Student loan “forgiveness”???

Why the scare quotes above?

The headline: Biden's student debt forgiveness will cost taxpayers $400 BILLION over 10 years, non-partisan Congress office says: White House says announcement is coming soon' on massive cancellation plan (Daily Mail UK, by Katelyn Caralle).

The clarification:  (h/t Bookworm Room):

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Discrediting our Founding Fathers: cont’d

 

The headline at the New York Post:  “Founding father James Madison sidelined by woke history in his own home”.  This blog recently linked to a similar reportabout Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia home Monticello.  And reader Ribicon at the Lucianne site – an aggregator – posted this comment and link:

Selection from 45 goals for the takeover of the USA by the communist party, as stated in 1963 [and as entered into the Congressional Record].

29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.

30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the 'common man.'"

31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the 'big picture.'"

The link: https://rense.com/politics6/com.htm [https://rense.com/politics6/com.htm]

Exit question: How many of these goals have been met?  (Spoiler Alert: most of them.)

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Canceling Big Tech

 

You've seen the ongoing headlines; conservative voices  -- including President Trump's -- are being censored or canceled by Big Tech.   Our household has:

• uninstalled Mozilla Firefox
• cancelled Amazon Prime
• begun the process of canceling Facebook and Gmail (a Google product)

And no more Apple products for us. A reader at RedState via Lucianne posted the following comment:

You don’t need [Facebook] to keep up with anyone - use email, text messages or actually call people and interact with them in person. You don’t need Amazon - you can go on their site, find what you need and then order it directly from the company, manufacturer or distributor bypassing Amazon completely. And you don’t need Google [for] anything. DuckDuckGo is a perfectly good alternative. Google tracks absolutely everything you do and can follow you as you move around even if you have your phone or tablet turned off.

Our household uses Bing for searches.

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Propaganda vs expanded sources of news

image credit: vectorstock.com

Cherie Zaslawsky’s article, “Trump Derangement Syndrome: A Misdiagnosis” starts off:

Listen to Fox News, and you'll hear phrases such as “Trump derangement syndrome” and “liberal heads are exploding” on a daily basis. 

Conservative newscasts are peppered with comments like these: “They're delusional!”  “The Democrats just can't seem to accept that they lost the 2016 election.”  “They've gone crazy!”

Crazy like a fox.

. . .

From the beginning of its “long march through the institutions,” the Left has been playing the long game.  That hasn't changed.  Leftists are playing it today.

Why did they take over the media?  The universities?  Hollywood?  To get their hands on the key levers of propaganda.  Add to this the leftward tilt of Google, Facebook, and Twitter, and we're looking at a virtual lockdown on the primary sources of information and public influence.

. . .

What can be done?

I suggest that, rather than only responding to each of the Left's baseless attacks on our president, those on our side change the debate by exposing the radical leftists' use of propaganda — by shining a light into the dark recesses of their strategy.  This may wake up some of their followers and maybe even begin to free America from the dark power of the Left.

I have had limited success pointing the media’s corruption to people I know who still rely on The New York Times or NPR or CNN for their news. One suggestion that has worked a few times is to propose that a person expand their sources of news. Tuning in to conservative talk radio can be traumatic, but browsing through aggregators and at least comparing headlines has made a difference with some friends and relatives. These days my go-to sites are Politipage, Instapundit, Lucianne, and a few others (but not Drudge any more). Full American Thinker article is here.

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Neverland

photo credit: pinterest 

(it's Sandy Duncan as Peter Pan in the 1979 Broadway revival) 

As a kid, I saw the television and the stage versions of the musical Peter Pan. One of the memorable songs is “Never Never Land.” The opening lyric is

I have a place where dreams are born,

And time is never planned.

It's not on any chart,

You must find it with your heart.

Never Never Land.

And then:

You'll have a treasure if you stay there,

More precious far than gold.

For once you have found your way there,

You can never, never grow old.

An essay at American Thinker by Deana Chadwell was featured on the Lucianne aggregator yesterday. It is indeed a must-read, and its title is “The Left's Neverland.” It is a perceptive, if scary take on the emotional ideology of today’s liberal, especially young liberals. The essay begins:

I hear more and more frequently concerns about an impending civil war. It is certain that something momentous is taking place; the signs are all around us, but I’m not at all sure that the something will turn out to be two sides of the same country warring over principles, like the Civil War, which was mainly about slavery and states’ rights. Now, we’re up to our nose-piercings in politically polarizing problems and the leftist contingent of the country doesn’t even like America anymore.  If we come to open warfare, it will be as two separate nations battling it out. Over what? Not over policies, not over territory, not even over moral issues. We will be fighting over reality.

The left, which I used to see as misguided but mostly benign, has built for itself -- because it knows it can’t convince Americans to throw away freedom -- a make-believe utopian country. It has constructed, ex nihilo, a nation that has no borders, no laws, no specific language, and no recognizable morality. When Barrack Obama said he wanted to “fundamentally change” America, he wasn’t bluffing. When he’d stick out his chin and say, ”That’s not who we are,” he wasn’t talking about us; he was talking about the citizens of his make-believe land which I’ll name “Neverland.”

The name is suitable in many ways. In the first place, it isn’t real and never will be.

The full article is here. Highly recommended.

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Protesting immigration law enforcement

About those protests over immigration on Friday:

message /art via Lucianne.com

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Don Surber's tribute to Phyllis Schlafly

photo credit: blacksportsonline.com

Phyllis Schlafly lived 

Don Surber’s blog columns are often accessible via some of the aggregators. His column yesterday (via Lucianne.com) was a tribute to Phyllis Schlafly, who passed away over the Labor Day weekend. While many Tea Party people will be aware that Mrs. Schlafly’s organization Eagle Forum was recently challenged with a hostile takeover by a faction led, sadly, by her daughter, Surber’s tribute is entirely about Mrs. Schlafly’s courage and effectiveness as a champion of conservative principles. Here's some of his blog column: 

  

The Labor Day death of Phyllis Schlafly at 92 brought out the trolls among the left who called her names. Her death matters less than her life. She kept pushing for an unvarnished and unapologetic conservatism, as championed by Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.

World Net Daily published her last column a few hours ago. [It’s also up on Eagle Forum here.]

Donald Trump’s surprise visit to Mexico, where he met the Mexican president and discussed the many contentious issues between our two countries, reminds me of President Reagan’s important trip to Geneva in 1985. Reagan was more than willing to sit down with the Communist leader of the USSR in an effort to build a personal connection between the two men without sacrificing America’s vital interests in the Cold War.

The 1985 Geneva summit was highly advertised as a potential showdown between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the supposedly reasonable new Soviet leader. When it was over, Americans realized that behind Reagan’s genial affability was a steely determination to protect our country against the threat from Soviet nuclear missiles.

Just as today’s mainstream media are bent on undermining Trump’s call to put Americans first in our dealings with Mexico, the media of the 1980s (led by ABC’s Sam Donaldson and CBS’ Dan Rather) were overwhelmingly pro-Gorbachev and anti-Reagan in their daily coverage.

Her column is a reminder that we are on the right course, and we should remain true. The critics who hate America -- its self-reliance, its upward mobility, its sheer majesty -- never change. Only our heroes do.

Read the rest here. 

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