Posts Tagged → socialism
April 22nd, 2021
Earth Day…talk about climate change, the climate and meaning of this ‘hippie holiday’ has really changed since it was first declared. What began as a plea for help and attention as so American rivers were so polluted that when the Cuyahoga caught on fire, it was only slightly more fascinating than the huge fish kills in the lower Hudson, is today a sort of Mother Earth May Day Against Capitalism. Gone are the clear lines in the sand that modern industrialization had gone too far with its pipelines dripping green goo direct from factory floor work aprons to the local waterway. Now, today, Earth Day is not about fixing polluted waterways, but about “fixing” capitalism to death.
Somehow the people pushing this attack are conveniently forgetful that the greatest industrial pollution has occurred not under capitalist markets, but under rigid authoritarian socialist governments. But people like me are not forgetful, because to forget is to see freedom dry up and vanish; capitalism is fundamentally about human freedom and choice. Socialism being “green” is a myth, because socialism is never about choices, like the choice to be free of pollution. Rather, socialism is about top-down control and coerced obedience, at any cost. And in Russia and China, the environment was the very first thing to be sacrificed for industrial mass production.
Here are two big Earth Day-related myths.
Myth Number One: Environmental Groups are About Environmental Quality. Sorry, hate to say it, but most so-called environmental groups today are not about the environment or protecting environmental quality. Rather, most environmental advocacy groups are politically partisan about implementing socialism, and attacking capitalism, and the environmental issues they talk about are just one pathway. Have you ever seen an environmental group criticize Democrat Party officials? Like really get after them and hound them.
Nope, not like they demonize Republicans.
Some years ago, Pennsylvania had a Democrat governor, Ed Rendell. Like all good liberals, Rendell could not stay away from money to buy votes with, and so he dropped the natural gas drilling bomb on Pennsylvania public lands. Environmental groups were silent as our state forests went from quiet hinterlands to super industrialized moonscapes in just months. Crickets chirped and not a human voice was raised in opposition to this huge damage to our public lands.
However, literally the day Rendell’s successor took office, Penn Future and other environmental advocacy groups were out in force at the Capitol with bullhorns proclaiming Tom Corbett to be “Governor Corporate,” because of his supposed unhealthy commitment to….natural gas drilling. The guy hadn’t been governor for one minute and already the supposed green groups that had looked the other way while Pennsylvania public lands were criss-crossed with pipelines and drilling rigs were proclaiming him the environmental anti-Christ. Corbett had made zero decisions about drilling on Pennsylvania public lands, but because he was a Republican and Rendell a Democrat, the supposed environmental groups lined up and attacked Corbett and protected Rendell.
So don’t be fooled; the environmental groups are not so much about the natural environment as they are about shaping the political environment inside the US Capitol and state capitols around America. They are mostly fakes. I give land trusts and conservancies credit for actually doing real environmental work, but even they have become infected with the PC buzzwords and partisan political nonsense to the point where their credibility is often at stake.
Myth Number Two: Climate Change is About Environmental Quality. Human-caused climate change, as it is propounded by the various bullies supposedly expert in it, is based only on really lousy computer models and scanty data at best, faked data at worst. Other than these two weak legs, the notion of human-caused climate change stands on literally nothing. The climate change movement has been riven with scandals (East Anglia University, my alma mater Penn State’s Michael Mann etc) and scientists who are facile about jumping back and forth over lines separating science and policy and politics. These scientists decided the cash was greener on the side of climate alarmism, and so they went with the corporate foundation money.
Earth’s climate is changing. It has always changed. Volcanos, huge storms, meteors, tectonic shifts, glaciers advancing and receding and advancing again without any human intervention…Planet Earth is a really dynamic place. Its climate is a product of all kinds of factors, most of which are outside human control. But this reality does not diminish climate change’s usefulness as a vehicle for advancing big government totalitarianism.
My main objection to human-caused climate change alarmism isn’t so much that it is obviously and shamefully fake, or even that it is another evil effort to destroy democracy and gain absolute control over free people. Rather, climate change alarmism detracts from the very real and potentially solvable problems of invasive species, ocean overfishing, surface water pollution, forest fragmentation, farmland loss, and other actual, verified environmental issues. That are not as sexy as the climate sky is falling message. Fake climate change casts its pall over all real environmental issues, and undermines their claim on people’s attention.
If the conservative movement is overly skeptical about environmental anything, to the point where deriding even real environmental issues has become its own form of conservative political correctness, it is because the very fake environmental advocacy groups gave up their integrity and believability, by polluting real environmental issues with fake climate change nonsense. Their adherence to evil climate change religion did it.
As scary media-creation child activist Greta Thunberg admitted, climate change isn’t really about the environment; it is about gaining political control and force-implementing socialism and changing a whole array of policies in Western Civilization, at great cost, while China, India and Pakistan move forward with their gushing pollution-based economies, at no cost.
What kind of normal job-holding American can really get on board with that?
