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Showing posts with label socialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label socialism. Show all posts

Thursday, May 11, 2023

Training Americans to spy on those who oppose leftism

 


At American Thinker, Andrea Widburg reports on yet another alarming development:

The DHS is training Americans to spy on those who oppose leftism

. . . A FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request revealed that it produced training documents teaching ordinary Americans to report on Americans opposed to Biden’s policies.

This sounds too far-fetched to be believable, but it’s true. The Foundation for Freedom Online reviewed documents that America First Legal obtained from the DHS via a Freedom of Information Act request. It showed that the DHS is planning to train ordinary Americans to intervene when they see “radicalization” among their peers.

. . .

It's one thing to urge citizens to be vigilant about packages that could be bombs or to be aware of someone sweating, mumbling prayers to himself, and smelling of rosewater at fairs or other crowded venues. It’s another thing entirely for the Department of Homeland Security to define the Democrat party’s political opponents as incipient terrorists.

This means we no longer live in a free, two-party representative democracy. Instead, we live in a budding socialist, totalitarian state, complete with a secret police that deputizes citizen fanatics to engage in unlawful searches for crimes. Just as the Deep State used social media to circumvent both the First and Fourth Amendments, it’s doing the same with a generation of citizen spies.

Read the full report here.

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Tuesday, April 25, 2023

The endless war against merit

 



This blog frequently links to historian Victor Davis Hanson’s essays. At his recent essay at American Greatness, he considers the definitions and consequences of socialism and its derivatives ("Do We Even Know We Are All Socialists Now?”).  Here’s his conclusion:

. . . A final note: the Orwellian police state is central to socialism, since the ideology is contrary to innate human nature and when fully implemented quickly ruins all that it touches and is commensurately despised in its fruition. So to force compliance is a 360 degree, 24/7 project that transcends all our institutions and culture.

That is why the woke FBI goes after counter-revolutionary parents at school board meetings or traditionalist Catholics rather than Pentagon leakers or Islamic terrorists.

That is why the FBI and the CIA respectively tried to warp the 2016 election with the phony Steele dossier and in 2020 probably did so by suppressing the truth about the “bombshell” evidence found on wayward Hunter Biden’s laptop.

That is why news disappears off Facebook and the old Twitter. That is why the order of Google search results seems bizarre. That is why Disney or Budweiser suddenly virtue signal their nihilist politics, or why Nike makes the mediocrity Colin Kaepernick a multimillionaire, or Stanford University attempts to purge vocabulary such as “citizen,” “immigrant,” and “American.”

Once socialism takes hold, every mediocrity, every ossified bureaucracy, every constipated careerist, every hack writer and nobody actor, comes out of the woodwork to find his socialist “fair share” of what he lacked in talent or accomplishment.

In the end, perhaps the best definition of socialism is simply “The endless war against merit.”

Read the rest here.

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Friday, March 17, 2023

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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Thursday, December 29, 2022

Climate change prison

 


Here’s Andrea Widburg on the most recent climate change insanity:

. . . in accordance with UN and WEF climate recommendations, the city of Oxford (home to the famed university) approved plans mandating that citizens may not drive more than 15 minutes distance from their homes without permission. It’s called the “15 Minute City” and is intended to reduce auto emissions. Mostly, though, it will reduce liberty, which is what climate change madness has always been about.

. . .

Making choices based on lifestyle preferences is a perfectly sound, market-based way to go through life.

But the marketplace is not what globalists want. They want control. Certainly, that’s the case in and around Oxford, England. Word is trickling into America that both the leftist Oxfordshire County Council and the Oxford City Council have plans. Big plans.

. . .

And the conclusion:

. . . Socialism is totalitarianism, which exists under many names (theocracy, military junta, fascism, communism) but, no matter the name, the goal is always the same: Completely control a population for the benefit of a small, well-defined group of elites. In Oxford, England, with its new plan to trap people near their homes and spy on them wherever they go, we’re seeing the latest phase in the socialist crackdown that Rush [Limbaugh] identified 30 years ago.

Coming soon to a neighborhood near you.  Read Ms. Widburg’s column at American Thinker here.

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Wednesday, November 23, 2022

What Thanksgiving Means To Americans


Image credit: en.wikipedia.org

 

Re-posted from earlier Cleveland Tea Party Thanksgiving blogs:

What Thanksgiving really means To Americans

A couple of years ago, Jerry Bowyer, writing in Forbes Magazine, recounted the real significance of Thanksgiving, a significance that is too often lost among the turkey dinners, football games, and stories about Indians who befriended the early settlers. 

