Posts Tagged → Marxism
We actually saw a movie
The other night, the Princess of Patience and I actually went to see a movie. Like the kind of movie that used to entertain, inform, and inspire Americans, instead of the dreck Hollywood has been excreting, lo, these past thirty years or more.
We saw “Oppenheimer,” a Hollywood movie that is based on fact, based on historic events, based on real people who did and said real things. It is not based on the vomitous Woke PC corrosive nonsense that Hollywood has specialized in for decades. We were entertained and informed by this movie, and inspired about the greatness of America. What a treat! This makes four movies we have seen in the past…five years? Or longer?
Oppenheimer is about a man named Robert Oppenheimer, a genius and socially inept physicist who is considered “the father of the atomic bomb.” Aside from all the sciency stuff about the why and how of developing the bomb, the movie also delves deeply into World War II, the ensuing Cold War with communist Russia, and the very real threat that communists living in America posed to a free America itself.
There is no spoiler alert here, because we all know that the atomic race against the Nazi Germans and the communist Russians resulted in The Bomb being dropped on a fascist Japan, thereby signaling America’s ability and willingness to use the Mother Of All Weapons. Genocidal Japan’s well-earned come-uppance in Nagasaki and Hiroshima also demonstrated how easily the entire blue planet we live on could be destroyed in a tit-for-tat use of atomic weapons, thereby ushering in the “Mutually Assured Destruction” doctrine of mutual atomic deterrence that shaped American, European, and Russian foreign policy for fifty years.
This strange conundrum of “I won’t blow up Planet Earth if you don’t blow up Planet Earth” became a strategic stalemate between superpowers, thereby forcing them to fight their battles in low-intensity conflicts around the globe.
I digress. But such is the force and pragmatic usefulness of such a movie as Oppenheimer that it naturally results in discussing all that came before, during, and after the film’s historic time.
The other important thing that this movie focuses on, but does not follow up on, is the communist takeover of the American universities. That really did happen, despite the Hollywood oh-so-sad depictions of meanie anti-communists trying to stop real communists from infiltrating American institutions. Today, sending your dear child to college is not likely to get them a real education, but rather an expensive indoctrination in (failed) cultural and economic Marxism at the hands of the successors to Oppenheimer’s fellow leftists.
Professor Oppenheimer was like not only a lot of his fellow Marxist academic intellectuals at the time, that is, exceedingly generous with other people’s money in order to vaguely “be nice to everyone,” but he was also like the many non-religious European Jews who had landed in America, abandoned their faith, and then embraced various degrees of Marxism in its stead. Some had already made this transition in Europe. This is a whole other subject, but it is very much threaded throughout Oppenheimer because a) so many of his fellow genius physicists and scientists on the Manhattan Project were former European Jews and b) so many of them were various shades of pink to bright red Marxist, and thus intrinsic threats to a free and democratic America.
While these brilliant minds were needed to make The Atomic Bomb from 1942-1945, they subsequently were very real security threats because of their….divided loyalties…or, said another way, their commitment to genocidal international communism rather than to the well being of their wonderful host country, our beautiful America. And Professor Oppenheimer captured this split or dual personality disorder very well. And so the Father of The Atomic Bomb ended up losing his security clearance in a ridiculous, procedurally deficient, dog-and-pony shadow kangaroo court proceeding that nonetheless had at its core the very real need to protect America from its own openness.
I could say more about this particular subject, but I am saving it up for an essay I have been writing for three years. Maybe longer. It is forthcoming here, because when I read yesterday about the ADL’s fascist Jonathan Greenblatt excoriating his political enemies for calling out American leftist fascism for what it is, I know I have to say whatever I can say to stem the tide of genocidal leftism that began in America in the 1920s, gathered steam among Professor Oppenheimer’s fellow academics in the 1940s, and is today utterly destroying America as a free and democratic country.
So…Oppenheimer. If you have not seen it, it is worth the nearly three hour watch and the ten bucks. I give it two thumbs up.
