You want to become a scientist, an engineer, a mathematician, a doctor? Okay, but you have first to become a racist, and if you’re white, a penitent, and if you’re black, a victim.

The re-education camps of America, aka the universities, have a name for their introductory course of indoctrination for newcomers: the First-Year Experience, commonly referred to as FYE.

John Tierney reports and comments at City Journal:

The programs often start with a “common read”, a book sent to everyone the summer before school starts, and proceed with lectures, discussion groups, seminars, courses, exercises, field trips, art projects, local activism, and whatever else the schools will fund. The programs are typically run not by professors but by “cocurricular professionals”—administrators lacking scholarly credentials who operate outside the regular curriculum. They don’t need to master an academic discipline or impart an established body of knowledge. They create a cocurriculum of what they want students to learn, which usually involves a great deal of talk about “diversity” and “inclusion”.

These professionals seem to lean even further left than the faculty, and in some ways they have more influence. They get to the students early, before classes begin, and they’re inescapable. By choosing your courses carefully, you can avoid the progressive sermonizing that passes for scholarship in some departments, but everyone has to undergo the orientation and first-year programs. You may have come to study computer science or literature or biochemistry, but first you’ll have to learn about social justice, environmental sustainability, gender pronouns, and microaggressions. You may have been planning to succeed by hard work, but first you’ll have to acknowledge your privilege or discover your victimhood. If you arrived at college hoping to broaden your intellectual horizons, you’ll quickly be instructed which ideas are off-limits. …

When administrators of these first-year programs convened this year, they chose to be addressed by author Julie Lythcott-Haims.

As an undergraduate at Stanford, she had been required to take a course called “Western Culture”, but she and other students succeeded in eliminating the requirement by joining with Jesse Jackson in protests where they chanted, “Hey-hey, ho-ho. Western Culture’s got to go!”

In Africa the doctrine is known as Boko Haram.

She went on to Harvard Law School and a brief career in corporate law before returning to Stanford as the dean of freshmen, which enabled her to put her cultural philosophy into practice.

As dean of freshmen, she insisted on choosing books that “fostered a sense of community and belonging”. And now, after leaving academia, she has written just such a book herself, Real American, which she calls “a post-poetry memoir”.

She said in her address:

Mine is a memoir of being black and biracial in a country where black lives weren’t meant to matter. … I am privileged. I have privilege that I’m aware of and more privilege that I don’t even know.

The daughter of a white British immigrant and black American doctor who was once assistant surgeon general of the United States, she grew up in good neighborhoods and thrived at school academically and socially. In high school, she was a cheerleader and president of her class as well as the student council. But despite those successes, despite the degrees from Stanford and Harvard, despite the well-paying jobs and a bestseller she published on how to raise children, her memoir is a saga of oppression.

She has discovered the awful cloud behind all those silver linings by dredging up an incident from her high school days. The great pivot point of the book, the moment that would haunt her for decades, was her discovery of graffiti on a birthday card that a friend had taped to her locker. Someone, presumably a classmate jealous of her achievements, had defaced the card by scrawling the N-word, misspelled as “Niger”. 

This is the story of how despite all that privilege and opportunity, America made me loathe my black self, my brown skin …

… she tells the audience. It’s not clear why one semiliterate teenage bigot should represent America, but Lythcott-Haims quickly segues into denunciations of the police, Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, and whites in general, to repeated applause from the (mostly white) audience. She explains why she has left a wide margin on each page of the book (“As a black woman I do not have access to the full page”) and reads a passage: “You think your whiteness makes you better than the rest of us. You make us your scapegoat. Your excuse for your violent rage.”

What violent rage, we ask rhetorically, would that be?

In her memoir, the well-meaning liberal whites are continually guilty of unintentional slights. Don’t try suggesting that she overlook them, because she classifies “Get over it” as yet another microaggression. The nonliberals in the book are simply evil. When Peter Thiel and other classmates of hers launched the conservative Stanford Review, she is “scared to death of these unhooded whites printing their disdain for our existence”. When she sees Clint Eastwood speak to an empty chair representing President Obama at the Republican National Convention, she believes that it “symbolizes the chair underneath the Black man about to be hanged from a Southern tree”. 

Yes, it’s all part of her mission to “foster a sense of community and belonging”, as long as the community doesn’t include any Republicans.

The writing is dreadful, but you have to give her credit for knowing her audience. The first-year administrators give her a standing ovation, and afterward they wonder to one another what she charges for a campus speech. The intercollegiate competition for black authors has driven up their speaking fees …

Last year, when the University of Oregon assigned Between the World and Me for the common read, it paid Ta-Nehisi Coates $41,500 for a campus appearance (while also meeting his contractual requirement to be supplied with Nature Valley Oats and Dark Chocolate granola bars), and afterward students complained that the university hadn’t gotten its money’s worth. Coates was scheduled for a speech and question-and-answer session lasting 75 minutes, but he left the stage after 40 minutes without taking questions. Somehow, it didn’t feel very inclusive.

For colleges that can’t afford Coates, the first-year conference is a chance to scout for cheaper alternatives. Besides Lythcott-Haims, there’s another autobiographer, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, who gets a warm reception for her book When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir.

The administrators pack another ballroom to hear about All American Boys, a novel written to protest the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. The protagonist is an amalgam of the two martyrs, with a few details changed. Instead of pounding a white man’s head against the sidewalk, as Martin did, or shoplifting and then assaulting a police officer, as Brown did, this young African-American man is a peaceful, law-abiding customer at a convenience store, wrongly accused of shoplifting by a white police officer who slams his head against the pavement. The novel’s coauthors, one white and one black, extol their collaboration as a model for how the races can learn to communicate with each other—or at least communicate in one direction, as the white author, Brendan Kiely, tells the audience. “The most important thing I can do as a white man is listen, listen, listen to the truth coming from communities of color across the country,” he says. “I especially want to reckon with whiteness. Because as a white person I can’t talk about racism or dismantle the system that supports it or eradicate racism itself without first grappling with whiteness. It is whiteness that perpetuates racism.”

How does a white person “reckon with whiteness”? What must he do to “grapple with whiteness”? Presumably, that’s what FYE teaches you.

Clearly, since “whiteness” is what “perpetuates racism”, and since white people cannot be anything but white, the only way to bring about the elimination of racism is by extinguishing the white race.

The disadvantage of the social surgery would be the loss of the most important academic subject, the laying off of thousands of “diversity” officers, the obsolescence of hundreds of books, and – well, what do you do when your enemy vanishes? Whom shall you hate for all your frustrations? Whom blame for your failures?

While the days of hate last, while accusation, shame, guilt, obsequiousness can still be freely indulged, enjoy the presence of whiteness while ye may! Carpe diem.

The crowd applauds and listens raptly as Kiely sketches the possibilities for using this book on campus. “We should be talking about race consciousness in all our disciplines of higher learning,” he tells the administrators. “You can talk about it in your math classes. You can talk about in your education classes. You can talk about it in your humanities classes.”

He doesn’t explain the connection between calculus and Trayvon Martin, but then, he doesn’t have to. This audience knows that racism is the all-consuming topic in higher education. It has been the most popular theme for common-read books for the last three years, according to the National Association of Scholars (NAS), which has tracked these programs across the country for the past decade. The latest report by the NAS, a group dedicated to reviving traditional liberal arts education (and a haven for non-progressives in academia), analyzes some 350 schools’ common-read books and finds a “continuing obsession with race” as well as an “infantilization of students”.

The obsession depends on the infantilization.

Can real education ever be resurrected? Will a deeply humiliating defeat of the race-obsessed Left in the forthcoming elections restore common sense to the institutions of learning – and save the white race?

Many young voters, it seems, believe they really can have free education, free health care, free housing, and a guaranteed job at a sweet wage. “If that’s what Socialism will bring us, then let’s have it,” many of them are saying.

It is the responsibility of the conservative Right to impress on them that Socialism has never worked, that it cannot work, that under no circumstances and under no guiding hands can it ever possibly work. Far from landing them on rock-candy mountain with impressive degrees, strong bodies, neat houses, and a life of security and luxury, it will dump them in a bog of poverty, stagnation, sorrow, and serfdom.

