boy chooses to believe he is a girl, that’s his business – just as anyone else is free to insist that a boy is a boy based upon his DNA.

Instead, it is now a Thoughtcrime in the UK to tweet that a man is actually a man. That can get a person arrested, and investigated by tweeting a “transphobic limerick.”

And if it weren’t for the fact that the Senate is held by a party that has at least some hold on objective reality, we’d all end up in Room 101 [where in 1984 the victim of the state is confronted with whatever he fears most].

The writer sees the upside of this attempt to change reality by making laws against it as “another opportunity to demonstrate that it is the Left that are the Fascists”. And it is that. But his article also reports another “upside”: it outrages feminists.

This new edition of Newspeak also includes the acronym “TERF”.  What is a TERF?  It is a “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist.” It refers to radical feminists who are heretics …  because they insist that objective reality is objective reality.  That is, they know that a man is a man and a woman is a woman.

As Kara Dansky of the Women’s Liberation Front said at a recent Heritage Foundation panel, “The issue is really about the intellectual bankruptcy of gender identity ideology and the importance of language. No one really knows what these words mean.”

Go back and read that last paragraph again, because Hell must have frozen over for the Women’s Liberation Front to join forces with The Heritage Foundation. They did so because they rightly see the transgender movement as regressive to women.

During the panel, Julia Beck, a former member of the Law and Policy Committee of Baltimore City’s LGBTQ Commission, said, “We are losing an entire generation of sisters to this madness. That’s why it’s personal. It’s infuriating. It’s devastating.”

To nobody’s surprise, Leftists are demonizing these courageous women for speaking out in favor of objective reality.

Courageous? Slow would be a better word for them. Feminists need to be hit on the head by the head-hitting machine they have helped to build before they think there is something wrong with building it. They’ll need to be forced to wear burkhas before they’ll complain that it is wrong to force women to wear burkhas.

If The Equality Act speeds up the disintegration of the Left, it’s not such a bad thing after all.

One of our highly valued contributing readers, Jeanne, writes in a comment:

We may not like the form of “stabilization” that comes from Islam, but it worked to set up the type of community and family life that Mohammed desired. We may not like the “stabilizing” influence of Christianity from a thousand years ago, but it did the same. We may not like the Christianity of today that came from the Reformation, but it was a stabilizing factor of the beginning of our nation and forms the backbone of many communities by supporting the family, the individual and charities, which benefit them each. Judeo-Christian beliefs and values aided by the Enlightenment (or vice-versa) set the tone for the moral populace that was so important to our Constitutional Republic when it was making its mark and requiring such principled and responsible individuals to form a United States loosely held together by the laws of men and not divine-rule royalty or theocratic forces of Rome.

If we did not have such an organized Communist movement that worked on our nation for a century, helping to secularize the populace, we might have found that those who left the Judeo-Christian religion behind were still moral/ethical and responsible individuals disciplined enough to make a Constitutionalist proud, but that is not how it worked out. Instead we have no consequences for unethical behavior, because there is a deplorable lack of guidance for proper parental behavior, no reason to be ashamed of bearing out-of-wedlock children, no stigma to a man abandoning all his fatherly duties, no desire to be responsible, no desire to have allegiance to one’s community or country or to obey the nation’s laws and respect its heritage. And that has not so much come about as people left their church, but because of Progressive influence that has been very well done. Most people need religion to maintain a discipline of responsibility and morality.

We think it is a comment that deserves attention.

This is our review of it:

On Islam and the family: Muslim men can marry as many wives as they can afford to keep. The wives are totally subjected to the will of the husband. He is commanded by the Koran to beat her if he judges her to be disobedient or insubordinate in any way. There is no such thing as rape within marriage – a husband can rape his wife. A husband can divorce a wife by saying three times that he divorces her. For her, divorce is difficult to the point of being almost impossible. She cannot have custody of children past their infancy. A daughter can inherit only half as much as a son. If a woman is raped and four male witnesses did not witness actual penetration, she is not only considered uninjured, she is accused of illicit sexual intercourse which is a capital offense. Execution is by stoning. There is no lower limit to the age at which girls can be married. Little girls can be married to elderly men. Girls as young as five can be and often are raped by their lawful husbands literally to death. That was indeed the type of family life that Muhammad was said to desire. But if that is “stabilization”, then stability is no virtue.

On “Judeo-Christian”: This is a favorite hyphenation in the West of late. But it makes no more sense than would “Christio-Muslim”. (Islam derived some ideas from Christianity but it is a very different creed.) Christianity was a revolution against Judaism. The essential moral point of Jewish religious teaching was the idea of justice. (What those ancient men thought was just doesn’t match in every particular with what we may think is just, and the Jewish God is more a god of revenge than of justice, but the thrust of the doctrine was that guilt must be punished and innocence protected.) Christianity substituted love for justice. The guilty must be forgiven. The sin can be condemned but not the sinner. St. Paul, who is the author of the Christian religion (see the essay listed in our margin under Pages, The Birth and Early History of Christianity) wanted to abandon the Jewish Law altogether, insisting that it had been superseded by the “sacrifice” of “the Christ”. But the Church fathers could not organize an antinomian church so retrieved the entire Jewish bible as a prologue to their own “Testament” for the sake of preserving the moral law – which is to say, the “ten commandments”. They also needed the Jewish Bible for the prophesies of the Messiah, since they held Jesus to be the fulfillment of them. They changed the meaning of “Messiah” from ”King” to “God”, and declared that God was not One – the central tenet of Jewish theology – but Three. So little more than  a few laws, common to all the law codes of the Middle East and probably everywhere, remained of Judaism in Christianity. Christianity with its extreme intolerance even of slight doctrinal differences came down as a long night on Western Europe for a thousand years. Terrible religious wars between Christian factions, and between Christians and Gnostics such as the Cathars, took untold numbers of lives, century after century. What happened to families and the stability of communities while the Papal Inquisition was at work? Or in the civil wars fought over doctrinal differences? Or to the families and communities of the Jews persecuted throughout Christendom? It’s a blood-soaked history. When the Reformation came, the Protestant churches were as intolerant as the Roman Catholic church. The darkness was lifted at last only by the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment was a revolution against all the orthodoxies of all the churches, and broke their power. Western greatness dates from the Enlightenment. Doubt, valued by pre-Christian Greece and Rome, came back from long suppression to challenge the churches’ insistence on unquestioning conformity. The two greatest products of the Enlightenment were Science and the Constitution of the United States of America.

In a nation that made no laws respecting religion, the history of Western religion changed. Old historical religious conflicts were put to rest. In America, millions live peacefully with neighbors of different faiths and none. (But new ideologies have arisen, secular religions, stirring up antagonisms as intense and bitter as did the old.)

It may well be the case now that American church-going families are in general happier and more successful than others. It may well be that the abandonment of traditional religion contributed of late to delinquency, fatherlessness, and disregard of familial, patriotic, and civic responsibility.

But does that mean most people need religion to live responsibly and morally?

Did most people behave more morally and responsibly when they feared divine retribution? Was there in fact less theft, rape, and murder when, through the long Christian centuries,  everybody went to church? And if so, was it a good bargain to have more security for one’s possessions and one’s person at the price of living one’s entire life in terror of eternal hellfire?

