All they need is hope (giggle giggle) 229
The problem of the mass migration of Central Americans into the United States at “President” Biden’s invitation, is too big for him to handle.
President Donald Trump had put in place an array of disincentives to discourage would-be migrants from making the journey north. Biden removed Trump’s disincentives and suspended the construction of his border wall.
The Biden gang running this administration …
… has opened the door wide to illegal immigrants and encouraged mass migration to this country on the way to achieving their utopian vision of “No borders. No nations”. In the process, they are destroying piece by piece the rule of law that undergirds America’s constitutional republic.
Now there is a crisis at the border of Biden’s making, and he has no idea how to deal with it.
So he’s handed it off to his chosen “Vice President”, Kamala Harris.
In an article at Front Page, Joseph Klein includes this information:
Vice President Kamala Harris is Biden’s choice to work on stemming the flow of migrants from Central America.
She has neither visited the U.S.-Mexico border nor gone down to the Central American countries to study for herself the situation on the ground.
But she has a solution for the problem:
Harris recommended focusing on –
“An important four-letter word, which I hope always inspires us to do the work we do, and that word is ‘hope’. And in this regard, in – in our focus on the Northern Triangle, looking at the fact that we have an opportunity — as the United States of America, with the resources and with the will that we have — to provide the people with some hope that if they stay at home, help is on the way and they can have some hope that the opportunities and the needs that they have will be met in some way.”
Then she giggled.
She would like to hand the problem off, in her turn, to “our allies” [?] through that just and effective organization, the UN. That would be “some way“. Perhaps.
Harris did suggest internationalizing the effort to encourage economic development. “That includes reaching out to our allies, through the U.N.,” she said [and giggled].
Joseph Klein points out:
The United Nations is the wrong organization to rely upon, given its own corruption problems and its encouragement of more open borders.
When Harris was asked if she was planning a visit to the southern border, she replied that her job was to “lead the issue of dealing with root causes in the Northern Triangle”.
She was able to say which countries form “the Northern Triangle”! On that she had been briefed. She named them as Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
And she has a plan for them [she said, giggling].
Her plan is to give their people hope. Hope that they can survive in their homelands. Then they will not want to come to [what used to be] the United States.
Problem solved. Or will be. Perhaps. In some way.
Guffaw!
Religion and atheism argue in the labyrinth of good and evil 82
Dennis Prager is a brilliant advocate for conservatism. We agree with him on political issues.
But he is religious.
He writes, and we comment:
Conservatives often speak of Judeo-Christian values and how the current civil war in the United States and the rest of the West is essentially a battle between those values and the Left, which rejects Judeo-Christian values.
They are right.
But they rarely explain what Judeo-Christian values are. Yet, without an explanation, mentioning Judeo-Christian values is useless.
So, let me do that now.
First, a word about the term. Some Jews and Christians find the term confusing, if not objectionable, since Judaism and Christianity have different theologies. But no one speaks of Judeo-Christian theology, only of Judeo-Christian values.
See our critical discussion of “Judeo-Christian values” here.
Judeo-Christian values are essentially another term for biblical values. Judaism and Christianity are both based on the Old Testament—its God, its Ten Commandments, its admonition to love one’s neighbor as oneself, to love God, to lead a holy life, etc. Christians also believe in the New Testament, but only an opponent of Christianity would argue that the New Testament negates the values of the Old.
Here they are:
1) Objective moral standards come from God. As I have written and spoken about in a PragerU video and elsewhere, if there is no God who declares murder wrong, murder can be subjectively wrong but not objectively wrong. So, while there can certainly be nonbelievers who hold murder, stealing, and other actions wrong, without God, those are opinions, not moral facts. Without the God of the Bible, there are no moral facts.
No. People do not want to be hurt, robbed, or killed. For a society to make laws discouraging people from hurting robbing and killing is common sense, and such laws were made before any religion laid down moral rules as divine injunction.
Besides which – and in answer to all following points – no god ever spoke to a human being. All religious moral laws are human-made.
2) God judges our behavior, and we are therefore accountable to God for our behavior. Outside of a religious worldview, there is no higher being to whom we are morally accountable.
We need no “higher being” to judge us. We are responsible for what we do and bear the consequences of our behavior. As we say in our “Articles of Reason” (see under Pages in our margin), “justice may be elusive, but judgment is inescapable”.