October 7th, 2020
Yesterday I got a phone call from a man I knew in my teens, named Sam. The call from Sam was THE zombie apocalypse call, and if you are an American and you have anything of value to lose in your possession, you would do well to pay attention to the following telling of our conversation.
Although Sam and I have not spoken directly in about thirty years, he has been in and out of my family (the one I grew up in, not the one I am raising) in different roles, like business partner, religious leadership (Quaker), social friends. So although Sam and I have not actually seen one another for a long time, we have been aware of one another for a long time. It would therefore be natural, no big stretch, for him to pick up the phone and call me, which he did, from southeastern Pennsylvania, a location not far away from my own.
But Sam called without first ascertaining that I was still a Quaker, and that as such I still adhered to Quaker beliefs like pacifism/non-violence/ liberal anti-America treason, and socialism. And so Sam launched into a description of his work, and he made an effort to recruit me to participate in it. I could not believe what I was hearing, and with my heart beating faster than usual, I bit hard on my tongue and just listened.
Sam told me that for fifteen years he has been a professional social justice organizer, for one of the groups funded by George Soros. He is presently recruiting people for what he calls “mass direct action” protests across America, to begin the day after Election Day and into the weeks beyond, as needed.
“Sit-ins, block traffic, block businesses, strikes, mass civil disobedience and unrest all across America, all non-violent,” Sam said. His definition of non-violent is probably different than most people’s definition, because after all, he is using force, ‘direct action’ force, which means stopping people from moving, working etc. Coercion by another name.
Sam’s goal is to force President Donald Trump from office, regardless of the election outcome.
Why force, and why not rely on the election?
Sam said if Trump wins, it’s only through election fraud. There is no scenario where Sam and his friends will accept Trump winning the election. And if Trump refuses to accept his defeat (which could include the various partisan networks declaring the election for Biden even when Trump has won), the mass protests and strikes and civil unrest etc will be necessary to force Trump from office, Sam said.
In other words, my 72-year-old hippie friend refuses to accept election results that he doesn’t like just because he doesn’t like them. In fact, he is working to confuse those results, so that at best no clear winner can be determined or declared, and so the election outcome will be resolved by anarchy and street mobs, forcing the resolution into the US House and the courts. Basically Sam wants to bring Seattle and Portland street warfare and destruction nationwide, to your city, your neighborhood.
Only after giving me his sales pitch did he stop to ask if my political views align with his. Boy was he surprised that the young kid he remembered had now grown up to disavow all the destructive beliefs that had once been shoved down my throat by similar “well-intentioned” leftists. He was shocked that I have donated about $2,000 to the Trump campaign. Thank you, Sam, I enjoyed your reaction, and today I donated again to the Martha McSally campaign, just for good measure.
And so then we had a refreshingly and brutally honest discussion about what his “organizing” means, and the kinds of negative outcomes that are likely to result from it, like the violence he says he is opposed to. Sam said he is non-violent, but he cannot take responsibility for violence that occurs alongside his “95% peaceful” protests. He also blamed “right wing agitators” for all the leftist destruction we have witnessed with our own eyes across the nation this year, which is either an outright lie or extreme self-deception.
Sam also says he is opposed to all guns, to all private gun ownership, that no one should have any guns, that hunting is illegitimate and unnecessary, and people trying to defend themselves against “unarmed” mobs are morally incorrect. So a disarmed citizenry is also Sam’s goal.
Sam asked if I would shoot him during one of his “95% peaceful” protests, even if he doesn’t have a gun, and I responded “If I feel like you or your mob are threatening me, my home, my family, then yes, I will defend myself.” And he then said he thought conflict would be inevitable. So his anarchy is actually a violent confrontation that will lead to more violence? Who would have guessed?
We learned a few things from my phone call from Sam the anti-America agitator:
- Doublespeak is alive and well, meaning that when Sam says he is non-violent, it really means that he will provide thin moral cover for the violent murderers, looters, and arsonists who accompany him in his massive civil disobedience against fair American elections.
- When Sam says he doesn’t believe in private gun ownership, he means he wants us all disarmed, so that he can do whatever he wants to us with his mob of felonious villains afterwards.
- When the election outcomes and rules favor Sam’s personal desires and his political views, then the outcomes and the rules must be defended with massive street battles. But when and if the election outcomes and the rules end up favoring his political opponent, then the outcome and the rules must be challenged and thrown out, with massive street battles.
- The obviously fake surveys and polls being published by mainstream media outlets, most declaring Biden impossibly far in the lead, might be a pretext for the same media outlets declaring Bidehhhh the winner on Election Night, or at least for them to say that Trump could never have won the election, and thereby casting the results into doubt and confusion…and into anarchy.
- America is under assault from within. Enemies of democracy and freedom are operating freely within our borders, unchecked, unchallenged. Democracy is not a suicide pact, and treason is not free speech. So many Americans seem to erroneously believe that America is too big to fail, and so they pop a cold beer, throw some hamburgers on the grill, and sit back to watch a sports event, without getting involved politically, even though they are needed. America might not yet be failing, but America’s system of governance and economy is being sorely tested right now. God grant us success in preserving our Union, our liberties, our unique Republic.
