The hyperventilating politicians can’t help themselves. Doing
something, ANYTHING whether it makes sense or not, is not only predictable, but
to every thinking American, laughable. We see this in children desperate for
attention, except these are supposed to be adults. “Never let a crisis go to
waste.” Insidiously true!
First come the cries of “We have to have a serious conversation…”. Almost immediately thereafter comes the search for a scapegoat, “It’s the [fill in the blank]’s fault!” Then come the condescending vituperations and finally, if enough celebrities jump on the bandwagon, come the protests and sometimes riots.
For example, let’s take the current “mass shootings”. Even
though it’s been said a dozen times over that all the legislation needed to
enforce gun laws are already on the books, and nothing being proposed would
have made any difference in the great majority of the incidents, the theatrics
are omnipresent. The 2020 presidential candidates’ hand-wringing, eye-rolling,
blame-their-opponents, gnashing of teeth, weeping, wailing, demands to “do
something”… it’s all unadulterated nonsense.
Why? Because if every gun in America were eliminated on a Monday, how many guns would there be on the streets by Friday, and who would have them? Of course, the answer is hundreds, if not thousands, and it’d be the criminals and the madmen! And then we’d have to defend ourselves with baseball bats. I submit you’d have to have a hellavu swing to knock out of the park a 9MM bullet shot by a determined gunman threatening your family.
But on the Left, the rhetoric is tantamount to “confiscate all guns and America will be a safer place”. More nonsense. It’d be like giving everyone in the country a tee-shirt with a target on it and the words, “shoot here”.
“We’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of the people who shouldn’t have them,” is another familiar cry. Enacting legislation that tries to do this would create more injustice to responsible gun owners. Whether a responsible gun owner goes to jail or not would then be dependent on how good the victimhood act from the aggrieved party is. “He (or she…let’s not be sexist here) is an angry old white man who’s threatening me!” Of course, the spouse making that allegation may have just had his or her belongings destroyed by that baseball bat or some other infliction, and the threats were made by the non-gun-owner party. Who gets arrested?
No, the solution to the mass shooting problem is not more legislation. The solution is easily described but terribly difficult to achieve. It is the return to and practice of traditional values in society. Fundamental morality has to become popular again. The teaching of right and wrong has to be the norm. Heroes have to be good rather than evil, and the Golden Rule has to prevail. In the late sixties, before the pendulum swung completely to the left, it would not have been such a herculean task. Today, with the pendulum so far left it’s near the 270 degree mark, it is.
We are repeating the mistake of history. Every great civilization: Egypt, Athens, Rome, Western Europe and now America, has gone through the same pattern: growth, prosperity, indolence, moral decay, the rise of deviant, destructive hedonism and demagogues, challenges from envious nations, the crumbling of traditional family units, the celebration of evil and immorality, the eventual decline of the culture, sovereignty impugned until its demise and replacement by another civilization in an earlier stage of the cycle.
Where do you think we are in this continuum?
The rampant demagoguery we’re witnessing is the sad symptom of a great civilization that is very ill. Is our situation fatal? Absolutely not. There are many among us who are speaking out and trying to push that pendulum back the other way. We do so by word and deed. In public we no longer speak in whispers or hushed tones about the rabid and caustic influence the Left is having on our society. When we walk our dogs, we don’t just pick up after them, we take an extra bag along and collect wrappers and cans and plastic water bottles along the street as well.
Sadly, but inevitably, it takes an outside shock like a world war, a natural disaster, a pandemic or some other cataclysmic event to wake us up and propel us to pay attention to the basics again. And by basics I mean the STUFF THAT MATTERS.
But the one thing we need more than anything to turn our
civilization around is MORAL LEADERSHIP. The fact that so many would scoff at
the previous sentence is symptomatic of how great the need is.
The 2016 presidential election was a cataclysmic event and it indeed caused us to reflect on what matters. Now we need to pick up the pieces of our society broken by the events of the last 11 or so years and MAKE GOOD COOL AGAIN.
And we have to somehow get rid of demagogue politicians and replace them with serious adults who ACTUALLY care about our country and its future rather than power, influence and money – ones who will sometimes stand there and do nothing instead of making things worse.
I pray it is not too late. I pray there are still places in our country where traditional values still prevail. But the other day I read an article in American Thinker: “When the Left Snatches our Kids” by Sally Zelikovsky, to whom all credit is due, that so closely reflects my fears that I’m going to “retweet it”, i.e. reproduce it in full. It is precisely the kind of alarm I’ve been trying to raise for my own children and grandchildren. It isn’t so much prescriptive as a call to arms. It succinctly rifles to the crux of all that’s going wrong with our society.
While I’ve been careful to distinguish between Conservative and Traditional in my writings, one could do a cut and paste, replacing the word Traditional with Conservative in the article and it would remain spot on. The italics are mine.
“I am skeptical that our efforts as conservative parents to produce conservative offspring will materialize. Even with the best of intentions, the odds are not in our favor to successfully counter the Democrat-Media Complex, the educational system, and pop culture. That doesn’t mean there aren’t success stories (some in my own family), but I hear more about the failure and the disaffection it engenders in conservative families.
Conservative parents have learned the hard way that how your kids turn out depends on a host of factors that, at some point during the maturation process, are way beyond our control — friends, personal experiences, a particular book or documentary, brain chemistry, friends, a teacher/professor/boss, personality, a romantic relationship, college activities, pop culture, hobbies, and…friends. Usually, it’s not one but an amalgamation of several factors and presto chango! The kid who was once the lone conservative arguing at the lunch table, now thinks David Hogg and AOC are bitchin’.
We see them everywhere — the emaciated college-age vegans working at Starbucks, hysterical young girls pounding on Supreme Court doors, attractive anti-Semites leading the charge in Congress. I’m sure some of them had conservative upbringings — you cannot assume they were all raised by liberals. Yet, in her reporting about out-of-control liberal college students some time ago, I heard Laura Ingraham link their behavior to their upbringing. Only a parent whose children hadn’t yet attended high school could make such an absurd connection. We can try but we cannot guarantee what our children will believe.
Once again, I find myself referencing Red Scare movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It resonates. We have to be vigilant, stay informed, understand the arguments of the other side and how to combat them. If we don’t, eventually the pods take us over. I graduated high school a Reagan Republican whose political arguments were admittedly my Dad’s. When I arrived at a competitive college filled with smart, often private-school educated Merit scholars, I lost every political debate. I just didn’t have the breadth of information and understanding of history to counter their arguments. Thus, I graduated college…a Democrat. In time, I fell back on those critical thinking skills my parents instilled in me. A desire to understand more as I graduated from law school and entered the work force, led me to self-educate and, eventually, return to my conservative roots.
That was also in the ‘80s and early ‘90s when life was simpler and more balanced: when “gay marriage” was still an oxymoron; before triggers and safe spaces, the internet, social media, doom and gloom “climate change,” and legalized pot; before we had an alphabet of sexualities to choose from and the ability to change sexes; before blended families became the norm; before hatred became the quintessential reason for all of society’s ills.
