August 10th, 2019
Since the 1917 violent triumph of Socialism in Russia, communists have more aggressively spread their efforts world-wide. There is no secret about this. Lots of official information outlets of openly socialist and communist organizations precisely describe their goals and targets, past and present. Cambodia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, now Venezuela, all fell victim to socialism.
Where socialists have failed to openly gain control in democracies, like America and Britain, because their intended victims have more say through voting, they have mostly gone vague. Vagueness allows socialists to talk in circles and in generalities, avoiding the unpleasant hard realities their policies will truly mean for hard working Americans and Britons.
In that vein, for decades the Democrat Party purveyed a more palatable-sounding ideology than socialism or communism. They became Liberals. Liberalism, now called “progressivism” and its advocates “progressives,” is still the same old evil socialism; it is just more incremental than the overtly revolutionary form of the 1917 Soviet Union’s tyranny.
And so for one hundred years, liberals in American government have steadily introduced policy after policy, regulation after regulation, textbook after textbook, slowly changing American culture from the inside. For one hundred years liberals have used America’s democratic form of government (technically America is a republic, but loosely speaking we are governed by democratic principles) to achieve non-democratic outcomes. That is, liberals have used America’s freedoms and government to implement anti-freedom and anti-America policies and changes to our national fabric.
In general, American liberals have sought greater government power over the citizenry, a diminishment of individual rights, a lessening of the individual ability to stand up to and prevail against the kind of overwhelming government power America was originally founded to prevent. Their assault on America has at its core a determined corrosion of American identity and norms; that makes it easier to sell their anti-America, anti-freedom laws, regulations, and policies.
So, for example, by inverting the First Amendment, liberals have removed God from the public square. To liberals, any practice of religion in public is officially establishing religion. By gaining control of public schools through teacher’s unions, and then removing God’s values from those schools, liberals removed the ancient barriers and social mores that glued Americans together.
We can go down a list of liberal laws and policies that have been inflicted on America, and we can talk about how liberals have captured institutions like media, entertainment (Hollywood’s violent movies and ultra-violent video games), and academia, but let’s just say that after one hundred years of liberals tearing away at America’s social fabric, they have succeeded in destroying a great deal of what held America together.
Hearing liberals talk about more gun control is like watching people remove the wheels from my car, and then tell me how dangerous it will be to drive it and how I need to just give them the car keys.
I grew up in a rural community that had more guns, and more cows, than people. We all owned guns from an early age, and we suffered no gun crime. No mass shootings, no individual shootings. My 7th grade biology teacher reloaded my 7×57 Mauser rounds for me. In 7th and 8th grades I took my deer rifle on the school bus from home to Park Forest Junior High School in State College. The gun was placed inside my locker, and at the end of the school day, we students who had brought our rifles joined together to go deer hunting at some local farm or forest. Someone’s parent was in charge of picking us up and taking us to the hunt, and someone else’s parent was in charge of picking us up and taking us all back home at dark. It worked just fine.
Fast forward 40 years and America is a different place. School kids are shooting each other, unlike any previous time. The wheels have come off!
What changed is the American culture that supported responsible gun ownership was weakened by liberals, who have sought to eliminate private gun ownership. The founding American culture that created and reinforced values like self-reliance, personal responsibility, deferring immediate pleasure and gratification in lieu of future success, and making good choices was all tossed away in liberal-controlled public schools and colleges.
Instead of good solid time-proven American values, liberals taught bozo ideas like “challenge authority” — meaning disrespect your parents, having babies out of wedlock is fun, killing babies at will is freedom, who needs Home Economics and a hard work ethic when the government will just give you taxpayer-funded welfare money, and so on. So the culture of America changed, and now many of our youngest seem incapable of living up to basic American norms while still being presented with basic American freedoms, like gun ownership.
Liberals created this failed culture in which young Americans shoot each other. Just look at every major American city: They are nearly all run by liberals, home to the latest and best liberal ideas, and yet they suffer the greatest social failure, financial failure, and violence.
Liberalism is not the solution, but the cause of all that ails America today, especially the mass shootings in liberal-controlled schools.
And so liberals now demand gun confiscation, and phony “universal background checks” that are designed to create lists of who has what guns, to make gun confiscation easier.
