President Trump is the only great leader of our time 197

No one but Donald Trump can save America and the world.

It is lucky for America and the world that he exists. He is our last chance. If the power of the presidency is withheld from him a second time, it will be one of the great tragedies of history.

Some Republican pundits say that Governor Ron DeSantis should be the GOP’s candidate for the presidency in 2024 rather than Donald Trump. They are wrong. DeSantis is conservative and competent, but he is not a political genius. Donald Trump is a political genius.

Paul Ingrassia writes at American Greatness:

When it becomes safe to take a position on a once controversial issue (i.e., wokeism), only then will DeSantis latch on. Compare this with Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign rhetoric about locking up illegals; forcing Mexico to pay for the wall; locking up Hillary Clinton for her corruption; implementing a complete and total shutdown of all Muslim immigration until we figure out what the hell is going on. These statements were powerful, and memorable, because the ideas behind them were not circulating until the words flowed from Trump’s lips. He alone was responsible for moving the Overton Window on these questions.

Trump remains the only candidate who does not frame himself in reaction to an existing agenda, but proactively sets the agenda himself. For all his fame, DeSantis is still but an offspring of the MAGA movement. If DeSantis were truly a kingmaker, he would have launched an attack on the Republican establishment, deeming Biden part of an illegitimate establishment, and explicitly called on both Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to step down to pave the way for better leaders. Figuring himself a would-be presidential candidate, DeSantis would break ranks with his party and attack the national security state head-on, calling for a negotiated settlement with Vladimir Putin. He would expel from state borders any federal agents who willfully circumvent due process and raid the homes of political adversaries with impunity. DeSantis would also recognize the gravity of the political moment, if he were worthy of the title, and make sure that his and President Trump’s interests were perfectly in line. Deference to Trump should be expected out of respect for what DeSantis owes to him and out of recognition that the state of the country depends on these two men operating in sync. …

The Grand Old Party would have gone the way of the Whigs had Trump not risen to the occasion in 2015 and taken that ride down the escalator. It is only proper now that Republicans, DeSantis included, put to one side any reservations they harbor about Trump, and in humility support the only man who made American Greatness the center of his movement.

And Matthew Boyle at Breitbart writes:

Former President Donald Trump told Breitbart News that conservative victories in Brazil, Italy, Sweden, Hungary, and more are proof that the “great movement” he leads is spreading worldwide.

“The whole thing is a great movement that’s taken place and now it’s happening all over the world,” Trump said … “It’s a very simple movement: Give us borders, give us safe streets, we don’t want crime, give us good education, give us dignity and give us respect as a nation. It’s not complicated.”

Asked if he thinks these global wins against globalism are foreshadowing a looming American victory against globalism, like what happened in 2016, Trump said, “I think it is.”

“They saw what happened to me, they saw what happened to our country and now they’re comparing it to what’s happening with the Biden administration,” Trump said. “We had no inflation. We had the hottest economy ever in the history of the world prior to the virus coming in. Then I built it back up a second time. The stock market was higher than just before the virus coming in. They saw what we did and they saw the movement. It really became big. We started it—and it became very big. It’s happening here again. It’s happening now again because people see the results of the open borders and the stupidity taking place, the crime. All of the things that are happening in our country, other countries are watching.”

Trump [in his interview with Breitbart News] noted correctly that his domestic endorsement record “was close to 99 percent in the primaries and we’ll do great in the general elections too” …

The Republican Party is largely Trumpean now.

Trump has also been getting active in international endorsements, first helping deliver a victory earlier this year to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and helping Bolsonaro in Brazil. …

Americans who see the world like he does, Trump added, “should be excited” as they are watching this play out around the world.

“It’s a great thing and it’s a great tribute to common sense—not only conservatism but just common sense,” Trump said. “A lot of what we do and what we preach and what we believe in is common sense.”

President Trump can save America. And by doing so, he would save the Western world.

If his Party wins both the House and the Senate in the coming elections – which it is likely to do – hope for our civilization will revive.

Posted under Brazil, Capitalism, Conservatism, Hungary, Italy, Sweden, United States by Jillian Becker on Monday, October 31, 2022

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Do conservatives need to change into radical revolutionaries? 99

Are American conservatives trying to conserve what no longer exists?

John Daniel Davidson, writing at The Federalist, declares that to be the case.

His article is titled We Need To Stop Calling Ourselves Conservatives. Why? Because “the conservative project has failed, and conservatives need to forge a new political identity that reflects our revolutionary moment”.

He argues that –

Conservatives have long defined their politics in terms of what they wish to conserve or preserve — individual rights, family values, religious freedom, and so on. Conservatives, we are told, want to preserve the rich traditions and civilizational achievements of the past, pass them on to the next generation, and defend them from the left. In America, conservatives and classical liberals alike rightly believe an ascendent left wants to dismantle our constitutional system and transform America into a woke dystopia. The task of conservatives, going back many decades now, has been to stop them.

In an earlier era, this made sense. There was much to conserve. But any honest appraisal of our situation today renders such a definition absurd. After all, what have conservatives succeeded in conserving? In just my lifetime, they have lost much: marriage as it has been understood for thousands of years, the First Amendment, any semblance of control over our borders, a fundamental distinction between men and women, and, especially of late, the basic rule of law. …

He maintains that “conservatism used to be about maintaining traditions and preserving Western civilization as a living and vibrant thing” but “Western civilization is dying” – is effectively already dead, and “you cannot preserve or defend something that is dead”.

The traditions and practices that conservatives champion are, at best, being preserved only in an ever-shrinking private sphere. At worst, they are being trampled to dust. They certainly do not form the basis of our common culture or civic life, as they did for most of our nation’s history. …

So what kind of politics should conservatives today, as inheritors of a failed movement, adopt? For starters, they should stop thinking of themselves as conservatives (much less as Republicans) and start thinking of themselves as radicals, restorationists, and counterrevolutionaries. Indeed, that is what they are, whether they embrace those labels or not.

