It is the Hitler/Stalin/Maoist jackboot with a new shine. A-Bomb 20th Century retro replete with economic looting, cultural/national destruction and those bitter sweet chocolate Swiss numbered accounts to stash the spoils out of view. But, the object lesson imprisonment of Julian Assange, the UBS destruction of whistle blower Stephanie Gibaud, the Joe-for-sale White House and the death by a thousand cuts moral suicide of American elected political leadership still isn't enough to "woke" the sleeping giant. Would a limited nuclear strike have had any more impact on the world psyche than the Hamas assault? As in Nazi Germany, "we the people" are being forced across lines of human moral demarcation that may result in the destruction of the world. The French central banker Macron didn't fiddle while Paris burned. But he sure danced.
Again!! Let's name the disease: Megalomaniac hubris and narcissism (the CCP/DNC/WEF/EU Davos billionaire crowd) manipulating mal formed ideological utopianism (D.E.I./BLM/Antifa/"woke"). They serve one another. Example: In Russia with the backing of international capital a handful of bolshevik's seized the country. And, for a select few, life was good for a very long time. Employee's of the bureaucratic surveillance state profited and faithfully served totalitarianism until societal collapse. Then took the country for itself.
You are being held at gunpoint and the Hamas assault put the corporate fascist finger squarely on the trigger. You are under arrest!! Is there any difference between an ankle bracelet and 24 hour state surveillance? If I can seize your bank account, destroy and cancel your life at will or disappear you on a whim how free are you? Europe is lost!! Surveillance, arrest and imprisonment for thought and speech crimes, state seizure of property, travel restrictions and, as intended for the World, the slow, steady overlay of a CCP style surveillance control mechanism is already well underway. Free speech, free peoples and culture must be silenced to prevent the exposure and incarceration of an out of control immoral international criminal elite who destroy everything they touch. And the monsters of the D.E.I. "woke" commissariat are there to make sure they get away with it. Have they not gutted, looted and destroyed the greatest economy in the world and undermined every American institution of moral value and worth?
Tech/AI/communications has created a new world consciousness and left the perps running the political/financial grift transparent to reality. They are desperate, dangerous and visionless. "ism's" are dead because criminal finance and the minions of "woke" murdered them. This is an entirely new age and it is demanding an entirely new eyes and voice. The American Republic, the Constitution and the citizen are the only engines of survival.
Marxist "woke" is the lipstick on a pig called international criminal finance.
Got Constitution?
".. run--you can't run--tell my friend poor Willie Brown...I'm standing at the crossroads..and I believe I'm sinkin' down...." CROSSROADS/Robert Johnson
I really truly hope the author is correct and we have finally hit an inflection point in the downward spiral of woke. But be prepared for a fierce and sustained backlash. People in power -- especially those who have stolen that power -- and in danger of losing it will behave like wounded, cornered wild animals and strike out viscously and indiscriminately.
It proves what I have said all along. The Dem/Soc Party is the party of evil. It is now siding with terrorists. No wonder they won't censure the squad. They agree with them.
How can any decent human being vote for the party of terrorism?
Age and political alignment are two crosstabs. What I would really like to see is a distinction between college graduates and non-graduates over, say, the past 20 years. I'll bet that would open a lot of eyes.
And beginning the next day and continuing to the present day she called his 2016 election "illegitimate," still refusing to acknowledge that the Clinton "collusion" concoction -- a brazen "assault on our democracy" before, during, and after Trump's election -- was a sham and a fraud . . . just like Hillary herself.
But that’s the brilliance of the way the Left handles this. On the one hand, Hillary does the “classy” thing (concedes and congratulates) but on the other hand, she launches a sneaky, underhanded plot to manufacture evidence of Russian interference in the election.
So all people remember is that she “behaved well” at the time.
For all intents and purposes her shallow concession was effectively withdrawn. Which, I suppose, still puts her ahead of Stacy Abrams, low bar that it is.
That's.. not the same thing as claiming the election and vote counts were "rigged" by a vast conspiracy (the basis of which has shifted with the "facts"), and that millions of votes were just "fraud". She did bring up the heavy infiltration of foreign propaganda, on Trump's behalf, that was all over social media and with ties to Trump's campaign - sorry, Mueller's report, as well as the Republican led Senate Intelligence Committee, the Roger Stone and Paul Manafort all demonstrated these links and influences. But she never once claimed that the raw vote count, and electoral certification, of Trump's 2016 election was in and of itself fraudulent - a claim Trump, and far too many Republicans in power *continue to make*, and there was never a mass plan within the Democratic Party to not certify Trump's win or to utilize then VP Biden to "de-certify" the electors from states that Trump narrowly won (and which there were challenges over, particularly in WI where the count was especially close).
And there's a vast difference from claims (backed by evidence) that there were external and foreign influences on the election that drove certain issues, candidates, etc that should be cleaned up in future elections and that proliferated over social media platforms (a relatively new phenomenon of having such a prominent role in the campaign), than claiming that millions of votes that were verified through subsequent hand counts and multiple reviews were "fraud" regardless, and then to move past the failed legal challenges to an attempted legal coup to use the Congressional certification process to overturn the legally certified state electors. And then, of course, to instigate a riot over it.
Assange was a liar, but aside from that, and I don't know how much finance is pulling the trigger, versus trying to ride the wave. Otherwise, spot on, and this should be turned into an article.
Much like the beliefs of the ancient pagans, I have no idea how much our elected leaders and the actually leading bureaucrats believe the woke drivel... is it like them offering entrails at an altar with cynicism for public show, or do they actually think it is the way the world works?!? I dunno which is worse!
"“The events of the last week have shattered the illusion that wokeness is about protecting victims and standing up for persecuted minorities. This ideology is and has always been about the one thing many of us have told you it is about for years: power." Yes.
Best FP ever! We get to all of these bad places via ideology.
How were Open Borders ever going to work?
BLM founder Patrisse Cullors bought herself a number of mansions and funded transgenderism.
George Floyd died of a drug overdose while existing arrest. Of course, we need to be against racism. But, we do not do that by signaling false virtue and instituting more racism.
No one is against people with psychological disorders - but no one can become a different sex (of which there are 2). Yet, we teach our children that they can.
"stunning scientific, technological, social, and cultural breakthroughs " = also 1930s Germany
Of course we have arrived at a very bad place in our culture via Progressive Ideology. There is a great recent WSJ article "Dostoevsky Knew: It Can Happen Here". The author is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Northwestern University - discussing Hamas atrocities and the reaction of many University students and educated people.
"Dostoevsky continues, but if some progressive expert were to come up with a theory showing that sometimes flaying skins can benefit the right cause because “the end justifies any means,” and if that expert were to express his view “using the appropriate style,” then, “believe me,” there would be respectable people among us “willing to carry out the idea.” Despite our sophistication and professions of compassion, “all that’s needed is for some new fad to appear and people would be instantly transformed.” Not everyone, of course, but the number of adherents of the new fad would grow while others would be afraid, or embarrassed, to cling to old ideas."
And
"Solzhenitsyn concludes: “Ideology—that is what gives evil-doing its long-sought justification and gives the evil-doer the necessary steadfastness and determination . . . so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but receive praise and honors.” "
Allowing institutions to dispense harmful synthetic hormones to children & young people and allowing therapists to bend minds and most horribly, allowing plastic surgeons to flay breasts off of health young women and even celebrate new "Identities" like Eunuch - is justified because the end is to "match" the wrong body the youth was "born into" - to a modern cult fantasy - and that will solve all of a young person's discomfort in life. That was OK. It took beheading Israeli babies for anyone to open their eyes.
Because, so far butchery has been Ok! It is more than OK, it is to be celebrated! These are American "respectable people" experimenting on kids and everybody else is embarrassed to cling to old ideas (like that there are 2 sexes) and not celebrate the gendered soul. At best, this is a psych disorder guys, at worst a mass social hysteria.
"Florida gender surgeon promotes 'eunuch' gender identity for kids"
Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn describe why Dr. Diane Ehrensaft can have a job after her Satanic Panic days, after saying babies in onesies express their Gender Identity, and that a teen girl can always get new breasts if she regrets her double mastechtomy. https://4thwavenow.com/ Ehrensaft is a doctor at UCSF! All these things happen under "Woke" or "Progressivism". Eugenics began as a healthy baby program. https://pitt.substack.com/p/echoes-of-eugenics-what-the-doctors
Open Borders worked just fine so long as the illegals, rapists, child trafficers, MS-13 assassins, cartel Fentanyl dealers, etc. stayed in the border red states. Once they started to metastasize into the precious blue state sanctuary cities -- not to mention the consecrated grounds of the all-white elite summer playground of Martha's Vineyard -- then and only then did the open border become a problem.
The ultimate expression of NIMBY - No Immigrants My Back Yard.
So true. Every time I hear the woe-is-me tales of how overwhelmed they are in NYC and Chicago, all I can think of is the people and community service workers in El Paso and any number of Texas and Arizona border towns who have been dealing with this invasion for YEARS. They must listen to these big cities whining about how hard it is and how they need government help and just roll their eyes. Their towns and lands are being inundated, but their appeals for the Feds to do something to stop it have been ignored because the official party line is that there is no problem. The border is secure. Anyone who says otherwise is just a redneck xenophobe.
Yes. Good move for those governors to bus them. The horror of being sent to Martha's Vineyard! They sure were not allowed to stay there long - but they should have.
I think it was less than 24 hours before they were deported to a military base on the cape.
FFS, the Obama compound alone has something like 24 bedrooms. If they had doubled up those Venezuelans two to a room they could have sheltered the lot of them for the winter.
I just want to correct one common misconception. 90+% of illegal drugs cross the border the old-fashioned way. Boats, planes, and at legal vehicle crossings. Not on the backs of cartel mules.
George Floyd died of a drug overdose? Ok, if he had drugs in his system, does that mean the police officer was just justified to keep his knee on his neck as long as he did?
If you can speak, you can breathe. That is just how Humans work. All I saw was an l.e.o with his knee at a man's throat. I didn't see an l.e.o leaning into it. If you can't breathe; neither can you talk. Air has to pass both ways over your vocal chords. Now go away and detain us no further. Play stupid games; win stupid prizes. Enough.
George Floyd may have been a scummy person (similar to many people that cops deal with). How does that justify kneeling on his neck for an extended period of time? Two things can be true at the same time. That’s the point of The FP.
I do not think George Floyd deserved death. However, the police officer did not cause his death. The guy asked to be placed on the ground because he could not breathe - do to the drugs. So, he might have died without any arrest/resisting arrest. I think the officer used the kind of restraint that he was taught to use. But, the tragedy was spun for its narrative value.
Interesting. I think you are dead wrong in that the officer was totally out of line. I agree that narrative was completely distorted for many other reasons. Also, thank you for sharing.
His knee was on his back, if you took the time to see all the body cam footage you would see the angle they didn't show on the propaganda feeds. His knee had nothing to do with his death, the medical examiner's report that was not reported states this plainly. It was known this was not a murder very early on.
A career criminal, in the act of another crime, resisted police after shoving a bunch of drugs in his mouth to cover evidence. His ill health and the toxic level of drugs did him in.
He was convicted by a rigged system and a jury of activists, it should not have made the court room in the first place, that is the first breach of our system and the jury were simply hateful activists, not rendering a verdict based on the facts.
The case is being appealed, yes, but a lot of our judicial is captured with activists violating their oaths.
The rule of law has been nearly removed, the checks and balances are not operating as they should. If our system was functioning, mass prosecutions for domestic terrorism would have resulted from the BLM domestic terror incidents that spanned months, caused nearly three dozen murders and $4B in property damage.