Free goodies. That’s what the now-far-left Democratic Party is offering them. It is all the Democrats have to offer: a lie. And if the electorate is conned by it into putting them in power, its the steep way down to Venezuela for all of us.

If they are defeated in the November 2018 elections – ideally overwhelmingly defeated – a terrible fate will be avoided, and, in splendid addition, the Left may wither away and the advance of Islam may be stopped.

One way or another, we are entering a different world.

We select some passages from an article by Virgil at Breitbart about the passing of a man and an era:

Perhaps the most revealing moment in the week-long media extravaganza over John McCain’s death came on September 1, when Meghan McCain, daughter of the late senator, chose to use her “eulogy” to rip into Donald Trump.

Here’s how The Washington Post set the scene:

Trump was absent and his name never invoked, but the entire service was animated by a sustained rebellion against the president’s worldview and his singular brand of politics.

“We gather here to mourn the passing of American greatness,” she said, gritting her teeth through the tears. “The real thing, not cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice he gave so willingly, nor the opportunistic appropriation of those who lived lives of comfort and privilege while he suffered and served.”

Okay, we get it: Ms. McCain hates Trump so much that she has to grit her teeth when she talks about him.  Trump and his supporters already knew that, of course. …

She is an expert in telling the Establishment what it wants to hear — and the Establishment will hugely reward her for her “courage”. Once again, the Post, that reliable reflector of Beltway conventional wisdom, sets the scene:

When she fiercely declared that “the America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always great,” the generals, senators, former presidents and other world leaders who filled the pews burst into applause.

We might linger over those last words: “burst into applause”.  It’s worth recalling that this was supposed to be a funeral service, and yet Ms. McCain turned it into a kind of political rally for the Establishment and for what it sees as the “good old days”.  Ah, for the good old days of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, and … John McCain.  The days when the Establishment, for sure, was great — or at least greatly in charge.

Yes, in the Establishment’s collective mentality, the good old days were the time when the U.S. border was open, when trade deals were easy, and foreign wars were being fought.

The Establishment, of course, never cared that, as a result, social chaos was increasing, wages were declining,  regions were de-industrializing, and young Heartlanders — not Establishmentarians, of course — were getting killed and maimed overseas.  So when Meghan McCain defined those days as “greatness”, well, that was what the Establishmentarians came to hear.   She was patting the big shots on the back, and they were glad for the pat.  And John McCain, of course, was the champion of that sort of Beltway bonhomie — and, especially, the bipartisan “fun” of foreign wars.

Except when he was running for re-election in Arizona, McCain made no apologies for any of his views, even as they ultimately drove down his approval rating, among Arizona Republicans, to just 20 percent — with a whopping 68 percent disapproving.  Indeed, according to another poll, McCain was the third-most unpopular Senator in the nation.

Yet to the Establishment, such unpopularity is a badge of honor; that is, if a political figure is willing to “stand up” to the dopey masses, well, that’s a good thing.  So it’s little wonder that John McCain received the John F. Kennedy “Profile in Courage” award, that annual liberal smug-fest.  And now, maybe Meghan McCain will win it, too.

Indeed, Ms. McCain won extra points with the Establishment by snubbing Sarah Palin. The former Alaska governor had been John McCain’s running mate in 2008, and had delivered what’s commonly regarded as the greatest vice presidential acceptance speech in modern memory. So if the McCain-Palin ticket lost in ’08, it certainly wasn’t her fault.

And yet to the Establishment — including the many McCain campaign staffers who now make their living on MSNBC — Palin was hopelessly deplorable. She was too much the populist and no kind of elitist. So by not inviting Palin to the service, the McCains made it clear that they wanted nothing to do with the Deplorables, now and forever. Thus we see that class warfare is alive and well within the Republican Party — assuming, that is, that the McCains still think of themselves as Republicans at all. …

The Establishment will cheer for Meghan McCain, and its handmaidens in the MSM were happy to make the whole of last week into a McCain Mediathon.  And yet at the same time, the Establishment is deathly afraid that it can’t put the old humpty-dumpty back together. … John McCain really is gone.

The American Establishment might know, down deep, that it has screwed up in its hubris — although, of course, that can never be admitted publicly. Can’t show weakness to the proles!

Nevertheless, the Establishment is visibly growing nervous. In its jitteriness, it is clapping wildly, and inappropriately, for those who still hold to the fading faith — such as the McCain family.

… The Establishment is raging against the dying of the light. … The elites know that this is their political twilight and that dusk is giving way to nightfall.

… Establishmentarians fear, most of all, that a new and different sun is rising.

Will it go on rising? Will it be a new day?

Or will the Left win and bring down a very long night?

“Free” government benefits are the most expensive goods in the world.

The Democratic Socialist Party – formerly the Democratic Party – is trying to win votes by promising free health care for all.

Supposing a national health service were to be introduced into the USA, what would it cost?

Investor’s Business Daily reports and comments:

Democrats have been falling over themselves to endorse Bernie Sanders’s government takeover of health care. Maybe they should have taken a closer look at his “Medicare for all” plan before signing up. The gargantuan price tag is just one of its many terrible flaws.

Last year, 16 Senators, including three presidential hopefuls, co-sponsored Sanders’s “Medicare for all” bill. And earlier this month, more than 70 Democrats signed on to form a “Medicare for all” caucus. Support for the bill is now something of a litmus test for Democratic hopefuls.

Do they have any idea what they’re endorsing?

A new study out Monday from George Mason University’s Mercatus Center finds that the Sanders plan would add $32.6 trillion to federal spending in its first 10 years, with costs steadily rising from there. That closely matches other studies — including one by the liberal Urban Institute — that looked at the Sanders plan.

To put this in perspective, “Medicare for all” would nearly double the size of the already bloated federal government.

Doubling corporate and individual income taxes wouldn’t cover the costs.

Even this [estimate of $32.6 trillion over 10 years] is wildly optimistic. To get to this number, author Charles Blahous had to make several completely unrealistic assumptions about savings under Sanders’ hugely disruptive plan.

The first is a massive cut in payments to providers. Sanders wants to apply Medicare’s below-market rates across the board, which would amount to a roughly 40% cut in payments to doctors and hospitals. Blahous figures this will save hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

Democrats are also apparently unaware that “Medicare for all” would be a more expensive than anything that exists anywhere else in the world … 

Sanders’ plan would eliminate all out-of-pocket expenses for medical, dental and vision care. The only exception would be a small copay for brand-name drugs. …

There is no industrialized country in the world that does this.

Even in the Scandinavian countries that Bernie Sanders directs us to admire (rather than Stalinist Russia which is actually his ideal), “people pay as much as 30% of their nations’ health costs out-of-pocket”. 

And – perhaps surprisingly to American communists –

In Communist China, almost a third of health spending is out-of-pocket.

In Bernie’s USA, the illusion of all medical treatment being “free” would need to be maintained. But how? After all, doctors cannot work for nothing. Hospitals have running costs.

Because Sanders would eliminate prices entirely from health care, the only way to control health spending would be to slap stiff price controls on doctors, hospitals and drugs, or ration care.

Rationing is inevitable in any government-run health service. Administrators have to decide how to allocate resources. When you are in control of your own medical decisions, you decide what treatment, what drugs you are able or prepared to pay for. When the state decides for you, it will not consult your preferences. It will make kill-or-cure, life-or-death decisions for you. The “death panels” that Sarah Palin warned against will determine how long you live; and, for as long as you live, in what state of health.   

Here’s what health care in the U.S. would look like as a result:

There would be chronic shortages of doctors nationwide. Hospital overcrowding would be epidemic. Waits for everything from hip replacements to cataract surgery to cancer treatments would be extensive. Drug innovation would come to a virtual standstill. And there would be endless fights over the size of the government’s health budget, along with massive amounts of waste, fraud and abuse.

How do we know this? Because this is precisely what’s happened in countries that have already gone down the “Medicare for all” road.

In Canada, the average wait time for a hip replacement is nearly two years in some provinces. Patients with cataracts can end up waiting a year for surgery. The UK has fewer doctors, nurses and hospital beds per capita than any other industrialized nation, and is in a state of almost constant crisis.

“Almost constant crisis”? There is no break, no pause, no relief for the briefest of moments from the crisis that is the National Health Service of Great Britain.