In the past, in the long perspective, has religion proved itself to be a force for good?

Is it good now for a civilized educated nation to teach children to believe that a person rules over the universe, continually watching their every thought and deed so as to reward or punish them?

Is it good if the citizens of a free republic believe that a Lord, a King, an invisible Sovereign rules over them?

Is it good to kneel to, worship, suffer for, pray to, an omnipotent, omniscient, unknowable, immortal Tyrant?

Contrary to the story told by Rep. Rashida Tlaib that the Arabs of Palestine tried “to create a safe haven” for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, they supported and actively aided Hitler’s massacre of the European Jews with passionate enthusiasm, and did all they could violently to keep the region from becoming the Jewish homeland promised by the Balfour Declaration.

Karin McQuillan writes at American Greatness:

Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and the Democratic Party leadership defending her indefensible comments on the Holocaust are now promoting the Big Lie about Arabs as innocent victims of World War II. Nazism was widely popular among Palestinians, who played a key role in the Holocaust. Adolf Eichmann himself went to Cairo to train the Muslim Brotherhood in anti-Semitic propaganda, military sabotage, and terrorism—launching the modern jihadi movement in the process. Without Arab Nazism, 6 million Jews would not have been murdered.

Not sure about that. But it’s a plausible conjecture. And certainly the Arab role in the Nazi ‘s attempted genocide can hardly be overestimated.

This is a history Americans should know, since it is a war we are still fighting today.

Tlaib and her colleague, Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), are not on America’s side in this battle. Nor, it seems, is the Democratic Party.

Are they on America’s side at all?

Before Hitler adopted the Muslim Brotherhood, its Islamist message focused on the sexual decadence of the West, the evil of treating women as equals, and calls to reject modernity. This got them exactly nowhere, languishing with a membership of 800 cranks. With Nazi funding and training, the Brotherhood adopted the Third Reich’s obsession with anti-Semitism.

But – as the author goes on to acknowledge – Arab Muslims already hated the Jews as the Koran commanded them to:

Hitler’s message was fused with the Koran’s anti-Semitic teachings into a toxic mix. The Muslim Brothers grew a thousand-fold during the war, emerging triumphant with 1 million members. Thus the jihadi movement was born. The history of the Middle East was changed forever.

The Democrats’ embrace of multicultural anti-Semites such as Tlaib, Omar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) poses a danger to our country—both morally and politically. No nation has ever embraced anti-Semitism and remained a decent country for its own citizens. This is a path we do not want to go down, because down it leads.

We have a warning about our forgetfulness, like words in a bottle, launched right after the war by members of the Greatest Generation.

Years ago, I was poking around in the basement of Brandeis University’s library and came across a slender volume that changed my understanding of the Palestinian role in the Holocaust forever. In 1947, with memories of Nazism fresh in their minds, New York City Mayor Robert Wagner, along with Fiorello LaGuardia, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and two dozen other prominent citizens, published a report titled “The Arab War Effort.”

Their words from 72 years ago would be well directed to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and all the other Democrats appeasing the anti-Semites in their ranks today.

“The tendency to forget the lessons of the past has always been one of man’s most dangerous characteristics,” the report begins. The authors continue:

One of those hard-earned lessons is simply this: that appeasement does not work. The enemies of human freedom could neither be bribed nor cajoled.  . . . Yet now in 1947 we seem to be returning to the policy of appeasement in dealing with precisely those Arab leaders who did their utmost to aid the Axis powers. . . . It is not claimed that the facts stated in this document constitute a revelation. They do not appear to be in dispute in any responsible quarter. There seems, however, to be a tendency to ignore them as no longer politically relevant. This [is] unfortunate, for the data herewith presented point to conclusions that are still valid with regard to the political reasoning prevalent among the Arab peoples.

The authors’ stated goal was to record for posterity—that is, for us living today—that the Arab populace, not simply a few leaders, were enthusiastic supporters of the Nazis. They were wise enough to foresee we would reap the whirlwind from politicians’ foolish appeasement and erasing of the Arab Nazi past. Pelosi and company, under pressure from the black and socialist caucuses, are repeating the mistakes of past appeasement.

The message to us from 1947:

[S]ympathy with the Axis powers were widespread among the common people of the Arab countries… these feelings permeated the majority of the population, while the leaders often cooperated directly with the Axis. Fascist and Nazi ideologies were not so much imitated as paralleled in the Arab world; they fitted into modes of thought already in being and were taken up by existing political clubs and associations.

Palestinian involvement in the Final Solution was crucial to Hitler’s success. The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust published by Yad Vashem (Israel’s famous Holocaust Museum) devotes more pages to the head of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine, Haj Amin al-Husseini elevated by British appeasement to become the Mufti of Jerusalem, than to any Nazi leader other than Hitler himself. This indicates how important the Palestinian role was in the genocide of Europe’s Jews.

Winston Churchill spoke against the appeasement of Palestinian Nazism, and Britain restricting Jewish immigration, while allowing Arabs to pour in to the Jewish Homeland from their impoverished, backward countries all around, trying to outnumber the Jews there. “So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population. …We are now asked to submit, and this is what rankles most with me, to an agitation which is fed with foreign money and ceaselessly inflamed by Nazi and by Fascist propaganda.”

The most famous Palestinian Nazi, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini traveled to Germany to meet Hitler in 1941. They shook hands on a plan to exterminate the Jews of the Middle East. The Reich preserved the memo, the minutes, and a photo of their handshake.

The Mufti returned to Berlin the next year for the duration of the war. Goebbels recruited him as the Nazi voice to the Middle East, with a radio program broadcast daily into every café. This Nazi station was listened to by practically the entire male population during the long war years. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini recalled it fondly. Listeners enjoyed the mix of music, jihad, and anti-Semitism.

According to testimony from the Nuremberg trials by Dieter Wisliceny, Adolf Eichmann’s deputy: “The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and advisor of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of the plan. He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures.”

A popular Arab song during the war went, “Allah in heaven, Hitler on earth.” Palestinians founded a division of the Nazi Scouts.

Unlike Germans, following the war Palestinian Arabs did not end their Nazi propaganda and terrorism. Members of the PLO often use noms de guerre such as Hitler and Rommel. Arafat’s personal bodyguard named his two sons Hitler and Eichmann.

Arafat took the name Yasser in memory of a leader of the Mufti’s terror campaign of the 1930s funded by Hitler. They murdered thousands of moderate Palestinians who were willing to live peacefully with Jews. They threw live victims into pits of scorpions and snakes. They drove 40,000 Arabs into exile. The corpses of their victims would be left in the street for days, a shoe stuck in their mouth, as a lesson for any Arab who believed in tolerating a Jewish homeland.

The Mufti boasted of visiting the gas chambers of Auschwitz. He pressured the Nazis to let no Jew escape, focusing especially on Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia—Axis countries that were willing to allow Jews to flee.

Palestinian participation in the Nazi cause posed a genuine threat to the British. They created espionage, parachute and sabotage networks covering Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Palestine that reported to German Intelligence. They formed Muslim legions in the Balkans, Crimea, Azerbaijan, and Turkistan for the Wehrmacht and a plan to recruit half a million soldiers.