I have also read he had a large quantity of opiates in his system and it wasn’t a knee to his neck that killed him! So pathetic what they packaged and regurgitated to the unsuspecting public! Not sure if this is 💯 true but if it is its really pathetic
I do not think George Floyd deserved death. However, the police officer did not cause his death. The guy asked to be placed on the ground because he could not breathe - do to the drugs. He likely would have died without any arrest/resisting arrest. I think the officer used the kind of restraint that he was taught to use. But, the tragedy was spun for its narrative value.
for the 6th time, the knee was not on his neck. you cannot cry mama if your airway is blocked. I know you really want his death to be about white cops, but his death is about a drug overdose and a media looking to set the country on fire... especially on Trump's watch.
That's the exact line that REALLY resonated with me. What I've been trying to articulate myself for quite some time, Mr. Konstantin did so perfectly in a short paragraph. Thank you to the author!!
Reality is undefeated. No amount of word salad virtue signaling, regurgitation of “diversity is our stength” “no borders no walls” "hate has no home here" will change that. Even though their power structures are polar opposites, the woke and jihadists share a common hatred for Western civilization and many other similarities: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-wage-a-progressive-jihad
Absolutely. They are natural allies fighting imperialist West. And while doing that leftists don't mind putting any anti-patriarchy motives to a back burner the same way they put any moral constrains.
Hi Yuri, how do you suppose we get "sex assigned at birth" removed from the forms we all routinely sign? It is like having to swear your faith in /allegiance to Gnosticism each time you visit a doctor- or really - interact with the bureaucratic state in any way. We all let it happen.
Thank you, Sam. Whenever there is a paper form I do something like that. But, most forms are electronic now and you cannot get past it without answering.
Yes, I really appreciate Sam's words but you cannot get past it on an electronic form. We need to get rid of this worse-than-nonsense in a systemic manner. Most people are not for it but its there.
Most important electronic forms - especially medical forms - insist on knowing what your sex is. They do not let you move forward by saying that your sex is "other" (???) or "prefer not to say.". Sex matters and most of all in healthcare.
And, it is of first importanc. Requiring people to agree that sex is something that is "assigned" at time of birth forces them to agree with an unreality/blatantly false cult narrative which most people (who do not suffer from a psychological problem) know is crazy. Theodore Dalrymple says it best:
“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."
"Precious Child" (an adult man) calls for death to women he does not like. But, we cannot say he is a man and use any pronouns that make sense. Even as the journalist calls out what the guy is doing he refers to "Precious Child" as "she". It might have been too "violent" for the writer to call him "he"?
Also, isn't "drag queen" or "Presious Child" a role, like playing a police detective on television? Yet society humors such folks (not folx) that they really are "Columbo" and we must call them "Sergeant" - or else! The guy's name, which might be Bob Smith or something, is a "dead name". And, you are "dead" if you use it.
That's the basic Christian worldview, all humans are sinful by nature (the concept of original sin) and you can't resolve that by simply trying harder and implementing better laws. You have to take human nature into account when trying to build a viable society. Anyone who has studied especially the Communist history of the 20th century knows what absolute atrocities are born out of utopian ideas and grand ideologies. Progressive ideology isn't different, it sounds great but it can not withstand the reality of human nature.
Well put! I have a friend with an "unconstrained" worldview - this idea that all humans are inherently good - and it is fascinating to see the way that she parents her young children. Any time her child acts out she takes the blame on herself for putting her child in a situation in which she would act that way. Over time she's had to concede that it is impossible to accommodate all of her daughter's misbehavior and it's left her confused and frustrated that "negative outside influences" have tainted her children. It seems exhausting!
Parenting is hard. It's being kind but firm in enforcing reasonable expectations of behavior. Too many people with children today have replaced parenting with coddling and letting the child set the rules. The ultimate expression of this is believing it's best to "affirm" your child when he or she says they want to change genders. The woke say, if you object, the state should take your kid away.
Jesus Christ believed humans were both malleable (“You need to be reborn”) and perfectible (“Be ye perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect”). No one can say Jesus Christ wasn’t one to “take human nature into account.” His vision vis-a-vis the perfectibility of humans, and hence society, was unconstrained. He believed perfection was possible, indeed, mandatory.
Perfectable only through Him, otherwise His sacrifice was unnecessary. Only the most cursory reading of the Bible would lead someone to believe in an unconstrained world view. He believed we should strive for perfection, but that we’re unable to attain it.
If we could attain perfection on our own, the law of the Old Testament would have been sufficient. Nobody was able to keep all of the laws, so we have to be faithful but also realistic.
Nehemiah 4:9 But we prayed to our God and guarded the city day and night to protect ourselves.
The so-called "Old Testament" does not say that one is supposed to attain perfection on one's own. Rather, it comes through prayer and seeking God's help and through the hard work of examining oneself and taking concrete steps to improve one's character traits (such as envy, greed, lust, etc.) There is no magical "saving" by saying "I accept You, I'm saved!" No, it's through prayer AND hard work on oneself!
This is one area where the Christian view and the scientific align.
Christianity says we’re born in sin. Science says we’re animals. By either view, unless we BOTH readily acknowledge our innate tendencies AND strive to rise above them, we’ll do evil / act as the self-serving pack animals we are.
By accepting that by our nature we are not good, we’re that much more likely to question whether our feelings and actions are as good and pure (and valid) as we feel and believe they are.
Conversely, if you instead believe you are good and pure by nature, it follows that you’ll trust that your heart and mind will never lead you astray.
There is no joy in having seen this all coming. We have all been witnesses to so much folly and destruction in what made the world great and wasted so much time. How do you deprogram the generations who have wallowed in this nonsense and repair trust in journalism and government. I fear that these problems so easy to create will take decades to repair.
"How do you deprogram the generations who have wallowed in this nonsense and repair trust in journalism and government."
Like with the Children of Israel with Moses in the desert, a whole generation must die off before things can change and they can enter the "Promised Land". They are too fundamentally poisoned at this point to be redeemed.
Totally agree. Moses knew what he was dealing with when he had Hebrews wander for 40 years, so much so that he made the personal sacrifice of denying himself entry to the Promised Land in order to create the necessary mind-shift in the population. I struggle to imagine what modern day scenario might accomplish the same goal with this misaligned generation.
Exactly. And this misinformed generation will have children and have already become teachers.
I work in education. If you want any of this to really change, please get involved in your schools, your school boards. I cannot stress this enough. Schools truly are moving forward with all the progressive wants. Even in small town America where I am. Superintendents sign off with preferred pronouns, equity training is king, and white fragility is taught to staff. This is not fear mongering. It is real. Even at my grade level (PreK).
And for God's sake, limit what your child does on smart devices.
If not, what will come will be far worse. The writing is on the wall.
The disobedience was for Moses taking 'credit' for deriving water from rock, as well as striking the rock with staff rather than 'speaking' to rock as Yahweh had instructed:
You're so welcome. Each generation has much to learn and re-learn from the OT (or more properly the Hebrew Bible or 'Tanakh'). It is the source of all goodness and wisdom.
I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Moses choice, to not enter the Promised Land. Numbers 20:8, God speaking tells Moses to speak to the crag, that it may bring out water. But in Numbers 20:10-12, it says “Then Moses and Aaron called the congregation together before the crag, and he said to them: “Hear, now, you rebels! Must we bring out water for you from this crag?” 11 With that Moses lifted his hand up and struck the crag twice with his rod, and much water began to pour out, and the assembly and their livestock began to drink. 12 God later said to Moses and Aaron: “Because you did not show faith in me and sanctify me before the eyes of the people of Israel, you will not bring this congregation into the land that I will give them.” In Moses saying, “Must WE bring out water from this crag?” & STRIKING the rock twice with his staff, he fails to santify God. He did not follow what God said & he did not give the glory to God. Thus, Aaron was first to climb a mountain, be stripped of his outer garment & it was given to his son Eleazar. Then, Aaron dies. Moses is later, shown the Promised Land but he does not enter.
I’m not as pessimistic as you are. Note the response of the Harvard groups when a lucrative employment offer was rescinded. Everyone suddenly had identity crises. They didn’t really feel that way, or they hadn’t read the statement carefully, or their organization hadn’t sought their opinion before signing it, or…..
Bottom line: turn on the lights—aka what we call “reality”—and the roaches scurry. With luck, the lights will remain on long enough for substantial change to happen. Those changes will have to led by persuasive voices calling out reality deniers. At least, if this article really reflects the current situation, an increasing fraction of people are accepting reality, ugly as it is.
I agree but isn’t that just the human condition? The cockroaches go into hiding and then they come back. It’s been that way since the beginning and it’ll never end.
In the past, wars tended to destroy the majority of the cockroaches, leaving the few survivors to crawl off and hope they could breed their ideas before they died.
Today, cockroach nests are an accepted fixture of our society, so the cockroaches are never really in danger at all.
“…when a lucrative employment offer was rescinded.”
lol You do realize the Fed has printed $7 trillion over the past decade? Any and all rational human incentives can be negated by morons with good “intentions”.
I mean its all dependent on events ~ "harold macmillan" ~ doesn't it? If things get bad enough meaning Hamas starts shooting trans people in front of them well then either the problem solves itself or they wake up to what they have become. ie so brainwashed and deluded that they put two opposite things together and the bigger one ate the smaller one. Lions and goats can be friends..... lol!
Yes, great metaphor. 40 years it took to purge that generation. And that was a pure experiment. There was no slippage. We have a much harder task on our hands.
Change will never happen from the top down. It has to be a movement at the grassroots level.
You’re starting to see some of that “movement” with the school boards and city councils in smaller towns shifting to a more conservative, pro-family, position.
However, you’re combating 50 years of leftist ideology in our school systems that have already indoctrinated millions of Americans, many of them in position of power.
Yes, he was hamstrung and the EO didn't go anywhere and was immediately reversed by the Biden Administration, but (and it's a big but!) if there was a single moment in time when the pendulum began to swing back it was the moment Trump signed the EO.
Prior to the EO Tom Cotton was asked on cable news what could be done about the "culture issues" that were a top concerned of polled Republicans and his answer was: "I don't know."
The EO launched Christopher Rufo--Trump had seen him on Tucker Carlson and then collaborated with him on it. It put a name on what we were fighting and people like James Lindsay got traction making the intellectual ties to Marxism and the philosophy behind it. The EO showed the Right and the red pilled what a pathway forward looked like. It simplified what is a complex topic, gave us the verbiage to use, and pointed us in the right direction energizing thousands of activists.
Not a bad record for an EO that got "hamstrung" and didn't accomplish any of the things it was meant to accomplish...
But we must never give up so that means keeping these conversations going with those we think have bought into the progressive mindset. Some of my children bought into it especially after attending college. Now, when they see the potential match up for presidential candidates Trump and Biden and they are paying attention -- especially after the terror acts on Israel. I refused to sit by this election. Casting a vote is simply not enough any longer so I have personally gotten involved in Haley's grassroots coalition.
No joy, some would say sad. Tribes have done this to each other since there were tribes. The difference is we have nukes and WiFi. The end of this earth age will be televised.
We have roughly 12 thousand years of some sort of human record. It is the same story, time after time.
I have two degrees in Liberal Arts (Comparative Religion, in effect), have read most of the major "intellectual" works of the Left, and was a moderate Democrat until I was 25 or so.
Having said that, I can honestly say that seen INTELLECTUALLY Conservatism is vastly richer, more interesting, and of course more practical than all the pseudo-pieties--and of course patent nonsense-- masking moral cowardice and not infrequently outright sadism that characterize the Left today.
