Posts Tagged → BLM
What Would MLK Say?
Today is a national holiday honoring and remembering a great American leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Like great leaders across human history, King captured a moment in time, crystalized it, and put a flame in it that later generations of people can touch and be inspired.
Below is the famous I Have a Dream speech that King gave in Washington, DC, probably the last great speech given in that swampy town.
However, before we get teary-eyed and inspired by Dr. King’s honest speech and honest goals, let’s ask a simple question.
Today, the word “racism” and “racist” have become immediate responses for just about anyone who disagrees with liberal ideas. Any ideas, not just the subject of skin color.
This includes debates about the role and place of Islam in a democracy and republic. Islam is not a race, it is a bunch of ideas. Race has nothing to do with it, unless you are looking at the skin color caste system in most Muslim countries, or how Arab slavers started the African slave trade and continue it to this very day. Those things aside, race is not a component of Islam.
And yet proponents of American security, freedom, and Judeo-Christian culture are called racists if they do not accede to demands for unlimited Muslim immigration with zero acculturation and assimilation.
Accusing people of being racist even now takes off from completely unrelated subjects, as in “You said you follow the Bible, and it is not pro-gay. That is almost like racism. In fact, it is just like racism. It is like being racist. You are a racist.”
Don’t laugh, I have seen it happen in person and in writing.
So that “racism” becomes the standard synonym or fill-in for any kind of discrimination or bigotry or even self-selective behavior based on thousands of years of human history, at best. At worst, it becomes an empty accusation that as soon as it is uttered is seen for what it is, fake.
And let’s not even delve into the NAACP, Black Lives Matter, or even the Congressional Black Caucus, where members accuse someone of “racism” if they merely sneeze, and where brutally racist statements are made nearly daily. The NAACP has become one of the most racist organizations in America, and it is enabled by the outrageously bigoted Southern Poverty Law Center. Which is funded and run by white liberals. Ditto for BLM.
When one of these groups says “You are a racist until we say you are not,” it is meaningless, because they have misused, abused, and failed on this claim for decades. By making it partisan, where racists in one party are excused because they are from “the correct” political party, and members of the other political party are always shamed and accused and never excused, these self-appointed arbiters of right and wrong are exposed as hypocrites. Their credibility plummets as a result.
If you are having trouble following this, try this: What results from the misuse of accusations of racism is a watering down of the word and idea.
If racism becomes subjective, and not quantifiable, then those wrongly accused of being racist will burn out and lose their yearning for fairness. After all, they themselves are being treated unfairly, accused unfairly.
Hijacking the word can only boomerang back. People stop listening. Oh, they care, but they no longer ascribe credibility to the NAACP, BLM, SPLC, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and the other fakers who have long overreached and overplayed that hand.
Yes, it is true that there are many things worse than racism, but if we are going to value a racism-free America (a good thing), then we must reserve that word and its connotations for when it really applies. We must not misappropriate it, nor may we engage in racist behavior and then accuse the subjects of our abuse themselves of being “racist.” Especially when there are simply legitimate disagreements on policy and law.
“Racist!” cannot be a crutch. That will only undermine everything MLK fought for, and what he got the vast number of Americans to buy into: The idea that we are all meant to be free, we are all meant to be equal, we all deserve to have equal opportunity and no artificial barriers between us and our dreams and goals. An America devoid of discrimination is an America full of its greatest promise.
So what would MLK say about today’s misuse and watering down of the white-hot word that used to galvanize tens of millions of Americans to do the right thing?
What would MLK say about how the Left has turned nearly every American institution into a force of discrimination and persecution against those with whom the Left merely disagrees, politically?
What would MLK say about the fake accusations of ‘racism’ to cover up the internecine mass murders among young black men occurring daily in nearly every single American city… That is done to obscure and excuse the utter and complete failure of nearly all of America’s black leadership, so that fifty-four years later, the American black community is in some ways in much worse condition than when Dr. King had his dream?
Liberals are filled up with hate, over nothing
Several years ago we caught two local guys stealing oak firewood, tree tops set aside along a field edge for cutting and splitting. By us, the owners.
Despite posted signs, the two men helped themselves, relying in their own minds on an old, long-gone approval they had enjoyed years and years prior, and which I had already revoked and conditioned on prior approval in the future.
These are not run-of-the-mill guys. Both are highly educated, tall, big, strong, married guys with plenty of confidence and income.
One, S, is a successful attorney, who risked his law license over some “free” firewood.
