Posts Tagged → first amendment
America needs an Exodus moment
America as founded is dying. The pro-individual rights constitutional republic carefully constructed through competing equal branches of government since 1789 is being forcefully bulldozed by rogue Big Government forces. Our unique system of checks and balances, meant to disperse power widely across the body politic, is under atttack at every turn. Central planners desire to collapse decision making into just a few hands.
Whether it is the Electoral College that prevents mob rule, or free speech under the First Amendment, or private ownership of firearms under the Second Amendment, or secure borders meant to protect free taxpaying citizens, every safeguard designed to protect the individual citizen is being ignored or forcefully broken into little pieces in front of our faces by the advocates of government totalitarianism. In our media, academia, and indeed from within government itself there is a huge emphasis on growing powerful big government and diminishing the ever smaller citizen into the role of powerless serf.
With FBI and ATF federal government excution squads running lawlessly amok across America, a weaponized and now heavily armed IRS looking deeply into the private lives of their political opponents, an enormous replacement of native Americans with lawless illegal aliens, the leading political leader being hounded by a dozen fake lawsuits and under threat of being illegally jailed during an election year, and on and on, America as a distinct nation based on the rule of law is dying. It is being killed, axe murdered, set on fire and blown up right in front of us.
Yes, one political party is directly responsible for this, but the other political party is enabling the attack by deliberately not fighting back or resisting. Both political parties are killing America, and with the failure of political leadership it’s now up to our citizens to decide how we want to live.
Tonight is the beginning of Passover, and it is a reminder that America needs an Exodus moment. We need a shining example of direct Diving intervention that results in our people being set free from the rampant lawlessness and injustice being forced on us, to make us all into slaves to Big Government. Hopefully, we are worthy of it. Incidentally, when the Jewish People left Egypt roughly 3,300 years ago, they were “chamushim,” meaning fully armed. Just as free Americans should be in 2024.
Pray hard, folks, and also prepare for the long, hard spiritual renewal journey ahead of us this year. Do not look to politicians for salvation or freedom, that road is now closed. Rather, look to each other and to God.
Charlton Heston portrayed a prophet, and also served as one when he encouraged Americans to defy and resist our lawless government-gone-rogue.
King George III called George Washington “the greatest man in the world” because he declined to be king of America, and instead sacrificed himself for the creation of a people-led constitutional republic. Washington prayed hard before leading his surprise attack across the Delaware River. All Americans should aspire to be like Washington, especially in 2024.
Speaker Johnson’s religious behavior
Speaker of the US House of Representatives Mike Johnson is being widely criticized in the mainstream media for kneeling in prayer while on the job the other day. I watched one mainstream media TV personality take Rep. Johnson to task in an interview, about minding the supposed “separation of church and state,” and “keeping prayer in private,” and not letting it out into the public sphere.
Pretty curious approach, given that across America and Europe hordes of bloodthirsty primitives have also recently knelt in prayer in public spaces, promoting baby butchery, baby baking, and gang rape with a huge helping of subsequent mutilation and torture on Israelis, to the great joy of mainstream media. Why all these sincere people, just look at them, bless their hearts. Get them some brown shirts and night sticks.
The Left’s love affair with radical Islam is no secret, and it is just and fair to say this love affair exists because both the Left and radical Islam seek absolute destruction of Western Civilization with a resulting dominion over everyone and every thing on Planet Earth. The Left and radical Islam have a common cause, and whatever differences they have will be settled between one another once people like Rep. Johnson and his religion are out of the way. Keep this foremost in your mind as the drumbeat about Rep. Johnson’s Christian practice goes on.
Couple of things about this Mr. Smith Goes To Washington’s religiosity.
First, Christianity is the founding belief system of America, albeit that was a nascent and broad minded Protestantism that immediately resulted in the anti-slavery abolitionist movement. America’s pilgrims and Founders also identified strongly with the Jews’ quest for freedom from evil tyrant Pharoah, and with the Torah’s value-laden story of that quest. And so thousands of towns and locales across America are named after Biblical places like Hebron, Shiloh, Judah, Bethany, and Zion. Christianity’s sacred Judaic touchstone places, and their inherent unspoken values, are interwoven into the cultural fabric of America from our very beginning.
Second, Christianity is still the main and largest repository of morality and right action in America. This is a cold numeric fact, not a defense of or advocacy for Christian theology. As sad and deflated as American Christianity is right now, it is nonetheless still the biggest single force for all things good and for learning about good values in our nation.