Not all teachers and professors were proselytizing progressives, the media was less corrupt, and your politics were not a factor in getting or retaining a job. Because of the deep societal changes since then, not every Millennial or Gen Xer has the wherewithal, the background, or the backbone to recognize and then punch back against the forces of propaganda, fess up to and toil with their own ignorance, or simply engage in respectful debate with those who have another point of view — no matter how steeped in conservatism their childhood.
I am not suggesting we stop lecturing our children about competing points of view, stop teaching them to be skeptical about what they learn in school or from their peers, or stop challenging the false orthodoxies they are barraged with on virtually every topic from sexuality to climate, energy to food, and national security to border security. We should continue to bang the drum. We must. And we must remain hopeful that someday those we lost will return to the conservative fold because they see the wisdom of conservative principles. But for all of you young parents out there who think you’ll do better than those before you, be prepared for disappointment.
The conservative path is littered with the bodies of well-intentioned parents who are devastated when their formerly straight kids come out of imaginary closets, transition to the opposite sex, or demand to be called “they”; when their Jewish Day School educated children announce their support for the BDS movement; when their evangelical children support blatant infanticide; when their happy, well-adjusted kids go off to college and return believing weed is innocuous, struggling with drug addiction, or suffering from mental illness.
These cultural maladies affect liberals and conservatives alike, but are unusually bitter pills for conservatives to swallow because they are packaged in a lifestyle and value system antithetical to everything we teach our children — resilience, pride, integrity, honesty, open-mindedness, self-reliance, individuality, taking responsibility for our actions, doing right when we screw up, and teaching a man to fish. Liberals cast us as hypocrites whose principles clash with reality, but what they don’t understand is that we believe in taking responsibility for and learning from our missteps so we constantly evolve into better beings (and don’t get mired in unbridled, misplaced hatred and lifelong victimhood).
Secondly, conservative parents are treated by their children with a level of hostility that doesn’t seem to afflict liberal parents with conservative children. Loving, nurturing conservative parents find themselves catapulted to Holocaust-denier status and demoted to homophobic, intolerant, racist, privileged, religious zealots. Relics of an oppressive past. It is painful when your kids reject everything you raised them to value. Despise you. Scoff at you. Turn against you. Align with your political foes. Resent you for brainwashing them with yourhateful, 1950‘s agenda.
Now, some of that is typical teenage/young adult angst and rebellion. When frontal lobes are soothed by the right combination of hormones and our insecure little monsters segue into more confident adults, those nasty side effects often dissipate. But much of the antipathy they are exposed to is encouraged by “the man” in the liberal camp — we’ll call him “the burning man.” He instructs us to hate authority, hate anything established, hate tradition, hate the moral code you grew up with, hate anyone who is white or successful, and hate those who embrace any of this. Hence, hate your parents. Hate your old neighborhood. They are the problem. And while today all you have to do is oppose them, someday you might have to actively go against them, even “turn them in.” The burning man says this is okay because you are right and the end justifies the means. I’m not being paranoid. Our entire educational system is based on appropriating the minds of our children and undoing all they have learned at home, turning them into weapons of mass societal destruction in the burning man’s toolbox.
We have all participated in holiday dinners and family vacations ruined by dissension and door-slamming. Family harmony devolves into family discord, function into dysfunction, and closeness morphs into estrangement. Parents are instructed to just shut up already! Politics and religion are off the table. Dinner conversations revolve around silly cat videos and trivial drivel. Soon there is little left to discuss. After all, everything is political now — from your sneakers to your bus commute during Pride Month.
Once upon a time, we could fall back on cultural interests like music, movies, theater, travel, and sports to avoid potentially explosive conversations at family gatherings about politics and religion. Now, virtue signaling is so ubiquitous that everything seems to fall into the Realm of the verboten. It becomes more and more difficult to find common ground. Constructive input I like your haircut and simple questions Did you decide on a major? What are you doing for break? How do you like your job? are potential triggers. Family get togethers are so contentious there is an increasing tendency to minimize interactions. Even life’s big “hatching, matching, and dispatching” events are often fraught with tension — relatives who couldn’t be seated together because of some family squabble are now separated because one has a worldview the other finds detestable.
Some parents give in. They don’t want politics or values to stand in the way of their relationships with their kids, so they re-visit their Weltanschauung. Constant pressure from your 20-year-old bubelah goes a long way towards re-educating Mom and Dad. Senator Rob Portman was against gay marriage until his son came out and then… he evolved. I’d rather fight than switch is a paean to another time.
This is nothing new. Many parents drank the Kool-Aid and became part of the 60s counterculture their children brought home. Ironically, many of their hippie children became yuppies and did the unthinkable — morphed into their conservative parents. Hmm. I suppose we can be clear-eyed about the transformative societal and political forces pulling our children away from conservatism, at the same time we cling to the hope that our liberal progeny will switch and fight for conservative principles and maybe even cling to their bibles and the Constitution, too.”
Wish I could have said it like that!
Comment by DOC DURACOAT August 3, 2019: “All you people should move to Boca Raton, Florida! Our public high school has been rated A for the last 10 years straight. We have a very active ROTC program, and it is routine to see these kids in the halls wearing military uniforms. The flag is respected, everyone stands for the pledge of allegiance, even the minority students. Graduation rates and college acceptance rates are very high. Discipline is enforced, disrupting class is not tolerated. My kids and their friends all graduated as sports playing, modest dressing, great conservative kids. Come on down and bring your guns and bibles! Your kids will graduate with a great education and strong conservative moral values.”
It’s not that the study of human behavior and interaction in the fields of Anthropology, Archaeology, Economics, Geography, History, Law, Linguistics, Politics, Psychology and Sociology, the so-called Social Sciences, isn’t useful. It’s just that they’re not SCIENCE, and one of our big problems today is that their practitioners use a lot of questionable or rigged scientific data and analysis to advance special interests and hidden agendas.
Science, as it was rationally taught when I was in 6th grade, was based on the use of the Scientific Method, the principles of which have been around since Sir Isaac Newton wrote Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687. “Social Science”, misleadingly named to give it an air of formality, rigor and credibility that Newton would never have ascribed to it, and to which the Scientific Method can’t be applied, belongs to what serious scientists label as Junk or Pseudo Science.
Today, the Left-infested science curriculum has turned the
Scientific Method into mush. Here’s the definition from the website Science
Buddies which illustrates what I mean:
“The scientific method is a process for experimentation
that is used to explore observations and answer questions. Does this mean all
scientists follow exactly this process? No. Some areas of
science can be more easily tested than others. For example, scientists studying
how stars change as they age or how dinosaurs digested their food cannot
fast-forward a star’s life by a million years or run medical exams on feeding
dinosaurs to test their hypotheses. When direct experimentation is not
possible, scientists modify the scientific method. In fact, there are probably
as many versions of the scientific method as there are scientists! But even
when modified, the goal remains the same: to discover cause and effect
relationships by asking questions, carefully gathering and examining the
evidence, and seeing if all the available information can be combined into a logical
answer.”