For those with an inclination, one good book to start with, in addition to everything by Sowell and everything by Paul Johnson (particularly Intellectuals), is "Reflections on the Revolution in France", by Edmund Burke. Everything going on today was going on in some form back in France in the 1790's, and certainly canceling (for which the penalty was public beheading), and virtue signaling, and he was critiqueing it then.
None of this is new. None of these conflicts are new. None of these REALIZATIONS are new.
It was written in Ecclesiastes "There is nothing new under the sun" perhaps 2,500 years ago. The main difference between Conservatives and those delusional and childish enough to think that THIS TIME ridiculous ideas will work, is that we LEARN FROM HISTORY. Leftists don't. They don't learn at all. They don't learn from their own history, because they live in fantasy worlds. There is no virtue in delusion. Obviously.
Perhaps Leftists don't learn from history because the history they are being in fed in our universities is misinformation/disinformation? How can you learn about the French Revolution and its Reign of Terror, how can you learn about the aftermath of the Russian Revolution or Mao's victory in China and not see the evil unleashed in those places...and not connect that to today's progressives?
Likely true. I have been arguing for some time that “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” and “The Black Book of Communism” should be required reading at the high school level. The first, so people stop abusing the words Nazi and Genocide; and the second so that people understand large crimes are rarely committed without attractive rhetorical wallpaper; and that COMMUNISTS LIE ABOUT EVERYTHING. Always. Its integral to everything they do.
So I get your point, Finbar. But there is no way in hell any kid in high school in our current age will be able to read something as dense as 'The Rise And Fall..'
Ain't happening - and it's not happening for the very reason idiotic twenty year old progressives in Ivy league schools spout Death to Israel when Jews are already being murdered - because they are ill informed and poorly taught - our educational system has failed them. They can't read properly to begin with, and what they are capable of reading does not include impartial (and long) books of history.
They could read Rise and Fall their junior year and Black Book their senior year. The language is not hard. Someone just needs to require it. Our kids are not born stupid: they are made that way.
They should ALSO read "From Time Immemorial", by Joan Peters, which would help in understanding today's Middle East politics. But it won't happen, because truth reveals darkness, and darkness hates the light.
'Rise and Fall', all 1200 pages of it - in competition with Tik Tok and Instagram amongst kids who can barely read to begin with? With teachers who barely have enough resources to work with to 'require it'?
Reality bites. No high schooler will read anything longer than 250 pages unless they're being taught in an expensive private school.
You may be right. You may also be wrong. The likelihood, of course, is that some kids would and some would not, but the ones fir whom it would be most important would be the college bound kids, and that should definitely be within their scope. That sort of thing WAS the standard for a long time. I dont think its ever too late to make the decision to stop sucking at life.
My daughter's HS teachers were mostly incapable of writing a single paragraph without grammatical errors (including her English teacher). The principal was worse. My biggest f-up in life was not sending her to private school. On the other hand, she has a good job and has chosen to avoid university, a decision I (with 3 degrees) support given the garbage she likely would have been fed there.
It took me two years to finish "The Rise And Fall of the Third Reich", but it fully explained the current trend in todays politics. It should be taught in EVERY political science course, from high school to the universities.
I dont think most Leftists understand how the first two apply to them. This may sound insane—and it is—but that is my experience. It is the mindset of children, but they literally think everything they touch turns into sunshine and rainbows and that all evil comes, and can ONLY come, from ideological enemies.
Even now, they are not so much excusing Hamas crimes, as IGNORING them. Their minds can only accommodate a digital, us/them, good/evil world, but they lie even about THAT. That is why it is so important for them to accuse ideological Others of crimes they didn’t commit. It enables them to ignore their own much worse crimes, thereby protecting their self images of being snow white angels in a terrible world they are trying to fix.
As I said, lying is an inescapable and necessary feature of such hallucinatory thinking.
Agree on Rand, but she is stronger medicine than most such virgin spirits can handle.
My own view is that honest history is the best way of easing into withdrawal from what amounts to a sociogenic mass psychosis.
You may be right, but I am less concerned with changing the minds of committed leftists than with saving those who have not yet gone over the edge, helping them recognize the lies when they hear them.
Fair. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
I read George Faludys account of his time in a Hungarian labor camp (which the authorities of course claimed didn’t exist) and he made the interesting comment that nobody he knew who learned Latin became, or at least remained, a Communist. It is an eminently logical language, and the patterns of thought it embodies was an apparent innoculation against bullshit.
"Their minds can only accommodate a digital, us/them, good/evil world,"
I call this 'Binary Thinking' where there are two modes, good/bad. I once met a girl in the ER (I was an EMT) she thought taking heavy doses of Tylenol 3—which is Tylenol with codeine—had no adverse consequences. We tried to explain that Tylenol was destroying her liver. She kept saying 'but its medicine.' She was unable to grasp the concept that medicine is a tradeoff between toxins and disease.
YES!!! This is the arc of history, repeated again, and again, ad finitum. But who is really paying attention? No one in power positions. And the media always looks at these fools as if they were the new sages of wisdom. One day these "sages" will do the unthinkable and end our current civilization into something more illiberal and repressive and then call it "progress".
Always! They never hid it. They were proud. They tucked it in the back when it didn’t poll well for a minute but it was always there. Their cheerleaders turned a blind eye or worse, they agreed!
What I always thought revealing about the BDS movement over the last two decades or so is that it was fuelled not by Israeli intransigence on reaching a peace accord, which would have made sense had that been the case, but by Palestinian refusal to sign on to three peace proposals (over ten years) already agreed upon by Israel. In effect, the movement is trying to reward the Palestinians for not wanting peaceful coexistence with Israel, while condemning Israel for agreeing on peace proposals.
Despite militia of slavery, expulsions, pogroms, mass murder, and prejudice, the indoctrinated "woke" cannot allow Jews to be seen as either an oppressed minority or as indigenous people because we are "too white" and "too European", which means that we cannot possibly be anything other than "oppressors". How can a people "occupy" the very land they came from?
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. It's a policy to try to destroy Israel economically by boycotting all products made in Israel, pulling out of all investments in Israeli companies, and calling for countries to impose economic sanctions against Israel.
It has been more successful than you'd think. A lot of products I used to buy that happened to be made in Israel are no longer made in Israel, at least according to the packaging.
October 7th should have been a wake up call especially liberals to how evil can strike at any moment. Watching posters of kidnapped children being ripped down this weekend is evidence many liberals found it easier to blame the Jews for the atrocities committed by monsters.
The tearing down of posters of kidnapped children is such a bizarrely childish--and yet simultaneous evil--thing to do. Tearing down these posters does not change the fact that the evident heroes of these poster-tearers (or is it poster-terrorists?) really did kidnap hundreds of people. Tearing down posters suggests only one thing: that the person doing so approves of that kidnapping (and the rape and murder that accompanied it).
I think those ripping down the posters are really trying to get rid of the proof they they are wrong but can’t come to admit it. What’s a common theme among the radical left...they think they are the smartest people in the room and cannot admit that they are not, hence they get rid of the evidence. It’s why they try to silence other views, cancel their perceived opponents and don’t people to hear a different viewpoint. Insecurity to the extreme.
This is their puerile way to fight the war beyond the battlefield. Notice the responses of the doxxed: the dentist in a Jewish neighborhood outside Boston offers a sinister smile and a haughty chortle, the shaved head ,nose ring woman in Brooklyn swears in Arabic and invites police intervention, also in Brooklyn a thirty four old social worker displays dull apathy and the serial offender at VCU offers only stuttering anger. None appear embarrassed. Minus embarrassment how is shame possible? Without shame how is a civilized world possible? These are the shameless shock troops of the 21st century left. Their souls have surrendered to a soulless ideology.
It’s simple: a child willfully misbehaves, but he doesn’t want to advertise the misbehavior to his parents, lest he be punished. So he bullies witnesses into silence.
In this case, the only difference is that the child—bad seed in this case—is doing it vicariously, abetting the crimes of others, but which crimes he enjoys having witnessed.
Maybe not - maybe it shows they are ashamed of actions and ideas they cannot deny having long vocally supported. They can only try to remove the evidence of the consequences that laid bare their own illusions and bad faith.
In my experience people hate to contradict themselves even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Some will repent and revise; some will resent the evidence itself and try to bury it. May God help each of us to find a way through this without bitterness or violence.
Yes and no. Tearing down the posters could mean entire affiliation with the murderous motives of terrorists, but it could also mean nothing must get in the way of the sanctimonious narrative of the 'victimhood' of Palestine from the Israeli 'colonizers.' Kidnapping victims displayed to the public might shift sympathy towards Jews, and these deluded kids can't have that.
I can't help feeling that those are, at this moment, shades of difference without meaning.
Where the rubber hits the road, people are either pro-existence-of-Israel or they are anti-existence-of-Israel.
Every mealy-mouthed attempt to explain how supporting Palestinians and/or decrying Israel's behavior somehow does NOT mean eliminating Israel ultimately runs up against the hard, cold wall of Islamic unwillingness to accept the right of Israel to exist as a nation. No matter how Palestinian sympathizers try to dress up their suggestions (if they have any--many just cover their ears and shout "stop the violence!"), the natural end-point of all of those suggestions requires Israel to cease to exist.
True enough. And of course, much of this is not new. The shock of know nothing kids spouting verbally violent antisemitic tropes might be, condoning murder, but the "Islamic unwillingness' has been there for generations of Palestinians, amply emphasized by their systemic refusal to agree to any viable (flawed they may have been) treaty with Israel that was offered to them over a ten year period.
These kids are all about magical thinking: if only X wasn't happening, the world would be perfect.
And so, of course, they imagine that there is some action on the part of Israel that would magically make the Palestinians willing to live peacefully. And if that action is for Israel is cease to exist...well, they're "white colonizers" and so they "deserve it," regardless of how ahistorical and genocidal that belief is.
The fact that Palestinians are perfectly happy to slaughter other Muslims and even each other never manages to be more than a "must be a Jewish lie" blip on their radar.
Hamas using their own citizens as human shields is a good example of your last sentence. Hezbollah, similar. They will murder their own for a political agenda. Criminal and immoral behavior. Not civilized and not 1st world. Of which Israel belongs.
Regarding those tearing the posters down, perhaps Mike Tyson said it best “ Social media made y'all way to[o] comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it."
Might be time to start punching people in the mouth…
As a long time conservative who has endured the arrogant dismissal, loathing and ridicule of progressives for years excuse me if I’m slow to accept that this “awakening” is real. The same people who built a statue glorifying a drug addicted rapist while cheering BLM and antifa tyranny are only now having a great awakening? When I see enough of you cancel your NY Times and Washington Post subscriptions and stop listening to NPR that they all disappear forever maybe my faith in the wisdom and character of my fellow citizens will be restored. When I stop having to endure race baiting self promoters on tv after every white on black crime regardless of the statistical insignificance I might start to regain hope for racial progress. When enough of us begin to truly be curious about how elected officials making middle class incomes amass generational wealth while claiming there is no proof of influence peddling or insider trading I might be encouraged. I could go on but you get the point. Because we might agree on our support for Israel excuse me if I don’t suddenly embrace or trust you as an ally in fighting on the issues that matter in saving our country. It’s not just about Israel. Western Civilization and capitalism is not the cause of all the world’s problems, it is its best hope. Defend and protect it, it’s survival is not a given.
I'm afraid too many woke progressives who are horrified by Oct 7 are only concerned that these supporters of human atrocities are crazies that have somehow been included into their tribe, but they don't see how the ideology is fluid between the crazies and their own wokeism.