The other guy, J, is a historian, a curatorial professional with a government job, which is also at risk for committing theft. He’s no dummy.
When confronted, the lawyer left six voice mails on my phone, asking forgiveness. Months later, we encountered one another at a land protection dedication ceremony, and he came right up to me and said “We need to talk.” His remorse was evident, and I declined to talk further about it, because my prior experiences with him had demonstrated that his remorse and appreciation has previously been short-lived. And sure enough, his wife then acted unpleasantly, as if I had done something wrong when I next encountered her. As if!
Here’s the rub and the point of this: Both men (and their wives) are politically liberal. When I say liberal, they are as liberal as I am conservative-libertarian. They are both gun owners who denigrate the NRA, which is freeloading, in my opinion, but I have never brought it up with them. On almost all other issues they are very liberal.
We three are polar opposites, politically, which never bothered me and which I had always taken in stride. We rarely discussed politics in social contexts, preferring to talk about hunting, fishing, the kids, etc.
The difference is that I do not judge people based on their politics, and whether or not we disagree, or agree. These differences are as natural and naturally variable as enjoying chocolate versus vanilla ice cream, family backgrounds, etc. Rather, I mostly enjoy people in all their diversity.
Well, back to the firewood.
Much of the resolution to the firewood theft was conducted through emails.
The emails that I subsequently received from J were unbelievably vituperative, aggressive, accusatory. No remorse for his bad behavior, none, and filled with hate and criticism for me. He called me a “bad person,” though I have no criminal history or record, having NEVER been arrested or charged with a crime.
J was simply angry at me and caustically critical because of my political views. He labeled me a bad person because of my views, not my actions. He did not object to the (gentle) way we had resolved the firewood debacle.
Even S eventually fell back onto this same approach, bad-mouthing me to anyone who would listen to him, even people he saw in downtown Harrisburg on the street. Perhaps S feared being outed, and went on the offense in an effort to “inoculate” himself.
Many of these people he talked with naturally reported back to me on what they were hearing from S, wanting to know what could lead to such a raw outcome between us. I never told anyone the full story, because I did not want to impugn either of the men, though they had both earned it. Especially in the aftermath of the original theft. From what people have told me, S’s criticism of me is primarily rooted in his visceral distaste for my political views.
The difference between our behaviors in this case are a microcosm of the larger divide between liberals and everyone else in America, and this double standard is not working. It is not good.
Through constant bombardment in public schools, colleges, the media, and the entertainment industry Liberals have been taught and conditioned to utterly hate and despise conservatives, Republicans, religious Christians, and now even “white” people.
To Liberals, the moderate Republican Koch brothers are evil, cruel, mean, despised, demonized, even when they donate hundreds of millions of dollars, but equal billionaire capitalists Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are lauded no matter what they do.
ANTIFA and BLM’s violent war on free speech and the First Amendment rights of political opponents is an epic example of the natural results of modern Liberalism. They actually go so far as to say that their suppression of other’s rights is “resistance” and “self defense.” That is pure crap.
This unhealthy dynamic and double standard has reached the point where merely disagreeing with a liberal on policy issues results in someone being branded racist, homophobic, mean, sexist etc etc etc. This is utter crap, of course.
Used to be that Liberals were open-minded, considerate, reflective, etc. Those qualities are now long gone, and they have been replaced by naked contempt and hate for people who disagree with them and their policy goals.
Ironically, the more rational and articulate the disagreement, the worse the liberal’s hatred. Wanting my son’s Boy Scouts troop to be free of anything sexual, because it creeps me out that some adults want to sexualize little kids, has liberals branding me and others nationwide as “haters” because we want the BSA institution to remain above politicization.
This Liberal hatred is a form of intense bigotry, and it has deeply divided Americans, corroding our national soul to the point where everyone is feeling raw and angry. It has caused liberals to go on murderous rampages with guns, shooting people with whom they have a political disagreement.
For a long time conservatives thought they were merely under disagreement with liberals, whereas Liberals were at war. Now we see it; we are at war.
And now we have arrived at the latest results of that war, 59 dead and about 600 people wounded in Los Vegas.
Liberals need to ask themselves if this is really, truly what they want. If it isn’t, then the time for soul-searching and making amends has arrived.
Liberals who disagree with this politically correct war on America and Americans, your voice is needed.
Current American Parallels with the Fall of Ancient Rome
In the recent past I have been in touch with some old high school friends.
