The Historical Roots of Political Correctness thumbnail

The Historical Roots of Political Correctness

By P. Brooks

“The highest art in the world cannot guild socialism. It is impossible to make beautiful, the denial of liberty.” — Auberon Edward William Molyneux Herbert, British writer, theorist, philosopher, and 19th century individualist.


Posted by P. Brooks.

America as a nation, is now dominated by an alien system of beliefs, attitudes and values, become known as Political Correctness (PC). It seeks to impose a uniformity in thought & behavior among all Americans and is therefore totalitarian in nature. It has roots in the ideology of Marxism, which requires a radical inversion of the prevailing traditional culture by Cultural Marxism (CM), in order to achieve a social revolution. Such a social revolution is the kind envisioned by Karl Marx, as an inversion of the social order and commensurate inversion of the power structure.

Social revolution has a long history involving a number of disparate forces, conceivably inspired by Plato’s “Republic”. But it was the French Revolution of 1789 which probably inspired Karl Marx to do what he did in the 19th century. In the 20th century, success of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Russia, sent a wave of optimistic expectation among Marxists in Europe & America believing the new Proletariat world of equality espoused by Karl Marx, was now at hand. Russia, as the first communist nation in the world, would lead revolutionary forces to final victory.

Marxist revolutionaries in Europe could not restrain themselves. They leapt at this opportunity to lead the proletarian workers into a promised new world. There was a Communist ‘Spartacist’ uprising in Berlin, led by Rosa Luxemburg; the creation of a Bavarian ‘Soviet’ in Germany, led by Kurt Eisner and an Hungarian ‘Soviet,’ established by Bella Kun in 1919.

There was great concern Europe might fall, under the banner of Bolshevism.

This sense of impending doom was given vivid life by Trotsky’s Red Army invasion of Poland in 1919, which was expected to begin a triumphant conquest of all Western Europe by Soviet Armed Forces – allied with local communists, according to Lenin’s plan.

However in 1920, Trotsky’s Red Army was defeated by Polish forces at the Battle of The Vistula – and the Spartacist, Bavarian Soviet & Hungarian Soviet moments all failed to gain widespread support of workers and after a brief time, were deposed by opposition forces.  These events created a quandary for Marxist revolutionaries in Europe. Under Marxist economic theory, oppressed workers were supposed to be beneficiaries of a social revolution that would place them on top of the power structure. When revolutionary opportunity presented itself, workers didn’t respond. Marxist revolutionaries did not blame their theory for these failures. They blamed workers. The Marxists resolved their quandary by an analysis focused on the cultural superstructure of society, rather than the economic substructure as Marx had done. Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs contributed most to this, ‘Cultural’ Marxism.

Antonio Gramsci worked for the Communist International in 1923 – 1924, in Moscow & Vienna. He was later imprisoned in one of Mussolini’s jails where he wrote his famous “Prison Notebooks”. Among Marxists, Gramsci is noted for his theory of cultural & ideological hegemony, as the means of class dominance. His view that a new Communist Man must be made, before any political revolution could succeed, led to a focus on efforts of intellectuals in the fields of education & culture, to perform this task. This was to be a long march through society’s institutions – meaning government, judiciary, military, schools and the media. Gramsci concluded, so long as workers had Christian souls, they would not respond to revolutionary appeals. Multiculturalism thus can be seen as a means of breaking the grip of traditional cultural hegemony on American society.

Georg Lukacs, the son of a wealthy Hungarian banker, began his political life as a key Soviet agent of the Communist International. His book “History and Class Consciousness” gained him recognition as the leading Marxist theorist since Karl Marx.

Like Karl Marx, Lukacs’ primary emotion was hatred.

I saw revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution to cultural contradictions of the epoch,” was one of Lukacs’ noxious screeds. In defending Bolshevism, Lukacs proposed, “Such a worldwide overturning of values cannot take place without annihilation of old values and creation of new ones by revolutionaries.”

In 1919, Georg Lukacs became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the Bolshevik Bela Kun Regime in Hungary, where he instigated what became known as ‘Culture Terrorism’. Lukacs launched an explosive sex education program. Special lectures were organized in Hungarian schools and literature printed & distributed to instruct children about free love, the nature of sexual intercourse, the archaic nature of bourgeois family codes, the outdatedness of monogamy and the irrelevance of religion, which deprives man of all pleasures. Children urged to reject & deride paternal authority and the authority of the Church – and to ignore precepts of morality – easily & spontaneously turned into delinquents, with whom only the police could cope. This call to rebellion for Hungarian children, was matched by a call to rebellion for Hungarian women. This was a precursor to what Cultural Marxism would later bring to American schools.

As result of a meeting in 1923, attended by Lukacs & other Marxist intellectuals associated with the Communist Party of Germany, the “Institute of Social Research” was founded at Frankfurt University in Frankfurt, Germany in 1924. This Institute became known as ‘The Frankfurt School’. Its model was the ”Marx Engels Institute” in Moscow. The members of this Institute prepared numerous studies on beliefs, attitudes and the values they assumed led to the rise of German national socialism. These were critical studies combining Marxist analysis with Freudian psychoanalysis.

The sum of these critical studies became known as Frankfurt School Critical Theory.

Frankfurt School Critical Theory was essentially destructive criticism of the main elements of Western culture such as Christianity, capitalism, authority, family, patriarchy, hierarchy, morality, tradition, sexual restraint, loyalty, patriotism, nationalism, heredity, ethnocentrism, convention & conservatism.

Frankfurt School criticisms are reflected in their written works like, “Studies on Authority and the Family”, Erich Fromm’s ”Escape From Freedom” and his ”The Dogma of Christ”, Wilhelm Reich’s ”The Mass Psychology of Fascism” and Theodor Adorno’s “The Authoritarian Personality”, published in 1950.

Frankfurt School Critical Theory encompasses specific sub-theories such as matriarchal theory, androgyny theory, personality theory, prejudice theory, authority theory, family theory, sexuality theory, racial theory, legal theory and literary theory. These various sub-theories are used to induce inversion of the prevailing belief system, so Marxist revolutionaries can engineer a non-violent social revolution. As the Marxist social revolutionaries readily proclaim, their avowed purpose is to destroy the hegemonic white male power structure. This requires the inversion of beliefs of white males, so they feel compelled to relinquish their positions to women & minorities. This reflects the psycho-dynamics of social revolution, that lie at the core of Political Correctness.

The belief in patriarchy is inverted to a belief in matriarchy, in accordance with Frankfurt School matriarchal theory. The belief in distinct gender roles is inverted to belief that gender roles should not exist, in accordance with Frankfurt School androgyny theory. The belief in inherent differences among races is inverted to belief that differences do not exist, in accordance with Frankfurt School racial theory. The belief that heterosexual is the norm is inverted to belief that homosexuality is normal, in accordance with Frankfurt School sexuality theory. Frankfurt School prejudice theory as presented in Theodor Adorno’s “The Authoritarian Personality” had the intended effect of inverting belief about racial discrimination. The belief that racial discrimination was a normal instinctive response to a perceived threat to survival of a race, was inverted to belief that racial discrimination was evidence of social pathology and mental sickness in an individual. This Frankfurt School theory of prejudice was then applied to gender & sexual discrimination in much the same way.

By its very nature, Frankfurt School Critical Theory amounted to a grand scheme for inversion of the intrinsic worth of white heterosexual males, opening an intellectual door to the racial & sexual antagonisms of the Trotskyites, Herbert Marcuse and Betty Friedan. The expressed views of Leon Trotsky, adopted by his ‘Fourth International’, were especially revealing. Trotsky had denounced prejudiced white workers in scathing, bitter terms.  He asserted that due to oppression, Negroes could become the most revolutionary element of the population – and furnish the vanguard of the revolution. Trotsky demanded white workers assist blacks in this revolution.

Most young student leaders of the 1960’s counterculture revolution, to a large extent, followed dictates of Leon Trotsky, attempting to elevate black revolutionaries to positions of leadership. Since the counterculture revolution of the 1960’s was an attempt to invert prevailing culture – as its very description implies – acceptance of an inversion of white & black roles seemed logical to student revolutionaries.  These radical Marxists likewise followed Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School – who became the admired philosopher on 1960’s campuses at American colleges & universities, with his advocacy of women’s & black revolutions.

As a Marxist revolutionary alumnus of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse became a key practitioner of revolutionary theory in America. In 1947, he argued for a Soviet style republic and welcomed anarchy, disintegration & catastrophe, to bring about revolutionary change. Marcuse preached the “Great Refusal”, sexual liberation and the merits of feminist & black revolutions. His primary thesis was that revolutionaries like university students, ghetto blacks, the alienated, the asocial, and the Third World, could take the place of the Proletariat. In his book, “An Essay On Liberation”, Herbert Marcuse proclaimed his aims of a radical transvaluation of values; the relaxation of taboos; cultural subversion; critical theory and a linguistic rebellion amounting to a methodical reversal of meaning. As for racial conflict, Marcuse echoed, ‘it is true that the white man is guilty and that the black population appears the most natural force of rebellion’. The similarity to Leon Trotsky’s mindset should be noted.

Another important revolutionary contributor to Political Correctness was Betty Friedan, who promoted the modern feminist movement in America & Canada with her book ”The Feminine Mystique”. In that book, she claimed the feminist movement was sex role revolution. This sex role inversion did indeed eventually take the form of the extreme demand for female combat soldiers & female fighter pilots, which was duly complied with by new American males. In her book, Betty Friedan devoted almost a full chapter to Abraham Maslow’s theory of self-actualization.

Abraham Maslow was a social psychologist, who in his early years, did research on female dominance and sexuality. Maslow was a friend of Herbert Marcuse at Brandeis University and had met with Erich Fromm in 1936. Maslow was so impressed by Fromm’s Frankfurt School ideology he wrote an article entitled, “The Authoritarian Character Structure”, published in 1944. This piece reflected the personality theory of Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Maslow was likewise impressed with Wilhelm Reich, another Frankfurt Schooler & originator of personality theory – which became integral to Marxist ideology in America.

The significance of the historical roots of Political Correctness cannot be fully comprehended unless Betty Friedan’s sex-role revolution is viewed for what it really is – a manifestation of a social revolutionary process begun by Karl Marx himself. Friedan’s reliance on Abraham Maslow’s reflection of Frankfurt School Marxist ideology is but one indicator.  The very idea of her sex role inversion corresponds with Georg Lukacs’ annihilation of old values & creation of new ones by Marxist revolutionaries and Herbert Marcuse’s radical transvaluation of all values. But the idea of transforming a patriarchy into a matriarchy – which is what a sex role inversion is designed to do – can be connected directly to Frederick Engel’s book, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”, published in 1884, which popularized a currently adopted feminist belief that deep-rooted discrimination against an oppressed female sex was a function of patriarchy.

Belief that matriarchy is the solution to patriarchy flows from Karl Marx’s comments in his ’The German Ideology” of 1845. In that document Marx advanced the theory that wives & children were the first property of patriarchal males, which Engels elaborated upon in his book, from notes by Marx. The Frankfurt School’s matriarchal theory and its related androgyny theory both originated from these sources. So there is historical consistency to this sex aspect of the Marxist social revolution. There is another historical consistency to the racial aspect of Marxist social revolution. Karl Marx had a revolutionary friend named Moses Hess, who introduced him to communism. In 1865, Hess wrote a dictum in his book, ”Rome and Jerusalem” that race struggle was primary. This could be seen as the inspiration of the Frankfurt School’s prejudice theory, as well as the attitudes of Leon Trotsky & Herbert Marcuse on the race subject.

There is further historical consistency to Marxist social revolution related to the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory as destructive criticism. In his 1844 war plan against the Prussian State, Karl Marx was more blunt about his use of ruthless criticism. Criticism was a weapon to destroy. He intended to destroy the bourgeois middle class in class warfare. Under Marx’s formula, the middle class Bourgeoisie would become the oppressing class, in which evils of society would be concentrated – and thus regarded as the notorious center of crime for the whole society. The middle class would be criminalized. This was the initial part of Karl Marx’s social revolutionary process leading to middle class disintegration. Later similarity to Herbert Marcuse’s use of the term ‘disintegration’ should be observed. In 1969, Marcuse wrote in “The Carnivorous Society”, What we must undertake is a type of diffuse and dispersed disintegration of the system.

It happens the Frankfurt School’s book, ”The Authoritarian Personality” authored by Theodor Adorno, et al, edited by Max Horkheimer & published in 1950, was a seminal event, because of its substantial impact on American social psychologists & social scientists of the day. It was one of a series of books entitled, “Studies on Prejudice”. Adorno’s premise evolved from a simplified formula developed by the Frankfurt School in Europe. Christianity plus capitalism, plus patriarchal authoritarian family, created a character prone to racial prejudice & German fascism. After the Frankfurt School group of social revolutionaries came to America in the mid-1930’s, they looked around and observed an America that was Christian, capitalist and with patriarchal families – so they sensed potential for authoritarian regime, as had came about in the Hitlerian Germany they left. As a result, ”The Authoritarian Personality” came to serve as an ideological handbook for a national campaign against any kind of prejudice or discrimination, on the theory that if these evils were not eradicated, another Holocaust might ensue. Political Correctness evolved from that milieu.

What had begun with the founding of the Frankfurt School in 1924, as destructive criticism of the elements of Western culture, had ended in “The Authoritarian Personality”, as a psychological method for pathologizing any evidence of religious, cultural or racial superiority, in the thinking & behavior among an American majority. No single religion was to be superior. No single culture was to be superior. No single race was to be superior. So multiculturalism was invented. And then no single sex was to be superior. And with nothing superior, there was nothing to value. It was to be a matter of choice by the individual self, since there was to be no higher authority than self. This is the very essence of Political Correctness. It serves as the means to conduct the psychic decapitation of any potential leader who might seek to unify Americans, on the basis of a shared religion, culture or race. Americans were to be kept fragmented by this radical individualism & subjected to a national condition of cognitive dissonance – meaning massive confusion over beliefs & values.