The most threatening accomplishment of the Palestinians on behalf of the Axis came in 1941, the darkest days of World War II when Britain was battling alone and seemed to be losing. Seizing Iraq was a major German goal. It would have deprived Britain of her chief source of oil, cut the sea lanes to India, a crucial source of raw materials, and cut the British empire in two. It would also have allowed the Axis to invade Russia along a second front from Iraq.

In the words of the American Christian Palestine Committee:

In the spring of 1941 Britain’s forces were at their lowest ebb. Neither Russia nor the U.S. had yet entered the war. … It was indeed a critical moment that the Iraqi rebels, prodded and aided by the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem [Haj Amin al-Husseini], chose for their uprising. For two months the fight hung in the balance. British troops were rushed to Basra from India… At the call of Haj Amin …subversive elements throughout the Middle East were touched off into activity. Looking back, one sees that it was by sheer miracle … most of all by the heroic Greek and British resistance in Greece and Crete…preventing the Germans from transporting reinforcements of men and material to Iraq—that the Iraqi revolt was quelled.

The Palestinian’s efforts to cut England off from the oil fields and the sea lane to India were foiled, but the British were now frightened of the Palestinian’s alliance with the Third Reich. The news of the Final Solution and the gas chambers reached Britain in 1942 and led to a public outcry to help Jews escape, but the British government remained adamant that the doors of the Jewish National Home, mandated by international law, must remain shut to Jews.

The enormity of Arab Nazism is sanitized, hidden and justified as nationalism—much as German Nazi Jew-hatred was during the 1930s. Far from occupying a moral high ground, Palestinian Arabs worked alongside and for Hitler with all the means available to them, and they succeeded in helping him destroy European Jewry. 

Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, visiting his friend Adolf Hitler

In 2011 Elizabeth Warren said:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.

In 2012 President Obama said:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me – because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t – look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something – there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

Whether or not they meant to be attacking private enterprise capitalism, that is what they were generally understood to be doing.

The capitalist, free-market argument is that if you own something you can use it as you like for all lawful purposes. If bakers of wedding cakes do not want to sell a cake, or florists do not want to supply bouquets, to same-sex couples, they are within their rights not to do so.

It is generally agreed that the private owners of places of public entertainment such as restaurants, movie theaters, hotels cannot be permitted to shut out some customers on grounds of personal antagonism.

Controversy has arisen as to whether the private owners of the “social media”, notably Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google, have a right to refuse the use of their forums to persons whose opinions they dislike, or whether they have the same obligations as owners of restaurants, movie theaters and hotels not to discriminate against some on grounds of personal disagreement.

Daniel Greenfield writes this magisterial opinion on the arguments:

“But, it’s a private company.”

It’s a familiar argument. Bring up the problem of Google, Facebook and Twitter suppressing conservative speech and many conservatives will retort that it’s a free market. The big dot com monopolies created their own companies, didn’t they? And we wouldn’t want government regulation of business.

In a FOX Business editorial, Iain Murray writes that breaking up dot coms like Google would be “a repudiation of conservative principles”. He argues that “Twitter is a private company” and that “there is no positive right to free speech on Twitter or any other private venue.”

“The same goes for the president’s attacks on Google and the complaints of conservative censorship,” Diane Katz writes at the Heritage Institute. “These private enterprises are not obligated to abide any sort of partisan fairness doctrine.”

The talking point that Google, Facebook and Twitter are private companies that can discriminate as they please on their private platforms, and that the First Amendment doesn’t apply, is in the air everywhere.

But it overlooks two very simple facts.

The driving force behind the censorship of conservatives isn’t a handful of tech tycoons. It’s elected officials. Senator Kamala Harris offered an example of that in a recent speech where she declared that she would “hold social media platforms accountable” if they contained “hate” or “misinformation”.

“Misinformation” is a well-known euphemism among Democrats and the media for conservative political content. It was originally known as “fake news” before President Trump hijacked the term to refer to the media. The recent Poynter list of “unreliable” sites was stacked with conservative sites. Lists like these aren’t hypothetical. Poynter runs the International Fact Checking Network which had been empowered by Facebook and other sites to deplatform conservative content through its “fact checks”.

All of this got underway in response to claims by Hillary Clinton and her allies that “fake news” had cost her the election and represented a grave attack on our democracy. The call was quickly taken up by Democrats in the House and the Senate. It’s been commented on supportively by powerful Clinton allies in the tech industry, like Eric Schmidt, the former chairman of Google.

Dot coms like Facebook are cracking down on conservatives as an explicit response to pressure from elected government officials. That’s not the voluntary behavior of private companies. When Facebook deletes conservatives in response to threats of regulatory action from Senate Democrats, its censors are acting as government agents while engaging in viewpoint discrimination.

Free market conservatives can argue that Facebook should have the right to discriminate against conservatives. But do they really want to argue that Senate Democrats should have the right to compel private companies to censor conservatives?

What’s the difference between that and a totalitarian state?

It might, arguably, be legal for your landlord to kick you out of your house because he doesn’t like the fact that you’re a Republican. But is it legal for him to do so on orders from Senator Kamala Harris?

Defending abusive behavior like that is a desecration of the free market.

The second fact is that the internet is not the work of a handful of aspiring entrepreneurs who built it out of thin air using nothing but their talent, brains and nimble fingers.

At this point we are going to have to concede, however much it stings our political nerve to do so, that Obama got something right when he said that Government research created the internet.

The internet was the work of DARPA. That stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA is part of the Department of Defense. DARPA had funded the creation of the core technologies that made the internet possible. The origins of the internet go back to DARPA’s Arpanet.

Nor did the story end once the internet had entered every home.

Where did Google come from? “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” the original paper by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the co-founders of Google, reveals support from the National Science Foundation, DARPA, and even NASA.

Harvard’s computer science department, where Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg learned to play with the toys that turned him into a billionaire, has also wallowed in DARPA cash. Not to mention funds from a variety of other DOD and Federal science agencies.

Taxpayers sank a fortune into developing a public marketplace where ideas are exchanged, and political advocacy and economic activity takes place. That marketplace doesn’t belong to Google, Amazon or Facebook. And when those monopolies take a stranglehold on the marketplace, squeezing out conservatives from being able to participate, they’re undermining our rights and freedoms.

“A right of free correspondence between citizen and citizen on their joint interests, whether public or private and under whatsoever laws these interests arise (to wit: of the State, of Congress, of France, Spain, or Turkey), is a natural right,” Thomas Jefferson argued.

There should be a high barrier for any company seeking to interfere with the marketplace of ideas in which the right of free correspondence is practiced.

Critics of regulating dot com monopolies have made valid points.

Regulating Google or Facebook as a public utility is dangerous. And their argument that giving government the power to control content on these platforms would backfire is sensible.

Any solution to the problem should not be based on expanding government control.

But there are two answers.

First, companies that engage in viewpoint discrimination in response to government pressure are acting as government agents. When a pattern of viewpoint discrimination manifests itself on the platform controlled by a monopoly, a civil rights investigation should examine what role government officials played in instigating the suppression of a particular point of view.