We saw Oppenheimer in a quaint old-time theater in rural America. Note the diametrically opposed movies: Puke -woke ninja turtles and Barbie vs. very real and important Sound of Freedom and Oppenheimer. Pretty good summation of where Americans are at right now.
What happened to Earth Day?
Earth Day began decades ago, in 1970, when I was a kid. I remember it as a distinct point in time where the people around me spoke about raw sewage and chemicals being dumped and piped directly into American waterways. Up until that point, Americans had kind of unhappily or grudgingly accepted environmental degradation and pollution as an unfortunate necessity of economic and technological progress.
But fish kills in what older people then clearly remembered as pristine trout streams, and obvious losses of waterways with once- major fishing and waterfowl hunting to untreated, unfiltered, unmitigated chemical and physical waste dumping bothered most Americans. A great deal of this pollution was out in the open, unsightly, and an obvious reflection on Americans as a people. Then the Cuyahoga River caught on fire because of all the dangerous pollution in it, and that image galvanized Americans to clean up our act.
What was happening then was public waterways and air that were shared publicly were being used as a cheap dumping ground by production facilities of all sorts. The American public was bearing the burden of environmental waste, while the same processes that generated that waste also generated income that was privatized. I am 100% for private income, but I strenuously object to using shared waters and air as a cheap garbage disposal, and so did people of all backgrounds in 1970.
Thus was Earth Day born. Fair enough, understandable enough. And the environmental cleanup and protection movement followed closely on its heels. The US Environmental Protection Agency, where I began my professional career, was created soon after Earth Day to address the obvious problems resulting from carelessness with our shared environment.
But now, after decades of increasingly crushing environmental laws and regulations that ridiculously “protect” us down to parts per trillion of chemicals that already naturally occur at those levels in the natural environment….Earth Day represents something totally different than it did in 1970. Today, Earth Day is a celebration of an all-out assault on Western Civilization by people pursuing a ridiculously impossibly unattainable “Net Zero” goal. Meaning that humans should have zero impact on the planet. None. Which naturally necessitates a complete (and unreasonable, undemocratic, authoritarian) overhaul of our way of life, freedoms, choices, food, etc.
Earth Day is now marked and promoted by people who supposedly “know better” what is right for us. And in fact almost 100% of the environmental and even land conservation organizations are politically partisan and politically extreme, embracing all kinds of cultural and economic Marxism while rejecting American capitalism and individual freedom. This shift away from cleanup to directing us on what to eat and when and where is patently bad, unfair, wrong, and in fact is so egregiously foolish it is hurting the credibility of the environmental quality movement.
When environmental groups like Penn Future and Sierra Club always protect one political party and always attack one political party, they are shown to be about partisan politics and not about environmental quality. They are political shells. And when a local land conservancy embraces evil “Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity” policies that are actually against the founding principles of said conservancy, such as private land ownership and capitalism, then we know that even the once- wonderful land trust movement has been hijacked and turned against America.
So in 2023, Earth Day represented authoritarianism, out of control Big Government, cruel assaults on and corresponding losses of individual personal freedoms and choice, and a whole bunch of other bad stuff. The fact that Earth Day is now openly un-American and anti-America tells us that Earth Day’s promoters are not trying to protect us from pollution, they are trying to take control of our lives and destroy what had been the most free nation on Planet Earth.
Supposedly in the name of saving us from ourselves. To which I and a lot of other Americans say No Thanks.
Today’s “I know what is best for you better than you do” mindset of the environmental movement is what drove me out of working at the USEPA. It is unreasonable, unproven, and every day it is shown to be wrong and wronger.
Instead of all the anti-science climate hysteria sky-is-falling nonsense, Americans should be celebrating the incredible environmental cleanup and success we have had in the past 53 years since Earth Day was first established. Tilting at environmental windmills makes some people feel like they have meaning in their lives, and if they themselves want to take on the burdens they propose for the rest of us, then they can make that choice. But they have no right to try to take away my right of choice, your right of choice. And if there is one clear indication that the loudest voices promoting Earth Day are not serious and do not deserve to be treated seriously, it is the fact that absolutely none of these people do what they say the rest of us must do “to save the planet.”