3) Just as morality derives from God, so do rights. All men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” declares the Declaration of Independence.
If your “rights” are violated, will “God” come to your aid? Rights are granted by man-made law, and justice must be sought in accordance with laws.
4) The human being is uniquely precious. While the Bible repeatedly forbids cruel behavior to animals … only human beings are created in God’s image.
Presumably he means “God’s moral image”. In theJewish scriptures, God is vengeful and cruel to the innocent (“unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me”), puts temptation in the way of his creatures and then punishes them for succumbing to it (Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil), capricious (alternately making Pharaoh relent over the release of his Hebrew slaves and then “hardening his heart” again and keeping them, time after time), permits Satan to inflict terrible suffering on human beings to test their faithfulness to him (Job). And in history, the Jewish God allows millions of his “chosen people” to be tortured to death (the Holocaust). And the Christian God, according to his scriptures, made humankind eternally indebted to him for sacrificing himself for them – for which at the same time, and as a double burden of guilt, they must be held to blame. So – no. In both the Jewish and Christian bibles, the divinities set no model of good behavior.
5) The world is based on a divine order, meaning divinely ordained distinctions. Among these divine distinctions are: God and man, man and woman, human and animal, good and evil, and nature and God.
Distinctions – as between man and woman – exist by nature. That God is distinct from nature is true enough. He exists only in human minds as a supernatural being. Humanity made God, not God humanity. There is no reason to believe that nature exists because a supernatural being made it.
6) Human beings are not basically good. Therefore, the most important moral endeavor is making good people. Religious Jews and Christians understand that the greatest battle in life is with one’s nature. For the opponents of Judeo-Christian values, the greatest moral battle is not with one’s nature; it is with society (specifically, American society).
We agree that “human beings are not basically good”. But we say that self-interest requires their decent behavior and most people understand this. The law helps to make people good. It is fear of others and fear of the law that prompt restraint, not biblical values.
7) Precisely because we are not basically good, we must not trust our hearts to lead us to proper behavior. The road to hell is paved with good hearts. Feelings make us human, but they cannot direct our lives. This alone divides the Bible-based from those on the left.
It is a false dichotomy, the religious on the one side, “the left” on the other. Millions of Leftists are religious Christians and Jews.
8) All human beings are created in God’s image. Therefore, race is of no significance. We all emanate from Adam and Eve, whose race is never mentioned. That many religious people held racist views only testifies to the almost infinite ability of people to distort what is good.
This confirms that it is “God’s moral image” that is meant. The various races are characterized by physical differences.
9) Fear God, not man. Fear of God is a foundation of morality. In the Book of Exodus, Egyptian midwives were ordered by the Pharaoh to kill all newborn Hebrew boys. They disobeyed the divine king of Egypt. Why? Because “the midwives feared God”. In America today, more people fear the print, electronic and social media than fear God.
We advise a sensible fear of the media. And of kings and other tyrants.
10) Human beings have free will. In the secular world, there is no free will because all human behavior is attributed to genes and environment. Only a religious worldview, which posits the existence of a divine soul—something independent of genes and environment—allows for free will.
Whether we actually have free will or not, we have to live as if we have it, so to all intents and purposes, we have it. It has nothing to do with having “a divine soul”.
11) Liberty. America was founded on the belief that God wants us to be free. On the Liberty Bell is inscribed just one thing (aside from the name of the company that manufactured the bell). It is a verse from the Bible: “Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land Unto All the Inhabitants thereof.” The current assaults on personal liberty—unprecedented in American history—emanate from those who reject the Bible as their moral guide (including more than a few Jews and Christians who have joined the assault, having been indoctrinated with anti-religious views in high school and college).
We reiterate that millions of Leftists are religious. Belief in the supernatural does not logically bring liberty. Often quite the contrary (examples: the Inquisition’s Spain, Calvin’s Geneva).
When Judeo-Christian principles are abandoned, evil eventually ensues.
In the name of the Hebrew god in ancient times, and in the name of Christianity for many hundreds of years, great evil was done – mass slaughter, extreme cruelty, which surely are evils.
One doesn’t have to be a believer to acknowledge this. Many secular conservatives recognize that the end of religion in the West leads to moral chaos—which is exactly what we are witnessing today and exactly what we witnessed in Europe last century. When Christianity died in Europe, we got Communism, fascism, and Nazism. What will we get in America if Christianity and Judeo-Christian values die.