- Gentlemen, prepare to defend yourselves, your homes, your families, your communities. The zombie horde is coming soon to your neighborhood
May 17th, 2020
Several years ago at a political candidate’s announcement event, an older woman came up to the candidate after his speech while I was standing next to him, and asked him to do something about how liberal colleges have become. I was close enough to both people to see their feelings.
“My grandson became a socialist and has disavowed everything his family has worked hard for since we moved here from Italy three generations ago,” she said, almost crying.
The Republican candidate seemed unmoved. Fighting socialist indoctrination on college campuses is probably not a big potential money maker for most would-be elected officials.
And no question about what she said, American colleges are now Ground Zero for socialist indoctrination and brainwashing. You can take a good kid from a solid loving, working home, with law-abiding working parents, a good work ethic, good grades, and a positive outlook on life, and within two semesters at pretty much any college in America, lose them to chic leftist radicalism. That is, socialism aka Everything that America is Not.
Which begs the question of Why.
My observation is socialism is popular because the younger generations have had to fight for nothing. They are spoiled rotten.
Everything has been given to them. Cars, expensive phones, expensive clothes, trips, freedom to come and go, time off from chores and work, peer-to-peer equal relationships with their parents and grandparents. As a consequence, America’s younger people are the world’s most spoiled little brats in the history of our planet. At their sixteenth birthday they are convinced they already know everything, including how the latest car racing simulator on XBox is actually – I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP – more realistic than actually driving (Yes, I really did hear a 16-year-old say this to his family recently).
As a result of being so spoiled and having no real meaningful adversity in their lives, the younger generations are looking for, searching for, adversity. Even if it means dreaming it up, inventing it out of thin air or out of bits and pieces of reality stitched together with bubblegum and bailing wire. It gives them a sense of meaning and purpose. And when they find it, it gives them a cause. Teenagers are nothing if not moral purists, and when they discover from their fake teachers that all of the money their parents worked hard for is actually stolen from living American Indians and ex-slave Blacks, they have discovered some adversity worth fighting against.
And off on the socialist crusade they go, filled with rage at their parents’ callous disregard for the poor and the suffering, the dispossessed.
The fact that their own grandparents disembarked from a boat into New York Harbor in 1948 with a grand total of a suitcase half-filled with clothes and the name of a nephew to their name doesn’t register. Or if you are from coal country, with your own grandparents telling you stories about how they and their parents worked in and around the coal mines, you are coached by a professor in “sociology” (yes, this is a real college thing, even though it is real nothing) to see your grandparents not as hard workers, but as exploited labor who enriched a bunch of wealthy aristocrats.
The entertainment industry is now the primary source for role models, values, and social cues, and add in some Hollywood movie virtue signalling, and we have now two generations of American kids who are spoiled, nearly worthless, unappreciative, un-grounded, disconnected from reality, and uninterested in anything except behaviors that make them feel good for the moment.
Even though my wife and I come from dramatically different backgrounds, we shared one common experience growing up that forms the foundation for our relationship: We had to work hard from a young age.
My wife made her own nice clothes for school, because neither she nor her parents could afford to buy nice clothes at the stores. And while I grew up splitting firewood daily from the age of nine, I had to work for my dad starting at age 14. Working on construction sites as the boss’s kid, doing all the worst jobs, got me plenty of abuse and socked arms by workers who wanted to put me in my place. I learned then to drink buckets of shit and just do my job, to the satisfaction of the meanest, grumpiest old worker on the crew. So now that I have been paying federal taxes since I was 14, I think I have a work ethic, and my wife does, too.
Like all of our friends our age (fifties), my wife and I actually enjoy working and seeing the fruits of our labors. But like our friends, we are dinosaurs, kind of the last of the dying breed. The last of the Americans. The next couple of generations seem to think that everything is supposed to be handed to them, and it seems they will cheerfully give away their unique American freedoms to a gigantic all-powerful government apparatus if it promises them mediocre “free” income and healthcare.
Not that our own kids aren’t great. They are, and I love them absolutely. Like most parents, we have done our best to raise them right. But I am afraid that college can warp even them, leading them to believe that socialism is the answer for the mean, exploitative parents who made them mow the lawn, take out the trash, and hang up the clean laundry.
March 1st, 2020
No doubt about it, Russia has been meddling in America’s elections for decades. It is one of the weaknesses that an open society like ours has, and which a closed, authoritarian society like Russia (and China) do not have. The nature of our democratic process leaves America vulnerable to tampering from without and to treason from within. And in our universities, our corporations, and our news outlets. And so it is not news anywhere that some Americans have been colluding with Russia in its meddling since forever, like since the 1920s.