In 1620, the Plymouth pilgrims based their original community on Plato’s Republic, a collective model that appealed to their religious convictions and morality. But the communal model didn’t work for them. After two years of failing harvests and resulting malnutrition, disease, starvation, and deaths, the pilgrims replaced the communal model with a model based on private property. The ensuing harvest was abundant, with surpluses available for trade.

Their Thanksgiving celebrated the triumph of the individual, private property, and incentive, over collectivism. At first, the pilgrims felt guilty because they were putting self-interest over the seeming altruism of socialism. Yet the devout survivors had learned two lessons: 1) that a theoretical and Utopian collective society fails, and (2) in real life, private property and capitalism produce prosperity. For them, God, not Plato, knew best. Accepting the principles of private property and self-interest was God’s way of harnessing self-interest to the greater good. We know all of this because an elder and Governor of the Plymouth plantation, William Bradford, kept a journal and it survives today. Mr. Bowyer’s earlier article, with additional historical background, is here.) 

Here’s Bowyer's “How A Failed Commune Gave Us What is Now Thanksgiving.”

It’s wrong to say that American was founded by capitalists. In fact, America was founded by socialists who had the humility to learn from their initial mistakes and embrace freedom. One of the earliest and arguably most historically significant North American colonies was Plymouth Colony, founded in 1620 in what is now known as Plymouth, Massachusetts. As I’ve outlined in greater detail here before (Lessons From a Capitalist Thanksgiving), the original colony had written into its charter a system of communal property and labor. 

As William Bradford recorded in his Of Plymouth Plantation, a people who had formerly been known for their virtue and hard work became lazy and unproductive. Resources were squandered, vegetables were allowed to rot on the ground and mass starvation was the result. And where there is starvation, there is plague. 

After 2 1/2 years, the leaders of the colony decided to abandon their socialist mandate and create a system which honored private property. The colony survived and thrived and the abundance which resulted was what was celebrated at that iconic Thanksgiving feast.

As my friend Reuven Brenner has taught me, history is a series of experiments: The Human Gamble. Some gambles work and are adopted by history and some do not and should be abandoned by it. The problem is that the human gamble only works if there is a record of experimental outcomes and if decision makers consult that record. For many years, the story of the first failed commune of Plymouth Bay was part of the collective memory of American students. But Progressive Education found that story unhelpful and it has fallen into obscurity, which explains why (as I alluded to before) a well-educated establishment figure like Jared Bernstein would be unaware of it.

I’m often asked why our current leadership class forgets the lessons of the past so often. They are, after all, very smart men and women. Don’t they know that collectivism will fail?

No, they don’t. Not anymore. For much of our history, our leaders were educated in the principles which were to help them avoid errors once they have joined the ruling class. They studied to learn how to not misuse power. Now our leaders learn nothing of the dangers of abusing power: their education is entirely geared to its acquisition.  All of their neurons are trained on that one objective – to get to the top. What they do when they get there is a matter for later. And what happens to the country when they’re done with their experiments is beside the point: after all, their experiments will not really affect them personally. History is the story of the limitations of human power. But the limits of power is a topic for people who doubt themselves and their right to rule, not the self-anointed.

That’s how it is now, and that’s how it was in 1620. The charter of the Plymouth Colony reflected the most up-to-date economic, philosophical and religious thinking of the early 17th century. Plato was in vogue then, and Plato believed in central planning by intellectuals in the context of communal property, centralized state education, state centralized cultural offerings and communal family structure. For Plato, it literally did take a village to raise a child. This collectivist impulse reflected itself in various heretical offshoots of Protestant Christianity with names like The True Levelers, and the Diggers, mass movements of people who believed that property and income distinctions should be eliminated, that the wealthy should have their property expropriated and given to what we now call the 99%. This kind of thinking was rife in the 1600s and is perhaps why the Pilgrim settlers settled for a charter which did not create a private property system.

But the Pilgrims learned and prospered. And what they learned, we have forgotten and we fade.  Now, new waves of ignorant masses flood into parks and public squares. New Platonists demand control of other people’s property. New True Levelers legally occupy the prestige pulpits of our nation, secular and sacred. And now, as then, the productive class of our now gigantic, colony-turned-superpower, learn and teach again, the painful lessons of history. Collectivism violates the iron laws of human nature. It has always failed. It is always failing, and it will always fail. I thank God that it is failing now. Providence is teaching us once again.