Communism, fascism, Nazism are also religions, without gods or with them. (Many Nazis worshipped Nordic gods.)
We are getting evil rule in America by many who say they are Christians. Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi claim to be “good Catholics”.
Leftism is a child of Christianity. (See our articles here and here.)
In conclusion: “Judeo-Christian values” or religious beliefs of any sort are not a cure for America’s calamity.
Victims of compassion 120
There are no asylums for the insane. Because the deeply immoral Michel Foucault (and others of his 1960s New Left revolutionary sort) said they are not nice.
How did it come about that European leftists could so easily change America?
Christopher F. Rufo writes at Jewish World Review:
In 1961, French theorist Michel Foucault re-envisioned the history of mental illness in his book Madness and Civilization, which documented the role of confinement, morality, and medicine from the Middle Ages to modernity. Foucault yielded some profound insights, but, like his radical-progressive American counterparts, he savaged the practice of confinement without proposing a substantive alternative.
What “profound insights”? We found none in his oeuvre.
Nearly 60 years later, it has become clear that the liberationists of the 1960s did not usher in a new era of freedom but something far darker. By reducing the entire cultural history of madness to one long progression of brutality, imprisonment, and false care, they laid the political groundwork for deinstitutionalization. At the same time, their insistence that mental illness was a “myth”, and that [although only a myth] it could be cured by new psychiatric drugs or would be transformed through political consciousness, turned out to be wrong.
Most needed is a renewed theoretical defense of the principles of the asylum — safety, rest, morality, and health — that Foucault and his compatriots demolished. This does not mean a return to the historical practices of the asylum but a revival of the spirit that animated the care and moral reasoning of the old retreats.
It is a moral scandal that our society, which has surpassed the material wealth of the nineteenth century 16-fold, cannot provide an adequate sanctuary for the mad and the unmoored. It’s easy to condemn the horrors of the old state hospitals, but the horrors of the invisible asylum may exceed them.
Do exceed them, as he has said above.
He describes some of the horrors of the “invisible asylum”, including an abandoned homeless mad woman devouring a dead rat.
And he relates this anecdote:
Patrol Sergeant Amy King and Officer Patrick Hutnik, who oversee the downtown area for the Olympia Police Department, take me on a tour. The officers are working their morning rounds, rousting awake people sleeping in doorways and asking them to move on. We see a slumped-over man who has soiled himself overnight, a man wrapped in cardboard complaining that his tent got stolen, and three women behind a barricade of shopping carts and filthy blankets. One of the women is tying off her arm with a blue rubber strap but loosens her grip when she sees us; the other two are barely cognizant, blinking at the officers and lifelessly nodding their heads.
The cast of characters in Sergeant King’s world is a difficult one. Hai air-fights through the streets because he believes monsters in the ground want to enter his body. Michael, an old man, calls 911 many times per day but doesn’t qualify as “gravely disabled”. Suburban Gary lives in a broken-down Chevy Suburban full of trash but refuses all offers of housing or services. And John, wheelchair-bound and covered in sores, huffs paint in front of officers because he knows he’s “untouchable” — the hospital will not take him, the prosecutor will not move on his criminal cases, and the psychiatrists cannot send him for involuntary treatment.
As they finish their morning rounds and head back to the station, Sergeant King and Officer Hutnik find a disheveled, shirtless man, passed out with his body extending into the street. Officer Hutnik politely wakes him, and the man, known as Angry Marty, begins screaming about zombies and food lines down at the mission. He manically gathers metal piping tubes from the ground and bangs them into a shopping cart. “There is going to be a mob that finally takes over this city!” he screams. “They’re going to kill you! They’re going to kill you!”
Under the current policy regime, this madness has become an eternal recurrence: the officers will see Marty again tomorrow morning, as he suffers through another drug-terror, and they must leave him to fend for himself.
As we head back to the station, we can still hear Marty’s cries in the distance.
“Is that compassion?” Sergeant King asks, disappearing into the doorway.
Compassion can be very cruel.
To our readers 77
We have have been informed today that we are banned from posting anything on our Facebook page for 60 days because of a joke we posted more than two months ago that hurt the feelings of the sensitive Fb anti-free-speech rulers.
Here’s the punishment order:
This draconian measure is probably in preparation for banning our page permanently.
