Free thought as heresy again 241

The Left has captured the culture. That’s well known and oft repeated. Education is now religiously Leftist from kindergarten to doctorate. The entertainment industry – stage, film, television –  faithfully carries the sacred messages. The media, both “mainstream” and “social”, are packed with acolytes.

Not only the guardians of the culture have converted en masse to the Church of Marx. Big panjandrums of our capitalist economy are dropping their checks for hundred of millions of dollars into the collection boxes of the Left’s terrorist curates – buying time, they foolishly hope. That would be more surprising if we didn’t have Vladimir Lenin’s (possibly apocryphal but highly plausible) prophecy that “the capitalist will sell you the rope you’ll hang him with”.

And now it is all too horrifyingly possible that the Left will re-capture the legislative and executive branches of the US government. As for the judicial branch, seven of the Supreme Court  justices – all nine of whom were formerly Jewish or Catholic which was not harmful to determinations of law – are dancing arm-in-arm leftwards through a side door into the C. of M., where doctrinal orthodoxy is strictly enforced. Could SCOTUS become the tribunal of the next Inquisition?

A dark age lies ahead. But need we despair? There is consolation to be found in the records of the fast fading era of free thought (roughly 1700-2000), that will still be available to us in books.

Or will they?

Oh, oh! It seems that books by or about the great  – mostly white – scientists, inventors, discoverers, philosophers, visionaries, economists, historians, educators whose ideas debunk the doctrines of the C. of M., are to be removed from libraries, bookshops, even probably our private rooms, and destroyed. Blotted out of human memory. They will not be published  again; or if published by some rogue publisher, not advertised;  or if advertised by some mischance, not sold; or if sold on a black market market of color, confiscated and destroyed.

On the other hand, books supporting the doctrine of the C. of M. (chiefly concerning anti-racism and the evil of being White) will abound. Vast libraries will be built to contain them. There’ll be at least one in every hotel bedside drawer. There’ll be cutely illustrated versions of some on the shelves of kindergartens; thousands to be checked out by students in all grades or else; and subterranean university bookstores will be chockfull of them.

Bruce Bawer, observing the trend, writes at Front Page:

Of America’s most powerful and prominent cultural institutions, it’s quick work naming those that aren’t entirely left-wing satrapies. TV? Fox News, although things are looking less and less encouraging there. Colleges? Hillsdale, I guess, though how many Ivy League faculty members would ever admit to having heard of it? Newspapers? The New York Post (sometimes), Wall Street Journal (kind of)and perhaps one or two others from sea to shining sea. Silicon Valley? Nothing. Hollywood? ¡Nada! Big business? Hmm: what is there, nowadays, honestly, other than that My Pillow guy?

One field in which there’s at least a soupçon of ideological diversity is the book trade. Yes, staffers at the major publishing houses are overwhelmingly on the left. Ditto bookstore employees. Plus the people who give out the major book awards. Not to mention that the heftiest advances for political books go to Democrats. Since the turn of the century, the biggest nonfiction book deal, amounting to at least $65 million, was for Michelle Obama’s Becoming (2018) and for an as-yet-unpublished opus by Barack; second – raking in $15 million – was Bill Clinton’s My Life (2004); third – at $14 million – was Hillary’s Hard Choices (2014).

One more thing about the reflexive leftism of the book scene. Thanks to today’s lethal cancel culture, even classics are at risk. Recently, in an article for the School Library Journal headlined “Little House, Big Problem: What To Do with ‘Classic’ Books That Are Also Racist”, Marva Hinton identified both Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird as racist. No, she didn’t just say that they contained racist language, which would have been fair enough; she asserted that these two books – both of them key texts in the history of the American struggle against racism – are in fact racist.

Hinton quoted Julia E. Torres, a Denver school librarian, as saying that when she’s consulted by teachers who want to assign Harper Lee’s novel to their student, she often suggests replacing it with Samira Ahmed’s dystopic novel Internment, “about a teen sent to a U.S. internment camp for Muslim American people”. Alternatively, Torres “suggests they teach To Kill a Mockingbird using excerpts or through a critical consciousness lens, which would include lessons on white saviorism and the weaponization of white women’s tears”. Check, please!

I’m not familiar with the novel Internment – just out in paperback from Little, Brown – but it’s part of a full-court press by the book business to normalize Islam and demonize “Islamophobia”.  Also in on this effort are the major pre-pub reviewing outlets, all of which gave Internment starred reviews that were short on praise for aesthetic values and long on PC drivel. (“Taking on Islamophobia and racism in a Trump-like America…” – Kirkus.  “A very real, very frank picture of hatred and ignorance…” – Booklist. “An unsettling and important book for our times.” – Publishers Weekly.)