He recalls Thomas Jefferson’s assertion that “periodic revolution to preserve liberty and civil society has always been and always will be necessary”.

He is  convinced that it is necessary now.

The imperative that conservatives must break from the past and forge a new political identity cannot be overstated. It is time now for something new, for a new way of thinking and speaking about what conservative politics should be.

He dates “the end of  Republican politics as we knew it” from the election of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016. That event “heralded a populist wave and … we are in uncharted waters”. He does not see Trump’s populism as a solution to the terrible change that the West has undergone.

Put bluntly, if conservatives want to save the country they are going to have to rebuild and in a sense re-found it, and that means getting used to the idea of wielding power, not despising it. Why? Because accommodation or compromise with the left is impossible. …

The left will only stop when conservatives stop them, which means conservatives will have to discard outdated and irrelevant notions about “small government.” The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life — and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed.

To stop Big Tech, for example, will require using antitrust powers to break up the largest Silicon Valley firms. To stop universities from spreading poisonous ideologies will require state legislatures to starve them of public funds. To stop the disintegration of the family might require reversing the travesty of no-fault divorce, combined with generous subsidies for families with small children. Conservatives need not shy away from making these arguments because they betray some cherished libertarian fantasy about free markets and small government. It is time to clear our minds of cant.

In other contexts, wielding government power will mean a dramatic expansion of the criminal code. It will not be enough, for example, to reach an accommodation with the abortion regime, to agree on “reasonable limits” on when unborn human life can be snuffed out with impunity. As Abraham Lincoln once said of slavery, we must become all one thing or all the other. The Dobbs decision was in a sense the end of the beginning of the pro-life cause. Now comes the real fight, in state houses across the country, to outlaw completely the barbaric practice of killing the unborn.

Conservatives had better be ready for it, and Republican politicians, if they want to stay in office, had better have an answer ready when they are asked what reasonable limits to abortion restrictions they would support. The answer is: none, for the same reason they would not support reasonable limits to restrictions on premeditated murder.

On the transgender question, conservatives will …  need to get comfortable saying … that Drag Queen Story Hour should be outlawed; that parents who take their kids to drag shows should be arrested and charged with child abuse; that doctors who perform so-called “gender-affirming” interventions should be thrown in prison and have their medical licenses revoked; and that teachers who expose their students to sexually explicit material should not just be fired but be criminally prosecuted.

If all that sounds radical, fine. It need not, at this late hour, dissuade conservatives in the least. Radicalism is precisely the approach needed now because the necessary task is nothing less than radical and revolutionary.

To those who worry that power corrupts, and that once the right seizes power it too will be corrupted, they certainly have a point. If conservatives manage to save the country and rebuild our institutions, will they ever relinquish power and go the way of Cincinnatus? It is a fair question, and we should attend to it with care after we have won the war.

For now, there are only two paths open to conservatives. Either they awake from decades of slumber to reclaim and re-found what has been lost, or they will watch our civilization die. There is no third road.

While it would not be hard to make a confirming case that “marriage as it has been understood for thousands of years, the First Amendment, any semblance of control over our borders, a fundamental distinction between men and women, and, especially of late, the basic rule of law” are “lost”; and “that Drag Queen Story Hour should be outlawed; that parents who take their kids to drag shows should be arrested and charged with child abuse; that doctors who perform so-called ‘gender-affirming’ interventions should be thrown in prison and have their medical licenses revoked; and that teachers who expose their students to sexually explicit material should not just be fired but be criminally prosecuted”, other assertions of his need more examination.

Is Western civilization effectively dead?

Is the idea of small government outdated and irrelevant?

Is the idea of a free market economy nothing more than an unrealizable “cherished fantasy”?

Should divorce be made harder?

Should abortion be totally forbidden in all circumstances?

Above all, if conservatives “awake from decades of slumber to reclaim and re-found what has been lost” will the strong exercise of political power – which he recommends as the remedy – be enough to resuscitate Western civilization?

If it is too late for traditional conservatism to recover the values that have been discarded, would authoritarian government be a new development of Western civilization or would it be a replacement of it with its opposite – Oriental style, Chinese Communist Party style, dictatorship?

If that is the only way to re-establish the rule of law, be rid of same-sex “marriage”, restore the efficacy of the First Amendment, re-seal our borders, save children from forced mutilation and sterilization for the profit of doctors and from racist indoctrination by teachers, then yes, Western civilization is already dead.

There is no third choice between liberty and tyranny.   

The virtues of President Trump 35

Posted under Commentary, United States, Videos by Jillian Becker on Thursday, August 11, 2022

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Thirteen words shake the tyrants of the administrative state 82

We select some paragraphs from an article titled A Revolution Against The Administrative State.

It deplores how Americans have been increasingly oppressed by –

… an unaccountable administrative state wielding power over every aspect of their lives.

In the last few years, agencies have seized unprecedented power over every area of American life. The Biden administration has argued in court that the Center of Disease Control (CDC) can issue an eviction moratorium and that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) can force workers to get vaccinated. Big government was using a crisis to wield unlimited authority with agencies seizing the thinnest pretext of authority to weigh in on entirely unrelated areas.

The administrative state is the root of all evil. Its members made up the “resistance” who sabotaged Trump administration policies, as they did those of his Republican predecessors.

The administrative state spent generations making elections and elected officials irrelevant. Congress might legislate, presidents might sign bills into law, and judges might rule on them, but the actual implementation was left to a massive expanding bureaucracy which had its own agendas.

So Daniel Greenfield accurately writes.

He goes on:

Government had become too complicated for self-government, by the people or their representatives.

The permanent bureaucrats running the departments and agencies of the executive branch became the actual government of America. They made their own rules and enforced them as they chose.

They chose to enforce them tyrannically. (Many of them command their own armed forces.) No one stopped them. No one knew how to stop them. Presidency and Congress, all the representatives of the people for whom the people cast their votes, were reduced to playing a part in mere window-dressing; they kept the country looking like a democratic republic. The bureaucrats wrote the bills  for Congress to vote on; decided which enacted laws they would execute; and continued to make and enforce their own regulations.

