Ronald E. Yates's Blog, page 63
June 26, 2020
Vote by Mail: Turning the Clock Backwards
When I observe what is happening to America—the country in which I grew up, in which I was educated, and that I served in the U.S. Army—I am appalled. Anarchy, violence, looting. This is NOT the country I know and love. This is an aberration, a disfigurement of our Republic.
America’s past is a checkered one. No doubt about it. Slavery, discrimination, lynching. They are stains on our history; blemishes on an imperfect nation. Yet, America remains the only country where people can strive freely for a more perfect union, where they are free to speak their minds, to protest, to worship as they wish, to be individuals, to pursue happiness, and to hold elected officials accountable without fear of retribution.
Today, some want to rip our nation apart and divide us into belligerent tribes based on race, religion, ethnicity, wealth, poverty, achievement, failure, livelihood, and political power. As a firm believer in America’s motto: E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One) I will oppose the tribalists to my last breath.
For the next several days I am reposting commentaries from Americans of all races and occupations who are as concerned as I am about this attempt to obliterate our country from within. I hope you will find them as illuminating and significant as I have.
Vote by Mail: Turning the Clock Backwards
Concerns about corruption in voting are not a new phenomenon. During the Constitutional Convention of 1787, James Madison worried about the abuses that might occur under the new Constitution.
Our federal system of government is predicated on the faith that a citizen, adequately informed and unmolested is capable of judging who is best fit to govern our country.
The U.S. Constitution stipulates – “the times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations.”
Over time, what has developed in the United States is a system of voting protecting both the legitimacy of an election and the privacy rights of the voter from outside interference. Without these two components, we would have no fair stable system of elections. All would descend to the chaos of corruption.
Today, using the coronavirus as an excuse, the Democrats seek to abolish how we conduct elections in the United States.
Our current system of voting came into being as a result of a great progressive reform movement in the latter part of the 19th century and early 20th century.
Ardent progressive reformers, like the socialist Henry George in 1886, strove to prevent corruption in the electoral process. The progressive reformers championed a system of voting by an official ballot printed at public expense by a neutral authority. Previously political parties had printed their own ballots and ward bosses paid people to vote for their candidates, stuff ballots, and vote repeatedly.
The system was intimidating and enormously corrupt. A supervisory public authority was necessary to monitor balloting, ensure fairness, and provide the necessary element of voter secrecy.
The new structure of reform called the ‘Australian ballot’, (named from its place of origin) specifies that a citizen coming to the poll be registered to vote and identified. At the poll, he gives his name and address. He receives an official ballot; marks it in the secrecy of a booth and hands it in to be counted.
Additional laws were passed protecting the voter from solicitation at the polls. These laws still survive today. Wardens at voting places acting on laws regulated by the local secretary of state keep those soliciting votes 100 ft. away from voters when they enter a polling place.
Massachusetts was the first state to adopt the secret ballot in 1888. By 1896, almost 90 percent of states had adopted it. The secret ballot is largely credited with rooting out the worst forms of voter fraud and intimidation. Later, voting machines came into being, which eliminated the paper ballot but ensured the same secrecy protections were kept with a curtain on the voting machine.
The corruption of the old political machine politics boss has ended, but the Democratic party today seeks to bring back Tammany Hall by a procedure called “Vote by Mail” which takes away voter privacy and mails millions of ballots often to those no longer living at the address the ballot is mailed to.
One should not confuse “Vote by Mail” with voting by an ‘absentee ballot.’ Absentee balloting is an older established regulated process. It is used in extraordinary circumstances for illness or absence when the voter cannot appear at the poll. Ballots are requested by the voter, are registered, and require a signature certification by the voter.
There has been corruption in absentee balloting. The most secure method of voting is to vote in person at the poll.
“Vote by Mail’ which the Democrats are advocating nationally is an irresponsible, unregulated system that seeks to mail ballots to every address in the country from inaccurate unpurged voter rolls regardless of whether the persons at the address is living, currently registered to vote, or are even citizens. Critics point out that ballots delivered to a wrong address or to someone who moved would be piled up in hallways for anyone to pick up and tamper with.
‘Vote by Mail” then allows the ballots mailed to be collected by unregulated political activists who are entrusted to bring them to election places to be counted. What happens along the way to these ballots is left to the horror of one’s imagination. There are no voter identity checks anywhere in the ‘Vote by Mail” scheme. Its insecure procedures encourage tampering and ballot fraud on a massive scale.
In the recent midterm 2018 elections, Republicans in the state of California were winning on election night in seven Congressional districts, but the vote harvested ballots allowed by “Vote by Mail” overturned the election results, giving all seven seats to the Democrats.
Some sections of California were found to have a voter registration of 112% — more registered voters than there were actual citizens! This is corruption pure and simple.
Fair elections are an essential part of the integrity of a republic. Any process that does not guarantee voter protections is an attack on the U.S. Constitution and on every voter’s civil rights.
‘Vote by Mail” denigrates U.S. citizenship and the integrity of the electoral process as it takes away the dignity and responsibility of a citizen appearing at a polling place while invading the voter’s privacy as the ballot passes through so many different hands. The voting booth is the last citadel of privacy in America.
The progressive reforms of the early 20th century are a proud part of American history. Various states in our federal republic became laboratories of democratic electoral reform. It would be a disaster to the integrity of the electoral process to turn the clock back to the days of ballot stuffing, bribery, and Boss Tweed.
Patrick J Walsh is a writer in Quincy Mass.
June 25, 2020
Free Speech is Under Full Assault
When I observe what is happening to America—the country in which I grew up, in which I was educated, and that I served in the U.S. Army—I am appalled. Anarchy, violence, looting. This is NOT the country I know and love. This is an aberration, a disfigurement of our Republic.
America’s past is a checkered one. No doubt about it. Slavery, discrimination, lynching. They are stains on our history; blemishes on an imperfect nation. Yet, America remains the only country where people can strive freely for a more perfect union, where they are free to speak their minds, to protest, to worship as they wish, to be individuals, to pursue happiness, and to hold elected officials accountable without fear of retribution.
Today, some want to rip our nation apart and divide us into belligerent tribes based on race, religion, ethnicity, wealth, poverty, achievement, failure, livelihood, and political power. As a firm believer in America’s motto: E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One) I will oppose the tribalists to my last breath.
For the next several days I am reposting commentaries from Americans of all races and occupations who are as concerned as I am about this attempt to obliterate our country from within. I hope you will find them as illuminating and significant as I have.
Free Speech is Under Full Assault
By: J.G. Carter
Increasingly, we see people holding unpopular views being attacked and refused a forum in which to speak. Through the threat of force and censorship to control people’s speech, free speech is under full assault. History is replete with others using similar tactics. As in the times before the Nazi rise to power, the Soviet gulag era, and Mao’s revolution, similar trends are prevalent today.
Freedom of speech is engaging in unrestricted speaking of one’s mind without fear of retaliation or censorship. It is the freedom to use one’s natural rights to engage in complex thought and speech. This is not a new concept. Freedom of speech has a history centuries old, long predating the founding of this country. Some want to control these natural abilities. This is where the dispute lies.
One does not have to look far to find multiple examples of the threat of violence and censorship. This ranges from online mobs to technology company and media censorship and peer attacks. Those with differing opinions are blackballed, blacklisted, attacked, and censored out of existence.
Take, for example, distinguished University of Chicago professor Harald Uhlig, attacked by his professional peers and online mob for writing that Black Lives Matters “just torpedoed itself, with its full-fledged support of #defundthepolice.” And, “Time for sensible adults to enter back into the room and have serious, earnest, respectful conversations about it all… We need more police, we need to pay them more, we need to train them better.”
The mode of operating is the same: disapprove the words someone uses, sensationalize the awfulness of it, then use every method of force available to attack them. As with Dr. Uhlig, threaten to take away their livelihood, discredit their work, and then, by proxy, incite mobs to physically attack them and their property. They are treated worse than the violent criminal who can at least work when released from prison. Even the radicals of the 60s had the decency to honor freedom of speech. One would think today’s academics would be the champions of free speech, not adversarial critics.
Then there are the technology giants like Twitter, Facebook, Google, and others, pretending to have an open platform but leading the charge for censorship and tyranny against free speech. This is like selling a microphone, then taking it away when the buyer uses it to say something the seller does not like. Or like selling a pair of shoes but taking them off someone’s feet when they do not like where they walk. These platforms are not free, people pay for them through advertisements and other fees. As allies of the government, these companies enjoy special protections and regulations, platforms, privileges, benefits, and partnerships.