Then America could be treated as one vast psychopathic ward – and controlled accordingly.

The method selected by Marxist social revolutionaries to control the American people is rather simple. It is the use of dialectical stages of operant conditioning words. Only instead of the bourgeois middle class being made to bear the brunt of all society’s ills and merit the criminalization of that class – as Karl Marx proposed – the modern Cultural Marxists have substituted white heterosexual males as the class to be criminalized, with charges of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia or xenophobia, as given particular circumstances require. They have manipulated the federal government itself into passing laws & regulations against discrimination, to keep white males in their ‘psychic iron cage’, where they fear to challenge what is being done to the American nation. Then Hate Crimes were added to this cultural terrorism, to keep white males in their place. This was an inversion of reality, since those originating the charge of Hate Crimes were the ones actually guilty of attempting to destroy the white male power structure.

This is what Frankfurt School Critical Theory is all about inversion.

A review of the historical roots of Political Correctness would not be complete without reference to the psychological process of dialectic stages of operant conditioning, by words directed against the larger body of Western Man generally, before Frankfurt School Critical Theory came to be used against American white males. For more than a hundred years, Marxist social revolutionaries have leveled criminal-like charges of imperialism, colonialism, militarism, chauvinism, feudalism as well as fascism and Nazism in later years against Western Man. These words are still part of the Marxist vocabulary. But they were used only in the first dialectic stage. What has been happening in America is the second stage. First stage was designed to destroy the whole Western structure of power, which in earlier times dominated the world. Now in America, the process is the same, except social revolution in America is just part of this larger global picture.

The visible evidence Political Correctness reigns supreme over the American landscape is not a nice sight to behold, in the eyes of traditional Americans. For all practical purposes, the social revolution promoted by Marxists of the Frankfurt School and others like Leon Trotsky, Herbert Marcuse & Betty Friedan, has been successfully executed in America. There is virtually no sphere of American life left untouched. The revolutionary inversions of the prevailing belief system – as a result of Frankfurt School Critical Theory – has had the effect of preparing Americans for an ongoing & steadily increasing displacement of white males, by women & minorities in government, judicial, military, education & informational structures of society, as the Marxist revolutionaries intended. For example, at the 1996 Democratic National Convention, fifty percent of delegates were women. The Republican National Convention was not much better in its pandering. There was loud cheers when the first woman was appointed Secretary of State in 1997. Before that, the President’s cabinet consisted of just four Euro-white males – out of fourteen cabinet posts. The remainder were women & minorities. Herbert Marcuse should be proud, for there were no complaints. So would deceased Antonio Gramsci – especially if he knew about the ordination of women in churches and the gender-neutering & demasculation of prayer books and other texts in synagogues. This leads to expanding sexual madness in the land, brought on by Frankfurt School Critical Theory, which became transposed into our present bane of Political Correctness.

Originally published by the Free Congress Foundation, Number 44, June 1997

AUTHOR

Raymond V. Raehn

Raymond V. Raehn holds an M.A. degree in International Affairs from The George Washington University and is a graduate of the U.S. Naval War College. He flew Navy fighter planes during World War II and became the Commander of a fighter squadron some years later. After serving on the staff of the Chief of Naval Operation, he retired to head a real estate development company. In 1981, he founded the United States Global Strategy Council and served as its president as an advocate of a comprehensive U.S. national security strategy which became law in 1986. He operates a family cattle ranch in South Texas.

©Raymond V. Raehn. All rights reserved. This column is republished with permission.

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The Boast in the Machine

By The Daily Skirmish – Liberato.US

Voting machines caused chaos in Maricopa County, Arizona on Election Day:

“Maricopa County was absolutely insane,” [a voter] said. “I mean, I woke up to messages everywhere about, you know, this polling location is closed, people are in line, they’re kicking them out, this polling location is closed, whatever.”

We “got in line, I got my ballot, filled it out, went to the machines, and it was rejected,” she continued. “Then they said, ‘Go over to the other machine,’ it was rejected…. And finally, after about 10 times, we spoiled it….  And finally, my third ballot and about, you know, five or six times they finally accepted it…. And that was happening all around me.

The problems affected 70 vote centers in the county, seven percent of all in-person votes cast there on Election Day.  Most of them still had not been counted a week later.

An election judge in a Republican area in the county believes the problems were intentional.  The tabulators were set up for 19-inch ballots, but the ballots were 20 inches and rejected.

I wish I could tell you these were the only problems with machines in this year’s elections, but there were lots more.

Twenty-five thousand votes for a third-party candidate for U.S. Senate in New York disappeared overnight.  This has not been explained, as far as I’m aware.  Also in New York, identical election results were reported across multiple counties, with Democrats winning every time.  How does that happen?

Voting machines went out of service in New Jersey and Texas.

Security features were found to be turned off in several voting machines in Georgia.  This was discovered when a fraudulent ballot printed on looseleaf paper turned up.  The machines are supposed to detect when the paper does not meet requirements.  So who turned off the security features and why?

A Democrat in Colorado was arrested for inserting a USB flash drive into a voting machine during a primary election in June.  This is one way to get a machine to flip votes.

We keep hearing that voting machines don’t connect to the Internet and, thus, results can’t be tampered with from the outside, but the Colorado Secretary of State admitted in writing Dominion machines have Wi-Fi connectivity.

An audit in New Mexico last month found a 25 percent difference between machine counts and hand counts in a primary election.

In a Virginia county, it was found the number of votes recorded by scanners was different from the number of paper ballots dropping down into the box below.  How does that happen?

None of this inspires confidence, especially when you hear things like Barack Obama saying in 2008 “I tell you what, it helps in Ohio that we got Democrats in charge of the machines.”   Or a Dominion voting system executive caught on video explaining to election officials in 2020 how to use the machines to alter election results.  Or the director of an electronic voting system company admitting that an entire election in Venezuela was stolen when a million votes were flipped in 2017.

No wonder some people want to get rid of the machines entirely and count paper ballots by hand again, like in France which doesn’t seem to have any trouble getting it done the same day.  Short of that, machine certification standards could be tightened, elections officials could do a better job of selecting equipment that actually meets specifications, and machines could be tested more rigorously before elections.  Whatever the solution, it’s clear the present state of affairs causes distrust in our elections and is, therefore, untenable.

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

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RELATED ARTICLE: Biden’s Massive Case of ‘Election Interference’ Struck Down by Federal Appeals Court

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COVID-shot Echoes: I Had a Most Odd Experience Saturday

By Selwyn Duke

In “My troubling COVID vaccine story experiences,” I wrote last year about how within a short period of time I met three men at the same recreational area who announced to me they’d had heart attacks. All three had previously taken the coronavirus genetic-therapy agents (GTAs, aka “vaccines”). Add the friend who suffered heart inflammation and the neighbor of mine who had an adverse reaction after having the shots, and it was quite a series of “anomalies.” I’ve had another similar experience now, too.

While in a supermarket checkout line Saturday, I got to talking to the fellow behind me, who was holding a pair of floral bouquets. He’d bought them for two different funerals. One was for his brother, who’d died of a heart attack — at age 24. The other was for a friend’s son who’d passed away. I asked him how old was the son was.

“He was in first grade,” the man replied.

“What happened to him?” I then queried. The fellow said he didn’t know, that the boy was found “dead in bed”; he’d died in his sleep.

Having studied COVID since the “pandemic’s” beginning and the GTAs’ secondary effects since the drugs’ introduction, you can probably guess what immediately occurred to me. But the man was glassy-eyed and obviously grieving, and I felt it would’ve been inappropriate to inquire about the departed’s GTA status, so I didn’t. But I wouldn’t want to bet they hadn’t had the shots.

Naysayers will claim I’m jumping to conclusions, but here’s the point: I’m well into middle age (very well!), and I’d never before had so many odd experiences such as those outlined above. What’s more, my anecdotal experiences accord with data showing there has been an enormous amount of increased mortality since the GTAs’ introduction.

Flashback: Just consider the December 30, 2021 testimonial of Scott Davison, CEO of insurance company OneAmerica, who spoke of a spike in mortality his industry was seeing that was worse than that associated with a one-in-200-year catastrophe. Bear in mind when reading the below that Davison wasn’t making any political point when delivering his information; in fact, there’s no indication that he’s even an ideologue. As The Center Square wrote January 1:

OneAmerica is a $100 billion insurance company that has had its headquarters in Indianapolis since 1877. The company has approximately 2,400 employees and sells life insurance, including group life insurance to employers in the state.

Davison said the increase in deaths represents “huge, huge numbers,” and that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying, but “primarily working-age people 18 to 64” who are the employees of companies that have group life insurance plans through OneAmerica.

“And what we saw just in third quarter, we’re seeing it continue into fourth quarter, is that death rates are up 40% over what they were pre-pandemic,” he said.

“Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic,” he said. “So 40% is just unheard of.”

Davison was one of several business leaders who spoke during the virtual news conference on Dec. 30 that was organized by the Indiana Chamber of Commerce.

Most of the claims for deaths being filed are not classified as COVID-19 deaths, Davison said.

“What the data is showing to us is that the deaths that are being reported as COVID deaths greatly understate the actual death losses among working-age people from the pandemic. It may not all be COVID on their death certificate, but deaths are up just huge, huge numbers.”

Now, note that that this “third quarter,” 2021 age-18-to-64 death increase generally coincides with when the GTAs were pushed on people under 65.

It was once vanishingly rare to hear about a young 20-something dying of a coronary or an apparently healthy seven-year-old passing away in his sleep. But such incidents occur with regularity now (related example here).

Unfortunately, establishment institutions have no interest in investigating this mortality, not any more than mainstream media have a desire to cover it. Too many powerful people are implicated. After all, it isn’t just Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of our time’s true villains, who has dirty hands. Politicians, bureaucrats, media figures and other influential figures all conspired to strong-arm Americans into taking the GTAs while censoring, demeaning and canceling those who dared dispute their narrative. The hole they’re in is so deep, all they can do is keep digging and wait for this all to “go away.”

My only hope is that a nation with a less compromised medical establishment (perhaps Sweden or Japan?) will investigate and expose the truth about the GTAs. Regardless, there’s a reason why Rabbi Hillel Handler, Hagar Schafrir and other Holocaust survivors labeled the mass GTA inoculation scheme a “Holocaust” last year and, along with other figures, have called for the Nuremberg Code’s application: The worldwide GTA push may thus far be the crime of the century.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on MeWe, Gettr or Parler, or log on to SelwynDuke.com

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A Way Forward for Public Policy and Marriage in the U.S.

By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

Creating a healthy marriage culture is not a job for governments alone. 


This is a lightly edited excerpt from the Witherspoon Institute’s recently published book, Marriage and the Public Good: Ten Principles (Second Edition).


When it comes to family life, the great paradox of our time is this: every society that we think of as generally best for human flourishing—stable, democratic, developed, and free—is experiencing a radical crisis around human generativity. Family fragmentation and fatherlessness are increasing enormously, usually coupled with the collapse of fertility to levels that, if continued, spell demographic and social decline. Suddenly, developed nations are finding themselves unable to accomplish the great, simple task of every human society: bringing young men and women together to marry and raise the next generation together.

With legalized same-sex marriage and historically low marriage and fertility rates, the United States has accelerated its own descent into this state of affairs. For the first time in our nation’s history, older people are projected to outnumber children by the year 2030. In the face of decline, however, we are witnessing a “marriage movement” and pockets of reasoned resistance. The great task for America in our generation is to energize a return to and renewal of traditional marriage. We need to transmit a stronger, healthier, and more supportive marriage culture to the next generation, so that each year more children are raised by their own mother and father united by a loving marriage, so that they can grow up to have thriving marriages themselves.

Our task is a daunting one. Creating such a marriage culture is not a job for the government. Families, religious communities, and civic institutions must point the way. But law and public policy are also teachers; they will either reinforce and support these goals or undermine them. We call upon our nation’s leaders and our fellow citizens to support public policies that strengthen traditional marriage as a social institution. This nation must reestablish the normative understanding of marriage as the union—intended for life—of a man and a woman, who welcome and raise together any children who are the fruit of their self-giving love, extending the family tree into a flourishing grove where other citizens can rest in its shade.

In particular, we advocate the following eight actions toward undergirding and strengthening marriage:

1. Maintain the legal distinction between married and cohabiting couples.

Powerful intellectual institutions in family law, including the American Law Institute, have proposed that America follow the path of many European nations and Canada in erasing the legal distinction between marriage and cohabitation. But since such a shift in law would create further harm by sending a false message to the next generation that marriage itself is irrelevant or secondary, we encourage our legislators to refuse to extend legal marital status to cohabiting couples. We believe it is unjust as well as unwise to either impose marital obligations on people who have not consented to them or extend marital benefits to couples who have not promised marital responsibilities.

2. Investigate divorce-law reforms.

Under America’s current divorce system, courts today provide less protection for the marriage contract than they do for an ordinary business contract. We believe that the current system is a failure in both practical and moral terms, and deeply in need of reform. We call for renewed efforts to discover ways in which laws can strengthen marriage and reduce unnecessarily high rates of divorce. We affirm that protecting Americans from domestic violence and abuse is a critically important goal. But because both children and adults in nonmarital unions are at vastly increased risk for both, encouraging high rates of family fragmentation is not a good strategy for protecting them. Proposals we consider worthy of more consideration include the following:

Extend waiting periods for unilateral no-fault divorce. Require couples in nonviolent marriages to attend (religious, secular, or public) counseling designed to resolve their differences and renew their marital vows.

