America’s state religion 431

Wokeism is fast becoming the American state religion.

Ben Weingarten identifies it as such, writing – surprisingly – at (woke) Newsweek:

Should it overtake our government, in making identity politics paramount it will unmake any semblance of a unifying American identity.

In so doing, it will serve as the ultimate tool of cynical, radically leftist power-grabbers, who will be dividing and conquering under the guise of a fraudulent virtue, justice and morality.

It is the religion of the party that is now in power. The government is woke. It is making identity politics paramount.

The Woke’s core views have been bubbling up from elite classrooms to the commanding heights of society for decades.

What is different is that now such views have been legitimated by the authorities and mainstreamed in our culture. If you dare to challenge them, you are liable to end up excommunicated from American life—canceled. After all, dissenting from the Woke orthodoxy makes you a racist.

Consider some of the signs that indicate the fast-accelerating ascent of Wokeism.

In New York City, at the same time Mayor Bill de Blasio was preventing Jews and Christians from freely exercising their religions—including peaceably assembling—he permitted adherents of Wokeism to assemble en masse in protesting, rioting and looting with impunity. The Woke enjoyed First Amendment rights foreclosed to the [other] faithful.

Mayor de Blasio, Governor Andrew Cuomo and the relevant health authorities had argued the coronavirus-driven draconian shutdown of New York City, and the rest of the state, was necessary to save lives. If so, by permitting the Woke to flood the streets, were not New York officials conceding that public health was not really the number one priority? Were they not suggesting that they were willing to let people get sick and die because the right to practice Wokeism was absolute, sacrosanct and preeminent—this, incidentally, after instructing citizens to take to the streets in celebration of the Chinese Lunar New Year in February, coronavirus be damned, in context of a broader campaign against purported coronavirus-related anti-Chinese discrimination? Were they not affirming that Wokeism mattered more than the lives of the Woke—and everyone else?

Certainly, this view would seem to have been reinforced, as, in the face of the Woke, New York reduced police funding, and policing itself, which coincided with a dramatic rise in violent crime.

In St. Louis, menacing protesters by the dozens were able to threaten a couple, the McCloskeys, at their home, without consequence. The police did not rush to the McCloskeys’ aid. In fact, after the husband and wife were recorded brandishing firearms to deter those descending on their home, authorities left them not only defenseless, but threatened to disarm them and throw them in jail.

Did it not appear again as if privileging the Woke was now the highest responsibility of government, over and above protecting our natural rights, including those to life, liberty and property—all of which the Woke threatened?

The religion of Wokeism is the most extreme racist ideology since segregation.

While the “summer of love” may be over in Seattle, with CHOP/CHAZ—the ultimate symbol of government acquiescence to Wokeism—no more, its ideals persist. Seattle recently held a training session for white municipal employees—to be clear, a government training session for those of a specific race—called “Interrupted Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness.” Meanwhile, Washington’s state phase-in plan for public schools calls for giving priority to “students furthest from educational justice first,” specifically including “students of color”—that is, on the basis of race.

Tal Bachmann deplores it at Steynonline:

Wokism is now the official state religion of the United States of America.

By constitutional standards, this means something has gone wrong. The United States isn’t supposed to have a state religion. The First Amendment specifically prohibits the establishment of a state religion. Yet it now has one, and its name is Wokism.

Wokism is now celebrated or taught as Absolute Truth in every elementary school class, every middle and high school class, every university class, every corporate training session, every Capitol Hill political chamber, every Hollywood movie or cable show, every civic ceremony, every law, every political speech, every novel, every awards show, every sports league, every everything.

Government, its corporate allies, and cultural institutions all fund Wokism. They, along with their street troops, all demand Wokist belief and perfect compliance with Wokist commandments and rituals. They all punish those who question Wokist orthodoxy, often by completely ruining their lives. They fire dissenters, ban them from social media forever, initiate global social media pile-ons, and even threaten to kill them. Sometimes our officially Wokist government sends in goon squads to scare, or even arrest, those who dare criticize Wokism.

Wokism, the writer rightly says, is a “bellicose, uncompromising, ruthless, unself-critical, totalitarian movement“.

Does that remind you of anything else? If you say Islam, you win. The fact is that Wokism is now well on its way to becoming to American government and society what Islam is to Iranian government and society.

That this has happened means—can only mean—that something has gone terribly wrong in America (and the rest of the West). America’s original plan was to avoid funding and pushing any particular religious ideology or practice. It was to have full religious freedom. It was to keep government limited to solely protecting a few basic liberties. It was for Americans and their government to live and let live.

But things have changed. Why?

Maybe luxury spoiled us and made us fat and lazy and stupid. Maybe the Frankfurt School communists really did inject a lethal dose of philosophical poison into American thought. Maybe misguided government policies, and socially corrosive movements like sexual libertinism or feminism, really did start the implosion of the family unit.

Somehow or other, we’ve wound up in a total mess. And somehow or other, we need to find a way out of it. This is no way to live. I know I’m not the only one who doesn’t want to live in a society run by frothing ideologues who have declared war on human biology, logic, and mathematics; on unborn children, confused adolescents, and the traditional familial arrangements which raise them; on Shakespeare and Homer; on fairness and decency; on reality itself—on survival itself. These people are all manic, obsessive-compulsive nation-destroyers, community-destroyers, culture-destroyers, family-destroyers, individual-destroyers, love-destroyers, beauty-destroyers, everything-destroyers.

Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness:

If wokeness should continue and “win”, by now we all know where it will end up.

The woke Left seeks a top-down erasure of America.