Happy Thanksgiving!

# # #


Wednesday, November 9, 2022

Whither the Red Wave

 

Gary Varvel cartoon at Townhall


Gen Z = voters under 30.  Robert Spencer at PJ Media explains the mid-term election results:

If Della Volpe’s numbers are correct, and 64% of voters between the ages of 18 and 29 really voted for Democrats, then one thing is clear: the corruption and politicization of our educational system has worked.

. . .

What he is crowing about is the apparent fact that the voting group with the least life experience and the most recent subjection to the Leftist indoctrination that dominates America’s educational system ended up voting as it was brainwashed to do. Gee, that’s terrific, if you like evidence of the success of the relentless propagandizing of a vulnerable and impressionable captive audience, but neither John Della Volpe nor anyone else should be proud of it. What it shows is not that the Leftist case is compelling or persuasive; it shows that patriotic Americans have been far too complacent in allowing public schools to become centers of Leftist indoctrination and hatred of our own nation and heritage.

. . .

. . . In China, Communist leader Mao Zedong began the Long March in 1934 to evade nationalist forces; the term, however, came to be associated with his slow, steady, patient rise to power, culminating in the Communist takeover of mainland China in 1949. The Long March Through the Institutions was the same kind of slow, steady takeover, as Communists, leftists, and their allies gradually gained control of America’s colleges and universities, its primary and secondary educational systems, its popular culture, and above all its ever-growing federal bureaucracy.

Mr Spencer concludes:

Many, if not most, of the Gen Z-ers who voted overwhelmingly for the Left will, as they get older, come to realize how foolish and wrongheaded they were to support socialist internationalism and the managed decline of the United States. But others will never wake up, and will applaud that decline as retribution for centuries of alleged racism and colonialism. Even as their own cities and towns become ever more squalid, poor, dirty, and dangerous, they will continue to think of themselves as righteous for having chosen all that. That pride will be all they have left.

Full column is here. 

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Sunday, September 4, 2022

Marxism 101

 

Pat Cross cartoon

At PJ Media, Robert Spencer published an excellent comparison in historical terms of Biden’s ideology and that of the former Soviet Union.  Mr Spencer begins:

In Marxist theory, the final stage of socialism is true communism, when everyone shares of his or her resources equally, the state withers away, and true justice finally dawns upon the earth. We never have seen that stage and never will, because Marxism is rancid pseudo-religious hogwash that runs directly contrary to human nature. The real final stage of socialism is what we saw in the last ten years of the Soviet Union: an entrenched, all-encompassing, corrupt and inefficient state bureaucracy nominally presided over by a succession of senescent, barely-there incompetents. With his disgraceful descent into open authoritarianism Thursday evening, Old Joe Biden and the Democrats signaled their intention to skip right to that final stage: they’ve already got the doddering figurehead and the ravenous bureaucracy firmly in place.

. . .

And now that Joe Biden is out in the open about criminalizing his opposition and brooking no dissent, we can skip here in the United States right to the final stage of socialism. We have the entrenched deep-state bureaucracy, and we have the dementia-ridden septuagenarian puppet in charge, so we’re all set. . . .

Read the full column here.

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Friday, July 29, 2022

They Can’t Let Him Back In

 

Michael Anton at CompactMag zeroes in on why we have to endure the January 6 Committee show trials and Liz Cheney’s Trump Derangement Syndrome. For me, Anton points out the obvious when he writes:

Love him or hate him, during Trump’s presidency, the economy was strong, markets were up, inflation was under control, gas prices were low, illegal border crossings were down, crime was lower, trade deals were renegotiated, ISIS was defeated, NATO allies were stepping up, and China was stepping back (a little). Deny all that if you want to. The point here is that something like 100 million Americans believe it, strongly, and are bewildered and angered by elite hatred for the man they think delivered it.

Nor was Trump’s record all that radical—much less so than that of Joe Biden, who is using school-lunch funding to push gender ideology on poor kids, to cite but one example. Trump’s core agenda—border protection, trade balance, foreign restraint—was quite moderate, both intrinsically and in comparison to past Republican and Democratic precedent. And that’s before we even get to the fact that Trump neglected much of his own agenda in favor of the old Chamber of Commerce, fusionist, Reaganite, Conservatism, Inc., agenda. Corporate tax cuts, deregulation, and bombing Syria: These are all things Trump’s base doesn’t want, but the oligarchs desperately do, which Trump gave them. And still they try to destroy him.