Here at home, the Veterans Health Administration — once touted by the left as a model of socialized medicine — has seen deadly delays and massive corruption, even as its budget ballooned in size.

Almost 10% of Medicare spending today is for what the government euphemistically calls “improper payments”, but anyone else would label it waste. Extend this across the entire health care system and Sanders’s “Medicare for all” would result in some $400 billion a year in “improper payments”.

But the biggest problem with “Medicare for all” — and any plan to socialize medicine — is its underlying assumption. Namely, that a handful of government central planners can manage trillions of dollars’ worth of resources better than hundreds of millions of people making trillions of decisions every day in the free market. They can’t.

We already know central planning never works, since it has miserably failed where it’s been tried. It didn’t work in the Soviet Union. It doesn’t work in North Korea or Cuba, and it’s causing untold misery in Venezuela.

A socialist government – which is what the government would be that saves or executes its subjects by controlling their health care – is always, necessarily, inescapably, one big Death Panel.

“Death, be not proud, though some have called thee/ Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so” – John Donne.

No, Death, thou art FUN. Thou art COOL.

Thou art CHATTER. Thou art ART.

Nothing to be gloomy about.

Where else this revisionism but in the New York Times? By John Leland:

It was the party of a lifetime, and Shatzi Weisberger wouldn’t have missed it for the world. After all, it was her funeral. Or, as she pronounced it, her FUN-eral.

“Come on in,” she said. “There’s lots of food. And a coffin that people are decorating.”

And so it was that a hundred or so people gathered in the common room of an Upper West Side apartment building recently to eat, sing, mingle and hear Ms. Weisberger’s thoughts about death and dying.

“I hope we have fun,” she said.

A former nurse, Ms. Weisberger wore white slacks, white sneakers and a bright floral print blouse. A biodegradable cardboard coffin in one corner bore handwritten messages in colored marker: “Go Shatzi! (but not literally)”; “death is only the beginning”; “Shatzi, many happy returns … as trees, as bumble bees, as many happy memories.”

Ms. Weisberger worked the crowded room. “I have been studying and learning about death and dying, and I want to tell people what I’ve learned,” she said. “Some people are coming because they love me, and some people are coming because they’re curious about what the hell it’s about.”

Is there something to be learned about death other than it is the end of your existence? If Ms. Weisberger revealed something new about it, the NYT does not give it away.

At 88, Ms. Weisberger has found a second calling in what has been labeled the positive death movement — a scattering of mostly women who want to break the taboos around discussions of death.

Taboos? What taboos? How many characters get shot dead every minute on TV? In most Hollywood movies?

Some connect through blogs or YouTube channels; some gather at monthly death cafes; … 

Will you have death with your coffee?

… some find more institutional grounding at the DeathLab at Columbia University’s architecture school or the Art of Dying Institute at the Open Center, a six-month program touching on everything from green burials (bonus: they’re cheap) to certified training for end-of-life doulas.

“Doulas”? Women servants.

Nearly a million people have downloaded the starter kit for the Conversation Project, a guide to discussing plans for the end of life. Others use the popular WeCroak app, which sends five daily reminders that we are all going to die.

All share a common idea: that Western culture has become too squeamish about talking about death, and that the silence impoverishes the lives leading up to it.

Yet again, Western culture is at fault. In better cultures, death is nothing to be “squeamish” about.

So chat about it to enrich your life.

Ellen Goodman, a retired newspaper columnist who started the Conversation Project after caring for her mother at the end of life, likened the foment to the earlier movement for natural childbirth. “Birth was perceived as a medical event, and then in came the women’s movement and ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves’,” she said. “It wasn’t doctors who changed the way we give birth in America. It was women who said that giving birth was a human event. I think that we’re trying to do that now. Dying is a human experience. We’re trying to put the person back into the center of the experience.”

True, dying is a human experience – if it it isn’t too sudden to be experienced. If you experience your dying, is there any way you cannot be “at the center” of it?

Ms. Weisberger is by no means a morbid person. She sings in the Brooklyn Women’s Chorus and shops at the new Trader Joe’s in her neighborhood.

If you sing in a chorus and shop at Trader Joe’s, you cannot be a morbid person?

But a few years ago, after sitting with a friend who was dying of cancer, she realized that she was unsatisfied with the American way of death.

“She became terrified, so scared that she couldn’t even talk about it,” Ms. Weisberger said of her friend. “I kept urging her to talk about what was going on, but she wouldn’t. And then she died. So that was a problem. We had not dealt with the issue — myself, herself and the others.”

For whom was it a problem that she did not talk about it? In what way? Would talking about it have changed anything? If so, what?

“So I started studying about it,” she said. Down the digital rabbit hole she went.

She Googled “death”? Wiki taught her all she sought to know about it? The NYT does not say.

If there is a germinal moment for the positive death movement, it is 2003, when a social worker at a New York hospice center became disillusioned by the care that the medical staff were able to give to dying patients and their families. The social worker, Henry Fersko-Weiss, saw what doulas did for women during and after childbirth. Why couldn’t dying people get the same level of attention and emotional support?

Having a doula around you when you’re dying makes a big difference? Dying isn’t anguish enough, you also need a doula chatting to you?

Using birth doulas as his model, he created a training program for end-of-life doulas, or midwives, to attend to patients’ non-medical needs — anything from helping them review their lives to sitting quietly in witness.

“There are tremendous similarities between birthing and dying,” he said. “There’s a great deal unknown, there’s a great deal of pain and a need for support for the people around the person who is going through the experience.”

For doulas in either setting, he said, “arranging the atmosphere, creating a special space around the event, is exactly the same.”

A little choreography? Costumes? Lighting? Jolly music?

As Mr. Fersko-Weiss was getting his program underway, Joanna Ebenstein, a graphic designer in Brooklyn, was thinking about death from a completely different angle.

“We just don’t know what to do with death anymore,” she said.

Used to know, but have forgotten?

“It’s this big, scary thing. We don’t have a set of rituals around it that contains it or gives it meaning. Ours is the first culture to pathologize an interest in death.”

There is no mention of resurrection, a judgment day, heaven or hell.

No religion mentioned yet.

In 2007, Ms. Ebenstein started a blog called Morbid Anatomy, highlighting ways different cultures represented death. Only in the United States, she said, were images of death absent from art and daily life.

That’s apart from all the TV series, movies, novels; and, in daily life, the streets, if you live – say – in Chicago, Baltimore, or Oakland.

The blog opened conversations about death outside of the realm of hospice or advance health care directives.

From the first posts, she said, she started hearing from an audience she had not known was out there: people who felt isolated by their interest in death. Before then, the only people she knew who shared her interest in death had been in the goth subculture.

“We’re not supposed to be curious about death now,” she said. “But how can you not be? It’s a great human mystery. It’s the thing that defines our life, but we’re supposed to pretend it’s not interesting to us? It’s in horror movies and pop culture, but there was no high culture discourse around it.”

Ah! She has noticed that it is in horror movies and pop culture.

She withheld her name from the blog because she was afraid her design clients, especially Scholastic, would think she was creepy. This was the era when Sarah Palin warned that the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act was trying to impose “death panels”.

Sarah Palin was right. Obamacare has to have death panels. A group (needless to say, diverse and inclusive) has to declare what treatment, what drugs you may be permitted to have. The panel’s job is cost-reckoning and death is always cheaper.

Ms. Ebenstein, 46, sees her work as resurrecting a lost strand of American culture.

This idea that we have now, that death is exotic and cannot be seen, is brand new,” she said. “Your grandparents tended to die in the house. They’d be laid out in the parlor when they died, which the Ladies’ Home Journal advocated changing to the ‘living room’ when the funeral parlor came around. The living room became the living room because it’s no longer the parlor for laying out the dead. And that’s around 1900.”

Verily? From where did she get that piece of esoteric information?

All of these changes are happening, and now we think of death as something that happens offstage, that we don’t see and children certainly shouldn’t see. But that was not possible until so recently.

Doesn’t she own a TV?

In 2014, Ms. Ebenstein and another woman spun the blog into a small museum of the same name in Brooklyn, which closed in 2016 but has been succeeded by a pop-up residency [?] at Green-Wood Cemetery. By then, something had changed. “Now this stuff was cool,” she said.