You oppose Christian theology? OK, so what is your suggested substitute in its absence here in America? Atheism? Well, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Stalin are all great advocates for atheism and horrible, unjust places to live. Judaism? You think 200,000,000 Americans are going to convert to orthodox Judaism? Never! There would be an immediate and everlasting shortage of pickled herring, and so the rabbis would never allow it. Radical Islam will cut your throat, cut off your head, or throw you off a roof, sometimes all three, so nah, hard pass on that, right?
So, I say an occasional annoying knock on the door by some nice church ladies is a small price to pay for living happily in the most successful nation in the history of humanity.
The Left’s attacks on Christianity are strategic. If they can brow beat, shame, drown, flood, and eliminate Christianity, they will eliminate America’s renewable, sustainable, organic cultural source of opposition to the Left’s tyranny, immorality, and evil.
The Left has gotten really creative about their attack on Christianity, and they have only succeeded to date because of the long flaccid acquiescence of American traditionalists and Christians, and by the Left’s official enablers, the GOPe. By accusing Christians of establishing religion when they merely practice it, a la Rep. Johnson, the Left has appealed to the First Amendment’s clear prohibition against establishing a formal state religion for America. And yet, the truth is Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Muslims all are merely expressing their First Amendment rights when they pray in private or in public. None of their public prayer behavior establishes any of these religions as the de facto state religion of America.
What the Left really objects to is anyone actually seeing the Christian religion practiced in public. Their message is it’s a dirty practice that people ought to keep to themselves behind closed doors.
Rep. Johnson’s public prayer on the US House of Representatives floor is an in-your-face to the tyrants and cultural Marxists in the mainstream media. And of course history is on the side of Rep. Johnson, because the US House of Representatives opened with public prayer for I don’t know how long, but for the vast majority of the chamber’s existence. And when inaugurated in 1789 as America’s first president in Manhattan, New York, George Washington led a grand procession to Trinity Church on Wall Street, where he led an hours-long prayer service.
It is only when America now finds itself in the throes of hypercoagulative materialism that its own long and deep religious roots, and religion’s fruit-bearing shading branches, become anathema. So what a breath of fresh air is this Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, this cherubic Rep. Johnson.
Don’t stop, Rep. Johnson, for all our sakes, I pray you, do not stop and do not back down, and may you shine as a beacon light to Christians everywhere, and may that rallying light shine and defeat the cruel darkness that is swallowing my civilization. I may not agree with you on the particulars, but by God I will defend your right and our collective necessity to have you pray in the US House of Representatives.
Either Christianity will save America as a free constitutional republic, or America and western civilization will die.
May God bless you, Rep. Johnson.
US Media: immoral head fake, or illegal “fire!” in a crowded theater?
The First Amendment to the US Constitution is one of humanity’s greatest achievements.
The First Amendment guarantees individual citizens, and the press (media), certain free speech, communication, and assembly protections and rights, as well as religious freedom rights.
But one exception to this amazing free speech right we all know is that the First Amendment does not guarantee a right to yell “FIRE!” in a crowded theater, because there is no public benefit, or private right, to cause an injurious stampede. You cannot use a liberty to cause injury to innocent people, which is what yelling FIRE! in a crowded theater does.
One after another fake, manufactured media crises over the past eighteen months have come and gone, and if all of them call into question the meaning of the First Amendment for today’s fake press, any one of them will suffice.
Russia collusion (after two years there is zero evidence, and never mind the FBI\DOJ collusion with Hillary Clinton’s campaign). Stormy Daniels (never mind that rapist and serial sexual harasser Bill Clinton is still a hero to half the nation). Milania’s pathetic shoes or Sarah Sanders’ face structure and clothing (weren’t we -correctly- supposed to not criticize women’s appearances?). Now it’s Hispanic babies fake-crying in English (not Spanish) for long distant parents who sent them alone to break American law and illegally enter America under the care of thieves, pedophiles, and human traffickers.
Every month or so the American press manufactures another crisis meant to stir up the American people, to put people in a panic, to get them racing and stampeding over one another. The press is essentially yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater, in an attempt to damage a president they dislike.
Each cry of “Fire! Fire!” by the press is at the very least an immoral head fake meant to distract from the documented crimes by many senior staff of the Obama administration, now wide open to the public as a result of the Dept. of Justice’s Inspector General. Or to distract from the amazing economic news, because they can’t let Trump get any credit or good news.
Incredibly, over 90% of the mainstream press’s coverage of President Trump is negative. That is not honest, it is not reporting. It is straight forward political activism.
The press today is not the press of the First Amendment’s 1787 ratification. Today’s press is not dedicated to serving as The People’s watchdog over government, helping hold government officials to account.