This kind of relativist nonsense is but one example of how our kids and grandkids are being brainwashed into believing that there is no right or wrong, no good and evil, everyone deserves a trophy and other Leftist necroses of traditional common sense.
One of the keystones of the Scientific Method is repeatable process. A hypothesis, then a theory, doesn’t become a fact until controlled experimentation occurs in a methodical, empirical manner. But importantly, it has to be reproducible by others using identically controlled methods.
In March 1989 two respected University of Utah professors
published a paper insisting they produced so-called “cold fusion” in
their laboratory: the production of energy without the usual exothermic
reaction that occurs in nuclear fusion or atomic bombs. Their scholarly work was widely circulated
and got the whole scientific and business world in a tizzy. What doomed them
was that no-one could reproduce what they say they observed notwithstanding the
precise replication of their methods!
One of the other cornerstones of the Scientific Method is that a theory has to be able to be validated. Another way of saying this is that theory only becomes fact once it can no longer be refuted by experimentation and observation. The social sciences rely on the review of gathered data, rather than the scientific method of hypothesis – theory – experimentation – validation – reproduction – peer review to assert facts that simply aren’t! And what social scientists do is put forth an idea based on some interpretation of the data, whether accurate, selective, falsified or otherwise, and then say, “Prove me wrong” to the rest of world. Their theories almost by definition can NOT be validated and thus can’t seriously be considered science. Oh, and “send me more money so I can continue to do research.” That is the very essence of Junk or Pseudo Science.
So, when Leftists of all stripes spout their dogma and profess it to have scientific backing, I urge you to throw what we call the BS flag! Don’t let the attachment of the word “science” to anything said by a politician, an economist, a lawyer, a psychologist, a sociologist or any kind of bureaucrat, (Right or Left by the way), cloud your judgment. That’s unless it’s REAL SCIENCE as we learned it in the sixth grade , not FAKE science!
I’m not a fan (understatement) of pop-psych, but of all the
tests and profiles that various employers put me through during my career, one
stands out as actually practical and useful: The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®.
I have consistently found it to be uncannily accurate in explaining and
predicting human behavior, particularly interpersonal behavior. In our
families, the MBTI® can promote understanding, enhance communication, and fuel
patience and forgiveness that we might not otherwise be able to muster.
Based on the work of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, the
MBTI was created by Katharine Cook Briggs (1875-1968) and her daughter Isabel
Briggs Myers (1897-1979). In this article I’ll barely scratch the surface of
the behavioral model, so apologies to the psychologists and psychiatrists among
my readers who would justifiably quibble with my treatment and usage. But here
goes.
The MBTI groups people into personality “types”
based on four behaviors or dimensions:
a. How we get our energy b. How we gather information c. How we make decisions d. How we order our lives
Within each of these four behavioral dimensions there is a range
or continuum which describes our “preference”.
The first behavioral dimension is: How we get our
energy. The continuum ranges from what Jung called Extraversion at
one end of the spectrum to Introversion at the other, the so-called ‘E-I
Preference‘. Note that the first is spelled Extraversion, not
extroversion. It’s not about how we behave outwardly, i.e. whether we’re
socially extroverted or introverted. It’s more about how we respond to others
and whether interpersonal engagement energizes or depletes us.
At a party, for example, the individuals with the E
preference gain energy by being around others. As the night wears on,
they seem to get perkier and perkier (with or without alcohol) while those who
are natural I’s become more and more exhausted.
It’s probably a good idea to emphasize here that no-one is
either always Extraverted, nor Introverted and this is true vis-à-vis the other
three dimensions as well. Whether a person is a so-called “E” or a
so-called “I” is relative. E or I is a preference and we can
be both. It’s just that we’re born, as the theory goes, with a natural tendency
or “preference” one way or the other. Fold your arms. You have a
natural preference for which arm goes over the top. Now fold them the other way.
You can DO it, but you clearly prefer and have a preference to do it the
other way right? That’s what we mean when speaking of preference in behavior.
The second behavioral dimension describes How we soak
up information. The preference continuum here extends from Sensor
to Intuitive. I like to explain this dimension by telling the story of
the two people sitting side by side in a plane approaching their destination
airport. The plane is in thick clouds and the plane is bump, jumping up and
down in the turbulence. The two people have their eyes glued on the window, but
all they can see is grey. Suddenly, they burst out of the clouds and the
airport is plainly visible below. The Intuitive says, “Ah, we’re
there.” The Sensor replies, “Not until we’re on the ground we’re
not!”
For the Sensor sees precisely ‘what is’ while the intuitive
sees ‘what could be’. Where we fit on this preference continuum has a major
impact on how we take in information. The ‘S’ and the ‘N’ individuals as
they’re called, can be presented with the exact same set of facts or sensory
input and interpret them 180 degrees apart! Not surprisingly, 70% of men are
S’s while 70% of women are N’s. (Hence the term ‘women’s intuition’!)
The third behavioral dimension is How we make
decisions. The preference continuum here is Thinking at one end
and Feeling at the other. In recent years we’re heard a lot about
“Emotional Intelligence”. In a way I believe that concept gives
support to the argument that decisions don’t have to be made in our left brains
all the time. They can also be made in the gut, and they’re just as valid. But
‘T’s are all about laying out the evidence, analyzing it, coming to an incisive
and informed decision. ‘F’s are about unconsciously mulling things over
viscerally and making their decisions based on how they ‘feel’ about them. Needless
to say, most scientists are T’s, and the majority of men are T’s, while the
majority of women are F’s.
The final behavioral dimension is How we order our
lives. The preferences range from Judgers on one end and Perceivers
at the other. Judgers are ordered. They make lists. If they accomplish a task
that they didn’t put on the list, they’ll write it on the list after the fact
and cross it out! Perceivers prefer to ‘go with the flow’, and are spontaneous
and accepting of whatever comes at them. This preference, in my opinion, causes
people who are strongly opposite to make each other crazy!
With four behavioral dimensions and two end points on the
preference continuum each there are 16 possible combinations of Dimensions and
Preferences and we tend to, upon testing with the MBTI, fall into one of the
16. So, in one corner of the matrix for example we have an ESTJ person: the
Extraverted Sensor Thinker Judger. At an opposite corner we might have the
INFP, the Introverted Intuitive Feeler Perceiver.
Going back to the party. The ESTJ or ENTJ commands
attention, some would say ‘holding court’. He or she has an opinion on
everything and anything and will tell you about it. When offered a tray of
cocktails they might first select the martini, then in a split second put it
down and instead take a gin and tonic. They will of course take a cocktail
napkin and hold it under the drink as they bring it to their lips. The INFP,
meanwhile, is politely smiling as someone bends their ear. They nod, they
listen actively and intently. When the cocktail tray comes by they ask the
waiter to describe the contents of each drink. They put their fist to their
chin and take quite a few seconds to mull over what they want. Once they make
up their mind, however, they take the drink and will not change it two
seconds later like the ESTJ did.
By the way, the ESTJ is attracted (opposites attract right?)
to the INFP because they display the qualities the ESTJ does not. The opposite
is of course true of the INFP, who admires and values the ‘strength of
character’ of the ESTJ.