Liberals have abandoned the Public Forum Doctrine, once a popular ACLU theme, while embracing censorship. But if the Doctrine could apply to a shopping mall, it certainly applies to the internet. …

When dot com monopolies get so big that being banned from their platforms effectively neutralizes political activity, press activity and political speech, then they’re public forums.

Second, rights are threatened by any sufficiently large organization or entity, not just government. Government has traditionally been the most powerful such organization, but the natural rights that our country was founded on are equally immune to every organization. Governments, as the Declaration of Independence asserts, exist as part of a social contract to secure these rights for its citizens.

Government secures these rights, first and foremost, against itself. (Our system effectively exists to answer the question of who watches the watchers.) But it also secures them against foreign powers, a crisis that the Declaration of Independence was written to meet, and against domestic organizations, criminal or political, whether it’s the Communist Party or ISIS, that seek to rob Americans of their rights.

A country in which freedom of speech effectively did not exist, even though it remained a technical right, would not be America. A government that allowed such a thing would have no right to exist.

Only a government whose citizens enjoy the rights of free men legally justifies its existence.

If a private company took control of all the roads and closed them to conservatives every Election Day, elections would become a mockery and the resulting government would be an illegitimate tyranny.

That’s the crisis that conservatives face with the internet.

Protecting freedom of speech does not abandon conservative principles, it secures them. There are no conservative principles without freedom of speech. A free market nation without freedom of speech isn’t a conservative country. It’s an oligarchy. That’s the state of affairs on the internet.

Conservatives should beware of blindly enlisting in leftist efforts to take regulatory control of companies like Facebook. The result would be a deeper and more pervasive form of censorship than exists today. But neither should they imagine that the “free market side of history” will automatically fix the problem. …

We have an existing useful toolset to draw on, from anti-trust laws to civil rights investigations to the Public Forum Doctrine. This will be a challenging process, but we must remember through it all, that we have a right to freedom of speech on the internet.

Our tax dollars, invested over generations, built this system. It does not belong to the Left. Or, for that matter, the Right. It belongs to all of us.

Now how to make sure Facebook etc. do not discriminate against us because of their political bias?

President Trump is willing to help us. (Though exactly what he can do we don’t know.)

SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS should advance FREEDOM OF SPEECH. Yet too many Americans have seen their accounts suspended, banned, or fraudulently reported for unclear “violations” of user policies. 

No matter your views, if you suspect political bias caused such an action to be taken against you, share your story with President Trump.

https://whitehouse.typeform.com/to/Jti9QH?fbclid=IwAR1oumZ36_InMnU29hRFZukzdSUrbBAxAaQ338B2_Lf-DYxMTJr2UBJMJWs

It’s worth trying.

.

(Hat-tip to liz for the White House link)

 

 

The Democratic Party is promoting abortion as the defining right of women. The enfranchised woman must have a right not to be forced into a woman’s “gender role” – which is to say, not to be a mother. 

The Left considers it a health right to have free contraception provided under insurance policies. Though male and female must be equal in sexual behavior, women can change their minds after intercourse and ruin the reputation of men through meetooism, an auxiliary right to special women’s justice which does away with due process. 

Democrats will probably not go as far as the mandatory, forced abortions of China. The one child policy there resulted in mass female infanticide. It is more important to abort boys in the “patriarchal” West. There is no need to feel compassion for the babies. Compassion should be kept for black murderers of white cops. 

Tucker Carlson said on his Fox News show (Monday May 14, 2019): “We have a political party that believes having children is a punishment.” It’s true. When Barack Obama was president, he said he didn’t want his daughters to be “punished with a baby”. Many “progressive” intellectuals, including spokesmen for the medical profession, argue for abortion at any stage of a pregnancy and even advocate infanticide. A movie actress asks women to adopt absolute chastity as a form of protest because some states are not allowing abortion at any stage of pregnancy on demand.

A  female Democrat in the House of Representatives, said: “There is a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult, and it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question. Is it OK to still have children?” That same Democrat, referring to the same “scientific census” (which does not exist) believes that the world is coming to an end in 12 years from now. It would be so unfair to give birth to a child who will have less that a dozen years to live.

Such a laudably unselfish view, that. But not common on the Left. The view that abortion is the defining right of women is the politically correct orthodox Democratic position. Children are invaders who would enter the world through the womb, occupying a woman’s body without her permission. Even though she knows how the invader gets in there, and almost always opens the door herself, she is being exploited. The invader must be evicted.

Those children who are so impudent and far-right, so bigoted, xenophobic, undiverse, uninclusive and Trumpian as to get born despite all efforts to abort them – or if their mother in collusion with a Democratic doctor does not kill them when they actually arrive in the world – then they must be made unhappy.

If they are white, they must be made to feel bad about it. Democratic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi – an exemplary anti-human – has said that she is proud of her grandson for saying that he wished he was brown like his friend.

If they are male, it is worse.  If they are male and white they are the guiltiest of the guilty and must be accused, abased, cut up, punished.

Boys should be changed into girls. Or at least a parody of girls. And why should not all girls be changed into boys? Or at least a parody of boys. Start the process when they’re 4 years old. (A British judge just overruled a school’s objection to a 4 year old being treated as a transgender.) They hold that “gender” is only a “social construct”.

So feed them on hormones. Mangle their sexual organs. Make them sterile. Make them wretched.

And since the curse of children is upon the nation, make use of them. Have them vote – for the Democrats. The party that knows it can rely on the votes of felons, illegal aliens, and lunatics, believes just as reasonably that it will get the votes of children.

There are many other uses for children too. The Left recommends that they be taught how to make their parents worried about “climate change”. (And to report the parents to the Totalitarian Authorities if they are obstinate?)

On the Mexican border, migrant men rent children and pretend to be part of families that are not theirs in order to enter the US.

Hamas, the terrorist organization passionately supported by two Congresswomen, uses children as living shields against Israel’s retaliatory bombs and guns. The Palestinians train children to be suicide bombers.

Of course (we hope) the Left will not go as far as Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, who made children kill and eat their own parents and then be footsoldiers and sex slaves.

Children can even take the initiative in leading campaigns that advance the agenda of the Left. A Swedish teenager named Greta Thunberg, 16, is leading a children’s crusade against the mythical curse of “man-made global warming”. She has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

So we can be optimistic and surmise that the Democrats will probably not make it illegal to have children.

For the first time in history (or so it seems to us – if we’re wrong, please tell us the precedent we’re overlooking) a working-class man is leading an angry protest of vast numbers of ordinary people against their country’s rulers.

The working-class man is Tommy Robinson. The people are the English. Probably with Welshmen, Scots and Irishmen among them.

They are angry that the ruling class is handing over their country to a corrupt European oligarchy which is scuttling European civilization by inviting millions of Third World migrants to occupy the continent and the British Isles.

Bruce Bawer, that clear-sighted commentator on the decline of the West, has a view much like ours.

He writes at Front Page:

In the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham … so-called Islamic “grooming gangs” were responsible for the repeated rape of about 1400 non-Muslim girls, mostly from the working classes, from the late 1980s on. Although local politicians, child-protection officials, police, and journalists were aware of the problem, they kept silent about it for decades, partly out of cowardice, partly out of political expediency, partly out of a misguided fear of inciting “Islamophobia,” and partly out of a classist disregard for the victims and their families. As a result, the perpetrators did not begin to be identified, arrested, and prosecuted until earlier in this decade.

