Ronald E. Yates's Blog, page 53

Biden’s Destruction of America via Critical Race Theory, Etc.

I never thought I would see the day when a U.S. president would lead the way in the obliteration of America. But that is exactly what is happening today. And it is quite possible Joe Biden doesn’t even know that he is doing it.

The man who is squatting in the people’s house is the most dangerous denizen of that abode in the history of our country.

Why? Two very obvious reasons: Because he is clearly suffering from dementia and because he is being controlled and manipulated by the most treacherous cadre of socialists and America haters ever assembled in Washington D.C.

These autocrats, who have been appointed to lead several key federal agencies, have one goal in mind and that is to accumulate as much power as they can in the shortest time possible so they can dismantle our constitution and the cherished protections it provides against a tyrannical and oppressive central government.

They are well on their way to achieving just that with the assistance of a mentally feeble and incompetent president and the complicit socialists in Congress.

The fact is, Joe Biden is not fit to be the president of this country.

Biden and his minions are in the process of doing what Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union were never able to do— defeat and demolish our republic and its democratic institutions.

By the time they are finished poisoning our children’s minds with the fallacious and preposterous concepts of Critical Race Theory and the equally idiotic 1619 Project—both of which posit that America’s founding and the founding fathers themselves were racist—we will be living in a nation few, if any, Americans over the age of 50 will recognize.

 Classroom of teenage students 

Biden’s Department of Education has signaled its intent to impose the most radical forms of Critical Race Theory on America’s schools, including the 1619 Project and the so-called “anti-racism” notions of the Marxist Ibram X. Kendi, who opposes capitalism and who contends that white people are inherently racist. In fact, Kendi’s flawed ideas are nothing more than a form of neo-racism—reverse discrimination directed at white people in general, and white children as young as five, in particular.

The Biden administration’s interest in pushing Critical Race Theory on America’s schools is evident because of the president’s constant endorsement of the idiotic and imprudent notion that America is “systemically racist.” Biden’s new American history and civics rule provides support for “Culturally Responsive Teaching,” the ultra-woke and utterly politicized pedagogy derived from Critical Race Theory that is being imposed on teachers nationwide.

You can find out more about the fallacious doctrine of Critical Race Theory and how children in all 50 states are being indoctrinated in public schools in an in-depth article entitled, American Education: Child Indoctrination, Struggle Sessions and Debt Slavery here:  https://ammo.com/articles/american-education-child-indoctrination-debt-slavery

The alternative to CRT is the 1776 Project, spearheaded by Robert Woodson, Sr. a civil rights activist and founder of the Woodson Center that works to support neighborhood grassroots leaders regarding family, community, and crime-fighting. Woodson strongly believes that the erroneous narrative of the 1619 Project deprives blacks of the agency to improve their lives.

“The 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory are two of the most diabolical, self-destructive ideas that I’ve ever heard,” Woodson said last month in an interview with Mark Levin on Life, Liberty & Levin.

Robert Woodson

“What Biden and the leftists are doing is rewriting American history and unfortunately, they are using the suffering and struggle of Black America as a bludgeon to beat America and define America as a criminal organization,” he continued. “It’s lethal . . . . And the message that they are sending is that all white Americans are oppressors and all Black Americans are victims. That exempts the Black community from any kind of personal responsibility. It’s really white supremacy to assume that Blacks have no agency . . . that they have no power over their own lives.”

Shelby Steele, is a political commentator specializing in race relations and his book, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights, is an excellent analysis of race in America. In his book he argues that “white institutions create policies such as affirmative action to give themselves moral authority, not to help blacks. A strong case can be made that high crime, divorce, unemployment, and school dropouts are a result of liberal policies that have harmed the black community.”

Shelby Steele

Steele also wrote and narrated the 2020 documentary film, “What Killed Michael Brown.” It is a thought-provoking film that I highly recommend. It critically examines the ludicrous narrative that the lives of minorities are mostly controlled and defined by white racism.

While Critical Race Theory is one of the most dangerous concepts ever to bubble to the surface from the national cauldron of hair-brained schemes, it is not the only fatuous thing Biden has done (or will do) during his disputed occupation of the White House.

There is the imprudent idea to pack the Supreme Court by adding four more justices to the nine already there. There is his idea to make Washington D.C. a new state, thereby adding one new Democrat seat to the House and two more Democrat senators to the Senate.

Of course, we can’t forget his policy of open borders, his plan to derail the Second Amendment, his constant haranguing of conservatives by labeling them “insurrectionists” and “white supremacists,” and his obsession to federalize all future presidential elections via the House’s HR-1 Bill, otherwise known as the “corrupt politicians act.”

The question many Americans have is this: Will Biden achieve all of these dangerous and transformative ideas before his confused brain stops working, and Willie Brown’s old California concubine and number one squeeze, otherwise known as Kamala Harris, takes over?

Or will he muddle on, kept vertical by frequent vitamin B-12 injections and unchallenged by a shamefully acquiescent press corps that kowtows to the sycophants in the White House?

Only time will tell. In the interim, time is running out for a nation that was once the greatest and most powerful in human history, but which today is allowing a vociferous minority of anarchists, socialists, communists, and obtuse anti-American Americans to obliterate our republic from within.

God save us from fools.

Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges! — When the republic is at its most corrupt, the laws are most numerous!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Key West Today: Hemingway Would Hate It

[Yesterday, I posted about the Ken Burns documentary/biography on Ernest Hemingway that is currently airing on PBS and the pilgrimage I made to Hemingway’s house in Key West, Florida. Hemingway lived in the house in the 1930s during the apex of his career as a novelist. In this post, I point out that Hemingway would hate what has happened to Key West today. I hope you enjoy it]

 Once upon a time, Key West was known for its fishing, sea salt refining, and salvaging operations. It was also the largest and wealthiest city in Florida.

Today, Key West is primarily known as a trap for tourists—hordes of them. In fact, last year some four million tourists ascended on the 7.4 square mile island, and its 25,000 permanent residents that are actually closer to Cuba (90 miles) than Miami (160 miles).

Some tourists come so they can say they visited the southernmost city in America; some are deposited there by giant cruise ships, and some come because they want to visit the place that Ernest Hemingway once called home and where he produced almost 65 percent of his work.

Having traveled to Key West, I am convinced that Hemingway would absolutely hate the place today.

Were he to walk from his house at 907 Whitehead Street to Sloppy Joe’s saloon (his favorite watering hole), Hemingway would have to elbow his way through throngs of tourists, tacky t-shirt stores, cafes, ice-cream stands, street performers, overpriced jewelry shops, shady art galleries, and bars—lots of bars with music blaring at a level Hemingway would no doubt have found annoying.

Hemingway would probably recognize the saloon at 201 Duval Street today. It hasn’t changed too much since 1937 when Hemingway was there knocking back Bacardi light rum Dobles, otherwise known as “Hemingway Hammers.” (Recipe is at the end of this post).

Locals will tell you that today’s Sloppy Joe’s is not the original Sloppy Joe’s. That bar is now called Captain Tony’s. It was there, from 1933 to 1937, that “Sloppy Joe” Russell, a charter boat captain and Hemingway fishing pal, ran a bar from a building that once housed the city morgue.

In 1937, Russell abruptly moved half a block to the current Sloppy Joe’s location, upset that his landlord raised his rent $6 a month. At midnight, his patrons, including (legend has it) Hemingway, helped him move lock, stock, and barrel to the current location.

Some locals insist that Hemingway provided Russell $5,000 to buy the new bar. Others point out that Hemingway removed the marble urinal from the old bar and took it home.

“I used the damned thing so much I figure I already paid for it,” Hemingway said. He set it up as an outdoor watering trough for his beloved polydactyl (six-toed) cat named Snow White. It is still there behind Hemingway’s house and Snow White’s six-toed descendants—all 40 or 50 of them—still drink from it.

Unlike the 1930s, today’s Sloppy Joe’s features a restaurant and gift shop loaded with Hemingway-related souvenirs. It also hosts the annual Hemingway Days Festival and Hemingway Look-Alike Contest.

I have to wonder what Papa would think about all of that.

I also wonder what he would think about the ubiquitous key lime pie shops that abound in the town where the dessert originated in the 1850s. They are everywhere and Key West is rife with arguments about which place has the best key lime pies.

Key Lime Pie

If there is one takeaway from Key West and other hallowed places steeped in the nostalgia of bygone days (and nights), it is this: They are not the same unspoiled places they were when their reputations were evolving.