Part of what changed was a funeral director in Los Angeles named Caitlin Doughty, who dressed like a lost member of the Addams Family and posted a series of plucky YouTube videos called “Ask a Mortician” that spoke frankly about corpses and decomposition and routinely topped 400,000 views. A typical opening line, from a video titled “All My Fave Graves,” went, “Something I’m always trying to get you to do is hang out with dead bodies.”

In April of 2013, Ms. Doughty tweeted, “Why are there a zillion websites and references for being sex positive but nothing for being death positive?”

With that, an inchoate curiosity had a brand name, a cachet and an internet presence. All it needed was an occasion to gather.

On a Monday evening at Bluestockings bookstore on the Lower East Side, Emily Leshner, a graduate student in visual media anthropology, had a question about the end of life. Specifically, she wanted to discuss the issue of digital immortality: is it right for people’s social media profiles to live on when they die? “Our digital presence exists beyond our biological life,” she said. “It made me think what kind of person I’d want to be my legacy.”

Meaning, what portrait of herself would she choose to leave? Beautiful? Rich? Successful? Admired? Smart? Happy?

It was the monthly gathering of the Lower East Side Death Cafe, one of a handful of death cafes that have formed in the last few years around the city. Jafar Al-Mondhiry, a resident in internal medicine, picked up Ms. Leshner’s question. He hoped to start a death-related podcast for other residents — a virtual death cafe. “Is social media a triumph over the body?” he asked.

Around two tables piled with carrots and other snacks, the conversations were lively and unstructured.

Melanie Nilsson described taking her father’s cremated remains to all of his favorite restaurants for a year.

Millet Israeli, a former corporate lawyer who changed careers to become a grief counselor, asked what sort of reactions the others got when they told friends they were attending a death café.

“They said, ‘Is that some sort of goth thing?’” Ms. Leshner said. “That it’s dark and trendy and cool.”

Death cafes, as a formal institution, began in East London in 2011, in the basement of a man named Jon Underwood, who quit his job as a business development director to create small gatherings where strangers could drink tea, eat cake and talk informally about death and dying. To encourage others to replicate his meetings, Mr. Underwood, who died at age 44 last year, published guidelines for discussions and a website for other death cafes to promote their meetings. The discussions have no leaders, are free or inexpensive, and are open to talk of all things death but are not support groups. The organization’s website claims to have initiated 6,503 death cafes in 56 countries.

Ms. Israeli, who facilitated the conversation at one table, met the women who started the Lower East Side group while they were all training as volunteer caregivers at the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, which takes a Buddhist approach to the end of life.

Ah, so religion does come into it. Zen. Buddhism. Reincarnation?

The death cafe, she said, “is almost like my form of activism to create an atmosphere publicly that permits talking about death. If we can talk about death and dying, maybe that will spread to easier conversations about grief and terminal illness.”

Grief and terminal illness. All fun, all chatter, all of the time. With tea or coffee. And carrots.

Ms. Israeli recalled a guided meditation at the Zen Center imagining her own death: the mouth becoming dry, the body shutting down, the attention becoming more internal. Even with all her work as a grief counselor, Ms. Israeli said, she was nervous going into it. “It seemed scary,” she said. “But the experience was the opposite. As heavy as that sounds, it made it feel lighter. It felt safer than it did going in.”

This is the odd math of the positive death activities. Embracing mortality, practitioners say, helps them live with less fear, more life.

On a Saturday morning at the Art of Dying Institute at the Open Center, Amy Cunningham led a discussion of different ways to hold a funeral, including at home. Ms. Cunningham, 63, worked as a journalist until she decided to go to mortuary school at age 54. “I thought it was going to be like becoming a real estate agent,” she said.

Ms. Cunningham discussed alternatives to embalming — which involves toxic chemicals — and coffins made of wool or other materials that decompose easily.

Always consider what’s good for the environment.

The group included 24 women and two men.

“We’re part of a movement, and it’s really a return to a female presence at the time of death,” Ms. Cunningham said.

Several of those attending worked in hospice or in the funeral trade. Others had enrolled after the deaths of people close to them.

Hillary Spector, who attended, teaches art in primary school and directs and acts in theater. Ms. Spector recently trained to volunteer as a death doula and joined a synagogue to meet people who might use her services.

Judaism making an appearance now?

“It’s a bit macabre,” she said, “but I’ve always been superfascinated by dying — the physiological processes, but also this idea of what happens to our consciousness. I don’t believe in heaven or an afterlife.”

But –

“I also feel that decomposition is deeply spiritual.”

Although –

“One of the things that draws people to this work is that we don’t have a basis in religion. That’s why a lot of people are becoming part of this death positive movement.”

The “spirit” is assuaged by entertaining death at a party.

Others offer different explanations for why all this is happening now. The AIDS crisis transformed grief and caregiving into expressions of community. The mass shootings on the news call for examination: What if today was your last day? The rising interest in Buddhism introduced alternative concepts of dying. And the aging population brought more urgency to questions of how people want to consider the last years.

Also, death has a bright future: the number of Americans dying annually is expected to rise by more than one-third in the next 20 years. In a social media landscape where fringe topics find large constituencies, death is a taboo that connects to everyone.

“We got so far removed from death even being an option that we finally got sick of it being closeted,” said Suzanne O’Brien, a former nurse who now trains end-of-life doulas and hosts a podcast called “Ask a Death Doula”. 

“The first step is recognizing that death is a natural part of life’s journey,” Ms. O’Brien said. “We can have it go well or have it go poorly. They say death and taxes are the only things guaranteed in life. But people don’t pay their taxes. So I’m saying death is the only one that’s for sure.”

Shatzi has already bought her after-death outfit. For the well-dressed cadaver.

At the FUN-eral, Ms. Weisberger showed off a burial shroud she plans to use when her time comes. She bought it online, from Amazon, she thinks. Three friends have agreed to wash her body according to Jewish tradition, and Ms. Cunningham — who supplied the cardboard coffin — will provide dry ice to preserve her body before burial, she said. …

“I really want to experience my dying,” she told the crowd. “I don’t want to die in a car crash or be unconscious. I want to be home, I want to be in my bed, I want to share the experience with anybody who’s interested.”

Bring your cellphones and take a selfie with the dying Shatzi or her corpse. Or make a video, “A Real Dying Housewife of New York”. A new kind of snuff-film.

Even if it is a scene of pain and struggle for breath – or is that not to be thought of?

And could a picture or film, or a chat with a doula, “contain” death, or “give death meaning”?

No, ladies. Non-existence has no meaning.

Acting on the inflammatory rhetoric of the Left, a comedian, Kathy Griffin,

suggested beheading the President of the United States in the manner favored by ISIS.

When she was criticized for her idea, she cried.

Yesterday (June 14, 2017) the Republican Representative Steve Scalise was shot by a far left Bernie Sanders supporter at a congressional baseball practice on the baseball diamond in Alexandria, Virginia. At the time of this writing, Mr. Scalise is said to be in critical condition. Four others were also wounded. Two were Capitol Police officers Crystal Griner and David Bailey before they shot the gunman dead. (“Had they not been there, it would have been a massacre,” a witness – Senator Rand Paul – said.) The other two were Matt Mika, a lobbyist, and Zack Barth, a staffer for Republican Representative Roger Williams.

There is obviously no dialogue possible between Left and Right in America now (or anywhere else in the world). So the battle has to be fought in other ways.

Victor Davis Hanson writes at Townhall:

The two Americas watch different news. They read very different books, listen to different music and watch different television shows. Increasingly, they now live lives according to two widely different traditions.

The Left is inconsolably bitter over losing the presidency, the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and most of the states. Having no arguments, no case to make, but being moved by intense childish emotion, Leftists strike out with fists, clubs, guns.

John Hawkins lists 20 quotations from the Left that urged the use of extreme violence. the beating, raping, torturing, and murdering of conservatives, Republicans, and Donald Trump. An accumulation of such declarations (there have been a great many) is more than likely to eventuate in attempts at murder.

You have plays, rap videos and prominent liberals glorifying the murder of the President …  while cops at left-wing universities stand back and allow violent students to riot, threaten and disrupt conservative speakers. 