We must put in a small correction here. The cowardice is fear of the Muslims who are taking over Britain and Western Europe. Fear of Islam. Not of “Islamophobia”, which does not exist because fear of Islam is entirely rational, as the writer himself goes on to show.

There is nothing unique about Rotherham, of course: it just happens to be the place where the dam burst first. The list of British towns where similar gang activity has been uncovered  continues to grow longer, and the number of perpetrators and victims is increasing apace.

Meanwhile, on July 7, 2005, Muslim suicide bombers killed 52 people and wounded about 700 in London. On May 22, 2013, two Muslims slaughtered a British soldier, Lee Rigby, in Woolwich. On March 22, 2017, on Westminster Bridge, a Muslim behind the wheel of a car mowed down about four dozen pedestrians, four of whom were killed. On May 22, 2017, a Muslim suicide bomber took 22 lives at Manchester Arena. On June 3 of the same year, three Muslims with a van killed eight people on and near London bridge.

In addition, every so often during the past few years, some British newspaper has dared to publish a news story like the one that appeared in the Daily Mail on Saturday: according to a secret government report, more than 48 Islamic madrasas in Britain, all of them run by the Darul Uloom (“House of Knowledge”) network, are staffed by followers of the Deobandi movement, which produced the Taliban.  The students, who are preparing to be imams, are thus “being taught that music and dancing comes  from the devil and that women do not have the right to refuse sex to their husbands”.

Even as all these rapes and terrorist acts have been taking place and all these future imams being schooled in Koranic principles, the Islamic population of Britain has been on the rise, and with it the aggressiveness of the religion’s adherents and the readiness of powerful people in government, the academy, news organizations, cultural institutions, social-media companies – and, not least, Britain’s EU overlords in Brussels – to appease them and harass their religion’s critics. More and more ordinary British citizens feel that their country and their freedoms are slipping away. This is a big part of the reason why they voted three years ago to leave the EU – a decision that both parties in the House of Commons have shamefully conspired to thwart.

Now, in a development that seemed inconceivable the morning after the Brexit vote, the British are preparing to go to the polls on May 23 to elect new members of that Soviet-style rubber-stamp body known as the European Parliament. Two non-establishment parties are vying for the support of “Leave” voters who are outraged at Westminster’s betrayal of Brexit: one of them is UKIP, which led the Brexit campaign in the first place, and the other is Brexit, a new party formed by former UKIP head Nigel Farage. Also running for MEP – as an independent candidate in the North West – is Tommy Robinson, the working-class lad from Luton whose years-long effort to warn his fellow Brits about the dangers of Islam and, in particular, to sound the alarm about the grooming gangs, has won him the admiration of millions and the contempt of the political and media establishment. 

The man who arguably represents that establishment more surely than anyone is Jacob Rees-Mogg, the natty Conservative MP from Somerset who (of course) went to Eton and Oxford, whose father was the editor of the Times of London, and whose accent is so ridiculously posh that it makes the late Sir John Gielgud sound like Andrew Dice Clay. Rees-Mogg voted for Britain to leave the EU, but is such a party loyalist that, until just the other day, he remained rock-solid in his support for Tory Prime Minister Theresa May, a “Remain” supporter who, though she insisted otherwise, was obviously out to sabotage Brexit. In the event, she ended up damaging her own party, which, if the polls and call-in shows can be believed, is set to lose the votes of millions of people who, though loyal Conservatives all their lives, now swear that they feel so betrayed that they will never support the party again.

It must be said that Rees-Mogg, the establishment man par excellence, is immensely articulate and comes off as intelligent and witty. Like most of his fellow MPs, however, he seems not to grasp the scale of what is going on in his country. “Anti-Islamic comments have no place in society,” he tweeted on April 18. Two days later, speaking to BBC Radio 4, today, he expanded on this statement, saying: “Anti-Islam comments are deeply disgraceful….I oppose them, I disapprove of them, I reject them.” He added: “I think that Islam is an important and interesting religion and that people in this country of the Muslim faith are as patriotic as Catholics are.”

It is worth pointing out that while Rees-Mogg has taken the trouble to weigh in against “anti-Islamic comments”,  he has said nothing – nothing! – about the outright threats (not just “comments”) made by violent Muslims and their infidel allies against Tommy Robinson, who announced on Sunday that police had refused to arrest three people who had assaulted him, that South Wales police had “liked a tweet celebrating an assault on me,” and that police were now telling him that “they have credible intelligence that someone is going to attempt to murder me on my campaign route and live stream it.” On the contrary, even as he has rushed to the defense of Islam, Rees-Mogg has consistently put down Tommy Robinson, telling the Express on April 19, for example, that Robinson “reflects a type of politics that is unattractive and not usual in Britain.” In his usual laconic manner, he warned the British electorate against taking the “extremist route”. 

Yes, you read that right: in Britain in 2019, according to Jacob Rees-Mogg, Islam – which has inspired grooming gangs and suicide bombers and intimidated authorities into curbing centuries-old British freedoms – is “important and interesting” and Tommy Robinson, whose life has been threatened repeatedly by Muslims, embodies an “extremist” type of politics that is – horror of horrors – “unattractive and not usual”. 

Rees-Mogg seems blithely unaware of it, but his nation is standing at a historical crisis point that calls for Churchillian resolve – and Churchillian rhetoric. It calls, that is, for rhetoric that is eloquent and stirring and tough – not for deliberately low-key, upper-class utterances of the sort that bring to mind some brandy-sipping Edwardian toff in some Merchant Ivory film. Yes, Islam is certainly “important and interesting.” It is also, like Nazism and Communism, a totalitarian ideology – and an existential threat to a free Britain. (Imagine Churchill, in the 1930s, giving speeches in Parliament in which he blandly referred to Nazism as “important and interesting”!)

And, yes, Tommy’s approach to politics is “not usual”. So are the times in which the people of the UK are now living. The last thing that Britain needs is politics as usual. Asked by an interviewer the other day about the electoral threat that UKIP and Brexit represent to his party, Rees-Mogg replied, “I would  encourage all people at all time to vote Conservative in all elections.” He might as well have said simply, “I always put party ahead of country.”

If Tommy symbolizes a kind of politics of which Rees-Mogg disapproves, Rees-Mogg himself symbolizes exactly what Britain no longer needs: government by Oxbridge snobs who give belligerent Muslims the kid-glove treatment while showing nothing but contempt for their own working-class countrymen. Rees-Mogg is often waggishly referred to as “the member for the eighteenth century”, and he seems to take it as a compliment, a way of saying that he represents time-honored values and traditions. In fact he represents the very worst of English traditions – namely, the matter-of-fact assumption that some people are, by accident of birth, superior to others. It is because of this tradition, which many working-class Brits still reflexively countenance, that people in places like Luton and the East End – people who have had to live with the results of mass Muslim immigration, and who thus understand the challenges facing their country far better than their fellow citizens in Kensington and Knightsbridge – have virtually no influence over the decisions made in their name by the likes of Rees-Mogg.