Looking back on the 1930s responses to open treason and the 1950s “Red Scare” and the resulting Hollywood blacklisting of Americans openly colluding with Russia in the attempted murder of America, it seems the problem’s surface was only scratched then. Groups like the ACLU, founded by open communists (Roger Baldwin – “Communism is the goal”), are still active and incredibly destructive today.
And even more so, we have a a political party whose leaders now openly identify as “Democratic Socialists.” They are not even hiding their actual allegiances any longer.
Yes, we see the American young people flocking to this Democratic Socialism Free Stuff banner. It is surprising and painful, because it is so at odds with the self-reliance and independence that marked American culture from our very beginning.
It is a fact that my wife and I have been complicit with others in our generation and the generation before us in absolutely spoiling rotten our kids, and priming them for this Free Stuff movement. Giving them everything, demanding from them very little. And sonofabitch, wouldn’t ya know it, when the little bastards grew up to teens and twenties, they actually expected everything for FREE. We trained our own kids to be this way.
Even though I had done my best to require from my kids home chores before dinner, or before fun time, I think I was like a lot of other old fashioned dads who also collided with our beloved wives on this.
As dads, we were boys once. And as boys, we in our generation were expected and often aggressively forced by our dads to work our butts off all the time, to do chores, in order to earn TV time, to earn a bicycle, to earn telephone time after homework was done, and so on. God bless our good wives today, they love our children so very much, they can’t imagine hurting their feelings by always backing us up on enforced chores. Making the children do chores gets in the way of their homework, ya know…hey, are you doing your homework or scrolling through endless humorous memes over there?
God help the dad who demands chores from the kids! Even my own son, my pride and joy, a good kid, the ‘mini me’ who is supposed to grow up to be smarter, stronger, faster than me, when tasked with helping fill our wood sheds with enough split firewood for the winter said “Well, that doesn’t sound like very much fun.” And then pouted about not being able to spend that time with his buddy.
So now America has one, maybe two generations of young people who really expect everything to simply be handed to them. Without having to work for it at all. Free participation trophies for everyone. Contrast this to the old days, a mere thirty or forty years ago, where young people expected to eventually inherit from their parents, but only after working very hard to achieve much on their own.
And so here we are, Crazy Bernie Sandals and every single other Democrat candidate for president, is promising free everything for everyone, like free college tuition, free income, free housing, free health care, including for law-breaking illegal aliens who illegally invade America and who have neither put money into the collective taxpayer pot nor will they. America’s own material success and wealth are being used as a weapon against America.
Obviously this free stuff movement is financially and socially unsustainable, because resources have limits and it is innately unfair. But that is not the point for the Free Stuff movement. The point is to use that lure and false promise to buy enough votes from gullible kids and illegal aliens to attain communism in America through our democratic process. That is, to turn America into a communist country.
Crazy Bernie Sandals honeymooned in the old Soviet Union Russia, because he was and still is a proud authoritarian communist. But he is not alone in this view; every other Democrat candidate has said more or less the same things he has said, sometimes differing by a few shades of grey.
Leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917, which is when Russia became an authoritarian communist country exporting its cruelty abroad, there were two movements to achieve communism in Russia. One group was the Bolsheviks, whose belief in Bolshevism required a violent overthrow and replacement of the existing government. Their competitors were the Mensheviks. They believed in the eventual slow drip-drip-drip overthrow of the Russian government, one chip at a time, one government position at a time, one vote at a time, using the democratic process to slowly implement their goals until the government was dominated by communists. And only then they would use force to implement their authoritarianism.
Know what the Mensheviks were called?
The Russian Social Democratic Party.
Sound familiar to something happening today right here in America?
December 29th, 2019
Socialism and its sisters communism, collectivism, authoritarianism, mass murder, and tyranny have never proven fun or beneficial for anyone but a chosen tiny handful, who lord it over the unfortunates below. Venezuela is the latest example of what socialism really is, no matter how many college professors tell you how wonderful it is: Violent poverty and no human rights. Socialist Russia and communist China have the worst environmental records and situations, because under socialism, there is no incentive to clean up the environment.
For the occasional Millennial who may accidentally be reading this essay, the words written above mean that under socialism, you don’t get to pick your healthcare system (like Obama promised when selling his not-free-for-all centralized healthcare system snake oil), you don’t get to keep your doctor (also like Obama promised), you don’t get to choose your friends (most will be carted off to jail and then disappeared), and you certainly don’t get an iPhone and a five dollar latte, ever. In other words, everything you take for granted right now is stuff you will never ever see in a socialist country.
And so, dear Millennial, you should know that after eight years of Obama’s effort to implement socialism at every level of America, which required him to lie a lot, and after three years of Trump’s fantastic economic revival, I find myself feeling so, so post-socialism.
I say this, even though it puts me at odds with a fad that has recently emerged on the left, where people loudly proclaim they are “post-capitalism.” While they simultaneously and shamelessly use capitalist medicine, drive capitalist cars, wear capitalist clothing, live in capitalist buildings, drink capitalist five dollar lattes, endlessly text on capitalist smart phones, and eat capitalist food.