Until, at last, a ruling of the Supreme Court set a limit to their powers.

One of the most tyrannical administrations is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The Supreme Court’s ruling in the case of West Virginia v. EPA puts a curb on it.

And the curb applies to all departments and agencies.

The implications of West Virginia v. EPA go far beyond environmental regulations. 

Which is why it has …

sent shudders through the vast infrastructure of the D.C. administrative state.

One sentence cast the spell that melted the arrogance of the tyrants!

What has touched off all that fear in the administrative state was merely Justice Roberts, the most liberal Republican appointee on the court, writing:

An agency must point to clear congressional authorization for the power it claims.

The fury over that modest proposal reveals how America is really run. And who runs it.

West Virginia v. EPA is a response to unprecedented power grabs in which the country is increasingly ruled by ‘pen and paper’ executive orders [issued by] a vast omnipotent bureaucracy.

It’s not a final reckoning, but it’s a revolution against a tyranny that has virtually eliminated meaningful self-government and the power of the people. And it’s a long overdue revolution.

Is it  a revolution? If it is, will it succeed?

We hope it is, we hope it will. We wait to see.

Posted under tyranny, United States, US Constitution by Jillian Becker on Monday, July 11, 2022

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The conquest of America 232

All those who with their votes or their assistance in the ballot-cheating got the Democrats into power, are guilty of destroying the America that was free, prosperous, ruled by law, and protected by a well-trained well-equipped military.

Now we are not only poorer, but impeded in all we do. Travel? You may need certification. Learn? Only approved topics and authorized dogma. Start a business? Get a license.

Every institution on which we used to be able to rely, has been corrupted, weakened, or destroyed.

The presidency was captured by fraud. A duly elected Republican president was twice impeached for no offense, no crime, while the offenses or crimes he was accused of were openly and brazenly committed by his accusers, including the fraudulent official who succeeded him by crookery.

We can no longer rely on the rule of law. Real insurrectionists who torched city centers, looted, murdered, threatened governmental authority, go unpunished, while people who walked into the Capitol and out again a few minutes later are imprisoned without trial for a year, ill-treated, and finally threatened with long prison sentences if they don’t confess to criminal acts they never performed – which will send them to prison anyway. The initiators of the “Russia-collusion” hoax – Hillary Clinton and her political lieutenants – have not been called to account. Applicants for legal immigration are kept waiting for years, while illegal aliens pour over the border unimpeded and are immediately given housing, schooling, health care, and even voting rights.

The House of Representatives is the staff quarters of a vindictive old woman. The Senate can be toyed with by a moronic vice-president.

The Supreme Court  is under threat of extinction. The junta in power wants to turn it into a rubber-stamping bureau that will support one party rule forever. 

Victor Davis Hanson writes at the Daily Signal:

Court-packing—the attempt to enlarge the size of the Supreme Court for short-term political purposes—used to be a dirty word in the history of American jurisprudence.

The tradition of a nine-person Supreme Court is now 153 years old. The last attempt to expand it for political gain was President Franklin Roosevelt’s failed effort in 1937. FDR’s gambit was so blatantly political that even his overwhelming Democratic majority in Congress rebuffed him.

Yet now “court packing” is a law school cause celebre. It is hailed as a supposedly quick fix to reverse the current 5-4 conservative majority.

Recently, a rough draft of an opinion purportedly overturning the Roe v. Wade decision that had legalized abortion in all 50 states was leaked to the media by someone inside the court.

That insider leak of a draft opinion was a first in the modern history of the Supreme Court. It violated all court protocols. Yet it was met with stunning approval from the American left.

The leaker either intended to create a preemptive public backlash against the purported court majority in the hope that one or two justices might cave and switch under pressure—or to gin up the progressive base to fend off a likely disaster in the November midterm elections.

The recent leak, however, is consistent with a left-wing assault on the court that has intensified over the last five years. Democrats have gone ballistic ever since former President George W. Bush’s and especially former President Donald Trump’s appointees solidified a conservative majority.

During Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings in 2018, protesters stormed the Senate chambers in protest. …

Later in spring 2020, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., whipped up a protest crowd right in front of the Supreme Court. He directly threatened Justices Neil Gorsuch and Kavanaugh:

I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.

What exactly did Schumer mean by “you will pay the price” or “you won’t know what hit you”?

Who or what would hit the two justices—and how exactly?

But it is not just the court the left is targeting. Long-standing institutions and even constitutional directives are now fair game.

At the 2020 funeral of Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., former President Barack Obama crudely proposed bringing in Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., as states—and with them likely four left-wing senators.

Obama’s “eulogy” also damned the 180-year-old Senate filibuster. Yet as a senator, Obama himself resorted to the filibuster in an effort to block the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.

The Electoral College is under continued assault, especially since Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016 were elected without winning the popular vote.

The Founders’ arguments for the Electoral College are never mentioned. But the drafters of the Constitution felt it forced candidates to visit rural areas. They believed it would discourage European-style multiple splinter parties. It made voter fraud more difficult on a national scale. And it emphasized the United States of America. That is, America today is 50 unique states that are represented as such in presidential elections.

The Biden administration also narrowly failed to push through a national voting law. Such legislation would have superseded the states’ constitutional rights to set most of their own balloting protocols in national elections.

So what is behind leaking Supreme Court drafts of impending opinions, or seeking to pack the Supreme Court with 15 justices, or ending the Senate filibuster, or adding two more states to the 60-year-old, 50-state union, or curtailing states’ rights to set their own balloting procedures, or trashing the Constitution’s Electoral College? …

And how can Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas openly negate federal immigration law? How can he welcome millions to cross illegally the southern border?

The answers are obvious.

The hard left had detoured from the mainstream of American voters onto a radical trajectory. So it will never find 51% public approval for any of its current extremist and crackpot initiatives.

Instead, it sees success only through altering the rules of governance or changing the demography of the electorate—or both.

Has any institution not been deliberately spoiled? Is any activity, if not yet prohibited, left free of government regulation?