Tommy Robinson is changing that – or, at least, trying to. Like President Trump in America, he is taking on the establishments of both of his country’s major parties in the name of the people – and, like Trump, he is being vilified for it by a legacy media that is aligned with the political elite and that has convinced millions of low-information citizens that he is a bigot, a fascist, a Nazi. While Trump’s enemies, moreover, sought to take him down by pinning on him baseless charges of collusion with the Russians – even though it’s his #1 enemy, Hillary Clinton, who has the dodgy foreign ties – Tommy’s enemies conspired to send him to prison, supposedly for imperiling a trial of Islamic rapists, when, in fact, he has done more than anyone else in the country to bring Islamic rapists to justice.

Briefly put: Rees-Mogg postures as a champion of British values, but, in his tepid, temperate way, not only refuses to take the bold action required to defend those values but frames Tommy Robinson, who has risked his life to defend them, as their enemy. When he looks in the mirror, Rees-Mogg may think he sees an heir to Churchill, that great Tory PM of the last century; when he looks at Tommy Robinson, he plainly sees an upstart, a guttersnipe, a lower-class council-flats type who has no proper place in the councils of state or, for that matter, in any of the exalted locales where Rees-Mogg lives his life.

In fact, though he may not look or sound the part, Tommy Robinson is the closest thing that today’s Britain has to Winston Churchill. And Rees-Mogg, who looks down his nose at Tommy? He’s Neville Chamberlain. At best.

Why would baffled scientists reach for a supernatural explanation of puzzling phenomena?

David Gelernter, professor of computer science at Yale, reviews books that argue against Charles Darwin at the Claremont Review of Books in an article titled Giving Up Darwin.

Stephen Meyer’s thoughtful and meticulous Darwin’s Doubt (2013) convinced me that Darwin has failed. … Two other books are also essential: The Deniable Darwin and Other Essays (2009), by David Berlinski, and Debating Darwin’s Doubt (2015), an anthology edited by David Klinghoffer, which collects some of the arguments Meyer’s book stirred up. These three form a fateful battle group that most people would rather ignore. Bringing to bear the work of many dozen scientists over many decades, Meyer, who after a stint as a geophysicist in Dallas earned a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge and now directs the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, disassembles the theory of evolution piece by piece. Darwin’s Doubt is one of the most important books in a generation. Few open-minded people will finish it with their faith in Darwin intact.

Gelernter explains the anti-Darwin arguments:

In the famous “Cambrian explosion” of around half a billion years ago, a striking variety of new organisms—including the first-ever animals—pop up suddenly in the fossil record over a mere 70-odd million years. This great outburst followed many hundreds of millions of years of slow growth and scanty fossils, mainly of single-celled organisms, dating back to the origins of life roughly three and half billion years ago.

Darwin’s theory predicts that new life forms evolve gradually from old ones in a constantly branching, spreading tree of life. Those brave new Cambrian creatures must therefore have had Precambrian predecessors, similar but not quite as fancy and sophisticated. They could not have all blown out suddenly [if, he is saying, Darwin was right], like a bunch of geysers. Each must have had a closely related predecessor, which must have had its own predecessors: Darwinian evolution is gradual, step-by-step. All those predecessors must have come together, further back, into a series of branches leading down to the (long ago) trunk.

But those predecessors of the Cambrian creatures are missing. Darwin himself was disturbed by their absence from the fossil record. He believed they would turn up eventually. Some of his contemporaries … held that the fossil record was clear enough already, and showed that Darwin’s theory was wrong. Perhaps only a few sites had been searched for fossils, but they had been searched straight down. The Cambrian explosion had been unearthed, and beneath those Cambrian creatures their Precambrian predecessors should have been waiting—and weren’t. In fact, the fossil record as a whole lacked the upward-branching structure Darwin predicted.

The trunk was supposed to branch into many different species, each species giving rise to many genera, and towards the top of the tree you would find so much diversity that you could distinguish separate phyla—the large divisions (sponges, mosses, mollusks, chordates, and so on) that comprise the kingdoms of animals, plants, and several others … But … the fossil record shows the opposite: “representatives of separate phyla appearing first followed by lower-level diversification on those basic themes”. In general, “most species enter the evolutionary order fully formed and then depart unchanged”. The incremental development of new species is largely not there. Those missing pre-Cambrian organisms have still not turned up. (Although fossils are subject to interpretation, and some biologists place pre-Cambrian life-forms closer than others to the new-fangled Cambrian creatures.)

Some researchers have guessed that those missing Precambrian precursors were too small or too soft-bodied to have made good fossils. Meyer notes that fossil traces of ancient bacteria and single-celled algae have been discovered: smallness per se doesn’t mean that an organism can’t leave fossil traces—although the existence of fossils depends on the surroundings in which the organism lived, and the history of the relevant rock during the ages since it died. The story is similar for soft-bodied organisms. Hard-bodied forms are more likely to be fossilized than soft-bodied ones, but many fossils of soft-bodied organisms and body parts do exist. Precambrian fossil deposits have been discovered in which tiny, soft-bodied embryo sponges are preserved—but no predecessors to the celebrity organisms of the Cambrian explosion.

This sort of negative evidence can’t ever be conclusive. But the ever-expanding fossil archives don’t look good for Darwin, who made clear and concrete predictions that have (so far) been falsified—according to many reputable paleontologists, anyway. When does the clock run out on those predictions? Never. But any thoughtful person must ask himself whether scientists today are looking for evidence that bears on Darwin, or looking to explain away evidence that contradicts him. There are some of each. Scientists are only human, and their thinking (like everyone else’s) is colored by emotion.

Darwin’s main problem, however, is molecular biology. There was no such thing in his own time. We now see from inside what he could only see from outside, as if he had developed a theory of mobile phone evolution without knowing that there were computers and software inside or what the digital revolution was all about. Under the circumstances, he did brilliantly.

Biology in his time was for naturalists, not laboratory scientists. … But the character of the field has changed, and it’s not surprising that old theories don’t necessarily still work.

Darwin’s theory is simple to grasp; its simplicity is the heart of its brilliance and power. We all know that variation occurs naturally among individuals of the same type—white or black sheep, dove-gray versus off-white or pale beige pigeons … [M]any variations have no effect on a creature’s prospects, but some do. A sheep born with extra-warm wool will presumably do better at surviving a rough Scottish winter than his normal-wooled friends. Such a sheep would be more likely than normal sheep to live long enough to mate, and pass on its superior trait to the next generation. Over millions of years, small good-for-survival variations accumulate, and eventually (says Darwin) you have a brand new species. The same mechanism naturally favors genes that are right for the local environment—warm wool in Scotland, light and comfortable wool for the tropics, other varieties for mountains and deserts. Thus one species (your standard sheep) might eventually become four specialized ones. And thus new species should develop from old in the upward-branching tree pattern Darwin described.

The advent of molecular biology made it possible to transform Darwinism into Neo-Darwinism. The new version explains (it doesn’t merely cite) natural variation, as the consequence of random change or mutation to the genetic information within cells that deal with reproduction. Those cells can pass genetic change onward to the next generation, thus changing—potentially—the future of the species and not just one individual’s career.