All enemies of free speech are similar; they control the free expression of speech, the words people choose and change the meaning of words when it suits them. They attack those who disagree, take away their income, and do whatever harm they can get away with toward those who disagree. It is a violent philosophy.
Ethics are defined by the expediency of the situation. Therefore, they justify making up stories and twisting facts, refusing to let what is just and right get in the way of cramming their beliefs onto others and getting what they want. Sacrificing the value of a person for the promises of self-serving ideology.
They are the masters of fear. Using out-of-control anger and sensationalized reactions, they bully anyone with differing views. All because a person has a different belief, seeks clarification, or wants to add something new to a complex subject. People are so afraid of the consequences of their violence, they hide, and go underground, carefully censoring what they say.
These are good people who just want to have the freedom to say what they want without attack. Doing as much harm as they can against those not supporting their platform of control is vicious, malicious, and malevolent.
When someone uses the threat of violence to restrict another’s natural rights or person, it is called a crime, as when a mugger threatens to hurt someone to take what is not theirs. Somehow, they have escaped this label. All the claims of good intentions are meaningless. “Legalizing” it is just a matter of convenience to act without impunity.
Though fear is used as a means of control, it is those who control who fear. Desperate, they are afraid of being found out. Only the intellectually and morally weak are intolerant of allowing others to speak alternative views. Alternative views will keep them from getting what they want. Freedom of speech threatens power, takes away control, and undermines the social designs of their larger agenda.
Given how malevolent they are when not governing and how malevolent their allies are who do govern, consider how much more vicious they will become with increased power.
What kind of society is left without freedom of speech? There can be no respectful social intercourse, nor any true academics, intellectual discussion, or moral choices without free speech, open debate, and the freedom to say, do, think, and express what wants without reprisals. No society will develop favorably without it.
Society requires free speech to process, consider the uncertain, and incorporate and adjust to new knowledge. Without free speech, civil society will dissipate. A good society is a society that protects people’s freedoms. Control over others and a free society cannot coexist.
Yet, we are complicit, giving our freedoms away. We do nothing while the tumbrels roll, cowering as victims of marauders. It is more dangerous to do nothing than to resist and take our freedom of speech back. It is a choice. Live in a society without those freedoms or live in a society where you are free to say as you choose without fear of retaliation.
Protect yourself and protect others. Decry those using these tactics. Call them out. Speak your mind.
June 24, 2020
Is America “Gone With the Wind?”
When I observe what is happening to America—the country in which I grew up, in which I was educated, and that I served in the U.S. Army—I am appalled. Anarchy, violence, looting. This is NOT the country I know and love. This is an aberration, a disfigurement of our Republic.
America’s past is a checkered one. No doubt about it. Slavery, discrimination, lynching. They are stains on our history; blemishes on an imperfect nation. Yet, America remains the only country where people can strive freely for a more perfect union, where they are free to speak their minds, to protest, to worship as they wish, to be individuals, to pursue happiness, and to hold elected officials accountable without fear of retribution.
Today, some want to rip our nation apart and divide us into belligerent tribes based on race, religion, ethnicity, wealth, poverty, achievement, failure, livelihood, and political power. As a firm believer in America’s motto: E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One) I will oppose the tribalists to my last breath.
For the next several days I am reposting commentaries from Americans of all races and occupations who are as concerned as I am about this attempt to obliterate our country from within. I hope you will find them as illuminating and significant as I have.
The identity of RBF remains a mystery to me, but the quality of his/her writing has grabbed my attention.
Is America “Gone With the Wind?”
BY RBF
“Racism is not dead. But it is on life-support, kept alive mainly by the people who use it for an excuse or to keep minority communities fearful or resentful enough to turn out as a voting bloc on Election Day.”
So said Thomas Sowell, senior Hoover Institute fellow, and among the most significant living social-political theorists. Dr. Sowell happens to be black.
In the face of reams of empirical data to the contrary, how have race hucksters, with media complicity, so successfully merchandised the canard that America remains a country of systemic racism? Not a hypothesis for a national debate, but assumed ipso facto.
When propaganda overrides facts, brainwashing occurs. This hypnosis impairs not the capability to reason, but rather a refusal to use the brain to consider ideas which might disrupt false narratives. Fully functioning intelligent liberals exhibit extreme agitation over the proposition of differing perspectives. If they preach loud enough, maybe it becomes real.
Leftists put forth a panoply of medicines to treat our diseased country.
Virginia governor Ralph “blackface” Northam righteously promised removal of Robert E. Lee and four other noxious Confederate statues polluting Richmond Virginia.
CNN’s Angela Rye imperiously points to Washington D.C.’s Washington and Jefferson monuments as insidious replicas of slave-owners rather than, respectively, the father of our country and author of one of the most transformative American documents. NASCAR nobly did their part, banning Confederate flags. Senate Republicans in the armed services committee agreed to reformat numerous military bases commemorating Confederate generals. This thesis subscribes that removing all above mentioned carefully orchestrated concatenation of Confederate symbols surely concludes in newfound racial harmony.
Nationwide, anarchists deface or obliterate monuments remembering Christopher Columbus. Black Lives Matter Boulevard debuted in Washington D.C. Advertisers boycott Fox News host Tucker Carlson for statements critical of Black Lives Matter; disagreement defaults to racism. Incorruptible T-Mobile, Disney, and Papa Johns have honorably withdrawn support. Mike Lindell, the founder of “My Pillow,” contributes a brave whiff of integrity and will continue endorsing Carlson, and adds “all lives matter.”
Advertisers that unabashedly cave in, signal not the moral superiority they crave, but ethical cowardice manifest to anyone courageous enough to pull back the curtain exposing decades-long narratives of orchestrated media prevarications.
While room for a civil debate on the fate of iconic structures can be valid, rewriting or revising history is in the interest of no one. Our past is what it is, and society must look the good and the bad squarely in the eyes and learn from mistakes. America’s warts are no more pronounced than most nations, and ad hoc media-driven proclamations of our inherent evil do nothing towards advancing the dialogue of reconciliation.
The media offered a healing gesture with HBO MAX’s decision to remove that perennial archetype of bigotry, “Gone with the Wind.” Not to be outshined, A&E Network eliminated thirty plus years leviathan “Live PD,” in homage of deprecating all things police.
CORPORATE AMERICA’S HONORABLE RESPONSE
Estee Lauder is a paradigm for truckling behavior of corporations that, when confronted with the mildest of criticism, grovel to appease and show obeisance to the gods of structural racism.
A hundred Estee Lauder employees delivered a letter to executive chairman William Lauder commanding resignation of Trump supporter and company director, uncle Ronald Lauder. Additional stipulations of $5 million spent on “social, economic and racial justice” plus similarly high-minded rebukes rounded out this revolt.
Remarkable that an organization of 48,000 genuflects to a mere hundred employees. Why not expeditiously annunciate to these recalcitrants a genuine appreciation and respect for their misguided opinions simultaneously, including a resignation form for those unwilling to labor for a business that tolerates the diversity of beliefs. In a gesture of virtue, Estee Lauder pledged $10 million to the NAACP.
Many companies try to run ahead of the sure to come corporate shakedowns. Bank America quickly announced a four year billion-dollar initiative for its culpability in social injustice. Happily, Pepsi put up $400 million to annihilate the scourge, concurrently gaining enormous corporate self-esteem.
CEO Rodney McMullen penned a sycophantic trope flagellating Kroger’s corporate culture, begging mercy for a litany of sins; likewise, Walmart, McDonald’s, Amazon, and dozens of others followed suit. And in a gesture of Platonic purity, Wells Fargo tethered executive pay with the high-minded goal of doubling black employees.
To avoid persecution, Jews during the fifteenth century Spanish Inquisition renounced their beliefs and embraced Catholicism. More than a few of these so-called “Conversos” were rightly suspected of continued secret adherence to Hebrew rituals. J
Jealousy over their financial success combined with suspect religious beliefs, the Papal sanction of a formal Inquisition sought to exorcise this inherent tumor preventing further metastasis; property confiscation, torture, and burning apostates and the final indignity of official Baptism.
Corporations will remain under minute scrutiny as inquisitors seek to root out twenty-first century “Conversos” to ensure fulfillment or not of lofty corporate mission statements. Ultimately in Spain, Grand Inquisitor Torquemada expelled thousands of Jews. Those that remained became subject to new “purity of blood” laws codifying Jewish prejudice axiomatically circumscribing opportunities. Henceforth, nothing could be done to expunge Jewishness.