Response to PA Gov. Tom Ridge on Conservatives & the Environment
On April 22nd this year, Earth Day, The Atlantic published an opinion piece by former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, about conservatives and the environment (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/environment-gop-out-touch/610333/). The Atlantic solicited responses to Ridge’s essay, and so I submitted one to them, but received back no indication they would publish it. They did not publish it, because liberals like those at The Atlantic accept and publish only liberals, and reject conservatives. So here it is, my response to Governor Ridge’s essay about conservatives and the environment.
I felt compelled to respond to Governor Ridge’s essay, in part because I worked in his administration, and in part because I have met few Republicans who can articulate a truly conservative view of environmental policy, which Governor Ridge failed to do. I was also afraid of being seen as attacking someone I hold in high esteem, and I need to say that while I may disagree with Governor Ridge’s essay and some of his recent public stances, like supporting PA governor Tom Wolf’s covid19 lockdown, I remain impressed by Governor Ridge’s high character. I am proud to have served in his distinctively excellent administration.
Governor Ridge’s essay slightly opens a doorway that I am both pleased and also reluctant to push all the way open. But it needs to be opened, all the way, because for far too long establishment Republicans have claimed to be conservatives, while acting like liberals.
Governor Ridge writes his essay “as a conservative,” and despite boldly leading by example in placing highly competent gays, women, and minorities in senior government positions literally decades ago, long before most Democrats followed suit, Governor Ridge was, in fact, a true conservative. His achievements in conservative policy are legion, including Pennsylvania becoming a shall-issue concealed firearm carry state and his administration’s brownfield land recycling program.
Nonetheless, the emphasis today is on he “was.”
Governor Ridge was a conservative, and by today’s standard, he is not. This is not because Governor Ridge has changed, but because what now defines a conservative has changed so dramatically since the time he was governor. The same holds true for liberals, by the way, in their own way (we see the Democrat Party now a totally, openly, violent, racist, anti-America Marxist organization).
And like so many, if not all other political elites, especially Republicans, and most especially establishment Republicans from the hide-bound, bunker-mentality Pennsylvania GOP, Governor Ridge has not changed with the times. Governor Ridge was a conservative, and today he often speaks like a liberal, and sides with liberals on policy disputes. He is not alone in this, but each Republican who does so still causes pain to us conservatives in the political trenches. It is frustrating as hell to experience a former Republican appointee or elected official try to speak with authority as some sort of representative of conservativism, when in fact, they are simply liberals. Or RINOs for short (Republican In Name Only – not conservative).
Probably the biggest indication that Governor Ridge is out of synch with today’s conservatives is how he encourages us to adopt a laundry list of liberal environmental policies in his The Atlantic essay. This means that his solution for conservatives to succeed is for us to adopt liberalism. Even though most of the “environmental” groups are simply employment offices for Democrat Party operatives pushing Marxist, partisan policies. Very few environmental groups today are even seeking solutions, because they are busy dreaming up new problems.
Most of the policies pushed by environmental groups today are by definition Big Coercive Government, Small Defenseless Citizen, anti-Constitution, disregard for private property rights, mountains out of mole hills, and so on. These groups are not about the environment, they simply use the subject of the environment as another avenue to push Marxism and the Big Government necessary to force it down our throats. Governor Ridge should know this, of all people.
What Governor Ridge failed to address is: How can we conservatives embrace the very same failed and inferior liberal policies that drove us to becoming conservatives in the first place? If we adopt liberalism, then we are abandoning conservativism, and failing as conservatives.
Every single environmental policy recommendation that Governor Ridge lists in his essay directly contradicts core conservative principles, like small government, less intrusive government, less spendy government, less activist government, less regulatory government, accountable government and accountable taxpayer-funded government employees. Literally every single policy he lists requires the government to intervene in a big, coercive way, often over trifling differences or demonstrably false premises.
Governor Ridge’s environmental ideas are not conservativism; they are quintessential big government liberalism.