The engine that powers Neo-Darwinian evolution is pure chance and lots of time. By filling in the details of cellular life, molecular biology makes it possible to estimate the power of that simple mechanism. But what does generating new forms of life entail? Many biologists agree that generating a new shape of protein is the essence of it. Only if Neo-Darwinian evolution is creative enough to do that is it capable of creating new life-forms and pushing evolution forward.

Proteins are the special ops forces (or maybe the Marines) of living cells, except that they are common instead of rare; they do all the heavy lifting, all the tricky and critical assignments, in a dazzling range of roles. Proteins called enzymes catalyze all sorts of reactions and drive cellular metabolism. Other proteins (such as collagen) give cells shape and structure, like tent poles but in far more shapes. Nerve function, muscle function, and photosynthesis are all driven by proteins. And in doing these jobs and many others, the actual, 3-D shape of the protein molecule is important.

So, is the simple neo-Darwinian mechanism up to this task? Are random mutation plus natural selection sufficient to create new protein shapes?

Gelernter’s answer, in agreement with the books he is reviewing, is No. He explains why in some detail. We have no quarrel with him over this point. We are not scientists and have no idea whether the answer is solidly proved or not. We accept that the answer is No, and that, consequently, Darwin has been caught out and disproved – in part.

But the reviewed books are about giving up Darwin; negating evolution.

It can hardly be surprising that the revolution in biological knowledge over the last half-century should call for a new understanding of the origin of species.

A new understanding. Darwin was wrong. Evolution is wrong. Species do not evolve. So what does explain the existence of species?

We held our breath at this point in the article. A new theory, as exciting and revolutionary as was Darwin’s when it was sprung upon the world, but better in that it explains the phenomena which Darwin failed to explain, was about to be set before us.

You may be as disappointed as we were with the answer. What explains the “sudden explosion” of Cambrian species; how did all those new living things appear over “a mere 70-odd million years”?

Why, God put them there.

That’s it. Let your heart sink. It’s God again. Not that the word “God” emerges from the scientist’s lips or pen. No, no! In fact Professor Gelernter is careful to inform us that “religion” is not mentioned by the scientists whose work he is discussing.

What they offer us, is the uncertain semi-rationalist’s euphemism for God: “INTELLIGENT DESIGN”.

Intelligent Design, as Meyer describes it, is a simple and direct response to a specific event, the Cambrian explosion. The theory suggests that an intelligent cause intervened to create this extraordinary outburst. By “intelligent” Meyer understands “conscious”; the theory suggests nothing more about the designer.

Can  a “conscious” mind be understood to be anything but a human-type mind? So a human-type mind designed – and made – living things on this earth at least once “over a period of 70-odd million years”.

Gelernter reveals that he himself does not find Meyer’s answer satisfactory:

But where is the evidence? To Meyer and other proponents, that is like asking—after you have come across a tree that is split vertically down the center and half burnt up—“but where is the evidence of a lightning strike?” The exceptional intricacy of living things, and their elaborate mechanisms for fitting precisely into their natural surroundings, seemed to cry out for an intelligent designer long before molecular biology and biochemistry. …  An intelligent designer might seem more necessary than ever now that we understand so much cellular biology, and the impossibly long odds facing any attempt to design proteins by chance, or assemble the regulatory mechanisms that control the life cycle of a cell. …

 “Our uniform experience of cause and effect shows that intelligent design is the only known cause of the origin of large amounts of functionally specified digital information,” [Mayer]  writes. …

Known? Who knows “intelligent design” to be that cause?

If Meyer were invoking a single intervention by an intelligent designer at the invention of life, or of consciousness, or rationality, or self-aware consciousness, the idea might seem more natural. But then we still haven’t explained the Cambrian explosion. An intelligent designer who interferes repeatedly, on the other hand, poses an even harder problem of explaining why he chose to act when he did. Such a cause would necessarily have some sense of the big picture of life on earth. What was his strategy? How did he manage to back himself into so many corners, wasting energy on so many doomed organisms? Granted, they might each have contributed genes to our common stockpile—but could hardly have done so in the most efficient way. What was his purpose? And why did he do such an awfully slipshod job? Why are we so disease prone, heartbreak prone, and so on? An intelligent designer makes perfect sense in the abstract. The real challenge is how to fit this designer into life as we know it. Intelligent design might well be the ultimate answer. But as a theory, it would seem to have a long way to go.

To design is to purpose. The believers in the Intelligent Designer must be asked: What was his purpose? Why did the Designer design and make the life-forms?

And how intelligent was he when he made so many mistakes; made so many life-forms so badly that they could not survive?

Although Stephen Meyer’s book is a landmark in the intellectual history of Darwinism, the theory will be with us for a long time, exerting enormous cultural force. Darwin is no Newton. Newton’s physics survived Einstein and will always survive, because it explains the cases that dominate all of space-time except for the extreme ends of the spectrum, at the very smallest and largest scales. It’s just these most important cases, the ones we see all around us, that Darwin cannot explain. Yet his theory does explain cases of real significance. …

We know that evolution happens. It is happening about us all the time. We ourselves evolve. If there are important questions about the evolution of species that remain unanswered, why not say, “Just as we now see from inside what Darwin could only see from outside, as if he had developed a theory of mobile phone evolution without knowing that there were computers and software inside or what the digital revolution was all about, so in the future we might learn what made the Cambrian explosion possible without looking to the supernatural to explain it.”

An Intelligent Designer is surely the least plausible, the most absurd “explanation” for how things are and how they came about. There is always the possibility that natural explanations will be found for natural phenomena however perplexing. There is no possibility that we will find anything outside of nature.

… to obstruct the will of the people.

That was a message sent by a lying British spy to the US State Department, the FBI, and Obama’s Department of Justice.

The State Department is notoriously the region of the US government swamp most thickly populated by its dirtiest denizens. They work devotedly and tirelessly in their dark reptilian ways to turn America into a Third World country. Lately they have been obediently assisted by members of their species that have slithered their way into the FBI.

No subversive activity however slimy, secretive and socialist found to be going on in either agency should be surprising. But it can still be shocking.

John Solomon, the excellent investigative journalist who has discovered and revealed so much about the Great Steele Dossier Hoax To Destroy Donald Trump, writes at The Hill:

If ever there were an admission that taints the FBI’s secret warrant to surveil Donald Trump’s campaign, it sat buried for more than 2 1/2 years in the files of a high-ranking State Department official.

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec’s written account of her Oct. 11, 2016, meeting with FBI informant Christopher Steele shows the Hillary Clinton campaign-funded British intelligence operative admitted that his research was political and facing an Election Day deadline.

And that confession occurred 10 days before the FBI used Steele’s now-discredited dossier to justify securing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and the campaign’s ties to Russia.

Steele’s client “is keen to see this information come to light prior to November 8”, the date of the 2016 election, Kavalec wrote in a typed summary of her meeting with Steele and Tatyana Duran, a colleague from Steele’s Orbis Security firm. The memos were unearthed a few days ago through open-records litigation by the conservative group Citizens United.