Take, for example, legendary wild-west towns like Virginia City, Nevada, or Dodge City, Kansas, or Tombstone, Arizona. When we visit these places we hope against hope they will be at least a little like they once were.

They are not. Like Key West, they are inundated with tourists surging through t-shirt shops and souvenir shops that sell everything from whoopee cushions to cheap jewelry.

But let’s not stop there. When I think of the venerated historical sites I recently visited in Europe it’s apparent how tourism has impacted them also. Take Rome’s Forum and the Coliseum, where for a few Euros you can have your picture taken with re-enactors dressed as Roman Centurions or  Vestal Virgins. And yes, you can buy t-shirts and other junk nearby.

Or how about England’s enigmatic collection of monoliths at Stonehenge and the Tower of London complex along the Thames? More t-shirt shops, more throngs of tourists, more junk in nearby shops.

With increasing numbers of people traveling further and faster than ever before, places with even a modicum of historical significance are now targets for tour operators and their convoys of pervasive buses. Even Machu Picchu, that ancient Inca city high in the Peruvian Andes that was once visited by a handful of hearty travelers, is now teeming with flocks of sightseers.

The reaction of many tourists is often: “Gee, I expected something more authentic with fewer people.”

Wishful thinking.

Key West has done a good job of preserving some of its past. Hemingway’s 165-year-old house, for example, is in surprisingly good condition given the number of tourists who traipse through it to ogle the furniture and other trappings of the renowned Nobel-prize-winning author. It also boasts a cadre of well-informed docents who will lead you through the house and grounds while providing you with running commentaries that are highly instructive and enlightening.

Inside Sloppy Joe’s

Even Sloppy Joe’s, with its ancient, wobbling ceiling fans, jalousie doors, and original long curving bar has managed to preserve some authenticity. It seems almost as grungy and cluttered as it was back in the day, and the booze still flows liberally.

And Key West, even with its plethora of overpriced shops, ice cream stands, rubber-wheeled trolleys, conch trains, and street performers, retains a kind of eccentric charm.

Maybe it’s the utter tackiness of the place, the crush of tourists, or the vague mystique associated with Hemingway, it’s most famous resident.

Or maybe it is something Hemingway once said about Key West when asked to describe the place.

“Key West is the St. Tropez of the poor,” he said.

Hemingway Hammer recipe

 

A Hemingway Documentary & a Pilgrimage to “Papa’s” Key West Abode

PBS is currently running a new three-part documentary about Ernest Hemingway by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick which explores the famous author’s own image-making. In the documentary, we see Hemingway as a “man’s man–” a battle-hardened war veteran, a big game hunter, a deep-sea fisherman, a brawler, a boozer, a bullfighting devotee, a seducer of women.

But just how true were these carefully crafted images? Michael Katakis, the manager of Hemingway’s literary estate tells us in one episode: “I hate the myth of Hemingway. It obscures the man. And the man is much more interesting than the myth.”

Irish author Edna O’Brien explains that Hemingway’s weakness was that he loved an audience. “Newspapers and magazines would show him hunting in Africa, fishing off the Florida Keys, carousing with soldiers during the second world war, always glamorously virile,” O’Brien says in one part of the documentary. “His stories and novels—about hunting and fishing, bullfighting and battle-fighting—fused him with his characters in the public imagination.”

Despite the myth-making, there is no doubt that Hemingway restructured American literature. Literary critics often describe Hemingway’s style as one of omission, of things left out or left unsaid. His writing doesn’t leave things out, though, so much as it veils them. This is what he suggested in his iceberg theory: that stories, like icebergs, may derive their heft from things submerged or unseen.

“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them,” Hemingway once explained. “The dignity of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”

I wonder how Hemingway would be tolerated or perceived if he were emerging as an author in today’s mawkish, self-indulgent world, where men and boys are being “feminized” in schools and media and where masculinity is often disparaged as “toxic” and in need of relentless reassessment.

The documentary seems intent on stripping away the myth of the man while exposing his personal struggles such as his life-long battle with depression, his insecurities, and his need for the women in his life to appease and sustain him emotionally. But try as it might, it cannot diminish Hemingway’s undeniable genius as a storyteller and his indisputable and lasting impact on literature.

That’s why a  couple of years ago, I made a long-overdue pilgrimage to Key West, Florida to see where Hemingway once worked and lived. Here is a post I shared after that journey. I hope you will find it illuminating. And, by the way, if you haven’t seen the Ken Burns PBS documentary on Hemingway, I highly recommend it.

A Pilgrimage to “Papa’s” Key West Abode

The house at 907 Whitehead Street in the heart of Old Town Key West looks about the same as it did when Pulitzer and Nobel-Prize winning author Ernest Hemingway lived there from 1931 to 1940.

But that’s where the similarity ends.

The 165-year-old limestone two-story house with its wrap-around veranda and lush gardens of coconut palms, frangipani, bougainvillea, and African tulips, is now a museum offering tours at $13 a head to thousands of tourists who make the 150-mile, four-hour drive from Miami through the Florida Keys to Key West.

[image error] Hemingway’s Home in Key West

Tour guides lead visitors through the house’s modest rooms explaining various architectural features, furniture pieces, and artwork. They also point out the 40 six and seven-toed cats that have the run of the house and gardens.

A highlight of the tour is a peek at the upstairs room of the small two-story guest house behind the main house where Hemingway penned such classic works as Death in the Afternoon, The Green Hills of Africa, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, To Have and Have Not, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. It was here that he also wrote dozens of short stories, poems, newspaper columns, and magazine articles.

[image error]      Hemingway’s Office

Hemingway was a prolific writer who rose early and began writing around eight a.m. and usually finished at noon. Then it was often off to Sloppy Joe’s bar for an afternoon of drinking and gabbing with pals or heading out to sea on his fishing boat, The Pilar.

For a journalist and writer like me, visiting the place where Hemingway produced 65 percent of his work, is a bit like making a religious pilgrimage to The Vatican, Jerusalem, or Mecca.

In 1961, after his suicide in Ketchum, Idaho, the unpublished manuscript that would later become the novel Islands in the Stream was found in a vault in the property’s garage.

I have always felt a fragile connection to Ernest Hemingway because of where we both began our journalistic careers. It was at the Kansas City Star. He worked there between 1917 and 1918 cranking out police stories and other articles. I began my career there in 1968 as a summer intern from the University of Kansas’ William Allen White School of Journalism.

While working at the Star, I recall reading some of Hemingway’s clips. In those days, reporters didn’t have bylines, but a reporter who mentored me at the paper let me see Hemingway’s stories on microfiche. His stories were crisp, punchy, and filled with insightful descriptions—all elements that would eventually characterize and define his writing.

Years later Hemingway recalled how his training as a Kansas City Star reporter prepared him for a successful career as an author.

“I learned how to use short sentences and eliminate superfluous words,” he said. “These are the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing.”

As many wise young reporters do, Hemingway latched on to a seasoned newspaperman named Lionel Calhoun Moise as a mentor. Moise was probably the biggest influence in Hemingway’s journalistic career.

[image error]  Hemingway’s studio

Moise, who was once described by a fellow Star reporter as “a big, brutal, son-of-a-bitch, who loved to drink and brawl,” believed that writers needed to experience what they wrote about. He told Hemingway to write crisply, with a minimum of description. Ultimately, Hemingway learned to let action and dialogue move the story along.

My mentor at the Kansas City Star was a 65-year-old reporter named Harry Hannon. Unlike Moise, Harry was a short, wiry man who walked with a limp. His beat, among other places, was the U.S. Federal Prison at Leavenworth, Kansas, and the Kansas State Prison just down the road in Lansing, Kansas.

Harry not only knew the wardens and many of the guards at both prisons, he knew many of the inmates—including some serving life sentences for murder and other nefarious crimes.

“You want some life experiences?” Harry asked me once as we walked through the Federal penitentiary. “You will hear plenty of those in here.”

Harry taught me things from the old Kansas City Star stylesheet like: “Say he was eager to go, not anxious to go. You are anxious about a friend who is ill;” and “He died of heart disease, not heart failure—everybody dies of heart failure;” and finally, “Don’t say, He had his leg cut off in an accident. He wouldn’t have had it done for anything.” 

Hemingway would have been given the Star’s style sheet. I have attached a copy of a 1915 version at the end of this post.

Harry never made the trip to Key West to visit Hemingway’s famous abode. But a few years later, after he retired from the Star, he came to Chicago for the horse races at Arlington Park. At the time, I was a new general assignment reporter for the Chicago Tribune.