Perhaps the centerpiece of his essay is that conservatives must concede at least a bit on “climate change.” Yet, for conservatives, this particular issue, more than any other, highlights the distinction between us and liberals. For conservatives to agree with the Marxist, disproven, and notoriously phony climate change religion would be to abandon basic, solid, conservative principles altogether….like Capitalism 101, solid math and science, and transparency. Again, we are unpersuaded the climate warming-cooling-change-whatever issue even exists, let alone that a government solution consistent with America’s Constitution could be found.
Governor Ridge writes “The Republican Party has largely abandoned environmental issues.” To which I and a host of other conservatives would respond, No, but many Republicans have abandoned the citizen voters and the forgotten taxpayers of America. Many careerist Republicans have embraced popular culture and its feel-good-now bubblegum policies. For Republicans to respect openly partisan “environmental” groups and embrace liberal nonsense like so-called ‘climate change’ and similar policies would only be one more betrayal in a long line of policy and political betrayals committed by the Republican establishment. Conservatives have perfectly sound environmental policies based on perfectly sound, all-American principles. If you but ask us, we will explain them. We conservatives didn’t abandon environmental issues, nor did we leave the Republican Party. The Republican establishment abandoned us.
Josh First is president of Appalachian Land & Conservation Services, LLC. He has worked at the US EPA in Washington, DC, The Conservation Fund, the Central Pennsylvania Conservancy, and was Director of Environmental Education and Information at the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation & Natural Resources in the Governor Tom Ridge administration.
Climate Change’s Story, as Told by a Rock
The subject of climate change has been a political issue for about ten years. Before that it was called global warming. Before that it was called global cooling. Despite having dramatically different, even diametrically opposed, oppositional names, this subject of earth’s changing climate has been treated the same by political activists for about 30 years. No matter how different, under all rubrics it has been presented as a result of planet-altering human intervention into Planet Earth’s fundamental forces.
In all of the undocumented claims presented about this subject over the past thirty years, especially the fake junk science claims, the ignored elephant in the room has always been the very well and long-documented evidence of great periods of climate change pre-dating the appearance of humans on Planet Earth. In other words, climate change/ global warming/ global cooling did not automatically appear in 1985 because Al Gore wrote a book about humans emitting too much carbon dioxide. Nope. The scientific elephant in the climate change room was standing here all along, because decades of non-politicized scientific inquiry demonstrated how mile-thick ice glaciers covered northern America, Canada, and northern Europe and Asia many times over the past 100,000 years.
That is, a natural ongoing cycle of climate change, real dramatic alterations to the face of the planet, even without one human being present to contribute one breath of carbon dioxide to it.
Well, here is the short and easy story of actual, real climate change; the long documented climate change that shaped the land you are standing and driving on every day. This big story is told by a simple humble rock. Here is a picture of that rock (below), unearthed the other day. It was unearthed about 600 feet above the Pine Creek stream bed and channel. Until it was unearthed, it was entombed on a hillside way above the existing channel, in mostly clay dirt amid sharp shards of shattered sandstone, all jumbled together like a giant mixer had tossed them around.
Look carefully at this stone.
It is rounded, unlike most of the other rocks around it in the dirt from whence it recently emerged. Someone with a bit of curiosity would ask “Gees, this rock looks totally different from the rocks around it. It is rounded like a typical long water-washed and tumbled river cobble I can find in any stream bed in the world. Now why is this rounded rock sitting hundreds of feet above the Pine Creek river bed? How did it get all the way up here?”
Great question! In most American class rooms, asking this question might get you ejected, or a bad grade from a fake educator who doesn’t want you asking good questions, but instead you are supposed to repeat a mantra of junk science that ignores the actual science represented by this simple little rounded rock.
Pine Creek’s history is retold at Leonard Harrison State Park, in DCNR geology circulars available online, and in many other places and publications. It won’t be reiterated at length here. But we do provide a history lesson in a nutshell.
Essentially it goes like this: Until about 15,000 years ago, Pine Creek flowed northward into the Genesee River watershed. After the last glacial age ended 20,000 years ago, the Laurentide Glacier began to melt, as prior glaciers there before it had melted. As the glacier melted, a pool of water built up against an ice dam, which eventually broke from the weight of the water and the thinning ice. When the ice dam broke, an enormous torrent of water was unleashed southward as a tidal wave. As it raced southward, the tidal wave followed the landscape’s natural contours, including the river bed of north-flowing Pine Creek.