The public is now increasingly bombarded by 360-degree, 24/7 wokeness in the fashion of the Maoist Red Guard gangs. There appears little refuge from it. Not in television commercials. Not from CEOs. Not from professional sports. Not from movies or television shows. Not from Wall Street, the internet, and social media. Not from the administrative state, and not from the military. Not from the K-12 teachers, much less the professors.

It is largely the well-off professionals, the “privileged” and the rich—CEOs, news anchors, actors, star athletes, college presidents, foundation heads, corporate board retired military brass, Wall Street grandees—who usually do the woke remonstrating (or fund it) to the supposedly non-privileged but guilty un-woke.

The most law-abiding of Americans now seem terrified of the law—the FBI of James Comey vintage, John Brennan’s legacy at the CIA, the same old IRS of Lois Lerner, the Justice Department once branded by Eric Holder, and the predictable court order of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Enlisted men fear their inquisitional officers.

Conservatives especially fear that the once-revered FBI can become analogous to the Stasi, the once indomitable CIA after 2015 began emulating the KGB, and the federal prosecutor has become a vindictive Inspector Javert. And just when you think they are crazier for such fears, another couple is rousted out of bed by agents for supposedly being at a riot they were not at.

The current madness is the stuff of history as we watch it predictably unfold. 

Roger L. Simon writes at the Epoch Times:

An iron-fisted, ideologically extreme minority has our country under its thumb—play along or face excommunication. This is stronger than anything in our history and almost identical to what we see and have seen in totalitarian countries.

All key aspects, most parts of them anyway, of our society “get it” … the media, the corporations, the government bureaucracy, the Democratic Party, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the military (yikes!), entertainment, the university system, the K-through-12 system, the medical community, the scientific community (incredibly), the religious, and on and on.

All, to one extent or another, believe in “woke” except—the people.

What the extremist ideology of “woke” actually provokes is talk of—and not just talk—secession and even civil war.

Few of us have heard anything like that in our lifetimes. But now it’s real. We have been driven apart as never before. We have been awakened indeed.

Anything can happen and some of us, who would never have considered anything like secession and civil war, suddenly do—highly disturbing to us as those thoughts may be.

How long will it be before “considering” comes to decision and “some of us”  – ideally most of us – act?

A cure for riches 9

We do not generally trust polls, but these figures endorse something we are pretty sure of anyway, so we trust them more than most.

Ameer Benno reports at the Western Journal:

The Democratic Party is now undeniably the party of the wealthy.

IRS data from 2020 show that Democrats represent 65 percent of taxpayers with a household income of $500,000.

Most taxpayers in Republican districts – 74% – have household incomes of less than $100,000.

Census Bureau data that show the typical congressional district represented by a Republican in 2020 was 13 percent poorer than its Democratic counterpart.

A somewhat less scientific analysis from 2020 reinforced that the GOP is the party of working Americans. According to The Cook Political Report, 85 percent of counties with a Whole Foods store voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump, while only 32 percent of counties with a Cracker Barrel Old Country store did so — a “culture gap” of 53 points.

This demographic shift is part of a long-term trend that began well before the arrival of Trump and his MAGA policies on the political scene.

A 2015 study revealed that families registered as Democrats have higher annual salaries than Republicans.

And, according to a Vox report from 2016, top-end wealth in America over the past several decades has increasingly concentrated in a handful of metropolises. Most of these very prosperous cities (especially New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Los Angeles) have become very solidly Democratic.

Despite these metrics, many cultural elitists on the left continue to perpetuate the canard that Republicans are country club snobs and that the Democrats are the party of the little guy, the underdog and the downtrodden. A Pew Research Center survey conducted during the Obama years revealed that more than 60 percent of Americans believed that Republicans were the party of the wealthy, but only 20 percent felt that way about Democrats. Conversely, 67 percent of Americans believed that the Democratic Party favors the poor and middle-class, and only 26 percent felt that way about Republicans.

The writer then speculates:

But if the Democratic Party is home to so many high-earners, why does it support so many wealth-killing measures, such as Biden’s 43.4 percent capital gains tax and the steep hike in the corporate tax rate?

The answer is that, generally speaking, its members view affluence — even their own — with scorn. Financial success does not inspire pride but shame. It is not something to be celebrated but punished.

Who can be so hard of heart as not to pity rich Democrats?

Luckily, there’s an easy cure for their suffering. Each has only to unload his/her/xir personal wealth onto any Republicans they happen to know or know of. Away with the dollars, away with the shame. Let Republicans endure the affliction of wealth.  

Posted under Commentary, United States by Jillian Becker on Sunday, May 2, 2021

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Buying revolution, buying poverty 64

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joel B. Pollak writes at Breitbart:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Democrats’ dance of death 54

The Film Emporium: Top 10 Films of the 50's/60's/70's

The two leaders of the dance of the Democratic Party’s death are Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden.

Both are senile, the old woman withering away into her second childhood, the old man already doddering with dementia.

When they open their mouths to make speeches, they stammer and drool.

President Trump has said that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is a “sick puppy”. Her sickness is plain to see. She is obsessed by an all-consuming hatred of the President, a fanatical  hatred way beyond the bounds of reason.

Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness of her “pathological hatred of Donald Trump”.

“Only such an obsession”, he says, can explain her extremely irrational behavior. He cites her highly publicized tour of San Francisco’s crowded Chinatown a month after the President imposed a ban on Chinese citizens entering the country because the coronavirus contagion came from China. To be so reckless as to deliberately set an example of ignoring a pandemic is  “not just politics or hypocrisy—it’s insanity”.