[image error] Hemingway doing some self-editing

We had dinner together at the Palmer House hotel where he was staying and then I took him on a tour of the Tribune’s sprawling newsroom where reporters were pounding out stories on big Underwood typewriters for the final edition. The raucous sound of phones ringing, typewriters clacking and agitated reporters yelling “Copy!” at copyboys and copygirls, resounded throughout the vast smoke-filled room.

“Now this is a real newsroom,” Harry said as we observed the kinetic atmosphere that once upon a time defined the city room of a big city newspaper. “I envy you.”

Harry never met Hemingway at the Star. He began his career at the paper a few years after Hemingway moved on.

“I remember some reporters talking about him,” Harry told me. “They remember him as a fresh-faced kid of 18 or 19 who moved to Kansas City from Chicago. He sometimes wore a red and black checkered hunting shirt to work. A lot of folks didn’t like the way the dressed, but hell, he worked mostly out of the office on the street, covering crime, fires, chasing ambulances, riding with the cops, and hanging out in hospital emergency rooms, so who cared?”

[image error]   Ernest Hemingway in 1918

As a general assignment reporter for the Chicago Tribune, I covered the same kinds of stories. It was the best training I ever got—my journalism courses at the University of Kansas notwithstanding.

Later Hemingway would cover war and mayhem for various newspapers and magazines, as did I for the Tribune.

Like Hemingway, I learned to write from my experiences. Unlike Hemingway, however, my fiction, while infused with many of my experiences covering wars and revolutions, does not rise to the level of virtuosity that Hemingway displayed.

Am I discouraged by that? Not at all. While Hemingway often said that writing was the hardest work he ever did, he also said telling a good story gave him the greatest joy.

Writing—whether fiction or non-fiction—is storytelling. As long as I can write for the sheer joy of it and tell a few compelling stories now and then, I will be the happiest of hacks.

The Star Copy Style

 

 

 

An Essay for All Those Who Don’t Get It

I don’t know who E.P. Unum is–though I do know that handle stands for E Pluribus Unum. Those Latin words are the traditional motto of the United States and mean: “Out of many, one.” So, whoever is writing under the name of “E. P. Unum” is paying homage to one of the founding philosophies of this country while preferring to conceal his or her true identity. In any case, Mr. or Mrs. or Ms. Unum has penned a fine essay here–one that I hope as many Americans as possible will read with an open mind.

There is great truth in what is written here, and within that truth, there is also a warning. We are on the verge of losing our Republic to those who want to turn us into the Soviet Union or China or perhaps even Cuba or North Korea. If that happens, then the millions of Americans who are sleeping while the mendacious and perfidious Biden administration destroys our Constitution and rips up our Bill of Rights deserve what they get–just as Cassius warned Brutus in Shakespeare’s play. I hope those Americans wake up before we lose our Republic!

Please read on!

By E.P. Unum

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.”  (From Shakespeare’s “The Death of Julius Caesar,” Scene I Act II, Cassius to Brutus plotting to Assassinate Julius Caesar.)

The legendary broadcast journalist and war correspondent, Edward R. Murrow used the above in his effort to reinforce the age-old principle that journalists cannot shrink from their responsibility, to tell the truth, and to never sacrifice that responsibility on the altar of convenience or succumb to bombastic, inflammatory rhetoric unsupportive by facts and hard evidence.

Where have you gone, Mr. Murrow? We sure could use your journalistic integrity now.

This essay is for all those who don’t get it:

Do you now understand why there was never any action against the Clintons or Obama, how they destroyed emails and evidence and phones and servers, how they spied and wiretapped, how they lied to the FISA Court, had conversations on the tarmac, sent emails to themselves to cover their asses after key meetings, how Comey and Brennan and Clapper never were brought to any justice, how the FBI and CIA lied, how the Steele Dossier was passed along, how phones got factory resets, how leak after leak to a corrupt, accomplice media went unchecked, why George Soros is always in the shadows, why they screamed “Russia” and pushed a sham impeachment, why no one ever goes to jail, why no one is ever charged, why nothing ever happens?

Now you know why there was no wrongdoing in the FISA warrants, why the Durham Report has been delayed, again, and with each passing day we will likely never see it; why Hunter Biden will likely walk free, perhaps with a fine and a slap on the wrist and some words to “go and sin no more.” Why the FBI sat on Hunter Biden’s laptop for over eleven months. Why the mainstream media, Twitter and Facebook, withheld publishing anything about the Hunter Biden scandal, which has close and direct links to now, President Joe Biden.

Why the Biden’s connection to China and massive cash payments were overlooked and hardly covered in the mainstream media, why, like “Manna from Heaven,” a lethal virus from China was unleashed on the western world, the perfect weapon, an invisible scourge that could be weaponized politically to bring down the greatest economy in the history of humanity and usher in unverifiable mail-in voting.

By now, you surely know why the media is 24/7 propaganda, and lies, why true journalism is dead, why up is down and down is up, right is wrong and wrong is right, why evil is good and good is evil. By now, you surely know why social media silences the First Amendment, speaks over the President of the United States and bans him from using their services. This has been the plan by the Deep State all along.

They didn’t expect Trump to win in 2016. He messed up their plans, delayed them a little. They had to get him out, so they concocted lie after lie, falsified information, tried unsuccessfully, twice, to impeach him! They assaulted him in the press every single day while he continued to serve the American people and put America First! They failed in all their attempts. But they weren’t about to let it happen again.

Covid was China’s gift to the Global Elites. It was everything the Deep State needed to rid themselves of the one man who could stand in the way of their takeover of America. So, Covid was weaponized, Governors helped shut down their states, the media helped shame and kill the economy, and the “super lucky unverifiable mail-in ballots” were just the trick to make sure the career politician, with a track record of zero accomplishments in 47 years, allegedly with his hands in Chinese payrolls; a man that couldn’t finish a sentence or collect a crowd, miraculously became the most popular vote recipient of all time! If you are foolish enough to believe that this was all on the up and up, there is a bridge in Brooklyn N.Y. I’d like to sell you….cheap.

Ladies and Gentlemen, you have just witnessed a silent coup, the overthrow of the US free election system, and the seeming end of our Constitutional Republic, and the merge of capitalism into the slide toward socialism and communism. What will happen next? Well, here is a look down the corridor of the future:

Biden’s fiasco at the southern border is just the beginning. By summer, we will have hundreds of thousands of people trying to enter the United States illegally, and they will likely be successful because that is what the left-wing zealots in the Democrat Party want. Joe Biden invited them in! You will continue to see agencies like CBP and INS, and Homeland Security muzzled or possibly deleted. Law enforcement will see continued defunding. Criminals will be released without bail, free to commit crimes again and again.

Soon, the idiots on the left will try to restrict our Second Amendment Rights to own weapons and will add this to the list of additional items to tax. There will be a concerted movement to make Washington D.C. a State along with Puerto Rico because democrats can then stack the House and Senate with additional votes. There will be an assault on the Electoral College with an effort to eliminate it. American history will be a thing of the past (if it isn’t already) erased in favor of Revisionist History. By fall 2021, you will see mounting pressure to pack The Supreme Court.

If you work in the manufacturing or oil industry, get ready. Biden’s day one action to reverse the Keystone XL Pipeline was just the beginning. There will be a full-scale attack on oil and gas because these are considered “evil.” In one stroke of his pen, Biden wiped away decades of effort that culminated under President Trump in making the U.S. energy independent and, for the first time in history, an oil-exporting country. Now, we will once again be dependent on Middle Eastern Oil while the starry-eyed intelligencia in Biden’s Cabinet play around with trying to make our nation carbon-free by 2035, regardless of what other countries in the world are doing!

If you run a business, brace for impact. Maybe you’ll be on the hook for slavery reparations like some people in Illinois are today, or have your suburbs turned into Section 8 housing. Feckless Joe Biden has just signed a $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that doesn’t rescue anyone and puts us further in debt while he pursues the left’s Utopia Goal.

Our taxes are going to increase significantly, regardless of the empty pledges of Joe Biden. Businesses will pay more, and the flight of capital offshore will accelerate, resulting, once again, in massive unemployment. Do you really believe Joe Biden when he says that his tax plan will focus on the “wealthy paying more and that families making less than $400,000 will not pay a penny more in taxes”?

What do you think the wealthy will do? For starters, like businesses, they will move someplace else, and we, the middle class, will end up footing the bill. But that should not come as a surprise because that is what the people in power want….the dumbing down of citizens…and more power concentrated in big government.