We were quite close way back then. All remain good people, and we have maintained irregular but meaningful contact for the past 35 years. So any communication between us now is like picking right up where we last left off way back then.
“When are you and your militia friends going to storm DC?” semi-teasingly asks one, a professional resident of Washington, DC.
Immediately I’m thinking “Trump winning pretty much was the storming of DC, in a way.”
But I don’t say it, as the cascade of shallow whining about the election results sure to follow has become regular and boorish among Trump detractors.
“Josh, I was no Hill-Dog lover [Hillary Clinton], and I liked Kasich [presidential candidate], but do you really like Trump?” asks another, this one a successful self-made businessman, his face unhappily wrinkling over Trump Anything.
Given the constant opposition to the Trump presidency from both establishment parties (Republicans and Democrats, or the ‘UniParty’ as some call both parties together), as well as from taxpayer-funded entitlement recipients, some small and many big business folk alike, and especially the media-academia Big Government complex, now seems a good time to remind everyone who has something to lose of the history that brought America up here and could drag us back down.
First, like America, ancient superpower Rome was also “too big to fail,” both in the minds of Romans and their many enemies. They had too much money, too much military power, and the Roman people were living too fantastically a high standard of life to envision it actually dissolving.
In that way, America is no different than Rome, or any other major civilization that has come and gone before us: We perceive we are too wealthy and powerful to fall, and our personal lives are so fantastically comfortable and convenient that we cannot imagine all of it coming undone. It’s just too good. How could it possibly go away?
But fail and fall, Rome did. First sacked in 410 CE by its own mercenaries, and then for good in 454 CE by its mercenaries allied with their ethnic tribes. Inside jobs, both.
Second, like Rome, America is an island anomaly in a sea of big, all-powerful governments, dictatorships, really, domineering little citizens. While by today’s standards ancient Rome may not have been a free society, by the measure of its time it provided a lot of liberty and opportunity to individual citizens, much more than anywhere else.
Rome also had a semblance of the rule of law. Most nation-states back then were simply feudal aggregations of people with swords at the top and field-cropping, over-taxed serfs at the bottom. No rule of law.
Today, Planet Earth still has mostly tyrants and dictators, with a cruel grip on their respective populace. So, like America now, Rome then had some extra work to do to hold itself together. Government power had to be diffused among senators, army officers, and business people. Standards and expectations were higher among a wider group of people. Government power, societal stability, quality of life did not depend upon the one monarch alone.
Predicting the end of America is almost as silly as predicting “climate change” -caused sea levels catastrophically rising, and super-powerful storms catastrophically leveling human civilization.
Though there is evidence of climate and weather affects on past human civilizations, it is a historical fact that human civilizations come and go of their own accord, usually due to simple power lust and ego. Sometimes environmental destruction rendered the land unfit for habitation. So on that alone we know that some day America will change. And it will not be a change good for the majority of its citizens.
America is nowhere near where Rome was when it fell, in terms of military preparedness. But in other ways we are past where Rome was, in terms of our unsustainable debt, ironically held by some of our worst enemies. The Chinese have become a kind of mercenary banker force, also supplying us with the electronics we use to run our daily lives as well as much of our military. That they are spying on us through their electronics is already proven.
Plenty of people inside and out would like to run America themselves, without the annoying, dirty citizenry in the way.
And yet so many Americans continue to party on, oblivious, as if we are invincible, invulnerable.
Go ahead and tease me, friends. Your ribbing is funny. But you should also be reflecting on the implications of ANTIFA, BLM, OWS etc mobs-cum-militia already rampaging across American streets, including DC and the US Capitol. Those stormings are already under way, under cover of national media and academia. They are real, and neither I nor any militia I know of have anything to do with them.
Go ahead and casually write off people like me, ‘kooks’ who love America in a simple way, a traditional way. We love all Americans, in all their ingenuity and passion for liberty and opportunity, and we have therefore come to despise the power-grab being waged against the citizenry by Big Government latté sippers. In both parties.
Go ahead and smugly dismiss us, mock us, cheerily toast our foolishness.
Just remember in the back of your mind, it is you we are trying to save. God knows, you can’t get it done.
Historic American Art vs. NAZI ISIS People
In the 1930s, the German NAZI party identified “degenerate” art that was supposedly representative of “degenerate” culture, officially unfit for Germans.