Her insanity cannot excuse her immorality. Not only is she of no help, she obstructs every effort the administration makes to alleviate the actual and potential effects of the disease. Hanson declares: “It is difficult to find one thing Pelosi has said or done that has not made the country worse off since the virus officially hit our shores in late January.”

She is, he says, “puerile”, “unhinged”, “increasingly dangerous”.

Her tearing up of the transcript of the President’s State of the Union speech was a puerile gesture. Presiding over the House of Representatives is an old crone acting like a sulky, defiant kid.

The Democrats’ apparent candidate for the presidency, Joe Biden, is making “botched commentaries” to the nation from his home. “He tried reading from a teleprompter script, and then talking ex tempore, and then both, and found he could do neither.”

May they keep leading the dance right up to the November election!

The Dance of Death: In art, ballet can be very bad for your health ...

Posted under Health, Leftism, United States by Jillian Becker on Tuesday, April 7, 2020

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The perfect representative 18

So at this moment, the day after Super Tuesday 2020, Joe Biden is the Democrats’ front runner for nomination as their presidential candidate.

He was never an intelligent man, and now he exhibits signs of being afflicted with senile dementia. He cannot remember where he is. He has said that he is running for election to the senate. He confuses his wife and his sister.  He cannot remember the wording of the Declaration of Independence when he wants to quote it. He forgets who it is he is talking to.

Could even Democrats really be so rash as to trust him with the nuclear button?

It’s very likely that the old Communist Bernie Sanders will overtake him.

So the Democrats’ choice will be between an old dunce who is corrupt and senile, and an old Communist who admires Stalin, Fidel Castro, the Nicaraguan regime of the Sandinistas and the vile men who brought Venezuela to ruin.

Happily, neither of them would be a threat to the re-election of President Trump with his record of unprecedented achievement, and whose popularity grows by the hour.

How pathetic, how worn out, how confused and asinine the Democratic Party has become. It’s well past its “sell-by” date. The oldest political party of modern times is itself senile, corrupt, and silly. Joe Biden is its perfect representative.

Posted under government, United States by Jillian Becker on Wednesday, March 4, 2020

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Myths of our time 93

This is a list of beliefs – in no particular order – that are very widely and commonly held, but are untrue:  

Sweden is a happy country. Fact: It is a Muslim-infested misery-state, the rape capital of Europe.   

The BBC is a trustworthy, truthful, unbiased source of news. Fact: It is dishonest, it routinely distorts or suppresses news it doesn’t like, is snobbish, deeply and persistently anti-Semitic, and heavily biased to the Left. 

The Jews seized the state of Palestine, sent most of the Palestinians into exile, and oppress those who remained. Fact: There never was, in all history, an independent state of Palestine. The territory is the historic homeland of the Jews. When Arab armies tried to destroy the modern Jewish state, many Arabs fled, intending to return when their side was victorious, but their side was defeated. Israeli authorities tried to persuade Arab residents not to leave. Those who remained are the freest Arabs in the Middle East, with all citizens’ rights. 

Nazism was a right-wing ideology. Fact: Nazism was National Socialism and as distinctly derived from the tradition of the Left as its rival International Socialism.

Che Guevara was a hero. Fact: Che Guevara was a torturer and mass murderer, and a coward.  

The Mahatma Gandhi was a good man who liberated India from the British Raj. Fact: Gandhi was a cruel man who had little if any influence on the British decision to withdraw from India.

Senator Joe McCarthy was an evil witch-hunter of Communists. Fact: McCarthy did his duty in tracking down potential Communist fifth-columnists, propagandists, and traitors during the Cold War.

President Roosevelt was a liberal who saved America from economic disaster. Fact: President Roosevelt was a Communist sympathizer. His policies prolonged the Depression.

President Obama’s period in office was scandal-free. Fact: President Obamas’ period in office was exceptionally full of scandals, some of them the worst examples of corruption and plain treason in US history. 

Islam is a religion of peace. And its name means “peace”. Fact: Islam is a religion of war and conquest. Its name means “submission”.

Carbon dioxide is a poison. Fact: Carbon dioxide is the food of green plants.

Human beings are changing the climate of the planet for the worse. Fact: The climate of the earth is always changing as vast cosmic forces act upon it. Human beings can make very little difference, if any, to the heating and cooling of the planet.

A baby in the womb is not a living human being. Fact: A fetus with a heartbeat is alive, a living human being.

Government exists to care for and provide for the people. Fact: government robs the people, threatens the people, frightens the people. Whatever government does, it does badly. Government must be kept within bounds to properly perform its only essential duty, the defense of liberty, by enforcing the law and preventing invasion.

President Trump is a racist. Fact: He is not and has never been a racist. He has worked all his adult life with people of many races, never discriminating against any of them on racial grounds.

President Trump is an anti-Semite. Fact: He is the most pro-Jewish pro-Israel US president ever.

President Trump oppresses women. Fact: he honors women, promotes them, behaves towards them as heterosexual gentlemen in our culture customarily do (or did).

President Trump is a liar. Fact: He tells the truth. Like every human being, he can be inaccurate with dates, numbers, recollections, but on all important matters he is consistently truthful.    

The Democratic Party protects minorities. Fact: The Democratic Party is the party of slavery, segregation, secession, and the Jim Crow laws. By keeping millions of blacks on welfare, Democrats have kept them from independence, advancement, and prosperity.

Democrats act in the interests of the working class. Fact: Democrats despise the working class.

The US media report the news. Fact: The US media, in the huge majority, are lackeys of the Left.