As soon as the tidal wave hit the Pine Creek stream bed, the tidal wave followed that natural channel southward, scooping up hundreds of millions of tons of stream bottom rocks, as well as surrounding ledgerock. We have seen the videos of the Japanese tsunami from several years ago, and this one probably looked similar. Thus, an increasingly muddy tumultuous mess of water, dirt, and rocks flowed southward to the West Branch of the Susquehanna River. Along the way rocks like our little rounded river cobblestone here were picked up and deposited high up on the river channel’s slopes.
Even though the rock had come from deep down in the river bed, it remained in place on the hillside as the roaring water receded to the stream flow we know and love today. The rock is an artifact of climate change, real honest-to-goodness climate change, devoid of any human causation or intervention.
Our pet Pine Creek stream bed rock now in Lycoming County, PA, probably originating due north in Steuben County, New York, 15,000 years ago, already rounded from thousands of years of tumbling in a stream bed
Ever since that melting glacier released that tidal wave and placed our little rock here on the hillside, Pine Creek has flowed south, into the West Branch of the Susquehanna River, and not northward into the Genesee River. And as a result of that huge rushing torrent southward, the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon was cut and shaped.
Climate change, folks. It is as natural as the Sun rising and setting on the Earth’s horizon. It can be real. It was real, and still is real and ongoing, even without human involvement. But you probably won’t find the real climate change science taught any more, because it is contrary to a radical political narrative that tells us modern capitalist societies are evil and destructive and must cease and desist, because we alone are destroying the Earth’s climate.
Which just goes to prove that Marxism really is anti-science, anti-truth, anti-fact, and anti-human. Shame on the Marxism Climate Change fraudsters who represent themselves as guardians of the environment. They are no such thing. They are destroyers of the environment, as every Marxist society’s destroyed environment demonstrates.
Shhhh! Don’t tell anyone you saw this, because the “climate change” activists will have me locked up for disseminating actual science!
All this climate change happened before humans were even present on the planet, let alone before we and our cows began farting so much and creating green house gases…
Be careful showing this glacial map to a New Yorker. They believe that New York City pre-dates all human civilizations and was founded by the gods, who would never let a mile of ice stand on top of their sacred ground.
Showing this image in a modern class on “climate change” is like showing a crucifix to a vampire, and you will probably be ejected from the classroom and declared unfit for indoctrination by the fake teacher. Be careful how you use this science.
Oh no, we did it, we showed New York City under ice. NYC mayor Bill DeBlasio will probably ban me from entering NYC henceforth.
Earth Day: Protect What Matters
Today is Earth Day, a day annually marked for environmental protection. Good, we need it. We all need to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and eat clean food.
All kinds of organizations run advertisements today promoting a clean environment, a protected environment, wildlife habitat conservation, and so on. Most of the ideas we will see promoted today are worthy of attention and worthwhile policy efforts, while some of the more heavily marketed ideas are Marxist anti-capitalism dingbat stuff.
The two biggest challenges we have on Earth Day are overcoming the fake issue of human-caused “climate change,” and protecting the American economy. Achieving both of these goals will actually maximally protect the environment.
“Climate change” on its face is a factual thing, because Planet Earth has had constant climate change since its creation. Glaciers have come and gone on their own, sea levels have risen and fallen on their own, and plants and animals have come and gone as the greater environmental forces around them directly shape their habitat, the salinity of the water they live in, and the air they breathe. All of this dynamism has happened without any human intervention. In fact, most of it has happened without any humans existing at all.
Climate change continues on today just as it always has since the Earth was born, and though human actions might contribute to it in some minuscule way, the fact is that humans have a far greater and more measurable impact on more important environmental issues.
The problem with the current human-caused climate change hoax is that it sucks all of the air out of the room, leaving no oxygen for other real, actual, measurable and documented issues like lost wildlife habitat, farmland loss, water quality, forest fragmentation, and controlling the invasive plants and animals that are literally destroying our native environments and species.