So OK, aside from the clean abundant food, the best medicine, the nicest buildings, the clean water, the clean air, the clean environment, the fuel efficient vehicles, and the best clothing, yeah, I guess capitalism sucks…like that old Winston Churchill line that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others…or like that scene from The Life of Brian, where Monty Python’s cast members recite a litany of popular improvements the Romans brought to Judea…”but what have the Romans ever done for us?”
The fact is, capitalism creates the best situation for the most people out of all the alternative forms of government (free choice). Capitalism has its weaknesses, but compared to all the alternatives, it is the best arrangement. We have seen this proven over and over. And it is proven by the fact that none zero nada of the “post capitalism” advocates are actually living socialist lives.
And that is why this bizarre “post-capitalism” posturing and virtue signaling has always mystified me; you know, the Che Guevara tee shirt wearers using their parents’ credit cards to pay for everyday things that no socialist or communist country ever had or ever will have. Or the socialist child climate activist barking at adults about the choices they make, while herself jet-setting around the world using capitalist planes trains automobiles and boats, and leaving a one-week carbon footprint bigger than my entire lifetime will be.
So I am over it, that socialism thing. Too much hypocrisy, too many lies.
Socialism sucked during the Obama administration, and watching newly socialist Venezuela crash and burn now is painful. As we learned during the Obama years, it is not cool or hip to say you are socialist, it is actually very stupid. And if you have a college professor or three who tells you socialism is great, then ask them to prove themselves correct by immediately living the socialist lifestyle. You know, give it all up, practice what you preach. Push come to shove, when those beret-wearing fake educators are put on the spot, you will find that deep down, those Che-lovin’ professors are actually so, so post-socialism, too.
It’s natural to be post socialism, because socialism is naturally bad for you.
Photo of Chinese military summarily executing an unarmed civilian who has not had a fair trial, for some imagined crime that only threatened the power of the state. This is socialism, and you should be post-socialism
In a socialist country, you can earn the death penalty by simply speaking your mind, by disagreeing with the official government positions
Strangely, China makes pretty young women about to die get dressed up before they get on their knees and are shot in the back of the head. Who knows what this unhappy young woman did to earn such a violent death, but we know she had zero due process. Socialism
socialism
same lady who is kneeling in front of the soldier above. Socialism is cool, right? No?
Nice ladies in a socialist country about to be executed on their knees. Is this what young Americans think is just fine? Do you drink $5 lattes and watch your friends get executed for fun?
this is the lady kneeling above and then with her head blown in half, as she is being taken off the truck to her execution. In socialist countries, you can easily earn the death penalty for simply disagreeing with a leader’s opinions. Not in America! So why is America supposed to be turned socialist?
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 20th, 2018
Recently I had the educational opportunity to have lunch with a refugee couple from Venezuela.
For safety reasons their names and location cannot be divulged. If it is any indication how insecure and unsafe America has become, this pair of humble, poor, well educated, fairly young EVIL capitalists (sarcasm) could not take refuge among their fellow countrymen in Florida. Should they be recognized, there are enough Venezuelan government -affiliated henchman there that they could easily be gunned down in what would be seen as a mere robbery.
We listened in shocked awe at the detailed and personal stories they told us of life in Venezuela’s socialist paradise. The absence of food or medical care, the absence of freedom or liberty, the absence of personal security. The absence of personal choice, the complete lack of free speech. The packs of government militia thugs on the prowl everywhere, spreading terror and forced obeisance.
Doors kicked in, people dragged from their homes.
Latin America has a long history of repression, violence, and autocracy. When a capitalist tyrant is in power somewhere there, the American press reports daily on his malfeasance. When a socialist tyrant is in power, there is practically a news blackout.
When I asked the husband what he thought of America so far, he said he liked our freedoms the best.
“Which one do you like the most?,” I asked him.
“Although I have never shot a gun in my life, I like that everyone here has a gun, if they want one,” he said.
Continuing in his halting, broken English, he said “When the new, illegitimate government [Maduro] wanted to really control the population, they rounded up every private gun they could find. As a result, the Venezuelan people were unable to fight back.”
Looking at me across the table, he said almost shyly, quietly, “Do not give up your guns.”
April 17th, 2018
Today is “Tax Day,” if such a thing could or should be celebrated or even noted among civilized peoples.
It is like marking “Oppressive and Scary Invasive Big Government Day” on your calendar.
Historically, tax collection involved brute force, some raping and pillaging to convey a sense of inevitability. A ‘heavy hand’ at best, done by the most powerful at the expense of the least powerful.
Historically, poor peasants hid what they could from tax collectors, who treated the poor working people and small landholders as a host body on which to parasitize, slowly sucking out the life force. Like a vampire, concentrating vast wealth collected from a large number of people into the hands of a very small number of people.
Historically the extracted wealth was concentrated in the hands of nobles, monarchs, empires.