1) “Michele (Bachmann), slit your wrist. Go ahead… or, do us all a better thing [sic]. Move that knife up about two feet. Start right at the collarbone.” – Montel Williams

The inciters become incoherent with rage. They choke on their fury. Their repetitious cussing is a sign that they have no reasonable case to make.

2) “F*ck that dude. I’ll smack that f*cker’s comb-over right off his f*cking scalp. Like, for real, if I met Donald Trump, I’d punch him in his f*cking face. And that’s not a joke. Even if he did become president — watch out, Donald Trump, because I will punch you in your f*cking face if I ever meet you. Secret Service had better just f*cking be on it. Don’t let me anywhere within a block.”– Rapper Everlast on Donald Trump

3) “I have zero doubt that if Dick Cheney was not in power, people wouldn’t be dying needlessly tomorrow … I’m just saying if he did die, other people, more people would live. That’s a fact.” — Bill Maher

4) “I know how the ‘tea party’ people feel, the anger, venom and bile that many of them showed during the recent House vote on health-care reform. I know because I want to spit on them, take one of their “Obama Plan White Slavery” signs and knock every racist and homophobic tooth out of their Cro-Magnon heads.” — The Washington Post’s Courtland Milloy

The Tea Party! If those peaceful polite mainly middle-aged people who got together to ask for fiscal responsibility, and who meticulously cleared up every scrap of debris on the ground after they held a public meeting, were  full of anger, venom and bile, they certainly never showed it. But no doubt the lying left-biased media reported that they were.

5) “F*** God D*mned Joe the God D*mned Motherf*cking plumber! I want Motherf*cking Joe the plumber dead.” — Liberal talk show host Charles Karel Bouley on the air.

It was to “Joe the Plumber” that Obama explained how he wanted to redistribute the wealth of the country. His administration, he planned, would take money forcibly from those who had earned it and give it to those who had not. “Joe the Plumber”, like a lot of other Joes, did not like the idea. So, says the Left, kill him.

6) “Are you angry? [Yeah!] Are you angry? [Yeah!] Are you angry? [Yeah!] Well, we’ve been watching intifada in Palestine, we’ve been watching an uprising in Iraq, and the question is that what are we doing? How come we don’t have an intifada in this country? Because it seem[s] to me, that we are comfortable in where we are, watching CNN, ABC, NBC, Fox, and all these mainstream… giving us a window to the world while the world is being managed from Washington, from New York, from every other place in here in San Francisco: Chevron, Bechtel, [Carlyle?] Group, Halliburton; every one of those lying, cheating, stealing, deceiving individuals are in our country and we’re sitting here and watching the world pass by, people being bombed, and it’s about time that we have an intifada in this country that change[s] fundamentally the political dynamics in here. And we know every – They’re gonna say some Palestinian being too radical — well, you haven’t seen radicalism yet.” U.C. Berkeley Lecturer Hatem Bazian fires up the crowd at an anti-war rally by calling for an American intifada

That was clear and plain incitement to terrorist action on a massive scale.

7) “That Scott down there that’s running for governor of Florida. Instead of running for governor of Florida, they ought to have him and shoot him. Put him against the wall and shoot him. He stole billions of dollars from the United States government and he’s running for governor of Florida. He’s a millionaire and a billionaire. He’s no hero. He’s a damn crook. It’s just we don’t prosecute big crooks.” — Rep. Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa

8) “..And then there’s Rumsfeld who said of Iraq ‘We have our good days and our bad days.’ We should put this S.O.B. up against a wall and say ‘This is one of our bad days’ and pull the trigger. Do you want to salvage our country? Be a savior of our country? Then vote for John Kerry and get rid of the whole Bush Bunch.” — From a fund raising ad put out by the St. Petersburg Democratic Club

9) “Republicans don’t believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the planet. Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recipe for disaster in the making; Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don’t give a hoot about human beings, either can’t or won’t. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm.” — The Village Voice’s Michael Feingold, in a theater review of all places.

10) “But the victim is also inaccurately being eulogized as a kind and loving religious man. Make no mistake, as disgusting and deservedly dead as the hate-filled fanatical Muslim killers were, Thalasinos was also a hate-filled bigot. Death can’t change that. But in the U.S., we don’t die for speaking our minds. Or we’re not supposed to anyway. Thalasinos was an anti-government, anti-Islam, pro-NRA, rabidly anti-Planned Parenthood kinda guy, who posted that it would be “Freaking Awesome” if hateful Ann Coulter was named head of Homeland Security.” — Linda Stasi, New York Daily News,on a victim murdered in the San Bernadino terrorist attack

11) “Cheney deserves same final end he gave Saddam. Hope there are cell cams.” — Rep. Chuck Kruger (D-Thomaston)

12) “If I had my way, I would see Katherine Harris and Ken Blackwell strapped down to electric chairs and lit up like Christmas trees. The better to light the way for American Democracy and American Freedom!” — Democratic Talk Radio’s Stephen Crockett

13) “May your children all die from debilitating, painful and incurable diseases.” — Allan Brauer, the communications chair of the Democratic Party of Sacramento County to Ted Cruz staffer Amanda Carpenter.

Can anyone get lower than that? Yup. For Leftists there is no bottom.

14) “Violence solves nothing. I want a rhino to f*ck @SpeakerRyan to death with its horn because it’s FUNNY, not because he’s a #GOPmurderbro.” – Jos Whedon

15) “I hope Roger Ailes dies slow, painful, and soon. The evil that man has done to the American tapestry is unprecedented for an individual.” — Think Progress editor Alan Pyke

16) “But, you know, the NRA members are the current incarnation of the brownshirts from Germany back in the early ’30s, late ’20s, early ’30s. Now, of course, there came the Night of the Long Knives when the brownshirts were slaughtered and dumped in the nearest ditches when the power structure finally got tired of them. So I look forward to that day.” — Mike Malloy

“Antifa” is a Leftist brownshirt organization, fascist if ever any organization deserved to be called fascist. It claims to be “fighting fascism”. They and other Leftist rioters who are attacking people at pro-Trump rallies (and the populist equivalents in Europe) are doing exactly what the fascist mobs, both Nazi and Communist, did in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. It is a joke – a very ugly one –  that they are doing their brutal violent murderous work against peaceful crowds in the name of “anti-fascism”.

17) “Or pick up a baseball bat and take out every f*cking republican and independent I see. #f*cktrump, #f*cktheGOP, #f*ckstraightwhiteamerica, #f*ckyourprivilege.” – Orange is the New Black star Lea DeLaria

18) “I wish they (Republicans) were all f*cking dead!” — Dan Savage

19) “Sarah Palin needs to have her hair shaved off to a buzz cut, get headf*cked by a big veiny, ashy, black d*ck then be locked in a cupboard.” — Azealia Banks advocates raping Sarah Palin over a fake news story.

They claim to have”imagination” while, they say, the Right does not. So there we see what it is they imagine: Jos Whedon’s hilarious dream of the rhino raping and killing Paul Ryan, and Azealia Banks’s wish for Sarah Palin. Behold the Vision!

20)” Yes, I’m angry. Yes, I’m outraged. Yes, I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House, but I know that this won’t change anything.” – Madonna

How many others, like yesterday’s would-be killer, take such outbursts to be declarations of war? There are surely more violent attacks to come.

The Left has become a terrorist organization.

President-elect Trump’s “wildly popular” deal with Carrier has elicited sharp criticism from some conservatives, notably from Ben Shapiro (who has consistently displayed antipathy to Trump), and more surprisingly from Sarah Palin.

They accuse the president-elect of “crony capitalism”.

We quote the Investor’s Business Daily editorial opinion of the deal:

President-elect Trump’s deal with Carrier isn’t important because it saved 1,000 jobs. It’s important because of the message it sends to businesses everywhere: Help is on the way.

The reaction to Carrier’s decision to retain some of its employees after meeting with Trump has been amusing. On the one hand, Trump’s critics say the deal was a mere trifle, since there are still so many people out there hurting. On the other hand, they claim that Trump is acting like a third-world despot.

A few headlines paint the picture:

“Trump’s Carrier Victory Is the Economy’s Loss”

“Trump’s Carrier deal is right out of Putin’s playbook”

“Is Trump’s Deal With Carrier A Form Of Crony Capitalism?”