American universities encourage free thinking, free and open exchange of opinion, the exploration of ideas. Fact: Most American universities are centers of Leftist indoctrination, dogmatic and intolerant.

Western civilization is grounded in “Judeo-Christian” values. Fact: Western civilization as we inherit it derives its values from, and owes its success to, the Enlightenment, which was an intellectual revolution against the oppressive authority of the Christian churches.

The “white patriarchy” has been bad for non-whites and women. Fact: Almost everything we have that sustains our lives and makes them endurable; almost everything we know;  every comfort, every convenience, every freedom that makes it possible for us to pursue happiness, physically, socially, politically, was given to us and the world by white middle-class men. 

That’s just a starter list.

We invite readers to add to it.

Prophetess: a cautionary tale 323

The Democratic Party is now led by a girl full of passionate intensity, little learning, and dreams of an all-powerful Democrat government supplying everything to everyone free of charge. She is counseling that all cattle be eliminated because they pollute the atmosphere. That aircraft be scrapped for the same reason. That no coal or oil be taken from the earth ever again. She declares that never again must vehicles running on gas pollute America’s roads. That every building in the country, homes and businesses, be torn down. If her prescriptions are carried out, she promises, the world will be renewed fresh and clean, and everyone will prosper.

“Kill all the cows,” she says.

Her rise to be the hypnotizing prophetess of her tribe recalls the story of Nonqawuse.

Nonqawuse was an orphan girl of the Xhosa, a nation of herders and farmers on the east coast of South Africa.

In 1856, when she was 15 years old, she returned one April day from the fields and told her uncle Mhlakazashe that she had met three spirits who said they were her ancestors. They had given her certain instructions for the tribe. If they were obeyed, the white colonists would be driven into the sea.

The instructions were that all the cattle of the tribe must be slaughtered because they were polluted. All cultivation of the fields must be abandoned. All the huts in which everybody lived must be demolished. Then not only would the evil whites be drowned, but the Xhosa would have more crops than ever before, pure and clean. New cattle would arise out of the earth, fresh and strong, and the tribe would prosper as never before.

Mhlakazashe believed what his niece told him because he recognized his dead brother from her description of one of the spirits. He went to see the chief, Sarili, and told him the story. Sarili believed it too. He ordered that all cattle must be killed.

The Xhosa obeyed. They destroyed their herds. No crops were attended to. They waited, shelterless, for the whites to be driven into the sea, for new cattle to appear, for their fields to become filled with sturdy grain.

They hung on the lips of the prophetess. Nongqawuse predicted that on February 18, 1857, the prophecy of the drowning would be fulfilled. On that day, she said, the sun would turn red and all the whites would be swept into the Indian Ocean.

February 18 came and went.The sun did not turn red. The whites stayed where they were carrying on with their white ways as usual. Chief Sarili went to see the prophetess. She told him that some people had not obeyed the spirits’ instructions, so the day of liberation had been postponed. The new date was eight days on. The chief had Nongqawuse’s word spread through the land. In eight days time a blood red sun would rise, there would be a heavy storm, and the dead would rise from their graves. Then the dramatic change would take place and the world would be made new. Before the eight days had passed, any cattle still alive must be slaughtered.

“Kill all the cows,” she said.

The eighth day dawned. The sun did not rise redder than usual. There was no storm. The Xhosa had no cattle and no crops. In the famine that resulted, most of the tribe, tens of thousands, died of starvation.

A hundred and sixty three years have passed since an ignorant girl full of passionate intensity made promises of a clean fresh world to her tribe, if only they would give up the filthy things on which they depended; a hundred and sixty two years since they followed her to ruin and death.

In 2019, the Democratic tribe of America might find a salutary message in the story of Nongqawuse if by some chance they should come to hear it.

The Democratic Party is terrifying 8

How terrifying the Democratic Party has become.

How ugly and brutal.

Rude, crude, shallow, cruel, foul-mouthed, callow, ignorant, and vicious.

Dishonest, hypocritical, treacherous.

We are  not simply setting down a stream of invective because we disagree with the Democrats. We choose every word to describe accurately the nature of the Democratic Party as it now is. Every day it gives us new displays of atrocious acts and spiteful speech. From holding replicas of the president’s head dripping with blood to enacting wishful scenes of his murder, to demanding that mobs attack officials of the administration, to advocating the killing of police officers, to actual attacks on Republicans with guns, to viciously insulting and denigrating the president’s wife and very young child in the language of the gutter, they surpass themselves daily in savagery. Their military wing appears in hordes of thousands in black hoods and masks, howling and shrieking, spitting fury and wielding clubs. And millions of them use the social media to heap abuse on individuals, as a story we relay below illustrates.

The Democratic Party is now no more or less than a faction of the world-wide Left.

Its aims are absurd fantasies of utopias where everybody can have everything they want without having to pay for anything.

Democrats hold that women are in all respects equal to men, yet that women are the helpless victims of men.

They believe superstitiously that the greatest danger facing humankind is a rise in atmospheric temperature in the next century.

They are in alliance with the actual menace to our civilization, advancing Islam. They call it a “religion of peace”. It is of no concern to them that Islam burns and buries people alive, boils them in oil, decapitates, flogs and stones them. That Muslims mutilate the genitals of girls. That Muslim men enslave and murder women and consider doing so proof and preservation of their honor.

Like its ally Islam, The Democratic Party is a vast terrorist movement, dividing America.

And Americans discover that the Constitution which brought their nation into existence is not strong enough after all to bind them together.

Dennis Prager writes in an article titled Even Astronauts Fear the Left.

There are many reasons I pity today’s younger generation of Americans.