The banking system has become so byzantine that quite simple transactions, such as sending a payment abroad, takes days or even weeks to complete.

The schools and universities have been changed into indoctrination seminaries.

The mainstream media are as meekly submissive to the junta as a silly woman to a domineering husband.

The police are defunded, demoralized, weakened, disarmed, reduced in number, abused –  even murdered with impunity.

As for the army …These quotations are  from How Obama and Biden Destroyed the Greatest Military the World Has Ever Seen by Daniel Greenfield.*

Under Biden [“Biden” being the name of the president and so of the administration, though the man himself is senile and does not make the decisions propagated in his name], genocide and terrorism have become cultural norms that we are bound to accept.  (p.4)

China might beat us in the hypersonic weapons race, but America’s top military brass were determined to pull out all the stops to make sure they had the most diverse arrangement of incompetent radicals, preferably in senior leadership positions, to establish their progressive credentials. (p.10)

Obama didn’t just leave the military smaller in size, but smaller in spirit, its leadership class no longer dedicated to national security, but to the identity political agendas of the radical Left. (p.11)

Obama remade the military just as he remade the nation, from a team based on individual worth into a broken system divided by the intractable gulfs of oppressors and the oppressed. No military organization can function that way and no nation can survive that way.  (pp. 11, 12)

Long before the Taliban entered Kabul, the moral struggle had already been lost in Washington D.C. While the Taliban were carving up Afghanistan, the nation’s military leaders were busy implementing racial quotas, imposing implicit bias training, and teaching military personnel to hate their country through critical race theory. (pp.12,13)

There has been no accountability for the political leaders and military brass who wrecked the military. And none for those who were responsible for our defeat in Afghanistan. Patriots are being driven out while the disloyal leaders responsible for purging them and enabling the Taliban remain in charge. (p.62)

All that at a time when the US is faced with a more dangerous threat of attack than the nation has ever had to confront before.

Quotations from an article  by Judith Bergman at Gatestone:

China is putting up satellites at twice the rate of the United States and fielding operational systems at an incredible rate.

Look at what they [CCP) have today…. We’re witnessing one of the largest shifts in global geostrategic power that the world has witnessed.

The Chinese are building up their military capabilities in space, cyberspace, and in the conventional force. It’s all happening at the same time.

There is now as well the added probability of China and Russia engaging in military coordination…. a strategic partnership of “no limits” and with “no forbidden areas” in an agreement that they said was aimed at countering the influence of the United States.

Meanwhile, the Left has already captured and destroyed the free republic of America. It no longer influences the world for the better. It is ripe and ready for Chinese Communist conquest. 

Can the free republic be resurrected? Can America be saved?

 

 

*Published by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, PO Box 55089, Sherman Oaks, CA 91499-1964

How goes the revolution? 99

The radical Ethnic Studies addition to Minnesota’s proposed social studies standards encourages students to disrupt and dismantle America’s fundamental institutions.

Katherine Kersten writes at American Experiment about public education in Minnesota becoming nothing more than Marxist indoctrination, and how it is a model for the whole of America. (We quote a large part of her article, but recommend that it be read in full.)

Minnesota’s proposed new social studies standards have sparked controversy since the first draft was released in December 2020. What’s grabbed public attention in the final draft, now in the rule-making process, is Ethnic Studies. The Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) has added this highly politicized “fifth strand” — unauthorized by statute — to the four content areas named in law: history, government and citizenship, geography and economics.

The inclusion of Ethnic Studies marks a victory for forces seeking to radically remake Minnesota’s public schools. Ethnic Studies goes beyond the standard “anti-racist” Critical Race Theory (CRT) focus, especially in its stress on student political activism: “disrupting”, “dismantling” and “transforming” our nation’s fundamental institutions. It imports the whole ideological thought world from which CRT sprang, and serves as a vector for the activist network that is driving it nationally.

In short, Ethnic Studies is the spider at the center of the web that MDE is spinning.

How did this extremist ideology — born of the “Third World Liberation Front” that grew out of the 1968 student strikes and riots in California — make its way from San Francisco and Berkeley to elementary classrooms in Litchfield and Faribault, Minnesota?

It’s a scandalous story. When MDE appointed the standards drafting committee, it took the unprecedented step of excluding academic subject matter experts in history, civics, geography and economics. Instead, it stacked the committee with political activists, community organizers and their allies, who dominated the process.

These activists’ goal was not to revise and improve “rigorous standards” in “core academic subjects” in our state’s K-12 public schools, as law requires. On the contrary, they view Minnesota’s public education system … as a “white supremacist puzzle that must be taken apart and exposed for the lie it is”. 

Activists’ weapon of choice in taking our schools apart is Ethnic Studies. Forget about teaching students about the historical leaders and events that shaped our democracy, like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and America-led victories in World War II. MDE’s new “fifth strand” trains K-12 students to view our nation’s social and political institutions with suspicion and hostility and seeks to enlist them in … a “political struggle” to change the social, economic, and cultural system that underlies our polity.

When the Minnesota Legislature adopted our state’s social studies standards in 2004, it authorized MDE to revise them every 10 years to “raise academic expectations for students, teachers and schools”. By law, state standards must be both “objective” and “measurable”, and “consistent with” the U.S. and Minnesota Constitutions.

But MDE’s proposed standards fail on all these fronts. Under the new Ethnic Studies standards, one of which is entitled “Resistance”, for example, students are instructed to “organize” to resist America’s “systemic and coordinated exercises of power against marginalized”oppressed groups”.

How will this play out in Minnesota’s classrooms? Here’s an example: Students will study our police departments and justice system in connection with an Ethnic Studies standard that requires them to “understand the roots of contemporary systems of oppression” and “eliminate injustices”.

To this end, fifth graders will first “examine contemporary policing” and its alleged “historical roots in early America”.  The claim is that our police departments sprang directly from slave patrols of the Old South.