In 2006 I published a highly critical book about Islam. Even then, it was savaged by bien pensant book-world types. But criticizing Islam has become so verboten on the left that I doubt any major publisher today would touch a book like While Europe Slept – even though the problems described therein have grown far, far worse.

Meanwhile, to peruse the latest catalogues from those same publishers is to discover a blizzard of dreary-sounding new or forthcoming novels that, judging from the plot summaries, are drenched in identity politics. (Two quick examples from Knopf, perhaps the most respected of literary publishers: Burning by Megha Majumdar, about an Indian girl who’s falsely accused of terrorism and turns for help to a trans woman; My Mother’s House by Francesca Momplaisir, a novel that takes on “the legacy of colonialism” and “the abuse of male power”. …

Amazon’s current list of top ten bestsellers includes several far-left books on racism: Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and Stamped from the Beginning, Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk about Race, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. You might think there’s a market for at least one book criticizing these authors’ views; but I’ve been assured by industry insiders that no major New York house would even consider publishing such a book.

Even in book publishing, then, the left is way ahead. But this isn’t good enough for Alex Shephard, a young staff writer at the New Republic, who in a recent article maintained that the book industry is “overdue” for a major “reckoning”. Here’s his article’s subhead (italics mine):

The industry is facing demands to live up to its stated values. That might mean ditching writers like Donald Trump Jr.

And later there’s this (italics again mine):

…these publishing houses are, like many corporations in the country, being asked by their employees and customers to live up to a set of values. And that would seem to be impossible while also publishing the likes of Tucker Carlson…

What does Shephard mean by “stated values”? Simple: left-wing ideological purity. In his view, conservative books are, with exceedingly few exceptions, “valueless”. (Shephard implies that “quality control” alone would eliminate most conservative titles.) Also by definition, they’re awash in “factual inaccuracies”. Because of course you can’t possibly mount a convincing non-leftist argument for anything without radically distorting the truth. (As Shephard puts it: “Being forced to tell the truth is not an existential issue for most of publishing; it is for conservative imprints.”)

Hence, if book publishers began to be serious about fact-checking, it would, argues Shephard, “make it impossible to publish a great many conservative books”. Indeed, even the “more ‘respectable’ side of conservative publishing”, as represented for Shephard by Jonah Goldberg’s 2008 bestseller Liberal Fascism (note, however, those scare quotes around the word respectable), would be challenged by a responsible fact-checking apparatus.

According to Shephard, another attribute of many conservative books is that their authors aren’t serious. He quotes Kimberly Burns, a book publicist: “I’m OK with books being published from different political viewpoints – in fact, it’s necessary for debate and being able to see a whole picture … The problem is when authors write things only to get themselves attention or to make news, instead of to enhance a dialogue…” Apparently this isn’t a problem with left-wing books.

Bottom line: Shephard really likes censorship of his ideological opponents. And he really admires his fellow “woke” types who put pressure on publishers to cancel books. He notes with obvious satisfaction that Henry Holt, the publishing house, “drew fire for its decision to continue publishing Bill O’Reilly after multiple accusations of sexual harassment were made against him”. (There’s no indication that Shephard believes multiple accusations of sexual harassment should affect Bill Clinton’s publishing career.)

Shephard approvingly mentions Simon & Schuster’s 2016 decision to drop the book Dangerous by Milo Yiannopoulos, whom he identifies as “a troll known for shallow publicity stunts”. And he tells us that he’s spoken to employees at another publishing house, Hachette, who “expressed discomfort about the company’s conservative imprint, Center Street, which publishes Donald Trump Jr., among others”.

Boy, I’ll bet they did. Since Shephard’s article appeared, Hachette staffers – largely lower-level Gen-Z brats – have said that they won’t work on J.K. Rowling’s forthcoming book because she’s criticized transgender ideology. Hachette is the same house that, in response to workers outraged over unproven quarter-century-old sex-abuse allegations, canceled Woody Allen’s about-to-be-published memoirs in March. Allen was never charged with any crime, let alone found guilty of one; years later he was permitted to adopt two children. Yet thanks to those junior Jacobins – every one of whom should’ve been fired – Allen was unceremoniously cut adrift.

And Shephard fully approves. He actually calls Allen a “pariah”. The ease with which this smug punk swats away the legendary writer-director is chilling. No matter what you may think of Allen or his films, the whole ugly spectacle is just too reminiscent of the way things worked under Stalin and Mao. And it’s all too representative, alas, of the atrocious attitudes of the rising generation of lockstep cancel-culture creeps who, like it or not, are well on their way to becoming our nation’s official cultural gatekeepers.