Among them are:

The unconscionable debt we are leaving them.

The obliteration of male and female as separate and distinct categories — and the sexual confusion that is left in its wake. 

The emasculation of men and the de-feminization of women.

The undermining of the value of marriage. 

The receiving of indoctrination, rather than education, in most schools from elementary through graduate. 

The inability to celebrate being American.

We have omitted one of the items on his list: “The lack of God and religion in their lives — and the consequent search for meaning in the wrong places.” Of course we do not agree with him about that. We deplore religion. And as for “meaning” – it is as we make or perceive it. But as usual with this writer, we agree with him to a large extent, so we overlook his religious belief.

He goes on:   

Tragically and ironically, each one of these was brought on by the very group many young people identify with: the left.

You can add the left’s tearing down of heroes to the list.

This came to mind this past month, when world-famous astronaut Scott Kelly, who spent a year on board the International Space Station, among other space-related achievements, tweeted the following message in commenting on the deep divisions in American politics: “One of the greatest leaders of modern times, Sir Winston Churchill, said, ‘In victory, magnanimity.’ I guess those days are over.”

He was then widely attacked on social media — for quoting former British Prime Minister Churchill and deeming him a great leader. According to the trolls, Kelly is now in league with the hateful, racist Winston Churchill.

As I repeatedly point out, if you do not understand the left is a wholly destructive force whose primary mission is to tear down the leading institutions and individuals of the Western world, you do not understand the left.

Thus, to many — perhaps most — young Americans, the Founding Fathers of America were not the giants you and I believe them to be. They were rich, racist, misogynistic white men. Now it is Churchill’s turn to be torn down. It means nothing to the left that he led the world in fighting the greatest racist of all time, Adolf Hitler, and the greatest racist ideology of all time, Nazism. …

Those on the left regard themselves as Ubermenschen, superior to all those who lived before them and all those who differ with them today.

But the worst part of the Scott Kelly story is the astronaut’s immediate reaction to the negative tweets: “Did not mean to offend by quoting Churchill. My apologies. I will go and educate myself further on his atrocities, racist views which I do not support. …”

In Kelly’s view, Winston Churchill went from “one of the greatest leaders of modern times” to a man whose “atrocities and racist views” he will further educate himself on.

You know why? Because in America today, the greatest fear is fear of the left.

Are we all too afraid of it to speak and act against it?

Revolted and appalled by it as we are, are we just capitulating to it, as much of Europe has to the Left-Islam alliance?

We are lucky to have a leader in President Trump who is not afraid of it. Millions of Europeans are inspired by him to start fighting against their subjugation. We need to be his soldiery.

As in all wars, total loyalty to your side is essential if you are to win. At present, there are no good Democrats – however personally nice an individual member of the Democratic Party might be, however out of sympathy with its Leftism.

The nastiness of the Democrats now is a foretaste of how vile they will be with any power they get.

 

Posted under Leftism by Jillian Becker on Friday, November 23, 2018

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What about the workers? 194

The Democratic Party has become the Party of Wall Street billionaires, Hollywood stars, Silicon Valley whizz-kids, and the ruthless Utopians of the Ivory Tower.

Its “progressivism” harks back to the last century. Its concerns are mystical like those of all religions: the earth burning up; the end of days; the humbling of humankind; the profound spiritual need for the Holy Family Clinton and its angels to reign over the whole earth.

Its high priests are richly dressed and housed, driven in stately carriages, flown on the wings of Boeings.

Still, it claims to have a bleeding heart. Ask not for whom it bleeds. Obviously, dull-witted Underdog, it bleeds for thee!

James Pinkerton writes at Breitbart:

The Democrats, once the party of working people, are now a party dominated by environmentalists and multiculturalists. And I can prove it.

As we shall see, when Democrats must choose between … providing jobs for workers, and … favoring politically-correct constituency groups — they choose the PC groups.

Indeed, the old assumptions about the Democrats as the party of labor are nowadays so tangled and conflicted that the unions themselves are divided. Some unions are sticking with their blue-collar heritage, but more are aligning themselves with the new forces of political correctness — and oh, by the way, big money.

The proposed Dakota Access Pipeline, running through four states — from western North Dakota to southern Illinois — would create an estimated 4,500 unionized jobs.  That is to say, good jobs at good wages: The median entry-level salary for a pipeline worker in North Dakota is $38,924.

Yet the advancement of what was once called the “labor movement” is no longer a Democratic priority.  The new priorities are heeding the goals of “progressive” groups — in this instance, Native Americans and the greens. Indeed, this new progressive movement is so strong that even many unions are climbing aboard the bandwagon, even if that means breaking labor’s united front. To illustrate this recent rupture, here’s a headline from the The Huffington Post: “Dakota Access Pipeline Exposes Rift In Organized Labor.” Let’s let Huffpo labor reporter Dave Jamieson set the scene:

The nation’s largest federation of labor unions upset some of its own members last week by endorsing the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota. Some labor activists, sympathetic to Native American tribes and environmentalists, called upon the AFL-CIO to retract its support for the controversial project.

In response to the criticism, Sean McGarvey, head of the AFL-CIO’s building-trades unions, fired right back; speaking of pipeline opponents, McGarvey declared that they have …

… once again seen fit to demean and call for the termination of thousands of union construction jobs in the Heartland.  I fear that this has once again hastened a very real split within the labor movement.

Yes, it’s become quite a fracas within the House of Labor: so much for the old slogan, “Solidarity Forever!” We can note that typically, it’s the old-style construction unions — joined, perhaps, by other industrial workers, if not the union leadership — who support construction projects, while the new-style public-employee unions side with the anti-construction activists.