Sadly, I am in this camp. It shouldn’t take beheaded babies to convince people that wokism, corporatism, globalism, and everything the “left” has been doing for the past 20 years is bad. I fear things have to get much worse, our progressive chickens come home to roost, before it can get better.
A great many of them will practice Gell-Mann amnesia, declining to see that the same process by which the Left lionizes Hamas is used to make the left-wing argument on every other issue.
Best post on this thread, Jim. So-called "progressives" -- Jewish and non-Jewish alike-- have a lot to answer for. It's tragic that it took their ox being gored by unspeakable evil for them to suddenly see the light that has been blinding the rest of us for decades.
Brilliant article! I am also one of those people who has become politically conservative overnight after this issue. Never thought I would vote conservative until now. Even when I saw illogical and harmful demands were made about inclusion of trans women in sports, prisons, too much focus on skin colour. I still thought at its core these people mean well and want to create a more equal society, they are misguided, brainwashed and maybe misinformed due to hyper polarization driven by social media. But there is no way anyone can brainwash a moral person to think that killing babies is a form of “resistance”.
Ten years ago I thought leftists were wrong about most things but still not bad people. A few years later I saw them as tyrants. By 2020 I was convinced they were dangerous. Today I know they're evil.
Sadly, I have seen no viewpoint shift among my acquaintances. Two days ago I had someone say to me that the terror attacks were Israel’s fault because they taunted the oppressed by having a music festival so close to the “open air prison”.
I am finding that most of the left is merely a collection of empty academic credentials and meaningless phrases without a rational thought among them. Nor a meaningful life experience in the whole lot. There are indeed to perspectives. One based on reality. The other based on a warped self image.
I doubt that any of my Leftists friends have actually changed their minds about anything. Their current silence suggests to me that they are simply waiting until it is socially safe to push their Leftist ideas again.
Mine are also shockingly silent! People who normally prattle on in favor of defunding the police , or how the unhoused need to live in (other people's) backyards, now just want to talk about the weather!
At best I get avoidance of any related topic. I had one guy who is very left complain about crime in Philly the other day but quickly changed the subject when he realized that the next painful step would be acknowledging the policies that caused the crime. That's a no-go zone mentally. It is safe to complain but not safe (yet?) to look at the underlying cause of the complaint.
I'm afraid people's views are very greatly shaped by their base of knowledge. Leftists who watch MSNBC will never change, because they will never hear a disagreeing opinion or know of refuting facts.
Fantastic! I made the transition from Unconstrained to Constrained after reading Thomas Sowell in 2020, when considering the COVID and George Floyd response in my community. I want to share this article with so many friends who may not be Free Press subscribers— HELP! How do I do so?
If you have a browser with reader mode like Safari (Brave does this too, though not as well), I find that the easiest. Put it in reader mode, and on an iPhone or iPad if you share via email it will include the whole document. On a desktop, once in reader mode, copy and paste into an email.
My journey from Unconstrained to Constrained happened while reading Atlas Shrugged, given to me by my mom when I went off to university. Wise woman, my mom. This was 1976. It has been painful to get to this point. I did give the book to my three sons when they came of age. It took with two of them. Distressingly, the third is in the unconstrained camp, for now.
If you have an iPhone or iPad, select the Share icon and choose Print. Keep choosing Print until you get to the Save option. You will end up saving the article as a PDF file that you can then send as an attachment.
Let's never forget who said he was about to "fundamentally change America". He didn't start the slide from "constrained" to "unconstrained" but he clearly greased the rails. Through his proxies, he is still there and is pushing hard. It is through clear-eyed articles like this that perhaps, just perhaps, we can see what is happening to us.
Obama....oh how they loved/love him. This is where I first noticed the personal divisions among my friends and community. A biracial leader who could have tempered racial division as a living symbol of the inconsequence of skin color, chose instead to use it to further divide. He made sure that blacks like him were reminded of their victimhood and whites like him were embarrassed by their so called “privilege”. Very clever he was at stifling any voices who disagreed. His wasted legacy will be that good people who have kept silent and allowed to let this ideology permeate are now faced with a generation of cold hearted, non empathetic, divisively impulsive revolutionaries incubated in this transformation he began. This didn’t have to be.
Also, why is Michelle Obama's memoir worthy of 17 million readers? The truth is celebrity worship. Why is Taylor Swift a phenom? The Kardashians? I dunno, but the Obama's played the celeb game just as well.
Really? Publishing as money laundering? I heard Christmas tree farms, sanitation services, industrial laundry services...but publishing? I guess any industry can be used to launder.
Yes as noted above, it’s “customary” for hosts at speaking engagements to buy stacks of books of the speaker. Many / most of which are in a storeroom years later.
Well, for example - Bernie Sanders and/or Stacey Abrams book "sales" were largely gifts for political donations or pushed to be sold as part of speaking engagements. Also books pushed into the libraries of K-12 or college class plans.
"trying to figure out why Obama was given a Nobel" ... consider that Fidel Castro was nominated for a Nobel every year since the start of his revolution.
Yes - 100%. Everything you say. Even writing this... I'm mindful of how to criticize his leadership without being interpreted as racist. For *most* of my progressive friends he literally belongs on Mt. Rushmore (they have said that). In truth his legacy is... well I can't say it any better than you did.
My hope for his presidency was that he would speak out about the effect of fatherless homes. He did a little (if I remember correctly) but he could have made a huge difference there, I think. But he didn't...
Obama is plenty disliked around this comment forum. I get that. I myself have issues with his tenure in office. Still, sometimes the details get in the way of the memory driven commentary. The links below might tell you why, especially on the 'victimhood'..
Victor Davis Hanson does a great job of explaining Obama's vision of the world, especially our relationship with Iran. He states that one of the reasons Obaman was quiet at first about Israel, is our relationship with Iran, play nice and send money, help fund Hamas.
I think you mean Valerie Jarret. Obama didn't wipe his ass before consulting her. Some think she's still the one directing the Obama retreads running the Biden administration.
This is so true. They never hid it. They told us what we were doing. It was never a secret. I hate to say “told you so” but wow how I want to scream it now.
Spot on - reading this directly after watching a man in London needing Police protection from a mob of people with Palestinian flags. And why was the mob angry with him ? Because he had an English flag with God Save the King written on it. One can only hope that it is not already too late.
I am going to send this to all my democratic friend. I moved to the other camp when the schools,courts and medical establishment tried to change my child’s gender without me- I have seen the dangers first hand. And it is real
An often overlooked byproduct of modern immigration is the contempt of Western cultural ideals through pseudo-assimilation.
Under the guise of kindness and compassion, we’ve made the obscene tolerable, our weaknesses - our hubris as virtuous.
While our Western youth reconcile with manufactured Identity oppressions, an Ideological fervour of Jihadists has shown the true privilege to which most of us reside…
“If our civilization is allowed to collapse, it will not be replaced by a progressive utopia. It will be replaced by chaos and barbarism.“
Thank you, KK.
It is the Hitler/Stalin/Maoist jackboot with a new shine. A-Bomb 20th Century retro replete with economic looting, cultural/national destruction and those bitter sweet chocolate Swiss numbered accounts to stash the spoils out of view. But, the object lesson imprisonment of Julian Assange, the UBS destruction of whistle blower Stephanie Gibaud, the Joe-for-sale White House and the death by a thousand cuts moral suicide of American elected political leadership still isn't enough to "woke" the sleeping giant. Would a limited nuclear strike have had any more impact on the world psyche than the Hamas assault? As in Nazi Germany, "we the people" are being forced across lines of human moral demarcation that may result in the destruction of the world. The French central banker Macron didn't fiddle while Paris burned. But he sure danced.
Again!! Let's name the disease: Megalomaniac hubris and narcissism (the CCP/DNC/WEF/EU Davos billionaire crowd) manipulating mal formed ideological utopianism (D.E.I./BLM/Antifa/"woke"). They serve one another. Example: In Russia with the backing of international capital a handful of bolshevik's seized the country. And, for a select few, life was good for a very long time. Employee's of the bureaucratic surveillance state profited and faithfully served totalitarianism until societal collapse. Then took the country for itself.
You are being held at gunpoint and the Hamas assault put the corporate fascist finger squarely on the trigger. You are under arrest!! Is there any difference between an ankle bracelet and 24 hour state surveillance? If I can seize your bank account, destroy and cancel your life at will or disappear you on a whim how free are you? Europe is lost!! Surveillance, arrest and imprisonment for thought and speech crimes, state seizure of property, travel restrictions and, as intended for the World, the slow, steady overlay of a CCP style surveillance control mechanism is already well underway. Free speech, free peoples and culture must be silenced to prevent the exposure and incarceration of an out of control immoral international criminal elite who destroy everything they touch. And the monsters of the D.E.I. "woke" commissariat are there to make sure they get away with it. Have they not gutted, looted and destroyed the greatest economy in the world and undermined every American institution of moral value and worth?
Tech/AI/communications has created a new world consciousness and left the perps running the political/financial grift transparent to reality. They are desperate, dangerous and visionless. "ism's" are dead because criminal finance and the minions of "woke" murdered them. This is an entirely new age and it is demanding an entirely new eyes and voice. The American Republic, the Constitution and the citizen are the only engines of survival.
Marxist "woke" is the lipstick on a pig called international criminal finance.
Got Constitution?
".. run--you can't run--tell my friend poor Willie Brown...I'm standing at the crossroads..and I believe I'm sinkin' down...." CROSSROADS/Robert Johnson
Bravo, indeed. My hat is off to you.
I really truly hope the author is correct and we have finally hit an inflection point in the downward spiral of woke. But be prepared for a fierce and sustained backlash. People in power -- especially those who have stolen that power -- and in danger of losing it will behave like wounded, cornered wild animals and strike out viscously and indiscriminately.
Remember Hillary on election night 2016? 🥵
If all Hillary's complaints were on election night 2016, that would be one thing,
But she has CONSTANTLY kept it up since. It's seven years later and she is STILL complaining because she is STILL bitter.
Try this on for size:
https://www.axios.com/2023/03/16/democrats-sympathize-more-palestinians-israelis-gallup
It proves what I have said all along. The Dem/Soc Party is the party of evil. It is now siding with terrorists. No wonder they won't censure the squad. They agree with them.
How can any decent human being vote for the party of terrorism?
Age and political alignment are two crosstabs. What I would really like to see is a distinction between college graduates and non-graduates over, say, the past 20 years. I'll bet that would open a lot of eyes.
"Remember Hillary on election night 2016?".
I do. She conceded and called Trump to congratulate him :)
And beginning the next day and continuing to the present day she called his 2016 election "illegitimate," still refusing to acknowledge that the Clinton "collusion" concoction -- a brazen "assault on our democracy" before, during, and after Trump's election -- was a sham and a fraud . . . just like Hillary herself.
But that’s the brilliance of the way the Left handles this. On the one hand, Hillary does the “classy” thing (concedes and congratulates) but on the other hand, she launches a sneaky, underhanded plot to manufacture evidence of Russian interference in the election.
So all people remember is that she “behaved well” at the time.
For all intents and purposes her shallow concession was effectively withdrawn. Which, I suppose, still puts her ahead of Stacy Abrams, low bar that it is.