For fun, I’ll stipulate that the ESTJ is a guy and the INFP
is a gal. They get married because they are, in fact, opposites attracted to
one another. However, fast forward a few years and it’s inevitable, in my
experience, that that opposite-ness causes tremendous conflict. That’s not to
suggest that they shouldn’t have gotten married. It’s almost inevitable,
however, that they really have to work at their relationship.
Meanwhile, two ESTJ’s get married. They constantly bang
heads and argue and fight, but they go to separate corners and unwaveringly
come back at it until they come to some sort of truce, compromise or shared
understanding. Two INFP’s get married and they’ll sit silently in a room
together and simply enjoy and be completely satisfied in one another’s company.
Eventually, they’ll fall off a cliff holding hands but won’t argue while doing
so. And they’ll end up on their feet anyway!
One of the things I like about the MBTI is that it doesn’t
make judgments good or bad, positive or negative about these preferences. In
fact, the seminal work on the model is called “Gifts Differing”, suggesting
that each of the 16 personality types has gifts or talents, and there is no
right or wrong among them. They’re just, well, different.
Here’s an example of how an understanding of “Type”
can be useful. The ESTJ and the INFP are sipping the last of their wine at the
end of dinner on a Sunday evening in August. The ESTJ husband says, “Hey
Hon, how about we go skiing as a family next February.” The INFP wife,
after a pause, says, “That’s not a bad idea.” The husband takes that
answer as a thumbs up and a month later he’s got a whole family ski trip
planned out. Along the way, he’s checked in with his wife, “What do you
think of this condo, or that kids instruction package?” He repeatedly gets
an answer similar to the first, “That’s not a bad idea.”
The family takes the vacation, has a great time and ten
years later in family counseling the wife brings up this episode, emphatic that
she never wanted to go on that trip! Struggling to remember the details, the
husband says, “Hey, I checked with you at the outset and every step of the
way in planning that trip! Why didn’t you speak up?” The wife replies,
“Because you never gave me any time to think about it!”
Had the ESTJ husband understood Type, he would have realized
that asking what seemed like a straightforward question of his INFP wife was
not straightforward at all to her. Rather, the INFP needed to process the question:
take in the idea and internally explore it (the “N” in her), then mull
it over at the gut level (the “F” in her), and finally take time to consider
the whole concept and come to a complete and clear decision (the “P”
in her). By the time she’d done that, the ESTJ husband was miles down the planning
road!
The patience required of polar opposite husband and wife to
reach a mutually satisfying compromise decision is huge, emotionally draining
and if that kind of difference in approaching life is tested many times a day, one
will understand why opposites attract but inevitably have to work so hard to
have a good relationship!
I could go on and on sharing anecdote after anecdote of how
the very opposite personality types deal with one another within families, in
the workplace, among friends, among strangers, in public, in private…how an
understanding of the personality type of someone with whom we’re dealing could
help us achieve whatever goal we have with that interaction, or how it is that
when one is under stress one tends to behave as if they are the exact opposite
of who they are when not under stress.
Instead, I urge you to read Gifts Differing, and if you’re still working or thinking about your career, the book named “Do What You Are“. I’ve also provided below a cheat sheet (credit to Jake Beech) that pithily summarizes the 16 MBTI types.
Attributed to the American author Samuel R. Delany is the phrase “Words mean things.” Hijacking words and phrases is a powerful tool in the arsenal of the demagogue. And the twisting of usage and meaning into pretzels has always been a favorite device of politicians and pundits. With this in mind, I thought I should explain what I mean when I refer in my writing to Traditional Values, Traditionalists and Traditionalism.
Look up Traditionalism and you’ll receive a panoply of descriptions and definitions. One of the first articles that comes up from a search is: “a school of thought promulgated by a group of 20th and 21st century thinkers who believe in the existence of perennial wisdom, or perennial philosophy, primordial and universal truths which form the source for, and are shared by, all the major world religions.” Look further and one goes through the looking glass and into a rabbit warren of definitions in the context of societal norms, religion, philosophy, economics, culture, etc.
In 1964 Supreme Court Justice Potter Steward famously described obscenity (or rather, what it is not) as follows:
“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [“hard-core pornography”], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”
Jacobellis v. Ohio 378 U.S. 184 (1964)
Borrowing on that phrase, I will suggest that Traditionalism may be defined in a variety of ways, but in the end, Traditionalists know it when they see it.
However, a shortcut to how I define Traditionalism is: that body of ideals, values and mores that we were raised on by the Greatest Generation.
Speaking of the Greatest Generation, one of the definitions of Traditionalists refers to those who were born between 1900 and 1945. I believe it is precisely because of their espousal of Traditional Values that they were Great!
We Baby Boomers born between 1946 and 1964 on the other hand, are split into two camps: a) those of us who listened to what our Greatest Generation parents taught us, who were grateful for the peace and prosperity they bequeathed to us and who have tried to live our lives by their example and rules; and, b) the prodigals, the “Me” generation of the sexual revolution who grew up to be the radicals of the 70’s and the yuppies of the 80’s, a few of whom have come home to Traditionalism and the balance of whom have become today’s Leftists.
So what do I mean by Traditional Values? Often the term is conflated with “Family Values.” They are similar, but Traditionalism goes beyond Family Values. To me, Traditional Values include support for:
individual freedom to live as we wish within the basic constraints of Judeo-Christian principles;
the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights as they were intended for then and all future generations;
fundamental patriotism, including honoring our Flag, national symbols, anthems and emblems;
a strong military and national defense and protection of our sovereignty;
the right of self-defense and to keep, bear and utilize arms to ensure that right;
obeying the Law and supporting those who serve in law enforcement;
marriage defined as between one man and one woman (including acceptance of the biological fact that men and women are different!);
support for nuclear families consisting of a father and mother and their children;
freedom of worship and expression;
the Golden Rule;
support for and defense of free-market capitalism;
equal opportunity, not equal outcomes; and,
separation of powers within a limited, and republican government.
Traditional Values also include opposition to:
social engineering and bad (many wouldsay EVIL) social, economic and political ideologies such as socialism and communism;
crony capitalism;
‘free love’ and promiscuity;
abortion on demand and in lieu of contraception;
gender confusion;
LGBTQ militancy;
fascism masquerading as liberal or progressive free expression;
violent protest; and,
collectivism, globalism, cultural marxism and so-called “progressivism”.
The Greatest Generation didn’t have to think about or debate these principles – they lived them. They were part of the fabric of their society.
Today, these principles are under constant assault.
I used to teach a lesson in Sunday School using a glass of water and a dropper full of black ink. The water represented our souls. In the context of this article, it represents the reservoir of societal values. The black drops of ink I slowly added to the water represent, for purposes of this article, Progressive/Leftist ideas, norms, habits, values. Add one drop to the water and nothing seems to happen. As successively more drops are added, however, the water starts to turn grey, then greyer, murky, and finally black.
The metaphor aptly describes what’s happening to our country.
I hope and pray I’m joined by the
Silent Majority of our Boomer generation and budding Traditionalists of succeeding
generations in fighting for a return to the Traditional principles that made us
the greatest nation on earth and in the history of the world.