. . .

Anti-Trump hysteria is in the final analysis not about Trump. The regime can’t allow Trump to be president not because of who he is (although that grates), but because of who his followers are. That class—Angelo Codevilla’s “country class”—must not be allowed representation by candidates who might implement their preferences, which also, and above all, must not be allowed. The rubes have no legitimate standing to affect the outcome of any political process, because of who they are, but mostly because of what they want.

. . .

People I have known for 30 years, many of whom still claim the label “conservative,” will no longer speak to me—because I supported Trump, yes, but also because I disagree on trade, war, and the border. They call not just my positions, but me personally, unadulterated evil. I am not an isolated case. There are, as they say, “many such cases.” How are we supposed to have “democracy” when the policies and candidates my side wants and votes for are anathema and can’t be allowed? How are we supposed to live together with the constant demonization from one side against the other blaring 24/7 from the ruling class’s every propaganda organ? Why would we want to?

. . .

The full article is here.  On a personal note, liberal colleagues of mine bemoan the “divisiveness” in today’s society.  How could it be otherwise?  When liberals want to convert our country to some brand of socialism, how is that compatible with our Founders’ constitutional republic?

# # #


Friday, June 17, 2022

Dr Malone reports: another spook in the medical-industrial complex

 


At his Substack page, Dr Robert Malone exposes yet more corruption in the insatiable medical-industrial complex in DC: 

ARPA-H, a branch of the IC within NIH

I really did not begin to understand the Washington DC/Bethesda- based National Institutes of Health (NIH) healthcare bureaucracy until my research laboratory was recruited and relocated from the University of California, Davis to the University of Maryland, Baltimore School of Medicine in 1997. Before then, I had a vague notion that the NIH intramural (Bethesda/Rockville- based research campus) and extramural (mostly Rockville administrative campus) infrastructure was a sort of research paradise, where all the really important government funded biomedical research work was done. For the lucky few who were good enough, the elite of the elite, they were able to work unencumbered by the daily grind of the endless begging-for-dollars grant and contract writing (and associated funding politics) which has come to dominate the lives of most academic biomedical researchers.

. . .

I am searching my brain for the right metaphor to express the reality of the NIH that I actually encountered in moving from the academic epicenter of California agriculture to the belly of the medical-industrial complex beast - an astronomic Black Hole comes closest. Like the effects of a Black Hole on spacetime, the massive amount of money allocated to the NIH bureaucracy by the US Federal Government (year, after year, after year) distorts every aspect of modern medical research, across the United States medical research enterprise and beyond throughout the world.

So with that prelude and context, enter the new NIH program called ARPA-H (Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health).

Dr Malone concludes:

Frankly, what I see is yet another spook being embedded into the federal arm of the “public-private partnership” which exists between the global medical-industrial complex and the US federal government, and given a nice juicy $6.5B birthday gift with no strings attached and no ability of the executive branch to provide oversight. ARPA-H appears to me to be an intelligence community operational research arm that has been embedded into the Office of the Director of NIH. What could possibly go wrong?

Much more here. Again, Saul Alinsky's first Rule for Radicals:

“Control healthcare and you control the people.” 

# # #



Thursday, May 12, 2022

Prediction: more riots this summer

 



Athena Thorne predicts more riots this summer.  At PJ Media, she explains:

. . . Riots — or at the very least, large-scale organized protests (LOPs, for the sake of this article) — have become an industry, complete with its own infrastructure and professional workforce, and there are big bucks involved. Rioting isn’t going away any time soon.

. . .

And now, the infrastructure is in place and Big Protest’s shock troops are ready to roll at a moment’s notice. Not only that, but this industry is also intractably ensconced in the national establishment. The continuum comprises almost every sector:

Higher education teaches the justifications for the unrest and provides protest training exercises. It also provides manpower for summer riots, when staff and students alike are off for the summer and available.

Liberal government — local to national in scale — allows unrest to spread by undermining law enforcement’s ability to maintain order.

Corporate America supports the LOP industry by bankrolling it and also increasingly creating workplace cultures that encourage employees to back it.

The Fake News media provides messaging support and fans the flames.

Big Tech looks the other way as LOPs are organized and coordinated nationwide (even internationally in some cases) on its platforms.

Socialist policies, such as “free” healthcare, guaranteed incomes, and rent/mortgage relief, ensure that unemployed and underemployed troops remain idle and ready for deployment to a riot near them. Corporate money pays for their time, their meals, and the buses that transport them.