Permit the creation of prenuptial covenants that restrict divorce for couples who seek more extensive marriage commitments than current laws allow. (The enforcement by secular courts of Orthodox Jewish marriage contracts may provide a useful model, as well as Louisiana’s “Covenant Marriage” option.)

Expand court-connected divorce-education programs to include divorce interventions (such as PAIRS or Retrouvaille) that help facilitate reconciliations as well as reduce acrimony and litigation.

Apply standards of fault to the distribution of property, where consistent with the best interests of children. Spouses who are abusive or unfaithful should not share marital property equally with innocent spouses. The laments of spouses whose mate has left them against their will—especially in order to form a new union—ought to be heard and considered.

Create pilot programs on marriage education and divorce interventions in high-risk communities, using both faith-based and secular programs. Track program effectiveness to establish “best practices” that could be replicated elsewhere.

3. End marriage penalties for low-income Americans.

To address the growing racial and class divisions in marriage, federal and state governments ought to act quickly to eliminate the marriage penalties embedded in means-tested welfare and tax policies—such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Medicaid—that affect couples with low and moderate incomes. A recent study found that where there was an anticipated loss of income-tax credit due to a marriage penalty, lower-income women were less likely to marry and more likely to cohabit; thus, financial disincentives are potentially affecting the marriage decisions of millions of low-income women. It is unconscionable that government levies substantial financial penalties on low-income parents who marry. Other approaches to strengthening marriage for couples and communities at risk include public information campaigns, marriage education programs, and jobs programs for low-income couples who wish to get and stay married. Experimenting with such new initiatives allows scholars to determine which measures are best suited to the task at hand.

4. Protect and expand pro-child and pro-family provisions in our tax code.

The tax code ought to privilege institutions that stabilize society and help those making sacrifices to ensure the next generation.

5. Protect the interests of children against a powerful fertility industry.

Treating the making of babies as a business like any other is fundamentally inconsistent with the dignity of human persons and the human rights of children. At the very least, we urge our legislators to consider restricting reproductive technologies to married couples. In addition, we believe the following proposals are worthy of further investigation:

Ban the use of anonymous sperm and egg donation for all adults. Children have a right to know their biological origins. Adults have no right to strip children of this knowledge to satisfy their own desires for a family. Countries such as the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, New Zealand, and the UK all have banned this practice to protect the identity rights of donor-conceived children.

Ban all surrogacy. Some countries, such as Thailand and India, have banned commercial surrogacy; others, such as Nepal and Sweden, have banned all surrogacy. The European Parliament has condemned surrogacy as “reproductive exploitation” that “undermines the human dignity” of women, particularly “vulnerable women in developing countries.” Surrogacy also commodifies the children being carried, subjects them to increased health risks, and disregards their rights by prioritizing adult desire over a child’s best interests.

Refuse to create legally fatherless children. Require men who are sperm donors (or the clinics that trade in gametes) to retain legal and financial responsibility for any children they create who lack a legal father. The most important forces underwriting the current United States fertility industry are not technological; they are social and legal. Both law and culture have stressed the interests of adults to the exclusion of the needs of children. Parents seeking children deserve our sympathy and support. But we ought not, in offering this, deliberately create an entire class of children deprived of their natural human right to know their own origins and to experience the unique love of both a mother and a father.

6. Protect the freedom to live out and express belief in the uniqueness of traditional marriage without fear of government coercion and institutional hostility.  

Instances of intolerance for individuals who hold a traditional view of marriage grow more numerous by the day and are increasingly accompanied by legal efforts to compel either violations of individual conscience or religious beliefs. For instance, faith-based adoption and foster-care providers have been forced to compromise their belief that placing children in homes with a mother and a father is in the best interest of the child—or to cease offering services entirely, leaving vulnerable children in need. In a similar way, sexual orientation and gender identity nondiscrimination laws are often used by their backers as a sword “to punish the wicked,” as multimillionaire activist Tim Gill refers to his goals for such laws. We can only interpret this kind of language to indicate an intention to silence and stamp out dissent, violating legitimate individual and religious liberty.

7. Protect the freedom to conduct scholarly inquiry and promote dissemination of accurate research findings on marriage and related topics.

In tandem with the widespread misrepresentation of research findings both in academia and public media on the subject of marriage, a disturbing trend toward actual suppression of research based on ideological rather than scientific grounds appears to be emerging and altering the playing field in the study of sexuality and gender. For example, in August 2018, Brown University professor Lisa Littman published a study that explored the recent statistical upsurge of adolescent and young-adult gender-dysphoric girls and the possibility of social media and peer influence as a contributing factor. Despite being peer reviewed and found acceptable, the study was immediately denounced online by gender ideology activists, since it suggested that some of the girls could have been influenced by forces outside of themselves. In response to the attacks, Brown University removed the article from its news distribution on the basis that it “could be used to discredit efforts to support transgender youth,” while the journal editors posted a comment of concern and conducted an additional review that ultimately resulted in the publication of a revised version, even though the article’s results were unchanged. A former dean of Harvard Medical School spoke out against the journal’s and Brown’s actions.

8. Restore the public understanding of marriage as uniquely the union of one man with one woman as husband and wife.

In 2015, the Supreme Court redefined marriage and imposed a new legal standard of what marriage means, with some justices erroneously declaring that our historic understanding of marriage as the union of one man and one woman is rooted in animus or ignorance. While these legal mandates won’t be easily reversed, we can seek to restore the public’s understanding of the unique goods of traditional marriage for society. Our best hope in the years ahead is to foster a nonpartisan cultural renewal so that a new generation of legislators and justices will arise to legally reestablish the institution of marriage for the good of all Americans. Families, religious communities, community organizations, and public policymakers must work together toward a great goal: strengthening marriage so that each year more children are raised by their own mother and father in loving, lasting marital unions. The survival of the American experiment depends upon it. And our children deserve nothing less.

This article has been republished from Public Discourse, the journal of the Witherspoon Institute.

AUTHOR

Witherspoon Institute

The Witherspoon Institute, located in Princeton, New Jersey, is an independent center that renews culture by fostering the intellectual and moral formation of students, families, and tomorrow’s leaders. More by Witherspoon Institute

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Election Problem Deniers, Take Note thumbnail

Election Problem Deniers, Take Note

By The Daily Skirmish – Liberato.US

Today, I start a series on problems with our election system.  The election problem deniers will tell you ‘nothing to see here, move along,’ but there’s no shortage of undeniable problems.

Let’s start with stories about courts and government officials who rectified a number of problems in the days and weeks running up to the election.

The Delaware Supreme Court struck down no-fault absentee balloting and same-day voter registration because they violated the state constitution.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court invalidated the use of drop boxes which the state elections commission had instituted without authority.

Elections officials in Pennsylvania were allowing mail-in ballots returned with missing or incorrect dates on the envelope, but the state Supreme Court put a stop to it.

A Virginia judge ordered county election officials to follow state law and assign the main poll workers from different political parties in each precinct.  I’m in touch with activists from all over the country and ‘party parity’, as it is called, remains a problem in many places.

Hmm… I detect a pattern here, so far.  The problems I’ve mentioned came about because Democrats broke the law.  They’re scofflaws.

That means they have a lot in common with people recently charged with voter fraud.  Arizona indicted two people with illegal ballot harvesting last month.  They collected ballots from early voters and put them in a drop box.  That’s illegal in Arizona, but remains a problem in states like Virginia where the practice is legal.  It’s a bad practice.  Ballot harvesters have been known to pay people for votes, as in a ballot harvesting scheme just uncovered in Florida.  Also, nothing prevents fraudsters from stealing mail ballots, say, from apartment building lobbies, filling them out themselves, and dropping them in a ballot box.  There are too many loose ballots floating around before election day to think ballot harvesting is a good idea.  Ballot harvesting is a Democrat idea.  No wonder they don’t want to talk about it, or the unsecured drop boxes that enable ballot harvesting schemes.  The Chester County Pennsylvania elections board settled a lawsuit by agreeing to secure their drop boxes after activist surveillance video showed people dropping multiple ballots into the boxes.  Voters can only put their own ballot into the boxes, not ballots collected from others.  The board agreed to put up cameras and staff the boxes.

Democrats are still trying to hang on to changes made to the electoral process because of COVID, but a state judge ruled New York can no longer use COVID as an excuse for emergency rules and knocked down absentee voting rules that had been expanded during the pandemic.  Fewer loose ballots floating around – sorry, Democrats.

For the Democrats to sustain their phony election denier and voter suppression narratives, they’re going to have to prove that all the courts, law enforcement and elections officials I mentioned here today are election deniers who are trying to suppress the vote.  They’re all part of a vast conspiracy trying to deny people their civil rights. Good luck with that.

The correct analysis is the Democrats caused a bunch of problems, they won’t talk about the problems they themselves created, and they won’t fix them until forced to.  Fine, they’re on notice: the process of fixing our elections has begun and we won’t stop until we are confident we have free and fair elections once again.  Don’t mess with OUR right to vote.

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

Visit The Daily Skirmish and Watch Eagle Headline News – 7:30am ET Weekdays

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It makes no mathematical sense that the GOP State Treasurer just won reelection by 250,000 votes, but none of those voters also felt like voting for Kari Lake.

— James Bradley (@JamesBradleyCA) November 14, 2022

Katie Hobbs has a combined following of 148,000.

Kari Lake has a combined following of 1,100,000

Katie Hobbs was scared to debate, Kari Lake wasn’t.

Tell me again how Katie Hobbs won?

— Isabella Maria DeLuca (@IsabellaMDeLuca) November 14, 2022

Should Trump Run in 2024? thumbnail

Should Trump Run in 2024?

By Michael Charles Master

At his rally in Wilmington in Oct, 2022, Trump told me that he had many things to consider before announcing his candidacy for president in 2024. Should he run?

Many in the GOP establishment are pushing Ron DeSantis only because they want to eliminate Donald Trump. The “elites” do not really want Ron DeSantis in the Oval Office. But they want him to serve their short term purpose of stopping Trump.

GOP establishment prefer a candidate like Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, or Mike Pence because they can be controlled by them. Remember that in 2016, the “elites” wanted the presidential contest to be between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, because either one would be easily controllable. Donald Trump came along and upset their plans, which is why everything that can be done to destroy Trump is being done.

The Republican establishment allowed Democrats to win, to cheat, in the 2022 midterm elections so that they could blame Trump for the losses. McConnell held back funding for many key races that Republicans could have won.

The elections in Florida, Texas, Ohio, Wisconsin, North Carolina, provided results just as the pollsters predicted. Ballots were counted by 10:00 PM in each of those states. Those who were expected to win, won. But why not in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania? Why were the ballots counted immediately in Florida, Texas, Ohio, Wisconsin, North Carolina, but not in those other battle-ground states? Why did it take a week to count ballots in states with less than 5 million votes when France completed an election for 36 million with paper ballots all on one day? No early voting. No mail-in ballots except for those out of the country. No touch machines.

55 races in the house were too close to call on election night. At that time, Reps had won 200 seats while Dems had 180. 55 races were ”too close to call.” Tied. Ballots being counted for 7 days. 7 days! Why? Any reasonable person would believe that a bell shaped curve would happen in which Dems and Reps would split those remaining 55 seats since they were all tied and “too close to call.” Tied. Reps would end up with about 228 and Dems would get 207. Is that what happened? No.

How could Dems have won every Senate seat that was “too close to call?” Every tied seat? How? That is statistically unbelievable.

So why aren’t Republican leadership making a big deal about this? Why aren’t they calling for action?

  1. Because Reps fear being persecuted as “election deniers” as what happened to those who questioned the 2020 election. Election denial is the new demonization of conservatives just as when Democrats labeled them racists, deplorables, homophobes.
  2. Because RINOs, establishment GOP, really want Dems to win so Dems will continue pursuing Trump just as Biden promised in his election integrity speech.
  3. To keep from having to investigate Joe Biden from the Hunter laptop, to investigate 2020 election irregularities, investigate Fuaci, and investigate Pelosi/FBI actions on Jan 6.
  4. To kill the MAGA movement.

The GOP leadership just demonstrated what is most important to them. Power. They sold out their constituency to regain control of the Republican Party from Trump. At what price?

Donald Trump is a marked man because he stood up to the establishment politicians, the deep state, rich oligarchs, and the liberal media cartel.

So what should Trump do about 2024?

Well, Trump must have many personal issues that impact his decision. Only he can evaluate those. So let me just concentrate on these:

  1. If Trump decides to run, then he will win the Republican nomination.
  2. His support in the Republican Party is huge.
  3. The media is gaslighting America with their stories about his demise.
  4. MAGA is the only real alternative to Democrat destruction of American values. McConnell, et al have no answers.
  5. 93% of Trump candidates won in the Republican primary elections.
  6. Trump will win the Republican nomination in 2024 if he wants it.

Now, can Trump win the national election in Nov, 2024?

Democrats have figured out how to cheat. Ballot harvesting, drop boxes, mail-out of ballots, weeks of early voting (50 days in Pennsylvania… 50 days), days of counting ballots, machine manipulations/malfunctions, last minute ballot dumping, violations of state voting laws.

So who can stop Democrats from cheating? Especially since states are responsible for how each one runs its own elections? If Republican leadership will not try to stop the cheating, the irregular voting issues, then who else can? Who will stand up to the bad guys? So far, only Trump has done it.

Is Trump strong enough to continue his war against establishment politicians, RINOs, Democrats, deep state, and the liberal media cartel by himself with his MAGA army?

If he is not, then no other Republican can or will.

©Michael Charles Master. All rights reserved.

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If you want the party to change, the top leadership needs to change as well.