Will modern-day social justice warriors consolidate enough power to extirpate companies not suitably compliant to the unbending “Catholic” (i.e., anti-Trump) ideology?
Since Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s, the U.S. government has spent many trillions on countless welfare programs to improve the circumstance of black society. Instead of a look inward and accepting a modicum of responsibility for rampant teen pregnancy, broken fatherless homes, low literacy rates, high crime, and an ethos of non-assimilation, liberals methodically fabricated the marketing hoax of “Systemic Racism.”
As putative data annually announced the hundreds of billions in government outlays to blacks in food stamps, Section 8 housing subsidies, Medicaid, weren’t yielding desired results, the deception of racism and white supremacy fills the void of a horribly failed culture.
This vast apparatus depends on the integral cog of white guilt. Elites preach evermore government spending, generating endless new programs that will unlock the shackles of poverty and cycles of crime and recidivism. Beneath outward speech of grand equality, the subtext patronizes blacks as incapable dolts forever dependent on government largesse.
Ironically this addiction to intrusive government perpetuates more public reliance ergo discouraging self-reliance. All the tax dollars and programs are a ball and chain, a modern form of the same slavery that many black people hold as 150-year-old evidence of continued white supremacy.
New Leftist demands seek to guarantee blacks absolute “population-based” quantitative representation in industry and all professions. What more do these reactionaries want? For decades blacks have received preferential admissions to the finest universities.
Corporations do back-flips to hire people of color. Everyone winks and nods that they may not be the most qualified, so it has become an unspoken act of charity.
These newly enshrined numerical assurances seem devoid of qualitative requirements? Performance and capability get omitted from the manifesto of doctrinaire radicals. Is America prepared for Progressive’s envisioned defenestration of our meritocracy, the bedrock of this country’s exceptionalism?
Perhaps Silicon Valley has trouble hiring 13.2 percent population quota of black engineers because the best and the brightest are often Asians from Stanford and Berkeley. The standard script loudly promulgates a premeditated racist plot, anything but an acknowledgment that maybe there aren’t enough qualified black engineers.
While black poverty and attendant miseries are the focus, little hype goes toward the rising black middle class and that 8 percent of American millionaires are black.
In another contradiction of sorts, the percentage of black homeownership is highest in southern states, including Texas, almost all of which are Republican. Leftist progressive strongholds California, New York, and occupied Seattle report among the lowest rates.
I wonder how the many bright, accomplished black men and women that fought honestly to climb the ladder react to new mandates effectively demeaning their achievements? Do they lump themselves with members of their race pushed through the system solely because of their color?
The current zeitgeist debases the black intellect. The top-down approach, advancing people through skin color, never can accomplish a bottom-up course of action. But changing mindsets and ethics, building new black societies with cohesive families with education paramount would be difficult, time-consuming, and with no guarantee of desired results. Once again, take note of the stunning hypocrisy of the Left’s universal carping regarding discrimination based on skin color.
POLICE VIOLENCE
Evidence of organized collusive police violence against blacks fails even cursory statistical analysis.
Black Lives Matter use violence and intimidation filled campaigns, tacitly goaded in lockstep complicity from media and academia who inculcate their venom appealing solely to passions. A police officer is more than 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black American than for a law enforcement officer to kill an unarmed black person. The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database.
In 2018, there were 7,407 black homicides, with 93 percent committed by other blacks. Just over 1/10 of one percent of black men died at the hands of police.
According to social researcher and author Heather McDonald, “In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous.
African-Americans accounted for 235 or less than a quarter of the total. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders and committed about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.”
With 375 million annual civilian police encounters, more than 99.999 percent of law enforcement encounters are non-deadly.
A bad cop tragically murdered George Floyd. Then an apotheosis of this repetitive felon with multiple prison stints was as swift as it was incredible. A career criminal high on fentanyl passing counterfeit currency gets instantaneously transmuted to a gentle giant relocated from Houston to Minneapolis to start a new life.
Prejudice exists in America and every society worldwide. It always will. It’s endemic to humans that people tend to covey up with like-kind. There are plenty of black bigots as well as white ones. Listening to all news outlets might lead one to conclude that black people alone are uniquely subjected to discrimination. Yet, anti-Semitism stands at near-record levels, and lots of people describe all Muslims are terrorists.
CONCLUSION
Media propaganda constructs a society paralyzed with fear. Differing from liberal dogma earns an all-encompassing indictment of racism often corroborated by editing, and then broadcasting innocent comments taken out of context. The sophists of the Left contrive a world with a harsh doctrinaire fiction, disparaging facts, and replacing them with frenzied emotion conjuring white guilt and systemic racism, overwhelming those gullible enough to forfeit their reason.
George Floyd was brutally and unjustly murdered. Any unjust killing is one too many. Sadly, the recent shootings by a black man of Baton Rouge, La police officers pass unnoticed. Likewise, slain black officer David Dorn, bravely trying to stem ANTIFA and BLM hooligans. Place a value on these law-abiding lives?
The George Floyd Memorial Fund has pocketed over $14 million. Floyd’s gold casket and eponymous street names make lovely trappings for his ongoing rehabilitation. Logic dictates the Left choose this scoundrel as their martyr, their sordid icon, representing America’s perdition. I hear some calling for commissioning of George Floyd statues, perhaps where those of Lee once stood.
FYI, all the crazy ideologies seeking to restructure society with new norms or standards with the intent to eradicate a structural racism that mostly doesn’t exist to begin with, only begets bitterness, resentments, and bigotry where often none existed.
June 23, 2020
Is Hypocrisy the New Name of the Democrat Party?
Last week House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stormed around the Capitol building purging it of all things reminiscent of the Confederacy.
That prompted House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to wonder if Pelosi should consider changing the name of the Democrat Party given her newfound disdain for the Land of Dixie.
“The speaker has the power to do that,” McCarthy said in response to Pelosi moving to remove portraits of four speakers who served in the Confederacy.
“If the speaker is concerned about that, should she also start talking about changing the name of her party and actually changing the nominee?” McCarthy asked in a reference to Joe Biden, who referred to late Democrat Sen. Robert Byrd, a former KKK member, as a mentor and “dear friend.”
In a letter to House Clerk Cheryl Johnson, Pelosi requested the “immediate removal of the portraits in the U.S. Capitol of four previous Speakers who served in the Confederacy: Robert Hunter of Virginia (1839-1841), Howell Cobb of Georgia (1849-1851), James Orr of South Carolina (1857-1859), and Charles Crisp of Georgia (1891-1895).”
[image error] A Democrat Speaker bites the dust al al Pelosi
All of those men were once members of her Democrat Party—the party that has a long, tumultuous history of defending the institution of slavery and fighting to keep it.
Pelosi also called for the removal of Confederate statues in the U.S. Capitol, characterizing them as “monuments to men who advocated cruelty and barbarism to achieve such a plainly racist end. The portraits of these men are symbols that set back our nation’s work to confront and combat bigotry,” Pelosi told reporters. “You have to see the remarks that they had made and how oblivious they were to what our founders had in mind in our country. We must lead by example, so we’re glad that that is gone.”
Pelosi’s comments and actions are the very height of hypocrisy.
For example, Pelosi has yet to address the role her father, Thomas D’Alessandro Jr., played in overseeing the dedication of the Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee Monuments in Baltimore’s Wyman Park while serving as the city’s mayor in 1948
“Today,” her father said in remarks at the time, “with our nation beset by subversive groups and propaganda which seeks to destroy our national unity, we can look for inspiration to the lives of Lee and Jackson to remind us to be resolute and determined in preserving our sacred institutions . . . . to remain steadfast in our determination to preserve freedom, not only for ourselves but for other liberty-loving nations who are striving to preserve their national unity as free nations.”
[image error] Gen Robt. E. Lee & Stonewall Jackson statue
Ahem. “Preserving our sacred institutions?” Did you mean, perchance, slavery, Mayor D’Alessandro?
But wait. There’s more. Pelosi’s father also encouraged Americans to “emulate Jackson’s example and stand like a stone wall against aggression in any form that would seek to destroy the liberty of the world.”
Not exactly politically correct is it Nancy?
And, of course, that is exactly what’s wrong with the hysterical imbeciles who are toppling statues and attempting to erase and cleanse America’s checkered history.
The past is the past. People a century ago or longer thought behaved and spoke differently from people in the 21st Century.