“Trump Cheered for Carrier Deal Even as Other Jobs Are Trimmed”

“Bernie Sanders: Donald Trump ‘Has Endangered’ U.S. Jobs With Carrier Deal”

The White House, meanwhile, sniffed that saving 1,000 jobs was a mere fraction of all the manufacturing jobs supposedly created on Obama’s watch. (Earth to White House: Trump isn’t even president yet. Plus, there are 300,000  fewer  manufacturing jobs today than when Obama took office in January 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.)

To be sure, we are not thrilled with the fact that Indiana agreed to cough up $7 million in special tax breaks for Carrier to keep some of its jobs in the state. It’s a misallocation of resources that only encourages companies to hold states for ransom. But this is, unfortunately, a routine practice among state governments these days. And Democrats can hardly complain about it, since their only recipe for growth is to hand out special tax breaks to companies that do their bidding.

Nor are we fans of Trump’s threats to impose tariffs on companies for making products abroad — since the only people hurt by such tariffs will be the very working class families Trump is claiming to champion.

But listen to what Carrier said after meeting with Trump. It said its decision was made possible “because the incoming Trump-Pence administration has emphasized to us its commitment to support the business community and create an improved, more competitive U.S. business climate.”

If that’s the message Trump is delivering to business leaders, we should all be cheering

It means an end to eight years in which President Obama, instead of supporting U.S. companies, arrogantly scolded business leaders and treated businesses as either piggy banks to be raided or as enemies to be brought to heel through regulations and mandates. We’ve seen the effects of Obama’s approach — eight years of dismally slow growth, stagnant wages, and a surging population of labor-force dropouts.

What’s more, if Trump succeeds in cutting business taxes, allowing companies to repatriate money parked overseas, and easing the regulatory burden on job creators — as he’s promised — he won’t have to browbeat companies into keeping jobs here, because they will already be doing that, and creating millions more.

We can hardly wait to see how Trump’s critics try to put a negative spin on that.

And we have canvassed opinions on this issue among those of our like-thinking Trump supporters who are also free-market economists, and here is a summary of them:

This is not “crony” capitalism. This is all about reducing Government Tyranny to keep business in this country.

It is basic economics. Pro-business tax and regulatory reforms are now certain to be a part of the first 100 days of Trump’s administration. Carrier has to make a clear business decision not just about building furnaces but in all of their business dealings. If you want government contracts you need to not only be competitive with those contracts but you have to qualify even to bid. If a new administration gives preference to American-made, or to companies that keep jobs in America, that is just good policy, not crony capitalism.

If you do the math on it, this deal is win/win and quite compelling (even without including the supposed threat of 6.7 billion in other business). If you take 7 million dollars and divide it by the number of jobs saved (1100) it would cost the state of Indiana $6,363.63 for each job saved. The tax savings is spread over 10 years so that cost is $636.36 per year for 10 years. This cost is easily offset with the potential savings to unemployment insurance, state agency relief for families, health care costs, food stamps etc. This also does not consider that instead of 1100 people drawing from the system they will continue to pay into it. Not to mention the fact that the Carrier plant will continue to be a consumer of goods and services from the local community and continue to pay taxes in excess of their credit. And instead of all those dollars going to Mexico for producing these products, they’ll stay in the US. That has an exponential effect, a clear benefit that is difficult to quantify.

Then there are all the businesses in the area of the Carrier plant that support the 1100 families who will continue to work and spend money in their local communities. Those businesses will not see a dramatic drop in their business as those 1100 families no longer will need to scrimp and save just to get by. Plus Carrier has pledged to spend 16 million on facility improvements which will no doubt help the local economy. This will help everyone in those communities which in turn benefits the state of Indiana directly in the form of taxes.

This deal was also very good for Carrier as it turned a PR nightmare into a huge positive for them. They will likely see an increase in sales when they might have been expecting a decrease (as a backlash to their action). It may even help them to get more government contracts for being willing to work to save American jobs.

So in truth it likely cost Indiana nothing and might even be a windfall. It is the kind of “outside Washington” thinking that will likely turn this country around.

Sarah Palin is a shrewd politician. She foresaw the death panels – for which she was (as so often) viciously mocked by the Left. Now we have death panels – or, if you prefer, health care rationing. A life-saving drug might not be offered to you under Obamacare. But you must not call the people who decide that for you a panel. And although you will die for lack of the drug, the deciders most emphatically may not be called a death panel. Yet that is what they are.

Of course, Sarah Palin’s religion is nutty. But then, whose isn’t? We don’t see that the beliefs taught by the Wasilla Assembly of God are any more insane than those taught by any other church.

At present she is supporting Donald Trump’s bid for the White House, and has said she would like to be in his cabinet to head the Department of Energy – in order to get rid of it. Good idea!

Neither she nor Trump is a political philosopher. Is that a drawback to governing well?

Sarah Palin writes:

Mr. Trump should know he’s doing something right when the malcontents go ballistic in the press! There is no denying Donald J. Trump’s accomplishments and drive to create opportunity for every willing American to succeed. His own success is testament to the job-creating achievements made possible when one applies the courageous and tenacious pro-private sector precepts we need to fire up the economy. Trump joins a competitive field of GOP candidates that will duke it out in the arena of ideas and track records, a field representing diverse achievements. This, in contrast with the pro-big government party’s practice of merely anointing a chosen one, thus robbing voters of healthy debate.

Key to conservative’s victory is to do our own vetting of each candidate, focus on their ability to unleash America’s entrepreneurial spirit and dramatically shrink government in order to prioritize our nation’s security. That means we ignore the media’s participation in the liberals’ Pantsuit Politics of Personal Destruction. THEN, on an even playing field, in 2016 we charge forward after the radical left hears America shout, “You’re fired!”

– Sarah Palin

We would like to know readers’ views on the abolition of the Department of Energy, and whether ‘The Donald” is the president America needs now.

We have a high regard for Sarah Palin. She is well-informed, politically astute, and personally impressive. The Left, especially Feminists, fear her so much they sink to ever new depths of malice in abusing her, and that alone would recommend her to us. (As we always have to do with politicians, we politely overlook her – extra absurd – religious beliefs.)

This is the first of three posts on the case for impeaching Obama. Sarah Palin’s fact-packed opinion was expressed on July 11, 2014, on Fox News:

No serious person who is paying attention can deny that Obama and his administration have abused and violated the public trust and disregarded the Constitution. Let me count the ways.

Without notifying Congress as required by law, he set free terrorist prisoners at a time of war when they can return to the battlefield to kill our troops.

In violation of our Constitution, he regularly ignores court orders, changes laws by executive fiat, and refuses to enforce laws he doesn’t like, including our immigration laws.

When Congress declined to pass amnesty for illegal immigrants’ offspring, he unilaterally enacted his own version of it, which created the current crisis on our border as illegal youth pour into our country to receive what he illegally promised them.

He committed fraud on the American people when he promised that if we liked our health care plan we could keep it.

He got us into a war in Libya without Congressional approval. When our ambassador begged for security at the consulate in Benghazi, he was ignored and then murdered when the consulate was attacked as predicted. Americans were left behind to die, as the president did nothing to rescue our people there. Afterwards, he helped spread the lie that a spontaneous protest over a YouTube video was to blame for this highly organized, premeditated terrorist attack.

Obama’s IRS targeted his political opponents for harassment. Then the agency lied to and stonewalled Congress and likely destroyed subpoenaed evidence, while Obama falsely declared there’s no corruption there, not even a smidgen.

From the VA scandal to his unconstitutional recess appointments, to his DOJ wiretapping reporters and giving guns to Mexican drug cartels, to violating religious freedom exercised by businesses and ignoring in-house illegal fundraising, the list of abuse goes on and on.

Barack Obama’s administration is proving itself a festering boil of scandal. The Constitution is rock solid in holding the president responsible for the executive branch. He can’t just vote “present” while shrugging and feigning ignorance about all these abuses of the public trust, any more than a mob boss can claim innocence because he didn’t personally do the hit. The buck stops with the guy at the top.

Impeachment is the ultimate check on an out-of-control executive branch. It is serious, not to be used for petty partisan purposes; and it is imperative that it becomes a matter of legitimate discussion before the American people lose all trust in our federal government.