— Ryan Fournier (@RyanAFournier) November 13, 2022

Mitch McConnell is a Democrat.

Period.

— James Bradley (@JamesBradleyCA) November 12, 2022

Stalinism and The KGB’s Mafia/Army in America thumbnail

Stalinism and The KGB’s Mafia/Army in America

By Simona Pipko

Republicans definitely underperformed in the midterm 2022 elections and there is a direct answer why: they are not familiar with the terms of the title. If the terms the KGB’s Mafia/Army and Stalinism are not familiar to you, this is the time to learn them. Tucker Carlson had presented Joseph Stalin to the audience of Fox News, two days before the midterm elections. But it was too little and too late… I am a former Soviet attorney, who adored America and who was reporting to the American people about Stalin and his Soviet Socialism for the last forty years. Yes, I was doing that to warn people to be vigilant, to know the foremost enemy of the American Constitutional Republic and prevent the Dem from implementing Soviet Socialism in America. Alas, it has happened…

I am a child of Stalinism. The Ideology of Stalinism I’ve learned since kindergarten, where Stalin’s portraits were looking at me in every room and where we sang songs about our leader and teacher every day. I loved Stalin maybe even more than I love my Father. In school, beside the general subjects of history, we learn Stalin’s “Short Course” that revised the true historical facts. The major knowledge of Stalinism came in from the Law School, where Marxism/Leninism was my favorite subject. The subject was mandatory in all Colleges and Universities for two first years. In Law Schools it was compulsory for four years. It was the time of Stalinist “Iron Curtain,” which meant the absolute taboo to any publication from the West. I loved Marxism/Leninism, because it was the only topic with the data from the West.

I am speaking my mind now, the mind of a former Soviet attorney with extensive knowledge of Marxism and Stalinist Soviet Socialism, first-hand experience. I have never thought that knowledge of Marxism will help me to become a writer in America. When I immigrated to America, I didn’t know the language. Can you imagine the existence of a former professional speaker without an ability to communicate with people? You can read about it in any of my books. The most crucial event was, however, my knowledge of Marxism in America. Judge for yourself.

The Marxist Theory and Stalinism

Marxist Theory is a social, political, and economic theory originated by Karl Marx that focuses on the struggle between capitalists and the working class. He believed that this conflict would ultimately lead to a revolution in which the working class would overthrow the capitalist class and seize control of the economy. The model was developed by Marx for Western Europe. He precisely indicated that in the Communist Manifesto in his fourth postulate: “Marxist theory was to be limited to industrially developed European countries.”

The Marxist theory had never been realized in practices of industrially developed Europe. The first Socialist Revolution was victorious in 1917 Russia, definitely an agricultural country. The leader of the Russian Socialist Revolution, Vladimir Lenin, to apply the theory to Russia, while knowing that Russia was an agricultural country, wrote the following: “We do not consider the theory of Marx to be a complete, immutable whole. We think on the contrary that this theory has only laid the cornerstone of science, a science which socialists must further develop in all directions if they do not want to let themselves be overtaken by life. We think that, for the Russian socialists, an independent elaboration of the theory is particularly necessary.”

Lenin died in 1924 and the irony of history provided Comrade Stalin with an unlimited power over Russia’s future. Stalin began his “personal elaboration of the Marxist theory” by creating a model of Soviet Socialism. Living under Stalinist Soviet Socialism, the Soviet people called the ideology—Stalinism. Writing almost for forty years now, I dedicated all my books and over a hundred columns to the ideology of Stalinism.

That ideology created a new model of Socialism inextricably intertwined with the variety of the Soviets’ punitive agencies as the custodians of the ideology: the model couldn’t survive without their force. I have described them under the term KGB’s Mafia/Army. Hence, Stalinism and the KGB’s Mafia/Army are an inseparable tandem, their agenda—implementation of Stalinist Soviet Socialism globally, where the KGB’s Mafia/Army is a DOER. Though a smart and knowledgeable man, unfortunately, Mark Levin doesn’t know Stalinism. He doesn’t know Marxism well either and confused millions of Americans by his book American Marxism.

Without this information the Republican Party will be finally crushed in the future. Stalinist “operation disinformation” had been poisoning the American minds for 7-8 decades and the quantity has gradually moved to the quality of superiority. You can read in detail how it was done in my book Socialist Revolution in America, XLIBRIS, 2021. Reading the book you will also learn another term: Socialist Charlatans: the part of the Stalinist “Operation Disinformation.” The GOP leadership still has no idea of that destabilizing force exploited by the Dems against Republicans.

Stalinist “Operation Disinformation”

Stalinist Soviet Socialism corrupts everything it touches. Though American politicians constantly use the words disinformation and misinformation, they still don’t know the source and the KGB’s operational control of them. Stalinist “Operation Disinformation” is a complex political process consisting of a variety of dirty tricks and acts designed by Stalinist Apparatchiks. They have been described by me for decades; Socialist modus operandi: lies, deceit, fabrication, and fraud. The second is Stalinist blame game: “Never admit crime committed, instead accuse your opponent of that exact crime.”  Please, recall the recent seven years and the Dem’s fiasco accusing Trump collusion with Russia. They did it to cover up that exact crime they had committed following Stalinist recommendation.

Another part is Socialist Charlatans. Here is my email to all Republican candidates: “Your opponent is Socialist Charlatan led by the President with dementia. They are implementing Socialism in America. Read my column, it exposes Socialist Charlatans-Apparatchiks and all Obama/Biden’s lies.”

Socialist Charlatans are undermining us in all aspects of our lives every day to help Biden build Socialism. You know George Soros and Bernie Sanders, but America has millions of them, you don’t know. They are the Dem’s candidates for the presidency or for governors. “Andrew Gillum, the Democrat who lost the 2018 Florida governor’s race to Ron DeSantis, surrendered to federal authorities in Tallahassee on Wednesday after he and a close associate were charged with conspiracy and 19 counts of fraud over how they raised and used funds when he was mayor of Tallahassee and a candidate for governor. Mr. Gillum, 42, was also charged with making false statements to the F.B.I.” By Patricia Mazzei, June 22, 2022

We also have very smart and well-informed citizens. In the case of a current very suspicious story with Paul Pelosi, I found a twitter from Rising Serpent: “Isn’t it amazing how the media hasn’t figured out the Jan 6 pipe bomber, the Supreme Court leaker, a single one of Epstein’s clients, the motive of the Las Vegas shooter, but they knew Paul Pelosi’s midnight visitor was MAGA even before both could put their underwear back on?” Incredible! I couldn’t say it better, I have already discussed all those cases knowing the KGB’s Mafia/Army activities. Read my columns about the KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov, he had designed a simultaneous penetration to the American media and American Security Apparatus by his agency. Don’t be surprised by the dysfunctional FBI and CIA today. If you want to know who paralyzed our social media, read about Clinton’s Mafia and George Stephanopoulos in my books.

Biden’s White House: a Headquarter of the KGB’s Mafia/Army

Stalinist Soviet Socialism corrupts everything it touches. It was infiltrating and penetrating all America’s democratic institutions, especially the Democrat Party for many decades. And the doer, the KGB’s Mafia/Army was very successful overturning a Truman’s Party to America’s Socialist Party. America missed a chunk of the 20th century’s history, which was Stalinist Russia and that definitely helped the KGB’s Mafia/Army to succeed.

Joe Biden was appointed by Obama to be a point man for Ukraine in 2013-2014 for a reason: he wanted to continue the ties with Vladimir Putin. Obama got that connection from Bill Clinton and wants to make it a Dem’s legacy. Joe Biden has accomplished his role. Just recall his statement of quid-pro-quo against the investigator dealing with the Hunter case. It was a mutual attempt of Joe and Vladimir to suffocate a democratic Ukraine. That collaboration has never ended and I was writing about those ties in my columns about Hunter’s strange meetings in Ukraine. How could he find a Burisma, which belonged to a pro-Russian owner? Hunter didn’t know the country and its language. The Dem’s legacy brought him to a pro-Russian man-connection. In fact, it is not Hunter’s case, but Joe Biden’s case…

​Biden’s presidency has answered all questions and cleared the issues—it doesn’t like America the Beautiful! Reading my latest columns, you will be stunned by how much you didn’t know and how much the American people have missed. In short: First, Biden’s open borders policy goes hand in glove with Putin’s KGB actions of putting together migrants and unaccompanied children from 180 countries. Second: There are no Mexican Cartels. Those are Russian Cartels with Mexican names run by the KGB’s Mafia/Army. Third: Biden has killed American energy independence, helping Putin to earn billions. Biden’s help to Ukraine is another manipulating game to save the Dem’s leadership for the crimes they had committed…

My opinion about Afghanistan has not changed: The Afghanistan operation has been designed by Vladimir Putin and executed by the KGB’s Mafia/Army from the White House. Yes, the KGB is running the Biden presidency by using his mental state of dementia…  The Democrat Party has deliberately created a breakdown in Law & Order to cover up crimes it had committed…

The future of our country relies and is engaged on informed citizens and especially on our youth. Although the special investigator John Durham’s hands were tied, he was on the right path. Though he was unable to deliver the result of his investigation, I have done it by reporting and writing for the last forty years. It is the real story and the scale of the KGB activities in America in my latest book: What is happening to America? The Hidden Truth of Global Destruction, Part III, published in Oct. 2022.

Wake up America!

www.simonapipko.com  and www.drrichswier.com/author/spipko/

The New Puritans: The Woke Left wants to put all of us on trial thumbnail

The New Puritans: The Woke Left wants to put all of us on trial

By Kenneth R. Timmerman

When was the last time you watched MSNBC or CNN – or any of the broadcast networks? I am not suggesting that one should do this often; but like taking cod’s liver oil or boiled spinach, watching the opposition is an essential ingredient to building character.

Because no matter which of the smug Woke left hosts you happen upon, they are all preaching the same sermon, over and over, so often in fact you would think they would tire of it: we are the virtuous ones, the vigils of Democracy. We are the ones who command history, art, culture. We are America. And themThey are the enemies of democracy.

This is what we have come to. We are no longer a nation divided, but two separate and distinct nations, each with its own culture, its own history, its heroes and villains, its own aspirations, its fears. Even its own language. (Here is Joy Reid telling us that Republicans “taught people the word ‘inflation.’”)

Some have suggested we are witnessing a repeat of the 1960s. But the drug-laden counter-culture of the Strawberry Statement and Abbe Hoffman and the Chicago Seven was quite distinct from today in significant ways. The sixties were about an awakening – an awakening of the mind and a liberation of the body from the shackles of generations of predominantly Anglo-Saxon Puritanism.

Today’s Woke Left are the new Puritans. They do not seek to liberate our minds from habit, or challenge us to innovation, but to enslave us in new doctrines far more rigid than anything earlier generations of Americans could conceive, from redefining biological sex to re-engineering freedom itself.

They have already held dress rehearsals of their Salem Witch Trials: the Mueller hoax, two impeachment fantasies, and the phantasmagoric January 6 inquisition. Now they want to put all of us on trial.

In the 1960s – as today – the media played a key role as a vector of change. Then, it was television bringing the horrors of war out of the shadows and into the living rooms of a nation of women. Before television, twentieth century war was something fought over there, whose gruesome evil was anaesthetized into newsreels and magazine articles that focused on big picture battles, with rare but sanitized glimpses of individual heroes. When the Greatest Generation returned from Europe and the Pacific, they largely nursed their wounds quietly, among themselves.

Vietnam changed all that; indeed, it made war dirty and present and dangerously real. The natural reaction of all but the martial spirits among us to televised war was revulsion – revulsion at our capacity for evil, and fear that we might be called upon to engage in it. Vietnam made cowards of many.

Today it is social media that acts as the enforcer of the new Alinsky-ite norms of behavior, shaming those who dare to defy the Woke Left.

This is why we must pay attention to what they are saying, because they no longer disguise their intentions. They believe they have won the battle for the soul and direction of America, and all that remains is to clean up the bodies left on the field.

According to the president of the United States:

“The MAGA Republicans don’t just threaten our personal rights and economic security. They’re a threat to our very democracy. They refuse to accept the will of the people. They embrace, embrace political violence. They don’t believe in democracy.”

So-called ‘presidential historian’ Michael Beschloss went even further: “We’re on the edge of a brutal authoritarian system.” If Republicans win on Tuesday, “our children will be sentenced to death and put in prison.”

It’s too easy to say that Biden and the others have lost their minds. They believe every word of it. Even a red tsunami on Tuesday will not cure them of their conviction that they alone stand up for truth, and that their opponents are the embodiment of evil.

Because they are convinced they have definitively won the battle for the soul of America, the Woke Left is now treating their political enemies as a vanquished population — to be slowly starved, silenced, and banned from social intercourse.

They are telling this to their supporters every day: they are evil, they are corrupt, they want to destroy America, destroy democracy. 

The Woke Left sees us as players in the Hunger Games. But I believe this over-reach will be their downfall.

I predict they will soon discover that we have our own District 12, our sanctuary cities and free states where the dream of America’s better angels still thrives and Justice still wears her blindfold as she holds the scales. They might not admit to it, but they will know it. They will fear it.

You may even see the truth dawn on them during their election night coverage, as we saw in 2016 once it became clear Donald Trump was going to become president.

Even in defeat, they will not give up. But watch them, listen to them; know them for who they truly are.

They have been waging a (not-so) civil war on the American center-right for decades, and we have rarely fought back.

Now it’s time to take our victories at the ballot box and use them judiciously, cutting off the Woke Left from the levers of power – not just in Congress, but in our culture. And it starts by declaring their project for a socialist America illegitimate, un-American, throwing it out of our schools – and most importantly, defunding it.