Rather, today’s press\media is a completely partisan, dedicated communication arm of just one political party. The press covers up for the crimes of one party, and helps invent fake crimes for the other political party. And yet, America’s press gets the benefits and protections of the First Amendment, as if press members are doing holy work for the Republic.
The question is, does the First Amendment apply to a partisan activist “press,” whose political advertising and advocacy contributions to just one political party are worth billions of dollars as undeclared in-kind political contributions?
We have to ask, because at a certain point CBS, ABC, NPR, BBC, NYT, Washington Post, et al must have their political contributions assessed. If they are found to have violated campaign election law, then let the legal chips fall where they must.
White House Correspondents Dinner Proves It
If anyone really had been or still is under the illusion that America’s media are somehow professional truth-seekers, Saturday’s bizarre annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner ended that.
If you have not yet watched it, you should watch some, just for the educational experience. It will help you understand why and how conservatives and regular Americans are so skeptical about the American media.
When you hear the accusation “fake news” leveled against the mainstream media, this event illuminates the why and how.
An impressively responsive audience lived and breathed public white-hot hatred and cruel mockery Saturday night. Hatred of President Trump, hatred of regular Americans, hatred for American patriots and patriotism, cruel mockery of conservative women’s appearances, their bodies, their clothes, their hair, their faces.
This is repulsive behavior, but the liberal audience ate it up openly, nonetheless.
The audience’s open contempt and disdain for average Americans tells a lot about the media’s disconnect from real people.
That the liberal audience was made up of the Washington, DC, elite “expert” and “professional” reporters says it all. These are not reporters of news and facts. Rather, they are elitists, partisan political activists using the First Amendment’s protection of the media as a fig leaf over their political and cultural activism.
The dinner’s motto should be “All The Fake News We Can Print.”
The end of the Internet as metaphor
As intriguing as the thought of artificial intelligence may be, the truth is always so much more prosaic and humble.
The last frontier and the only real outpost of true free speech, the Internet was never broken, it needed no fixing. And yet the Obama administration, through the FCC and FEC, is planning on regulating it like a utility and then regulating its content.
If you have a website, like this blog, you will have to apply for a license, just like a radio or TV station. Imagine some government bureaucrat not liking the message of smaller, more accountable government on this or similar websites, and then not issuing the necessary license to have it in the first place. Your free speech, my free speech, is shut off, shut down, by the very government that is supposed to guarantee the First Amendment.
That is the FCC role.
And then if I write things that are supportive of one candidate over another, it’ll count as an in-kind contribution to that candidate’s campaign. Imagine an army of government bureaucrats monitoring free speech on the Internet, and writing down and tabulating what people say and write on their blogs as campaign contributions.
That is the FEC proposal, and it is none too supportive of free speech, either.
And mind you, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, CNN, NPR, MSNBC and other establishment and legacy media will all get passes. They can continue to be active arms of one particular political party, and their writings, their endorsements, will not count as in-kind campaign contributions.
While all this government interference and control in our private lives seems insane to the normal freedom-loving American, it is, in fact, what is happening right now. “Net neutrality” sounds, well, neutral, and it is anything but that.
Tempting as it is to say “And then add this to the IRS political suppression and NSA spying scandals…,” the truth is that few people seem to care, no matter what Obama does. Americans are willingly giving up their freedoms, their control of government, their tax money, their security, to a man who clearly does not like America as it has been founded and run since 1776.
Apparently, government control of Internet content and our individual personal lives fits into that general malaise. Sad.
What is even sadder is that so many people so much want one particular party to have complete control that they will do all of this, plus grant amnesty to illegal aliens to overrun the established voters who built the nation. None of this is sustainable. No nation can withstand this.
My take on tonight’s Corbett – Wolf Debate, and Tom Brokaw’s Plea for Control of Our Lives
Like a few thousand other attendees at the Pennsylvania Chamber of Commerce dinner tonight, I sat in the audience and watched Governor Tom Corbett and Democrat nominee Tom Wolf debate each other, with reporter Dennis Owens moderating. Dennis was outstanding. I also stayed for the Tom Brokaw speech afterwards.
Here are the highlights as I see them:
1) Corbett beat Wolf hands-down, in substance, poise, accuracy, and humility. And damned if I am not still surprised. Given how insipid the Corbett campaign has been to date, I expected the worst performance from him tonight. That did not materialize.
2) While overall the debate was Dull vs Duller, and neither man was exciting or inspiring, the amazing fact is that Tom Corbett found his voice tonight. Tom Wolf talked in circles, kept stating that he is a businessman (six, seven times), mis-spoke (“the vast majority of married Pennsylvanians file separate tax reports”), spoke in vague generalities bordering on fluffy clouds and flying unicorns, and addressed none of the substantive issues pegged by moderator Dennis Owens or by Corbett.