The 60 days ban takes us past the date (end of March) when we warned that we would be abandoning our Facebook page because our reach is being continually reduced and we have been contradicted, rebuked, corrected, forbidden to boost our posts, stripped of hundreds of our “likes” and followers, frequently censored, and sometimes banned for days.
We promised to give our Fb readers another warning about when the abandonment would happen, and now we are unable to do so.
We have asked a few of our regular FB followers to try making a comment under one or several of our latest posts along these lines, or to this effect, to explain what has happened:
ON BEHALF OF TAC, AND AT THEIR REQUEST, I AM NOTIFYING ALL READERS THAT FACEBOOOK HAS IMPOSED A BAN ON TAC POSTS FOR 60 DAYS. THIS MEANS THAT FURTHER WARNING OF TAC’S INTENDED ABANDONMENT OF FACEBOOK BY THE END OF MARCH HAS NOW BEEN MADE IMPOSSIBLE.
TAC HOPES ITS FACEBOOK READERS WILL GO INSTEAD TO THE ATHEIST CONSERVATIVE WEBSITE, WHICH IN THE NEXT FEW WEEKS WILL BE REDESIGNED TO INCLUDE A DISCUSSION FORUM.
If that is already up (we cannot find out for ourselves by looking there), we would be grateful to any website reader for adding an endorsing comment under it.
Hitler and Catholicism 0
Ever since the Second World War, the Catholic Church has desperately tried to separate itself from the history of the Third Reich, and repudiate Adolf Hitler as one of its sons.
Before the war, in the early years of Hitler’s chancellorship, the Church in Germany did oppose him. But from 1939 onward, it collaborated with him; a fact which it has gone to great pains to try and disprove, without success.
We suspect it is embarrassed rather than appalled by what Hitler wrought without its interference, condemnation, or even the mildest official objection when the Final Solution, the genocide of the Jews, was implemented. We say this in consideration of the Catholic Church’s own totalitarian, anti-Semitic, and blood-soaked history.
Hitler was born into a Catholic family and was brought up as a Catholic by a pious mother. He was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church as an infant in April 1889. He was confirmed in 1904. He was a communicant and an altar boy. For a time in his adolescence he thought of becoming a priest.
In adulthood, his ardour for the Church cooled. He did not go to confession or attend mass. But he continued throughout his life to think of himself as a Christian, and as Dictator of the Third Reich he maintained the most cordial and co-operative relationship with the Vatican and the German primates.
The Church will not confess to this. Its revisionism, how it now presents its attitude to Hitler, is illustrated by this quotation from a letter dated November 21, 2002, written by David E. Utsler, the Information Specialist of an organization called Catholics United for the Faith, in Steubenville, Ohio:
It is true Hitler was born to Catholic parents. His father was reported to be lukewarm in his faith, but his mother was very devout. Adolf Hitler was confirmed in 1904, but did not often attend Mass. The question is not whether Hitler was a Catholic, but whether he practiced the Catholic faith and if his lifestyle accurately represented Catholicism. Clearly, the answer to that question is “no.”
Hitler was not a faithful son of the Church, docile to her teaching, but rather looked at the Church in a way that served his own ends. For example, in his Mein Kampf, he makes reference to the Catholic Church, because he perceived the Church to be a blueprint for the totalitarian state he wished to create. It is absurd to construe Hitler’s political delusions as an indictment against the Church. …
The real question is whether Hitler persevered in the faith of his baptism or turned from it. The historical record clearly shows that Hitler, in both word and deed, repudiated the faith of his baptism, so Hitler’s “Catholicism” is a non-issue.
How they would like it to be a “non-issue”! But while Hitler could certainly be described as a “lapsed Catholic”, and although the Church likes to claim now that his deeds demonstrate a repudiation of Catholicism, there is no record of his ever making a statement of renunciation.
What were Hitler’s religious beliefs?
The following information and quotations come from an essay by Chris Thiefe, an American atheist of German descent:
As Hitler approached boyhood he attended a monastery school. (On his way to school young Adolf daily observed a stone arch which was carved with the monastery’s coat of arms bearing a swastika.) …
In MeinKampf he wrote about his love for the church and the clergy. “I had excellent opportunity to intoxicate myself with the solemn splendor of the brilliant church festivals. As was only natural, the abbot seemed to me, as the village priest had once seemed to my father, the highest and most desirable ideal.”…
He was never excommunicated nor condemned by his church. …
In a document dated 22 July 1933, he wrote: “The fact that the Vatican is concluding a treaty with the new Germany [concerning German tax revenues sent to the Vatican] means the acknowledgement of the National Socialist state by the Catholic Church. This treaty shows the whole world clearly and unequivocally that the assertion that National Socialism is hostile to religion is a lie.” …
The Church preached Nazi ideals in their sermons and “in turn Hitler placed Catholic teachings in public education”.