©Kenneth R. Timmerman. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: Target Liberty: The Dangerous Stalinism of the “Woke” Hard-Left

EXCLUSIVE: Judge Approves Restraining Order Against Lincoln Project Co-Founder Steve Schmidt thumbnail

EXCLUSIVE: Judge Approves Restraining Order Against Lincoln Project Co-Founder Steve Schmidt

By The Daily Caller

The soon-to-be ex-wife of Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt was granted a temporary restraining order against the political operative, court records obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller show.

Angela Schmidt filed for the restraining order on Aug. 15 in a Summit, Utah, state court, according to a case history of the Schmidts’ divorce. It was modified and granted on Oct. 16, according to the case history, obtained by the Daily Caller. Since the restraining order was granted, Schmidt has repeatedly accused Republican media figures and candidates of acting inappropriately towards women.

Details of the underlying behavior that led to the court issuance of the restraining order are not publicly available. However, under Utah state law, individuals going through divorce and child custody proceedings may request a restraining order with the court. The orders are only granted when the individual taking out the order will face “irreparable harm unless the court issues an order.” Judges are allowed to grant the orders at their own discretion and are not required to alert the subject of the order.

View the case history here:

Schmidt TRO Information-1 by Michael Ginsberg on Scribd

Angela Schmidt did not respond to the Daily Caller’s request for comment on the matter.

The TRO is the latest accusation of Schmidt behaving inappropriately with women. Several news outlets have reported that the longtime operative has berated reporters and campaign staffers. Schmidt drew a rebuke from the Coalition for Women in Journalism in March after he published messages with New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman. Schmidt compared Haberman to former Times reporter and Soviet Union propagandist Walter Duranty, and Haberman accused Schmidt of “menacing” and “harassing” her “on Twitter and on text.”

“The Coalition For Women In Journalism condemns the incident and demands that Steve Schmidt offers an apology, not just for his unprofessional opinion but also for his latest attempt to bully Maggie Haberman on social media. CFWIJ has routinely reported on how quickly social media and digital space can be weaponized against women journalists, and Schmidt’s decision to release private correspondence in order to expose some ‘rot’ appears to be an attempt to do just that,” the organization said in a statement.

Schmidt’s organization, The Lincoln Project, was also a hotbed of harassment and misconduct, according to a report from The 19th. Schmidt reportedly believed that the campaign ad shop was a way to generate “inter-generational wealth,” but the group devolved amid infighting and allegations that cofounder John Weaver sexually harassed young men. Employees frequently referred to women as “girls,” and their enemies as “pussies,” “cocksuckers,” or “faggots,” the report adds.

Schmidt resigned from the board of the Lincoln Project in February 2021.

Steve Schmidt could not be reached for comment at phone numbers publicly listed under his name.

Schmidt turned on the late Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain, whose 2008 presidential campaign he ran. The operative told Politico in May that he did not vote for McCain, believing him “unfit” for office. He called the senator’s daughter, conservative commentator Meghan McCain, “rotten, entitled, spoiled, cruel, mean and bullying,” and favorably contrasted his interactions with her to those between Trump White House officials John Kelly, James Mattis, and HR McMaster and the children of the 45th president.

Currently employed by Democratic Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan’s failed Senate campaign, Schmidt repeatedly accused Republican opponent JD Vance of supporting domestic abuse. Vance said during a speech to a southern California high school that increased levels of divorce stemming from the sexual revolution negatively impact kids.

“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term,’” Vance said, according to Vice News.

Schmidt frequently referenced the reported remarks on Twitter, including after his ex-wife took out the restraining order.

I really think most normal people don’t think women who are beaten should stay married to the men who beat, shoot, stab, burn and torture them. JD Vance  proves this theory. He wants the beaten women to stick around for the next beating. It’s extreme and sick. It’s disqualifyin[g],” Schmidt tweeted on Nov. 4.

I really think most normal people don’t think women who are beaten should stay married to the men who beat, shoot, stab, burn and torture them. @JDVance1 proves this theory.

He wants the beaten women to stick around for the next beating. It’s extreme and sick. It’s disqualifyin https://t.co/OsJZXK24Bf

— Steve Schmidt (@SteveSchmidtSES) November 5, 2022

Schmidt also referenced sexual harassment allegations levied against the late Fox News CEO Roger Ailes and other Republicans.

I used to be smuggled into Fox News for secret meetings with Ailes. Same elevator he abused the women out of,” he claimed on Nov. 2.

Violence against women is a very specific type of crime. It is almost always perpetrated by men, usually a family member,” Schmidt said in a tweet thread about Missouri GOP Senate candidate Eric Greitens.

AUTHOR

MICHAEL GINSBERG

Congressional correspondent.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

5 Counterintuitive Things I Learned Reading Ayn Rand’s ‘The Fountainhead’ thumbnail

5 Counterintuitive Things I Learned Reading Ayn Rand’s ‘The Fountainhead’

By Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

Rand makes some radical claims in the book, but when you think about it, they make a lot of sense.


I recently picked up Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead, and I must say I quite enjoyed it. For those who haven’t read it, The Fountainhead is a story about a young architect named Howard Roark. Roark is a non-conformist who finds himself at odds with the rest of his profession because of his refusal to compromise his artistic expression for the sake of tradition. It goes deeper than that, however. Roark’s self-described worldview is “egotism,” and it’s this selfish, individualistic attitude that the rest of the world can’t seem to stand, save a few of his close friends.

Rand unapologetically uses the story to advance her life philosophy, called Objectivism. Roark is the prototypical hero in this philosophy, though if you read some of the things Roark does, you may bristle at the thought of holding him up as an example to be emulated.

Thinking back on the book, I enjoyed the narrative, but the dialogues are really what made it stand out. They were incredibly clever and sharp, and they really help the reader get to know the characters and their worldviews.

The book also challenged me to rethink a lot of “common sense” ideas people often take for granted. Throughout the story, Rand makes many counterintuitive points that push back against the mainstream view on various topics.

Here’s a selection of some counterintuitive ideas that stood out to me.

1) Our Culture Is Not as Individualistic as We Think

Most people would say we live in a fairly individualistic culture in the West, but Rand would disagree. According to Rand, our society is full of “second-handers,” people who live for and through others.

This theme is introduced early in the book in a dialogue between Roark and Peter Keating, a fellow architect. Keating knows Roark is good at architecture, so he goes to Roark for advice. Roark’s response is illuminating.

“If you want my advice, Peter, you’ve made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work. Don’t you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?”

As we learn through the rest of the story, asking for advice may seem benign, but it often reveals that you don’t have any opinions of your own—you can only live through the opinions of others. And it’s not like these others have their own opinions either. They too are second-handers, reflecting the opinions of everyone around them. It’s “like the senseless infinity you get from two mirrors facing each other across a narrow passage,” Rand writes, “…reflections of reflections and echoes of echoes. No beginning and no end. No center and no purpose.”

The point is that we live in a culture where people are afraid to be original and to have their own ideas. We strive so much to please others, to be the person others want us to be, that in the process we lose our very selves.

Truly being yourself—genuine individualism—is difficult. Because it inevitably means being unpopular, unliked, and constantly criticized. And when you’re criticized, you need to have enough integrity to say, “I disagree with your criticism and refuse to incorporate it. I refuse to be the person others want me to be simply to appease them.” Integrity in this sense is loyalty to your self—to you. Betraying your self to the whims of others is the telltale sin of the second-hander.

Rand expands on the second-hander idea in a later section of the book. “That, precisely, is the deadliness of second-handers,” she writes. “They have no concern for facts, ideas, work. They’re concerned only with people. They don’t ask: ‘Is this true?’ They ask: ‘Is this what others think is true?’ Not to judge, but to repeat. Not to do, but to give the impression of doing. Not creation, but show. Not ability, but friendship. Not merit, but pull.”

People often say two heads are better than one, and there are times when that’s certainly the case. But according to Rand, the “teamwork” mentality is applied far too broadly in our culture, with mediocrity being the predictable result.

There’s a story in The Fountainhead that’s intended to illustrate this point, and it revolves around an architectural project called The March of the Centuries, which is part of an exhibition for the World’s Fair. Eight of the best architects in America were chosen to design the building—collaboratively. It was intended to demonstrate how much better working with others is compared to working alone. Peter Keating was one of the eight collaborators.

The project, however, was a “ghastly flop.” And as usual, every reason except the most obvious one was given for its failure.

A few chapters later, Roark is talking with Peter Keating, trying to make him understand the individualist ethos. In an offhand comment, Roark brings up The March of the Centuries. “Peter, every single one of you on that committee has done better work alone than the eight of you produced collectively. Ask yourself why, sometime.”

I asked myself “why” when I read that, and the answer was self-evident, as Rand intended it to be. The reason the project was a flop is because creation and production are best pursued as individualistic enterprises. One person with a grand vision—someone who can control every detail—is usually the key to achieving excellence. When you lead by committee no one is really in charge; you have to compromise and incorporate everyone’s input. The result is a hodgepodge of half-baked ideas. No single, comprehensive vision can come to fruition. But it is precisely single, comprehensive visions that make a product great.

There’s a reason almost all great art is created by individuals rather than teams.

3) The Imbecile Always Smiles

“Have you noticed that the imbecile always smiles? Man’s first frown is the first touch of God on his forehead. The touch of thought.”

That line instantly clicked the moment I first read it. Many people—“imbeciles” in particular—seem to have a certain unseriousness about them. They spend all their time in bars, at parties, and watching laugh-track TV shows, chasing what basically amounts to cheap thrills. It’s a kind of hedonism, a cavalier approach to life that is frankly rather shallow and trite.

The thing these people all have in common is that smile. That naive, whimsical, childish smile.

What sets apart the mature—in my view and in Rand’s—is the frown of thought and determination. It’s not a renunciation of joy. It’s learning to find a deeper joy, perhaps in applying yourself on a difficult project, or in learning something new, or in appreciating genuinely good art.

Jordan Peterson highlights this dichotomy in his analysis of The Lion King. In the beginning of the movie, Simba is young and immature, and you can see it in his face. But by the end, he has grown into adulthood, he has shouldered responsibility. You can see the change especially in the eyebrows, which point firmly down when someone is concentrating.

4) When It Comes to People, You Often Can Judge a Book by Its Cover

It’s common knowledge that you’re not supposed to judge others by first impressions. You’ve just met them, after all. It’s almost unfair to jump to conclusions about their character and personality when you hardly know them.

Or is it? In one section of the book, Rand makes an interesting point about intuition that challenges this notion that we can’t possibly judge people just by looking at them.

“‘There’s nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we’re not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge. Have you ever thought about the style of a soul, Kiki?’

‘The … what?’

‘The style of a soul. Do you remember the famous philosopher who spoke of the style of a civilization? He called it ‘style.’ He said it was the nearest word he could find for it. He said that every civilization has its one basic principle, one single, supreme, determining conception, and every endeavor of men within that civilization is true, unconsciously and irrevocably, to that one principle. … I think, Kiki, that every human soul has a style of its own, also. Its one basic theme. You’ll see it reflected in every thought, every act, every wish of that person. The one absolute, the one imperative in that living creature. Years of studying a man won’t show it to you. His face will. You’d have to write volumes to describe a person. Think of his face. You need nothing else.’”

In recent years this philosophical speculation has been backed up by some pretty cool scientific research. For instance, in a 2016 paper titled Perceptions of Sexual Orientation From Minimal Cues, psychologist Nicholas Rule summarizes the literature on “gaydar,” the colloquial term for being able to intuit someone’s sexual orientation. “The bulk of scientific evidence suggests that people are sensitive to differences in sexual orientation and can reliably perceive it based on minimal nonverbal cues,” Rule writes.

Many other characteristics can also be reliably predicted from subtle cues, according to a 2013 paper by Rule and coauthor Konstantin Tskhay. “The majority of groups to which we may belong (e.g., professions, religious groups, political parties) are ambiguous, yet research has nonetheless shown that many of these distinctions are perceptible,” they write.

This isn’t to say we should always rush to judgment, of course. We should be open to new information and be willing to revise our initial assessments of people should they prove erroneous. But as Rand, Rule, and Tskhay point out, we often know far more than we think, even if we can’t “unravel the knowledge.” It’s subconscious. I can’t tell you how I know what you’re like. I just know. You betray far more than you realize when you show your face to the world.

5) Man’s Ego is the Fountainhead of Human Progress

The summary of The Fountainhead that appeared on the first edition in 1943 begins with the following line: “An excitingly dramatic novel, this book is based on a challenging belief in the importance of selfishness, on the provocative idea that man’s ego is the fountainhead of human progress.”

In his afterword, Rand’s protégé Leonard Peikoff sheds some more light on the title, which is never directly explained in the book itself. “Ayn Rand’s working title for the novel was Second-Hand Lives,” he explains. “The final title, chosen after the manuscript was completed, changes the emphasis: like the book, it gives primacy not to the villains, but to the creative hero, the man who uses his mind first-handedly and becomes thereby the fountainhead of all achievement.”

The idea that man’s ego is the fountainhead of progress and achievement is the central claim of the book, and perhaps the most radical. But Rand’s explanation of this idea—both through dialogue and narrative—is compelling.

“Before you can do things for people,” Roark says, “you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. The work, not the people. Your own action, not any possible object of your charity. I’ll be glad if people who need it find a better manner of living in a house I designed. But that’s not the motive of my work. Nor my reason. Nor my reward.”

Rand’s point is that productivity and creative achievement only really come from individuals acting in their own self-interest. Paradoxically, the best way to help others is to be, in a sense, selfish.

That probably sounds uncouth, but Rand challenges us to at least wrestle with the idea. Ask yourself, who is the more effective benefactor of the downtrodden? The one who professes love for them but is impotent to help, or the one who acts out of sheer self-interest but—as a result of that self-interest—is actually able to produce something of value?