They certainly did so in 1948 when Pelosi’s father praised Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson during the dedication of those statues. I wonder if Pelosi, in her fervor to cleanse history, will call for those statues in Baltimore to be ripped down?
But wait! They were removed by the city in the dead of night thereby saving them from defacement and destruction.
In that case, I wonder if Pelosi will condone the desecration of her father’s grave (as some have suggested with the graves of Confederate soldiers) because he was sympathetic to those two giants of the Confederacy?
Don’t count on it. Pelosi has conveniently forgotten the dark history of her beloved Democrat Party.
For example, its founder, Andrew Jackson, was a slaveholder and Confederate politicians were ALL Democrats.
Hmm. As they say on TV: “And that’s not all!”
The Democrat Party for decades fought desegregation, formed the Ku Klux Klan, resisted Reconstruction following the Civil War, created Jim Crow laws, and instituted the notion of separate but equal in the South—a clear violation of the 14th Amendment of the U. S. Constitution that guarantees equal protection under the law.
The party itself is the very quintessence of hypocrisy. What about it, Speaker Pelosi? Is it time to cleanse the Democrat Party of its past sins? Should you not be working to eradicate its transparent and nauseating connection to the Confederacy?
Speaking of nauseating Democrats, what about Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va? Last week on the Senate floor he blathered that America “didn’t inherit slavery from anybody. We created it.”
That has to be the dumbest declaration ever made on the Senate floor. The Democrat Party has now completed its unconditional surrender to the forces of historical illiteracy.
Slavery has been rife throughout all of ancient history. Most, if not all, ancient civilizations practiced it and it is described (and defended) in early writings of the Sumerians, Babylonians, and Egyptians. It was also practiced by early societies in Central America and Africa.
Three thousand years ago Egyptians enslaved Jews who eventually escaped via something we now know as “The Exodus.”
Then there were the Romans. They enslaved just about everyone they conquered. And lest we forget, what about the million or so Europeans who were kidnapped by African Muslims and forced into slavery?
Here’s another reality. Slavery in America existed long before the first Europeans arrived. American Indians were slaveholders before and long after slavery became an institution in the South. In fact, slavery is the only African institution ever adopted by this country.
And here’s another salient fact: Portuguese — not Americans — brought the first slaves to Jamestown in 1619.
For those in this country who believe slavery in the world ended with the American Civil War, guess what? It still exists today and is even more prevalent than it was in the 19th Century.
Every day across the African continent, black men, women, and children are captured, bought, and sold into slavery with the Western world paying scant attention. For example, in Mauritania, slavery persists with tens of thousands of blacks continuing to be held in bondage.
In Sudan, tens of thousands of African women and children from mostly Christian villages were enslaved during the jihad raids of the Second Sudanese Civil War. At least 50,000 remain in bondage today.
According to the Global Slavery Index (GSI), 106,000 black Africans are estimated to be enslaved in Algeria. Migrant women and children of both sexes risk being forced into sexual slavery, while men perform unskilled labor.
Sound familiar? For Democrats, it should. It’s what that party supported and protected for decades in the South until President Lincoln and the Union Army ended slavery by force.
[image error] Grant and Lee at Appomattox
And by the way, as bad as the turgid goons who are ripping down statues think this country is, America remains the only country that fought a bloody war to end slavery.
But even then (unlike the demented zealots who rampage through our cities today) with more than 600,000 Americans from both sides dead and millions wounded, there was room for forgiveness, benevolence, and graciousness.
At the South’s surrender at Appomattox, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant allowed Gen. Robert E. Lee to keep his sword. As Lee mounted his horse to leave, Grant saluted him. Then, after announcing the South’s surrender at the White House, President Lincoln ordered the band to play “Dixie.”
It was a stunning and humane way to end the bloodiest war in America’s history–a point that is lost on the destructive imbeciles running amok in our cities today.
June 22, 2020
Woman Becomes First Observant Sikh to Graduate from West Point: ‘A Humbling Experience’
While thousands of ANTIFA thugs, protestors, vandals, urban occupiers, looters, BLM adherents, and other malcontents were ripping down statues, looting, burning, attacking police, and demanding the obliteration of our past, Second Lieutenant Anmol Narang was actually making history.
The 23-year-old woman became the first observant Sikh to graduate from the United States Military Academy at West Point in New York. She was one of 1,107 other graduates who came together for the academy’s annual commencement ceremony on June 14.
[image error] 2d Lt. Anmol Narang
“It’s an incredible feeling. It’s a humbling experience, I have never worked harder for anything in my life,” she told reporters. “Being a Sikh woman is a very important part of my identity and if my experience can play a small role in being an inspiration for others, regardless of their career field, that will be wonderful,” she stated.
What a contrast to the thousands of victim-signaling agitators who screeched “systemic racism” as they demanded the defunding and abolishment of the nation’s police forces, who defaced the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Philadelphia, and who threatened to desecrate the graves of Confederate soldiers.
[image error] Antifa thugs in action
Born and raised in Roswell, Georgia, Narang says she always had an appreciation for military service because of her maternal grandfather’s career in the Indian Army. During high school, she visited the Pearl Harbor National Memorial in Honolulu, Hawaii, which only furthered her interest in the military.
“Seeing the sacrifice those people made and the results of that sacrifice was really impactful. I stayed until it closed, then worked on my application when I got back to my hotel room,” she recalled.
In 1802, President Thomas Jefferson signed legislation that established the United States Military Academy at West Point. Jefferson took the action with the expectation that those attending the Academy would be representative of a democratic society.
Although other Sikhs have graduated from the academy, Narang was the first observant Sikh woman to do so.
“The confidence and support of my community back home in Georgia has been deeply meaningful to me, and I am humbled that in reaching this goal, I am showing other Sikh Americans that any career path is possible for anyone willing to rise to the challenge,” Narang said.
It’s an upbeat and sanguine message that is likely to fall on the deaf ears of thousands of rabble-rousers and other malcontents who have infested the nation’s streets the past few weeks.
Narang graduated with a degree in nuclear engineering and plans to pursue a career in air defense systems. She will finish her Basic Officer Leadership Course at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, then go to her first post in Okinawa, Japan, in January.
Meanwhile, thousands of whiners and faultfinders who are unable or who refuse to see the opportunities this country offers to all of its citizens will continue to spew their hatred of America and its past.
I wonder which group will inspire the next generation? The 1,107 self-sacrificing graduates of West Point? Or the thousands of America-haters who occupy our city streets?
June 21, 2020
The Protests Have Been Hijacked
When I observe what is happening to America—the country in which I grew up, in which I was educated, and that I served in the U.S. Army—I am appalled. Anarchy, violence, looting. This is NOT the country I know and love. This is an aberration, a disfigurement of our Republic.
America’s past is a checkered one. No doubt about it. Slavery, discrimination, lynching. They are stains on our history; blemishes on an imperfect nation. Yet, America remains the only country where people can strive freely for a more perfect union, where they are free to speak their minds, to protest, to worship as they wish, to be individuals, to pursue happiness, and to hold elected officials accountable without fear of retribution.
Today, some want to rip our nation apart and divide us into belligerent tribes based on race, religion, ethnicity, wealth, poverty, achievement, failure, livelihood, and political power. As a firm believer in America’s motto: E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One), I will oppose the tribalists to my last breath.
For the next several days, I am reposting commentaries from Americans of all races and occupations. They are as concerned as I am about this attempt to obliterate our country from within. I hope you will find them as illuminating and significant as I have.
The Protests Have Been Hijacked
For two days, November 9–10, 1938, the Jewish people underwent a seminal moment in their glorious but often tragic history. During these two nights, unaffectionately dubbed Kristallnacht or “Night of Broken Glass,” Nazis in Germany torched synagogues; vandalized Jewish homes, schools, and businesses; and killed close to 100 Jews.
Two days prior, a 17-year-old Polish Jew named Herschel Grynszpan heard that his parents had been deported by the Nazis to Poland. Seeking retribution, Grynszpan tracked down Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat in Paris and assassinated him. It turned out to be just the pretense Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels was seeking to incite anti-Semitic riots throughout Germany. Nazi officials ordered German police officers and firemen to do nothing as the riots raged and buildings burned. Sound familiar?
Fast-forward 82 years to the murder of George Floyd.
What started out as a peaceful protest against the death of this unfortunate man has likewise spawned unprecedented, widespread violence and destruction throughout the United States. This mayhem has thus far taken the lives of at least 11 people, many of whom are black Americans. Hundreds of others have been injured in the chaos, with police officers getting shot and protesters struck with rubber bullets.