This photo depicts Hitler with Archbishop Cesare Orsenigo, the papal nuncio in Berlin. It was taken On April 20, 1939, when Orsenigo celebrated Hitler’s birthday. The celebrations were initiated by Pacelli (Pope Pius XII) and became a tradition.
In the 1920s, Hitler’s German Workers’ Party adopted a 25 point program. Point 24 stated:
“We demand liberty for all religious denominations in the State, so far as they are not a danger to it and do not militate against the morality and moral sense of the German race. The Party, as such, stands for positive Christianity, but does not bind itself in the matter of creed to any particular confession…”
The Church alleges that Hitler was an atheist, or a pagan, or was interested in mystical cults and occultism.
But he was positively intolerant of atheism:
“’We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out’.” -Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Berlin on 24 Oct. 1933.
And, Thiefe writes, “the following words from Hitler show his disdain for atheism, and pagan cults, and reveal the strength of his Christian feelings”:
“’National Socialism is not a cult-movement– a movement for worship; it is exclusively a ‘volkic’ political doctrine based upon racial principles. In its purpose there is no mystic cult, only the care and leadership of a people defined by a common blood-relationship… We will not allow mystically- minded occult folk with a passion for exploring the secrets of the world beyond to steal into our Movement. Such folk are not National Socialists, but something else– in any case something which has nothing to do with us. At the head of our programme there stand no secret surmisings but clear-cut perception and straightforward profession of belief. But since we set as the central point of this perception and of this profession of belief the maintenance and hence the security for the future of a being formed by God, we thus serve the maintenance of a divine work and fulfill a divine will— not in the secret twilight of a new house of worship, but openly before the face of the Lord… Our worship is exclusively the cultivation of the natural, and for that reason, because natural, therefore God-willed. Our humility is the unconditional submission before the divine laws of existence so far as they are known to us men.” -Adolf Hitler, in Nuremberg on 6 Sept.1938.
Of course Nazism itself was a mystic cult – as that statement convincingly confirms. And the cult was not Christian. But the Christian God was never dethroned in Hitler’s mind.
Testimony to this comes from his architect friend, Albert Speer, who wrote in his book Inside the Third Reich:
“Around 1937, when Hitler heard that at the instigation of the party and the SS vast numbers of his followers had left the church because it was obstinately opposing his plans, he nevertheless ordered his chief associates, above all Goering and Goebbels, to remain members of the church. He too would remain a member of the Catholic Church, he said, although he had no real attachment to it. And in fact he remained in the church until his suicide.“
The Catholic Church continues to do its utmost to exonerate Pope Pius XII, pleading that he saved some Jewish lives. But the hard truth remains that the Church stood by as Hitler did his worst.
Jillian Becker September 17, 2010
Whiteness punished? 120
Are the teachers and school administrators we wrote about in our post Thinking skin (January 24, 2021), and the writers Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi, and the New York Times, and all those who promote anti-white racism, accessories in the murder of three-year-old Victoria Rose Smith?
The teachers do that in their classrooms, DiAngelo does it with her book White Fragility and Ibram X. Kendi does it with his book How to be AntiRacist, and the NYT does by promoting both books and publishing many columns to the same effect. The whole of international Left does it.
Their insistence that all whites are guilty of cruelty to blacks, so all blacks have cause to hate whites, has consequences.
Victoria Rose Smith, the three-year-old white child beaten to death allegedly by the black couple who adopted her, could be one of their victims.
The Blaze reports:
A woman who criticized “white privilege” on social media was charged with the child abuse murder of her 3-year-old foster child, who was white.
The disturbing story unfolded in Simpsonville, South Carolina.
Police allege that Ariel Robinson, 29, and her husband, Jerry Robinson, 34, inflicted a “series of blunt force injuries” on their adopted child, Victoria Rose Smith. The two were charged with homicide by child abuse.
The parents called 911 on Jan. 15 to report that the child was unresponsive. When medical professionals arrived, they immediately suspected child abuse.