A Novel for Our Time

Though it was written many decades ago, The Fountainhead has enduring appeal because it speaks to issues that are as relevant today as they were when the novel was first published. The battle between individualism and collectivism in particular rages on, and it shows no signs of slowing down.

This book will challenge many assumptions about morality and what a life well-lived looks like. But the challenge doesn’t come in the form of an argument. It comes in the form of a story, one that has the potential to transform how you see the world.

This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter. Click here to sign up and get free-market news and analysis like this in your inbox every weekday.

AUTHOR

Patrick Carroll

Patrick Carroll has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and is an Editorial Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

COVID Amnesty? How About Unconditional Surrender? thumbnail

COVID Amnesty? How About Unconditional Surrender?

By Selwyn Duke

Brown University professor Emily Oster has created quite a stir with her recent article asking for a “pandemic amnesty.” In it, she calls for “both sides” in the COVID debate to forgive each other so we can focus on solving current problems. If Oster wanted exposure, she certainly got it, with commentators far and wide responding to her plea. If she wanted to heal wounds and close chasms, however, she failed miserably. Many have told her to go pound sand.

Genuine calls for forgiveness are noble, but, Professor Oster, you (and your critics) miss a significant point here: Forgiveness does not obviate punishment. Were it otherwise, following Jesus’s “70×7” prescription would mean emptying the prisons and hurting our beloved children by never holding them accountable for misbehavior.

So I’ll do my best to forgive, Professor Oster, but forgetting? No! I speak for many in saying that your plea is rejected — and offensive. And for there to be even the beginning of a rapprochement, there are two requirements (I’ll speak in this piece of “two sides” even though, of course, there’s much variation within each):

  1. You must hand over your “leaders” for judgment and justice.
  2. You must issue a genuine mea culpa and demonstrate that you’ve learned from your mistakes.

This matters immensely. Many on my side are angry, but I’ll nonetheless do what I and others did during the pandemic — not what you did, professor. I’ll react based on reason and not emotion and say that I’m not seeking retribution, viscerally pleasurable though it may be. And reason’s application informs that, as Herbert Spencer put it, “The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.” Thus must the foolish and often fiendish pandemic puppeteers be in the dock — and thus must their erstwhile puppets demonstrate that they’ve learned from the past.

Unfortunately, though, professor, you appear to have learned virtually nothing. You speak as if the COVID battles were some kind of mutual misunderstanding that degenerated into an ugly rift. This is yet another slap in the face. There was nothing mutual about it, not in terms of misunderstandings or malevolence or power or persecution.

Though many of us counseled against COVIDian madness, my side was content to let you and your fellow travelers wear a mask, or three masks; take a genetic-therapy agent (GTA) shot, or five; social distance by six feet, or 60; shut down your businesses and lock yourselves indoors for one month, or six; and generally behave like mysophobic Chicken Littles. But that wasn’t good enough.

Not only did you impose your mask empire and distancing fancies on us, but you shut down our businesses as part of a COVID regulation regime; destroyed livelihoods; impoverished people; caused untold numbers of lockdown-induced, secondary-effect deaths; and tried coercing us into taking the GTAs under pain of career destruction, firing tens of thousands of Americans who resisted your will. Why, CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen, cheered on by millions of you and speaking for many more, actually said that people such as me, GTA realists, should be prohibited from participating in society and banished to our homes. You also censored us when we dared explain our dissent, said we were killing people and impugned our character and patriotism.

By the way, Wen more recently renounced much COVIDian theology and wrote an article about how she no longer believes in masking children because her young son suffered mask-induced developmental problems. Yet as with you, professor, she issues no apology for her ill-informed, life-rending prescriptions.

Speaking of which, Professor Oster, you wrote of our correct prescriptions that in “the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing.” “We didn’t know,” you protested. Well, speak for yourself, professor.

Of course, some did oppose COVID regulations based purely on a desire for liberty or relied on instinct. Yet a twist on a famous saying comes to mind here: The more I research, the “luckier” I get.

Was it luck, professor, when I cited Dr. Knut Wittkowski — former longtime head of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at the Rockefeller University in New York City — as warning in an April 1st and 2nd, 2020 interview that lockdowns were counterproductive? He also provided sage but unheeded prescriptions for managing the disease.

Was it luck, professor, when I cited experts as saying in February 2020 that the vast majority of us will contract the coronavirus, that most cases are mild and that “vaccines” wouldn’t save us? This information, by the by, was printed in the liberal Atlantic, the very magazine that published your piece! Did you miss it?

Was it luck, professor, when I cited early data out of Italy showing that the COVID mortality victims were aged 79.5 on average and more than 99 percent had comorbidities, again indicating that it wasn’t a disease imperiling the majority? Was it luck when I, presenting research, warned in 2020-’21 of masks’ lack of efficacy and the perils they pose, especially to the young? I could mention additional data, studies and experts I and others drew upon, but the point is this:

You could have known, professor. But you didn’t show due diligence. You had your head buried in establishment media and wouldn’t pay any mind to those who dared contradict it. Hey, only Ivy League input need apply, right, professor?

This matters because the problem isn’t that you fell victim to COVID propaganda; it’s that you’re the kind of person who could fall victim to COVID propaganda. And unless this changes — unless you learn from past mistakes — you’ll just make similar ones again during a future crisis. In fact, we see the same phenomena even now with climate change.

You also say, professor, that we should be willing to move on because most of those adopting bad policy had good intentions. Yet even if this were true, it’s irrelevant. A doctor can have the absolute best intentions but still be sued into oblivion for malpractice.

What of your claim, however? Does it reflect good intentions

  • when politicians, such as Governor Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.), imposed onerous COVID restrictions on us but then arrogantly violated those rules themselves?
  • when officials said we knew little about a “novel” virus but then made continual cocksure pronouncements and, colluding with Big Tech, censored anyone contradicting them (including the aforementioned Dr. Wittkowski)?
  • when an effort was launched to turn COVID “heretics” into second-class citizens?
  • when even today some schools have GTA mandates for young people, despite the well-known health risks?
  • when Dr. Anthony Fauci and other officials continually lied to America while accusing dissenters of peddling “misinformation”?

Of course, it’s true that man is complex and people rationalize — aka, lie to themselves — perhaps more than they lie to others. But if the above is the result of good intentions, professor, who needs bad ones?

The point, however, is that these COVIDian “leaders,” such as Fauci and Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D-Mich.), must be held to account and not survive, in power, to tyrannize another day. Yet our pseudo-elites instead continue to fail upwards, with your support, professor. But, then, you enjoy the same benefits, don’t you? Why, you say you’re now actually co-teaching a college class on COVID. Talk about an idiocracy!

In conclusion, Professor Oster, you opened your article mentioning that in “April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes.” This brings us to my response to your amnesty proposal: You can go take another one.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on MeWe, Gettr or Parler, or log on to SelwynDuke.com

©Selwyn Duke. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: No chance of pandemic amnesty for enforcers of false COVID narrative

The Problems with ‘Free Stuff’ thumbnail

The Problems with ‘Free Stuff’

By The Daily Skirmish – Liberato.US

South Dakota voters approved Medicaid expansion in Tuesday’s election, leaving just 11 states that have not expanded their Medicaid programs to include middle-class able-bodied childless adults making almost $40,000 a year.  I hope the remaining states hold the line because they will be in a world of hurt if they don’t.

The first problem is voters demanding free stuff with nary a thought of how to pay for it.  Missouri voters previously demanded Medicaid expansion, but the state couldn’t figure out a sustainable way to pay for it.  Expansion would cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but nobody knew what the funding mechanism would be.  The same thing happened in Idaho and Oklahoma – Medicaid expansion occurred without a stable permanent funding source.   Since Medicaid is now such a huge part of state budgets, every expansion state faces fights in the legislature about raising taxes or pulling money from other priorities like education to fund more government-sponsored healthcare.

That’s just for openers.  Expansion states face a raft of other problems.  Enrollment always exceeds expectations and many states have hit the wall in terms of being able to afford their programs.  I haven’t seen any more reports of this lately, but extra federal COVID money has postponed the day of financial reckoning.   I would argue the reason we still have a federal COVID emergency, though the medical facts no longer justify it, is to keep the states – especially expansion states – from going bust over their Medicaid expenses.  A world of hurt is coming because the fiction of a COVID emergency can’t be maintained forever.

Other problems with Medicaid expansion include

  • middle class dependency on government – a tragedy, not a triumph as the Left would have you believe, and completely unsustainable
  • billions of dollars spent on people who aren’t eligible
  • new inequities like traditional enrollees – low-income children, pregnant women, and the disabled – getting sent to the back of the line as childless able-bodied adults enter the system
  • substandard care – women already on Medicaid account for the majority of pregnancy-related deaths
  • longer wait times for ambulances and medical services
  • worse health outcomes than private insurance as more doctors refuse to take Medicaid patients because of the low pay and paperwork burdens
  • more drug overdoses and lower life expectancy in expansion states
  • lower labor force participation, and
  • special interests like large hospitals and managed care companies benefitting more than enrollees

Speaking of special interests, they are busy agitating for Government Healthcare 2.0.  It’s not enough that one in four Americans is now on Medicaid, we have to expand the range of services and the amount of government money spent on them for them to become healthy, or so the pretext goes.  The theory is called Social Determinants of Health (SDOH).  I call it naked redistribution, with calls growing for, and localities dabbling in, providing Medicaid recipients with free housing, transportation, food aid, education, job programs, guaranteed income, and other social services galore.  The theory has been around for a while but it is gaining traction, inducing mission creep in the Medicaid program.  Proponents claim the theory saves money, but their analysis fails to account for the magnet effect of free stuff from the government drawing ever-larger numbers of people into government dependency.  Once again, the Left points to immediate gains and fails to think systemically.

If you think the nation is too far in debt now, and states are biting off more than they can chew with Medicaid expansion, just wait.   Insolvency 2.0 is the inevitable outcome of social determinants of health.  Insolvency is what you get when no claim on public funds can be resisted and the government tries to put a soft pillow under absolutely everybody for absolutely everything.  Ultimately, it won’t work.

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

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Critically Thinking about the 2022 U.S. Election Results thumbnail

Critically Thinking about the 2022 U.S. Election Results

By John Droz, Jr.

What did we learn and what needs to be done to fix this?


It will take awhile to have the smoke settle following the 2022 US elections, but a few things are appearing out of the fog already…

Once again, there are many election results that simply defy logic — especially considering the dire direction our country is going in. Some possible explanations are:

a) there has been election malfeasance,

b) Conservatives are poor at messaging,

c) Conservatives are doing an inadequate job of working together, and/or

d) too many citizens are making emotional rather than logical choices.

There is absolutely no way to ascertain the legitimacy of any election (“a” above), without selective post-election forensic audits. That these have not yet been implemented in any state makes no sense, and is simply unfathomable.

Regarding “b thru d” here are two results from a current American poll that indicate a serious disconnect between what the public believes, and scientific reality:

1 – 62%± believe that climate change is of high concern.

The climate matter has been wildly exaggerated. Why? Because those who would like to take more control over our lives know that fear works (think COVID). If you want to read an easy-to-understand summary of the climate Science, then checkout this report. If after that you want more, then go here.

2 – 54%± believe that US energy policy should be expanding wind and solar use.

This is a key finding, as there is ZERO scientific basis to support such an opinion. None. Nada. Wind and solar are not only very uneconomical, they are inherently unreliable — and reliable electricity is the foundation of our modern society.

BUT, you may say, what about those (e.g., see #1) who buy AOC’s (a former bartender) assertion that the world will now come to an end in 9± years unless we take immediate, drastic measures to stop manmade CO2 production! Don’t we need to do a lot of wind and solar to do that? NO!

There is ZERO scientific proof that wind or solar make any consequential difference regarding reducing CO2. See here and here. AOC disciples should OPPOSE wind and solar as they are an illusion, propagated by well-paid lobbyists. The best source of electricity that will achieve their ends, is nuclear.

The bottom line is that this 54% is a telling indication of how easy it is to trick many good people to buy unscientific nonsense, simply with marketing and PR.

Here are some other disturbing (and several contradictory) poll findings indicating that of US citizens:

25%± relate to no religion

60%+ rarely attend religious services

60%± expect American life to be worse in the future

75%± are dissatisfied or angry about how federal government works

55%± want the federal government to be more involved with solving issues

65%± want health care to be the responsibility of the federal government

43%± believe that president Biden is doing a good job

42%± believe that Biden has the mental capacity to serve effectively as president

42%± believe that K-8 schools are teaching too little about racism

47%± trust that the media is reporting news fully, accurately and fairly

86%± believe that the future of US Democracy is an important consideration

73%± believe that votes will be counted accurately [Note that counting votes accurately is VERY different from whether all votes are legitimate, etc.]

There are several takeaways from all this, but IMO this shows how easily non-critically thinking citizens can be deceived. One of the good outcomes to the 2020 elections, was that a lot more right-leaning groups started to pay attention to the election process. Hopefully this week’s result will cause an additional spike of interest and actions. My team is ready to do a new Pennsylvania Report (here was our first),

One way or another election integrity needs to be genuinely fixed, or AOC will turn out to be right — all will be lost very soon!

©John Droz, Jr. All rights reserved.

You Really Expected a Red Wave? thumbnail

You Really Expected a Red Wave?