That's.. not the same thing as claiming the election and vote counts were "rigged" by a vast conspiracy (the basis of which has shifted with the "facts"), and that millions of votes were just "fraud". She did bring up the heavy infiltration of foreign propaganda, on Trump's behalf, that was all over social media and with ties to Trump's campaign - sorry, Mueller's report, as well as the Republican led Senate Intelligence Committee, the Roger Stone and Paul Manafort all demonstrated these links and influences. But she never once claimed that the raw vote count, and electoral certification, of Trump's 2016 election was in and of itself fraudulent - a claim Trump, and far too many Republicans in power *continue to make*, and there was never a mass plan within the Democratic Party to not certify Trump's win or to utilize then VP Biden to "de-certify" the electors from states that Trump narrowly won (and which there were challenges over, particularly in WI where the count was especially close).
And there's a vast difference from claims (backed by evidence) that there were external and foreign influences on the election that drove certain issues, candidates, etc that should be cleaned up in future elections and that proliferated over social media platforms (a relatively new phenomenon of having such a prominent role in the campaign), than claiming that millions of votes that were verified through subsequent hand counts and multiple reviews were "fraud" regardless, and then to move past the failed legal challenges to an attempted legal coup to use the Congressional certification process to overturn the legally certified state electors. And then, of course, to instigate a riot over it.
Details! ; P
Keep tryng, Hillary...
Only once they peeled her off the ceiling and shot her with a tranquilizer dart.
"Got Constitution?"
Yes, we do and it is time to use it
One word
“WOW” thank you so well posted!
Bravo sir.
Assange was a liar, but aside from that, and I don't know how much finance is pulling the trigger, versus trying to ride the wave. Otherwise, spot on, and this should be turned into an article.
Much like the beliefs of the ancient pagans, I have no idea how much our elected leaders and the actually leading bureaucrats believe the woke drivel... is it like them offering entrails at an altar with cynicism for public show, or do they actually think it is the way the world works?!? I dunno which is worse!
Indeed, power and control over money.
"“The events of the last week have shattered the illusion that wokeness is about protecting victims and standing up for persecuted minorities. This ideology is and has always been about the one thing many of us have told you it is about for years: power." Yes.
Best FP ever! We get to all of these bad places via ideology.
How were Open Borders ever going to work?
BLM founder Patrisse Cullors bought herself a number of mansions and funded transgenderism.
George Floyd died of a drug overdose while existing arrest. Of course, we need to be against racism. But, we do not do that by signaling false virtue and instituting more racism.
No one is against people with psychological disorders - but no one can become a different sex (of which there are 2). Yet, we teach our children that they can.
"stunning scientific, technological, social, and cultural breakthroughs " = also 1930s Germany
Of course we have arrived at a very bad place in our culture via Progressive Ideology. There is a great recent WSJ article "Dostoevsky Knew: It Can Happen Here". The author is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Northwestern University - discussing Hamas atrocities and the reaction of many University students and educated people.
"Dostoevsky continues, but if some progressive expert were to come up with a theory showing that sometimes flaying skins can benefit the right cause because “the end justifies any means,” and if that expert were to express his view “using the appropriate style,” then, “believe me,” there would be respectable people among us “willing to carry out the idea.” Despite our sophistication and professions of compassion, “all that’s needed is for some new fad to appear and people would be instantly transformed.” Not everyone, of course, but the number of adherents of the new fad would grow while others would be afraid, or embarrassed, to cling to old ideas."
And
"Solzhenitsyn concludes: “Ideology—that is what gives evil-doing its long-sought justification and gives the evil-doer the necessary steadfastness and determination . . . so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but receive praise and honors.” "
Allowing institutions to dispense harmful synthetic hormones to children & young people and allowing therapists to bend minds and most horribly, allowing plastic surgeons to flay breasts off of health young women and even celebrate new "Identities" like Eunuch - is justified because the end is to "match" the wrong body the youth was "born into" - to a modern cult fantasy - and that will solve all of a young person's discomfort in life. That was OK. It took beheading Israeli babies for anyone to open their eyes.
Because, so far butchery has been Ok! It is more than OK, it is to be celebrated! These are American "respectable people" experimenting on kids and everybody else is embarrassed to cling to old ideas (like that there are 2 sexes) and not celebrate the gendered soul. At best, this is a psych disorder guys, at worst a mass social hysteria.
"Florida gender surgeon promotes 'eunuch' gender identity for kids"
https://thepostmillennial.com/florida-gender-surgeon-promotes-eunuch-gender-identity-for-kids
Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn describe why Dr. Diane Ehrensaft can have a job after her Satanic Panic days, after saying babies in onesies express their Gender Identity, and that a teen girl can always get new breasts if she regrets her double mastechtomy. https://4thwavenow.com/ Ehrensaft is a doctor at UCSF! All these things happen under "Woke" or "Progressivism". Eugenics began as a healthy baby program. https://pitt.substack.com/p/echoes-of-eugenics-what-the-doctors
"How were Open Borders ever going to work?"
Open Borders worked just fine so long as the illegals, rapists, child trafficers, MS-13 assassins, cartel Fentanyl dealers, etc. stayed in the border red states. Once they started to metastasize into the precious blue state sanctuary cities -- not to mention the consecrated grounds of the all-white elite summer playground of Martha's Vineyard -- then and only then did the open border become a problem.
The ultimate expression of NIMBY - No Immigrants My Back Yard.
So true. Every time I hear the woe-is-me tales of how overwhelmed they are in NYC and Chicago, all I can think of is the people and community service workers in El Paso and any number of Texas and Arizona border towns who have been dealing with this invasion for YEARS. They must listen to these big cities whining about how hard it is and how they need government help and just roll their eyes. Their towns and lands are being inundated, but their appeals for the Feds to do something to stop it have been ignored because the official party line is that there is no problem. The border is secure. Anyone who says otherwise is just a redneck xenophobe.
Yes. Good move for those governors to bus them. The horror of being sent to Martha's Vineyard! They sure were not allowed to stay there long - but they should have.
I think it was less than 24 hours before they were deported to a military base on the cape.
FFS, the Obama compound alone has something like 24 bedrooms. If they had doubled up those Venezuelans two to a room they could have sheltered the lot of them for the winter.
I just want to correct one common misconception. 90+% of illegal drugs cross the border the old-fashioned way. Boats, planes, and at legal vehicle crossings. Not on the backs of cartel mules.
That may be. We still need to be secure from terrorist crossings. And, I think we've had plenty of MS-13 come through at the border.
No country can survive without a border - especially the US.
George Floyd died of a drug overdose? Ok, if he had drugs in his system, does that mean the police officer was just justified to keep his knee on his neck as long as he did?
If you can speak, you can breathe. That is just how Humans work. All I saw was an l.e.o with his knee at a man's throat. I didn't see an l.e.o leaning into it. If you can't breathe; neither can you talk. Air has to pass both ways over your vocal chords. Now go away and detain us no further. Play stupid games; win stupid prizes. Enough.
https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/22/the-george-floyd-jr-narrative-unraveled/
George Floyd may have been a scummy person (similar to many people that cops deal with). How does that justify kneeling on his neck for an extended period of time? Two things can be true at the same time. That’s the point of The FP.
I do not think George Floyd deserved death. However, the police officer did not cause his death. The guy asked to be placed on the ground because he could not breathe - do to the drugs. So, he might have died without any arrest/resisting arrest. I think the officer used the kind of restraint that he was taught to use. But, the tragedy was spun for its narrative value.
Interesting. I think you are dead wrong in that the officer was totally out of line. I agree that narrative was completely distorted for many other reasons. Also, thank you for sharing.
His knee was on his back, if you took the time to see all the body cam footage you would see the angle they didn't show on the propaganda feeds. His knee had nothing to do with his death, the medical examiner's report that was not reported states this plainly. It was known this was not a murder very early on.
A career criminal, in the act of another crime, resisted police after shoving a bunch of drugs in his mouth to cover evidence. His ill health and the toxic level of drugs did him in.
The entire platform of BLM was based on lies.
Assuming this is true, how was he convicted and is he going to appeal?
He was convicted by a rigged system and a jury of activists, it should not have made the court room in the first place, that is the first breach of our system and the jury were simply hateful activists, not rendering a verdict based on the facts.
The case is being appealed, yes, but a lot of our judicial is captured with activists violating their oaths.
The rule of law has been nearly removed, the checks and balances are not operating as they should. If our system was functioning, mass prosecutions for domestic terrorism would have resulted from the BLM domestic terror incidents that spanned months, caused nearly three dozen murders and $4B in property damage.
I have also read he had a large quantity of opiates in his system and it wasn’t a knee to his neck that killed him! So pathetic what they packaged and regurgitated to the unsuspecting public! Not sure if this is 💯 true but if it is its really pathetic
That may be true, but how does that justify kneeling on his neck for an extended period of time?
I do not think George Floyd deserved death. However, the police officer did not cause his death. The guy asked to be placed on the ground because he could not breathe - do to the drugs. He likely would have died without any arrest/resisting arrest. I think the officer used the kind of restraint that he was taught to use. But, the tragedy was spun for its narrative value.
for the 6th time, the knee was not on his neck. you cannot cry mama if your airway is blocked. I know you really want his death to be about white cops, but his death is about a drug overdose and a media looking to set the country on fire... especially on Trump's watch.
That's the exact line that REALLY resonated with me. What I've been trying to articulate myself for quite some time, Mr. Konstantin did so perfectly in a short paragraph. Thank you to the author!!
Yes. Chaos, barbarism, and grifting (as we see in the flimflam scam artistry of BLM, Ta-Nihisi Coates, and Ibram X Kendi).
Hi Nancy, Yes. And since I believe in standing up for Reality I will include some real names:
Ibram X Kendi = Henry Rogers
Precious Child = Darren Merager
He recently threatened JK Rowling. I just learned he is the same guy who exposed himself to women and a little girl at the Wi Spa in LA a couple years ago https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/02/person-charged-with-indecent-exposure-at-la-spa-after-viral-instagram-video
And, poor Jazz Jennings = Jaron Bloshinsky
Remember when we instinctively knew not to trust people who used aliases?
Well put, Melanie.
True
Reality is undefeated. No amount of word salad virtue signaling, regurgitation of “diversity is our stength” “no borders no walls” "hate has no home here" will change that. Even though their power structures are polar opposites, the woke and jihadists share a common hatred for Western civilization and many other similarities: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-wage-a-progressive-jihad
Absolutely. They are natural allies fighting imperialist West. And while doing that leftists don't mind putting any anti-patriarchy motives to a back burner the same way they put any moral constrains.
Hi Yuri, how do you suppose we get "sex assigned at birth" removed from the forms we all routinely sign? It is like having to swear your faith in /allegiance to Gnosticism each time you visit a doctor- or really - interact with the bureaucratic state in any way. We all let it happen.
Just cross it out and write in all caps wrong!!! I feel your frustration LM.
Thank you, Sam. Whenever there is a paper form I do something like that. But, most forms are electronic now and you cannot get past it without answering.
I’ll do that on a paper form but what if it’s online? No way to register one’s discontent on a website form, usually.
Yes, I really appreciate Sam's words but you cannot get past it on an electronic form. We need to get rid of this worse-than-nonsense in a systemic manner. Most people are not for it but its there.
If it's of minimal importance, I always choose "other," or "prefer not to say."
Most important electronic forms - especially medical forms - insist on knowing what your sex is. They do not let you move forward by saying that your sex is "other" (???) or "prefer not to say.". Sex matters and most of all in healthcare.
And, it is of first importanc. Requiring people to agree that sex is something that is "assigned" at time of birth forces them to agree with an unreality/blatantly false cult narrative which most people (who do not suffer from a psychological problem) know is crazy. Theodore Dalrymple says it best:
“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."
― Theodore Dalrymple
I am for reality - which should not be as subversive as it is today.