Worse, these structures are flexibly effective, no matter the cause of the moment — all roads meet at the intersection, after all. Whether it’s pressuring recalcitrant CEOs to fund “anti-racism” organizations, menacing justices to support women’s “rights,” or lending a hand to local ballot traffickers (as described in the film 2000 Mules), Big Protest is well-staffed, well-funded, and ready to roll. . . .

Read the full article here.

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Saturday, March 5, 2022

Andrea Widburg: Russia, Ukraine, & Nazis

 


At American Thinker, Andrea Widburg brings some historical clarity to the word “Nazi” as it is being bandied about in the reporting on Russia and Ukraine:

The word “Nazi” is suddenly everywhere. This isn’t the modern habit of calling everyone we don’t like a “Nazi.” Instead, because of events in Ukraine, the word is showing up in the news, where it has real-world ramifications. . . .

. . . Communism and fascism are the two bastard children of the socialist ideology. Communism calls for the destruction of private property, with the government owning and controlling the means of production, ostensibly for the people’s benefit. Fascism allows private property to exist, provided that the property owners understand that they have no rights separate from the state. Both are totalitarian systems that call themselves “democracies” because people are required to vote for pre-approved chosen candidates. These governments are inevitably repressive.

Most of the world’s governments today are fascist. All power rests in the government, which allows private property to exist but subordinates that property to government control. In China, the control is militaristic and obvious. In Europe, through the EU, it’s bureaucratic and someone more subtle. The current American system—a dominant political party disdainful of the Constitution working hand-in-glove with massive corporate, technocratic interests—is increasingly fascist.

Not all fascists, though, are Nazis. The National Socialist Party in Germany added a few twists to baseline fascist totalitarianism: A quest for world domination and racial obsessions. These two factors led Nazis to believe it was their right to enslave all inferior races except for the Jews, whom they intended to exterminate entirely.

. . .

In the fight for control in Ukraine, both governments are European-style right wing (i.e., totalitarian) governments and both are nationalists. Putin is showing an unnerving yen for regional domination. However, neither the governments nor their troops are Nazis, although each has the potential to be.

Full column is here (includes her chart of forms of government measured by individual freedoms)

# # #

Tuesday, February 1, 2022

Socialists Condemn Workers Of The World For Uniting

 


You have nothing to lose but your chains!  The Babylon Bee strikes again:

OTTAWA—Socialists around the world are condemning the trucker freedom protest in Canada as the working class unites to defend their human rights. 

"When workers of the world unite against overbearing government mandates, that's literal fascism," said a sobbing socialist Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from deep within his top-secret bunker underneath Washington, D.C. "True, compassionate socialism is when the government partners with private corporations to force experimental drugs on the populace and threaten their very livelihoods if they don't. Everyone knows that."

According to sources, socialists were initially thrilled by the trucker convoy, as they had mistaken it for a bread line. To their dismay, they soon found out that it was a toxic freedom march organized by the working class against the Canadian bourgeois. 

. . .

Read the rest here.  Good fun. 

# # #


Monday, January 10, 2022

Marxists: getting what they want by any means

 

Steve Hecht is a new name for me.  From his bio:  Mr. Hecht is a businessman, writer, and film producer, born and raised in New York. He has lived and worked in Guatemala since 1972. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and a Master of Business Administration in Banking and Finance, both from Columbia University. His article about the Saul Alnksky tactics being used to divide Americans is on point:

The deceitful portrayal of the January 6 protest as an insurrection is a tactic to divide the nation and impose a dictatorship. With big-tech censorship and regime-media manipulation, the false narrative has garnered momentum and is paving the way for further erosion of the electoral and judicial systems.

The January 6 event could not have been an insurrection. It had zero chance of overthrowing the government, which was not even the intent of the protest. They wanted to restore electoral integrity and transparency. Those who assert otherwise are boldfaced liars or blind followers of the liars.

In his 1971 work, Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky wrote, “All issues must be polarized … One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other.” By making opponents devils, followers of radical manipulators need not even consider an issue’s merits. They follow party dogma to avoid empowering the evil ones.

Information control is essential to convince a large proportion of the public that a lie is true. Legacy and social media partner with Democrats by lying to and hiding the truth from their audiences. A scan regarding any issue important to Democrats reveals complete lockstep representation in legacy outlets and on social-media platforms. Without media partners, the Biden regime could not have achieved power; the truth stands in the way of the Biden agenda.