As the carnage, looting, arson, and assaults have been allowed to continue in Democrat-controlled states and municipalities, it has become undeniably evident that the wrongful death of George Floyd has morphed into anarchism. As lives, businesses, and personal property have been driven asunder, the criminal perpetrators are buoyed by pusillanimous Democrat politicians too timid to take back their own streets. Whether it be Crown Heights, August 1991; Rodney King, May 1992; Ferguson Missouri, August 2014; Baltimore, April 2015; or one of many others, the script has remained the same. In concordance with fawning state and local officials, a legitimate protest is hijacked by a throng of anarchists.
[image error] Jerrold L. Sobel
In doing so, the Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln, is branded by Democrats as the party of racist policies. Barry Shaw, the international public diplomacy director at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies, had this to say in an article entitled “America’s Race Problems: An Outsider’s Perspective”:
The media went in search of white incitement to make a case against Republicans but found instead, white inciters were members of the far-left nihilist group, Antifa. They support and vote Democrat and that imported agitators, looters and arsonists were predominantly black.
According to Wikipedia, Antifa, which ironically stands for “anti-fascist,” comprises autonomous groups “that aim to achieve their objectives through the use of both non-violent and violent action rather than through policy reform.” No hidden agenda there. The article goes on to state: “Antifa’s political activists engage in protest tactics involving property damage, physical violence, and harassment,” ostensibly against fascists, racists, and those on the far right. Tell that to black and other business-owners whose life’s work has gone up in flames.
Poignantly, the article concludes: “Individuals involved in the movement tend to hold anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist views, subscribing to a range of left wing ideologies such as anarchism, communism, Marxism, social democracy and socialism.” Irrespective of color, creed, or origin, these are not exactly ideologies most Americans have grown up following.
Seemingly forgotten in all this turmoil are the advances black Americans have witnessed during the Trump years. Since taking office, the president has created over a million jobs for that constituency. Prior to the recent pandemic, national black unemployment hit an all-time low of 5.5 percent — even lower for black women at 4.4 percent.
Several months ago, Pastor Darrell Scott, a member of President Donald Trump’s executive transition team, and co-founder of the New Spirit Revival Center in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, penned an article entitled “Black Communities Thriving Thanks to President Trump.”
The pastor states: “That focus on expanding economic opportunity for minorities has been a major priority for the Trump Administration and by eliminating the sentencing disparities caused by the horrendous Clinton-era crime bill, African American inmates, sentenced unfairly were given a second chance at the American Dream.” He concludes: “After all the progress African-Americans have made under Mr. Trump, it’s difficult to even imagine going back to the Democrats’ failed, big-government policies that have held us back for so long.”
Words such as these are anathema to the race-baiters and insurrectionist elements in the aforementioned states whose sole goals are discord, dissolution, and anarchy, not social justice. As they burn police precincts, pillage property, and illegally occupy large swathes of cities, they are emboldened by state, local, and federal Democrats who acquiesce to their every wish and whim, no matter how absurd — the latest being to defund the police.
Rep. Ilhan Omar, representing Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District, is in the vanguard of this movement. She’s quoted saying: “The Minneapolis Police Department is rotten to the root and so when we dismantle it, we get rid of that cancer and we allow for something beautiful to rise.” The only beautiful thing to rise without a viable police force can be seen occurring today in Seattle.
In an interview on FOX News, Omar’s opponent in November, Republican Lacy Lee Johnson, recognizing the imbecility of dismantling the police department, had this to say about Omar and the Minneapolis City Council. “We have a reckless city council making reckless decisions about the safety and health of our community by passing this law to disband and stop funding the police. They are putting our community at risk.” Admonitions such as this have so far fallen upon deaf ears in other Democrat-run states such as Washington, particularly in the once beautiful city of Seattle.
This past week, going by the acronym CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone), a cabal of far-left adolescents directed by Antifa and Black Lives Matter affiliates occupied a seven-square-block portion of that city. Breaking through police barricades, protesters attacked police with bricks, bottles, rocks, and improvised explosive devices, sending some officers to the hospital. Abandoned by a feckless mayor, Jenny Durkan; a city council of equal irrelevance; and an ineffectual governor, Jay Inslee, police withdrew from the area, in effect relinquishing control of an American city to mob rule.
In a matter of days, unelected, self-proclaimed “warlords” created a hardened border and a rudimentary form of government based on principles of intersectional representation. “Rather than enforce the law, Seattle’s progressive political class capitulated to the mob and will likely make massive concessions over the next few months. This will embolden the Antifa coalition, and further, undermine the rule of law in American cities.”
Witnessing their success in Seattle, there can be little doubt that other U.S. cities under Democrat administration will soon follow suit and fall sway to instigation and violence by the likes of Antifa; Black Lives Matter; other insurrectionists and anti-American organizations.
Jerrold L. Sobel is a retired History teacher from New York who has resided in Naples, Florida since 2001. He writes a newsletter called The Israeli Advocate, which defends Israel and the Jewish people. He has been the President of the Zionist Organization of America/Southwest Florida Chapter since 2009
June 20, 2020
Class, Not Race, Divides America: The Truth that White Progressives Dare Not Utter
When I observe what is happening to America—the country in which I grew up, in which I was educated, and that I served in the U.S. Army—I am appalled. Anarchy, violence, looting. This is NOT the country I know and love. This is an aberration, a disfigurement of our Republic.
America’s past is a checkered one. No doubt about it. Slavery, discrimination, lynching. They are stains on our history; blemishes on an imperfect nation. Yet, America remains the only country where people can strive freely for a more perfect union, where they are free to speak their minds, to protest, to worship as they wish, to be individuals, to pursue happiness, and to hold elected officials accountable without fear of retribution.
Today, there are those who want to rip our nation apart and divide us into belligerent tribes based on race, religion, ethnicity, wealth, poverty, achievement, failure, livelihood, and political power. As a firm believer in America’s motto: E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One) I will oppose the tribalists to my last breath.
For the next several days I am reposting commentaries from Americans of all races and occupations who are as concerned as I am about this attempt to obliterate our country from within. I hope you will find them as illuminating and significant as I have.
Class, Not Race, Divides America
The truth that white progressives dare not utter
Nothing is stranger in these tense days than the monotony of the inexact and non-descriptive mantra of “white privilege” and “white solidarity”—as if there is some monolithic white bloc, or as if class matters not at all.
In truth, the clingers, the deplorables, the irredeemables, and Joe Biden’s “dregs” have very little in common with those who so libel them, but superficially share supposedly omnipotent and similar skin color.
In the past, we saw such tensions among so-called whites in CNN’s reporting of the allegedly toothless rubes at Trump rallies, in the Strzok-Page text trove about Walmart’s smelly patrons, in the callous coastal disregard for the five-decade wasting away of the American industrial heartland, in the permissible elite collective disparagement of Christian evangelicals, and in the anthropological curiosity about and condescension toward such exotic, but presumably backward, Duck Dynasty and NASCAR peoples.
As a result, we have reached the surreal point at which the nation’s privileged whites on campuses such as Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, in the top echelon of politics, and the corporate and entertainment worlds, all deplore in the abstract something they call “white privilege” in others who have never really experienced it.
Of course, whatever such a thing is, they possess it in abundance but give no hint they have any intention of giving it up other than rhetorically or through the medieval concept of hair-shirt penance and Twitter confessionals. On the other hand, they are furious that middle-class whites do not join their theatrics of bending the knee and offering abject apologies for original sins.
Progressive, affluent whites run most of the blue states that oversee the big blue cities that hire the liberal police chiefs and their unionized officers. So how strange it is for liberal elite white people to damn supposed white privilege for the logical sins of their own ideology and governance.
Little in Common Culturally and Socially
Across the hollowed-out rust belt, in Appalachia, throughout California’s foothills and Central Valley, or in the rural South there are millions of white Americans who fail in terms of income, longevity, suicide rates, dependence on government assistance, and drug dependence statistically compared to nonwhite ethnic groups such as Punjabi immigrants, or Asian-Americans in general, and elite black and Latino minorities.