Environmentalism, or what we used to call Conservation in
saner days, has become, for all intents and purposes, a religion. There is
little difference between the fire and brimstone sermons of fundamentalist preachers
and what’s emerging from the mouths of the spokesmen of today’s increasingly
popular faith: The Green Movement. I hasten to insist that I’m not denigrating
religion. I’m merely pointing out that we need to call and treat worship of the
environment and Mother Earth what it is, and push back on the nonsense that
it’s science.
As with most subjects, the First Law of Experts (which see) applies here. I don’t need to produce a list of all the PhD’s and world-renowned “authorities” who can cite irrefutable, documented, empirical evidence that climate change is man-made and that we are going to use up Mother Earth’s resources within ten years (that goal post, by the way, has been moved at least five times in just MY lifetime!), and that we must immediately ban the use of all fossil fuels, stop eating meat so we can destroy our flatulent cow population, etc.
Could we all check the hysteria for a minute and remember
what we were taught in 6th grade science about the scientific method and
photosynthesis?
Two of the principles underlying the scientific method are reproducibility and repeatability – a hypothesis or theory doesn’t even become a tendency, much less a law, unless the theory can be tested in a controlled setting. Know any environmentalists who’ve been able to prove any of their “settled science” using the scientific method? Of course not. What they’ve done is “interpret data”. But not only is the data crap, a lot of it has been falsified or just been made up. Again, I won’t enumerate all the environmental data scams that have been foisted upon us.
As for “carbon footprints” and all the nonsense about reducing CO2 emissions. Remember what our 6th grade science teacher taught us happens to plants at night? Oh yes…in photosynthesis they TAKE IN carbon dioxide and produce OXYGEN…kind of important for life on Earth. Oh, and “Greenhouse Gas”? Guess what is far and away the most prevalent one. Water Vapor! Sigh…and that ain’t man made.
True believers can ignore the scientific method of
course and forget 6th grade science because they absolutely, fundamentally
BELIEVE what their environmentalist, Earth-worshipping prophets and pastors
have taught them. They can feel it in their bones. They’ve seen it on
Insta-gram; they’ve heard it from Al Roker who has given his testimony of
having “witnessed it first-hand”, and they have had it confirmed by
the most authoritative source of all, Twitter!
Not just the First Law of Experts but also the law that
“He who has the loudest megaphone wins in the court of public
opinion,” also applies. One of the huge downsides of the Internet and the
age of Social Media has been the placing of 1,000 watt amplifiers in the hands
of so many fringe lunatics. With the right catch phrases and the most
outrageous attention grabbers, United Church of Earth congregants have fanned
out to proselytize and saturate the airwaves.
And so as we must with so many insidious movements today, let’s follow the money. Oh wait, it’s darn near impossible to do that! Many investigative journalists and truth-seeking organizations have tried. What we get as a result of their painstaking effort is a spiderweb on top of a patchwork of money and influence connections that all reveal the same m.o.: power hungry politicians and megalomaniacal globalists bent on control receiving “just a sliver” of the money flying around, much of it extorted or extracted from businesses or the public from influence-peddling (think the Clinton Foundation). They’ve succeeded in making even Mother Earth a victim, and if you’ll just text $10 to them, they’ll fight those nasty corporations and people on the Right who are exploiting her!
I urge everyone to take 3 minutes to read the Heritage Foundation commentary that puts it far better than I can. It can be found here.
The Green Movement, Climate Change, Environmentalism…whatever you call it… listen to its sermons, read its writings, contemplate and ponder what its acolytes are testifying at your own risk, and use your own judgment as to whether you’ll put money in its Church donation tray on Sunday, or give it to, say, The Gary Sinise Foundation. I’ll go with Gary Sinise.
There’s a new narcissism in the land. Too many people view
the world through lenses that are two inches in front of their nose. “What does
that have to do with ME?”, they either consciously or subconsciously ask. And then
they wonder how what’s going on around us got this way.
Some of this nearsightedness is understandable. Those of us
with traditional views on hard work, merit, dedication to family, etc. have
been too busy to pay attention to, much less do something about what I call
Leftist Creep. Except it isn’t creep anymore. It’s a full-fledged tsunami of idiocy:
a deafening, shrill assault on values, traditions, norms, fundamental decency
and principles that are the bedrock of the greatest nation and force for good
the world has ever known.
Some of the nearsightedness is due to self-respect. How
could that be? Simple. People who care about their reputations, who truly care
about their community and country, who care about how they are perceived by others,
don’t seek to draw attention to themselves. They don’t lash out and condemn
anyone with whom they disagree with labels and slurs. They’re not activists and
community organizers. They’re not loud and noisy and obnoxious. They go to work
each day to provide for themselves and their families. They don’t look or ask
for handouts. They acknowledge those who truly matter: God, family and friends.
They respect the Flag and our country’s position and responsibility as guiding
light and standard bearer of freedom and truth to the world. They’re the silent
majority. They’re the REAL people of America.
Many are actually clothed in Leftist garb, speak in Leftist
terms, and nod when they hear Leftist drivel. But they know something’s
terribly wrong with what their leaders are saying. They won’t answer poll
questions honestly. To do so would make them outcasts, pariahs, less accepted
at cocktail parties where they gush over the latest victim fundraising goals
while stuffing their faces with prawns. But they’re the ones who, in the
privacy of the voting booth, have the courage and self-awareness to vote for
candidates with traditional views and policies that they know made this country
great. They are what I call Closet Traditionalists.
One of the insidious strengths of the Progressive Left is
that they simply don’t care about what people think of them. They will say and
do just about anything to advance their agenda. They don’t care if they make
fools of themselves. They’re not even aware that the nonsense that comes out of
their mouths or their perverted actions are foolish! They see themselves as righteous
social justice warriors, true believers in a utopian fantasy at least. At worst,
their ‘leadership’s’ addiction to power and dominion breeds the kind of
corruption, anti-American cancer we see advancing day by day.
And because Traditionalists aren’t noisy and obnoxious, and
care what others think about us, we have ceded the battleground to the Left. And
the Left has taken advantage of our silence and absence, our nearsightedness. The
louder and more obnoxious they have become, the more people have been
brainwashed by their verbal diarrhea. Even those of us who are focused on
what’s right can’t help but slow down and look at the accident by the side of
the road. We see the gathering of idiots in the field and the train-wreck
happening, and can’t help but be poisoned, even a bit fascinated by the
spectacle.
And like the frog in tepid water that remains until it has
been boiled…like the death by a thousand cuts, our country is being eaten alive
by this Leftist cancer. That’s how we got here. Nearsightedness.
So what do we do about it?
We need to see beyond our noses and have the courage to
stand up and throw the BS flag as often and as clearly as needed. We need to
strengthen our families and resolve to teach correct principles, to think
critically, to not just shield ourselves from Leftist Creep, but fight back
against it. It’s nothing short of the war between the between the doers and the
slothful, between the producers and the takers, between right and wrong…
frankly, between good and evil.