Sixth graders will describe the “impact of Minnesota’s juvenile justice system” on “historically disenfranchised groups”. High school standards suggest the notion of criminality itself is racist: “explore how criminality is constructed and what makes a person a criminal.”

Biased, misleading instruction of this kind will likely convince many young people that policing and the very idea of criminality are oppressive, racially “constructed” and among the many things schools are instructing them to “resist”.

The campaign to highjack the revision of Minnesota’s social studies standards may look homegrown, but it is nothing of the kind. EdLib MN [Education for Liberation Minnesota] is a state chapter — indeed the only state chapter — of a national extremist organization called the Education for Liberation Network.

The EdLib Network makes no secret of its revolutionary agenda: to dismantle and replace America’s fundamental institutions. Or in its own words, it “promotes the transformation of existing institutions and the creation of new ones that reflect the values of Education for Liberation”.  The network’s strategy to achieve this objective is “wholesale K-16 implementation” of Ethnic Studies in schools across the nation.

Two 20th-century Marxist thinkers, Paulo Freire and Antonio Gramsci, are central to the Ed Lib Network’s worldview. …

The name and concept of “Education for Liberation” are drawn from the ideology of Brazilian Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in 1968. Freire maintained that education’s purpose is not to pass on knowledge, but to build revolutionary consciousness among the “oppressed” to achieve “liberation” by overthrowing the system. For decades, his book has been one of the most widely assigned texts in many colleges of education.

Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Communist [a founder of the Italian Communist Party – ed) has been called the godfather of cultural Marxism. … He proposed that activists infiltrate and gain control of key institutions of civil society, like schools and political parties, to shape a new ideological consensus and organize opposition to the existing social order. This strategy has become known as “the long march through the institutions“.

According to its website, the EdLib Network has worked since 2012 to promote Ethnic Studies in California, the epicenter of the movement. In March 2021, California’s board of education approved the state’s new Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum.

The model curriculum’s “guiding principles” call for “transformative resistance” and repudiate “forms of power and oppression” that include “cisheteropatriarchy” and “anthropocentrism” (the belief that human beings are superior to animals). The curriculum originally incorporated student chants to bloodthirsty Aztec gods, but recently dropped these following a legal settlement.

Now the EdLib Network is going state-by-state, “building power from the ground up” and creating “regional assemblies” to help “educators and grassroots organizers to implement Ethnic Studies in their own communities”.  …

The curriculum begins by declaring its support for political revolution: “System changes occur when people unite, mobilize and organize in coordinated resistance to disrupt and dismantle inequitable systems.”  

Lessons are saturated with the concepts and lingo of Antonio Gramsci’s Marxist ideology. Starting in pre-K, for example, students are taught to reject “normalization”. Older students are repeatedly instructed to question “common sense” and refuse to “consent” to “hegemony”— i.e. the power “white men use to dominate others”. In grades 7-12 lessons, Gramsci is invoked by name. “We need to understand common sense the way that Antonio Gramsci, an Italian philosopher, understood it,” students are told. They are asked, “What hegemonic beliefs do you plan to disrupt?” and assigned to “create counter-hegemonic stories.”

Throughout, instruction is cult-like and highly manipulative, and the pressure to conform is overwhelming. Elementary pupils are assigned to rewrite popular songs to reflect Ethnic Studies ideology, and to recite Gramsci’s ideological tenets in “choral readings”.  Overall, these mind-numbing lessons conjure images of youthful Red Guards being groomed for China’s Cultural Revolution. …

The new field of “Ethnomathematics” teaches that math began in ancient “empires of color”, was appropriated by the West to oppress BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color), and should be taught, in part, through racial and ethnic storytelling. In science class … students may study Ojibwe architecture.

[In Minnesota] legislative proposals [include] one bill that would require MDE to establish an Ethnic Studies Task Force, with “input” from the Minnesota Ethnic Studies Coalition. This task force would be charged with developing K-12 Ethnic Studies standards in a range of subject areas, which MDE (the Minnesota Department of Education] would be required by law to adopt and to do so using an expedited process allowing minimal public input. …

Meanwhile, many young people — especially minority children — lack the basics in history, reading, science and math, as class time spent on fundamental knowledge shifts to indoctrination in extremist ideology.

Brave parents are stepping up to demand that our schools be returned to the people of Minnesota. But so far others — including the business community, civic organizations, and school boards and administrators — have been silent. Unless we all raise our voices, our state’s and our children’s futures will soon be in the hands of forces determined to transform our nation beyond recognition.

Will America allow Communism to win the Cold War after all?

Has it already won?

Posted under communism, education, Marxism, revolution, United States by Jillian Becker on Saturday, April 23, 2022

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Voting for tyranny 73

In 2020, tyrants came to power in the United States by fraud. They were not elected by a majority. The majority voted for Donald Trump to be president, which means most Americans want freedom. But far too many did actually vote for the tyrannical party. All Americans got the government the large minority wanted and that they, but not most Americans, deserved.

In other Western countries, Germany for instance, the tyrants now in power were elected by majorities.

The proven fact that hundreds of millions of Westerners want to be governed by authoritarians welding power arbitrarily, cruelly, and destructively is strangely omitted from conservative commentary.

But Paul Gottfried has observed the horrifying fact, and writes about it at American Greatness:

A bad habit on the establishment Right, here and in other Western countries, is to treat those who have made disastrous electoral decisions as victims. If the choices made by these “victims” turn out badly, as they have in the cases of numerous municipal governments and blue states and with the election of Joe Biden, conservatives carefully avoid accusing the voters. Apparently high crime rates, unnecessary lockdowns, goofy LGBTQ+, antiwhite measures, and galloping inflation should not be pinned on those who cast electoral ballots.

If eligible voters in heavily black urban areas endorse corrupt politicians who thrive by playing the race card and ignore rising crime rates, the fault, we are led to believe, is entirely with those who have been elected. The stigma belongs to politicians who have betrayed the “people,” although a majority of the “people” dutifully voted for them. Are we to think that those who have voted more than once for Maxine Waters, Kweisi Mfume, and Bill de Blasio or who ran in droves to rescue Gavin Newsom in the California recall election last year are simply the hapless victims of evil politicians?