By Kelleigh Nelson

“ACORN, you may recall, is the left-wing activist group with longtime ties to community organizer-turned-President Barack Obama. The nonprofit, which now takes in 40 percent of its revenues from American taxpayers after four decades on the public teat, has a history of engaging in voter fraud, corporate shakedowns, partisan bullying and pro-illegal immigration lobbying. The Democrats’ stimulus proposals could make the group – and its lesser known but even more radical ideological allies – eligible for upward of $5 billion in new public cash.” —  Michelle Malkin

“In selecting men for office, let principle be your guide. Regard not the particular sect or denomination of the candidate – look to his character.  When a citizen gives his suffrage to a man of known immorality he abuses his trust; he sacrifices not on his own interest, but that of his neighbor, he betrays the interest of his country.” — Noah Webster

“It has been thought that corruption is restrained by confining the suffrage to a few of the wealthier of the people: but it would be more effectually restrained by an extension of that to such numbers as would bid defiance to the means of corruption.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1785 – Thomas Jefferson advocated for extending the right to vote as widely as possible.


Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH) said, “I’m hopeful in about eight and a half months there’s gonna be a big change on election day.”  Well Jim, you and a whole lot of other Republicans and rightwing pundits said much the same thing, but all of you were ignoring the 2018 and 2020 election.  Don’t you remember Jim? In 2018, so many republicans went to bed election eve believing they had won only to wake up to recounts and eventual losses.  In the end, the Democrats took the House.

Thanks to the failure of the Republican Party to do anything about the 2018 and 2020 voter fraud, the “Red Wave” most pundits forecast was not forthcoming.  Those of us who look at reality, and tell the truth to the people, knew it was highly unlikely the Stalinist Democrats would relinquish their control.  And yes, it was fine to pray, but one also needs to work to stop the criminal theft.  Name me one Republican who has done anything to stop the gigantic fraud in America’s elections.

The Supreme Court refused to hear any 2020 general election cases involving voter fraud.  On December 11, 2021,the Supreme Court denied a Texas effort that would have essentially nullified the presidential elections in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia and Wisconsin. Seventeen other states joined in the suit brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.  Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch dissented.

On February 22, the Supreme Court rejected three GOP elections-related lawsuits regarding the state of Pennsylvania.  The same three justices dissented.  The fact that states did not follow their own state legislatively set laws is the issue millions of people still are not happy with.  The Roberts led Supreme Court has declined to hear any of the cases brought challenging the procedures of how the election was conducted.

Most of my friends and those who read my articles know election fraud has been around for a long, long time.

The Disputed 1876 Election

In order to ensure Republican Rutherford B. Hayes’s election in 1876, Republican leaders negotiated an agreement with Southern Democrats in the House. The Republicans agreed to remove federal troops policing the South as soon as Hayes became president. Hayes also agreed to have at least one Southerner appointed to his cabinet.  The 1876 election saw the highest voter turnout of any in U.S. history (82%) and was decided by a single electoral vote.

At the end of election day, there was no clear winner in South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana.  Yet, both parties claimed victory.  Republican controlled “returning” boards determined the official electoral votes.

Those controlled boards determined which votes they’d count or throw out if they deemed them fraudulent.  Sound familiar?  They argued in all three states that fraud, intimidation and violence in certain districts invalidated votes, and they threw out enough Democratic votes for Hayes to win.  All three state-returning-boards awarded their electoral votes to Hayes.

While Hayes strongly supported African Americans’ right to vote and protection of their civil rights, he had little influence in the South. By the time he took office, the only federal troops still in the South protecting Republican governments were limited to small areas surrounding state houses in the capitals of New Orleans and Columbia.  But, thank the Lord, after 12 years of Martial Law in the Southern States, the federal troops were gone.

1948 Texas Senate Election

Frank Hamer was the legendary Texas Ranger who trapped and killed notorious outlaws, Bonnie and Clyde.  R. Cort Kirkwood wrote the entire story for the February 1st, 2021 New American Magazine.  Hamer was shot 17 times and killed 53 men during his illustrious career.  He also saved 15 black men from death at the hands of lynch mobs in various towns and cities in east Texas, where he led an unpopular fight against the Ku Klux Klan.

It was July, 1948 when beloved Texas Governor, Coke Stevenson ran for the Senate and won, but victory was stolen by election thief Lyndon Baines Johnson.  In the Democratic primary of 1948, Stevenson bested Johnson by more than 70,000 votes, but neither candidate received a majority of the more than one million cast.  Three men were in the running, but the most votes went to Stevenson with 477,077 and to Johnson with 405,617.  The two met again in a runoff on Saturday, August 28th.

Kirkwood writes, “Though polling put Stevenson ahead, 53-47 percent, Johnson turned that deficit around. As more precincts reported results, Stevenson’s lead dwindled to less than 1,000 votes, and while more uncounted votes magically appeared, by Tuesday, election officials had declared Stevenson the victor by a slim 349. Yet the counting still wasn’t finished. More and more counties in the Rio Grande Valley reported “new votes” for Johnson, which cut his deficit to 157. That still wasn’t enough to defeat Stevenson.  At 12:30 p.m. on Friday, September 3, Jim Wells County called in a 200-vote change that gave Johnson 494,191 to Stevenson’s 484,104.”

Sound familiar?

Cork Stevenson knew there was fraud, so with his friend Frank Hamer and two lawyers, they traveled to Corpus Christi to check the votes.  Hamer and Stevenson went to the bank where election records for Precinct 13 were kept. “Git,” Hamer told one band of five. “Fall back!” he ordered the second larger group blocking the bank’s door. He was ready to draw the gun holstered at his side.  The other men had removed their jackets and none were armed except Frank.

They proved the votes had been rigged and a “7” had obviously been changed to a “9.”  A Mexican American in the precinct told the two lawyers that “people live longer down here if they keep their mouths shut.”

Even though they had the proof of vote fraud, the Democrats did the same thing they always do and on January 6th, 2020, they declared Johnson the winner by one vote.

The evidence from Hamer and Stevenson didn’t matter.  Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black halted the trial just minutes before the vote boxes were to be opened in court. Johnson’s attorney, future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, successfully argued to Associate Justice Hugo Black, then in charge of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, that primaries were “irrevocably and incontestably vested” in Texas law.

Black agreed, and the Supreme Court upheld his ruling. Fraud was discounted out of hand, just like it was in our 2020 general election and the runoff in Georgia in January of 2021.

Hugo Black was one of the liberal democrats nominated and confirmed to the Supreme Court by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Many Americans also know of the 1946 Battle of Athens in McMinn County, Tennessee regarding Democrat vote fraud by Paul Cantrell, the candidate for sheriff who tied his campaign closely to the popularity of the Roosevelt administration and rode FDR’s coattails to victory over his Republican opponent.  He ruled until 1946 when returning WWII veterans stopped the deceit.

1960 Election

As reported in the Chicago Daily News, sister publication of the Chicago Sun-Times:

In 1960, some irregularities in Illinois votes, specifically the ones in Chicago, prompted calls for an investigation from Republicans over then-Sen. John F. Kennedy’s victory. The saga played out in the pages of the Chicago Daily News.

“Fewer than 100,000 votes out of a total of 69 million cast in the Nov. 8 election may decide whether Vice President Nixon or Sen. Kennedy is to be our nest President,” William Harrison Fetridge, chairman of the Nixon Recount Committee of Illinois, told the Daily News on Dec. 5, 1960.

Fetridge name-dropped Chicago as one of the cities “where entrenched political machines control the election machinery,” alleging voter fraud. A lawsuit later filed accused Cook County of digging up “Kennedy voters from the cemeteries of Chicago.”

Voter fraud in Cook County certainly wasn’t unheard of at the time (picture it: Cicero, 1924), but did Republicans have a case? According to scholar Edmund F. Kallina’s article in “Presidential Studies Quarterly,” the answer is yes, but also, no. His research found that Nixon was not “cheated out of Illinois’ electoral votes.”

2000 Election

In the 2000 election, George W. Bush narrowly lost the popular vote to Democrat Al Gore but defeated Gore in the electoral college.

Ultimately, the contest focused on Florida. Networks initially projected Gore the winner in Florida, but later they declared that Bush had opened an insurmountable lead. Gore called Bush and conceded the election, but then…in the early hours of the following morning, the race in Florida seemed far closer than Gore’s staff had originally believe.  Fewer than 600 votes separated the candidates and appeared to be narrowing.  Gore called Bush and retracted his concession.

Then came machine recounts, hanging chads, pregnant chads, and finally a statewide recount by ordered by the Florida Supreme Court.

But wait, the Bush campaign quickly filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court, asking it to delay the recounts until it could hear the case; a stay was issued by the court on December 9. Several days later concluding that a fair statewide recount could not be performed in time to meet the December 18th deadline for certifying the state’s electors.  Ultimately, the court issued a controversial 5-4 decision to reverse the Florida Supreme Court’s recount order and that awarded the presidency to Bush.  The electoral vote was narrow, but Bush won over Gore by 271 to 266, again by only one (1) more vote than required.  One Gore elector abstained.

America’s past elections have been questioned again and again, but the 2018, 2020 and now 2022 elections manifest blatant irregularities that are noticeable by much of the electorate.

We’ve seen it all, late night suitcases of votes being poured into the coffers, all for one particular candidate.  Mike Lindell proved the damning evidence of voter fraud and Dinesh D’Souza showed it to us on film.

Conclusion

If we don’t fix the problem, the problem will repeat, and that’s what we saw Tuesday evening.  Evil has a hold on America and the demons aren’t about to let go.  We’ve tossed the Lord God out of everything in our culture and society, so why does anyone expect anything good to come of efforts until we turn back to Him?

The Red Wave was a lie from the beginning and most folks knew it.  You can’t have change when the same fraud is still in place.

Pennsylvania electing an idiot like Fetterman?  Please!

Maricopa County in AZ still all screwed up just like 2020?  Please!

Kari Lake barely getting enough votes to beat Katie Dobbs?  Who are they kidding?

Everyone rushed out to vote, truly in droves, but it was just as useless as the massive voting in 2020.

I had hoped and prayed it would be different, but I knew in my heart what we’d see again.  I’m sure many people feel as I do, America is dying.  And a lot of folks told me that if these election results weren’t good, then there is no reason to bother to vote again unless it is fixed, and that seems unlikely.

A new year is coming and there is something we can do.  Urge everyone to open their Bibles and read through the entire book in one year in chronological order.  Do not forsake the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible), for therein lies the foundation for all of our Judeo-Christian faith.

Draw closer to our Creator and He will help us.

It is the only answer.

Isaiah 41:10

©Kelleigh Nelson. All rights reserved.

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Dems learned to mass harvest vote by mail in every rust belt state (and highly effective youth vote ops) and they are never going to turn it off

Either GOP admits this and puts big $$$ behind it or have more uneven elections like this

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) November 9, 2022

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Fetterman ‘won’ the Senate race for Pennsylvania

By Vlad Tepes Blog

As is totally predictable, dialectic media is claiming that opposing someone not mentally fit for office is bigotry. That because he clearly cannot think or speak clearly, is not grounds to vote against him, setting aside the fact that when he was mayor of a city he trashed the place into the ground with his policies. This means a few things. For one, it means they now have a fully remote controlled Senator. There is no way he has the strength of will or character to set or make policy happen against the will of the deep state.

For another, it means that the Democrats can get a ham sandwich elected, by hook or by crook. Put another way, it means the Democrats can run Jeffery Epstein, and if anyone objects, they can call you racist against the metabolically challenged. Totally overriding any real objection to the nature of the man or his crimes. All that matters is you’re a racist for saying a dead man can’t be in the Senate.

Below is a segment of a chat with The Baron from Gates of Vienna from last night before any results where in, about the need for the Democrats to place Fetterman in power:

you know the thing that Theodore Dalrymple said, about the lies of the communist state being as much about humiliation as anything else?

That is, that it’s humiliating to be forced to repeat an obvious lie as the truth. Which is a large part of the point, the humiliation. 

“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.” 

Fetterman is running in Pennsylvania, where one of the best vote fraud machines is in place, mostly in greater Philadelphia.

Making Fetterman win would be like the obvious Lie

biggest lie of all.

I think there is a lot of food for thought in that observation.

Lastly, there is Fetterman’s ideology itself apart from his disability. (A word which when broken down means, not able, or someone who cannot do.)

Check out the tattoo on his right forearm:

I wondered what was under there pic.twitter.com/m0hzNnm5gA

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) August 24, 2022

Although it is also a quote from an excellent song from Nine Inch Nails, it is also a statement of intent. For those uncertain of the nature or origin of the intent, or with whom he shares that intent, please read this important article from Canada’s National Post about former governor of the Bank of England, and The Bank of Canada, Mark Carney.

A small excerpt:

Carney draws inspiration from, among others, Marx, Engels and Lenin, but the agenda he promotes differs from Marxism in two key respects. First, the private sector is not to be expropriated but made a “partner” in reshaping the economy and society. Second, it does not make a promise to make the lives of ordinary people better, but worse. Carney’s Brave New World will be one of severely constrained choice, less flying, less meat, more inconvenience and more poverty: “Assets will be stranded, used gasoline powered cars will be unsaleable, inefficient properties will be unrentable,” he promises.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Vlad Tepes Blog column by is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Jones: Dems Failed to See Voters Deal with Inflation Every Day, Not Abortion or Democracy thumbnail

Jones: Dems Failed to See Voters Deal with Inflation Every Day, Not Abortion or Democracy

By Discover The Networks

Monday on CNN Newsroom, political commentator Van Jones stated that Democrats failed to see how much inflation mattered for working-class voters and pointed out that people do have to deal with inflation every day, while they don’t have to deal with abortion or voting every single day.

Jones said, “I think there was this kind of fool’s gold, this idea that the threat to democracy is so severe in the wake of this insurrection and in the wake of these election deniers possibly grabbing control of the government, that that was something that you had to talk about. But you also have to talk about the economy. I think the tragedy here is that the Democrats have something to say on the economy in terms of what Biden has done when it comes to 10 million jobs, what Biden has done when it comes to prescription drug prices, standing up to China on the CHIPS Act, and also the fear of what Republicans will do.”