In more modern times Socialists stole private wealth by revolution or through bureaucratic means, and repurposed it in the name of “income redistribution.” But somehow socialism always involves keeping the Socialists in complete power, too. Over the peasants, once again. Cuba, Soviet Russia, China, and now Venezuela…all totalitarian, authoritarian, unfair, failed. And Socialist.
By its very nature, humans in centralized authority always crave more money, because money translates into soldiers with weapons and thus, more power, more control over other people.
Centralized government always craves more money, even in a democracy or republic, because money translates into more bureaucratic and enforcement power. People in centralized government get to make decisions for everyone else. It’s an ego trip. Rarely does all that bureaucracy actually become tangible services to the actual taxpayers at the ground level, where people live their daily lives.
Consider America.
America was originally created as a confederation of autonomous states, obligated to one another through the concept of ‘full faith and credit’, where the licenses and official bureaucracies of each state would be accepted by all the others. As equals, though different from one another, slightly unified through a weak central government. If you didn’t like the way one state ran things, you could move to another state. Rarely did you, the citizen, encounter the central government.
When the issue of slave states and free states arose in 1794, the states nearly went to war against one another, and finally did so in 1860.
Today a lot of urban Americans are unabashedly rethinking a great deal of what it means to live in America. Even things that have been settled since the nation’s founding, like basic freedoms. In much of their thinking, states are no longer autonomous, but are rather vassals to or withered appendages of the central government in Washington, DC. Citizens are no longer free to make their own decisions, and smarter, better-educated technocrats with the best of intentions will make those decisions for them.
Some of this urban rethinking of what it means to be an American is pretty radical stuff, and all of it involves a much stronger centralized government. The kind of centralized government that can quickly and authoritatively reach deep into the personal lives of all citizens, and threaten them with severe punishment for not following the new rules which the urbanites envision.
For example, these largely urban Americans now openly want to criminalize the otherwise peaceful ownership of basic firearms (AR15s, and semiauto shotguns and rifles), and clamp very tight controls on the ownership of all the other firearms they would allow (bolt, pump, lever actions, even single shots). They look at the Second Amendment to the US Constitution and simply scoff. They themselves do not want to own or use these damned guns, so why would anyone else?
Turn them in, or else!
Another largely urban idea is the notion of human-caused global climate change (begun as the former global cooling, then global warming, now global climate change). It is premised on the otherwise very real fact that humans have previously and continue even now to seriously degrade the natural environment that sustains us.
But a bunch of urbanites and false academics want to criminalize and severely punish the non-belief in human-caused climate change, a well-deserved rejection of heavily politicized climate change “science.” Despite the fact that these urbanites have a greater and less sustainable impact on the natural environment than rural landowners.
That all these crushing new rules and laws are not directly connected to crime reduction or pollution reduction is an indication of how radical these ideas are, how radical the urbanites have become. There is no direct link between one thing and the other, no cause-and-effect result, but they want it nonetheless.
These proposed laws and rules are about bureaucratic control, that is all. No pretenses are made at amending the Constitution to achieve these changes.
Rather, these changes to constitutional rights would simply be done by legislative power grab or even worse, by executive fiat, which the Obama administration began experimenting with.
Their best argument is that “times change and we all need to change with it,” i.e. certain guns do not fit these modern times and therefore must go away. But the time-honored established process for legitimately implementing that change is not suggested by the advocates of change.
Historically, huge swings in American law and custom were mostly associated with major improvements in lifestyle. For example, the 13th (ratified 1865), 14th (1868), and 15th (1870) Amendments were all about freeing and then protecting the African slaves.
After the 15th Amendment, for another 43 years America did not ratify another constitutional amendment, probably because the changes in rights and then law resulting from those three big amendments took a long time to digest politically and culturally.
Four long decades later, in 1913, the 16th Amendment was ratified, giving the US Congress the “power to lay and collect taxes on incomes…” This was a huge change in American politics and culture, as it concentrated tremendous authority, power, and wealth in the hands of a relative few in the nation’s capital.
Today this is known as the Income Tax, and it concentrates tremendous power into the hands of the few, funding everything the central government does, and much more, including returning to some states and foreign allies parts of that collected money. Or funding heavily politicized “research” into “gun crime” and “climate change.”
So here we are 105 years later after the 16th Amendment was ratified, and after such a long time Americans can really legitimately now ask themselves if this way of funding the central government is effective, fair, or consistent with a constitutional republic that puts the freedom, liberty, and happiness of its We The People citizens first and foremost.
In the context of prior constitutional change, 105 years between amendments is a long time, and one could easily argue that America is now overdue for a revisitation to the income tax. Or at least a hearty debate about it.
A flat rate tax is the fairest, most efficient. Why don’t we do it that way?
Plenty of evidence now that the 16th Amendment’s income tax is inefficient and unfair, and worse, that it results in an invasive, un-American GOTCHA! government culture where unaccountable bureaucrats are back to terrorizing the peasants with all kinds of sudden searches, house tossing, life-and-liberty-threatening activity with the power of official coercive force behind them. The IRS was turned into a weapon against conservative groups with which the Obama administration disagreed.