Kavalec’s notes do not appear to have been provided to the House Intelligence Committee during its Russia probe, according to former Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.). “They tried to hide a lot of documents from us during our investigation, and it usually turns out there’s a reason for it,” Nunes told me. Senate and House Judiciary investigators told me they did not know about them, even though they investigated Steele’s behavior in 2017-18.

One member of Congress transmitted the memos this week to the Department of Justice’s inspector general, fearing its investigation of FISA abuses may not have had access to them.

Nonetheless, the FBI is doing its best to keep much of Kavalec’s information secret by retroactively claiming it is classified, even though it was originally marked unclassified in 2016. 

The apparent effort to hide Kavalec’s notes from her contact with Steele has persisted for some time.

State officials acknowledged a year ago they received a copy of the Steele dossier in July 2016, and got a more detailed briefing in October 2016 and referred the information to the FBI.

But what was discussed was not revealed. Sources told me more than a year ago that Kavalec had the most important (and memorialized) interaction with Steele before the FISA warrant was issued, but FBI and State officials refused to discuss it, or even confirm it.

The encounter, and Kavalec’s memos, were forced into public view through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation by Citizens United. Yet, all but a few lines have been redacted after the fact. …

The mere three sentences that the FBI allowed State to release unredacted, show that Kavalec sent an email two days after her encounter with Steele, alerting others.

“You may already have this information but wanted to pass it on just in case,” Kavalec wrote in the lone sentence the FBI and State released from that email. The names of the recipients, the subject line and the attachments are blacked out. …

The three sentences visible in her memo show that U.S. officials had good reason to suspect Steele’s client and motive in alleging Trump-Russia collusion because they were election-related and facilitated by the Clinton-funded Fusion GPS founder, Glenn Simpson.

A certain institution – identified for good reason by John Solomon as the Democratic National Committee (DNC) – approached Steele’s organization Orbis …

‘… based on the recommendation of Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch [of Fusion GPS]  …  and is keen to see this information come to light prior to November 8,” Kavalec wrote. “Orbis undertook the investigation in June of 2016.” …

The FBI under Director Christopher Wray classified the document as “secret” just a few days ago. To add injury to insult, the FBI added this hopeful note: “Declassify on 12/31/2041.” That would be 25 years after the 2016 election.

Despite the heavy redactions, Kavalec’s notes have momentous consequence.

For the first time, we have written proof the U.S. government knew well before the FBI secured the FISA warrant that Steele had a political motive and Election Day deadline to make his dossier public.

And we know that information was transmitted before the Carter Page FISA warrant to one or more people whose job is so sensitive that their identity had to be protected. That means there is little chance the FBI didn’t know about Steele’s political client, or the Election Day deadline, before requesting the FISA warrant.

Documents and testimony from Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr, whose wife Nellie worked for Fusion GPS, show he told the FBI in August 2016 that Steele was “desperate” to defeat Trump and his work had something to do with Clinton’s campaign.

Kavalec’s notes make clear … the election was Steele’s deadline to smear Trump.

There is little chance the FBI didn’t know that Steele, then a bureau informant, had broken protocol and gone to the State Department in an effort to make the Trump dirt public.

That makes the FBI’s failure to disclose to the FISA judges the information about Steele’s political bias and motive all the more stunning. And it makes the agents’ use of his unverified dossier to support the warrant all the more shameful.

Kavalec’s notes shed light on another mystery from the text messages between the FBI’s Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, which first revealed the politically-biased nature of the Trump collusion probe.

Strzok, the lead FBI agent on the case, and Page, a lawyer working for the FBI deputy director, repeatedly messaged each other in October 2016 about efforts to pressure and speed the review of the FISA warrant.

For instance, on Oct. 11, 2016, Strzok texted Page that he was “fighting with Stu for this FISA,” an apparent reference to then-Deputy Assistant Attorney General Stu Evans in DOJ’s national security division.

A few days later, on Oct. 14, Strzok emailed Page he needed some “hurry the F up pressure” to get the FISA approved.

If the evidence is good and the FISA request solid, why did the FBI need to apply pressure?

The real reason may be the FBI was trying to keep a lid on the political origins, motives and Election Day deadline of its star informant Steele.

And that would be the ultimate abuse of the FBI’s FISA powers.

We know what impatience feels like all too well as we wait for the Great Steele Dossier Hoaxsters to be brought to justice.

Now there’s a real need to hurry up and find the whole truth.

We fear that if it does not happen soon it will not happen at all.

Joe Biden is at present the frontrunner among the innumerable Democrats who have declared themselves willing and eager to be elected to the presidency in 2020.

Yesterday (May 6, 2019) The Hill reported that Biden has a 32 point lead over his nearest rival for the Party’s nomination, the Communist candidate Bernie Sanders.

What are Biden’s qualities? Is he well-informed? Is he a thinker? Has he expressed original and inspiring ideas?

This video clip provides a vivid glimpse into his mind:

https://youtu.be/0Jf17Yo7hBM 

Ah! The truth’s revealed. He’s a scatterbrain. Out of his mouth streams an incoherent jumble of confused ideas, non-facts, and crackpot nonsense. 

One needs to listen to him for no more than a minute to know this. 

Is it the very reason why he’s the current favorite among Democrats?    

If it isn’t the reason, what is?

So the Democrats’ Ideal Candidate for the presidency is a non-white transgendered “woman” Muslim or pro-Muslim Socialist.

What must “her” policies be?

“Free” life-long health care, luxury housing, and higher education for everyone, and free abortion available and recommended for all women who have uteruses.

Legalizing the killing of children who evade abortion or are for any reason unwanted.

Guaranteed employment of everyone by the government.

Abolition of national borders and free flow of immigrants into what has hitherto been the United States of America.

Abolition of police; border police first, then “a conversation must be had” about abolishing the institution of law enforcement.

Preventing Republicans or any opposition party ever coming to power again.

Reducing “emissions” (whatever they may be – “she” doesn’t have to say exactly, but getting rid of cows will help).

Banning the production and use of fossil fuels, and harnessing wind, sunshine, and the ocean tides to supply the world’s energy needs.

Banning gun ownership by civilians. Possibly extending the ban to the military as well (or at least “having a conversation” about it – which might also be about possibly abolishing the military).

Setting limits to free speech, because the Right uses it to criticize the Left and Islam out of sheer irrational hate.

Keeping white men born as men out of positions of authority.

Changing the Constitution as need arises.

Letting everyone vote who can get registered within what used to be the borders of the USA. And perhaps “a conversation should be had” about whether anyone anywhere can have a postal vote. After all, the writ of Congress will no longer stop at what used to be a border. To exactly what body, with what powers, voters will be sending representatives, and whom the representatives will be representing, has yet to be decided. “A conversation must be had” about this. It will probably not be necessary to decide what law will be applied where, by whom, or how, because law-enforcement will likely be a discarded concept.

Abolishing the Electoral College.

Enlarging the Supreme Court with no limit to the number of justices who may be appointed to it.

Abolishing the flag. “A conversation must be had” about whether to create a new flag more representative of “a diverse and inclusive society” or do without one.

Ditto the national anthem.

Punishing Donald Trump for winning the 2016 election.

 

The Ideal Candidate has not yet joined the crowded field of Democrats jostling for the Party’s nomination, but the policies are “on the table”.

Please remind us of any we have left out.