In Joe Biden’s America, there is not a single problem that exists that cannot be solved by big and more expansive government throwing more and more taxpayer money at it. I bet you found it exciting to learn that Biden’s new Secretary of Defense, General Lloyd Austin, proudly took time to focus on how the Pentagon has designed new, more fashionable uniforms for pregnant female soldiers, sailors, and marines and that we will spend our tax dollars providing surgical procedures for those in the military who wish to be transgender.

Doesn’t that make you feel safe and comfortable? I can’t wait to hear how we intend to deal with the Chinese Navy who now has more ships and submarines than we do. And make no mistake, our enemies, China, Iran, Russia, and North Korea, are watching all of this unfold before them, and they will soon seize upon the opportunity our bungling, babbling weak-kneed President offers them. They are watching closely as Biden extends $75 million in aid to the Palestinians, an affront to our ally Israel. They are laughing at us as we grovel at the feet of Iran, seeking to begin a new round of talks towards rejoining the nuclear agreement negotiated by Obama and John Kerry.

And the spending spree is not yet done. Biden is seeking to push another $2.3 Trillion Infrastructure Bill through Congress, only 7% of which is directed to infrastructure. What could go wrong? Well, think about it this way: If you go shopping for bread or milk and notice that there is an enormous supply of bread and milk at the supermarket, what would you expect the prices of those two staples would be? You would expect because of the oversupply of milk and bread, that prices would go down. It’s that way with money because money is essentially a commodity, a product.

The only way Biden and his gaggle of miscreants can finance their spending spree is for the Federal Reserve to print more money. The problem is that when the Fed cranks up their printing presses, they fuel inflation because there is no corresponding increase in productivity. We thus have “too many dollars chasing too few goods,” the very definition of inflation. Suddenly we will find our economy following the paths of Argentina, Venezuela, and Cuba. If you don’t know the history of these economies, you should do your homework and find out.

I could go on and on. There is no real recovery from this sort of tremendous civil unrest and civil disobedience, possibly civil war. The elections from this point on will likely be decided by New York City, Chicago, and California. At that point, the Republic will be dead. Mob rule, appeasement, and corruption will run rampant. The candidate who offers the most from the Treasury will get the most votes. But the votes really won’t matter, just the ones received and counted. That precedent has been set. As I type these words into my computer, I note where Major League Baseball has pulled their annual All-Star Game from Atlanta, Georgia, because the White House and the left-leaning media have taken the position that Georgia’s new voting law is racist and unconstitutional. Since when is the MLB political?

By now, you all have heard the story. “Benjamin Franklin was walking out of Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention in 1787, when someone shouted out, ‘Dr. Franklin, what have we got? A Republic or a Monarchy?’”

Franklin responded, “A Republic if you can keep it.”

Ladies and gentlemen, The ascension to the Presidency of Joe Biden, one of this nation’s greatest frauds, incompetents, and crooks, along with Vice President Kamala Harris whose claim to fame and experience on the national stage is……nothing……has ushered in the pending collapse of our Republic, the last bastion of freedom in the world, the shining city on the hill.

And remember this. In dealing with the China Virus, which is now a year old, we locked down the greatest economy in the history of humankind over a virus that has a 99.96% recovery rate. The government shut down religion, and people turned from God. They turned from family. They turned from Flag and Country. People embraced degeneracy culture. They celebrated and looked to fools for guidance. They worshipped themselves selfishly as they took for granted what many sacrificed and died to give them. People disregarded the lessons of history and all it teaches. On their watch, America just died a little. I’m afraid she’ll never be quite the same again.

I used to sit on the stoop in my NYC neighborhood as a young boy and listened to my grandfather, who told me time and time again, in Italian, “you can sometimes trust a thief, but you can never trust a liar.”  I may be wrong, but I believe with all my heart and soul that the greatest tragedy of this experience is that we continue to allow the people we elected to run our government to lie to us.

I studied the works of Edward R. Murrow and marveled at his ability both in radio and then pioneering such successful CBS TV shows like “Person to Person,” “CBS Reports,” “Small World,” and “See it Now.” Here is one of my favorite quotes from Mr. Murrow, one I use in teaching my college students every semester:

“To be persuasive, we must be believable; to be believable,  we must be credible; to be credible, we must be truthful.”

It is a sad commentary on the current state of our media that they lack this very basic of all responsibilities.

Cassius got it right: “The fault dear Brutus is not in the stars but in ourselves.”

 

Stop Critical Race Theory Before It Destroys America

Today, I am reprinting a commentary on the damage Critical Race Theory is doing to children in our schools and to our nation as a whole. It is written by Roger L. Simon, a novelist, and screenwriter. I have posted on Critical Race Theory before with my own thoughts about CRT which coincide with what Roger Simon is saying here. Take a look. His piece is eye-opening.

ROGER L. SIMON

The U.S. Civil War was an extraordinary and unique event in world history. For the first and only time, a country sacrificed hundreds of thousands of its own citizens in a righteous fight to end the evil of slavery.

That fight had begun years before with many heroes risking their lives, but the war was the moment of truth. Slavery would be abolished or the country would cease to exist. Good prevailed.

Since then, the struggle for racial equality has continued and, despite many twists and turns, some extremely disheartening has generally headed in the right direction … until now.

Something called “critical race theory” (CRT) intervened to turn our society around, head it back toward racial enmity and, to be blunt, destroy our country, and with it our common humanity unless it’s stopped.

Unlike slavery, which was overt, CRT is a growing cancer infecting our schools, media, entertainment, and businesses. It’s everywhere, often unseen and more often not even known or recognized by a large percentage of the public, so all the more dangerous.

Many definitions and explanations of CRT exist, a literal phantasmagoria of intellectual obfuscation, the stuff of theses and “studies,” some of it quite brilliantly, if sophistically, executed, but CRT boils down to something quite simple.

 

Martin Luther King Jr.’s justifiably famous dream that the day will come when we judge each other by our characters and not by the color of our skins has been turned on its head.

The color of our skins is to be the be-all and end-all of our existences, no matter what, no escape. That is what determines our position in life and our fate, beyond class and, apparently, beyond our character as well (i.e., how we actually behave and what we have done).

Race is everything. In order to be considered good, you must acknowledge it, literally bow to it, and behave accordingly.

And, it goes without saying, the Caucasian race (variously defined according to the situation—there is now something called a “White Hispanic”) has, in this construct, done virtually everything that is bad and is inherently the root of all evil. Hence, we have “white privilege,” “white ’splainin’” and so forth.

Minorities cannot be racist, only whites.

This idea doesn’t comport remotely with reality or with the DNA of homo sapiens (in which race is a barely visible, minor component) and is, in essence, racist itself.

Marxist Intellectuals

CRT was an outgrowth of Critical Theory, which was developed by frustrated European Marxist intellectuals who were trying to deal with the failure of the working class to do what they were supposed to— opt for the workers’ state.

They gave up on the recalcitrant workers and decided the route to communist nirvana was a “march through the institutions” (media, the academy, entertainment) to take over those three key areas and inculcate their form of Marxism from above.

It worked to a great extent—just look at what has become of these institutions throughout the West—but that wasn’t enough. A coup de grace was necessary. Western civilization must crumble altogether and be replaced by their diktats of how we must all live, act, and think— or else.

This couldn’t be done easily by Westerners, except perhaps in the background, since the classical liberalism they abhorred was a product of the West.

Enter critical race theory. That would cement their totalitarian stranglehold on society because race is immutable. (The sprinkling of outliers who pretend they are from another race adds up to very little.) “This is the army, Mr. Jones” became “You are your skin color, Mr. Jones.”

People who grew up admiring George Orwell, or saying they did, were suddenly willingly living out “Animal Farm” as if they didn’t realize it was a satire.

“Four legs good, two legs bad,” was becoming an American reality, only it was “Black good, white bad, yellow good, white bad, brown good, white bad.”

If you wanted to invent an ideology that actually created racism where it doesn’t exist, you could do no better than critical race theory. It’s a superb method of controlling society to your advantage.

Every aspect of our culture has been infected with this absurdity, right up to the corporate board rooms. Even Coca-Cola executives are now instructing us on the dangers of “whiteness.” Do they actually believe this hogwash? Who knows? Perhaps they are just scared, cowards playing along with the zeitgeist to keep their lucrative jobs. But if that’s so, it’s worse.

Taught to Hate

Most importantly, the ideology has infected our schools, even at the lowest levels, to the degree that young children are being hard-wired to hate or distrust each other and, even more sadly, themselves.