We are back to Medieval times with this kind of official behavior, and it is really not the kind of government that America was founded on or meant to be. Quite the opposite.
You could argue pretty effectively that the Income Tax has not been good for American citizens, and that the 16th Amendment (or the IRS) concentrated too much power in the hands of too few unaccountable central government employees.
The complete failure of the 18th Amendment (ratified 1919, repealed 1933), known as “Prohibition,” which was a complete ban on alcohol, reminds us that America went through a previous round of control-freak exploration around the same time as the 16th Amendment. Very similar to what is being proposed now by today’s modern Prohibitionists, this time against guns and personal freedom. Their “war on drugs,” “war on poverty,” and a zillion other do-gooder laws haven’t worked to eliminate or even reduce crime, so why not go back to holding up the old law-abiding people for better results?
After all, people control is the real goal, as it always has been since time immemorial.
It stands to reason that American citizens would now revisit Tax Day and the 16th Amendment altogether. Consider them for abolishment or replacement, because on the other hand we have a pile of urban Americans demanding that about fifty million fellow citizens be turned into criminals overnight by virtue of simply exercising their Constitutional rights with firearms or freedom of conscience.
I mean, if something so basic and fundamental as personal freedom is being questioned and slated for abolishment, then heck, let’s really open up the process to include subjects and government activity long, long overdue for review, like tax collection. One should naturally follow the other.
March 25th, 2018
Yes, today’s slavery is the long-going slavery of Africa, where after a thousand years of continuous slaving, both Africans and Arabs still enslave weaker Africans and sell them or use them as slaves. The contraband diamond pits of west Africa are where many African slaves are sent nowadays, even as small children. Worked unceasingly with little food or shelter, people don’t last long in these roles.
This is occasionally reported in the press, mostly in the English media, which has a commendably long history of abolitionist fervor.
Yes, it is also the “white” slavery of Asia, Europe, and America, where every-day people down on their luck disappear from streets, bars, and hotels. Some are already prostitutes, largely separated from their families and friends, and thus already vulnerable to going missing. They are already easy pickings for disappearing and sale abroad. Plenty of white girls from stable middle-income homes are included; “runaways” who are never found.
Many are sold to Asian, Arab, and European oligarchs, who use these slaves for personal pleasure until they are done with their “fun,” and then they discard them like a broken toy. The discard is usually some sadistic and gruesome ending.
Plenty of Chinese and Latin American people are being shipped over into America as slaves, too, as are Russians and Ukrainians. They have specific destinations, usually factories, where they are promised eventual release for working long days. If you think they are eventually released, don’t kid yourself. Once a human being is enslaved, that’s it. Pretty much only escaping is the happy answer to the question of what next.
A very tiny amount of this is reported in any media, and why this is so, remains a mystery. After all, slavery is slavery is slavery. It is all bad. The Chinese human trafficking does seem to get more media attention, probably because Chinese are considered to be a “minority” in America, and therefore some sort of at-risk population. And we know how the US media like a good victim, real or imagined. It is difficult to understand how an Asian slave is more of a victim than a Caucasian slave from the corn fields of Iowa, but this is how multiculturalism warps people’s views. And no one has a more warped view than a person holding a degree in journalism.
And then there is the new slavery, and it is the worst of all because it is done under the guise of “kindness” or “fairness,” and it has the force of government coercion behind it.
We are talking here about big government socialism making a full-out assault on Western democracies, and an assault on the idea of the free individual, under the guise of fairness and equality, everyone being treated the same.
Of course, the fairness and equality of socialism and Marxism are forced on people, by a big government apparatus. You do not have a choice in the matter. And it is always sold as being done with the best of intentions, even when it turns into a disaster, as have all socialist and Marxist governments.
The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen.
The stronger the government, the weaker the citizen.
Although by modern standards and definitions, citizens are supposed to control their governments, western civilization is now succumbing to a Marxist march that was begun a hundred years ago. But it really picked up steam in the 1970s, when colleges began stacking their decks with avowed Marxists who then indoctrinated the young people coming to them for education. Year after year, young people have gone to college to get an education, and instead have emerged with a seething hatred for everything blocking the Marxist takeover of America: Armed citizens, conservatives, Republicans, businesses, the Constitution.
What is now under way is the aggressive attempt to enslave Americans to a form of government completely alien to how America was founded. A tremendous clash is shaping up, not between Democrats and Republicans, but between about 25% of the population that loves freedom and individual liberty on the one side, and about 20% of the population that believes in forcing Marxism on everyone through big government programs and restrictions on the other hand.
The Democrat Party is, as it always was, the party of slavery. It is the Democrat Party that is the official voice and political force for Marxism through big government, and therefore it is the force of slavery in our day.