In the meantime, for its part, the Democratic Party has made a choice: It now firmly sides with the new progressives.

To cite just one ‘frinstance, we can examine the July 2016 Democratic national platform, released at the Philadelphia convention. That document includes a full 16 paragraphs on “climate change”, as well as 14 paragraphs on the rights and needs of “indigenous tribal nations”. Here’s one of those paragraphs; as we can readily see, Democrats are striving mightily to synthesize the demands of both groups, green and red:

We are committed to principles of environmental justice in Indian Country and we recognize that nature in all its life forms has the right to exist, persist, maintain, and regenerate its vital cycles. We call for a climate change policy that protects tribal resources, protects tribal health, and provides accountability through accessible, culturally appropriate participation and strong enforcement. Our climate change policy will cut carbon emission, address poverty, invest in disadvantaged communities, and improve both air quality and public health. We support the tribal nations efforts to develop wind, solar, and other clean energy jobs.

By contrast, the Democratic platform included a mere two skimpy paragraphs on workers and wages.

Some Democrats are troubled by this shift in priorities, away from New Deal-ish lunch-bucket concerns — because, as a matter of fact, it’s a shift away from the very idea of economic growth. For example, William Galston, a top White House domestic-policy aide to Bill Clinton in the 90s, had this to say about the Democrats’ latest platform:

The draft is truly remarkable — for example, its near-silence on economic growth. . . . Rather, the platform draft’s core narrative is inequality, the injustice that inequality entails, and the need to rectify it through redistribution.

… Perhaps it seems strange that a political party would lose interest in such an obvious political staple as economic growth. And yet if we look more closely, we can see, from the perspective of the new Democrats, that this economic neglect makes a kind of sense: We can note, for example, that the financial heart of the green movement is made up of billionaires; they have all the money they need — and, thanks to their donations, they have a disproportionate voice.

One of these noisy green fat cats is San Francisco’s Tom Steyer, who contributed $50 million to Democratic campaigns in 2014 and has been spending heavily ever since. We can further point out: If Steyer chooses to assign a higher value to his eco-conscience than to jobs for ordinary Americans, well, who in his rarified Bay Area social stratum is likely to argue with him?

Admittedly, billionaires are few in number — even in the Democratic Party. Yet at the same time, many other groups of Democratic voters aren’t necessarily concerned about the vagaries of the economy, because they, too, in their own way, are insulated from its ups and downs. That is, they get their check, no matter what.

The most obvious of these groups, of course, are government employees.  … Public-sector workers have an obvious class-interest in voting Democratic, and they know it — lots of Lois Lerners in this group.

Then there are the recipients of government benefits. … Welfare recipients, for example, are overwhelmingly Democratic. And Democratic politicians, of course, know this electoral calculus full well. Indeed, in this era of slow economic growth, nearly 95 million Americans over the age of 16 are not in the labor force; not all of them are receiving a check from the government, but most are. And that has political consequences.

We can take this reality — economic stagnation on the one hand, economic dependence on the other —a  step further: If the Democrats can find the votes they need from the plutocrats and the poor — or near-poor, plus public employees — then they can make a strategic choice: They can ignore the interests of working-class people in the private sector, and they can still win.

So for this cynical reason, the Democrats’ decision to stiff the working stiffs who might have worked on the Dakota pipeline was an easy one.

We can sum up the Democrats’ strategy more concisely: In socioeconomic terms, they will go above the working class, and also below the working class. That is, they will be the party of George Soros and Al Sharpton. So no room, anywhere, for the blue collars. (Of course, if any of those would-be pipeline workers end up on public assistance, well, they’ll have a standing offer to join the Democratic fold.)

We can see this Soros-Sharpton coalition in America’s electoral geography: The Democrats expect to sweep the upper east side of Manhattan, and, at the same time, they expect to sweep the south side of Chicago. Moreover, this high-low pattern appears everywhere: Greenwich and the ghetto, Beverly Hills and the barrio.  

In addition, Democrats can expect to do well in upper-middle class suburban enclaves, as well as college towns. And so if we add all those blocs together, plus the aforementioned public-employee unions, we can see that the Democrats have their coalition …  a 2016 victory coalition.

So now we can see the logic of the Democrats’ policy choices. And we can even add an interesting bit of backstory to the Democrats’ 2016 platform. In June, as a concession to the insurgency of Sen. Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton’s campaign agreed to include a contingent of Sanders supporters on the 15-member platform-drafting committee.

Specifically, the Clinton camp accepted the Palestinian-American activist James Zogby, the Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison of Minnesota, the environmental activist Bill McKibben, the African-American activist Cornel West, and the Native American activist Deborah Parker. …

The unions got a grand total of one name on that 15-member body. … So we can see: Big Labor isn’t so big anymore; it is now reduced to token status within the party.

Given this new correlation of forces, it’s no surprise that top Democrats oppose the Dakota pipeline. …

In this new era of green-first politics, the anti-pipeline forces must win, and the pro-pipeliners must lose. …

For her part, Hillary Clinton certainly knows where she stands: She’s with the new eco- and multicultural Democrats, not the old unionists — who were, after all, mostly “deplorable.” As she said to a cheering campaign crowd earlier this year, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

To be sure, Clinton has a heart — a taxpayer-funded heart. In fact, she has offered to put all those soon-to-be ex-coal workers on the government dole; she has proposed a $30 billion program for them.