White kids—no matter their social class, no matter at what point their families came to America, in many cases decades and more after slavery, fleeing genocides, pogroms, the most abject poverty or whatever—are being taught they are oppressors and must spend their lives expiating the sin of their skin color.

What do you think that does to their psyches, whatever color they are, whatever side of this they are on?

If you wanted to invent an ideology that actually created racism where it doesn’t exist, you could do no better than critical race theory.

It’s a superb method of controlling society to your advantage. Hitler, of course, had his own form of CRT in his master race theories. The Soviet Union had internal passports on which everyone’s ethnicity was specified, going beyond mere skin color to include their region and religion as well.

With the blessing of CRT, one of the major goals of the civil rights movement, integration, has also been flipped on its head, back to segregation, with institutions such as Columbia University holding separate graduation ceremonies for different ethnic and racial groups. Not that long ago, this would have been considered a racist outrage by the same people.

These institutions are now leading the charge against free speech, with critical race theory as their intellectual underpinning. After all, the Bill of Rights was written by white men. It had to be thrown away.

This attitude didn’t emerge out of nowhere. A certain amount of it was present years ago in the Black Power movement and the Black Panthers. But it has reemerged stronger than ever.

Not only did critical theory need yet another turn of the ideological screw, but another factor was also prominent in this recent rise of CRT. It began to gain acceptance during the very time America elected a black president, not once but twice, providing evidence that a racist society was finally, at least for the most part, in the rearview mirror.

That couldn’t be countenanced by the not inconsequential group that relied on opposing racism for power and income, indeed for their own survival and self-image. Critical race theory was therefore welcome to them as it was to whole sectors of what could be called the American nomenklatura, known to others fallaciously as “elites.”

Now it’s everywhere, with Antifa and Black Lives Matter the leading exemplars of CRT played out in the streets.

Local Action

There is some good news, however. Like a lot of things now, to a surprising degree, this anti-democratic, racially divisive onslaught can be stopped best locally. This is especially true at the critical school level where parents, all of us really, can organize and step forward to stop the indoctrination.

During COVID-19, many parents were able to see on Zoom for the first time what their children were being taught and were deeply disturbed. They must follow through and put a stop to it.

This will take bravery and conviction that many have never shown before or even know that they have. But they do. Many are beginning to show it across the country.

Among the most courageous doing so now are black men and women who see more clearly, feel more acutely, than any of us the disastrous betrayal of the civil rights movement and of their own people by critical race theory and are opposing it vehemently.

They are the heirs of Dr. King.

As we used to sing in those days, “Black and white together, we shall not be moved/Like a tree standing by the water/ We shall not be moved.” 

Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, co-founder of PJ Media, and a columnist of The Epoch Times,  from where this commentary was reprinted.

 

 

 

 

 

Ramblings about the Late Larry McMurtry

[image error]When I heard that Larry McMurtry passed away last Thursday in his Archer, Texas home at the age of 84, I was saddened.What a loss! What a prolific writer! What a storyteller!

His 30 novels, many of which have been turned into classic films and television series, such as The Last Picture Show, Lonesome Dove, Terms of Endearment, and Comanche Moon, are brilliant in their ability to delineate convincing characters and bring them to life.

Along with the late Elmore Leonard, McMurtry was one of my favorite contemporary writers. He not only created tough, gritty characters, but vulnerable and fragile ones too.

His books brought him numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1986 for Lonesome Dove. In 2005, he and co-author Diana Ossana won an Oscar for writing the screenplay for “Brokeback Mountain.”

McMurtry’s first novel, “Horseman, Pass By,” was published in 1961, and was turned into the 1963 film “Hud,” starring Paul Newman. That was the first of many film or television adaptations of McMurtry’s works.

“The Last Picture Show,” his 1967 coming-of-age story set in a small town similar to Archer City, was made into a 1971 film by Peter Bogdanovich.

“Terms of Endearment,” McMurtry’s 1975 novel about the relationship between a mother and her daughter, was turned into a 1983 film by James Brooks and starred Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger, and Jack Nicholson. A major commercial success, the film was nominated for 11 Academy Awards and won five, including best actress for MacLaine and best-supporting actor for Nicholson.

In 1985, McMurtry published “Lonesome Dove,” a historical saga about two Texas Rangers and a cattle drive from Texas to Montana. After winning the Pulitzer Prize, the book was turned into an epic four-part TV miniseries starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall. The series received multiple Emmy nominations and won seven.

So, that’s a little bit about McMurtry’s literary and cinematic successes–most of which you probably already knew.

What is probably NOT known about this literary giant, is the fact that he wrote all of his books on a typewriter. Yes, a typewriter. Not a computer.

“I thank my typewriter,” McMurtry said when he accepted a Golden Globe Award for the Brokeback Mountain screenplay. “My typewriter is a Hermes 3000, surely one of the noblest instruments of European genius. It has kept me for 30 years out of the dry embrace of the computer.”

I know what he meant. I loved the portable 17-pound Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter I carried with me when I was working as a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune.

That Olivetti never failed me, though it took a severe pounding as I jumped on and off helicopters in places like Vietnam and Cambodia, bounced down rutted roads in jeeps and trucks in El Salvador and Afghanistan, and exposed it to 110-degree temperatures and monsoon rains in the Amazon jungle.

Its solid, blue metal shell behaved like armor plating. No matter how much I threw that typewriter around or how often I dropped it when I unzipped the vinyl case and pulled it out, the platen always held my paper in position, and the keys always worked.

In 1975, this was state-of-the-art technology. Tough. Dependable. Cheap. Easy to maintain.

Today that Olivetti resides on a shelf in my garage. And I am sure if I cranked a sheet of paper into it and began banging on the keys, those low-tech black letters would start marching, albeit haltingly, across the page, just like the old days.

But beyond its sturdiness and durability was the way I wrote with it.

McMurtry thanked his Hermes 3000 typewriter because “It has kept me for 30 years out of the dry embrace of the computer.”

I know what he meant. When you write with a typewriter you are forced to plan ahead and think about what you are going to write because unlike a computer, a manual typewriter is unforgiving when it comes to mistakes. You can’t just hit a backspace bar and erase your mistakes.

But with a computer, you can write any kind of gibberish you want and the word processing software will make sense of it via a grammar or spell checker and even offer you alternatives to the faulty sentence you have just written.

While that may be fine for most people, writers (and I consider myself one—though certainly not in McMurtry’s or Leonard’s class) prefer NOT to be coached or shamed into writing perfect English.

An author might use bad English or faulty grammar deliberately or construct an incomprehensible sentence because the story calls for it.

Like McMurtry, I use a lot of 19th century vernacular in my books—specifically, the kind I heard in rural Kansas when my great-grandparents and grandparents spoke.

McMurtry grew up and lived in Archer City, Texas, a town with a population of 1,834 souls just south of Wichita Falls, Texas.

I spent a lot of my early years in Greenleaf, Kansas—a town of about 650 people when I was living there.

Greenleaf, Kansas, ca. 1948

 

One of the things I notice about writers is that the best ones listen—really listen—to the way people talk, not just to what they say, but HOW they say it. And I have noticed, people who live in small towns like Archer City, Texas or Greenleaf,  Kansas, talk differently from people in Chicago, or Los Angeles, or any other inhospitable and manic metropolis.

For one thing, they talk much slower and usually with conspicuous thriftiness of words—the way retired Texas Rangers Captain Woodrow Call and Captain Augustus McCrae do in Lonesome Dove; or the way Billy Battles and his shadow riding Cousin Charley Higgins do in my Finding Billy Battles trilogy.

 

Here’s McMurtry using an economy of verbiage to talk about writing:

“You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.”

“Writing is a form of herding. I herd words into little paragraph-like clusters.”

The world has lost one of its greatest literary shepherds.

RIP Larry McMurtry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In 1975, this was state-of-the-art technology. Tough. Dependable. Cheap. Easy to maintain.

 

 

 

Biden Meets the “Press”

Like a lot of Americans, I subscribe to Mike Huckabee’s newsletter. I was going to write my take on Biden’s woeful press conference (Biden love-in is probably a better description), and I still might, given that there probably won’t be another such festive jamboree for another three or four months–if then.