[Victoria] was taken to a hospital where she was pronounced dead.
[Ariel Robinson posted social-media] entries decrying “white privilege” while talking about her three adopted children, all of whom were white.
Unless the guilt of Jerry and Ariel Robinson is proved in court, we cannot know that they killed Victoria. It is possible one or both of the child’s own white brothers, also adopted by the Robinsons, did it; or one or both of the two black boys who are the couple’s natural sons. Perhaps it was not done out of race hatred. Perhaps one or more of the boys did it out of jealousy because they felt the parents treated the little girl more leniently or indulgently than they treated them.
But if the motive of the killer or killers was anti-white racism, then those who teach it in schools, and DiAngelo, and Kendi, and the NYT, and the entire Left, are guilty of the murder.
WE ACCUSE them of murderous intent now, and the predictable mass murder of whites and not-whites in the age of anti-white racism that they are ushering in.
*
We tried to post the following abstract of Thinking skin, our post of January 24, 2021 – incorporating quotations from an article by Katherine Kersten at the American Experiment – on our Facebook page, but Facebook did not allow it.
The Appalling Racism of the Left
Racism is only wrong when whites judge people according to their race. When not-whites do it, it is the paramount principle of the ideology of the Left, now forcibly taught by both whites and not-whites. The doctrine of “racial equity” advances in the name of justice and harmony. Yet its fundamental premise is deeply divisive: it splits the human species into two hostile camps, white and non-white. Whites, it teaches, are perpetual oppressors and non-whites are perpetual victims. Racial equity instruction warns children they can take no pride in their accomplishments because these are merely a function of “white privilege”. It insists they routinely harm their non-white classmates by committing micro-aggressions of which they aren’t even aware. It’s a no-win situation: if they think they aren’t racist, this just proves how racist they are. The message is that white skin is a source of self-deception, guilt and shame. The idea that people’s skin color doesn’t matter is, according to the indoctrinators, actually “whiteness-at-work”, a “socialization strategy that perpetuates a racist status quo”. Not-white children are told they bear no responsibility for their behavior. They are urged to feel anger and resentment. All that matters about you is the color of your skin. Skin color is the measure of all worth, the desideratum of morality. White is bad; not-white is good.
Next, the wrecking of our language 155
It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought … should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. – George Orwell, 1984
*
Ideologues and activists of the Left have wrecked everything in our Western civilization as they roll on to the moment – very close now – when they can destroy civilization itself.
The record of their destruction must be headed by the annihilation of hundreds of millions of human beings.
In addition, they have succeeded in changing for the worse everything that makes people’s lives worth living and their freedom protected, including: the plastic arts, architecture, music, the family, free speech, the press, publishing, broadcasting, theatre, films, higher middle and lower education, judiciaries, civil services, intelligence services, armed services, law enforcement, representative government …
And now, in America, the English language.
And it’s not just about forcing the use of silly made-up [by whom?] pronouns – though that is there and de rigueur. (See chart below. Take special note of “they likes themselves” and understand that grammar is a tool of white oppression and must be abandoned.) It’s a banning of words; words that sin against a current obsession of Leftist ideologues; words that convey the sex of a person referred to.
Using George Orwell’s novel 1984 as an instruction manual, they are now decreeing the vocabulary that will be accessible to future generations, selected and controlled so that no one can articulate, or even think, thoughts that are not approved by Big Comrade and nir/vis/eir/hir/zir/xyr scaly batwinged cohorts.
Alana Mastrangelo writes at Breitbart:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Rules Committee Chairman James McGovern (D-MA) unveiled the rules for the 117th Congress … which contain “future-focused” proposals, including the elimination of gendered terms, such as “father, mother, son, and daughter”.
“This package, which will be introduced and voted on once the new Congress convenes, includes sweeping ethics reforms, increases accountability for the American people, and makes this House of Representatives the most inclusive in history,” said the House Committee on Rules in a statement.
The Democrats will not confine themselves to legislating law; they will legislate morality. That is what they have chosen as their chief function.
By “morality” understand “immorality”. (On George Orwell’s model of “Ministry of Truth” being the bureau of official lies.)
By “inclusive” understand “exclusive“.
House Speaker Pelosi went on to say she is “pleased to join Chairman Jim McGovern in introducing this visionary rules package, which reflects the views and values of the full range of our historically diverse House Democratic Majority.”