Yet whether or not Congress ever approves that $30 billion, it’s a safe bet that if Clinton wins, more fossil-fuel workers will need to find some new way of earning a living. After all, just last year, the Obama administration pledged that the U.S. would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent by 2025. And whereas Donald Trump has promised to scrap those growth-flattening CO2 targets, Clinton has promised to maintain them.

Indeed, during Monday night’s debate in New York, she promised to install “half a billion more solar panels” as part of her plan, she said, to create 10 million new jobs.

We can quickly observe that most blue collars don’t seem to trust Clinton with their livelihoods; Trump beats her among non-college-educated men by a whopping 59 points. Yet at the same time, we can add that if Trump leads among blue collars by “only” 59 points, that might not be enough for him to overcome Clinton’s advantage — her huge strength among the Soros-Sharpton coalition.

And here we can note, with some perplexity, that the leadership of the industrial unions is still mostly in lockstep with the Democrats. That residual partisan loyalty to the party of FDR might cost their members their jobs now that the Democrats have found policy goals other than mass employment, but hey, perhaps the union bosses themselves can get jobs at Hillary’s Department of Labor.

So if Clinton wins this November, what will happen to the private-sector blue collars, especially those in the traditional energy sector?

Sadly, we already know the answer to that question; the only unresolved matter is how they might react.

The Party of the American princess, the professor, the fashionable the cool the glamorous, the very rich and the very safe is the Party of the party. Of parties in Manhattan, Nob Hill, Santa Monica, Bel Air.

But its heart bleeds for … Oh, you know, blacks and Hispanics and gays and women and Muslims and …

And the workers?

You gotta believe it.

If you don’t … all you can do is vote Trump for President.

The Democratic Party: the party of slavery and black oppression 349

The Left habitually re-writes history – because its own history is appalling. It should not be allowed to get away with it.

Statement of DNC Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz

June 22, 2015

For decades community leaders in South Carolina – and across the country – have been calling to get rid of this symbol of hatred, and action has been long overdue. But this is just the beginning of a conversation we as a society need to have about race, bigotry and violence in this country – not the end of one.

Jeffrey Lord writes an open letter in reply, posted at the American Spectator. We quote most of it:

Dear Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz:

I note with interest [your] statement … with regard to the controversy over the flying of the Confederate flag on the grounds of the South Carolina State Capitol.

Good enough. It’s good to know you wish to begin this conversation and I am happy to oblige. Let me begin with this question:

Will the Democratic Party finally apologize for supporting slavery, segregation, lynching, and the Ku Klux Klan?

Let me recall these lines from some of your party platforms.

From your 1840 platform:

Resolved, That congress has no power, under the constitution, to interfere with or control the domestic institutions of the several states, and that such states are the sole and proper judges of everything appertaining to their own affairs, not prohibited by the constitution; that all efforts by abolitionists or others, made to induce congress to interfere with questions of slavery, or to take incipient steps in relation thereto, are calculated to lead to the most alarming and dangerous consequences, and that all such efforts have an inevitable tendency to diminish the happiness of the people, and endanger the stability and permanency of the union, and ought not to be countenanced by any friend to our political institutions.

And again in your 1844 platform:

That Congress has no power, under the Constitution, to interfere with or control the domestic institutions of the several States; and that such States are the sole and proper judges of everything pertaining to their own affairs, not prohibited by the Constitution; that all efforts, by abolitionists or others, made to induce Congress to interfere with questions of slavery, or to take incipient steps in relation thereto, are calculated to lead to the most alarming and dangerous consequences, and that all such efforts have an inevitable tendency to diminish the happiness of the people and endanger the stability and permanency of the Union, and ought not to be countenanced by any friend to our Political Institutions.

This staunch support for slavery — not to mention the unsubtle threat that accompanied it (there would be “alarming and dangerous consequences” if serious attempts to abolish it were made) is repeated again in your party platforms of 1848 and 1852.

By 1856, your party’s support of slavery was expanded in your newest platform, with several additional sections added including vowing: “That the Democratic party will resist all attempts at renewing, in Congress or out of it, the agitation of the slavery question under whatever shape or color the attempt may be made.”

In 1860 your platform said: “Resolved, That the Democratic party will abide by the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States upon these questions of Constitutional law.” This was, in fact, an endorsement of the infamous Dred Scott decision by the Court, a decision which legal scholars say was designed to write slavery into the Constitution. And your party approved of it.

As the Civil War was ending your party opposed the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment — which ended slavery. Among those who opposed ending slavery was Congressman Fernando Wood. Wood (as noted in Bruce Bartlett’s Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past) was not only a member from New York, he was a former mayor of New York. Wood explained why he and the vast majority of the House Democratic Caucus — in which you now sit — opposed ending slavery.

The Almighty has fixed the distinction of the races; the Almighty has made the black man inferior, and, sir, by no legislation, by no military power, can you wipe out this distinction.…The condition of domestic servitude as existing in the southern states is the highest condition of which the African race is capable…

Likewise your party opposed not only the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments that gave legal rights to African-Americans as well as the right to vote, your party supporters banded together to form the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan being described by University of North Carolina historian Allen Trelease as the “terrorist arm of the Democratic Party,” while historian Eric Foner of Columbia University calls the Klan “a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party.”

For decades your party gave free rein to the Klan and its rabid, racist violence. In 1924 the Klan ran your Democratic Convention in New York’s Madison Square Garden, known to history as the “Klan bake” convention. Time and time and time again your party selected Klan members to represent it in the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House as well as state governorships and all manner of local officials.

Your party used this support to win the congressional power that passed everything from the creation of the Federal Reserve to Social Security. One of the latter’s notable supporters, in fact, was Mississippi’s Senator Theodore Bilbo, a proud supporter of Social Security who boasted of his membership in the Klan.