Impeachment requires moral courage to advance what is right, and it requires political will. A complacent or disheartened electorate may silently endure these abuses from the administration, the permanent political class is only too happy to maintain the status quo, and the mainstream media is not a fair watchdog. So, the nation’s last line of defense is for We the People to rise up and say, “enough is enough”. 

Obama’s lawless encouragement of illegal immigration should be the tipping point for that political will because it impacts all Americans – native-born and legal immigrants of all backgrounds who followed the rules and now watch rewards go to rule breakers while they’re forced to compete for limited jobs and resources. It’s the tipping point because the forgotten working class is hurt most by this lawlessness …

Some are arguing for cautious inaction and dismiss even a discussion of impeachment. With Obama’s poll numbers in the tank and his liberal policies exposed as failures, why rock the boat? But that argument misses the point.

The president is radically changing the way the executive branch does business. He is setting a dangerous precedent that will fundamentally change us. With his “pen and phone,” he’s abrogating Congressional authority in violation of the Constitution’s separation of powers. He’s making himself a ruler, not a president. We had a revolution back in 1776 because we don’t like kings.

Some argue we should wait for midterm elections and hope a big victory by Republicans in both Houses of Congress will rein in Obama. Been there, done that in 2010.

If Congress refuses to use the power the Constitution gives it, Barack Obama will continue to rule however he wants.

Some argue that at best the House might vote for articles of impeachment, but the Senate is unlikely to convict. But that is no argument against holding a president accountable and sending the people’s message to all successors.

Obama can keep laughing and say, “so sue me” to the House’s tepid lawsuit threat. Let’s hear him laugh off impeachment. At the very least, despite his mocking the Constitution, this Constitutional process will put him on notice.

The only thing necessary to transform America into something unrecognizable is for good men to do nothing! If not these violations and the president’s promise to continue to “go it alone” in ignoring the separation of powers and rule of law, what will it take for you to take a stand? How bad does it have to get?

We live in an America where the NSA spies on our communications, the IRS targets us because of our political beliefs, the border is overrun by foreign nationals, terrorist leaders are released to the battlefield, our health care is taken from us and we’re forced to buy a plan we don’t want and can’t afford … 

If you’re comfortable with all that, then by all means sit back and hope for the best. Those concerned about America want change. That comes with healing the injuries done to society by an unchecked president; that starts with impeachment.

Obama knows nothing of what goes on in his own administration.

The scandals it gets itself into come as a total surprise to him.

Jean Kaufman writes about this at her blog Neo-Neocon here:

Obama says “if only Obama knew”…

… about the problems in the VA:

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney … told reporters that President Barack Obama first learned from a TV news report that his Veterans Administration was denying medical care to vets with secret off-the-books-waiting lists.

The actual quote is this; note how careful Carney is to parse his words about the “specific” reports, because he knows that the White House was told about the general problem when Obama first took office in 2008:

A CNN reporter asked Carney on Monday when the president was ‘first made aware … of these fraudulent lists that were being kept to hide the wait times’ at VA medical centers.

‘You mean the specific allegations,’ Carney asked, ‘that I think were reported first by your news network out of Phoenix, I believe?’

‘We learned about them through the reports.’

He’s a sly one, that Carney, isn’t he?

As for Obama, it’s a good thing we have the news, because otherwise he’d never learn about anything that happened under his watch:

After the Operation Fast and Furious scandal broke, Obama responded to national outrage in an interview broadcast by CNN’s John King on October 12, 2011, similarly saying he was out of the loop until he turned on his television…

A few months into his presidency, Obama’s White House approved an unannounced New York City flyover by Air Force One…It was a mistake,’ the president said on April 28, 2009, the day after the flight. ‘It was something we found out about along with all of you. And it will not happen again.’

Last year on May 14, Carney told reporters that Obama had learned about his Department of Justice seizing two months’ worth of Associated Press journalists’ phone records ‘from news reports yesterday, on the road.’

‘We don’t have any independent knowledge of that,’ Carney insisted.

That punt came just one day after Obama himself told the Washington press corps during a joint press conference with UK Prime Minister David Cameron that he was in the dark – until it hit news reports – that the Internal Revenue Service had targeted conservative nonprofit groups for special inquisitions when they applied for tax-exempt status.

‘I first learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this,’ he said in the East Room of the White House on May 13, 2013. I think it was on Friday…

Why shouldn’t Obama keep doing this? With the cooperation of the MSM, it has worked for him so far.

Sarah Palin comments:

The head of a government that has the most sophisticated spying apparatus ever created can monitor who we talk to, what we talk about, how many twinkies our kids eat and the calories we consume, where we travel, etc. etc., yet announces [his] daily Intelligence report is actually prepared by Matt Drudge.

David Horowitz was a “red-diaper baby”. In his own words:

I was a leftist as early as I can remember. Raised in a Communist family and surrounded by radicals my entire childhood, I could hardly be anything else”.

– Until

A  friend of mine named Betty Van Platter was murdered by the Black Panthers in 1974. … I  was forced to question my most basic beliefs, and that began my long and difficult journey to sanity.”  

We’ve just received a booklet from the David Horowitz Freedom Center, titled Rush Limbaugh’s Conversation with David Horowitz. (The whole of the conversation, which took place six months ago in November, 2013, can be read here.)

The following  are extracts from it:  

Horowitz: … According to a Pew poll, 49% percent of young Americans have a favorable view of socialism. What is socialism? It is a system that leads to mass misery, mass impoverization, and human slaughter. That’s what it means. Yet almost half of the young think it’s benign …

RUSH: … I look at so-called conservative commentators in Washington who seem to be content to commentate, but they don’t have any interest in beating this back. I don’t want to mention names, but most of them are that way. Same thing with the Republican Party. You come from the left. You’re one of the founders of the New Left. You’ve emerged; you were in the inner circle. You’ve spent much of your career trying to explain who these people are, the destructive, vicious malice that they have.

HOROWITZ: Yes.

RUSH: And you don’t think — this is astounding to me — you don’t think that the Republicans or conservatives really yet comprehend the seriousness of the threat.

HOROWITZ: No.

RUSH: Wow.

HOROWITZ: No. Otherwise they wouldn’t be squabbling among themselves so much. There’s another thing going on, and that is that the left controls the language. Our universities, our schools, our mainstream media are gone [into the hands of the left] — so if you pick a real fight with the left, you get tarred and feathered, as you know all too well. Conservatives are brought up in a healthy way; they mind their reputations, they don’t want to be bloodied, they don’t want to be looked at as kooks and extremists, which are the terms of abuse that are used.

RUSH: That’s true.

HOROWITZ: Obama is a compulsive, habitual liar. He makes Bill Clinton look like a Boy Scout. Clinton spun things and he did lie about something very personal and embarrassing to him, but Obama lies about everything, and all the time. And yet it’s taken five years for people to start saying this. Including conservatives. Take so-called single payer health care. Why do we use phrases like “single payer?” It’s communism! If the state controls your access to health care, which is what this is about, they control you.This is a fundamental battle for individual freedom, which is what conservatives are about, or should be. But who’s saying this about Obama’s plan to organize health care along communist lines?

RUSH: Let’s talk about persuasion a second. I’ve got true believers in my audience, and I’ve also got elements of the low-information or the swing-voter segment, and then a few leftists who listen. One thing I have discovered over the course of my career is that whenever I’ve used the word “communism” to describe, say, typical modern-day liberals, people say, “Oh, come on, Rush! They’re not communists!” It ends up being counterproductive, because I have found people don’t want to believe that about somebody like Obama. How do we go about persuading people that it is what it is?