But Mike has nailed the ludicrous pretext for a press conference that Americans witnessed last week. Journalists (if you can call them that) during that dismal affair should be ashamed of themselves–not only for the softball questions they lobbed underhand at the stumbling bumbling Biden–but for agreeing to submit their questions in advance and to be “called on” like a room full of second-graders, rather than insisting on the free-for-all press conferences that Donald Trump held in which reporters yelled questions and actually argued with the president. Times certainly have changed, and it is obvious what the political affiliations are of the obedient scribes who pretended to be serious reporters.

Having said all of that, take a look at how former presidential candidate and former Arkansas Governor Huckabee had to say about the fawning press and their sacrosanct Great Mumbler.

By Mike Huckabee

On Thursday, over two months into his presidency, Joe Biden finally held his first press conference. His media cheering section is trying to defend it as triumphant proof that he’s totally in charge of both the executive branch and his faculties. But while he might have cleared their bar, I haven’t seen a bar set so low since Animal Planet aired the Snail Olympics.

I’ve seen leftists on social media claim that Biden’s clinging to his detailed notes on who to call on and what to say is nothing out of the ordinary, that all Presidents did that. No, they didn’t. They found one photo of Trump holding a note with a message to repeat on it as “evidence,” but didn’t mention that he would stand up nearly every day for an hour or more, answering unscripted and usually hostile questions from anyone who wanted to grill him.

Biden’s list of reporters & their questions

Maybe Biden’s performance seemed better to some than it really was just in comparison to the cringe-worthy job the “reporters” did. After spending four years going after Trump like a pack of rabid wolves, they suddenly transformed into tranquilized poodles, quietly waiting their turns to ask pre-approved questions and await their scripted responses with no tough follow-ups. They made the North Korean press’s treatment of Kim Jong Un look hard-hitting.

The most embarrassing moment came when fawning PBS (your tax dollars at work) reporter Yamiche Alcindor gushingly suggested that the reason so many migrants are flooding over the border is that he’s such a “moral, decent man” that they want to come here and trust him with their unaccompanied minors.

Or maybe they think he’s just so sweet; they want to come to kiss his feet to see if they taste like sugar. I’ll bet she thinks that.

Aside from the pre-scripted answers and the sycophantic press, here are a few other takeaways:

Biden thinks he’s going to run for reelection in 2024 , when he will be 82 years old, five years past the average US male lifespan. This despite him already giving answers like this: “I have never been particularly poor at calculating how to get things done in the United States Senate. So the best way to get something done, if you, if you hold near and dear to you that you like to be able to…anyway…”He ran as a moderate, bipartisan unifier, but he now sees himself as the most “transformative” President since FDR, and he’s willing to do away with the Senate filibuster in order to steamroll a far-left agenda through with only 50 votes plus Kamala Harris to break the tie.  Here he is defending the importance of the filibuster in 2005 . Does he remember that speech? Or 2005?

He even suggested the Republican Party might not exist by 2024. Personally, I think the Republican Party will exist for the same reason it was founded in the first place: someone has to stand up against the Democrats’ addiction to ordering powerless minorities to shut up and do whatever they’re told. Since Biden claimed to have been in the Senate for 120 years, I assume he remembers that.

Biden claims it’s okay to destroy Senate norms he once defended because he and his party’s radical left programs are popular in the polls. I won’t repeat what I’ve already written over the past few days, but in a nutshell: his net approval rating in the Rasmussen daily tracking poll was -10 points and falling; support for giving illegal immigrants a pathway to citizenship has plummeted 14 points since January to 43%; and majorities of all demographics, even blacks, and Democrats, support voter ID laws that are among the election integrity safeguards he wants to abolish.

Since everything that gets in the way of the Democrats’ lust for all-consuming power is now “racist” (even fossil fuels – I kid you not), Biden tried to paint attempts to insure the honesty of elections as racist with one of the weirdest lines ever :

“What I’m worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It’s sick. It’s sick. I’m convinced that we’ll be able to stop this because it is the most pernicious thing— this makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle.”

FYI: Democrats created Jim Crow laws. “Jim Eagle” is apparently a cartoon character created in Joe Biden’s mind. And is there any idea in government today more racist than the condescending claim that blacks are too dumb or helpless to be able to obtain a legal ID? By the way, studies have found that voter ID laws do not depress voter turnout. The only thing they suppress is vote fraud, which means black and Hispanic voters who voted for Trump would not get their votes canceled out by fraudulent ballots.

Biden is either living in a fantasy world, or he lies like a rug, and the press will never call him on it. The same press that screamed, “Lying liar who LIES!!!” every time Trump told a joke or expressed an opinion sat by adoringly as Biden dispensed whoppers so blatant that I practically had to pry my jaw off the floor after hearing them. Like claiming that there are always surges of illegal immigration at the border at this time of year, or that the surge started under Trump, or that Trump let children starve to death (I discuss that slander elsewhere in the newsletter.)

President Unity/Morality/Decency loves to make snide, nasty allusions to his predecessor while taking credit for the vaccines that wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Trump and the distribution system, which he actually did inherit from Trump.

On that subject, the truly great, unheralded news from the press conference is that the pandemic is over! I assume it must be since nobody even bothered asking Biden about it, and since he’s letting so many illegal immigrants who are COVID-positive swarm into the US, even he must not be concerned about anyone catching it anymore.

 

The AR-15 Rifle: Myth & Reality

Once again there has been a senseless mass shooting in America–actually two, in which a total of 18 innocent people were killed. One was in Boulder, Colorado in which 10 persons were killed; the other was in Atlanta, Georgia, in which eight persons were killed. The killer in Boulder used an AR-15 rifle. The killer in Atlanta used a 9mm semi-automatic pistol.

Naturally, the immediate response by the anti-Second Amendment crowd has been to demand the banning of so-called “assault rifles,” or “military weapons.” Sorry, but the AR-15 is neither, and neither is the 9 mm handgun used by the Atlanta mass shooter.

If we are to believe the anti-gun mob, the mainstream media, left-wing politicians, and even President Biden, the AR-15 and other semi-automatic rifles are the main weapons of choice for gun-related murders in America.

Once again, that is simply not true.

Here are the facts, taken directly from FBI crime statistics for 2019–the year for which the most recent statistics are available.

Of the 13,258 murders committed in America with various weapons in 2019, 364 were with rifles–all rifles, including bolt-action hunting rifles, .22 caliber “varmint” rifles, and yes, semi-automatic rifles such as the AR-15.

That means of all the murders committed in America with all types of weapons, just 4.8 percent were by rifle.

Meanwhile, 6,368 murders were committed with handguns, 200 with shotguns, and 45 with “other” guns.

Those are facts. They don’t lie or twist the truth like Biden and his gun-hating, anti-Second Amendment minions.

And here’s another fact you won’t hear from the mainstream media or uncle Joe. While just 364 murders were committed with rifles, 1,476 were committed by “knives or cutting instruments.” So why not a call to ban knives? They are clearly more dangerous than rifles.

But let’s get back to the AR-15. Last fall I  attempted to clarify the difference between the AR-15 and so-called “military weapons.”  Apparently, not everybody, including those in the mainstream media, saw it. Too bad. If they had maybe they wouldn’t continue to repeat the distortions and misrepresentations about the AR-15.

So, here is that post again. I hope you find it enlightening and useful the next time some unapprised politician or clueless reporter refers to the AR-15 as a military-grade “assault rifle.”

During one of the Democrat presidential candidate debates in 2020, Peter Francis O’Rourke famously (or infamously) declared: “Hell, yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.”

As it turned out, O’Rourke took himself out of the presidential race instead, and therefore, his threat to sabotage the Second Amendment is now moot.

Given all of the chatter out there about assault rifles—and specifically the AR-15—perhaps a little background is needed to clear the air.

I don’t want to get too technical here, but as a U.S. Army veteran, it irks me when politicians, uninformed television pundits, and anti-Second Amendment fanatics rant on and on about so-called “military-grade weapons” owned by the general populace that should be confiscated by the government.

Let me say right off, I do not own an AR-15 nor an “Avtomat Kalashnikova,” otherwise known as an AK-47. However, I have fired both on rifle ranges. Both are excellent rifles, though one (the AR-15) is normally chambered for the smaller .223 or 5.56 mm NATO round, while the other (the AK-47) is chambered for the larger NATO-standard 7.62 mm or 30.06 round.

                                     Woman firing an AR-15

I should also point out the “AR” in AR-15 does NOT stand for “Assault Rifle,” which is what the unapprised media and lawmakers like to tell you it means. The “AR” in AR-15 stands for “ArmaLite Rifle,” not “Assault Rifle,” or “Automatic Rifle,” or “American Rifle,” or whatever other spurious name Second Amendment opponents have propagated.