One troubling sign of just how close was your party’s relationship with the Klan was President Franklin Roosevelt’s appointment of Alabama’s liberal New Deal Senator Hugo Black to the Supreme Court. Black held a “golden passport” — aka a lifetime membership in the Klan. Decades later, in 1968, Justice Black wrote:

President Roosevelt… told me there was no reason for my worrying about my having been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He said some of his best friends and supporters he had in the state of Georgia were among members of the organization. He never in any way, by word or attitude, indicated any doubt about my having been in the Klan nor did he indicate any criticism of me for having been a member of that organization.

Black was far from alone with his Klan connections in your party. The notorious Eugene “Bull” Connor, the Birmingham, Alabama Public Safety Commissioner who unleashed both police dogs and fire hoses on civil rights protesters in 1963, was both a Klan member and a member of your Democratic National Committee. There isn’t enough space to list the elected leaders of your party who served under the hoods of the Klan and supported the savage violence inflicted on black Americans for decades.

From the rabidly segregationist President Woodrow Wilson (who showcased the pro-Klan Birth of a Nation film in the White House and also made certain his segregationist and progressive Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels segregated the Navy) to other prominent Democrats, your party has been the home of those who use race to win elections and make public policy. Senators with names like South Carolina’s James F. Byrnes (also an FDR Court appointee and Truman’s Secretary of State) or Georgia’s powerful Richard Russell …  were typical of the honored roles bestowed on the rawest of racists by your party. …

The real damage done by your party with its culture of race and violence has been to create exactly the climate in which the Dylann Roofs of America feel they can operate. Note well that the roommate of the Charleston killer said that Roof was a “segregationist” — which is to say he was precisely emulating the culture that your party has spent two centuries creating and celebrating.

Isn’t it time for your party to finally apologize for all of this horrendous behavior that your party is directly responsible for? Isn’t it time for the Democratic Party to finally own up and apologize to black Americans?

Generally we think it rather foolish for people living now to apologize for what past generations did, but in this case an apology would at least be an acknowledgment of guilt. Our experience is that when Democrats are reminded of their past as slavery supporters, they insist the Party changed so completely that the present one has no connection whatsoever with what the old Party did. Yet they also like to say they are the oldest political party in the world – which implies there was no break. Oh well – the Left never minds contradicting itself. It has no sense of hypocrisy. It has no shame.

Suddenly there is much talk about removing Confederate flags from this or that state capitol where politicians of your party — like South Carolina’s then-governor Ernest “Fritz” Hollings — placed them in the first place. Now talk is abroad about removing statues of “Confederates” — meaning prominent Democrats — from the U.S. Capitol and some state capitols. The statue of Democrat Jefferson Davis — the ex-president of the Confederacy who also served as a Democratic Congressman, U.S. Senator, and Secretary of War in a Democratic administration — has been mentioned for possible removal from its place in Kentucky’s state capitol.

Interesting. A growing mass call to remove the names of one prominent Democrat after another from the public square. One has to ask? Is it time to rename the Woodrow Wilson Bridge that crosses the Potomac from Virginia to Washington, the latter a majority black city? If so, may I suggest the name of Hiram Rhodes Revels, the first black U.S. Senator — in 1870? Oh yes, Senator Revels was also a Republican.

Calls for slavery “reparations” are occasionally heard. And in the spirit of Charleston perhaps the question should be asked directly of you as Chair of the Democratic Party.

Will the Democratic Party itself pay reparations to black Americans? Reparations for those party platforms that supported slavery? Not to mention for passing all those segregationist laws that were deliberately designed to evade the 14th and 15th amendments of the Constitution? Reparations for using the Ku Klux Klan as the “terrorist arm of the Democratic Party” — with that terror directly targeting black Americans?

We are not for the paying of reparations to people who live now and suffered no injury. No reparation is possible to the dead. But if these questions make Democrats squirm, let them be asked!

You, Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz, along with President Obama and former Secretary Clinton, talk of what happened in Charleston by mentioning the need to discuss “race bigotry and violence” (you), or saying of racism that “societies don’t, overnight, completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior” (President Obama) or calling the Charleston attack “an act of racist terror” (Secretary Clinton). But somehow you never get around to saying just who was doing all of this — your political party. The Democrats.

In fact, as I noted in 2008, the Democratic National Committee — on the eve of the Obama nomination — went out of its way to deliberately erase a full fifty years of Democratic Party history from the official DNC website. What was erased? All reference to your party’s role in slavery, segregation, lynching, and the rest. Those platforms that supported slavery, mentioned above? The number of Democrats who occupied the White House while owning slaves? The platforms that supported segregation — and the Democratic presidents, senators, governors and more who supported segregation? The tie between Democrats and the Klan? All of this and more was simply gone from your website — deliberately and willfully hidden from voters while trying to leave the impression that your party was a historically enthusiastic supporter of civil rights. Which, to understate, is not true.

Amid all the tragedy of Charleston, I would suggest that it is finally time for the Democratic Party — the party you chair — to come forward and admit its role in this long-running national horror. It’s time — way, way past time — for an apology. An apology directly from the leaders of the Democratic Party to black Americans, not to mention the rest of the country, for what your party has done.

And instead of raising all those millions for the next election? How about raising some millions from all your rich donors to pay black Americans for the damage you have done to them since the inception of your slavery/segregation and race-based party in 1800?

Damage that has now, yet again, brought violence and tragedy from someone inspired by your ugly history. It would seem, at a minimum, that now is the time to apologize for — instead of ignore or hide — that history.

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