The danger of believing nonsense 3

Professor Wilfred Reilly cheerfully talks hard good sense:

Posted under Race, United States, Videos by Jillian Becker on Thursday, July 9, 2020

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To arms, citizens! 104

What are conservatives looking to, to stop the Marxist revolution now underway in America?

In what are we putting our hope and trust to save us from the national calamity that has not just begun but is gathering force and pace?

The November election.

We cling to the hope that Donald Trump will be re-elected to the presidency, both the House and the Senate will achieve Republican majorities, and then – hey presto! – the Left, its black-masked militant cohorts, its murderous thugs, it screaming mobs, its nasty leaders in Congress, its billionaire funders, its powerful propaganda media, the public schools and the universities teaching that the federal republic of America is too immoral to be allowed to continue, the governors and mayors authorizing insurgency, will give in, and all the revolutionary activity will subside like a spent summer storm.

They won’t. It won’t. If the Left loses the election, the mobs, the leaders, the funders, the media, the Marxist theorists, the little Stalins and Maos of the states and the cities will intensify their violent aggression.

If they win, the free republic of America will be finished, over, lost.

Either way, the election will not save us.

We have vaguely expected that a magic document we call “The Durham Report” will be published soon, and it will produce such facts, such accusations, such proofs of perfidy and corruption in the Obama administration that inevitably justice will be done, the guilty men and women who plotted a coup d’état against President Trump will go to prison covered with shame, and lo! law and order, constitutionality, safety and freedom will be restored.

It won’t. If this rumored report ever appears, it is unlikely to do so before the election; if it does appear before the election, it is unlikely to indict the guilty; if it does indict the guilty, they are unlikely to be brought to trial; if they are brought to trial, they are unlikely to be found guilty; if they are found guilty, they are unlikely to go to prison. Even if our hopes are rewarded, and before November the plotters are charged, tried, and condemned to long terms of imprisonment, it will not give the Leftist revolutionaries a moment’s pause.

Can we do anything to save our country and ourselves?

Mark Tapson writes at Front Page:

It is time for American patriots to turn the tide against the hateful race agitators, the masked anarchists, and the Marxist subversives terrorizing our nation and wreaking a destructive, “fundamental transformation” of the United States. That includes not just the demonic foot soldiers of the mob itself, but their enablers in academia, the news media, the entertainment arena, and political office.

It’s not enough anymore for our side to share snarky social media memes ridiculing social justice snowflakes; the time for joking about this cultural upheaval is over, because the other side has taken it very, very seriously for half a century, and those snowflakes are now waging a scorched-earth policy against every American institution and value.

What then do we do? …

First and foremost, get off our knees. … Free American citizens do not bow and scrape before any man, any mob, any tyrannical ideology. Forget trying to placate and to reason with the leftist mob; neither is possible. Simply resist and fight. If you give the left an inch, they will take mile after mile after mile. Do not give them that inch.

Speak the truth fearlessly, every day and everywhere, and never apologize for it. Teach your children the truth, and demonstrate to them what courage and integrity look like by standing up for it. Speaking of your kids: take them out of public schools (and even many private schools) at the earliest possible opportunity and commit, no matter the sacrifice, to homeschooling them – or you will lose them in the indoctrination mills of the left.

Do not kowtow to the power-lust of petty Democrat despots like governors Gretchen Whitmer, Andrew Cuomo, or Gavin Newsom, whose coronavirus strategy is to release felons from prison and allow mass, violent protests while cracking down on law-abiding citizens for singing in church. Commit to civil disobedience against their unreasonable dictates – and to uncivil disobedience if it comes to that.

Take a leaf from the Left’s playbook and community-organize. Organize to flood your representatives, local and national, with emails and calls demanding they take immediate, concrete actions to protect our heritage, defend the police, and enforce law and order. For that matter, take another leaf from the leftist playbook and pack their offices with noisy protesters who refuse to leave until our demands are met. Those demands are to stop hamstringing law enforcement and start protecting the community’s citizens, businesses, and monuments. Show up armed, if your state allows open-carry. Support law enforcement and other first responders in word and deed. Tell every cop you know and see that Blue Lives Matter and you respect and appreciate them for putting their lives on the line.