All of the “climate change” policy bandied about is a result of bad modeling using flawed data, junk science, topped off with deliberate fraud and public shaming of heretics. The fake but well-heeled climate change industry is fueled by juicy foundation and government grants, making all kinds of financial incentives for people to continue this fakery. Fake climate change junk science can be a hell of a good business for a few private bank accounts!
Normal people see this obvious policy fraud and end up writing off the entire quest for environmental quality as just a bunch of “environmentalist wackos” trying to destroy Western Civilization. And indeed, a great many of the climate change advocates are in fact America-hating Marxists, whose suspect opinions aren’t worth spit. But it is not fair to roll all environmental quality efforts in with the climate change nonsense. Leftists include the real issues together with fake climate change to give climate change unwarranted credibility, while magical-thinking meatheads on the right also do it to discredit all environmental quality issues.
If there is one thing we have all witnessed over the past month of China Flu coronavirus here in America, it is that in addition to weakening America by sending our technology and jobs there, for decades Americans have exploited Chinese slave labor and the Chinese environment so that we could have more cheap junk available to play with at home. It is an undeniable fact that like the Russians before them, Chinese Marxism has destroyed the Chinese environment, while American capitalism has created the high living conditions here necessary for our citizens to expect environmental protection.
Capitalism protects the environment, while Marxism and communism destroy it through unbridled industrialism to buoy up their ruling elites.
Today, on Earth Day, the best thing we can do is to re-open the American economy and create the kinds of high quality living conditions here that incentivize environmental protection. Protect the world’s environment by repatriating American jobs from their thirty-year hiatus in China. Demonstrate to Americans that we can all enjoy high quality environmental protection without sacrificing our economy on the false altar of human caused climate change..or a Chinese virus whose effects are felt locally but whose costs are being applied equally everywhere across the United States.
About that New Zealand mosque massacre…
Once again, liberal ideas have resulted in terrible results, and yet, the people who promote those ideas blame everyone else for their failures. Now it is a mass shooting in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand.
The massacre did not happen in a vacuum.
New Zealand has the same kind of stupid, ineffective “gun control” that anti-firearm activists have demanded for everyone everywhere: No handguns, mass registration with the goal of eventual mass confiscation for a gun-free society (except for the police and security services controlled by the liberals). Had the members of that mosque had access to handguns, like our concealed carry laws permit here in America, then they could have defended themselves against the lone attacker. But nope, anti-gun activists require these bodies and blood in the street in order to make the emotional case for yet more anti-freedom, anti-safety gun elimination.
Sorry, mosque members. I am sorry that you were martyred by the same leftists who have brought so much destruction to everyone else across the planet.
And then, so many questions come to mind, like:
Did that mosque serve as a launching point for public or private anti-Christian, anti-Jew hatred and bigotry, as so many other mosques do around the world?
Did that mosque have members who were actively engaged in denigrating and materially undermining Christianity and Western countries from within, as so many mosques do? Did they take advantage of New Zealand’s freedom and democracy to achieve non-democratic results?
Was that mosque a security risk for New Zealand? Does it harbor violent terrorists or proponents of Islamic terrorism?
Was the mosque officially silent about the non-stop bloodbath perpetrated by Islamic jihadists against innocent people around the world, notably Christians living peacefully in Paris and London and Antwerp?
Was the mosque officially silent about the obvious danger that Islamic jihad represents to the entire world?
Did that mosque serve as a center for spreading Islamic terrorism, as so many other mosques do around the world?
These questions and many similar ones must be asked, because if any of them are affirmative, then the massacre could be construed or even understood as an act of self-defense by the perpetrator, acting on behalf of his vulnerable countrymen who are paralyzed by leftist political correctness and an inactive government run by people willing to sacrifice the entire nation on the altar of “understanding” a fascist, totalitarian ideology that is mutually exclusive with the openness and tolerance New Zealand and every other Western nation stands for.