Since 2016, Democrats and their media partners have falsely demonized Trump and his supporters as white supremacists, xenophobes, and any epithet they can pile on.  . . .

Legacy and social media, Democrats, and federal bureaucrats (the cabal) together created false narratives about Trump-Russia collusion, a call to Ukraine, Hunter Biden’s computer, and finally, the January 6 events. Using typical Marxist self-projection onto the enemy, the cabal falsely portrays Trump supporters as cult followers. The purpose is to keep cabal followers angry, fearful, and ready to support any action, including crimes, against the enemy.

Some pundits say Democrats are hypocrites for condemning the January 6 event as an insurrection while viewing the violence between June and August of 2020 in many cities as peaceful. Totalitarians go beyond hypocrisy and double standards. They have only one standard: getting what they want by any means.

. . .

The (Not) for the People Act must not pass. Democrats support it because they cannot win free elections. If America-first Republicans succeed over RINOS, such as Democrat facilitator Liz Cheney, and limit electoral fraud, Americans will have a chance to recover in 2022 and 2024.

. .

Read the entire article here.

# # #


Wednesday, November 24, 2021

What Thanksgiving means To Americans

 

Image credit: en.wikipedia.org


Re-posted from earlier Cleveland Tea Party Thanksgiving blogs:


What Thanksgiving really means To Americans

A couple of years ago, Jerry Bowyer, writing in Forbes Magazine, recounted the real significance of Thanksgiving, a significance that is too often lost among the turkey dinners, football games, and stories about Indians who befriended the early settlers. 

In 1620, the Plymouth pilgrims based their original community on Plato’s Republic, a collective model that appealed to their religious convictions and morality. But the communal model didn’t work for them. After two years of failing harvests and resulting malnutrition, disease, starvation, and deaths, the pilgrims replaced the communal model with a model based on private property. The ensuing harvest was abundant, with surpluses available for trade.

Their Thanksgiving celebrated the triumph of the individual, private property, and incentive, over collectivism. At first, the pilgrims felt guilty because they were putting self-interest over the seeming altruism of socialism. Yet the devout survivors had learned two lessons: 1) that a theoretical and Utopian collective society fails, and (2) in real life, private property and capitalism produce prosperity. For them, God, not Plato, knew best. Accepting the principles of private property and self-interest was God’s way of harnessing self-interest to the greater good. We know all of this because an elder and Governor of the Plymouth plantation, William Bradford, kept a journal and it survives today. Mr. Bowyer’s earlier article, with additional historical background, is here.) 


It’s wrong to say that American was founded by capitalists. In fact, America was founded by socialists who had the humility to learn from their initial mistakes and embrace freedom. One of the earliest and arguably most historically significant North American colonies was Plymouth Colony, founded in 1620 in what is now known as Plymouth, Massachusetts. As I’ve outlined in greater detail here before (Lessons From a Capitalist Thanksgiving), the original colony had written into its charter a system of communal property and labor. 

As William Bradford recorded in his Of Plymouth Plantation, a people who had formerly been known for their virtue and hard work became lazy and unproductive. Resources were squandered, vegetables were allowed to rot on the ground and mass starvation was the result. And where there is starvation, there is plague. 

After 2 1/2 years, the leaders of the colony decided to abandon their socialist mandate and create a system which honored private property. The colony survived and thrived and the abundance which resulted was what was celebrated at that iconic Thanksgiving feast.

As my friend Reuven Brenner has taught me, history is a series of experiments: The Human Gamble. Some gambles work and are adopted by history and some do not and should be abandoned by it. The problem is that the human gamble only works if there is a record of experimental outcomes and if decision makers consult that record. For many years, the story of the first failed commune of Plymouth Bay was part of the collective memory of American students. But Progressive Education found that story unhelpful and it has fallen into obscurity, which explains why (as I alluded to before) a well-educated establishment figure like Jared Bernstein would be unaware of it.

I’m often asked why our current leadership class forgets the lessons of the past so often. They are, after all, very smart men and women. Don’t they know that collectivism will fail?

No, they don’t. Not anymore. For much of our history, our leaders were educated in the principles which were to help them avoid errors once they have joined the ruling class. They studied to learn how to not misuse power. Now our leaders learn nothing of the dangers of abusing power: their education is entirely geared to its acquisition.  All of their neurons are trained on that one objective – to get to the top. What they do when they get there is a matter for later. And what happens to the country when they’re done with their experiments is beside the point: after all, their experiments will not really affect them personally. History is the story of the limitations of human power. But the limits of power is a topic for people who doubt themselves and their right to rule, not the self-anointed.