3) Wolf seemed to play it safe, venturing nothing new, nothing specific. He did not even respond the to the Delaware Loophole questions posed to him. He simply ignored them. If he persists in this evasiveness, Corbett can catch up and beat him. Voters can now see it, and it ain’t pretty. Corbett may be The Most Boring Man in the World, but Wolf looked completely unprepared to be governor.
4) Wolf’s “I’ll-know-it-when-I-see-it” response to policy and finance questions is not acceptable for a candidate to run a state government.
5) Corbett actually ate some humble pie, admitting that he is not a good communicator. Understatement, yes, but he is not a guy who likes to admit he’s wrong. So that was big. Again, expectations for Corbett were super low, and he started out looking and sounding defeated. But even he recognized that he was beating Wolf, and his performance picked up as the debate went on.
Brokaw:
1) Ancient establishment reporter Tom Brokaw has a great voice, and lots of stage presence. He’s good looking for a guy that old. He wrote a book about The Greatest Generation, so he must be a pretty great guy. That is the marketing, anyhow. His ideas run the gamut from standard liberal to downright contradictory and mutually-exclusive confused, to pathetic control freak.
2) Although Brokaw started talking about the Tea Party, and he complimented its members for getting involved in the political process (which he said is necessary), he never said or recognized the American Constitution as core to tea party’s goals, values, principles, or guiding role. So although he talked about it, it didn’t seem evident that he understands or has thought about the Tea Party much.
3) Brokaw said “I leave it to you determine if the Tea Party is good for America. I’m just a reporter, I just report the facts. You have to come to your own conclusions.” As if he was not passing judgment on the Tea Party. Yet, he asked the question and obviously thinks the Tea Party is bad for America; that is his hint. Given that Brokaw is a liberal at war with America, this is a big cue to conservative activists: Keep it up, the liberal media establishment is scared of you.
4) He called for “filtration” and a “filter” of the internet, and talked about the “simple people” who manage his Montana ranch and get news from the Internet, which he disavowed and sees as unworthy. This is the kind of intellectual region where Brokaw makes no sense. On the one hand, the big establishment media is all over the Internet, so if people get their news from the Internet, and not TV chatterheads or fishwrap newspapers, then there’s no real problem with the Internet as a news source. What Brokaw seemed to be challenged by is the fact that Breitbart and citizen reporters (think Watchdogwire, or my own blog) are circumventing the establishment media. He does not understand or care that the ‘simple’ masses are hungry for unfiltered news, for real news, for facts and not liberal agenda. How his imagined filters jibe, square, or conflict with the First Amendment was not mentioned; I am unsure it even occurred to Brokaw that purposefully filtering information is censorship. But he is a guy who believes in sixty years of past liberal censorship, so I guess he has to stay consistent today.
5) Brokaw implied that the establishment media are the source of accurate information and “big ideas,” and that alternative news and opinion sources are not. He said he doesn’t believe what he reads on the internet. He is clearly bothered there’s now no difference between establishment media and bloggers and citizen reporters in terms of equal accessibility. He’s having a tough time letting go of controlling the message Americans receive, which is really his objection: Liberal media elites are losing the propaganda war because they no longer have a choke hold on the information flow; ergo, the Internet is full of bad information.
An indication of just how undeveloped his thinking is: Richard Nixon, Richard Nixon, Richard Nixon…for Liberals, Nixon was the High Priest of Done Bad in Government. It does not seem to occur to Brokaw that Nixon’s crimes pale in comparison to the lawless tyranny Obama has inflicted upon American citizens. E.g. NSA spying and IRS crushing of political dissent.
6) On the other hand, he’s into high tech and the future of technology. Very impressed by Google staff and all of the “big minds” gathered at tech conventions. Brokaw doesn’t reconcile his adulation with his view of information flow on the net. I am guessing here that he’d be OK if Google ran all the news on the Internet, because Google is made of liberals who share his political agenda. “Good” liberals and “bad” conservatives is what he is after.
7) Annoyingly, Brokaw dropped names all over the place, as if to impress us with how important he is: Jon Stewart, the NFL commissioner, et al. “I was emailing with ____ _____, and he says ‘Tom..’.” “My books.” “I’m on the board of…..” This seemed self-conscious and actually undermined his standing, because truly great people never look at themselves this way. They simply Are Great.
8) Finally, he called for a new form of foreign service corps, some hybrid of the Peace Corps, Americorps, and the military. It was terribly confused, but it was also the kind of Big Idea he admires others for having, so evidently he must have one, too, even of it makes no practical sense.