The same tendency to shift blame misleadingly is characteristic of the German democratic Right, as I gather from reading their leading weekly Junge Freiheit. Although Germany has moved even further to the left than the United States on social and cultural issues and is governed by a Green-Social Democratic coalition that is even more radical than our Democrats, the fault, according to German conservatives, does not lie with the German “volk“, which is no longer even recognizable as such.

Significantly, German voters stand behind a state that has little respect for civil liberties, one that has gone after its only non-leftist party—Alternative for Germany—because its leaders have suggested in speech that Germans are an historic nation, not just a collection of individuals. Unfortunately, most Germans don’t seem to care if a leftist woke government shuts them up and strips them of their national identity.

The lockdowns established by the German government were also far more comprehensive than ours, and the state attacked those who protested them as Nazi sympathizers and in many cases subjected them to arrest and prosecution. The new German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, who has published in the far-left Antifa, has designated as her first priority, “combating the far-right threat,” a war that should start in kindergarten. Last week, the culturally radical Social Democrats swept to an unanticipatedly large victory in Saarland. Their chief competitor, the Christian Democrats, lost to the Social Democrats, who managed to outdo them in LGBT advocacy, and in calls for massive immigration and blatant antinationalism. The last time I checked, it was overwhelmingly ethnic Germans who voted for this woke hell.

Are we to pretend that those who vote for race-baiters and unhinged antifascists are not really voting? They are simply the victims of malign forces that bring to power leftist demagogues and crazed social engineers despite the “people”? Although it may be convenient to nurture that fantasy, real majorities often elect utterly loathsome governments

I’m also not willing to give these voters the benefit of the doubt because they have been under the influence of lying media. Although the leftist media lie through their teeth, one might expect that adults at some point would notice. But even if they don’t, I see no reason to treat voters as the helpless victims of their own choices. Truth is, they are getting the leadership they deserve. And they are suffering the consequences they brought on themselves.

We should assume that when citizens are authorized to vote, they are responsible for what they mark on a ballot. We are, however, free to doubt that all voting citizens take civic obligations seriously, and in the 19th century, the educated bourgeoisie … wished to limit the franchise to literate property holders like themselves. They believed that only the “capable classes (les classes capacitaires)” were able to exercise political power prudently, and some doubted that women, with certain exceptions, were emotionally stable enough to attend to political affairs.

Although these early bourgeois liberals may have had a point, Western countries since have moved in a different direction. We are therefore obliged to operate with another assumption. That assumption is that all authorized citizens should be able to choose their leaders. This means that they will be getting the government they democratically elected, and the responsibility for that choice is theirs.

Why have millions of citizens of the formerly free countries of the West turned against freedom?

Posted under China, Germany, Totalitarianism, tyranny, United States by Jillian Becker on Thursday, April 7, 2022

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Tsar Vladimir and our world of illusion 23

Here’s a video of GBNews hosted by Mark Steyn on Thursday, February 24, 2022 – the day Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Watch from about 6.25 minutes to about 26.25 minutes.

Listen to historian David Starkey on how the West has given up force to become a world of illusion. Without force, “human rights”, “international law”, and a “United Nations” are illusions.

Putin is Tsar of Russia striving to restore the Tsarist Empire.

The rivalry of empires is the future, as it was the past.

Posted under Russia, Ukraine, United States, War by Jillian Becker on Friday, February 25, 2022

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To steal another election 343

The plot is laid.

The [current Democratic] American regime wishes to purge conservatives in the military and national security establishment, crackdown on gun owners and conservative organizations, assume greater federal control over state and local police, and censor and repress all political dissent to rig the 2024 election.

For this regime, the only available justification for such a coup is the specter of January 6, so they must exaggerate its importance out of all proportion to reality, while simultaneously avoiding any real investigation that could puncture the narrative. The one-off incident of January 6 has been cast as a “permanent insurrection,” a bloody shirt that Democrats and our anemic overlords can wave whenever needed to justify a new and previously-unprecedented power grab.

This permanent insurrection is the real Big Lie of 2020, and it will become the Big Lie of 2022 and 2024 if the corrupt ruling class can get away with it.

For half a decade, the globalist American ruling elite have stoked fears about “democracy” being in “peril” whenever they lose an election. Now, they are on the brink of overthrowing democracy completely in the name of “saving” it.

We quote from Revolver:

In 2020, despite unprecedented efforts to rig the outcome with delayed vaccine trials, suppression of the Hunter Biden story, rewritten election rules, and ballot harvesting, Joe Biden eked out a “win” by the smallest of margins. Now, one year into his administration … ’70s-style inflation is back, dozens of cities are setting murder records, the Afghan War ended in profound national humiliation, and Biden’s signature legislative initiative is Build Back Deader. Endless Covid panic, critical race theory in schools, and the urban crime explosion may finally break apart the Democratic coalition of the fringes that focuses all of America’s hatred onto a dwindling population of white middle class kulaks. …

The American regime is terrified. They moved heaven and earth to derail Trump’s term in office and turn him out after four years. Now the ruling class faces the very real prospect that, if the 2024 election is remotely fair, he will be swept back into the White House, more powerful than ever before…

That is, if the 2024 election is fair.

America’s governing class and its media apparatchiks have repeatedly labeled Trump’s complaints about the 2020 election “the Big Lie.” But there is a Bigger Lie afoot, one with a much greater bearing on the future. The Bigger Lie is this: That the January 6 Capitol incident was an “attempted coup,” and that this coup was launched by a wider pro-Trump “anti-democracy” movement (as opposed to the anti-Trump, anti-democracy movement known as the FBI).

The January 6 “insurrection” itself was plotted, incited, organized, directed by the FBI, for precisely the purpose it is now being put to. 

This movement, the Bigger Lie goes, is a “danger to our democracy” and must be hunted down to destruction.