That’s how it is now, and that’s how it was in 1620. The charter of the Plymouth Colony reflected the most up-to-date economic, philosophical and religious thinking of the early 17th century. Plato was in vogue then, and Plato believed in central planning by intellectuals in the context of communal property, centralized state education, state centralized cultural offerings and communal family structure. For Plato, it literally did take a village to raise a child. This collectivist impulse reflected itself in various heretical offshoots of Protestant Christianity with names like The True Levelers, and the Diggers, mass movements of people who believed that property and income distinctions should be eliminated, that the wealthy should have their property expropriated and given to what we now call the 99%. This kind of thinking was rife in the 1600s and is perhaps why the Pilgrim settlers settled for a charter which did not create a private property system.

But the Pilgrims learned and prospered. And what they learned, we have forgotten and we fade.  Now, new waves of ignorant masses flood into parks and public squares. New Platonists demand control of other people’s property. New True Levelers legally occupy the prestige pulpits of our nation, secular and sacred. And now, as then, the productive class of our now gigantic, colony-turned-superpower, learn and teach again, the painful lessons of history. Collectivism violates the iron laws of human nature. It has always failed. It is always failing, and it will always fail. I thank God that it is failing now. Providence is teaching us once again.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sunday, November 7, 2021

Cloward-Piven Plan is happening now

 

image credit: pinterest.com

Wayne Allyn Root is a contributor to Townhall.  He’s taken controversial positions in the past, but I personally find his logic and reasoning in this article to be persuasive.

Vaccine Mandate Is Cloward-Piven Plan To Destroy USA and End Capitalism  

Mr. Root starts off:

Back in the 1980s, I was a Columbia University student learning about a plan to destroy America and end capitalism. It was called Cloward-Piven -- named after a Columbia University husband-and-wife professor team. Their insane goal was to turn America into a socialist, communist hellhole.

They planned to do it by overwhelming and collapsing the U.S. economy with massive debt, created by getting as many Americans as possible to depend on welfare, food stamps and unemployment benefits. In the ensuing economic catastrophe and collapse of our country, every business owner would get on their knees to beg government to save them.

At that moment of crisis and chaos, we would become a socialist, communist country.

Don't look now, but it's happening. The communists of Columbia (and every other elitist Ivy League school) have tried for decades to force a majority of Americans to rely on welfare benefits. They failed. But they won't give up. They've modified the plan. It's now a powerful one-two punch.

First, they've opened the borders to let millions of migrants and refugees into this country -- almost all of whom want cradle-to-grave welfare. Also, don't forget they all need free health care for themselves and their kids, and their new babies, and their extended families. That alone could overwhelm the system and collapse the economy. That's before welfare and food stamps. And then there's free public school for all their children and expensive English-as-a-second-language programs that cost billions of dollars but make teachers unions filthy rich.

Open borders is Cloward-Piven strategy updated for 2021. 

. . .

Part Deux of Cloward-Piven is the vaccine mandates. . .

Read the full column here. As I said, I have a hard time finding a flaw in his reasoning.  More scary stuff.

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Wednesday, June 9, 2021

North Carolina's Mark Robinson: 3½ minutes that will bring tears to your eyes

This video is short and already viral; I accessed it on Conservative Treehouse. It’s Lt. Governor of North Carolina Mark Robinson addressing the North Carolina Republican convention:

North Carolina Lt. Governor Mark Robinson Defines The Challenge

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Monday, May 17, 2021

Socialism's seductive appeal

 



Roger Kimball has good history and philosophical lessons for us at American Greatness. He concludes:

For centuries, prudent political philosophers have understood that the lust for equality is the enemy of freedom. That species of benevolence underwrote the tragedy of Communist tyranny. The rise of political correctness has redistributed that lust over a new roster of issues: not the proletariat, but the environment, not the struggling masses, but “reproductive freedom,” gay rights, the welfare state, the Third World, diversity training, and an end to racism and xenophobia. It looks, in Marx’s famous mot, like history repeating itself as farce. It would be a rash man, however, who made no provision for a reprise of tragedy.