He added, “Dobbs versus jobs, most people are going to be focused on the jobs.”

Jones concluded, “You don’t get an abortion every week. But you do buy gas every week. You don’t vote — democracy’s on the line, you don’t vote every day. You do have to eat every day. So, the price of food and the price of gas matters for a lot of working-class voters in a way that I don’t think Democrats really factored in.”

He’s half-right about democracy being on the line — it is, but the Republican Party isn’t the threat. Democrats are.


Van Jones

128 Known Connections

In April 2008, Jones made clear his desire to incrementally socialize, by stealth, the U.S. economy: “Right now we say we want to move from suicidal gray capitalism to something eco-capitalism where at least we’re not fast-tracking the destruction of the whole planet. Will that be enough? No, it won’t be enough. We want to go beyond the systems of exploitation and oppression altogether … until [the green economy] becomes the engine for transforming the whole society.”

To learn more about Van Jones, click here.

EDITORS NOTE: This Discover the Networks column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Free Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips thumbnail

Free Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips

By Jihad Watch

An important message from the editors of Frontpage:

It’s clear: They’ve been jailed for telling the unwelcome truth about the state of our elections today.

In yet another of the Left’s increasingly brazen miscarriages of justice, Monday, November 7 will mark a week since the leaders of True the Vote, Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips, were imprisoned in Houston for refusing to disclose the identity of an FBI informant. But as is always the case with the Left, there is much more to this case than that: the imprisonment of Engelbrecht and Phillips is part of the Left’s efforts to cover up its own election crimes. Engelbrecht and Phillips are deeply committed patriots; the Freedom Center was privileged to help Catherine Engelbrecht launch True the Vote in its first promotional video, which was filmed in David Horowitz’s living room with David as its endorser.

These are heroic individuals on the frontline of the battle for American democracy, and now that they’re directly in the Left’s crosshairs, they should be supported by every patriot.

Engelbrecht and Phillips have maintained, quite rightly, that whenever they have acceded to demands to reveal their sources in the past, the Left has doxed and harassed those sources. It’s also quite clear that this legal harassment that Engelbrecht and Phillips are experiencing right now is designed to distract attention from and obscure what they’ve discovered about severe vulnerabilities in our elections process. Once again, Leftists are covering up their own misdeeds.

The Texas Tribune reported last Monday that Engelbrecht and Phillips will “remain in jail until they release the name of the man.” They’re bearing up well: on Wednesday, according to Gateway Pundit, “Catherine delivered an audiotaped message from prison to thank all of her and Gregg’s supporters for their ‘prayers and kind messages of support.’ Engelbrecht announced that they are appealing their cases to the Fifth Circuit Court and are praying for a good result. She also asked that Americans remain focused on the upcoming election and encourage everyone they know to vote. She ended her message by saying, ‘God bless America. And I’ll see you soon…’”

We hope so. They’re in prison now as the result of what they discovered about the 2020 election, and their release would be a small measure of justice amid the monstrous wrongs that were committed during that election and are still being committed today. The Texas Tribune notes that Konnech, an “election management software company,” filed suit True the Vote, claiming that its allegations against Konnech’s founder and CEO, Eugene Yu, “led to personal threats to him and his family and damaged his company’s business.” This is a familiar Leftist tactic: when exposed or even simply criticized, claim that the negative coverage has exposed you to threats of violence from the unhinged “right-wing extremists” that loom so large in Leftist propaganda but are so hard to find in real life.

What’s really going on is an attempt to cover up what Engelbrecht and Phillips have discovered. “In podcasts and interviews,” the Tribune reports, “Phillips described a dramatic night in early 2021 in a Dallas hotel, where a man he later identified as Mike Hasson revealed what True the Vote has said was hard evidence of Konnech’s alleged influence on the 2020 election.” True the Vote found evidence that Konnech “had stored American poll worker data on a server in China.”

Meanwhile, the charges that True the Vote have made against Konnech have been demonstrated to be accurate by an unlikely source: the Los Angeles district attorney’s office. Eugene Yu “is facing felony charges of grand theft by embezzlement and conspiracy to commit a crime. The Los Angeles district attorney’s office said Yu and Konnech violated the company’s contract with Los Angeles County by illegally giving contractors in China access to data that was supposed to be stored only in the United States. Yu has filed a motion to dismiss the charges, arguing that even if the charges are true, they aren’t criminal. Los Angeles prosecutors have acknowledged receiving an early tip from Phillips.”

So True the Vote uncovered evidence that China had access to American elections data. That’s the real reason why they’re in prison today, and why it is such an immense injustice that they are. Just as Leftists have woven an elaborate fantasy of a January 6 “insurrection” in an attempt to defame, discredit and destroy Donald Trump and his supporters, so also they’re doing everything they possibly can to keep the full truth about their chicanery in the 2020 election from coming out. One supporter of Engelbrecht and Phillips summed it up succinctly: “This is what tyranny looks like.”

Yes, it is. And it must not stand. Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips must be freed immediately, without being required to disclose the name of their confidential informant. The American people are watching Joe Biden’s Justice Department closely, and more and more people are realizing that there is a two-tier justice system: one to protect Leftists such as Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton, no matter how serious their crimes may be, and another to persecute patriots who still believe in the promise our free republic offers. Attorney General Garland: End this injustice now. Free True the Vote.

AUTHOR

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

America: Battered, but looking better thumbnail

America: Battered, but looking better

By Wallace Bruschweiler

The recent mid-term elections confirm America’s unique ability to survive wide swings in governance and come back to America’s center-right foundations. History gives us a clue: Thomas Jefferson penned most of the Declaration of Independence. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison penned most of the U.S. Constitution. Later, Jefferson and Madison would align themselves vs. Hamilton.

Looking at the attacks today’s political candidates hurl at each other, it is fair to wonder if the political debate has ever been worse. Yes, the newspaper campaigns waged somewhat surreptitiously against each other by Hamilton and Jefferson were vicious and mean-spirited to the extreme. But, despite their differences, Hamilton and Jefferson were both patriots. True patriots who would be opposed to the just-defeated Socialist assault on American institutions.

The anti-slavery Hamilton and even the slave-holding George Washington had a different vision for America from that of the slave-holders Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. While Hamilton thought agriculture would always be important to America, Hamilton and the Federalists envisioned America as more of a manufacturing, mercantile, and commerce nation. Jefferson and Madison, (then, the Republicans) whose fortunes rested on slave-tended cotton and tobacco, felt agriculture should play the dominant role in the American economy.

President Washington, who eventually freed his slaves, foresaw the end of slavery and the need for America to turn toward Hamilton’s ideas about manufacturing, merchandising, and commerce. And so, during contentious cabinet debates between Hamilton and Jefferson, President Washington sided slightly more often with Hamilton than Jefferson.

The French Revolution brought the differences between Jefferson and Hamilton to a head. Jefferson and Madison excused the mass beheadings of the French nobility and the Catholic clergy as the natural, albeit distasteful, components of a true Revolution. Besides, the French had sided with the Colonists, providing crucial military and naval aid to Washington’s forces.

Hamilton countered by saying French aid was given by French nobles, not the masses. With France and Britain at war (as usual) Hamilton felt President Washington should issue a Proclamation of Neutrality which Washington did. Another defeat for Jefferson, although Washington, over Hamilton’s objections, agreed to receive an ambassador from Revolutionary France.

The French sent over a Girondist ambassador (whose faction was less bloodthirsty than the Guillotine-besotted Jacobins) who styled himself as Citizen Genet. In his luggage, Citizen Genet carried 150 Letters of Marque that authorized any sea captains who accepted them to become armed sea raiders for France, to include forcing American sailors to serve in the French Navy against Great Britain.

When President Washington told Genet to stuff his Letters of Marque back in his luggage. Genet said he would go around Washington to the American masses and win their support. That ripped it. Washington ordered Secretary of State Jefferson to tell France to recall Citizen Genet. A bitter pill and the last straw for Jefferson in Washington’s cabinet.

As Genet was about to sail for France, his Girondists fell out of power. Had Genet landed back in France, he would have been beheaded. Hamilton convinced Washington to grant asylum to Genet who lived out his life in obscurity in northern New York.

So, while we may rightly think today’s political campaigns are rough and tumble, they are not without precedent.

‘Suggested reading: Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, 2004. Jefferson and Hamilton: The Rivalry that Forged a Nation, by John Ferling, 2013.

©2022. William Hamilton. All rights reserved.

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Locking Up the Violence Vote

By The Daily Skirmish – Liberato.US

Today is Election Day and I will show you what the Democrats are really like.  The stories I’m about to tell you didn’t get much publicity but, taken together, they tell the tale about how the Democrats trade in political violence.

We never had committee investigations into all of the people and political organizations that supported politically motivated violence, property destruction, and murders in American cities.

I think that time is coming. pic.twitter.com/pjeER4SgEl

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) November 8, 2022

A canvasser for Marco Rubio was brutally beaten to the point of needing surgery and was told ‘Republicans aren’t allowed in this neighborhood.’

The Republican senate candidate in New Hampshire was hit by an attacker right before his debate with the incumbent Democrat senator was set to begin.

A suspect fired shots into the home of the parents of a Republican congressional candidate in North Carolina, just feet away from where the candidate’s children were sleeping.

A Texas man was arrested for throwing a beer can at Senator Ted Cruz during the World Series parade.

A journalist was choked and slammed to the ground after asking Beto O’Rourke if he would disavow transgender surgery for minors.

A Lee Zeldin supporter needed medical attention after being punched and choked at a Kathy Hochul rally.  You might recall Zeldin himself was attacked with a weapon on stage in July.

When Democrats aren’t being violent, they’re threatening violence.

A Chicago man was charged with threatening to kill the Republican candidate for governor.  “I’m going to skin Darren Bailey alive, making sure he is still alive, and I’m going to feed his f*****g family to him as he is alive and screaming in f*****g pain,” the threat said.

Two threatening letters containing a white powder were sent to Kari Lake’s campaign headquarters in Arizona.  Threatening messages were received around the same time.

Last, but not least, Ohio Democrat Congressman Tim Ryan earlier this year called on supporters to “kill and confront” MAGA Republicans.  Ryan is now running for Senate and just last month expanded the list of targets to include his Republican opponent J.D. Vance, whom Ryan called an ‘extremist’.  Ryan said this in a debate with Vance with the whole world watching.

None of these attacks or threats was condemned by Democrat Party leaders, giving the green light for more attacks and threats.  What else would you expect from the party of Antifa and the KKK – the party that can’t do without political violence, paramilitaries, and street thugs?  The Party’s answer to all that is to bail the offenders out of jail so they can riot and maim again.  Don’t forget: Kamala Harris is hip-deep in that effort.

Far be it from me to suppress the violence vote.  If, after listening to all this, you still want to vote Democrat, go for it.  I’m content to know you heard me today, you will never succeed in forcing your utopia on the rest of us through violent means, and you can never be happy about voting Democrat again, knowing as you do, your party is violent to the core.  If your party had any real arguments left to make, it wouldn’t be resorting to violence, now would it?

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

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This would be breaking news on every major station if this was a Republican man choking a black female Democrat. But it’s not, because the lady being choked is a Republican.@leezeldin supporter. pic.twitter.com/uldlZTTdOj

— Hodgetwins (@hodgetwins) November 6, 2022

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Herschel Walker Leads Georgia Senate Race In Final Poll

By The Daily Caller

Republican candidate and former football star Herschel Walker is leading incumbent Democratic Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock in the final round of polling before Election Day.

Walker leads Warnock by 3.2 points, with the support of 49.7% of respondents, in a Trafalgar poll released Monday. That poll, taken between Nov. 4 and Nov. 6, surveyed 1,103 respondents and had a 2.9% margin of error.

If no candidate in Georgia wins more than 50% of the vote, the top two candidates will enter a runoff election for the seat. The race between Walker and Warnock has been close, with Walker maintaining a steady lead in recent weeks, at an average of 0.5% per RealClearPolitics, a statistical tie.

It’s a great day in Georgia!

If you want a leader who is tough on crime, puts parents in charge of their kids’ education, and knows the value of a dollar, send @HerschelWalker to the Senate! Let’s get out the vote! #GASen 🇺🇸♥️ pic.twitter.com/NnYRVZTLBn

— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) November 6, 2022

The race between Walker and Warnock has been closely watched as Republicans seek to retake a seat they lost in 2020 when Warnock, a novice politician and pastor, defeated appointed Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler in a special runoff election by 2 points.

Walker’s campaign had earlier faced a scandal after a woman alleged that he conceived a child with her in 2009 and paid her to abort the pregnancy, despite calling himself “100% pro-life” on the campaign trail. Though some polls immediately after the news showed Walker trailing Warnock by double digits, he quickly rebounded.

The Senate race is quite unlike the state’s gubernatorial campaign between incumbent Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams. Per the same Trafalgar survey, Kemp, with 52.6% support, is expected to win outright, defeating Abrams for a second time with an increased margin of victory following his win against her in 2018.

Other Senate races across the country polled by Trafalgar show GOP challengers leading their Democratic incumbents. In Ohio, Republican J.D. Vance leads Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan by 11.4% while, in North Carolina, Republican Rep. Ted Budd is leading the Democratic candidate, former North Carolina Chief Justice Cheri Beasley, by 6.4%.

Trafalgar polls have an “A-” rating from FiveThirtyEight for reliability.

Walker and Warnock’s campaigns did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

AUTHOR

ARJUN SINGH

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: ‘Legal Immigrants Are More Patriotic’ — Nikki Haley Says We Should ‘Deport’ Warnock At Herschel Walker Rally

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.