To trace our way back to some measure of sanity, civility, and security in America, the collectivist, racist, divisive mentality of identity politics that has spread like a cancer in this country must be eradicated. Reject this ideology wherever it rears its ugly head. Push back against your children’s teachers and administrators when it is taught in the schools. Call it out in the workplace, consequences be damned; silence and keeping your head down will no longer save you. Reject the ideology when you make your shopping choices. When corporations send you emails notifying you of the steps they’re taking to help achieve “racial justice,” email back and ask them how their virtue-signaling on behalf of anti-Semitic, black supremacist communists like Black Lives Matter helps ease racial tensions. Boycott and down-vote any entertainment featuring elitist celebrities who loudly proclaim their contempt for this country and for the people who love it. Boycott the NBA and protest their racial division outside their arenas at game time. Boycott the NFL, especially the Super Bowl. Boycott Nike and its hate-mongering spokesman Colin Kaepernick.

The time for smug complacency about our side “having all the guns” is over, unless we’re willing to actually use those guns in defense of our country and our freedoms, and not just our homes. If you are a gun owner (and if not, why aren’t you?), hone your skills and, as my friend the columnist Kurt Schlichter always advises, stock up on ammunition. Create networks of friends, relatives, and neighbors you trust and formulate a multi-stage plan for having each other’s backs in various scenarios in which the shit hits the fan – because if the mob hasn’t reached your neighborhood yet, don’t assume they’re not coming. When the lily-white, nose-pierced assistant professors of Antifa in their skinny jeans are confronted by organized resistance, they wet themselves.

Don’t sit back and expect this communist takeover of the United States to fizzle out; it will not. Don’t expect the current madness to ensure a Trump landslide in November, either; in fact, what you can expect is massive Democrat voter fraud, and if Trump survives that, there will be violent resistance surpassing anything we’ve seen so far. So the time to act is now.

It’s probable that the revolutionaries are not taking the November election seriously anyway; that they regard all the old white political traditions such as elections as empty rituals, their results of no importance, carrying no consequences. Which explains why they have put up a dummy as their candidate, a senile leftover from the Obama days, allowed to burble whatever nonsense oozes out of his poor old addled brain.

We must fight now. By all necessary means.

An Independence Day message 54

THE ATHEIST CONSERVATIVE

WISHES ALL ITS FRIENDS, FOLLOWERS, COMMENTERS, VISITORS, CRITICS,

A VERY HAPPY 4TH. OF JULY, 2020!

 

Posted under United States by Jillian Becker on Saturday, July 4, 2020

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Independence Day 2020 6

Reflections on Flag Day | Military.com

Posted under United States by Jillian Becker on Friday, July 3, 2020

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The name of the party 142

The Democratic Party has a racist past. Could it shake off its history by changing its name?

No.

What if it stopped being racist? And – and – and then changed its name? Could it then be considered morally clean?

That would be a good thing in  itself but  – no. It  will go on smelling bad because of its history no matter what it does. What happened, happened. Nothing that happens can ever be undone.

But a name-change would indicate that it regrets its past, wouldn’t it?

It could indicate that – or it could be seen as trying to conceal its past. Either way, it’s past will still be there, tied to its tail with imperishable bonds.

The Western Journal reports and comments:

Democrats who’ve spent the past month salivating as mobs attacked symbols of American history might want to think about the rocks heading for their own glass house. …

And a resolution Monday night by the Republican Party of Connecticut’s central committee is calling them on it.

The resolution came the same day that a Christopher Columbus statue in (Connecticut’s capital) Hartford was removed … “as a symbol of white supremacy”.

But as the Connecticut GOP’s resolution made abundantly clear, as symbols of white supremacy go, Columbus had nothing on the American Democratic Party. In a long and historically accurate recitation, the resolution noted that it was the Democratic Party that:

    • Was the driving force behind the Confederacy’s secession from the Union — to protect the institution of slavery;
    • Tried desperately to block the “Reconstruction Amendments” to the Constitution, which were written to ensure the slaves freed by the Civil War had full rights of citizenship;
    • Were behind the organized terror of the Ku Klux Klan in the Civil War’s aftermath and instituted the rigid segregation of the Jim Crow era.
    • Was opposed to the civil rights movement even into post-World War II America.

… [Yet] the party that truly represents centuries of literal “systemic racism” — racism written into law and enforced with the lash — has managed to cast its political opponents, the party literally founded on abolishing slavery, as the enemies of equality. …

It’s about time the [Democratic Party] gets called to account for its own past.

Democrats wanted to keep the institution of slavery while Republicans wanted to abolish it and succeeded in doing so.

Having lost the battle to keep Blacks as slaves, the next best thing for democrats was to keep them subservient with the Jim Crow laws.