Paintings, sculptures, drawings, pottery, books, poetry, you name it, if it had any artistic value, the NAZIs scrutinized it carefully. And if that art did not match the NAZI’s new standards, then it was forbiddden, burned, destroyed, or looted and hidden away, to be ransomed and sold off to future buyers outside of the ‘culturally supreme’ Deutchland.
Entire museum collections and privately owned collections throughout NAZI-occupied Europe were looted, damaged, and or destroyed, because the art did not comport with the new standard these Ultra Germans had created. Priceless artifacts were lost forever, at best melted down for their precious metal value.
If you want to see the long-term impacts of this intolerant approach to art, use www.duckduckgo.com to search the phrase “nazi looted art,” and marvel at the sad results. Real Western culture took a huge hit from the neanderthal NAZIs, and the ill effects are still felt today.
Fast forward six decades to ISIS, the puritanical Muslim movement that uses extreme violence and sadistic cruelty to achieve political domination. A lot like the NAZIs, come to think of it.
ISIS has a thing against most art and even historic artifacts, if they do not fit neatly into the Sharia law that ISIS followers believe in.
Ancient Buddhist cliff carvings, imposing and inspiring…detonated into rubble, by ISIS.
Ancient Assyrian cities, buildings, from the beginning of recorded human history….bulldozed and detonated into shards of broken rock, by ISIS.
Important archaeological digs providing useful history, bulldozed by ISIS.
Entire churches looted of anything of immediate value, then burned down, by ISIS.
Entire museum collections either destroyed, or looted and re-sold on the international black market, by ISIS.
Fast forward just a few years to ANTIFA, Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, etc., and now we have priceless American artifacts that belong to the public being outright destroyed by mobs from these groups.
Irreplaceable and beautiful bronze statues of long-dead generals and soldiers are being removed and destroyed either by street thugs enabled by big city mayors, or by the big city mayors themselves.
This is a war on history and art no different than the NAZIs or ISIS.
At the very best, this is simply the mistake of applying new understandings to old history.
Oh sure, the neanderthals claim that these statues are memorials to bad ideas, and sad times, and to some extent there may be some vague shred of truth in that. But to keep these cultural artifacts, these works of high art, is no endorsement of what they may have once captured long, long ago.
Rather, these statues are mute testimonials to our nation’s history, its struggles, and its triumphs. The fact that the Confederacy did not win, due to the intervention and huge sacrifice by hundreds of thousands of Caucasian men from the north, is the real story of these old monuments.
Today we have one American political party that is increasingly at open war with every basic value and idea that undergirds America, as it was founded. These public square symbols are caught up in that party’s war.
That political party has more and more officials doing cheap political stunts, like seizing old bronze statues in the public square, and declaring them “Cherem” (unfit, like ISIS does to the churches it burns), and culturally unfit, like the NAZIs did.
Frankly, there is zero difference between these mayors, and Virginia governor Terry McCauliffe, and the other totalitarian movements that preceded them, like the NAZIs, ISIS, and the Soviets (who tore down beautiful old Russian statues and replaced them with boring, utilitarian statues of Lenin and Stalin meant to project an intimidating political message).
Whether these mayors and governors act unilaterally and use publicly owned machines to take them down, or if they allow their allied street thugs from ANTIFA and BLM to tear them down, while the city police are ordered to make no arrests, it makes no difference.
In the end, these mayors and their violent street soldiers are no different than the worst people in history. But if they win, you can bet they will erect statues of themselves, glorifying their total transformation of America to…God knows what.
Now they are talking about destroying the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC. No lie.
I say we make a stand like a stone wall to protect this historic American art, and stop this insanity, stop this assault on America, by these modern day NAZIs and ISIS thugs.
BLM giving open land a black eye
The Bureau of Land Management was established as a temporary holding entity, dealing more with water management than common natural resources and the plants and animals living on the land under its care.
Now, BLM has become the poster child of Big Government Gone Wild, using armed force and the threat of lethal force, let alone more prosaic forms of terrifying government coercion, to achieve dubious policy goals. Many of these policy goals grate on the public, who perceive them as being at best ancillary to BLM’s mission, if not at odds with the multiple-use land management models the agency is supposed to implement.
Citizens, who own their American government, chafe at official signs that say “No Trespassing – BLM Property,” as though the very taxpayers underwriting BLM are alien invaders upon that government-managed ground.
Job #1 would be to actually communicate with the citizenry about the agency’s policy goals, the underpinnings and purpose of its policies, the reasons for protecting some landscapes from vehicles. Certainly, BLM can achieve better ways to manage environmentally sensitive land, and perhaps asking the citizenry for ideas would take the agency into new, good places. Many users of federally-managed lands are actually savvy about Leave No Trace, and most others at least care, even if they do not yet know how to minimally impact an area.