Here in America, Muslima Terrorista Suprema Linda Sarsour used the massacre to publicly explain exactly what is at the heart of this civilizational conflict. She explicitly blamed “white Christians” as the source of all evil on Earth and of being the biggest threat to all civilizations. In other words, when some mosque somewhere gets a taste of its own medicine, suddenly jihad against Christians and whites is openly justified. As if jihad against Christians and Christianity has not been ongoing for 1,300 years! No wonder Westerners are phobic of Islam; they are afraid for very good reasons.
Here in Harrisburg, the local JCC issued a Marxist screed about the shooting, decrying, among other ridiculous things, “Islamophobia” and “bigotry” (no, not the explicit anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, anti-Hindu bigotry of the Koran). One wonders if the regular, normal, hard working members of the many various JCCs and Jewish Federations around America will ever tire of underwriting the Marxist march of their institutional professionals, who seem to specialize in delivering sappy Yiddish entertainment to elderly people and Marxist-everything-else for everyone else. In the past it was Margie Adelmann, now it is Jen Ross, the “professional Jews” who represent the very worst of secularism and controlling, destructive leftism. Neither of them was or is responsive to JCC members who want them to stop politicizing everything in the name of Marxism and political correctness.
They, too, are on a jihad, parallel with Linda Sarsour, the rest of us be damned.
The Democrat Party left me, I did not leave the Democrat Party
Following the ancient dictum of “If you are conservative when you are young, you have no heart, and if you are liberal when you are old, you have no brain,” I was once a registered Democrat.
Long ago, in my early twenties.
True, I was from central Pennsylvania, where the differences between the Democrats and the Republicans (and everyone else) were barely noticeable. The Democrats were the union guys who worked in the coal mines, and a lot of farmers who depended on government crop insurance programs; the Republicans were the mine owners and managers, the small business owners.
But everyone drove the same pickup trucks with an American flag and an NRA sticker. Everyone was full-throated do-or-die patriotic over America. No question. Everyone owned guns. It was the odd home out there that did not have any guns, and in fact, I cannot think of any homes where I grew up that did not have at least a handful of firearms. At least one was a .410 shotgun kept by the back door for starlings, groundhogs, and crows in the garden. Guns were as practical as any other tool in the home.
So in 1988, I was the Al Gore for President campaign’s central Pennsylvania coordinator. Way way back in 1988, you know, before the last Ice Age, Al Gore was an NRA-endorsed, pro-life conservative. His party affiliation was almost irrelevant. He was my kind of guy. And he cared about the environment, in which I like to hunt and fish.
And then the creeping, seeping radical anti-America 1960s politics caught up with even the rural areas, including Tennessee, which then-Senator Al Gore, Jr., lost, after running for president as a kook-Left Democrat. Gore even lost his senate seat.
That is because by the early 1990s, most of America’s rural Democrats started becoming former Democrats, and abandoning the political party that had so suddenly abandoned them.
Fast forward to today, and the Democrat Party is not your grandfather’s Democrat Party. Gone is the patriotism, the pride in America. Hell, even the loyalty to America is gone.
Instead, the Democrat Party has now become a witch’s brew of treason, sedition, anarchy, political violence, lawless political opportunism, and blame-America-for-everything Marxism.
That political party now stands for illegal alien invaders over American citizen taxpayers; for illegal alien invaders over secure borders and secure families inside the borders; for sanctuary cities over the rule of law; for bureaucracy over freedom; for vague feelings of supposedly aggrieved groups over the Constitution’s guarantee of individual rights and liberties for everyone. And so on. There is very little to nothing that the Democrat Party stands for today that is good for America. Pretty much everything the party stands for today is anti-America.
I am pro-America. It is the best nation on the face of the planet, bar none. It has created the greatest amount of opportunity for the greatest variety and number of people of any nation in history. If this is not good enough for you, then America is probably not the right place for you. On the other hand, America is more than good enough for me; I worship America. I am staying here, and I will defend her.
I did not leave the Democrat Party, the Democrat Party left me. Hell, the Democrat Party abandoned America, completely.