[image error] Victor Davis Hanson
But more importantly, I can attest after living my entire life near the rural nexus of Fresno, Kings, and Tulare Counties, ground zero of the 1930s and 1940s Grapes of Wrath Oklahoma diaspora, that many whites by no stretch of the imagination could be defined as “privileged.” They are also not deplorable, irredeemable, or clingers to their guns and religion, much less dregs. Whatever they may be, they are not the beneficiaries at birth of any intrinsic advantage. They certainly did not enjoy the affirmative action of the white elite, defined by familial networks of like professionals, alumni influence, money, quid pro quo interning, incestuous leveraging, and good ole’ boy favoring.
So they have little culturally or socially in common with the elites of predominantly white coastal corridors from Boston to Washington and La Jolla to Seattle. The indifference of one to the other is mutual.
There is no shared concept of “It’s a white thing, you wouldn’t understand.” Again, the white underprivileged feel about the white privileged about the same as the latter feels about them. In that sense, the generic “white” means very little.
Class matters, not superficial commonalities of race. Lower-middle-class or poor whites are more likely to live among poorer minorities than are elite, high-income whites whose experience of the Other is often confined either to career contacts with wealthy minority professionals of like tastes, education, backgrounds, and values—or their asymmetrical brief conversations with their own gardeners, housekeepers, and nannies.
The white underclass lives, schools, and works among the supposed Other; the overclass not so much. As a result, in our increasingly polarized racial society, the white overclasses have constructed a psychological edifice to contextualize the paradox of their own de facto racial apartheid and segregation.
In rural Fresno County, for example, most poorer whites—in terms of the local public schools, friendships, and social outing—have far more in common with Mexican-Americans and Hmong minorities and are of the same class, than they do with the wealthier and professional white classes in the Bay Area.
One reason that many African-Americans are often suspicious of white liberal elites is that they sense their apologetics serve as cheap penance for their apartheid lives of privilege. No one has much respect for a chronic dissimulator, appeaser, and apologist, even if superficially ideologically akin. A great unexplored topic is an African-American disdain for the white elites who so easily are superficially obsequious, not out of authentic desire to be equals but to preen among one another of their condescending paternalism. Only in the irrational venom toward black conservatives, who warn of the white progressive elite, do we see the extent of the white elite liberal’s superciliousness.
Racial Demagoguery vs. Class Appeals
One of the reasons that the Left and the Democratic Party feared and hated the Trump movement was its emphasis on class rather than race, a more fluid and potentially more dynamic appeal, and one with the potential to unite rather than divide those of different tribes.
Indeed, much of the left-wing focus on Trump’s supposed “racism” emerged in response to the fact that, unlike past Republican bogeymen such as Mitt Romney and despite his billions, Trump was not so easily caricatured as an elite grandee who felt uneasy among the nonwhite.
Whatever Trump was, he talked to blacks just as he talked to everyone else—same accent, same mannerism, same vocabulary. He was not going to feign a black patois and pander in the Joe Biden style of “Put y’all back in chains” or “You ain’t black,” or reinvent himself in Hillary Clinton fashion as a civil rights veteran possessed of a phony drawl, “I don’t feel no ways tired. I come too far . . . ” Think of the logic driving these white liberal elites: “Blacks cannot understand my good English, so I will descend into their poor grammar, diction, and syntax to feign ‘y’all’ and ‘ain’t’ and ‘no ways tired.’”
In the context of promoting real national healing or efforts to ensure a more equitable society, Americans need to understand something about many of the Antifa protestors in the streets; the professors at the barricades; the New York and Washington grandees; and the Pelosis, Schumers, and Bidens of the world. Their abstract lectures about “privilege,” public prostrations on their knees in the Capitol with Kente cloths, self-interested promises of additional billions of dollars for blue-city bureaucracies, and narcissistic virtue signaling with other superficial bumper stickers of the revolution condemning white anything or privilege something—all of it—amounts to nothing more than day jobs to be turned on at 9 a.m. and switched off at 5 p.m. The show means little to most of them except the otherwise necessary price for feeling good about doing even better in their own eyes.
After Mitt Romney’s recent walk in a Black Lives Matter protest, an interview on television ostensibly displayed his caring for the black underclass. Do we recall prior left-wing hit jobs on him as a racist during his 2012 presidential bid? There were so many, but two ads stand out.
One was that now-infamous secretly recorded tape in which, to a receptive audience, Romney expressed his credo “there are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president [Obama] no matter what” because they are “dependent upon government . . . believe that they are victims . . . believe the government has a responsibility to care for them . . . these are people who pay no income tax.”
Romney apparently no longer believes that or least would not again utter it even in the presence of a friendly audience. But at the time he seemed oblivious to the fact that some of those 150 million Americans did not make enough income to pay income tax, or were unemployed and wished to work, or were disabled or were sick or were on Social Security without any other private assistance.
And second, there was a vicious, but equally effective hit ad against him, a quite unfair one starring his empathetic black garbage man. He complained that Romney, supposedly unlike his other more humane customers, never greeted or talked with him. (“We’re kind of like the invisible people.”)
My point is not so much that the smear ads were unfair, only that such propaganda worked.
Why so? Not because Barack Obama, Romney’s opponent, was any more concerned with the underclass than was Romney. Indeed, the Obamas likely by now have a far greater income and perhaps even greater net worth than Romney and may soon surpass his number of luxury homes. They probably live an even more segregated existence.
Rather, both ads suggested that the “caring” of the public Romney was demonstrative, while the private Romney if the public could just get a glimpse of him, was not so interested in personal empathy or outreach. A cynic might add, in this age of loud virtue signaling, that had Romney just spoken to his garbage man, or told a private meeting of supporters that “the 47 percent” really could be reached and persuaded that new policies would help far better than fossilized programs, he might not have found himself in the position of much later needing to feel the need to march in front of a national audience in a fashion that will have little if any effect on anyone but Mitt Romney.
Separatism Won’t Heal the Racial Divide
If one is actually troubled—indeed, really concerned about the plight of the nonwhite underclass, about systematic violence in the inner city, about the abject failures of the public schools, about the insidious spread of microaggressive racism, about virtual immunity given rogue cops—then one should recognize that virtue signaling from the gated estate, public confessionals, and medieval penance to square the circle of private apartheid have done nothing and will do nothing to address these problems.
We need not hear any more sermonizing, even from the iconic Michelle Obama, who ventures out from her multimillion-dollar Martha’s Vineyard estate or Washington mansion to lecture black Americans—millions of whom are now locked in their inner-city homes, terrified by looting and arson, and not a policeman to be seen—that they cannot become “too angry,” all before venturing back inside her chateau rooms with a view.
Instead, why not commit to real change? Why do we not integrate Sidwell Friends with those schools of the inner-city and of lower classes? Why do not our actors, the Pelosi grandchildren, the scions of the Zuckerberg, Gates, and Bloomberg families, all vow to place their offspring into the public schools, to become personally engaged with the less fortunate, and to pledge that their own fates will hinge on those of others? One can write a check for millions to the anti-Semitic and racist Al Sharpton and his charity and thereby do far less than simply tutoring one inner-city teen or taking him on as a personal intern to advise him how one gets ahead in America.
Indeed, why not eschew the third home, the walled compound, the private-jet getaway, and instead have a second home in an inner-city or Latino suburb or among the rural hamlets of the Central Valley or Western Texas? People do not want tele-condescension but rather face-to-face dignity. And dignity comes from being treated as an equal and a partner, not as a cause.
Why not have over to dinner those who make $50,000 rather than $500,000? Why not eschew giving a check to Black Lives Matter and instead quietly and privately help mentor African-American youth in the arts of business, or medicine, or law, and invest personal time in genuine devotion to those who do not have the tools and support network to ensure upward mobility? Or why not weld alongside, or hammer with someone you romanticize in the abstract as much as you avoid in the concrete?
The racial divide will not be healed by black separatist tribalism. It will not be bridged by the white apartheid guilt of the well off. It certainly will not end by this absurd medievalism of affluent, sequestered, well-meaning, white progressives championing black causes in ways that are loud and public, but ultimately selfish.
The next time we hear a lecture about caring from a woke Yale professor, or a sermon on systematic racism from a CEO, or more Hollywood confessional video drivel, we should pause and politely ask, “But where do your children go to school? And why do you live where you live? And dine with whom you dine?” Then remember class, not race, is what divides America—the truth that the upscale white progressive dares not utter.
Victor Davis Hanson is an American military historian, columnist, former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He was a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno, and is currently the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict was Fought and Won (Basic Books).
June 19, 2020
Three Generations of Brainwashing Pays Off For the Left
When I observe what is happening to America—the country I grew up in, that I was educated in, and that I served as a soldier—I am appalled. Anarchy, violence, looting. This is NOT the America I know and love. This is an aberration, a disfigurement of our Republic.