BLM’s heavy hand in the supposed name of environmental quality is giving all open land a black eye. As a result of BLM’s foolish behavior, all kinds of questions are being asked about public land, not just about how it is managed, but why it even exists. Perhaps it is a good discussion to have, and I certainly stand on the side of having those public spaces, but so far the BLM is just pouring gasoline on the fire, which threatens to overtake all public lands.
Part of any discussion should include What Next about BLM. The agency has clearly outlived its established purpose. My instinctive thinking is to divide up its lands among the agencies best suited to manage each piece – National Park Service for this heavily used area, National Forest for this timbered area, and so on. And no, conveying some of these lands to states is not a bad thing, so long as the deeds carry perpetual stipulations that the lands cannot be sold to private owners or converted to some other use. Mining, timbering, preservation of historic artifacts, water management, passive and active recreation, scenic beauty, ecological purposes…states can do many of these as well as a federal agency, and all without having snipers in fatigues pointing guns at citizens.
If nothing else, getting rid of BLM to get rid of its ridiculous snipers and armed thug culture is a worthy step. Not only is that insane behavior unworthy of a representative government, it is unrelated to the purpose of protecting open land in the first place.
Earth Day boomerang
It’s a topic I speak about frequently, and write about often. Environmental protection.
The gist of my message is that the problems facing America’s environment 50 years ago are totally different than the problems facing it today. Fifty years ago, huge problems: Rivers on fire, PCBs, raw sewage, industrial dumping. Etc. Bad stuff.
Today? Regulations on parts-per-trillion, beyond de minimus concern. Picayune issues exploding into billion-dollar costs.
We defeated the biggest problems. We solved them. And we are carefully watching many others. But that’s not enough for activists who need to make the Earth Day of 2014 as meaningful and as heavy as the first Earth Day in 1970. It’s silly on its face, but politics is full of silly behavior, of course.
Watching Al Gore, Barack Obama, and other advocates of environmental gloom and doom jet about on expensive corporate jets, emitting huge quantities of carbon, proclaiming Earth Day, is frustrating. Their hypocrisy is naked.
On this Earth Day, I’d like to know what study the Bureau of Land Management used to determine that desert tortoises were at risk from the Bundy cattle, but not from the wild bison that roamed the same land for twenty thousand years, without detriment.
Happy Passover: Freedom for Everyone
Happy Passover to those who observe the holiday. It is the holiday of freedom, and liberty.
Is it any surprise that the Bundy ranch was liberated on the eve of Passover? While no shots were fired, the standoff at the Bundy ranch had all the ingredients of another Waco or Ruby Ridge. Except that today, millions of Americans are ready to leap to their fellow citizens’ defense. Many patriots who joined the Bundy family made the point that another civil war could start over the standoff. While later news reports indicate that the desert tortoise had zero to do with the BLM removing the Bundy’s cattle, and rather US senator Harry Reid’s son wanted the land for a solar project, the bigger specter of an over-reaching, unnecessarily aggressive, thuggish government mixing it up with armed citizens, and then backing down, was not lost on most watchers.
America regained a shred of liberty this week. Whether you are sitting down to a Seder tonight, or not, you should give thinks for the liberty we have and that which we just won back.
What should happen in Arizona
The federal government is over-reacting, as usual, tossing cows off of long-time federal grazing land in Arizona, as it is now magically no good for grazing.
Apparently desert tortoises never got along with huge buffalo, which look and weigh a lot like cattle…but wait…the tortoises did get along with the buffalo. So it is tough to see what the US government needs to do this for.
It is certainly another Obama attack on self-reliant rural Americans.
It is certainly another opportunity for hopped-up federal agents to play cowboy with American citizens in their gunsights. They set up “First Amendment Zones” that are ridiculous to see, and they are arresting people trying to document how many valuable cattle (beef is at an all-time high now) the government stormtroopers are taking away.
It is a bad situation, like Ruby Ridge and Waco were unnecessarily bad situations.
You know what should happen? A posse of militia should go out there and throw the federal agents off the land. Have an armed stand-off. Show this heavy-handed government that we, the people, are not going to take it any more.
This sounds radical to you? Well, then, the Boston Tea Party, Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill were “radical,” too.
C’este la revolution. C’este America.