Descent into a Clown World

  

At Freedom First Network, J B Shurk explores America’s “Descent into a Clown World.” Here’s an extract:

Just as the beer companies, fake conservative news networks, and so many iconic American companies before them, the sports leagues have turned their backs on generations of loyal fans in a display of repugnant pusillanimity.  I wonder whether the Judases will one day regret it.  I know that the ESG- and DIE-pushing communists are castrating corporate holdouts that resist the Woke Borg, but by bending to the Borg’s will, these companies have destroyed any goodwill with lifelong allies.  When the Marxists come for another pound of flesh from their corporate vassals — and another after that — those in charge will eventually be forced to fight back or surrender.  By that time, though, nobody will be willing to come to their defense.

This has always been the shortsighted corporate gamble of the Woke Wars — there’s never been a communist revolution that did not devour itself.  By yielding to those who have always hated them and betraying those who have long defended them, companies choosing to comply with woke orthodoxy are now entirely dependent on remaining in the Marxists’ good graces.  Yet grace is not something Marxists possess in any discernible quantity.

It is not that politically conservative and religious Americans have blindly defended corporate interests in the past, but rather that liberty-loving, rights-protecting people tend to mind their own business.  Their first reaction to a company’s success is not envy.  They do not immediately turn their sights on how best to confiscate another’s good fortune.

People who work hard for what they own do not worry about what somebody else owns.  They simply seek to be left alone.  . . .

One problem is that while communists are organized, passionate, and good at messaging, conservatives “simply seek to be left alone” – it’s just not an effective marketing message.

The full article is here.

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A Case Against Socialism

 

Posting at Campus Reform, Ilya Buynevich explains why advocates for socialism in America don’t know what they’re talking about:

Walking near Temple University, I noticed a flyer advocating for “socialism in our lifetime.” The message from an outside group reads in full, “Socialist Revolution: Join the fight for socialism in our lifetime.” Having grown up in Soviet-era Ukraine and now a tenured professor at Temple, I feel strongly that most college-age Americans do not understand what they are saying when they advocate for socialism. 

Today, many American college students do not understand that they are advocating for a system that goes beyond what even the Soviets promoted. There is a real distinction that students do not appreciate between the romanticized idea of state socialism in Scandinavia and the reality of socialism – what I experienced as a student in the Soviet Union. 

Most student activists tout equity and many undergraduates champion socialism as a means to achieve equity – a process to engineer outcomes. Where I grew up, this would mean giving everyone the same grade, so it was never a factor in Soviet higher education.  . . .

Much more at the link here.

RELATED:  ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) will bankrupt you (Allan J. Feifer at American Thinker here)

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New World Order: Conrad Black’s perspective

 

Klaus Schwab is is the head of the World Economic Forum (WEF). He is famous for saying that "You Will Own Nothing and You'll Be Happy."    

Conrad Black has participated in WEF sessions, so he knows whereof he speaks.  His column at The Burning Platform offers this:

As one who attended for 20 years — and, following the controversial death of Bob Maxwell, was co-leader (with the late Lord Rothermere) of the WEF media group — I found the sessions interesting and informative, and sometimes even entertaining. (On one occasion, I was speaking with the doyen of conferenciers, Henry Kissinger; when someone approached, Kissinger said, “Here comes that goddamn Indian.” I remarked that he was quoting General Custer; the networker turned out to be the prime minister of India.) Klaus Schwab thought the leaders of the international organizations he featured at Davos — the European Union, the World Bank, the United Nations, World Court, World Trade Organization and all their affiliated agencies — should play an increasingly important role to implement his vision of universal supranationalism.

As the Cold War ended, and the international left presciently clambered aboard the accelerating bandwagon of environmentalism to attack capitalism from a different direction in the name of saving the planet, Schwab became a fully paid up advocate of the most comprehensive version of the virtues of global governance. This evolution rushed back to me these last days as I watched Schwab at the G20 meeting, as part of the Business-20 portion of the summit, with his heavy Teutonic accent that sounds like the Marx brothers imitating Kaiser Wilhelm, advising the world’s 20 most prominent political leaders that the Davos reset of a universal, heavily regulated, post-national, post-religious world of synchronized egalitarian toiling was inevitable and infinitely desirable. For a moment I wondered, in Margaret Thatcher‘s phrase, “Do my ears deceive me?” They did not.

As the editor of a just-published collection of essays titled Against the Great Reset, (Bombardier Books), Michael Walsh points out, “The World Economic Forum (WEF) advocates a complete reimagining of the Western world’s social, economic and moral structures.” This book contains 18 mostly very stimulating essays from such noted authorities as Victor Davis Hanson, Douglas Murray, Roger Kimball, Michael Anton and Walsh himself (including a modest contribution from me). Klaus Schwab has expressed pride that Justin Trudeau, Chrystia Freeland and Mark Carney (who converted the Bank of England into a rabid partisan of Britain’s continued membership in the European Union and a crusading promoter of militant environmentalism) are all Davos alumni. And federal Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre has publicly warned against the WEF’s globalist agenda: “Freedom means making our own decisions here at home.”

For Schwab, stakeholder capitalism means the overarching requirements of society as interpreted and enforced by an emergent international class of theoretical regulators that would enforce the interests of everyone in society in the activities of the entire private sector. He calls this the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” which, he says, is “fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.” The 2020 book, “The Great Reset” was inspired by the COVID crisis to present a full frontal exposé of the Davos ambition 50 years after its gestation: “It will steer the market towards fairer outcomes, environmental, social and governance metrics.… To ensure that investments advanced shared goals such as equality and sustainability.… And harness the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution to support the public good, especially by addressing health and social challenges.” 

As Victor Davis Hanson points out in his essay, “The viper tongue of totalitarianism is most often bathed in palliatives before it strikes.” As I wrote, the whole concept of the Great Reset is based on the fervent endorsement of “democracy, as long as everyone votes for increased public-sector authority in pursuit of green egalitarianism and the homogenization of all peoples in a conformist world,” under the direction of the Davos claque of world bureaucrats and redistributors.  . . .

Much more at the link here.  This is no wild and crazy conspiracy theory.  It’s happening today.  And recall that among the WEF / Davis alumni are Justin Trudeau, Angela Merkel, Jacinda Ardern, Tony Blair, and closer to home, Huma Abedin, Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark-R), Rep. Dan Crenshaw (TX-R), Brian Deese, National Economic Council, Tulsi Gabbard, Nikki Haley, Bobby Jindal, Adam Kinzinger, Gavin Newsom, Samantha Power, and Rep. Elise Stefanik  (NY-R). 

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Homelessness by design

 

Elizabeth Nickson researched a book titled Eco-Fascists. Over the years of her research, she came to some conclusions that relate to the collapse of the western world.  And her findings tie in to some of this blog’s earlier postings on the government’s plans for deliberate destruction (e.g., see here, here, and here). Here’s an example from her Substack posting: 

. . . All the poverty you see around you, all the lack, the financial pain in the faces you pass, the lost businesses of the last three years, the titanic risk in the markets, the actual recession, all of it has been engineered. We all, all of us, every single one of us, should be three times as wealthy, and three times as creative.

The most visible result of their malfeasance is homelessness. Which has been engineered to shame you. Entirely. 100%. Every time you drive by some poor soul dying on the sidewalk, you are meant to feel

1. Guilt
2. Anger at the system (capitalism) and
3. An urge to vote for the compassionate left who promise to work only for the dispossessed.

It’s a psy-op. It is why the homeless population is front and center in the richest, most beautiful city in the world: San Francisco. This fact is meant to shout that no matter how much money private enterprise generates, capitalism means losers, addicts, madmen and women, because our system is brutal and must be changed.

San Francisco’s beauty and reputation mean that its homeless catastrophe is publicized all over the world.

When I was researching Eco-Fascists for Adam Bellow at Harper Collins US, I drove 20,000 miles into the American hinterlands, talking to everyone who would talk to me about why their communities were dying. There was one reason: over-regulation. . . .

Ms. Nickson's full column is here.  Not pretty.

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The Destruction is Deliberate

 

At American Thinker, the pseudonymous columnist Ed Sherdlu makes the case that the destruction of America is the goal of the Biden administration.  And he considers the nomination of Saule Omarova as evidence.  He starts off:

The comptroller of the currency is not another one of those do-nothing Washington jobs.  The person filling this critical role controls all federally licensed banks, credit unions, and foreign banks operating in the United States and similar institutions.  Normally, you would think receiving your postgraduate education at the University of Moscow (in the USSR) and writing your doctoral dissertation on the advantages of Marxism over free economy capitalism might be a disqualifier for this all-powerful position.  But not in the Biden administration.

To Biden and his cronies, the fact that their nominee for comptroller is a lifelong Marxist is not disqualifying.  In fact, to the radical Democrats pulling Biden's strings, Russian-born Saule Omarova's dedication to hardcore communism is one of her strongest qualifications.  Ms. Omarova makes no attempt to hide her radical leftist political and economic feelings other than to try to prevent the Senate committee considering her confirmation from accessing her other "academic" works.

As noted yesterday, some conservatives digging into Omarova's recent past may have found the wooden stake to drive through the heart of her nomination.  In a newly unearthed video clip, this woman who Biden wants to control all our nation's finances told her audience, "In order to prevent climate change, we have to bankrupt all the coal, oil, and gas companies."

Under other circumstances, we might consider this utter foolishness to be little more than the drunken utterance of some Ivy League sophomore.   Unfortunately, in this case, the threat and intent to completely bankrupt American energy producers came directly from the mouth of a person who might be given the power to do just that!

And Mr. Sherdlu concludes:

In looking at Omarova's nomination and everything else this administration has done, from the border to Kabul to the supported terrorists, including Iranians, receiving de facto permission to build their atomic bomb, I believe we are forced into one inescapable conclusion: the Biden/Harris administration's actions are not the result of ineptitude.  They are a carefully thought out, well-planned, and almost flawlessly executed plan to ensure the destruction of the United States as we know her.  It is being viciously implemented by Obama acolytes such as Susan Rice and hundreds of others who are the people really running our country under the Biden administration.

. . . Omarova's nomination leaves little doubt as to their intentions.

The full column is here.  I would like to think that Mr. Sherdlu is wrong, but it's hard to argue with his points. 

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Today is Earth Day - ahem

John R. Smith at Biz Pac Review explains:

You may have noticed that some folks “celebrate” Earth Day each April 22. Celebrants believe that the purpose of Earth Day, as quoted by a naïve liberal politician, is “to preserve the quality of our water and the air we breathe, and to protect all the natural wonders….”

It would be wonderful if that was all Earth Day was about.

But the political objective of the people who sponsor Earth Day globally is much more sinister than the preservation of our environment. Read on.

The global environmental crusade is the modern home of the socialist/communist movement. Earth Day is the creation of this movement. The purpose of the global environmental movement is to give governments control of land and resources at the expense of private ownership. They would gut private property rights. They work to create government authority over the West’s industrial production, through such mechanisms as the U.N.’s Paris Agreement and Kyoto Treaty, while exempting socialist countries like China and India. 

Their method? To blame humans and the corporate world’s industrial atmospheric emissions as the primary culprits behind global climate change. 

Their ultimate goal? To curb or crush free-enterprise capitalism.

Much more at the link here.

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Socialism in a nutshell

Mark Levin’s guests on Sunday evening were talking about socialism in general, and free "Medicare for All" in particular. Prof. Robert Lawson explained the fallacy:

If you want to find out how expensive something is, make it free.

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Income inequality is fair

Image credit: ventura632.wordpress.com

A core Tea Party value is "free markets." Walter E. Williams and Thomas Sowell are two economists who are able to make complicated subjects accessible to Everyman. In his column today, Mr. Williams explains why capitalism is not a zero-sum game:

Some Americans have much higher income and wealth than others. Former President Barack Obama explained, "I do think at a certain point you've made enough money." An adviser to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who has a Twitter account called "Every Billionaire Is A Policy Failure" tweeted, "My goal for this year is to get a moderator to ask 'Is it morally appropriate for anyone to be a billionaire?'" Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Elizabeth Warren, in calling for a wealth tax, complained, "The rich and powerful are taking so much for themselves and leaving so little for everyone else."

These people would have an argument if there were piles of money on the ground called income, with billionaires and millionaires surreptitiously getting to those piles first and taking their unfair shares. In that case, corrective public policy would require a redistribution of the income, wherein the ill-gotten gains of the few would be taken and returned to their rightful owners. The same could be said if there were a dealer of dollars who — because of his being a racist, sexist, multi-nationalist and maybe a Republican — didn't deal the dollars fairly. If he dealt millions to some and mere crumbs to others, decent public policy would demand a re-dealing of the dollars, or what some call income redistribution.

. . .

A system that requires that one serve his fellow man to have a claim on what he produces is far more moral than a system without such a requirement. For example, Congress can tell me, "Williams, you don't have to get out in that hot sun to mow a lawn to have a claim on what your fellow man produces. Just vote for me, and through the tax code, I will take some of what your fellow man produces and give it to you."

Let's look at a few multibillionaires to see whether they have served their fellow man well. Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, with a net worth over $90 billion, is the second-richest person in the world. He didn't acquire that wealth through violence. Millions of people around the world voluntarily plunked down money to buy Microsoft products. That explains the great wealth of people such as Gates. They discovered what their fellow man wanted and didn't have, and they found out ways to effectively produce it. Their fellow man voluntarily gave them dollars. If Gates and others had followed President Obama's advice that "at a certain point" they'd "made enough money" and shut down their companies when they had earned their first billion or two, mankind wouldn't have most of the technological development we enjoy today.

. . .

The only people who benefit from class warfare are politicians and the elite; they get our money and control our lives. 

Say what you like about Bill Gates; Mr. Williams has a point. The full article is here. 

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Pushing back against Socialism

A.F. Branco cartoon credit: Townhall 

There are a lot of good editorials online this week comparing capitalism and socialism. But Alicia Colon is always one of my favorite contributors, and her column today begins

If Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez had grown up as I did during the Cold War in the 50's the very last thing she would be promoting would be socialism.

Granted our circumstances were very different as my family was dysfunctional, poor and we lived in the tough streets of Spanish Harlem; unlike the new Democrat congresswoman who spent most of her teen years in a more posh neighborhood.

Nevertheless I benefited from a solid parochial education taught by anti-Marxist nuns.

AOC, as she is now known, is a product of academic indoctrination by Marxists professors who have obviously never read Animal Farm or 1984 and are enthralled with the socialist agenda.

. . .

As poor as we were, we felt fortunate to live in this great country where we had the freedom to become whatever we chose to be. Most of us wanted to become wealthy enough to leave the inner city and raise healthy families. That was not possible under communism where the state ruled over everyone's lives.

. . .

AOC and so many poorly educated millenials have become useful idiots for the progressive Marxists disciples of Saul Alinsky and the Frankfurt School that Andrew Breitbart warned us about. We, who lived in the ‘50's, learned how to think and reason so that the very idea of global warming smelled to high heaven. How on earth could we plan to save a planet that old based on data that has only been around for a few hundred years?

. . .

Unfortunately, the feeble-minded have the stage right now and it is up to us older citizens in the silent majority to cut through the lies of the progressive and lamestream press and recognize that it is no longer viable for Americans not to get involved with politics. One of the major parties has been hijacked and supports infanticide, anti-Semitism and boos when it hears the name of God.

The full article is here. And Roger L. Simon at PJ Media comes to the same conclusion:

Those of us who believe in the market, even with the usual reservations, should be preparing for battle. We have in our corner that some Democrats (Omar, AOC, etc.) are heading off a cliff. That's to the good, but complacency is our enemy. As the left would say, the struggle continues (la lucha continua). Let's turn it back on them.

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What is their endgame?

image credit: theburningplatform.com

I go hot and cold on Mark Levin. But his column yesterday was the lead link at Doug Ross’s Director’s Blue blog, and it’s a good one. Here’s his conclusion:

Challenge socialists on this single point: What is their endgame?

When is enough government control enough? Why won’t socialists -- or Democrat Socialist -- share their blueprint for society? What industry is a “bridge too far” for socialism? Why can’t they tell us what their limits are on taxation, control of industry, and how much of society should be dependent upon their handouts?

Conservatives know their endgame: it is called the United State Constitution. These four pages of wisdom, condensed instructions gleaned from thousands of years of human experience, ended up germinating the most magnificent nation-state yet to arise from humanity’s tumult.

And a great percentage of our fellow citizens neither recognize nor appreciate the magnificent society with which they have been bequeathed. They take for granted this unique and precious anomaly in the context of human history.

Only education can help them. Not all of them, to be sure, but many: those who possess both open minds and a willingness to learn.

He asks a good question, one which my ultra-liberal friends and relatives might have difficulty responding to. The full article is here. 

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Socialism on the rise

image credit:thedebtweowe.com

The disconcerting headline (disconcerting to Tea Party people!) in Rick Moran’s piece in American Thinker:

"Socialism is going mainstream, and Millennials are the cause"

From the article:

A headline in The Hill captures a significant moment in American history: "Four socialist-backed candidates win Pennsylvania legislative primaries."

The Democratic Socialists of America supported all four candidates, who will almost certainly win in November, given their lack of GOP opponents.

The DSA itself thinks socialism's time has come:

The DSA hailed the legislative victories as a huge moment for the socialist movement. 

Arielle Cohen, co-chair of the Pittsburgh DSA chapter, told HuffPost that she feels a "monumental shift" after the victories, noting DSA's growing membership since President Trump's election.

"We won on popular demands that were deemed impossible.  We won on health care for all, we won on free education," she said.

"We're turning the state the right shade of red tonight," she added.

The "right shade of red" is due to a growing acceptance for socialism, especially among Millennials, and outright hostility and opposition to capitalism. 

. . .

How did this happen? The short answer is that the American people are ignorant of the dangers to human liberty posed by socialism and have been propagandized by our educational system, our culture, and our media to hate capitalism.  If you are told capitalism is evil for your entire life by teachers, movies, TV, and news media, you are going to believe that capitalism is evil. 

The rest of the article is here. If you go to the link, you will see more than the usual number of reader comments - over 400 when I posted. 

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