IBM used to give away desk name plates with the word THINK on
them. Perhaps that’s what the title of this post should have been. Pausing to
think is as much of a challenge today as how one thinks.
We are becoming increasingly scatter-brained. Business and
Life at the Speed of Thought leaves no time to smell the roses unless of course
the scent comes packaged as aromatherapy. “Ready, fire, aim,” we’re told. “If
you snooze you lose.” “Just do it!”
When was the last time you had the patience to watch, much
less actually watched a show on television that wasn’t comprised of five minute
segments, where the people interviewed weren’t forced to rush their answers because
of “hard breaks”? As an aside, when was the last time you saw commentators who
actually presented meaningful analysis or had something truly substantive to
say? (Answer: the only contemporary show I can think of is “Life, Liberty and
Levin”.
FOMO. The Fear of Missing Out. It’s not just a millennial
thing. I see countless supposed adults with their noses pinned to small screens
studying the latest (within the last 2 minutes) pop-culture meme. Too many of
us to block out the real world and live in a virtual one. FOMO causes shallow
thinking. No thinking, really…just reaction to often heart-string-tugging snippets
or easy-to-remember, catchy slogans and phrases.
Since information, whether true or false, right or wrong,
good or bad is always at our fingertips through Google! (it’s a verb now), why
bother to memorize, remember or LEARN anything? Fewer and fewer people actually
concentrate on a single subject or topic. And thus, increasingly, we have an
entire generation who are a mile wide and an inch deep. And fewer and fewer
people actually think. Most just respond to stimuli.
What happened to “Less haste, less waste?” What happened to
Critical Thinking?
Laziness. What the internet and exponentially growing
databases of “stuff” has done is condition people to obtain information from
sound bites, with no real depth, no substantive corroboration, no skepticism.
If it sounds good, or “feels” right, it’s accepted.
Talk about mind control! The demagogues of the Third Reich
would have loved this medium. An ability to influence/brainwash an entire
population of dumbed-down, lazy people would have meant we might all be
speaking German today! Oh, and by the way, the Russians and Chinese and the
LEFT have figured this out and are doing
precisely what the Third Reich would have done…broadcasting propaganda with an
efficiency and effectiveness that only “The Matrix” could improve on.
Think. Think! When so much garbage is constantly overloading
our input circuits, at an ever-increasing rate, we have to force ourselves to
stop and think. And it’s not just stopping to think. It’s compartmentalizing so
as to shut out the noise. It’s not just turning off the ring tone. It’s turning
off the vibration notification as well. It’s finding a quiet spot and moment
amid the chaos to consider what’s important, what really needs to be done, not
what the voice in your ear or the face on the screen are telling you to do.
And it’s being skeptical, increasingly. We used to say,
“Don’t believe everything you read.” That became, “Don’t believe everything you
hear.” Whether you liked him or not, everyone expected and relied on Walter
Cronkite to give us Real News. Can you say the same of the 6PM news anchors
today? Sure, the Bon Ami folks tried to convince you that their product would’t
scratch your porcelain surfaces. But we all recognized that as advertising.
Now, “infomercials” abound, and ALL the news is biased, colored, i.e. ‘fake’ in
the sense that it never just reports what’s happening. We need to listen to or
watch EVERYTHING with a major, not just healthy, dose of skepticism.
It’s sad that we can’t count on anyone or any organization
to provide honest information anymore. But that’s the current reality. The only
antidote is Critical Thinking – forcing ourselves to sort the wheat from the
chaff, to make decisions and form opinions based not on what the firehose of
noise directs at us, but on what reasoned judgment emerges from pause and
reflection.
Most definitions of psychological projection begin by stating that it’s a defense mechanism. Perhaps some unconsciously use it to protect themselves from looking in the mirror, but shrill politicians and their operatives use it consciously as an offensive mechanism.
It’s like little children on the playground. “You did
it!” “No, I didn’t, YOU did it!” One can almost visualize the scene.
As with most behaviors, there are abundant examples of projection on both sides of the political aisle. However, as with most bad behavior, the Left is guilty of much greater frequency and abundance than the Right (see previous post entitled “It’s a Question of DEGREE!). And while the Right’s use of projection usually amounts to peccadilloes, on the Left its use is egregious!
Some examples:
The Left says the Right is bereft of morals while promoting promiscuity, infanticide, drug abuse, profanity, homosexuality, profligacy, illegal immigration, etc.
The Left condemns the use of fossil fuels and the companies that supply them while freely using their cars and planes.
The Left calls the Right fascist at the drop of a hat, while Antifa is precisely the opposite of its name.
The Left cries “racism” so frequently serious people don’t even bother to defend themselves against the labeling. It’s laughable that those who scream the accusation the loudest are themselves the poster children for racism.
I could go on and on. But if you’ve read this far, I’m
preaching to the choir. You know precisely what I’m talking about and are
probably as disgusted by the Leftist talking heads and rhetoric as I.
The question is, with a gullible, dumbed-down population receiving a constant dose of Leftist drivel, how do we combat the false impression created by their projection, and return to civility and equal time for traditional views?
Unfortunately, there is no high road to be taken. The
megaphone the Internet and social media has placed in the hands of the Left has
given them influence far beyond what they should have and certainly far more
than they deserve.
The only answer is to fight fire with fire. That’s not to suggest the Right should engage in projection itself. It is to suggest that traditionalists cannot afford to let the “airwaves” be filled with Leftist nonsense and allow that nonsense to go unchallenged. We must use the megaphone ourselves, broadcasting what is right (Right) and counter punching and challenging every incidence of Leftist projection and other hypocritical behavior.
It’s ok to have opposing views. What’s not ok is to stand on
the playground screaming projection epithets, accusations and patently false
labels at others. Sometimes the playground bully is only silenced when the
normally reticent recipient of that bullying runs up and punches the bully in
the nose.
In 2016 the Oxford English Dictionary’s “Word of the Year”
was post-truth, suggesting that truth is dead, and objective facts no
longer have any meaning. Really? Have we become so poisoned with relativism that
standards no longer exist and the individual is the sole arbiter of right and
wrong, fact and fiction, truth or lies and, by way of conclusion, “anything
goes?”
“What is truth?” is one of the central questions of
philosophy. Is Corey Booker correct to suggest that we must all live “our truth”? Plato, Aristotle,
Socrates and Corey Booker can debate the answer. Here’s one truth, however,
that should but probably won’t be universally accepted. It is that there is a
difference between truth and belief.
What is or should be of great concern is how falsehood, what
a business school course once called “creative misrepresentation” and
fiction are used to persuade or judge everyday matters. And of paramount
concern is how lies have been weaponized so as to cause belief to be to pushed
and accepted as truth. By way of example, that the Benghazi disaster was the
result of an anti-muslim video was proclaimed so loudly and assertively, it brainwashed
many.
It’s also true that not everything is black or white. Grey
is the predominant color in debate. But has the questioning of norms and rules
gone so far overboard that it attacks the very idea of having any rules at all
as Victor Davis Hanson suggested in his 2014 essay “The
Poison of Postmodern Lying“? As he so starkly points out,
“Without notions of objective truth, there can never be lies, just
competing narratives and discourses. Stories that supposedly serve the noble
majority are true; those that supposedly don’t become lies — the facts are
irrelevant.”