ArmaLite is the name of the company that originally produced the AR-15 in 1959. That year, the AR-15 platform’s rights were sold to Colt Firearms, and Colt’s 1963 redesign was adopted by the US Army in Vietnam, tweaked with select-fire capabilities, a heavier barrel, and rebranded the M-16.

As for the other rifle O’Rourke promised to take away from Americans, the “A” in AK-47 stands for “Automatic,” not Assault.

It was invented by Russian weapons designer Mikhail Kalashnikov in the late 1940s for use by the Russian military. It is a military-grade “select fire” weapon and has been outlawed in the U.S. since 1984. “Select fire” means that it can be fired semi-auto or full-auto.

All full-auto or burst fired weapons are highly regulated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and are almost impossible to come by via a legal sale. Of course, criminals, drug cartels, and urban gangs can buy fully automatic weapons like the AK-47 from gun smugglers and other illicit weapons dealers—and do!

So, there is a world of difference between an AK-47 and an AR-15. One is truly an assault rifle, the other is not.

But let’s get something straight. Any rifle, pistol, revolver, shotgun, or even pellet gun can be an “assault weapon” if it is used to attack another person. So, calling an AR-15 an assault weapon compared to a 12-gauge shotgun, a bolt-action .30-caliber hunting rifle, or a .357 magnum revolver is idiotic and demonstrates an individual’s complete ignorance of small arms nomenclature.

When I was in the U.S. Army (active duty and reserves), I qualified “Expert Rifle” with the M-1 Garand, the M-14 (the successor to the M-1), and the M-16. I have never fired the rifles currently used by the U.S. military—the M16A2 or the M-4A1. The M16A2 is a semi-automatic rifle capable of three-shot bursts, while the M-4A1 is a more specialized weapon capable of fully-automatic fire.

The AR-15, as we know it today, is a semi-automatic civilian rifle. Semi-automatic means one trigger pull results in one bullet being fired. Automatic means one trigger pull will result in continuous fire until the magazine is empty or you remove your finger from the trigger.

                          A boy firing an AR-15

The AR-15 is most commonly chambered in .223, but some platforms accept .22, .308, etc. The AR-15 is light (6.5 pounds), easy to clean and maintain, exceptionally fun to shoot, and is an all-around versatile firearm.

I have had anti-gun advocates ask why any hunter needs to have an AR-15 with a 20-round magazine. For one thing, the AR-15 IS NOT a hunting rifle. In its standard 5.56 / .223 chambering, the AR-15 is great for pest control against varmints like prairie dogs, groundhogs, foxes, and coyotes.

Traditionally it’s not much of a hunter beyond that. The 5.56 / .223 is too much for use on small game you’d want to harvest and eat, but not quite enough for medium-sized game, like deer, or bigger animals. By the way, there are very few states that allow you to legally hunt deer-sized game or larger with a 22 caliber bullet.

The AR-15 is a good “ranch rifle,” a tool traditionally used for outside the home defense or pest control. Got a large piece of property, boat, or RV to defend? The AR-15 will do the trick out to about 300 yards.

Invariably the person telling me the AR-15 is an assault rifle is someone with very little, to zero, firearms knowledge or experience. They’ve typically never had firearms training, don’t hunt, don’t target shoot, and don’t even see the value of guns for self-defense. The difference between picking up an AR-15 (or any other firearm) or dialing 911 when an armed intruder has just broken into your house quite simply can be the difference between living and dying, as thousands of Americans can tell you from first-hand experience.

Additionally, most of the folks opposed to civilian ownership of the AR-15 can’t define an assault weapon as outlined by the Federal Ban that became law in 1994 under President Bill Clinton.

Firearms safety has been drilled into my head since I was 8 years old. That’s when my father gave me my first rifle—a .22 caliber model 1904 Winchester pump.  I’ve been shooting ever since—in the Army and out. It’s second nature to me.

The Second Amendment, written in the era of muzzle-loaded muskets, does not mention or describe what arms we have the right to keep and bear. But we have an idea, based on how they were used: to protect their owners’ homes, businesses, farms, and families, and to fight the tyranny of the British crown. In the 18th century, the general populace had the same weapons that the British Red Coats and the Continental Army carried.

Today, civilians cannot own the varieties of weapons currently used by our military. I own an M-1 Garand 7.62 mm (30.06 caliber) semi-automatic rifle. This was the rifle used by the U.S. military during World War II, Korea, and even in the early years of Vietnam. It fires a much more lethal round than the AR-15’s 5.56 mm round—and no one is trying to ban it.

                                               My M-1 Garand

In any case, these days I use my M-1 only for target shooting. When I bought it several years ago, I had visions of using it as a deer rifle, but I no longer hunt. When I did hunt, it wasn’t to kill animals for sport. I learned early in life that you don’t kill any animal for sport. You only kill an animal for food. Every rabbit, squirrel, pheasant, duck, deer, or quail I ever killed, I field dressed, cleaned, and consumed.

It’s been said that the Second Amendment was put in the Bill of Rights to protect the other nine. As Fox News contributor Judge Andrew Napolitano notes:

“The historical reality of the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms is not that it protects the right to shoot deer. It protects the right to shoot tyrants, and it protects the right to shoot at them effectively, with the same instruments they would use upon us. If the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had had the firepower and ammunition that the Nazis had, some of Poland might have stayed free and more people would have survived the Holocaust.”

Amen, Judge.

 

 

 

 

How Political Correctness is Destroying Humor in America

(A while back I posted about the death of humor in America. Here is an updated version of that post. I hope you enjoy it )

Once upon a time in America, we used to be able to laugh at ourselves. And nobody was offended. Just listen to old radio shows, and you will see what I mean.

Without a doubt, the old Fred Allen radio shows would be banned today because of the ethnic humor displayed in a segment called “Allen’s Alley.”

The Cast of Allen’s Alley

There was the wry Jewish housewife Pansy Nussbaum, stoic New England farmer Titus Moody, and bellowing Southern Senator Beauregard Claghorn–all stereotypes that in today’s hypersensitive culture would be considered politically incorrect.

Allen’s show ran from the 1930s into the late 1940s, and it was really funny. I discovered it, and other fantastic comedy radio shows like Jack Benny, George Burns & Gracie Allen, and Bob Hope in the 1960s when there was an old-time radio revival and many old radio shows were rebroadcast on stations devoted to nostalgia.

I can still recall listening to Senator Claghorn say things like: “Somebody, Ah say, somebody knocked;” “I’m from the South, Suh;” “That’s a joke, son”; and “Pay attention, boy!”

After talking with Sen. Claghorn, Allen would introduce the next guest in the ally by saying:  “It’s Titus Moody.” The stoic New Englander would answer with a sardonic “Howdy, Bub.”

Then there was Mrs. Nussbaum who spoke with a decidedly German/Yiddish accent and when Allen introduced her, said things like “You were expecting maybe…” at which point she would butcher some famous person’s name “…Veinstein Chuychill?”

In their book The Big Broadcast 1920-1950, Frank Buxton and Bill Owen wrote:  “[Claghorn, Nussbaum, and Moody,] were never criticized as being anti-Southern, anti-Semitic, or anti-New England. The warmth and good humor with which they were presented made them acceptable even to the most sensitive listeners.”

Sadly, the Political Correctness Gestapo that pervades America today would disagree.

And so do many of today’s comedians who have gone on the record lamenting the hyper-sensitivities of today’s readily offended audiences as well as the death of the kind of humor that made Fred Allen a staple with audiences.

Take this recent joke by Canadian comedian Norm Macdonald:

“Two businessmen bought the Milwaukee Bucks for $550 million. They are very excited with their purchase, as this is the only legal way to own black people,” Macdonald quipped on his podcast.

Norm Macdonald

Jokes like this don’t fly in today’s America. If he told that joke here, the habitually offended would immediately protest and call Macdonald a racist. However, there is hypocrisy in this. Typically, jokes in which white people are made fun of, are less offensive to people than jokes where black people or a minority are made fun of. This is because of the rise of a politically correct (PC) culture where people seem to think that minorities are offended by jokes about them.

For your consideration, I offer several more comments from comedians and comics who feel the political correctness that permeates America today is robbing us of our ability to laugh at ourselves and others.

John Cleese of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers fame explained recently that he stopped using any race-related jokes when he was criticized for telling jokes about Mexicans in his routine.