Sadly, the Republican Party is not the abolitionist party it was in the 1850s and 1950s. No, today the Republican Party has been largely co-opted by Marxism-lite, with most elected Republicans around America being “moderates” who neither stand up for the citizenry nor for America. These are big government Republicans who have made a business of government, turning government operations into a get-rich scheme. They simply delay the day that Marxist slavery arrives, they do not actively, aggressively oppose it. They are too busy trying to get rich off the citizenry.
And if we kind of follow this line of thinking to its logical conclusion, as the politics are likely to play out, then that makes Justice Neil Gorsuch about the most endangered human being on the planet. And that is because he alone is the deciding vote, for now, blocking the anti-Constitution Marxists on the US Supreme Court from implementing their judicial coup d’etat over America’s citizenry (their stated goal of overriding the Second Amendment and forcefully disarming Americans, through, what else, massive, invasive, personal government coercion, exactly what the Second Amendment was designed to prevent).
Frankly speaking, and yes, it saddens me to observe this, with all of the Democrat street violence aimed at conservatives over the past two years, and with all of Obama’s illegal government spying against his political opponents and attempts to frame them and put them in jail, and with this latest DC march to disarm innocent civilians who have done nothing but live by their Constitution, and with all of the media now siding with the big government Marxist slavers, it is surprising that America has not experienced a wave of political assassinations.
I hope and pray that Justice Gorsuch has adequate security.
December 13th, 2017
Judge Roy Moore has probably lost the special election for the vacant US Senate seat in Alabama by just a couple thousand votes.
What this result means to me, and I think to a lot of others who share my values and way of seeing things, is the following:
- Moore’s big “crime” was to be a conservative Christian Constitutionalist who bucked the bipartisan big government UniParty, and who openly challenged US Senate leader Mitch “The Squish” McConnell.
- Moore’s unwillingness to go along with the GOP’s careful bipartisan management of America’s slow motion death spiral was a direct challenge and affront to the GOP establishment’s grip on power.
- This “crime” made Moore a big target, and all through his tough primary election he faced tens of millions of dollars of negative attack ads by, who else, the GOP establishment, including incredible statements by McConnell (and other Republicans) that he’d prefer a liberal Democrat in that seat over an independent-minded conservative Republican like Moore.
- Once into the general election against super leftist Democrat Doug Jones, lo and behold!, allegations of sexual impropriety suddenly emerge against Moore. From forty years ago. Surprise! By a couple women who had actual details and another five who basically said he asked them to date him. The media specializes in these assassinations against Republicans and conservatives, and it is a now predictable cycle.
The Washington Post made it a cause célèbre to beat Moore, if not outright destroy his character, so the unproven, empty allegations were repeated and repeated and repeated as if they were fact. When people outside the establishment media began to dig into these “allegations,” one woman’s claims immediately failed under scrutiny. Her stated facts and timeline changed constantly, the other people in the story said she was lying, that she never worked in the places she said she worked, and so on. She appeared to be a political shill with an axe to grind or a hankering for media attention.
The one other woman actually sounded credible, but the bottom line was when she and Moore were alone, and he busted a move on her, she declined and he then took her right home. The fact that she was fourteen at the time adds a big Ooh Icky Gross factor to normal people today, but forty years ago she was of the age of consent in Alabama. Hey, I’m a Yankee, so don’t ask me about that. Bottom line for Moore was that he was operating inside the boundaries, not outside. With one woman; not five or seven or nine.
- Moore faced the combined power of both the Democrat and Republican parties, and their collective interest groups. He faced the combined power of the entire establishment media. He had on his side political activist Steve Bannon and some independent-minded conservatives from around America. Against this incredible wave of hate, lies, false vilification, and tens of millions of dollars of negative attack ads, it is amazing that Moore actually came so close to winning.
- The take-away from this election result is that the American People now openly face a bipartisan UniParty that believes in all-powerful big government, increasingly limited individual liberty and freedom, mass illegal immigration and cultural conversion (not cultural assimilation), and the fundamental changing of America from a Constitutional Republic to….some sort of European social democracy.
While the Democrat Party has since Obama’s election openly embraced socialism, communism, and national suicide, the Republican Party has quietly hidden its agenda. Over Obama’s eight year reign of terror, the GOP made all sorts of symbolic gestures, but it never fought him. Moore’s kind of special elections have really tested the GOP, and they have showed their hand: They are Democrat Lite.
For the GOP it is not a question of whether or not America will become a socialist dystopia, but simply when. There is no fight left in the GOP, at least not against socialism and national suicide. Instead, the GOP saves its fight for opposing independents and conservatives who threaten its hold on whatever power it can carve out for itself in its power-sharing arrangement with the Democrats. The GOP party functionaries are like little bureaucrats, ready to move into whatever positions of political and government power are handed to them. The GOP and its functionaries are not patriots, they are not on the side of The People. They are our enemy, not our friend.
- So, for me it means more resolve to stand and fight for America, the America as it was envisioned in 1776 and constituted in 1787. Wherever that takes me. I can also easily say this: If I lived in a state with an open primary, I would become a registered Independent. The Republican Party left me, or rather has kicked me and people like me aside. Duly noted.
