Thomas Jefferson: downright anti-American

 

Robert Spencer is the proprietor of Jihad Watch, a website that specializes in the histories and ideologies of Islam and jihad.  However, in his recent column for PJ Media, he reports on the politicization (i.e., going “woke”) of Thomas Jefferson’s legendary Virginia home, Monticello.  Mr. Spencer begins:

“Who controls the past controls the future,” writes George Orwell in 1984. “Who controls the present controls the past.” Were he with us today, Orwell would be getting tired of being right all the time, but he has just been proven right again: Thomas Jefferson’s famed mansion Monticello has been turned into a fount of woke propaganda that denigrates Jefferson and treats unsuspecting visitors to an over-the-top orgy of victimhood and white guilt regarding slavery. The Left hates America and wants very much for you to hate it, too.

. . .

Not surprisingly, “The Thomas Jefferson Foundation is run by a roster of big-money Dem donors and former Democratic officials.” Monticello’s descent “has largely been funded by left-leaning philanthropist David M. Rubenstein, who donated $20 million toward that effort in 2015. Rubenstein is “on the boards of the globalist World Economic Forum, China’s Tsinghua University, and the Council on Foreign Relations, among others.” Now it’s beginning to become clear why all this is happening.

The endgame is not just to make Americans despise Thomas Jefferson, but to make the average American ashamed of being American. That’s what this has been about from first to last. . . .

What’s more, the reason why the Left hates him with such burning intensity is not that he was a slave owner. Leftists love Fidel Castro, who enslaved an entire nation. They love all manner of authoritarians, totalitarians, and mass murderers. They’ve never minded the eggs that have to be broken to make their socialist omelets.

No, the real reason why the Left hates Thomas Jefferson is for all the things for which he should rightly be celebrated: Because he fought against tyranny. Because he helped create a free republic. Because he placed statements in those founding documents that would ultimately lead multitudes of the citizens of the new nation to believe that slavery was wrong and immoral and give their lives to bring about its abolition.

Jefferson is just the sort of man whom the fascist thugs of Antifa, busy smearing ACAB on the sides of buildings and hurling obscenities at police in pursuit of their vision of socialist utopia, and their moneyed backers would despise and fear. They want a docile American populace, frightened into submission to their authoritarian vision. The example of Thomas Jefferson could inspire Americans instead to pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to preserve our hard-won freedoms. Can’t have that. Jefferson’s name must be made anathema to Americans.

Howard Zinn would be proud (see here).  Read the full article here.

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Big Brother is here

 

Victor Davis Hanson sees frightening parallels to our societal decline and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.  His column at American Greatness (“Did Americans Come to Love Big Brother?”) concludes:

Under memory-hole rules, just as everything good under the prior administration is now “bad,” so everything bad under the new administration will be presented as “good.” 

Americans in the new calm of all good news, and no bad news, then will supposedly come to appreciate that our Ministry of Truth’s Wokespeak—our version of Orwell’s “Newspeak”—was for our own good. 

Will it be easier to sleep when President Xi Jinping smiles at us on CNN, when we read in the New York Times how Joe Biden is reining in Benjamin Netanyahu, and when MSNBC hosts a town hall with John Kerry and Javad Zarif to announce a new and improved Iran Deal? 

When you are tired, and stuck in commute traffic, would you rather hear yet another NPR theory about how the sinister Donald Trump never paid his taxes and made millions while in office—or listen to a softer, upbeat voice narrate how the Biden Foundation is helping needy, undocumented workers?

So will Americans, exhausted by Trump-Goldstein, at least confess that the Ministry of Truth’s new rosy fantasies are not as nerve-wracking and depressing as its old angry hate-Trump propaganda? 

In other words, too many Americans may come to resemble Winston Smith, the defeated hero of Nineteen Eighty-Four, who at last accepts the false calm—in his appreciation that all the devilish enemies of the past have faded away and there is only the tranquility of media triumph: “Everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

Full column is here.

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Therapeutic totalitarianism

 

Nicholas J. Kaster’s column today at American Thinker has a sobering analysis of the local and state governments’ endless mask mandates, lockdowns, and other joys of the never-ending pandemic:

We have entered the seventh month of coronavirus panic, with large parts of America still partly or wholly shut down. What began as a 15-day expedient designed to “flatten the curve,” has gradually become the norm in American life. The goalposts have continued to shift. First, the focus was on hospital overcrowding; then it moved to overall deaths; then it moved to number of positive cases; now it seems to be shifting to the availability of a vaccine. The real endgame appears to be the November election.

. . .

Many have seen parallels in this creeping authoritarianism to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. And indeed, there are some: the obsessive mask conformity, the endless and often contradictory edicts by state governors and mayors, and the tiresome mantras celebrating obedience (e.g., “Alone together”).

But a closer analogy to our current predicament can be found in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Huxley’s novel, published in 1932, 17 years before Orwell’s, envisions a dystopia that is sated but soulless, where the people’s every earthly need is met, but at the cost of their liberty and humanity.

. . .

The idea of a riskless utopia is pure fantasy, of course, but the power that will accrete to the ruling class is very real.

Mr. Kaster’s column is here.

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Do you believe what you read and see in the media?

art credit: mediacontrolingourminds.wordpress.com

Is the election already over? In a short piece titled “Media-driven Political Insanity” at American Thinker, Joanna Rosamund begins:

Psycholinguistics and cognitive science have long been interested in linguistic relativity – the concept that language influences way of thinking.  George Orwell, the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, also considered: “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”  In the dystopian novel, Orwell depicted a totalitarian state using controlled language and “thought-crime” charges to keep people from thinking.  Throughout history, real-life dictatorships have been known to “pre-define” reality via meaningless slogans, political correctness, and punishment of cerebral dissent.

The fact that several months before elections we are constantly told that a candidate has already won definitely rings an alarm bell.  Orwellian “Newspeak” morphed today into NewsSpeak, with the mainstream media acting as thought police.  While we are being nonchalantly reminded about a long list of observable crimes that go unpunished, the media cheer those crimes’ authors and try to contaminate us with the “enthusiasm.”  One can’t help but notice how visionary Orwell’s writing was: “[s]o much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.”

Where did ol’ good logic go?  The processes used in thinking and reasoning should be natural to homo sapiens, and it’s impossible not to have a brain-ache when you clearly see that it´s not the case.

Read the rest here.

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