For instance, "Precious Child" is not a woman or a victim:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12656675/transgender-singer-precious-child-photo-beheaded-JK-Rowling-sings-kill-TERF-today.html
"Precious Child" (an adult man) calls for death to women he does not like. But, we cannot say he is a man and use any pronouns that make sense. Even as the journalist calls out what the guy is doing he refers to "Precious Child" as "she". It might have been too "violent" for the writer to call him "he"?
Also, isn't "drag queen" or "Presious Child" a role, like playing a police detective on television? Yet society humors such folks (not folx) that they really are "Columbo" and we must call them "Sergeant" - or else! The guy's name, which might be Bob Smith or something, is a "dead name". And, you are "dead" if you use it.
Update
Precious Child = Darren Merager - He is the guy who recently threatened JK Rowling.
I just learned he is the same guy who exposed himself to women and a little girl at the Wi Spa in LA a couple years ago https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/02/person-charged-with-indecent-exposure-at-la-spa-after-viral-instagram-video
That's the basic Christian worldview, all humans are sinful by nature (the concept of original sin) and you can't resolve that by simply trying harder and implementing better laws. You have to take human nature into account when trying to build a viable society. Anyone who has studied especially the Communist history of the 20th century knows what absolute atrocities are born out of utopian ideas and grand ideologies. Progressive ideology isn't different, it sounds great but it can not withstand the reality of human nature.
Yes!
Well put! I have a friend with an "unconstrained" worldview - this idea that all humans are inherently good - and it is fascinating to see the way that she parents her young children. Any time her child acts out she takes the blame on herself for putting her child in a situation in which she would act that way. Over time she's had to concede that it is impossible to accommodate all of her daughter's misbehavior and it's left her confused and frustrated that "negative outside influences" have tainted her children. It seems exhausting!
Parenting is hard. It's being kind but firm in enforcing reasonable expectations of behavior. Too many people with children today have replaced parenting with coddling and letting the child set the rules. The ultimate expression of this is believing it's best to "affirm" your child when he or she says they want to change genders. The woke say, if you object, the state should take your kid away.
Your friend needs an intervention.
Before the cancer claims her children.
Believe it; I lost my daughter.
I'm sorry to hear that. That must be so painful. :(
Words cannot describe. Teen girls are particularly susceptible to the TikTok path to self destruction in its innumerable permutations.
Jesus Christ believed humans were both malleable (“You need to be reborn”) and perfectible (“Be ye perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect”). No one can say Jesus Christ wasn’t one to “take human nature into account.” His vision vis-a-vis the perfectibility of humans, and hence society, was unconstrained. He believed perfection was possible, indeed, mandatory.
But not with human means. Only via the spirit.
Perfectable only through Him, otherwise His sacrifice was unnecessary. Only the most cursory reading of the Bible would lead someone to believe in an unconstrained world view. He believed we should strive for perfection, but that we’re unable to attain it.
If we could attain perfection on our own, the law of the Old Testament would have been sufficient. Nobody was able to keep all of the laws, so we have to be faithful but also realistic.
Nehemiah 4:9 But we prayed to our God and guarded the city day and night to protect ourselves.
The so-called "Old Testament" does not say that one is supposed to attain perfection on one's own. Rather, it comes through prayer and seeking God's help and through the hard work of examining oneself and taking concrete steps to improve one's character traits (such as envy, greed, lust, etc.) There is no magical "saving" by saying "I accept You, I'm saved!" No, it's through prayer AND hard work on oneself!
Perhaps not: "Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.” Matthew 7:13-14.
This is one area where the Christian view and the scientific align.
Christianity says we’re born in sin. Science says we’re animals. By either view, unless we BOTH readily acknowledge our innate tendencies AND strive to rise above them, we’ll do evil / act as the self-serving pack animals we are.
By accepting that by our nature we are not good, we’re that much more likely to question whether our feelings and actions are as good and pure (and valid) as we feel and believe they are.
Conversely, if you instead believe you are good and pure by nature, it follows that you’ll trust that your heart and mind will never lead you astray.
Even as you celebrate a massacre.
That’s it in a nutshell. Sadly, there’s too many that can’t accept that reality and truth. We are flawed by nature accept it learn to manage it.
Yes, those silly humans get in the way of a morally righteous objective.
There is no joy in having seen this all coming. We have all been witnesses to so much folly and destruction in what made the world great and wasted so much time. How do you deprogram the generations who have wallowed in this nonsense and repair trust in journalism and government. I fear that these problems so easy to create will take decades to repair.
"How do you deprogram the generations who have wallowed in this nonsense and repair trust in journalism and government."
Like with the Children of Israel with Moses in the desert, a whole generation must die off before things can change and they can enter the "Promised Land". They are too fundamentally poisoned at this point to be redeemed.
Totally agree. Moses knew what he was dealing with when he had Hebrews wander for 40 years, so much so that he made the personal sacrifice of denying himself entry to the Promised Land in order to create the necessary mind-shift in the population. I struggle to imagine what modern day scenario might accomplish the same goal with this misaligned generation.
Exactly. And this misinformed generation will have children and have already become teachers.
I work in education. If you want any of this to really change, please get involved in your schools, your school boards. I cannot stress this enough. Schools truly are moving forward with all the progressive wants. Even in small town America where I am. Superintendents sign off with preferred pronouns, equity training is king, and white fragility is taught to staff. This is not fear mongering. It is real. Even at my grade level (PreK).
And for God's sake, limit what your child does on smart devices.
If not, what will come will be far worse. The writing is on the wall.
Limit what your child does on smart devices. Seemingly innocent visuals show up on my grandaughter's device and becomes very inappropriate.
40 years was not a random number.
Moses didn’t do that (deny himself entry to the Promised Land) - the Lord denied him.
Correct.
I cannot even begin to wrap my head around a modern day purge of a poisoned population.
A daunting task indeed.
Did Moses do this or was it God?
It was God. Yahweh showed Moses the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 34:4-5) but denied him entry:
https://www.bibleref.com/Deuteronomy/34/Deuteronomy-34-4.html
Numbers 20:12 describes the no-entry as punishment for Moses' pride & disobedience:
https://www.bibleref.com/Numbers/20/Numbers-20-12.html
The disobedience was for Moses taking 'credit' for deriving water from rock, as well as striking the rock with staff rather than 'speaking' to rock as Yahweh had instructed:
https://www.bibleref.com/Numbers/20/Numbers-20-8.html
https://www.bibleref.com/Numbers/20/Numbers-20-10.html
https://www.bibleref.com/Numbers/20/Numbers-20-11.html
To Moses' credit he did not complain about his punishment from the Lord and continued to lead Israel and honor God.
Yes. Really appreciate the Bible references. Thank you
You're so welcome. Each generation has much to learn and re-learn from the OT (or more properly the Hebrew Bible or 'Tanakh'). It is the source of all goodness and wisdom.
I'm researching this in the context of agriculture and food supply.... It's a scenario https://www.wsj.com/science/environment/solar-storm-early-warning-system-b6324524
I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Moses choice, to not enter the Promised Land. Numbers 20:8, God speaking tells Moses to speak to the crag, that it may bring out water. But in Numbers 20:10-12, it says “Then Moses and Aaron called the congregation together before the crag, and he said to them: “Hear, now, you rebels! Must we bring out water for you from this crag?” 11 With that Moses lifted his hand up and struck the crag twice with his rod, and much water began to pour out, and the assembly and their livestock began to drink. 12 God later said to Moses and Aaron: “Because you did not show faith in me and sanctify me before the eyes of the people of Israel, you will not bring this congregation into the land that I will give them.” In Moses saying, “Must WE bring out water from this crag?” & STRIKING the rock twice with his staff, he fails to santify God. He did not follow what God said & he did not give the glory to God. Thus, Aaron was first to climb a mountain, be stripped of his outer garment & it was given to his son Eleazar. Then, Aaron dies. Moses is later, shown the Promised Land but he does not enter.
Our country will not survive the process.
I’m not as pessimistic as you are. Note the response of the Harvard groups when a lucrative employment offer was rescinded. Everyone suddenly had identity crises. They didn’t really feel that way, or they hadn’t read the statement carefully, or their organization hadn’t sought their opinion before signing it, or…..
Bottom line: turn on the lights—aka what we call “reality”—and the roaches scurry. With luck, the lights will remain on long enough for substantial change to happen. Those changes will have to led by persuasive voices calling out reality deniers. At least, if this article really reflects the current situation, an increasing fraction of people are accepting reality, ugly as it is.
Turning on the lights doesn't get rid of the roaches; it just causes them to go into hiding.
The problem with metaphors is how easily they can be refuted, Celia.
Good to see you remain on Substack.
I agree but isn’t that just the human condition? The cockroaches go into hiding and then they come back. It’s been that way since the beginning and it’ll never end.
In the past, wars tended to destroy the majority of the cockroaches, leaving the few survivors to crawl off and hope they could breed their ideas before they died.
Today, cockroach nests are an accepted fixture of our society, so the cockroaches are never really in danger at all.
First need to outlaw the masks
No kidding.
“…when a lucrative employment offer was rescinded.”
lol You do realize the Fed has printed $7 trillion over the past decade? Any and all rational human incentives can be negated by morons with good “intentions”.
I am an eternal optimist.
But I do see how difficult this challenge can be.
Very scary indeed.
I feel like I should be one of those cockroaches and just hide.
My fear as well.
😢
Unfortunately, we are unlikely to be allowed 40 years to correct things.
I mean its all dependent on events ~ "harold macmillan" ~ doesn't it? If things get bad enough meaning Hamas starts shooting trans people in front of them well then either the problem solves itself or they wake up to what they have become. ie so brainwashed and deluded that they put two opposite things together and the bigger one ate the smaller one. Lions and goats can be friends..... lol!
Time to ridicule and laugh at their stupidity. No more going along with their nonsense hitch doesn’t stand the slightest scrutiny.
Some will see the light, they will be angry at being lied to for so long...creating a whole new problem!
Yes, great metaphor. 40 years it took to purge that generation. And that was a pure experiment. There was no slippage. We have a much harder task on our hands.
Change will never happen from the top down. It has to be a movement at the grassroots level.
You’re starting to see some of that “movement” with the school boards and city councils in smaller towns shifting to a more conservative, pro-family, position.
However, you’re combating 50 years of leftist ideology in our school systems that have already indoctrinated millions of Americans, many of them in position of power.
My fear is, is it too little, too late.
Trump exists because of a grassroots movement...
He signed an executive order meant to expunge DEI from the federal government, but mean tweets and he's socially icky.
Yes, he did. However, he was quickly overwhelmed (and hamstrung), by the indoctrinated.
Yes, he was hamstrung and the EO didn't go anywhere and was immediately reversed by the Biden Administration, but (and it's a big but!) if there was a single moment in time when the pendulum began to swing back it was the moment Trump signed the EO.
Prior to the EO Tom Cotton was asked on cable news what could be done about the "culture issues" that were a top concerned of polled Republicans and his answer was: "I don't know."
The EO launched Christopher Rufo--Trump had seen him on Tucker Carlson and then collaborated with him on it. It put a name on what we were fighting and people like James Lindsay got traction making the intellectual ties to Marxism and the philosophy behind it. The EO showed the Right and the red pilled what a pathway forward looked like. It simplified what is a complex topic, gave us the verbiage to use, and pointed us in the right direction energizing thousands of activists.
Not a bad record for an EO that got "hamstrung" and didn't accomplish any of the things it was meant to accomplish...
“Socially icky” and “mean tweets”? Quite immature language for such a serious subject.
Susan's point is that that Trump's mean tweets and rather irritating social shortcomings are in the big picture of things not serious at all.