By “historically” understand “now”.
“Thanks to the leadership of Chairman McGovern and our Members, Democrats have crafted a package of unprecedented, bold reforms, which will make the House more accountable, transparent, and effective in our work to meet the needs of the American people,” said Pelosi.
By “bold” understand “compulsory”.
By “accountable” understand “arbitrary”. By “transparent” understand “secretive”. By “effective” understand “oppressive”.
“These future-focused proposals reflect our priorities as a Caucus and as a Country,” the House Speaker added.
Within the proposals are the creation of the “Select Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth,” which would require Congress to “honor all gender identities by changing pronouns and familial relationships in the House rules to be gender neutral.”
In clause 8(c)(3) of rule XXIII, gendered terms, such as “father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, nephew, niece, husband, wife, father-in-law, mother-in-law, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, stepfather, stepmother, stepson, stepdaughter, stepbrother, stepsister, half brother, half sister, grandson, or granddaughter” will be removed.
In their place, terms such as “parent, child, sibling, parent’s sibling, first cousin, sibling’s child, spouse, parent-in-law, child-in-law, sibling-in-law, stepparent, stepchild, stepsibling, half-sibling, or grandchild” will be used instead.
Learn this chart. (Don’t quibble about the errors – wrong words in the headings, bad grammar in the examples.) There will be a test.
Triumph and disappointment 63
President Trump is strong, but the Big State is stronger.
Bruce Bawer finds consolation in historical precedents for the political disaster happening now. They are interesting, but we omit them from our quotation of his article at Front Page, being concerned for the moment only with the great disappointment he describes:
This year’s apparently successful election fraud … was not a stand-alone event but the culmination of several years of Democratic chicanery, beginning with the effort to destroy Trump’s campaign and continuing with the attempt to bring down his presidency. During these years, one public figure after another was held up to us as a hero and then shown to be yet another Big State sewer rat. …
Remember being assured by people you trusted that Bill Barr and John Durham would get to the bottom of the Russia hoax? The other day, when Texas AG Ken Paxton took his election-fraud case against four other states to the Supreme Court, were you among those who expected the three Trump appointees to join Alito and Thomas in stopping the steal?
Yes, the Trump administration has yielded one triumph after another. But living through it has also meant experiencing one crushing disappointment after another. It’s been hard not to feel that the swamp was too deep even for Trump to drain, and that, by dreaming otherwise, we were being hopelessly naïve.
For heaven’s sake, not only did Barr, after promising to deliver a long-overdue reckoning, drag his heels on the Russia probe; it now turns out that during the entire campaign season he’s known about investigations into the Biden clan that, if made public, would almost certainly have reduced voter support for Joe to a point that would’ve made the election steal impossible.
We feel duped. Deflated. Stunned in 2016 by Trump’s victory, we’re even more stunned in 2020 to see victory snatched from our president and handed to a senile, China-owned mediocrity.
We now face the prospect of an inauguration at which Joe and Hunter, Bill and Hill, Barack and Michelle – all of whom should be in prison – will be celebrating their joint triumph over Trump. …
We shouldn’t let this election steal … make us feel that a golden age of morality has given way … to an era of perfidy and lies. …Nor should we feel disappointed in Trump if he fails to overcome the election steal. He’s accomplished a remarkable amount, but expecting the superhuman from him is neither fair to him nor good for us. …
Our country’s Founders … in their wisdom, sought to fashion a government that would, in the face of our species’ moral frailty, stand a chance not only of enduring in the long term but also of making possible, from one generation to the next, the survival of liberty.
But the preservation of that liberty depends on us. “Freedom,” Ronald Reagan famously proclaimed, “is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
Indeed. At this admittedly strange and disturbing historical moment, it’s important for all Americans of good faith to rise above any self-pitying or (heaven forfend) nihilistic sense of lost innocence that we might feel, to embrace with hope and heart our role as the Constitution’s current custodians, and – for the sake of our progenitors and our posterity – recommit ourselves to our obligation to right our beloved ship of State when she’s been buffeted, or worse, by the waves of malfeasance and mendacity.
Stirring stuff. But a gang of crooks has been wangled into power by the Big State in order to discard the Constitution and replace it with a Great Reset, a new world order, an agenda that renders our Constitutionally recognized rights no longer “unalienable”.
They will if they can scuttle the ship of State. Destroy America.
What will, what can, heart and hope do to save it?