HOROWITZ: That’s a very good question. … I think the language problem is a very serious one. I once tried to launch the word “neo-communist.” We talk about neo-fascists, so how about neo-communists? But that doesn’t work. People look at you as a relic if you use the term. But you have to at least say what their agenda is, and their agenda is controlling, is destroying individual freedom. That’s the way I would do it. By continually reminding people of what their agenda is. It’s anti-individual freedom. You can’t talk about the national debt just as an accounting problem. It’s taking away the freedom of future generations. It means that you have to work for the government instead of yourself. Currently we work something like half our lives for the state. Every other day we’re working for the government instead of for ourselves. What Obama is doing is diminishing the realm of freedom. Conservatives need to keep bringing that up all the time. …

RUSH: You pointed out that Democrats are always in lockstep, in contrast to Republicans, who are all over the place rhetorically and strategically. You said, and I’m quoting here, “The result is that a morally bankrupt, politically tyrannical, economically destructive [Democrat] Party is able to set the course of an entire nation and put it on the road to disaster.” David, people always ask, my callers ask me, “Why don’t the Republicans do ‘x’? Why don’t they do this? Why don’t they do that?” So let me ask you why. Aside from what you’ve said, that there’s a fear of being castigated by the media, mischaracterized. … Republicans simply don’t want to have mean things said about them. They want to be liked by the people who run Washington, D.C. But I don’t even see any pushback from the Republican Party. They’ll go after Ted Cruz and they’ll go after Sarah Palin and they’ll go after Mike Lee, but they won’t go after Obama.

HOROWITZ: Exactly. I have never seen Republicans conduct such bloody warfare as they do against conservatives. They don’t do that to Democrats, ever. And I think it’s great that all the people that you mentioned, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, are people, finally, who don’t care what The Washington Post says, don’t care what The New York Times says, and don’t care what the Republican establishment says. That’s the way it has to be done. I will tell you that the big difference between the left and the right that I saw when I came into the conservative movement 30 years ago was that the right had no ground army. I watched as the Democratic Party was pushed to the left by the activists in the streets — the MoveOn.org people, the Netroots — until it’s now just a left-wing Party. It was Howard Dean, a 60s leftover, who launched the anti-Iraq war campaign that shifted the whole Democratic Party. But on the Republican side, there was nobody pushing from the right. There was no ground war, no force pushing on Republicans from the grassroots. Now we have the Tea Party.

RUSH: You come from the belly of the beast. …  You lived this stuff. You were a leader of the left in your youth. Talk about MoveOn.org — these are average Americans. They may make $50,000 a year. The Netroots, they’re a bunch of people in their pajamas, sitting there blogging and posting. What do they think is in it for them? They are not people Obama is prospering.

HOROWITZ: What’s in it for them is the fact that progressivism is a religion, or a crypto-religion. Like religious people, they believe the world is a fallen place. But they also believe that they can be its saviors. Salvation and redemption are … going to come … from the movement they are part of, from the organized left. What they get out of this is the consolation of religion. They get a sense of personal worth; they get a meaning to their lives. That’s what drives them. It’s not money. It’s much more powerful. When Whittaker Chambers left communism, he said, “I’ve left the winning side for the losing side.” Why did he think that? Because communists have ideas they’re willing to die for, and conservatives don’t. Conservatives have to get that idea. They have to understand that their freedom will be lost if we don’t stop the left.

RUSH: About stopping them. …  Can the right triumph ever again?

HOROWITZ: I remain an optimist, which brings me to the second problem with conservatives. In addition to their decency and their not wanting to make enemies and not wanting to turn politics into war, they’re fatalists. If you think you’re going to lose, you can’t win. That’s very basic. I believe there’s a lot of hope. The ideas of the left are bankrupt. They don’t work. We’re seeing this now with Obamacare. Ludwig von Mises wrote a book in 1922, titled: Socialism. He explained that you can’t centrally plan a large economy, and he showed why. 1922. That’s almost 100 years ago, yet the Democratic Party rammed through Obamacare, ignoring what the last 100 years has proved. They’re going to organize the health care of 300 million Americans with their computers. It’s lunacy. Yet it’s the policy of the whole Democratic Party. They’ve staked their political future on this. … To sell Obamacare, they claimed — lied — that it’s to cover the uninsured. But it doesn’t even do that. Everything they said about Obamacare is a lie. Why? Because their real agenda is not health care. It’s to create a socialist state. To do that they need comprehensive control over people’s lives. I never thought I’d be saying this, because I didn’t see it even in a remote future, but we’re on the brink of a one-party state if they were to succeed. If you are ready to use the IRS politically, if you have access to every individual’s financial and health care information, and if your spy agency can monitor all communications, you don’t need a secret police to destroy your opponents. Anybody you want to destroy, you’ve got enough information on them and control to stop them. That’s how close we are to a totalitarian state. They want to control your life — for your own good of course — even to the point of whether you can buy Big Gulps. That’s not incidental.

RUSH: No, it’s not. Now when this kind of thing happens … I wonder about the average American, somebody who’s not an activist like you or me. Do they not see this, and if they don’t, how can they be made to see it?

HOROWITZ: I don’t think they see it. Most people are averse to politics and don’t pay that much attention. However, Obamacare is going to make them pay attention because his plan affects so many people. You have to start using moral language against these people. I want to hear our guys saying, “This is a threat to individual freedom. You are attacking the freedom of every American when you run up the debt like this. You are attacking the freedom of every American when you put them all in a government-controlled program like this. Government should not have this information.”  …  Every time they have a program that hurts individual liberty, we need to stop talking about it as though it was just about money. The money figures are so big, trillions, nobody can even grasp them, unless they’re very involved in the economy and understand it — and then they probably are Republicans. …  

RUSH: … Freedom requires personal responsibility. …

HOROWITZ: … We need to use a moral language. Notice when the left attacks, it’s always using moral language. Racist, sexist, homophobic, whatever. These attacks sting. We don’t use language like that. We need to. It’s they who are racist. …  Why are we letting them get away with their destruction of inner-city minority communities? Detroit, Chicago: why weren’t the disasters Democrats have visited on these cities huge in the Republican campaign last time? Democrats control these cities, they’ve controlled them for half a century and more. They’re ruining, destroying the lives of young black and Hispanic kids in these cities, and poor whites there as well. They’re 100 percent responsible for that, yet we never mention it. It is beyond me. … They don’t want to be at war, and particularly a moral war, with other Americans. But that is the reality. The left has already made it that. Republicans are treated as though they’re of the Party of Satan. That goes with the religious nature of leftist beliefs. Progressives believe that they are creating the Kingdom of Heaven on earth and that people who oppose them are the Party of the Devil. That’s the way they fight. We have to use that kind of language. Fight fire with fire.

RUSH: You’re nailing it. You came up with something … that I think is worth repeating, and to me it’s brilliant. I would never have seen it had you not pointed it out. You write that the fall of soviet communism had the unforeseen effect of freeing leftists from the burden of defending failed Marxist states, which in turn allowed them to emerge as a major force in American life. That’s so right on. The failure of communism, ironically, led to a rebirth of it in this country. We wipe it out in the Soviet Union, and a shining example of its atrocities goes away, and it becomes a tougher sell to educate people what it is. 

HOROWITZ: Exactly, and leftists saw that at the time. That’s the first thing they said about it. …  That’s why connecting them to the communists is very important. It’s part of the battle. Republicans, and conservatives as well, have let the foreign policy issue, national security, slip off the political radar. Barack Obama is a supporter of the Islamofascists. He’s supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that wants to … destroy America. Obama and Hillary have supported them. Their Administration is infiltrated by Islamist agents. That’s why Benghazi is so important, and why I’m really encouraged that Republicans haven’t let it totally disappear. …

If conservatives and Republicans do learn at last to “fight fire with fire”, can America’s leftward slide be stopped? Can America be restored to a country that values and protects the freedom of the individual? Rush asks Horowitz if the rule of the left – of the Democratic Party – will “implode”.

HOROWITZ: I think they’re going to go down in flames in the coming election. I’m hoping for that, and I can’t see how that won’t happen.

So David Horowitz, at this point, is optimistic.

We would like to share his optimism. But we have one difference of opinion with him which makes us less sanguine that a Republican victory – even if led by a person such as Ted Cruz who understands the urgency of the need to recover from the leftward slide – is almost certain.

He says, in the same conversation, “we need morality, religion, laws”. Morality and laws, yes, we need them. But religion? He means a religion with a god – to oppose the communist religion which has no god. He observes with wonder the inability of the left to learn from the horrible history of their religion that it only creates widespread misery and sheds lots of blood. Yet he fails to learn from the much longer horrible history of god-worshipping religions that they created widespread misery and shed lots of blood.

We immensely admire the great work David Horowitz has done, and continues to do, teaching Americans the awful truth of the left’s ideology, and actively combating it.

But if the right insists on sticking “God” into its political platform, the left is much less likely to “go down in flames”.