When I hear elected politicians threatening to desecrate the graves of Confederate soldiers, tear down statues and smash monuments to our past, what they are actually saying is they want to erase and rewrite America’s history. But history is indelible and permanent. It happened. You cannot change it to fit some 21st Century politically correct narrative. What you can do, is learn from it.
Abraham Lincoln, followed by President Ulysses S. Grant worked assiduously to repair the damage done by the Civil War—the bloodiest war in our history. Part of that restoration was the Reconstruction of the South and appeals to “bind the nation’s wounds” and care for the widows and children of fallen soldiers from both sides of the conflict.
One of the more poignant policies implemented by Lincoln was to bury Confederate and Union dead next to one another in cemeteries. It was a symbolic gesture aimed at healing the deep wounds of the Civil War—a war that was fought to end slavery and which claimed the lives of more than 600,000 soldiers from both sides. Soldiers and veterans can understand the rectitude and reverence that sheathes that sentiment; conniving politicians and radical demagogues who never served in the armed forces and who lost buddies in combat, cannot.
America’s past is a checkered one. No doubt about it. Slavery, discrimination, lynching. They are stains on our history; blemishes on an imperfect nation. Yet, America remains the only country where people can strive freely for a more perfect union, where they are free to speak their minds, to protest, to worship as they wish, to be individuals, to pursue happiness, and to hold elected officials accountable without fear of retribution.
Today, there are those who want to rip our nation apart and divide us into belligerent tribes based on race, religion, ethnicity, wealth, poverty, achievement, failure, livelihood, and political power. As a firm believer in America’s motto: E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One) I will fight the tribalists to my last breath.
For the next several days I am reposting commentaries from Americans of all races and occupations who are as concerned as I am about this attempt to obliterate our country from within. I hope you will find them as illuminating and significant as I have.
Three Generations of Brainwashing Pays Off For the Left
by Newt Gingrich
As we watch radicals tear down statues, deface monuments, intimidate people who want to stand for the National Anthem, demand the firing of people who write or say something deemed inappropriate to the Leftist Anti-American Theology, it is utterly clear that many Americans today hate America.
People ask me how we’ve gotten to this point. All of this is the result of three generations of brainwashing going back at least to Herbert Marcuse, the German-born University of California, San Diego professor who taught young Americans the philosophical foundation of Marxism in the 1960s. As early as 1972, Theodore White was warning that the liberal ideology was becoming a liberal theology and dissent was less and less acceptable to the left.
[image error] Newt Gingrich
We have watched the hard left, the America hating totalitarians who want to define acceptable speech, as they took over the academic world. The college boards – made up of supposedly sound community leaders – refused to fight. Public universities and colleges continued to hire vehement anti-American professors, the state legislatures and governors refused to fight. Alumni continued to give to schools, which were teaching their own children and grandchildren to despise them.
We did not think through the eventual reality that graduates who had been taught systematic falsehoods would take those falsehoods into their jobs. As President Ronald Reagan said, “the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”
As I write in my upcoming book, Trump and the American Future, this educated ignorance has now infested our news media, bureaucracies, and corporate headquarters. These are sincere fanatics. It is this fanaticism which has been so visible in the last few weeks.
The uprising by the self-righteous fanatics of The New York Times got their opinion editor fired for the sin of publishing a conservative senator’s op-ed. The fanatics at The Philadelphia Inquirer got their editor fired for running the headline “Buildings Matter Too.” In case after case, the new fanaticism is imposing a thought police model reinforced by the Maoist tradition of public confession and group solidarity.
We were warned that this could happen. Having defeated Marxism in the Soviet Union, President Reagan was worried by the rise of anti-Americanism in our own country. He warned of the collapse of support for America in his farewell address on Jan. 11, 1989. It is lengthy, but I want to include it here, because it is important to recall now:
“There is a great tradition of warnings in Presidential farewells, and I’ve got one that’s been on my mind for some time. But oddly enough it starts with one of the things I’m proudest of in the past eight years: the resurgence of national pride that I called the new patriotism. This national feeling is good, but it won’t count for much, and it won’t last unless it’s grounded in thoughtfulness and knowledge.
“An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions.
If you didn’t get these things from your family you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea or the family who lost someone at Anzio. Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed you could get a sense of patriotism from the popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-60s.
“But now, we’re about to enter the 90s, and some things have changed. Younger parents aren’t sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children.
And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven’t reinstitutionalized it. We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom — freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It’s fragile; it needs production [protection].
“So, we’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important — why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant. You know, four years ago on the 40th anniversary of D-day, I read a letter from a young woman writing to her late father, who’d fought on Omaha Beach. Her name was Lisa Zanatta Henn, and she said, `we will always remember, we will never forget what the boys of Normandy did.’ Well, let’s help her keep her word.
If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let’s start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual.”
It would have been a struggle to win this fight for America 31 years ago when President Reagan warned us of the consequence of teaching falsehoods and anti-American lies. Now it will be much, much harder.
If we want America to survive as a constitutional republic under the rule of law, which protects the right of free speech and is dedicated to the belief that each one of us is endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we have no choice but to fight to defeat the anti-Americans and reassert our nation.
June 18, 2020
My View of Looters: This is a Great, Great Country
When I observe what is happening to America—the country I grew up in, that I was educated in, and that I served as a soldier—I am appalled. Anarchy, violence, looting. This is NOT the America I know and love. This is an aberration, a disfigurement of our Republic.
When I hear elected politicians threatening to desecrate the graves of Confederate soldiers, tear down statues and smash monuments to our past, what they are actually saying is they want to erase and rewrite America’s history. But history is indelible and permanent. It happened. You cannot change it to fit some 21st Century politically correct narrative. What you can do, is learn from it.
Abraham Lincoln, followed by President Ulysses S. Grant worked assiduously to repair the damage done by the Civil War—the bloodiest war in our history. Part of that restoration was the Reconstruction of the South and appeals to “bind the nation’s wounds” and care for the widows and children of fallen soldiers from both sides of the conflict.
One of the more poignant policies implemented by Lincoln was to bury Confederate and Union dead next to one another in cemeteries. It was a symbolic gesture aimed at healing the deep wounds of the Civil War—a war that was fought to end slavery and which claimed the lives of more than 600,000 soldiers from both sides. Soldiers and veterans can understand the rectitude and reverence that sheathes that sentiment; conniving politicians and radical demagogues who never served in the armed forces and who lost buddies in combat, cannot.
America’s past is a checkered one. No doubt about it. Slavery, discrimination, lynching. They are stains on our history; blemishes on an imperfect nation. Yet, America remains the only country where people can strive freely for a more perfect union, where they are free to speak their minds, to protest, to worship as they wish, to be individuals, to pursue happiness, and to hold elected officials accountable without fear of retribution.
Today, there are those who want to rip our nation apart and divide us into belligerent tribes based on race, religion, ethnicity, wealth, poverty, achievement, failure, livelihood, and political power. As a firm believer in America’s motto: E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One) I will fight the tribalists to my last breath.
For the next several days I am reposting commentaries from Americans of all races and occupations who are as concerned as I am about this attempt to obliterate our country from within. I hope you will find them as illuminating and significant as I have.
My View of Looters: This is a great, great country.
by BEN STEIN
Now for a few words about the criminal looters, arsonists, and murderers — and the good people — of today:
Yes, of course, black lives matter. But 99.9 percent of the blacks killed violently in this country are killed by other blacks. Very few are killed by the police. Let’s see the college boys and sexy upper-class white girls in their shorts demonstrate against the Crips and the Bloods. Let’s see the absolute idiot commentators on the news shows lambaste the gang-bangers. Of course, they don’t because they’re chickens–t. They only march against people they know won’t harm them.
If black lives matter, let’s shut down the abortion mills, where the great plurality of human beings killed are black babies. Of course, no one does that, because the abortionists and the Democrat party and the judges are all in bed with each other. No one hates black life more than the Democrat leadership, in my humble opinion, if we are to judge honestly by the numbers. Why isn’t anyone protesting against them and their abortuary pals?
Isn’t it interesting that the first stores the looters went after were super-high-end clothing and jewelry stores, shops far too expensive for me or my wife to go to, except for presents for close friends? Aren’t the looters supposed to be with the working class? Why didn’t they loot JC Penney or stores that sold work boots? Of course, they want to look rich. They aspire to do that by stealing.