Pedantry
Quite immature thinking to justify a vote in a serious election.
But we must never give up so that means keeping these conversations going with those we think have bought into the progressive mindset. Some of my children bought into it especially after attending college. Now, when they see the potential match up for presidential candidates Trump and Biden and they are paying attention -- especially after the terror acts on Israel. I refused to sit by this election. Casting a vote is simply not enough any longer so I have personally gotten involved in Haley's grassroots coalition.
I just cannot believe that this thread devolved into Trump! It isn't about TRUMP! It's about the future of the nation of ISRAEL!!!
I skip a lot of the comments here because every discussion on this site devolves into a Trump back-and-forth!
Agree
More like 100 years of leftist ideology in academia and our schools.
No joy, some would say sad. Tribes have done this to each other since there were tribes. The difference is we have nukes and WiFi. The end of this earth age will be televised.
We have roughly 12 thousand years of some sort of human record. It is the same story, time after time.
And yet the Leftists think they can change human nature. While they become just another hateful tribe.
Celia M - how'd you get so wise?!
Suffering. That's the usual way.
Maybe Hillary can help with the deprogramming
ROFL!!!
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
I have two degrees in Liberal Arts (Comparative Religion, in effect), have read most of the major "intellectual" works of the Left, and was a moderate Democrat until I was 25 or so.
Having said that, I can honestly say that seen INTELLECTUALLY Conservatism is vastly richer, more interesting, and of course more practical than all the pseudo-pieties--and of course patent nonsense-- masking moral cowardice and not infrequently outright sadism that characterize the Left today.
For those with an inclination, one good book to start with, in addition to everything by Sowell and everything by Paul Johnson (particularly Intellectuals), is "Reflections on the Revolution in France", by Edmund Burke. Everything going on today was going on in some form back in France in the 1790's, and certainly canceling (for which the penalty was public beheading), and virtue signaling, and he was critiqueing it then.
None of this is new. None of these conflicts are new. None of these REALIZATIONS are new.
It was written in Ecclesiastes "There is nothing new under the sun" perhaps 2,500 years ago. The main difference between Conservatives and those delusional and childish enough to think that THIS TIME ridiculous ideas will work, is that we LEARN FROM HISTORY. Leftists don't. They don't learn at all. They don't learn from their own history, because they live in fantasy worlds. There is no virtue in delusion. Obviously.
The Devils by Dostoevsky is another masterful exposition of all this. As Kisin said, it is all about power - it is always all about power.
Perhaps Leftists don't learn from history because the history they are being in fed in our universities is misinformation/disinformation? How can you learn about the French Revolution and its Reign of Terror, how can you learn about the aftermath of the Russian Revolution or Mao's victory in China and not see the evil unleashed in those places...and not connect that to today's progressives?
Great post Finbar, thank you.
Likely true. I have been arguing for some time that “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” and “The Black Book of Communism” should be required reading at the high school level. The first, so people stop abusing the words Nazi and Genocide; and the second so that people understand large crimes are rarely committed without attractive rhetorical wallpaper; and that COMMUNISTS LIE ABOUT EVERYTHING. Always. Its integral to everything they do.
So I get your point, Finbar. But there is no way in hell any kid in high school in our current age will be able to read something as dense as 'The Rise And Fall..'
Ain't happening - and it's not happening for the very reason idiotic twenty year old progressives in Ivy league schools spout Death to Israel when Jews are already being murdered - because they are ill informed and poorly taught - our educational system has failed them. They can't read properly to begin with, and what they are capable of reading does not include impartial (and long) books of history.
Sad but true.
It wasn’t that long ago that NYU fired a chemistry professor because his students complained the class was too hard.
Too bad my organic chemistry teacher wasn't fired. That was way back in 1974.
They could read Rise and Fall their junior year and Black Book their senior year. The language is not hard. Someone just needs to require it. Our kids are not born stupid: they are made that way.
They should ALSO read "From Time Immemorial", by Joan Peters, which would help in understanding today's Middle East politics. But it won't happen, because truth reveals darkness, and darkness hates the light.
'Rise and Fall', all 1200 pages of it - in competition with Tik Tok and Instagram amongst kids who can barely read to begin with? With teachers who barely have enough resources to work with to 'require it'?
Reality bites. No high schooler will read anything longer than 250 pages unless they're being taught in an expensive private school.
You may be right. You may also be wrong. The likelihood, of course, is that some kids would and some would not, but the ones fir whom it would be most important would be the college bound kids, and that should definitely be within their scope. That sort of thing WAS the standard for a long time. I dont think its ever too late to make the decision to stop sucking at life.
My daughter's HS teachers were mostly incapable of writing a single paragraph without grammatical errors (including her English teacher). The principal was worse. My biggest f-up in life was not sending her to private school. On the other hand, she has a good job and has chosen to avoid university, a decision I (with 3 degrees) support given the garbage she likely would have been fed there.
Cliff Notes!
It took me two years to finish "The Rise And Fall of the Third Reich", but it fully explained the current trend in todays politics. It should be taught in EVERY political science course, from high school to the universities.
Hitler should have been stopped at least half a dozen times, and easiliy could have been. That was the core lesson for me.
"Darkness at Noon"
"1984"
"Atlas Shrugged"
I dont think most Leftists understand how the first two apply to them. This may sound insane—and it is—but that is my experience. It is the mindset of children, but they literally think everything they touch turns into sunshine and rainbows and that all evil comes, and can ONLY come, from ideological enemies.
Even now, they are not so much excusing Hamas crimes, as IGNORING them. Their minds can only accommodate a digital, us/them, good/evil world, but they lie even about THAT. That is why it is so important for them to accuse ideological Others of crimes they didn’t commit. It enables them to ignore their own much worse crimes, thereby protecting their self images of being snow white angels in a terrible world they are trying to fix.
As I said, lying is an inescapable and necessary feature of such hallucinatory thinking.
Agree on Rand, but she is stronger medicine than most such virgin spirits can handle.
My own view is that honest history is the best way of easing into withdrawal from what amounts to a sociogenic mass psychosis.
You may be right, but I am less concerned with changing the minds of committed leftists than with saving those who have not yet gone over the edge, helping them recognize the lies when they hear them.
Fair. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
I read George Faludys account of his time in a Hungarian labor camp (which the authorities of course claimed didn’t exist) and he made the interesting comment that nobody he knew who learned Latin became, or at least remained, a Communist. It is an eminently logical language, and the patterns of thought it embodies was an apparent innoculation against bullshit.
"Their minds can only accommodate a digital, us/them, good/evil world,"
I call this 'Binary Thinking' where there are two modes, good/bad. I once met a girl in the ER (I was an EMT) she thought taking heavy doses of Tylenol 3—which is Tylenol with codeine—had no adverse consequences. We tried to explain that Tylenol was destroying her liver. She kept saying 'but its medicine.' She was unable to grasp the concept that medicine is a tradeoff between toxins and disease.
... what a mess
Although: why not? Anything we can to do to awaken these vicious beasts from their decadent and solipsistic madness is worth a try.
Just added "Reflection on the Revolution in France", by Edmund Burke. to my Audible library,
thanks for the suggestion.
Unfortunately, they in the White House at the moment.
YES!!! This is the arc of history, repeated again, and again, ad finitum. But who is really paying attention? No one in power positions. And the media always looks at these fools as if they were the new sages of wisdom. One day these "sages" will do the unthinkable and end our current civilization into something more illiberal and repressive and then call it "progress".
Great piece!
I have been saying it for years, and been laughed at in the process, that the anti-Israel/BDS sentiment has always been baked into the DEI agenda.
Always! They never hid it. They were proud. They tucked it in the back when it didn’t poll well for a minute but it was always there. Their cheerleaders turned a blind eye or worse, they agreed!
What I always thought revealing about the BDS movement over the last two decades or so is that it was fuelled not by Israeli intransigence on reaching a peace accord, which would have made sense had that been the case, but by Palestinian refusal to sign on to three peace proposals (over ten years) already agreed upon by Israel. In effect, the movement is trying to reward the Palestinians for not wanting peaceful coexistence with Israel, while condemning Israel for agreeing on peace proposals.
Despite militia of slavery, expulsions, pogroms, mass murder, and prejudice, the indoctrinated "woke" cannot allow Jews to be seen as either an oppressed minority or as indigenous people because we are "too white" and "too European", which means that we cannot possibly be anything other than "oppressors". How can a people "occupy" the very land they came from?
What's BDS?
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. It's a policy to try to destroy Israel economically by boycotting all products made in Israel, pulling out of all investments in Israeli companies, and calling for countries to impose economic sanctions against Israel.
It has been more successful than you'd think. A lot of products I used to buy that happened to be made in Israel are no longer made in Israel, at least according to the packaging.
Ok thanks for the info. It sounds like either a boy band or a serial killer.
Kind of a sick combination of both!
🤣😂🤣😂
October 7th should have been a wake up call especially liberals to how evil can strike at any moment. Watching posters of kidnapped children being ripped down this weekend is evidence many liberals found it easier to blame the Jews for the atrocities committed by monsters.
The tearing down of posters of kidnapped children is such a bizarrely childish--and yet simultaneous evil--thing to do. Tearing down these posters does not change the fact that the evident heroes of these poster-tearers (or is it poster-terrorists?) really did kidnap hundreds of people. Tearing down posters suggests only one thing: that the person doing so approves of that kidnapping (and the rape and murder that accompanied it).
I think those ripping down the posters are really trying to get rid of the proof they they are wrong but can’t come to admit it. What’s a common theme among the radical left...they think they are the smartest people in the room and cannot admit that they are not, hence they get rid of the evidence. It’s why they try to silence other views, cancel their perceived opponents and don’t people to hear a different viewpoint. Insecurity to the extreme.
It's narrative control. The posters make their side look bad, so they must come down. There is no other consideration of humanity or ethics.
Yes.
Great points. As if tearing down the posters makes it any less true that these people were kidnapped or slaughtered or both.
Good observation.
Plausible indeed.
This is their puerile way to fight the war beyond the battlefield. Notice the responses of the doxxed: the dentist in a Jewish neighborhood outside Boston offers a sinister smile and a haughty chortle, the shaved head ,nose ring woman in Brooklyn swears in Arabic and invites police intervention, also in Brooklyn a thirty four old social worker displays dull apathy and the serial offender at VCU offers only stuttering anger. None appear embarrassed. Minus embarrassment how is shame possible? Without shame how is a civilized world possible? These are the shameless shock troops of the 21st century left. Their souls have surrendered to a soulless ideology.
It’s simple: a child willfully misbehaves, but he doesn’t want to advertise the misbehavior to his parents, lest he be punished. So he bullies witnesses into silence.
In this case, the only difference is that the child—bad seed in this case—is doing it vicariously, abetting the crimes of others, but which crimes he enjoys having witnessed.
Cognitive dissonance on steroids.
Maybe not - maybe it shows they are ashamed of actions and ideas they cannot deny having long vocally supported. They can only try to remove the evidence of the consequences that laid bare their own illusions and bad faith.
In my experience people hate to contradict themselves even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Some will repent and revise; some will resent the evidence itself and try to bury it. May God help each of us to find a way through this without bitterness or violence.
Yes and no. Tearing down the posters could mean entire affiliation with the murderous motives of terrorists, but it could also mean nothing must get in the way of the sanctimonious narrative of the 'victimhood' of Palestine from the Israeli 'colonizers.' Kidnapping victims displayed to the public might shift sympathy towards Jews, and these deluded kids can't have that.
I can't help feeling that those are, at this moment, shades of difference without meaning.