So it seems nowadays that truth is in the hands of he or she
who has the bigger megaphone, or who can more cleverly devise a phrase or seven
second soundbite that tugs at a heartstring or “sounds right.”
The antidote?
Critical Thinking…something
that is sorely lacking in our population today. Or, how about, at least, healthy
skepticism?
Not all news is fake news, but a lot of it consists of
selective truth, or facts taken out of context. Not all advertising is
nonsense, though healthy skepticism should cause us to consider whether ground-up
peach pits will cure cancer, or whether an actress’s proclamation that
vaccinations cause autism should be accepted as truth.
If you hear a talking head say, “Let me be clear,”
or “Make no mistake”, or “The truth of the matter is”, or,
my favorite…”It goes without saying,” immediately turn on your
skeptic’s filter.
Separating fact from fiction, truth from lies, involves
work. It is the work of seeking out, validating and judging evidence. In
an era of information overload, (I like the analogy of trying to take a drink
from a firehose), sounding plausible or looking, in the case of websites or
television, as if it’s plausible does not mean it’s true. We used to say,
“Don’t believe everything your read.” Now we have to add
“hear” and “see” to the list. Today you can’t even believe
your own eyes thanks to the wonders of PhotoShop.
Besides applying the principle of critical thinking we can resolve
to tell the truth ourselves, teach our children and grandchildren the
difference between truth and a lie (remember George Washington and the cherry
tree?) and remind ourselves not to be swayed by the herd, by popular opinion, by
peer pressure and by what tugs at the heart while bypassing our brains.
The truth matters.
TODAY IS
Tuesday May 14, 2024
Quips & Quotes
January 2, 2024 "As we enter 2024, there is widespread public agreement about two things: (1) something big is about to happen, and (2) whatever that something is, it sure as hell won’t be pretty! While it may get pretty ugly pretty fast, though, there is an upside to what’s coming: as a country, we can finally pull this disgusting Band-Aid off, face reality for what it is, and stop pretending. However bad this year might prove to be, it might also be tremendously liberating.
Why? Because, one way or another, things will soon change. For too long, those who “run” America have had two things in common: (1) a hatred for individual freedoms, and (2) an even deeper hatred for the one country on the planet explicitly founded on their protection. As a national security surveillance State superseded the U.S. Constitution, leftists have controlled academia, journalism, the legal system, and entertainment. They have shoved anyone with a working brain out the door while assuring themselves that they deserve their privileged social positions and unearned accolades. They tell themselves that they are smart and enlightened, but anybody capable of self-examination knows this not to be true. Leftists are not happy people. They have not figured out any special meaning to life because, to them, life is meaningless. In other words, for too many years, a collection of the most depressed, least curious, morally relativistic, and intellectually homogenous people on the planet have been given pampered positions in exchange for acting as nihilistic and narcotic-dependent sea vessel captains willing to steer America into an iceberg of decline and failure." J.B. Shurk, American Thinker, January 2, 2024 "Do We Hit the Iceberg or Finally Change Course?"
November 3, 2023 "There’s a subtext to nearly all American political trends today. It’s hardly ever spoken about overtly and explicitly. But the topic is nonetheless always there. All insiders know about it. It’s also the central and critical debate concerning America’s future.
The question is as follows. Will the United States continue the present system whereby representative democracy persists as a mere veneer to keep the public distracted and defocused on the real rulers in the nation? Or will something dramatic be achieved whereby the swamp is truly drained, the administrative state gutted, the agencies disempowered, and we return to an actual constitutional system in which the people truly rule themselves through their elected representatives?
These are the two paths. It’s one or the other. They’re mutually incompatible." Jeffrey A. Tucker, November 3, 2023, Epoch Times, p A22, "Are You an Institutionalist or Anti-Institutionalist?"
October 30, 2023 "If you want an indicator of how lost Western civilization has become, go to your kids’ school and check their rules on fighting. Most likely, you’ll find out if two kids get into a fight, both get suspended, regardless of whether one was a punk bully who started it and the other was simply defending himself or some little kid. This is a moral disaster, of course – violence in the defense of what is right is a moral obligation and a symbol of a greater rot within society."
"The world's true nature is that good is forever pitted against evil."
"We must learn again to be ruthless in defeating our enemies. The big lie that Western civilization tells itself is that there are no real enemies, that there are no bad people – except the people of the West themselves, who bear some sort of original sin for not being corrupt and inept Third World barbarians."
"We have forgotten our strength and our courage. We have forgotten that we survive not through gentle hugging but through sword-swinging.The idea that Israel should somehow give these Hamas barbarians food, water, and electrical power even if it surrounds Gaza and prepares to attack is mind-boggling insanity. The moral illiteracy of expecting Israel to care more about the Palestinian people than other Palestinians do is simply bizarre."
"The hard truth is that the world contains bad people who must be crushed through ruthless violence, which shocks and horrifies modern sensibilities. But it is reality nonetheless. When people want to kill you, you are at a decision point. You can either let them kill you or stop them. But stopping them often involves aesthetically displeasing actions, such as blowing them into little bits with bombs or shoving a bayonet into their guts and watching them die in agony. And it necessarily means inflicting death and damage on the noncombatant camp followers around them. That’s why they say war is hell. And that’s why starting one is probably not a good idea. But when someone else starts one, you have to choose them or you. Someone’s going to die badly, and you know, I propose it is those other guys."
October 16, 2023 "Though around the world sociopaths stabbed some folks, the Day of Jihad fizzled in America – how many bummed patriots slammed in a mag hoping some mutant was going to choose his small town to prove Jason Aldean right? But it is only a matter of time. When you allow millions of military-aged males to come unvetted into your country, including many from bizarre hellholes where hatred for Americana is more common than food and indoor plumbing, there is a non-zero chance that some of them are part of sleeper cells waiting for the signal to murder Americans here at home." Kurt Schlichter, Town Hall, October 16, 2023, "We Are Sitting Ducks And Our Leaders Do Not Care"
August 22, 2023 "When arguing in federal court in HI in 2020, I had to get permission from the governor to enter his precious state to argue that his silly COVID lockdowns violated the Constitution. I lost. This same state, in real life, has shown how little respect for life its leaders really have. My perfectly healthy clients were not allowed to travel from one island to another to visit their own property. American citizens were turned away at the airport because they got the wrong COVID test on the mainland. The hotel gave me “parole” from the one way card key rule only to do my legal business and leave. I could not call an Uber or take a taxi at the airport. The National Guard met me at the gate to escort me to Hawaii COVID immigration to provide my information, which they verified with the hotel. I was to keep my phone on at all times so that they could track my location. This same police state didn’t turn the water on in Lahaina, didn’t have sirens, can’t begin to tell you how many children died from their incompetence. Or begin to explain it. Remember all this the next time you are asked to comply with farcical, unjust “laws” made by dictators. They are lying when their lips are moving about how much they care about you and your little life and your paper constitutional rights. Americans are beginning to realize how much we are on our own. Such a betrayal." Harmeet K. Dhillon, on "X", 8/22/23 12:44 AM
August 17, 2023 - A MUST READ!!!! The following is a transcription of Newt Gingrich's comments on Hannity last night. "“I think what you’re seeing tonight is one tree in a forest, and I think we are drifting towards the greatest Constitutional crisis since the 1850s, uh, and the rise of secession and the Civil War. I don’t mean that as hyperbole. Uh, if you read Andy McCarthy’s remarkable book, Ball of Collusion, which came out in 2019, he makes very clear that it is Barack Obama who corrupts the Justice Department, it is Hillary Clinton who routinely breaks the law and gets away with it. And now we have Joe Biden who’s learned, he’s learned from Obama that is doesn’t matter what you do, if you’re a liberal Democrat, you will not be prosecuted. He learned from Hillary that a person in high public office can get millions and millions of dollars. And they learned from watching Donald Trump that a true outsider, willing to take on the entire system, could destroy their entire machine. So what you’re seeing across the country, is a desperate, last-ditch effort by a corrupt machine to destroy their most dangerous opponent in a way which not only breaks the Constitution, destroys the rule of law, and establishes a moment of bitterness, uh, which I think will last for a generation or more. I think this is gonna be a horrendous period and we just need to understand: The people who want to control America and dictate to the rest of us will break any law, lie about any topic, and manipulate the system any way they can, and that includes a lot of the elite news media.”