“Make jokes about Swedes and Germans and French and English and Canadians and Americans, why can’t we make jokes about Mexicans? Is it because they are so feeble that they can’t look after themselves? It’s very, very condescending there.”

During a recent interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes, Daniel Lawrence Whitney (Larry the Cable Guy) said political correctness had gone too far.  

“It’s gotten way outta control. You know. I really think that we’re at a point in this country where people really need to take the thumb outta their mouth and grow up a little bit and realize there’s a lot bigger problems out there than what a comedian did a joke about.”

Take a look at the Cable Guy’s “politically correct” version of “The Night Before Christmas:”

A while back, Gilbert Gottfried wrote a piece for Playboy Magazine called “The Apology Epidemic” in which he said America’s current “apology culture” has gone too far.

“Imagine if the most brilliant comedians in history were working today,” he wrote. “They’d never stop apologizing. Charlie Chaplin would have to apologize to all the homeless people he belittled with his Little Tramp character. W.C. Fields and Dean Martin would both have to apologize to alcoholics. The Marx brothers would have to apologize to Italians, mutes and uptight British ladies. Comedy has been around for a long, long time, and there have been a lot of impolite, unpleasant and jaw-droppingly politically incorrect jokes. You went up there as a comic and joked about it all, and nothing was off-limits. And to this day, nobody has died from a single joke.”

Comedienne Lisa Lampanelli recently wrote an article for the Hollywood Reporter called: “How Political Correctness is Killing Comedy.”

In it, she said: “Here’s the problem: Comedy, probably more than any other art form, is subjective. What jokes crack up your mom, your little brother and your gay best friend will be completely different — unless it’s a video of a guy getting hit in the gonads with a piñata stick. That’s funny to everyone….If you like safe, generic comedy that’s fine. Go on a cruise ship and crack up listening to the comedian point out the hilarious differences between loafers and shoes with laces. But don’t go to one of my shows and be outraged by what you hear. Going to my show and expecting me not to cross the line of good taste and social propriety is like going to a Rolling Stones concert and expecting not to hear ‘Satisfaction.’”

Canadian comedian, Russell Peters might have summed it all up best in a recent interview. Society, he said, has become overly sensitive. And political correctness is the reason.

“If you look at TV in the ‘70s versus TV now, and you see the things people said back in the day – they said the most off-color stuff and nobody’s feelings were hurt. Do you know why? Because it’s about intent. The intent then was to make you laugh. And the intent is still to make you laugh, but they’ve (the PC Police) drilled it into your head that you’re not supposed to laugh at this.”

 

The mega-hit 1970s show “All in the Family” could not be aired in today’s hyper-sensitive America. But when it was, and the irreverent Archie Bunker issued his racial insults, attacked the idea of women’s rights, and generally behaved like a bigot–and was called out on it by his “meathead” son-in-law or other cast members–it not only made people laugh, it actually diffused the kind of racism, homophobia, and gender inequality that existed in the 1960s and 1970s.

The show’s premise was simple: by laughing at the imperfections and faults in American society, we were actually allowing people to modify their behavior and biases without threatening them or attacking them the way today’s “cancel culture” does.

In other words, the show’s writers thought America could laugh its way toward a more inclusive and unbiased nation. In my humble opinion, when a nation can no longer laugh at itself, we are in big trouble.

Political Correctness is a treacherous wedge that is dividing and polarizing us. Its proponents believe we should all think alike. But we are individuals. We don’t all think alike or laugh at the same things. Thank God!

That is not how the real world works. You won’t get far trying to walk through life on eggshells.

Kill me with comedy.  I’d rather die laughing than crying.

In that spirit, I offer up a couple of politically incorrect jokes for your amusement and consideration.

Q: Have you heard about McDonald’s new Liberal Value Meal?
A: Order anything you like, and the guy behind you has to pay for it.When asked if they would have sex with Bill Clinton, 86% of women in D.C. said, “Not again.”What does Nancy Pelosi call illegal aliens? Undocumented Democrats.

There. Now the PC Mafia and all the other handwringing moral guardians out there can lambast me for sharing such horribly politically incorrect humor.

And that’s no laughing matter.

 

 

 

 

 

The Regrettable Death of Civics Education in America’s Schools

I recall when I was in middle school, junior high, and high school learning about our distinctive system of self-government and the necessity for the active informed civic participation of American citizens.

Those classes had a variety of names: American history, History of the U.S. government, and social studies were but a few.

But what all of them had in common was something called “Civics.”

Just what is Civics? Simply defined, civics is the study of the rights and duties of citizenship. It is a close examination of the privileges and obligations of citizenship.  Americans’ participation in civic life is essential to sustaining our democratic form of government. Without it, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people will not last.

Those are exciting ideas if presented correctly. They are the very underpinnings of our country’s founding as well as our most pressing social movements.

Sadly, civics education in America’s schools is dying, and if we fail to revive it, our republic and its democratic principles may die with it. There has been a sharp generational decline in Americans’ knowledge of our government, our Constitution, and our civic responsibilities.

Here are some shocking facts that substantiate that statement taken from recent surveys conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center and the Pew Foundation:

Only 39% of all native-born Americans can pass the U.S. citizenship test.Even more alarming is what the data say about the generational decline: among native-born senior citizens, 74% pass the citizenship test, while a mere 20% of native-born Americans under the age of 45 can pass it.Only 2 of 5 Americans can name all three branches of government.Less than one-third of Americans can name the five rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.Almost one-third of millennials believe that choosing leaders through free elections is “unimportant.”Only 30% of millennials believe living in a democracy is “essential,” compared with 70 percent of baby boomers.One in 10 recent college graduates thought that TV’s Judge Judy was serving on the U.S. Supreme Court.And perhaps most alarming of all: Only 17 percent of Americans say they trust the government in Washington to do the right thing.

A major source of the problem is that the nation’s Founding principles are being undermined not only in colleges and universities but even in K-12 education—all of which have drifted progressively toward socialism.

There is little or no appreciation by teachers of the Founding documents, except to dismiss them as the sham rationalizations of white male property holders. We need to be wary because action civics is a movement that is pushing hard for wide-scale acceptance. We know our students are civically illiterate.

It seems prudent to first teach them what our principles are, and then, there are very proper ways for them to go out and ‘do civics.’ But understanding the Founders and our nation’s Founding principles must come first.

Instead, students today are being taught inaccurate, fraudulent, and revisionist versions of history by highly politicized teachers and professors. Using duplicitous tomes such as Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, mendacious notions such as Critical Race Theory, and the discredited New York Times’ 1619 Project, teachers are indoctrinating young minds with the idea that America is a malevolent nation whose history is corrupted by slavery, bigotry, white supremacy, systemic racism, exploitation, and capitalist imperialism.

The fact that America is the only nation in history ever founded on an idea—that the only legitimate purpose of government is to protect certain inalienable rights that include the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—is conveniently disregarded.

Our nation’s founders were quite clear: government is not there to tell people what to do, or how to live their lives or to take by force what each person has earned by his or her own efforts.

President Ronald Reagan once said: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

That’s a frightening thought, but today I see it becoming more and more likely.

Adam Seagrave, associate director of the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University, recently wrote the following: “Our schools have been largely neglecting Civics education for the past 50 years. Without this foundation in place, American constitutional democracy appears to be reeling. Why has this happened? Two main culprits are to blame:

The disproportionate emphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education that followed the original “Sputnik moment” during the Cold War and has been reinforced in public policy ever since; AND:The culture wars that emerged in reaction to the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s.

It is important that educators don’t see their role as teaching one political ideology over another. Too often, however, teachers confuse teaching civics with teaching politics. That is not what civics education is all about.

In today’s super-heated and polarized political environment teaching civics is a tough task. I discovered that while teaching journalism as a professor at the University of Illinois.

A class discussion about civil discourse can degenerate into all-out verbal warfare in seconds. One minute you are discussing the importance of carefully and rationally considering the opposition’s opinion, and the next you are throwing yourself on top of the “word- grenade” some offended student has just lobbed into the middle of the room.

The fact that social media and mainstream media are both setting an example for belligerent vitriol hasn’t help cool the heated exchanges either. These days, students are all too quick to follow suit.

Many students turn to spitting out soundbites they have heard and rarely listen carefully to the opposition. That shouldn’t be a reason to shy away from these discussions, but ironically, it is the very reason we need to have them.

When I was in elementary and middle school, every school day began with the class standing, hand on heart, and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

Today, that is considered passé and even discouraged in some schools. That’s too bad because those words still carry terrific meaning and in a way, they are a lesson in civics themselves: