Daniel Greenfield on policy: deliberate destruction

 

Daniel Greenfield cross-posts his Front Page commentary at his blog, Sultan Knish.  He weighs in on the subject of the Biden administration's policy of deliberate destruction of America's economy and society. Here’s Mr. Greenfield’s conclusion:

This is not a conspiracy theory. The only assumption being made here is that the Left is achieving its stated goals as the result of a plan rather than a series of accidental coincidences.

Too many Republicans are failing to hold the Left accountable by refusing to state what is going on. Hanlon’s Razor, “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” is fine when it’s not being applied to an ideology that is achieving its objectives through its actions.

That’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s policy.

Pasting Biden’s “I Did It” stickers on gas pumps is fine, but he’s completely expendable.

If Americans don’t understand that our misery isn’t an accident or incompetence, but part of a plan, then the downward cycle will continue to play out with increasingly worse outcomes.

Until the Left finally gets what it wants. And then the rest of us won’t have anything left.

Read the rest here. Hard to argue with Mr. Greenfield’s assessment.

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The Rittenhouse Verdict and “Funded riots”

 

image at cartoonmovement.com

A contributor to TheAmericanSun named Fred Watson Jr. posted a column in the aftermath of the not-guilty verdict for Kyle Rittenhouse.  Mr. Watson begins:

On August 25, 2020, a seventeen year old young man shot and killed two convicted felons to death and shot and disarmed another. It was all caught on livestream. Within two days, charges were filed against that young shooter for a flurry of offenses. On November 19, 2021, a jury acquitted that young shooter of all charges. The trial, both actual judicial proceedings and broader media persecution, of Kyle Rittenhouse was complete. Society now has to live with the consequences of our new era of political trial spectacles.

. . .

Who did answer? A seventeen year old, doughy faced kid. He protected where his family lived, where he worked. He went and cleaned up the mess rioters made. He showed amazing cool under pressure and marksmanship to take out multiple attackers. He did it all alone with a mob chasing him. He shamed an entire group of people: right wingers. Someone finally stood up to the months’ worth of mobs and it was a kid. He became a folk hero overnight and energized an entire faction of America. Someone had finally said enough. Someone had finally stood their ground. He was the right’s boy, and they would defend his actions. It was all on tape, and he had defended his community and self. His instincts were all right and intentions were from the heart yet he was persecuted by our warped regime for it.

And he concludes:

This is going to repeat itself. Funded riots are a way of life for the left now. The procedure is in place for more instances like Kenosha because the upper echelons of the right allow them to happen. When Sen. Romney marches with BLM, there is no leadership. White America, right wing America, is on its own. The events of 2020 made that clear. The post-verdict outrage from the left, from top to bottom on social media, makes it clear that there is no de-escalation. The events of the 2020s will only ramp up the tension. The riot indulgence will not go away. Will the self-defense veto remain?

This is not the end. This is not the beginning of the end or even the end of the beginning. This is the beginning of the show trial era. Low level civil conflict is already here. America will see more of these flashpoints. The right needs to become fully aware of the stakes and circumstances so that these situations do not arise, and when they do, whatever protective powers are available, are still available for its people. Laws must be enacted. State power must be wielded. Consequences must be real for the left’s random soldiers spread throughout our nation at every level and institution. There were too many structural features geared towards a left wing victory. It seemed God was on Kyle’s side and a competent defense team. God? How else to explain the one surviving assailant being the one to testify and bolster Kyle’s case? How else to explain Kyle shooting three ex-cons and missing the one black who attacked him. The right will have to get off its ass and realize no man on a white horse is going to clean everything up. It’ll have to stop relying on a system thoroughly dominated by the left. The right is going to have to stop letting one boy watch the wolves.

Read the rest here. Sobering.

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Sports Illustrated goes “woke”

 

Eric Utter published a piece about Sports Illustrated over the weekend at American Thinker.  I am not much of a sports fan, but his opening paragraphs offer a good summary of the cultural decline in America.  And his article is a good follow-up to my blog yesterday on the future of arts communities – if there is a future.  Mr. Utter begins:

The Left ruins everything. Television. Movies. Economies. Cities. Lives. Religion. Comedy. Sports. Everything. Literally everything.

It does so in many insidious ways. It divides us with multiculturalism and critical race theory. It makes some groups bitter, envious, and indolent by telling them they are victims of other groups’ bigotry…and that there is nothing any of the groups can do about it. It revises history, changes language, and restricts speech, all in an effort to restrict thought. It brandishes “wokeism” as a weapon and “cancels” those it dislikes. All of this has led to a more ignorant—and less fun—America.

The left has recently rendered sports less a form of entertainment that can bring all of us together and more of a vehicle to lecture and hector fans, in an attempt to hammer them into strict conformity of thought. We have all seen this with anthem protests, BLM messages, boycotts, etc., etc.

And now, even a once nearly-revered sports publication, Sports Illustrated, has completely given in to the mendacious minority mob that demands all things be seen exclusively through the prism of race/class/gender/politics. Sports Illustrated, like nearly all mainstream media, has leaned left for many years but has just recently completely abandoned all balance and objectivity in an apparently desperate—if puzzling­—attempt at virtue-signaling.

. . .

Mr. Utter then goes into specifics based on the latest issue.  Read the rest of Mr. Utter’s piece here.

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Wokeness erasing America

 

Most excellent commentary from Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness:

If wokeness should continue and “win,” by now we all know where it will end up. After all, this is not a prairie-fire, peasants-with-pitchforks, spontaneous bottom-up revolution.

The woke Left seeks a top-down erasure of America, engineered by the likes of LeBron James from his $40 million estate talking revolution to Oprah at her $90 million castle, as Mark Zuckerberg throws in $500 million here, and his colleagues $400 million there, and as the top executives of Coke, Target, and Delta Airlines believe their $17 million-a-year salaries make them experts on the crimes of non-diversity, exclusion, and inequity. Anytime revolutionaries at the outset of their enterprises seek exemption from the consequences of their own ideology, we know their plans will end badly for everyone else.

. . .

Full article is here.

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Real "Left and Right" of Politics

Insanity Wrap #201 (a/k/a Stephen Green) posted the graph below:

It seems like every week there’s some new chart or graph like this one, but Insanity Wrap thought this one was particularly thoughtful and well done. (Click to embiggen or click on the link above and scroll down).

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Democrats and radicals

Photo credit: legalinsurrection

This is not the Democrat party you or your parents knew in the 1950s. Karen McQuillan at American Thinker reports:

After 8 years of exploiting and enflaming the grievances of identity politics, the Democratic Party is being eaten by the monster they rode to power.

Radicals don’t need to be a majority – they never are.  They dominate through mob violence, media manipulation and threats.  They are now dominating Democrat politicians, not allowing them to “normalize.” 

This is not a recent development, IMO. I would say it’s been coming to this for a very long time. 

Read the rest here.

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Liberals, conservatives, and the American right VS the American left

image credit:  historynet

Dennis Praeger makes the distinction between liberals and the American left:

Liberalism — which was anti-left, pro-American and deeply committed to the Judeo-Christian foundations of America; and which regarded the melting pot as the American ideal, fought for free speech for its opponents, regarded Western civilization as the greatest moral and artistic human achievement and viewed the celebration of racial identity as racism — is now affirmed almost exclusively on the right and among a handful of people who don’t call themselves conservative.

. . .

How are those of us who oppose left-wing nihilism — there is no other word for an ideology that holds Western civilization and America’s core values in contempt — supposed to unite with “educators” who instruct elementary school teachers to cease calling their students “boys” and “girls” because that implies gender identity? With English departments that don’t require reading Shakespeare in order to receive a degree in English? With those who regard virtually every war America has fought as imperialist and immoral? With those who regard the free market as a form of oppression? With those who want the state to control as much of American life as possible? With those who repeatedly tell America and its black minority that the greatest problems afflicting black Americans are caused by white racism, “white privilege” and “systemic racism”? With those who think that the nuclear family ideal is inherently misogynistic and homophobic? With those who hold that Israel is the villain in the Middle East? With those who claim that the term “Islamic terrorist” is an expression of religious bigotry?

He concludes his column by sounding the alarm:

With the defeat of the left in the last presidential election, the defeat of the left in two-thirds of the gubernatorial elections and the defeat of the left in a majority of House and Senate elections, this is likely the last chance liberals, conservatives and the right have to defeat the American left. But it will not happen until these groups understand that we are fighting for the survival of America no less than the Union troops were in the First Civil War.

We all have family or friends who would identify as classical “liberals.” In my own family, after years of conversations, several liberal relatives have moved into the “conservative” column. We also have family or friends who think of themselves as liberals but who actually fit Praeger’s definition of being on the American left. So far, conversations with them haven’t made any difference.

Read the rest of Praeger's column here. 

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Fascism: redefining the word

woody.typepad via Steven Crowder/Twitter

  

If you managed to wade through Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, you already know that the term “fascism” has been misappropriated by Communists, Progressives, and other left-of-center isms to mean the opposite of its original far left definition. Several online dictionaries today reflect the switch in meaning, and even the Wikipedia entry shows the difficulty of navigating the origins of the term and its current usage by the political Left as a pejorative.

Today Bookworm (of the Bookworm Room blog) has a piece at American Thinker that summarizes the origin of the left/right nomenclature and the sleight-of-hand in redefining “fascism” – all in the context of a short history lesson. The entire article is here. Below are a couple of extracts:

For months now, the Democrat-Progressive fever swamps have been using the word “fascist” in connection with Donald Trump and those who voted for him. It took Michael Kinsley to elevate this shoddy claim onto pages of the Washington Post: Trump, he asserts, is a fascist.

. . .

Given that conservatives Republicans, including the majority of Trump supporters, are on the liberty side of the spectrum, far from the world’s most brutal tyrants, what gave rise to the glaringly false syllogism that “Republicans are right-wing fascists and Hitler was a right-win fascist, so all Republicans are Hitler”? 

You can blame it on a nasty little historic and linguistic trick American communists pulled, which was to make “fascism” synonymous with the political “right.” Once having done that, they could claim that American conservatives, being “right wing,” are therefore fascist. This is pure disinformation.

. . .

“Fascism,” another historic term, is one that American statists embraced until Hitler tainted it. It first gained political traction in Italy in the 1920s. Mussolini defined it to mean “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” In other words, fascism is purely on the statist side of the continuum.

Savvy readers will have noticed that fascism sounds remarkably like communism: It’s all about concentrating all power in the state, leaving the individual entirely subordinate to the state. The primary difference between the two ideologies is that in communism the government nationalizes private property, whereas in fascism the government does not nationalize it but nevertheless completely controls — as is the case, for example, with Obamacare, which saw the government establish the rules for the private insurance market and mandate that Americans buy the product.

. . .

One more thing: Obama said that the biggest disappointment of his presidency was his failure to grab more guns from American hands.  Statists always grab guns because their regimes are fundamentally hostile to the citizens they control, making it impossible for those citizens to defend themselves against tyrannical government. Trump’s promise to protect the Second Amendment is the antithesis of a statist, especially a “fascist,” regime.

Read the rest here. 

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