Britannia, Rule Britannia
Any institution that disregards a substantial native resource that is accessible and usable is shooting itself in the foot. Plenty of companies and governments make the mistake of missing out on key resources – human, material, or other – and are the poorer for it. They also know they must constantly be on the watch for it, and correct it.
When it happens to a private company, the company is less competitive than it could be, less profitable than it should be. The profit motive keeps companies sharp and on the lookout.
When this disregard occurs happens to a nation with its leadership, it is criminal, and unfortunately, there is no built-in measure or quantifiable yard stick. While many people will keep going and going as a nation ails until they and it go over a cliff, there are others who have long, old, and wise vision, and who would sail the ship of state into calmer, better waters. To ignore their leadership qualities is to waste the best resource a nation has. Democracy is the constant battle between these forces of cold comfort and patriotic ambition.
Take England as a bright and shining example of a great nation that is self-destructing by deliberately excluding its best leadership.
By any measure, material or intellectual, England is one of the world’s greatest civilizations ever achieved.
Begun and long run as a monarchy (like every other part of the world), a might-makes-right social structure with barons, dukes, counts, and attendant aristocrats to whom power and wealth naturally flowed (like every other part of the world), and a large underclass of poorly educated laborers barely able to survive (like every other part of the world), England today is in some ways a good example of meritocracy. More opportunity exists for more people. Democracy has largely worked.
The monarchy’s political wings have been clipped, the aristocracy was purposefully driven from the public square, and the most Marxist punitive measures possible were instituted to steal generational wealth so that any semblance of monarchical or aristocratic England would be eliminated.
As a result of these artificial policies, the National Trust now owns more castles and great halls than do private families, and some of England’s best natural landscapes (the natural environment) have been permanently damaged. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot!
One can argue that England is more of a meritocracy now than it was, but that is really difficult to prove, because the government is the new monarch. Isn’t it?
England’s bureaucracy is nothing short of an unassailable, unaccountable, unchangeable, singular power.
Few entrepreneurs really get ahead in England, because the regulations and taxes are so damning; holding on to generational wealth is nigh impossible, due to the death taxes designed to strip successful people of their rewards. A universally low-income population is the new goal of the English bureaucracy.
Even worse, some of England’s greatest personalities, strongest patriots, most well educated and biggest thinkers have been purposefully marginalized. These people are the residual aristocrats, the heirs to the dregs of the monarchical system that actually produced England’s greatest generations in WWI and WWII.
Can anyone imagine an Admiral Jacky Fisher or Admiral Roger Keyes rising to lead England, today?
My grandmother is rolling over in her grave as I write this, but MomMom, times change. Nations change. Needs change. My grandmother (MomMom) Jane was a true-blue Daughter of the American Revolution, a fierce advocate for meritocracy and a fierce opponent of monarchy or aristocracy. She raised us all on stories of the American revolution, its just response to the unfairness of aristocratic England, and the cruelty of King George.
But today, things have really changed. Those old symmetries and forces no longer exist, and in their place have arisen other forms of monarchy and repression. England today is wracked by a lack of social structure or universal national standards, by anarchy masquerading as government. A huge vacuum space has opened up, and the entire nation could implode.
Today in the place of King George is a cruel and tyrannical English bureaucracy and judiciary, that rules the English citizens as though they were serfs. Very little due process, no free speech, and ambiguous political correctness as the new unattainable measure. Say the wrong the thing, write the wrong thing online? Off with your head!
It is time for England to return to its greatness. To do so, she must draw upon one of her greatest and most ignored human resources, to resurrect many of her finest patriots, her most committed citizens, and employ them in leading the nation away from the brink on which it stands, and back to greatness. This would involve tapping into the aging aristocrats who remember a truly Great Britain, and who would Make Britain Great Again.
We have all learned over the past 250 years that monarchy is not such a good thing, and we have also learned that politically correct Marxism is just as arbitrary and anti-freedom as any monarch. The solution to what ails England today lies in the collective wisdom and patriotism of England’s best elders, the last connection to a truly Great Britain (not necessarily a Greater Britain); its aristocrats who care the most about the most English.
It is time Britannia, it is time for Britannia to rule Britannia once again.
Or put it this way.