Liberals created all these problems in the first place, and more liberal policy ideas like “gun control” are simply adding fuel to the fire.
Many years ago I worked with a woman who specialized in creating problems and crises in our office, and once the interpersonal conflicts were going hot, she would then swoop in and aggressively demand to “solve” the very problems she had created. Her proposed solutions always left her with more authority and direct control over everyone around her. This is what the liberals and the Democrat Party are doing with guns. They created all this mass shooting business, and now they want to exploit the violence crisis they created to further their assault on the rights of law-abiding gun owners, who have no connection to crime but who stand between liberals and their dream of absolute tyrannical control over everyone in America, like their socialist brethren everywhere else.
At a certain point normal Americans have to wake up to this obvious situation, and stop voting for liberals and their deceptive ideas. Liberalism is not good for America. Turn it back, restore our founding principles as America’s norms, take back our government and our institutions from destructive liberalism.
Here (below) is retired US Army Col. David Grossman talking about why children are now killing each other. Grossman was the guy who taught American special forces troops how to overcome their natural human inhibitions in order to quickly kill their opponents, and who then witnessed an alarming generational change in how American youth perceived killing. If you care about what causes mass shootings, watch Grossman’s fascinating videos.
June 30th, 2011
Yosemite Sam is, or was, a colorful rootin’ tootin’ California cowboy created by Warner Brothers Cartoons. Based on the ’49er image of a rough ‘n ready gunslinger, Yosemite Sam occasionally shot himself in the foot while Bugs Bunny casually outwitted him. Testing brains versus brawn, these classic cartoons lampooned trigger happy meat heads and, as always, elevated the higher valued brain power of the waskilly rabbit (rascally rabbit, as pronounced by another trigger happy meat head, Elmer Fudd). Using that proven Hollywood method of powerful if subliminal suggestion, the cartoons’ message was clear to impressionable little kids and meat heads alike: Use your head, you’ll do better.
Fast forward 70 years to the home of Yosemite, the supposedly golden state of California. Yesterday, that Liberal-laden welfare state signed into law a new tax on Internet sales. Because interstate commerce is constitutionally protected above individual states’ financial interests, taxes on Internet sales aren’t really legal or legit. Most consumers take some risk when they purchase online, and the absence of state taxes (a huge 8.75% in California), is an overall small but relatively large reward for taking that risk. Returning items by mail costs buyers money, and not paying sales tax offsets those costs.
Well, here we are, many decades after California became one of America’s premier economies, and the elected officials of that once-great state have decided to return to the 1700s way of doing business rather than embrace technology, mobile consumers, and the blurring of boundaries everywhere (like they enjoy the blurred boundary between California and Mexico, a blur long sought and much enjoyed by Liberals everywhere). Rather than leveraging technology to work for California, in this instance, California Democrats choose to take the one-dimensional approach to gathering revenue. Taxing Internet sales was projected to gather about $200 million annually, but with amazon.com and other big Internet sellers immediately ending their high-tech advertising relationships there, the state is now projected to lose about $135 million in taxes paid by the owners of those advertising businesses. And because many of those owners have said that they will now relocate to a nearby state without Internet sales tax, California loses those tax payers as well as the creative brain power that those entrepreneurs brought to the state.
Like all mis-named “progressives,” Liberals are ultimately interested in just one thing, and that is power. Like Yosemite Sam of old, the California Democrats behind this foolish move understand power alone, and by golly, they will exercise power simply because they can. For the simple sake of having it and demonstrating to all around that they have it. But like Yosemite Sam, California has shot itself in the foot. The net result of their Internet tax appears to be just about a complete wash, with the added loss of yet more smart working people from the state.
Like their ideological counterparts in North Korea and China and Russia, California’s Democrats are most satisfied to exercise power for power’s sake, regardless of the collateral damage. Shooting themselves in the foot never felt so good, except for the entrepreneurs and remaining taxpayer left behind in the growing exodus of brain power leaving that Statist state.
Hopefully, my own home state of Pennsylvania, also long a haven for high taxes and unfavorable business conditions, will find a way to take advantage of the Yosemite Sams now running California government, and funnel their loss into Pennsylvania and make it our gain.