When they failed with that too, they decided at least to keep blacks poor, badly educated, and dependent on government. Which means in effect to keep them enslaved.

Democrats have controlled the nation’s largest cities for decades, and the results of their misrule are apparent for anyone to see.

Inner-city public schools are the creatures of Democrat-supporting teachers’ unions, and disasters for educating students — many, sometimes most, of them black.

Unwed motherhood, a virtual guarantee of poverty … is [common] in the black community after decades of Democratic government programs. (According to a Center for Immigration Studies report in 2017, an astounding 77 percent of American black babies were born to unmarried women).

Even Democratic claims about being concerned about “police brutality” ring hollow [in the light of the fact] that the police departments where incidents take place are almost always run by Democratic officials (who infuriate police with their backstabbing).

If summer 2020 is a time when progressives are going to demand the country answer for its past problems, it’s well past time for Democrats to start answering for their own hypocrisy.

And they could start by dropping a name that’s been irredeemably disgraced.

The mobs on the streets have been hitting symbols of America’s past while Democrats cheered.

One of these days, those same mobs might get around to the Democrats’ disgraceful past too, as well as the party’s disgraceful present.

To what might the Democratic Party change its name?

An accurate name would be “the Racist Party”. But no Democrat is likely to acknowledge that to be true.

Same goes for “the Hypocritical Party”.

It would be good enough if the Democrats tacitly acknowledged their hypocrisy and intolerance by laughably calling themselves the Freedom and Truth Party. 

Posted under Race, United States by Jillian Becker on Friday, July 3, 2020

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Buying revolution, buying poverty 86

Economists investigate “the causes of poverty”. It’s surely no more difficult than investigating the causes of nakedness. Where clothes are taken off or not put on there is nakedness. Where wealth is not acquired or squandered there is poverty.

Poverty is a lack or shortage of necessary goods and the means to acquire them. It is the condition in which multitudes live short lives in Africa. And it is the condition to which once rich populations, notably those of Cuba and Venezuela, have been reduced by socialism.

The Democratic Party has become the party of socialism. Using its militant wing under various names – Antifa and Black Lives Matter the best known – to make the country seem ungovernable, it is working passionately, unremittingly, no-holds-barred to establish a collectivist, redistributionist, one-party, totalitarian socialist regime in the United States. It would certainly mean the impoverishment of the nation.  

Strangely, it seems there are persons in the US who don’t fear poverty. They are very wealthy types who have always been wealthy, or in some rare cases have forgotten what it was like when they weren’t.

Some have political power and use it to advance policies of redistribution, a reliable cause of impoverishment. Some give millions to help the redistributionist politicians keep or gain political power (so they could confiscate all their property but won’t, they trust).

So why are these olympians helping to accomplish a general ruin?

Because they are Christians? They believe that the rich will not get into heaven? Mmm – no. We don’t think it’s that. Not even in the case of old, rich, bewildered Nancy Pelosi who says she is “an ardent, practicing Catholic”.

Because they are Democratic Socialists? Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, Jeff Bezos owner of Amazon and the richest man in the world, George Soros  who has given billions to organizations working to destroy the Constitutional Republic of the United States, John Kerry who acquired billions by marriage, and many a president of a colossal corporation – do they believe so ardently in the Ideology of Redistribution that they would give up all they have for it? Mmm – no.

Do they think that when the Redistributionists come to absolute power they will be among them, in a position to redistribute the wealth of others to themselves? Probably. Or that the  Redistributionists will spare their helpers and benefactors? Surely not! Could anyone, even in her dotage, be so stupid as to believe that? Yes, they probably do.

Blindly, or desperately, or as true believers, they press on with the revolution. And they sense victory. 

Joel B. Pollak writes at Breitbart:

Three events last week showed that Democrats do not want a mere transfer of power if they win the November election: they intend to revolutionize our entire system of government.

The first happened Wednesday [June 24, 2020], when Democrats blocked the Senate from considering a bill on police reform by Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC).

Scott, who is African American, has been working on the issue for years. He had the full support of the rest of the Republican caucus. He also agreed to consider whatever amendments Democrats offered.

They still used the filibuster to block the bill from even being debated.

The episode showed that Democrats do not actually care about police reform. Nor do they want to unite the nation behind any sort of bipartisan compromise. They simply want to use the issue in the elections, which they hope will give them the House, the Senate, and the presidency. Then they can get rid of the filibuster and pass whatever they want.

The second episode happened later that same day, when the school board in Democrat-dominated Oakland, California voted unanimously to abolish the police force in local public schools.