Where the rubber hits the road, people are either pro-existence-of-Israel or they are anti-existence-of-Israel.
Every mealy-mouthed attempt to explain how supporting Palestinians and/or decrying Israel's behavior somehow does NOT mean eliminating Israel ultimately runs up against the hard, cold wall of Islamic unwillingness to accept the right of Israel to exist as a nation. No matter how Palestinian sympathizers try to dress up their suggestions (if they have any--many just cover their ears and shout "stop the violence!"), the natural end-point of all of those suggestions requires Israel to cease to exist.
True enough. And of course, much of this is not new. The shock of know nothing kids spouting verbally violent antisemitic tropes might be, condoning murder, but the "Islamic unwillingness' has been there for generations of Palestinians, amply emphasized by their systemic refusal to agree to any viable (flawed they may have been) treaty with Israel that was offered to them over a ten year period.
These kids are all about magical thinking: if only X wasn't happening, the world would be perfect.
And so, of course, they imagine that there is some action on the part of Israel that would magically make the Palestinians willing to live peacefully. And if that action is for Israel is cease to exist...well, they're "white colonizers" and so they "deserve it," regardless of how ahistorical and genocidal that belief is.
The fact that Palestinians are perfectly happy to slaughter other Muslims and even each other never manages to be more than a "must be a Jewish lie" blip on their radar.
Hamas using their own citizens as human shields is a good example of your last sentence. Hezbollah, similar. They will murder their own for a political agenda. Criminal and immoral behavior. Not civilized and not 1st world. Of which Israel belongs.
Regarding those tearing the posters down, perhaps Mike Tyson said it best “ Social media made y'all way to[o] comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it."
Might be time to start punching people in the mouth…
As a long time conservative who has endured the arrogant dismissal, loathing and ridicule of progressives for years excuse me if I’m slow to accept that this “awakening” is real. The same people who built a statue glorifying a drug addicted rapist while cheering BLM and antifa tyranny are only now having a great awakening? When I see enough of you cancel your NY Times and Washington Post subscriptions and stop listening to NPR that they all disappear forever maybe my faith in the wisdom and character of my fellow citizens will be restored. When I stop having to endure race baiting self promoters on tv after every white on black crime regardless of the statistical insignificance I might start to regain hope for racial progress. When enough of us begin to truly be curious about how elected officials making middle class incomes amass generational wealth while claiming there is no proof of influence peddling or insider trading I might be encouraged. I could go on but you get the point. Because we might agree on our support for Israel excuse me if I don’t suddenly embrace or trust you as an ally in fighting on the issues that matter in saving our country. It’s not just about Israel. Western Civilization and capitalism is not the cause of all the world’s problems, it is its best hope. Defend and protect it, it’s survival is not a given.
I'm afraid too many woke progressives who are horrified by Oct 7 are only concerned that these supporters of human atrocities are crazies that have somehow been included into their tribe, but they don't see how the ideology is fluid between the crazies and their own wokeism.
Sadly, I am in this camp. It shouldn’t take beheaded babies to convince people that wokism, corporatism, globalism, and everything the “left” has been doing for the past 20 years is bad. I fear things have to get much worse, our progressive chickens come home to roost, before it can get better.
I agree, sadly. The next police shooting/ gay slur/ forest fire will reset everyone to their priors.
A great many of them will practice Gell-Mann amnesia, declining to see that the same process by which the Left lionizes Hamas is used to make the left-wing argument on every other issue.
Hear ! Hear!
Best post on this thread, Jim. So-called "progressives" -- Jewish and non-Jewish alike-- have a lot to answer for. It's tragic that it took their ox being gored by unspeakable evil for them to suddenly see the light that has been blinding the rest of us for decades.
Brilliant article! I am also one of those people who has become politically conservative overnight after this issue. Never thought I would vote conservative until now. Even when I saw illogical and harmful demands were made about inclusion of trans women in sports, prisons, too much focus on skin colour. I still thought at its core these people mean well and want to create a more equal society, they are misguided, brainwashed and maybe misinformed due to hyper polarization driven by social media. But there is no way anyone can brainwash a moral person to think that killing babies is a form of “resistance”.
Ten years ago I thought leftists were wrong about most things but still not bad people. A few years later I saw them as tyrants. By 2020 I was convinced they were dangerous. Today I know they're evil.
Sadly, I have seen no viewpoint shift among my acquaintances. Two days ago I had someone say to me that the terror attacks were Israel’s fault because they taunted the oppressed by having a music festival so close to the “open air prison”.
I am finding that most of the left is merely a collection of empty academic credentials and meaningless phrases without a rational thought among them. Nor a meaningful life experience in the whole lot. There are indeed to perspectives. One based on reality. The other based on a warped self image.
Maybe I just need a better set of acquaintances.
I doubt that any of my Leftists friends have actually changed their minds about anything. Their current silence suggests to me that they are simply waiting until it is socially safe to push their Leftist ideas again.
Not so mine. I’ve been gratified that leftist friends of mine, in the words of Tom Lehrer, “feel like Christian Scientists with appendicitis.”
Mine are also shockingly silent! People who normally prattle on in favor of defunding the police , or how the unhoused need to live in (other people's) backyards, now just want to talk about the weather!
At best I get avoidance of any related topic. I had one guy who is very left complain about crime in Philly the other day but quickly changed the subject when he realized that the next painful step would be acknowledging the policies that caused the crime. That's a no-go zone mentally. It is safe to complain but not safe (yet?) to look at the underlying cause of the complaint.
I'm afraid people's views are very greatly shaped by their base of knowledge. Leftists who watch MSNBC will never change, because they will never hear a disagreeing opinion or know of refuting facts.
I think I read that MSNBC's rating are down 1/3 in the last few weeks. If true, that could mean that they are looking for other sources of info????
the left argues castrating boys turns them into girls , that's what your dealing with
You do, get rid of the current crop you won’t be sorry.
Critical thinking is not for the faint of heart or mind. It demands you step away from ideology and towards fact and humanity.
It isn’t “hard”. You just have to turn off the noise and KNOW the answers don’t lie within political positions but within an honest frame of mind.
And unfortunately for Marxist progressives, critical LISTENING, which is the first step toward critical thinking, requires the same discipline.
Fantastic! I made the transition from Unconstrained to Constrained after reading Thomas Sowell in 2020, when considering the COVID and George Floyd response in my community. I want to share this article with so many friends who may not be Free Press subscribers— HELP! How do I do so?
Open it on a computer, Ctrl-A to select all, copy and paste into a document.
If you have a browser with reader mode like Safari (Brave does this too, though not as well), I find that the easiest. Put it in reader mode, and on an iPhone or iPad if you share via email it will include the whole document. On a desktop, once in reader mode, copy and paste into an email.
My journey from Unconstrained to Constrained happened while reading Atlas Shrugged, given to me by my mom when I went off to university. Wise woman, my mom. This was 1976. It has been painful to get to this point. I did give the book to my three sons when they came of age. It took with two of them. Distressingly, the third is in the unconstrained camp, for now.
Just click the share button at the top of the article, just below the title (on the web page in a browser).
If you have an iPhone or iPad, select the Share icon and choose Print. Keep choosing Print until you get to the Save option. You will end up saving the article as a PDF file that you can then send as an attachment.
You should encourage them to subscribe. But I have mailed a printed copy before.
Let's never forget who said he was about to "fundamentally change America". He didn't start the slide from "constrained" to "unconstrained" but he clearly greased the rails. Through his proxies, he is still there and is pushing hard. It is through clear-eyed articles like this that perhaps, just perhaps, we can see what is happening to us.
Obama....oh how they loved/love him. This is where I first noticed the personal divisions among my friends and community. A biracial leader who could have tempered racial division as a living symbol of the inconsequence of skin color, chose instead to use it to further divide. He made sure that blacks like him were reminded of their victimhood and whites like him were embarrassed by their so called “privilege”. Very clever he was at stifling any voices who disagreed. His wasted legacy will be that good people who have kept silent and allowed to let this ideology permeate are now faced with a generation of cold hearted, non empathetic, divisively impulsive revolutionaries incubated in this transformation he began. This didn’t have to be.
I'm still trying to figure out why Obama was given a Nobel prize.
For not being George Bush.
Also, why is Michelle Obama's memoir worthy of 17 million readers? The truth is celebrity worship. Why is Taylor Swift a phenom? The Kardashians? I dunno, but the Obama's played the celeb game just as well.
It wasn't. Big book deals like that are a form of money laundering. Think also about Hunter Biden making millions off his 'paintings.'
Really? Publishing as money laundering? I heard Christmas tree farms, sanitation services, industrial laundry services...but publishing? I guess any industry can be used to launder.
Yes as noted above, it’s “customary” for hosts at speaking engagements to buy stacks of books of the speaker. Many / most of which are in a storeroom years later.
Well, for example - Bernie Sanders and/or Stacey Abrams book "sales" were largely gifts for political donations or pushed to be sold as part of speaking engagements. Also books pushed into the libraries of K-12 or college class plans.
It beggars belief at times
"trying to figure out why Obama was given a Nobel" ... consider that Fidel Castro was nominated for a Nobel every year since the start of his revolution.
For being a leftist black.
Don’t waste good energy it’s not worth put it into something more positive
Yes - 100%. Everything you say. Even writing this... I'm mindful of how to criticize his leadership without being interpreted as racist. For *most* of my progressive friends he literally belongs on Mt. Rushmore (they have said that). In truth his legacy is... well I can't say it any better than you did.
My hope for his presidency was that he would speak out about the effect of fatherless homes. He did a little (if I remember correctly) but he could have made a huge difference there, I think. But he didn't...
Excellent points!
Obama is plenty disliked around this comment forum. I get that. I myself have issues with his tenure in office. Still, sometimes the details get in the way of the memory driven commentary. The links below might tell you why, especially on the 'victimhood'..
www.theledger.com/story/news/2009/06/24/obamas-fathers-day-talk-worth-repeating/26611737007/
www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/05/19/obama-morehouse-college-commencement/2324241/
Well said, Elizabeth.
Victor Davis Hanson does a great job of explaining Obama's vision of the world, especially our relationship with Iran. He states that one of the reasons Obaman was quiet at first about Israel, is our relationship with Iran, play nice and send money, help fund Hamas.
And according to VDH because Susan Rice, Obama's chief advisor, is from Iran
I think you mean Valerie Jarret. Obama didn't wipe his ass before consulting her. Some think she's still the one directing the Obama retreads running the Biden administration.
Yes. When marvel runs out of villains to slay, they can gin up ValJar.
Bingo!
This is so true. They never hid it. They told us what we were doing. It was never a secret. I hate to say “told you so” but wow how I want to scream it now.
Please do scream from the mountain tops!
Spot on - reading this directly after watching a man in London needing Police protection from a mob of people with Palestinian flags. And why was the mob angry with him ? Because he had an English flag with God Save the King written on it. One can only hope that it is not already too late.
"One can only hope that it is not already too late."
As one warrior has been quoted as saying, "Hope is not a plan!"
I am going to send this to all my democratic friend. I moved to the other camp when the schools,courts and medical establishment tried to change my child’s gender without me- I have seen the dangers first hand. And it is real
I can't imagine there are many nightmares worse than that
An often overlooked byproduct of modern immigration is the contempt of Western cultural ideals through pseudo-assimilation.
Under the guise of kindness and compassion, we’ve made the obscene tolerable, our weaknesses - our hubris as virtuous.
While our Western youth reconcile with manufactured Identity oppressions, an Ideological fervour of Jihadists has shown the true privilege to which most of us reside…