Such attitudes are all but ubiquitous in modern democratic societies. Although of relatively recent vintage, they have spread rapidly. The triumph of this aspect of Enlightened thinking, as [philosopher David] Stove notes, marked the moment when “the softening of human life became the great, almost the only, moral desideratum.”

The modern welfare state is one result of the triumph of abstract benevolence. Its chief effects are to institutionalize dependence on the state while also assuring the steady growth of the bureaucracy charged with managing government largess. Both help to explain why the welfare state has proved so difficult to dismantle. The governments that support the welfare state, Stove points out,

are elected by universal adult franchise; but an electorally decisive proportion of the voters—in some countries, approaching a quarter—either is employed by government or is dependent to a significant extent on some welfare programme. In these circumstances it is merely childish to expect the welfare state to be reduced, at least while there is universal suffrage. A government that did away with free education, for example, or socialised medicine, simply could not be re-elected. Indeed it would be lucky to see out its term of office.

Is there an alternative? Stove quotes Thomas Malthus’ observation, from his famous “Essay on Population,” that “we are indebted for all the noblest exertions of human genius, for everything that distinguishes the civilised from the savage state,” to “the laws of property and marriage, and to the apparently narrow principle of self-interest which prompts each individual to exert himself in bettering his condition.”

“The apparently narrow principle of self-interest,” mind you.

Contrast that robust, realistic observation with Robert Owen’s blather about replacing the “individual selfish system” with a “united social” system that, he promised, would bring forth a “new man.”

Stove observes that Malthus’ arguments for the genuinely beneficent effects of “the apparently narrow principle of self-interest” “cannot be too often repeated.” Indeed. Even so, a look around at the childish pretended enthusiasm for socialism makes me think that, for all his emphasis, Stove understated the case. Jim Carrey and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (not to mention a college student near you) would profit by having a closer acquaintance with the clear-eyed thinking of Thomas Malthus.

It’s the same lessons that gave America its first Thanksgiving;  when collective socialism failed, the settlers learned that freedom, incentive, and private property harnessed self-interest to the greater good.

Read Mr. Kimball’s entire essay here.

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Thursday, April 22, 2021

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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Wednesday, February 24, 2021

Face Masks and Civil Disobedience in Burbank

 


Time to tear a page from a Burbank restaurateur. Carl Durrek at NOQ Report has the inspiring development:

Civil disobedience has been a staple of American culture since before the nation broke free from England. It is a necessary component of our freedom as government tends to lean towards authoritarianism whenever it sees a clear path. Covid-19 has opened up such a path for many authoritarians across the nation with California leading the way towards a dystopian near-future.

The city council of Burbank, California, has been in a mini-war with businesses from the beginning of the pandemic. One business in particular, Tinhorn Flats Bar and Grill, has chosen to fight back. Following yesterday’s unanimous vote by the city council to shutter the oldest bar in the city, the response from the local business was short and sweet:

As promised, the bar opened for business as planned. An hour after opening, there had been no word from the city or visits by law enforcement. So far it appears the civil disobedience is happening unimpeded. But that likely won’t last long as the strongarm of the law will soon step in. Very similarly to the infamous Hank Rearden speech in Atlas Shrugged, owner Baret Lepejian believes if government wants to stop them from doing business, they’ll have to do so with more than just an order.

“The pathetic-losers on the Burbank City Council had obviously made up their minds way before the ‘meeting'” ever started,” the bar posted on Facebook. “This was nothing short of a vicious mob with pitchforks coming for that who stands against their campaign of fear. I WILL NOT COMPLY AND I WILL NOT CLOSE MY BUSINESS TO THESE PATHETIC, UNAMERICAN SOCIALIST COWARDS. If need be, I will go down with my ship..”

This isn’t the first attempt by the city to shut them down. Last month, they revoked the restaurant’s public health permit in hopes of bullying the establishment into shutting its doors. But as noted by attorneys for the bar, they have never had a health violation. This latest move to revoke their business license has brought the city and bar national attention. Burbank City Attorney Amy Albano said that if the restaurant’s owners do not comply a lawsuit will be filed and a court order will be sought to close the business.

We wholeheartedly stand with Tinhorn Flats Bar and Grill as they fight to keep their rights to operate safely and within reasonable guidelines that follow medical science. Their story is America’s story. Their fight is our fight.

Which is why I posted this.  We’ve let the owners of our favorite neighborhood bistro know that if they want patrons who will refuse to wear a mask or to practice social distancing, we’ll be there. In the meantime, I continue to wear my [useless] mask like a beard across my chin.

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