With school shootings still a concern, the board bowed to the wishes of Black Lives Matter activists and removed a crucial layer of defense for the city’s children.

It is not an isolated episode: Democrats on the Minneapolis City Council voted Friday to disband their city’s police.

This is not a party that is interested in rational decisions on public policy. This is a party committed to a revolutionary course.

The third episode happened Friday [June 26, 2020], when the House of Representatives voted along party lines to make Washington, D.C., the 51st state.

It is an utterly absurd proposal. D.C. is barely even a proper city; in land area, it is smaller than Stockton, California. There is no pressing national demand to add another state and redesign of the national flag.

There is only one reason Democrats want to add another state: they want to add two Senators, who — given the partisan makeup of the Swamp — will always be Democrats. That means Republicans would have to work much harder to gain a majority. …

With a permanent majority in the Senate, and the filibuster gone, Democrats will be able to redesign the country, even without passing a constitutional amendment. They will be able to expand the Supreme Court and pack it with liberals with just a simple majority. They will be able to make all eleven-million-plus illegal aliens in the country voting citizens, permanently altering the electorate in Democrats’ favor. They will pass a version of the Green New Deal. And so on.

The Democrats knew a D.C. statehood bill would not pass now; their goal is to soften opposition so that they can pass it next year with minimal opposition, if and when they sweep the November elections.

Democrats have made their intentions clear. The only way to stop their socialist revolution is to beat them in November. 

A surprise? 112

Ami Horowitz finds “white opinion” but not “black opinion” is against the police:

Posted under Race, United States, Videos by Jillian Becker on Sunday, June 28, 2020

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Who can save us now? 32

“Who can save us now?” Sebastian Gorka asks at the Daily Signal.

No one that he can name. And certainly not those on whom we again and again pin our hopes – the Republicans.

So that question goes unanswered.

He does, however, know the answer to the question “How did we get here?”:

How has the freest nation in human history … arrive at the point where more than two-thirds of the millennial generation would prefer to live in a socialist or communist America?

(Or anyway say they do. Few of them have actually experienced that joy so they are saying nothing we need to listen to. Except that if we ignore them they’ll lynch us. They’re allowed to. Because neither we nor they are still living in a free country.)

Sebastian Gorka goes on:

Sadly, we arrived at this deeply disturbing point because of a decades long campaign by the left and cultural elites to transform our country. They have indoctrinated generations of Americans into hating their own country through education, media, and institutions that once believed in the American ideal.

Unfortunately, despite noble efforts by a small number of conservative culture warriors, we have too often been stymied by the Republican political establishment. These political leaders have failed us, and they did so in multiple ways over multiple decades.

When and where did it begin? It began after the failure of the rioters the last time our streets were on fire and police stations were being razed to the ground.

In 1968 and ’69, the radical left went all in. From the University of Berkeley campus to the streets of Chicago, groups such as the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground were using violence to effect political change in the name of “justice” and “equality”. But they failed.

Despite the killings and the bombings, America didn’t turn into a Maoist utopia. Chicago’s “Days of Rage” fizzled out and their uprising resulted in a damp squib.

But what did the “revolutionaries” do? Did they surrender their radical dreams, did they fold up their Che T-shirts and donate them to the thrift store? No, they learned from the proponents of a subtler revolution, studied the method of the members of the Frankfurt School, and adopted the works of thinkers and activists such as Saul Alinsky, the grandfather of “community organizers”.

They realized that a culture and a society as robust in its classic traditional values as America can resist all forms of violent frontal assault and that the only way to dismantle it is from the inside. Thus, hardcore anti-American radicals such as the Weather Underground’s Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, previously wanted by the FBI as domestic terrorists, made their way into our culture and wound up as college professors.

Yes, those who wished to destroy our nation were entrusted with shaping the minds of future generations.

And this was allowed by establishment Republicans.

Nor was it just the college campuses that became centers for America-bashing indoctrination. Those who had failed to set the country ablaze set to work sabotaging the minds of our children in far subtler ways. And when fellow radical Howard Zinn wrote his 1980 book A People’s History of the United States, they had all the ammunition they needed.

Zinn was an unrepentant socialist, a man who saw the world through the Marxist lens of class struggle, with the population of the globe divided between victim groups—usually people of color—and the oppressor, exclusively white. And the worst imperialist oppressor of all? America, of course.

That was Zinn’s message and it suffused his book, which would have been fine had it stayed in the “class struggle” section of bookstores in San Francisco. But it didn’t.