In the name of this Bigger Lie, America’s governing class of academics, security staters, elected lawmakers, and media propagandists are preparing to sweep away what remains of America’s democratic process. Their goal: to render the 2024 election null, with a preordained outcome that poses no danger to the ruling elite’s wishes.

The Atlantic magazine dribbled out a warning of the plot back in October. In his article entitled, Kamala Harris Might Have to Stop the Steal, Russell Berman argues that, while it would have been bad if Mike Pence had intervened to prevent Joe Biden’s victory last January, it will be perfectly legitimate if Harris does the same in 2024.

For a few hours inside the ransacked Capitol on January 6, then–Vice President Mike Pence helped to preserve the democratic order by insisting that he was powerless to change the outcome of the election.

Should Trump or his acolytes try to subvert the 2024 election, the last Democrat with any power to stop the steal—or at least try to—would be Harris. “She’s certainly going to have quite a job on her hands on January 6, 2025,” Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor and liberal constitutional scholar, told me. Nine months ago, Tribe and other Democrats praised Pence for interpreting his authority narrowly, but the next time around, they might ask Harris to wield the same gavel more forcefully.

Ominous.

Writing in the Washington Post … three retired Army generals further developed the open conspiracy against a free and fair election in 2024. The three stooges charted new waters of hyperbole and hysteria, warning of an impending civil war in the United States requiring, conveniently, “decisive action” from the military to stop a “Trumpian loser”. The fix for this grave danger? Naturally, a major purge of the military, and the imprisonment of senior Republican leaders:

As we approach the first anniversary of the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, we — all of us former senior military officials — are increasingly concerned about the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election and the potential for lethal chaos inside our military, which would put all Americans at severe risk.

In short: We are chilled to our bones at the thought of a coup succeeding next time.

All service members take an oath to protect the U.S. Constitution. But in a contested election, with loyalties split, some might follow orders from the rightful commander in chief, while others might follow the Trumpian loser. Arms might not be secured depending on who was overseeing them. Under such a scenario, it is not outlandish to say a military breakdown could lead to civil war.

With the country still as divided as ever, we must take steps to prepare for the worst.

First, everything must be done to prevent another insurrection. Not a single leader who inspired it has been held to account. Our elected officials and those who enforce the law — including the Justice Department, the House select committee and the whole of Congress — must show more urgency.

But the military cannot wait for elected officials to act. The Pentagon should immediately order a civics review for all members — uniformed and civilian — on the Constitution and electoral integrity. There must also be a review of the laws of war and how to identify and deal with illegal orders. And it must reinforce “unity of command” to make perfectly clear to every member of the Defense Department whom they answer to. No service member should say they didn’t understand whom to take orders from during a worst-case scenario.

In addition, all military branches must undertake more intensive intelligence work at all installations. The goal should be to identify, isolate and remove potential mutineers; guard against efforts by propagandists who use misinformation to subvert the chain of command; and understand how that and other misinformation spreads across the ranks after it is introduced by propagandists.

Finally, the Defense Department should war-game the next potential post-election insurrection or coup attempt to identify weak spots. It must then conduct a top-down debrief of its findings and begin putting in place safeguards to prevent breakdowns not just in the military, but also in any agency that works hand in hand with the military.

The military and lawmakers have been gifted hindsight to prevent another insurrection from happening in 2024 — but they will succeed only if they take decisive action now.

The comments beneath the piece make it clear that the intended audience, the professional-managerial segment of the Democratic base, is getting the message. The most-liked of the nearly 7000 comments on the article proposes banning Fox News from mess halls and other common areas at military installations. Another commenter among the top five proposes charging Republican leaders with treason. “A good place to start would be to immediately remove all service members who have refused the lawful order to be vaccinated,” writes another top commenter. …

David H. Freedman, writing in the digital pages of Newsweek, spun up his own fantastical scenario about the upcoming, inevitable Trump uprising.

Millions of Angry, Armed Americans Stand Ready to Seize Power If Trump Loses in 2024, blared the headline. Freedman further waxed hysterical:

In 2020, 17 million Americans bought 40 million guns and in 2021 were on track to add another 20 million. If historical trends hold, the buyers will be overwhelmingly white, Republican and southern or rural.

America’s massive and mostly Republican gun-rights movement dovetails with a growing belief among many Republicans that the federal government is an illegitimate tyranny that must be overthrown by any means necessary. That combustible formula raises the threat of armed, large-scale attacks around the 2024 presidential election—attacks that could make the January 6 insurrection look like a toothless stunt by comparison. “The idea that people would take up arms against an American election has gone from completely far-fetched to something we have to start planning for and preparing for,” says University of California, Los Angeles law professor Adam Winkler, an expert on gun policy and constitutional law.

Melissa Block of NPR published a piece entitled The clear and present danger of Trump’s enduring Big Lie. Once again, the focus was on the need for urgent action, right now, to check the amorphous danger of an impending Donald Trump coup d’etat. After all, a “failed coup” is just practice for a “successful one”, according to a professor quoted in the NPR piece:

“It wasn’t enough, but next time, it could well be enough. And the fact that it’s been rehearsed makes me worry,” Yale professor Timothy Snyder says. “This is what historians and political scientists who study coups d’etat say. They say a failed coup is practice for a successful one.”

What we’re potentially looking at, Snyder warns, is nothing less than the end of the democratic United States as we’ve come to know it. …

The regime media has relentlessly pushed that phrase — “failed coup” — in the last few months.

A smattering of mainstream media headlines demonstrate the crescendo of hysteria and hyperbole emanating from the nation’s chattering class.

The choice of emphasis on January 6th as a “coup attempt” is central to the open conspiracy to ensure that it isn’t at all possible for Trump, or any other Republican, to fairly contest what could be a very crooked 2024 election.

In the last election, Democrat attorney Marc Elias masterminded the successful strategy to change the rules and election laws in battleground states to ensure a Joe Biden victory. It is no exaggeration to say that without Elias’s efforts, Donald Trump would likely still be president.