August 10, 2023 "The fact that young men are getting more conservative is a cause for optimism. Remember, if you grew up male in the last ten years or so, every institution has been deployed against you. You’ve been told you are bad and horrible and evil and worthless. In contrast, every girl is an empowered girlboss ready to take her rightful place at the pinnacle of society. And to facilitate that, they must displace the dudes. And it’s no secret – that displacement, that consignment of men to second-class status, is not merely admitted but celebrated by our trash ruling class." Kurt Schlichter, August 10, 2023, Town Hall, "Angry Young Men Are Going To Disrupt The Garbage Paradigm"
Articles/Writings We Think Are A Must Read
Who Will Say No More to the Current Madness?
Once again, Victor Davis Hanson has nailed it. In his article there is a list of the most egregious crimes and failings of the Left and this Administration. Stronly urge readers to read the whole article. Here’s an excerpt of the most salient points:
“America is in existential danger.
The Biden administration has utterly destroyed the southern border — and immigration law with it.
Biden green lighted 7 million illegal aliens swarming into the U.S. without legal sanction or rudimentary audit.
China spies inside and over the U.S. with impunity. Beijing has never admitted to its responsibility for the gain-of-function COVID virus that killed a million Americans.
President Joe Biden printed $4 trillion at exactly the wrong time of soaring post-COVID consumer demand and supply shortages. No wonder he birthed the worst inflation in 40 years.
In response, interest rates tripled, gas prices doubled.
Our military is thousands of recruits short. It lacks sufficient munitions.
Following Biden’s humiliating pullout from Afghanistan, vast troves of arms were abandoned in Kabul. Billions more in scarce weapons were sent to Ukraine.
The Pentagon’s woke agenda trumps meritocracy in promotions and advancement.
Our enemies — Russia, China, Iran, North Korea — are on the move, while the U.S. seems listless.
The Biden renegade Department of Justice, CIA and FBI have become weaponized. Ideology, politics, and race — not the law — more often guide their investigations, intelligence operations and enforcement.
The downtowns of our once majestic major cities are becoming unlivable.
They are mired in refuse and trash, violent crime and homelessness. Stores and businesses leave. Millions each year flee the blue urban coasts to the red west and south.
To even say there are still two biological genders, that global warming may not be entirely manmade or necessarily destroying the planet, or that class, not race, is the proper barometer of inequality is to face ostracism and career cancellation.
The public assumes that Biden is severely cognitively challenged, likely corrupt, and a serial fabricator.
Most know what must be done, but few will tell the truth: Balance the budget. Return to legal only immigration. Restore a well-funded, but unwoke Pentagon.
Insist on racial unity. Curb the overweening administrative state. Enforce the rule of law.
Produce more gas and oil. Reestablish civic education. Insist universities protect free speech and due process — and stop proselytizing.
In other words, restore what until recently made America the strongest, most prosperous, and freest nation in the world. And quit undoing all the great good that eight generations of prior Americans bequeathed to us.”
Victor Davis Hanson saying it better than anyone. Perfectly describes the childish, impetuous behavior of the Left. A quick and incredibly accurate take on everything we see before our eyes.
An excerpt:
“Cry-baby tantrums won’t win over the public. These nonstop puerile meltdowns have turned off most Americans who tire of whiny narcissistic hypocrites.”
Strongly recommend the artful summary of what the Left is trying to do with the Disinformation Governance Board canard written by Michael Walsh in “The Pipeline”, May 2, 2022. You’ll find the whole article here. Some excerpts:
“So now the mask has dropped and, for the first time, the American people can see the modern Left in all its hateful, unadorned, vituperative, spiteful glory. Case in point: the announcement last week that the Department of Homeland Security—one of the excrescences of the Bush administration, cobbled together in its panic over 9/11—has created the “Disinformation Governance Board” in order to combat what it has, via its hitherto little-known Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, already dubbed “mis-, dis-, and mal-information.” Otherwise known as alternative points of view, but shut up, citizen.”
“Let us now remind ourselves of the late historian and Soviet scholar Robert Conquest’s third law of politics: “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.” At this point in American history, that is not only a theory but a fact. Having narrowly “won” the 2020 election by stealing it fair and square, the Left is putting pedal to the metal to accomplish as much of its anti-foundational agenda as it can before the clock runs out on its tiny congressional majorities this fall.”
On the Subject of “Things happening in the background to purge the illicit Biden administration“
The article in American Thinker by Dr. Brian Joondeph entitled: “Nothing Can Stop What is Coming. What if Nothing is Coming?” lays out the case for the increasingly skeptical that anything is going to halt the Leftist Leviathan. Strongly recommend this article not to throw cold water on all the hope so many of us have of there being some justice on the horizon, but to lay out the stark possibility that it’s all wishful thinking and we’re stuck with what we’ve got at least until January 2023.
On Climate Change Fraud
One of the best debunking articles/videos I’ve seen recently on the revolting fraud being perpetrated by the climate alarmists. In very calm, easy to understand terms the author shows how graphs and picking the right starting point for data visualization is being used to create the narrative that they rely on for their funding, their power, their nefarious attempts to alter society and our world. This same manipulation occurs with ALL kinds of data and the Left is expert in obscuring truth, altering perception and brainwashing a lazy, non-thinking mass of sheep to believe what they want them to believe. Strongly recommend watching this…12 minutes long and a must see!
Featured Friends
Straight Line Logic
Robert Gore’s blog. I put Gore up there with Victor Davis Hanson, Jordan Peterson and Thomas Sowell. His theses are chock full of substance.
The Burning Platform
Unabashedly conspiracy-theory driven, but thoughtfully so and well-written. Makes one think, “could this really be what’s happening?”