Zinn’s America-hating screed would, thanks to the assiduous work of fellow travelers on school boards and in teachers unions across the country, become the most popular textbook of American history in our schools.

Consequently, for two generations, our children were taught that whatever the ill —poverty in Africa, environmental degradation of the Amazon, international terrorism — it was an imperialist America built on slavery that was invariably the root cause.

Labor camps in the Soviet Union? America’s fault because of our desire to “encircle” and destroy Russia. Communist China oppressing ethnic and religious minorities? America’s fault because we weren’t opening up trade relations rapidly enough with the dictators of Beijing. Religious oppression of the great people of Persia by the blood-soaked murderers of Iran’s Islamist regime? America’s fault because we shouldn’t have helped Iraq after the fall of the shah.

And on and on and on.

What did most of the Republican establishment do? Nothing. Of course, some brave souls said enough is enough and took their children back to school them at home.

But what did the party do collectively to stop the indoctrination of more than two generations in America’s schools and universities? Nothing. In fact, most of us kept writing those checks to our alma maters because, well, didn’t I have a good time in college?

What did establishment Republicans do as Alinskyite tactics were deployed across the other key elements of our culture? From taxpayer-funded NPR’s becoming a literal mouthpiece for the Democrat Party, daily parroting left-wing talking points, to Hollywood’s shifting from being the maker of incredible pro-liberty and pro-America movies such as “Casablanca,” “Sergeant York,” and “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” to being a mill for conservative-bashing agitprop films by Oliver Stone, Sean Penn, and Michael Moore?

What did the establishment do as the subtly biased news media of the Cronkite years devolved into a festering pile of leftist propaganda that would side openly with rioters, call white men “the greatest danger to America”, and label the incumbent president a Kremlin asset for four years straight? …

Conservatives have the facts on our side; indeed, we have the truth on our side. But does that matter? …

Do we have the tools necessary to win over the disaffected and the apolitical before the extremists win?

That question also goes unanswered in the article. Gorka wants conservatives to re-educate young Zinners, but seems to have no hope that they will succeed – or even try.

We still look to President Trump to save the Republic.

We think he can. We hope he will.

“Of what use is religion?” 34

It is a tragedy that violent mobs are rampaging through the land laying waste our civilization as they go – and no one is stopping them: not the police, not the states governments, not the federal government – and most stunningly disappointing of all, not the president. Not yet, anyway.

President Trump, why are you are not acting to restore law and order?

At Townhall, the conservative online opinion journal, Derek Hunter writes:

There is a disturbing percentage of our fellow Americans doing whatever the hell they want to do with little or no concern for the law. And the law has little or no concern for itself, at least when it comes to those charged with enforcing it.

Across the country, charges are being dropped against rioters and looters. Why? Many of those people in position to prosecute the guilty have no interest in doing so. Hell, many of them ran on the idea of not prosecuting people. What kind of idiot would vote for a district attorney who promised to let people get away with more? Well, from San Francisco to St. Louis, they did just that.

With police ordered to stand down, or pulling back on their own, the mob has gone off the rails. Why shouldn’t you? If your store is raided, hope you have good insurance. If you’re randomly attacked, hope you fall safely. wouldn’t mind it so much if the piles of human garbage being given a pass stayed within the boundaries of the jurisdictions electing these morons to not enforce the law, but the idiots who do cast those ballots inevitably flee to sane areas, those not overrun by mutants like them, because who wants to live in a place where stealing anything valued at less than $1000 is no big deal?

While they flee what they made, they bring what made it with them – their vote. Spreading like a swarm of brain damaged locusts, they run to better areas, sane areas that enforce laws and soon are electing other morons to recreate what they just fled. An army of Ilhan Omars who fled a hell hole only to come to the United States and try to recreate that hell hole here.

Still more fellow travelers were actually lucky enough to have been born here and yet are so devoid of natural intelligence and critical thinking ability that they seek to destroy it too. Curiously, they also want open borders, which is like encouraging shipwreck victims to swim to their lifeboat, only to blow a hole in the side of it the moment new people get on board. I did mention they are insane, didn’t I?

Less sane are the rest of us, watching this happen and expecting Republicans to stand up to it. Who in Congress is drawing attention to this Democratic Party-embraced lawlessness? President Trump spent as much, if not more, time at his campaign rally Saturday reenacting a garbage story about how he’d walked down a ramp at the West Point commencement speech the previous week than warning the American people about what liberals are doing.