But the crafty lawyer Elias isn’t finished yet. Last year, Elias and his cronies worked to eliminate signature verification, allow ballots without a postmark, create shady drop boxes, and enable ballot harvesters to round up hundreds of ballots with little to no oversight. For the next election cycle, his strategy is even more banana republic.

Elias seeks to use lawfare to simply bar President Trump and his allies from the ballot entirely.

Over the past several weeks, Elias’ idea has gained momentum. Shortly after the new year, a group of eleven North Carolina voters filed a complaint to bar Rep. Madison Cawthorn from seeking reelection based on his supposed role in the January 6 “insurrection”. On January 22, The New York Times published UCLA law professor and former US attorney Harry Litman, who said the complaint presents a “strong case”. If this stunt makes any headway, expect it to be used again and again, with the left using ideologically corrupt judges and bureaucrats to try to bar the public from voting for the pro-Trump candidates it wants. …

The left is attempting a totalitarian power grab and present it as “protecting democracy”.  Kicking one’s opponent off the ballot, ideologically purging the military, and using that military to buttress a rigged political outcome? This is the kind of thing we would expect to witness happening in Zamunda, not America.

More and more blatantly, America’s ruling class is slowly making it obvious that to them “democracy” really just means they are in charge and the policies they support are adopted, the consent of the governed be damned. …

In 2024, Biden is the incumbent president, so unsurprisingly all the forecasts have changed. In 2020, when Democrats won thanks to last-minute rule changes often imposed by courts or unelected electoral commissions, this was entirely legitimate and in accord with “democracy”. In 2024, if Republicans win thanks to changes enacted by democratically-elected legislators and governors, their victory will be illegitimate, and Kamala Harris and the military will be tasked with swooping in to “save our democracy” extra-judicially extra-constitutionally.

Any demonstrations in support of Donald Trump or another Republican candidate will not only be declared invalid and illegitimate, they will be labeled a second “insurrection” justifying a devastating domestic military response against American citizens, Posse Comitatus Act be damned. Lastly, top Democratic legal experts are explicitly carving out the possible position that electing Trump or his closest allies to federal office is simply illegal under the 14th Amendment. …

The Democrats are trying to turn the federal republic into a one-party state; to establish permanent undemocratic rule by the Democratic Party.

That’s what they mean when the speak of “our democracy”.

So, while it does look highly probable that the Republicans will win the mid-term elections this year, don’t count on it.

The only things the Democrats are good at are cheating, lying, stealing, killing, enslaving and  – insurrection.

BedLaM 44

(A message in a bottle.)

I am old enough to remember happier times.

There used to be small shops and restaurants, cafes and bars all along the main street of our town. Not any more. A lot of the buildings are still there but the units are empty.  Everything we buy is delivered from warehouses which are fenced off and under military protection. The delivery drivers have an armed security guard riding with them and keeping beside them right to our front door. We must sign for everything every time and show ID.

Everything is very expensive. We buy much less food than we used to. The smaller children have never tasted meat or fish.

We are classed as “white” – even though two of us aren’t – so none of us in our part of this house gets relief money. You must be classed “of color” to get the government payout, unless you were ever in prison in the old days when people used to be punished for stealing or setting fire to buildings or killing police or taking children away from their parents. Then the credit you get is called “reparation payment”.

We cannot go for walks or bicycle rides. Our car was taken from us even though it was electric.

The schools are closed. They say the buildings are put to some use but we don’t know what. Children are taught by television and only officially sanctioned textbooks may be used. Formal home schooling is forbidden. Privately owned libraries have been confiscated, but there is a list of books you are allowed to own, up to a certain number.

All the prisons have been closed down, and the law courts, and the police offices and barracks. There are no police.

The hospitals are behind high fences and gates and are heavily guarded. Only ambulances are let in. You book an ambulance if you need to go to a hospital. The wait can be days, even weeks. The only exception is if you want an abortion. Then an ambulance comes for you in a few minutes. But if you lie so as to get to a hospital you are denied treatment. There is no emergency service. If people are injured in a street accident they are taken to a fire station for immediate first aid and then wait their turn for hospital treatment. Most firefighters are trained paramedics and do not fight fires.

If you work with your hands in a factory or as a repairperson, you are transported by bus. If you work at home you can only go outside into your own yard, provided it’s fenced in and has no back gate.

Every night, after curfew, we can hear gunshot like we used to hear traffic and talk and insects.

We are not allowed to have a gun in the house. We have put bars and grids over our doors and windows, and we have hoses ready in case of fire. But there are hours every day when we have no water. And hours when we have no electricity. Our old central heating and air-conditioning no longer work.

Our telephones will only get through to certain given numbers. Everything we send by email goes to the censors, whoever they are, and only some are sent on to the addresses we put on them. No messages to private people are allowed. We can send them to our representatives in the town or the state or Congress, or the IRS, or the boss of the government department we work for.

Voting is compulsory. Our ballot sheets are brought to us with the name of the person we are voting for already printed on them. All each of us needs to do is sign a sheet in front of the official who brings it. There is only one political party.

Very little traffic comes along our road. Just delivery vans, workplace buses, occasional ambulances, the military patrols, repair trucks, dog catchers, and the government inspectors’ armored cars. The inspectors call at every house a few times a week, at different times, sometimes at two or three in the morning. They are the highest paid workers. They are all “people of color”. (So are all the armed security guards.)

We do not know if it is the same everywhere in America, or anywhere else in the world. We only know what we are told during one news hour every evening: climate control data, the latest taxes and the dates by which they must be paid, information about the current epidemic and what we must do about it, whether masks, inoculations, isolation, and/or fines.

A security guard who came with a delivery person told me she was going on next to a house by the sea, so I asked her to throw this message in a bottle into the water. I’ve had it ready (except for this last paragraph) for days. I explained what it was. She seemed sympathetic. I think she will do me the favor, though I can’t be sure. If she takes it to the inspectors I’ll be in trouble. If you who are reading this are not an inspector, and are in another country, well, just so you know …

Posted under satire, United States by Jillian Becker on Friday, January 7, 2022

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