[image error] Ben Stein
Have you noticed that the overwhelming mass of the looters shown on TV are black? The overwhelming mass of the protesters against “racial injustice” are white prosperous-looking young people. Who is missing? Asians. They don’t loot. They don’t riot. They study and they work. And they get ahead, and they live in nice houses and buy at the stores the looters steal from. Why is that? Could there be some Asian mystery gene that does that? If so, when the Asians take over here, as my late pal Bob Bartley told me, they will not show the kindness to looters and killers of other races that we guilty, stupid whites do. They will crack down like Lee Kuan Yew and like the South Koreans.
My favorite TV commentator is Tucker Carlson. He’s a genius. But even he got it wrong recently when he, a brilliant man, talked about “the system” trying to hoodwink the people by stirring up race hatred. That way, said Tucker, “the people” won’t notice how much the bosses are stealing from them. He’s partly right. The top bosses of public companies are wildly overpaid by us pitiful small stockholders. But that’s a tiny sum in the context of this economy. And who is stirring up race hatred? Not the bosses. The media commentators, Tucker. I have never seen or heard of a CEO stirring up race hatred. It’s the media that’s in the race hatred derby.
There is nothing systemically wrong with the USA. Not racial injustice. That was gone long ago. Not class warfare. That’s ancient history. This is a super great country. It’s good to anyone who is willing to acquire human capital in the form of education as a lawyer, doctor, plumber, or electrician. If there is a problem, it’s the looters, murderers, and arsonists, and their pals in the media.
This is a great, great country, and if the media tell you different, they are lying. And the cops, 99 percent of them, are great people. Let’s thank them — not kick them for protecting us.
Benjamin Jeremy Stein is an American writer, lawyer, actor, comedian, and commentator on political and economic issues. He began his career as a speechwriter for U.S. presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford before entering the entertainment field as an actor, comedian, and game show host.
June 17, 2020
How To Destroy America From Within
When I observe what is happening to my country—the country I grew up in, that I was educated in, and that I served as a soldier—I am appalled. Anarchy, violence, looting. This is NOT the America I know and love. This is an aberration, a disfigurement of our Republic.
When I hear elected politicians threatening to desecrate the graves of Confederate soldiers, tear down statues and smash monuments to our past, what they are actually saying is they want to erase and rewrite America’s history. But history is indelible and permanent. It happened. You cannot change it to fit some 21st Century politically correct narrative.
What you can do, is learn from it.
Abraham Lincoln, followed by President Ulysses S. Grant worked assiduously to repair the damage done by the Civil War—the bloodiest war in our history. Part of that restoration was the Reconstruction of the South and appeals to “bind the nation’s wounds” and care for the widows and children of fallen soldiers from both sides of the conflict.
One of the more poignant policies was to bury Confederate and Union dead next to one another in cemeteries. It was a symbolic gesture aimed at healing the deep wounds of the Civil War—a war which was fought to end slavery and which claimed the lives of more than 600,000 soldiers from both sides. Soldiers and veterans can understand the rectitude and reverence that sheathes that sentiment; conniving politicians and radical demagogues who never served in the armed forces and who lost buddies in combat, cannot.
America’s past is a checkered one. No doubt about it. Slavery, discrimination, lynching. They are stains on our history; blemishes on an imperfect nation. Yet, America remains the only country where people can strive freely for a more perfect union, where they are free to speak their minds, to protest, to worship as they wish, to be individuals, to pursue happiness, and to hold elected officials accountable without fear of retribution.
Today, there are those who want to rip our nation apart and divide us into belligerent tribes based on race, religion, ethnicity, wealth, poverty, achievement, failure, livelihood, and political power. As a firm believer in America’s motto: E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One) I will fight the tribalists to my last breath.
For the next several days I am reposting commentaries from Americans of all races and occupations who are as concerned as I am about this attempt to obliterate our country from within. I hope you will find them as illuminating and significant as I have.
How To Destroy America From Within
by
Adam Smith, the Godfather of capitalism, once said, there’s a “great deal of ruin in a nation.” That’s doubly true when you’re talking about a nation like America, the world’s last remaining superpower. How do you destroy a country with a powerful economy, a strong military, and a moral and decent people?
It has to be a long, slow process that moves subtly on many simultaneous fronts. If you become too bold, too fast, people will catch onto what you’re doing and even many of your biggest supporters will be forced to distance themselves from you….well, at least until you get a little further down the slippery slope.
To begin with, as conservative provocateur Andrew Breitbart once said, “Politics is downstream from culture.” If you want to change people for the worse, you have to start by undermining their values. This happens by slowly, yet surely taking over their institutions.
Control Hollywood and the music industry and you can portray duty, honor, and character as old-timey concepts that no longer matter. You can also paint the most successful Americans as bad guys, the military as mind-numbed robots, and decent Christians as hypocrites who want to ruin everyone’s good time.
More importantly, once you have actors and musicians on your side, there is practically no limit to the number of ways you can shape the culture for the worse. You can promote drug use and promiscuous sex. You can encourage men to feminize and women to be more masculine. Most importantly, you can portray your opponents who want to save what’s great about America as desperately unhip.
This reinforces the messages young Americans, who care desperately about being popular, are getting from their schools. Once you control Hollywood, music, and the schools, you have a direct pipeline to the brains of the young Americans who will one day run the country.
So, what do you teach them? It would be best if you could entirely get away from teaching them reading, writing, arithmetic and history, but as of yet, other than in a few inner-city schools (see Detroit for a perfect example), that is not yet possible. So, what you do in the interim is distort their history.
Don’t teach them the nuances of the Constitution; teach them the flaws of the men who made it. Vilify capitalism and Christianity. Look for every opportunity to move from giving children hard facts to teaching them pabulum about diversity and being nice to other people as opposed to having any sort of moral standards. With enough work, you can turn them into ignorant, entitled creampuffs who need “safe spaces” and warnings about “trigger words” to even make it through a day in a coddled university environment.
Once you’ve worked your magic on the populace, then you can start making moves in the political sector. The first is to promote judges who believe in a “living Constitution,” which is functionally no different than not having a Constitution at all. This allows arrogant judges to override the people in order to put foolish policies into action, but more importantly, it allows the unlimited expansion of government.
The bigger government becomes, the less capable it seems of doing ANYTHING WELL despite its swelling cost. Once you have a government that’s almost universally considered to be incompetent despite spending so much money that it jeopardizes your nation’s future, your nation is on the road to ruin.
The key to keeping it on that road is capturing a political party that consistently appeals to people’s worst natures. You need a party committed to turning black Americans against white, women against men, gays against straights.
You need a party committed to rewarding poverty, bringing in unlimited numbers of poor, uneducated immigrants and defending the unions that make America’s public school system mediocre. A political party that promises to rob Peter to pay Paul, will build a large, corrupt base of takers who will support it to get their share of those ill-gotten gains.
No nation ever benefitted from having a large and growing class of parasites leeching off the most productive citizens and not even a nation as rich as America can bear it for long.
The thing that ties all of this together is a corrupt media that can largely control what news the population sees and focuses on. A media that is willing to lie in order to defame those trying to save a nation is useful, but not even necessary. All that really needs to be done is to focus the people on trivia, celebrities, and the flaws of those who mean well while the great crimes of the most corrupt are ignored or treated as trivial. When the people are obsessed with minutiae while the country is coming apart at the seams, the media has done their job well.
After this sort of interconnected system is built, the odds shift in favor of destroying a nation because as Machiavelli once wrote:
“And what physicians say about disease is applicable here: that at the beginning a disease is easy to cure but difficult to diagnose; but as time passes, not having been treated or recognized at the outset, it becomes easy to diagnose but difficult to cure. The same thing occurs in affairs of state; for by recognizing from afar the diseases that are spreading in the state (which is a gift given only to a prudent ruler), they can be cured quickly; but when they are not recognized and are left to grow to the extent that everyone recognizes them, there is no longer any cure.”
Once the system becomes self-sustaining as young Americans are no longer taught what made their nation successful, become obsessed with their feelings, come to believe that character doesn’t matter and buy into the destructive notions they see and hear every day on the big screen, on radio and in the papers, the disease that afflicts America will become so far advanced that it may never be cured.
John Hawkins is a columnist for Townhall and PJ Media. He created what was once a top 10,000 in-the-world website, Right Wing News, and is the author of “101 Things All Young Adults Should Know.” He’s been published at National Review, the Daily Wire, the Hill, Hot Air, the Washington Examiner, and Human Events among other outlets.
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