It’s so out of control that at this point you’d almost have to be an idiot to follow the law. … There are no consequences to disobeying the law. Want a new TV, just take it. See someone minding their own business while you’re in a bad mood? Beat the hell of out them. If you’re in a Democrat-controlled are, the police aren’t coming. Why in the world would cops stick their necks out when they’re what gets chopped first whenever Democrats need to save a buck or need a target to demonize in order to boost morale?

With police ordered to stand down, or pulling back on their own, the mob has gone off the rails. Why shouldn’t you? If your store is raided, hope you have good insurance. If you’re randomly attacked, hope you fall safely.

The mob is running the show, laws are for suckers. So why are the rest of us following them?

What are we paying taxes for? Democrats in these mob run areas are not only turning a blind eye to lawlessness, they’re cheering it along. But I bet they’d bring down every bit of the law on us if we didn’t pay property or income taxes. A tax protest would be beyond the pale, but break into a store, steal a TV bigger than your car, or pummel someone for not appreciating it with a brick and you’re a hero exercising your First Amendment rights. Don’t cut a check to Big Brother and you’ll find out just how tolerant the left is, even if you say you’re doing it in the name of “social justice”.

All this might not be a sign of “the end of the world”, but it’s the end of something. The people who produce are paying, the people who don’t are benefiting. The people paying the bills are trampled while the mob is cheered and protected. Democrats cheer, Republicans are either mumbling or silent. No country can survive long with circumstances like that. And no government – local, state, or federal – that allows it to continue deserves to.

Also at Townhall, Dennis Prager, a man of good sense who nevertheless believes in “God” asks now, in this crisis of insurrection, “Of what use is religion?”

America is being taken over by violent mobs; a vast amount of destruction and stealing has taken place (with little police intervention and the apathy of our political leaders). Why aren’t all clergy delivering thundering sermons about the Seventh Commandment, “Thou shalt not steal”? Does it now come with an asterisk? …

And most ominous by far, for the first time in American history, free speech — the mother of all freedoms — is being widely suppressed, not by the government but by the press, the universities, the high schools, the elementary schools, all the giant internet media, Hollywood and virtually every major business in America. Christians and Jews place repentance at the center of their theologies, yet there is no place for repentance if you did or said one insensitive thing — real or alleged — even if it was 20 or more years ago. Yet all we get from American religious leaders on this matter is … silence.

The freest, least racist, most opportunity-providing country in history — “the last best hope of earth,” in Abraham Lincoln’s words — is smeared as “systemically racist”; all white people are declared “racist”; and the statues of the greatest Americans, including George Washington and even Abraham Lincoln, are toppled and/or defaced. And all we get from most American religious leaders is either agreement or silence.

It leads this religious American to ask the question the anti-religious ask: Of what use is religion?

Take the claim that being “colorblind” is racist.

If you are a religious Jew or Christian — let alone a rabbi, priest or minister — do you believe that? Do you believe that the human ideal is not to be colorblind? Do you believe that the ideal is to see every person, first and foremost, as a member of a race? Is that what you learned at seminary? Is that what you have taught from your pulpit all of your life? …

So, why the silence? Why aren’t all rabbis, priests and pastors telling their congregations and telling America — in tweets, on Facebook, in letters to the editor, on television and radio, in opinion pieces — that there is one race, the human race, and that the only antidote to racism is to deny that race determines our worth, not to affirm its significance?

Does an ideology that affirms the significance of race have an honorable pedigree? Has it ever led to anything good? Isn’t that exactly what Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan advocated?

So, how are we to explain this tragic failure of religious Jews and Christians — and their clergy — to speak up against looting (aka stealing) and for freedom, for America, for Western civilization and for being colorblind? …

What is now apparent is that most Jews and Christians fear the left, fear The New York Times, fear being shunned by “friends” on Facebook and mobbed on Twitter more than they fear God.

That’s what this moment comes down to. Jews and Christians who fail this test will not only lose their freedom, lose the great American hope for mankind and lose the West; they will have also lost their souls.

If the only consequence of this rise of lawlessness and destruction were to be the total disillusionment of Jews and Christians with their religion, their realization at last that neither Jehovah nor Jesus is going to do a thing about the wrecking of our civilization, we would not be unhappy. In fact, we would pause in our lament for the loss of our civilization to exult and jubilate!

But only for a moment. Because disillusionment with religion will not be all. Disillusionment with government by the people, with the rule of law, with the liberty that only the rule of law makes possible – for that, lamentation can not be loud and long enough. Though it will do nothing to save us.

Posted under Anarchy, Christianity, Judaism, Race, Religion general, revolution, United States by Jillian Becker on Tuesday, June 23, 2020

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