Tag: history

Psychological Warfare

Law-abiding, patriotic, God-fearing citizens have been censored from the soap box, hamstrung by those controlling the jury box and disenfranchised at the ballot box.

The real goal is psychological terrorism—that is, engaging in a scorched-earth effort to destroy the target, and in so doing intimidating anyone willing to enter public service, or even just support a public figure that does not parrot the politically correct line.

The charges do not need to be true, or even credible. People do not recoil because of the charges themselves (although, as we see, the left spares no effort to dream up the worst accusations they can think of). People recoil out of fear.

This tactic relies on the human herding instinct. People naturally shy away from anyone so vilified, whether the charges are credible or not, simply out of fear of being smeared with the same brush. They don’t want to be ostracized by the group.

Such excommunication has real consequences on reputations, jobs, relationships, even survival. The real goal is to threaten the rest of us into silence.

Psychological Terrorism Enables Actual Terrorism

The vilification tactic is a form of psychological terrorism. Furthermore, because the fury displayed by those leveling the charges is so relentless and uncompromising, it carries its own threat. Sometimes people act on it and it becomes actual terrorism.

In 2012, homosexual activist Floyd Corkins attacked the Family Research Council’s office, intending to murder as many as he could. He admitted he was inspired by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which had FRC on its “Hate Watch” list. FRC, a mainstream conservative Christian organization, is still on the list.

Corkins was convicted of terrorism, and only stopped by a security guard who was injured in the process. Similarly James Hodgkinson, who attacked GOP congressmen practicing for a baseball game in 2017, engaged in a real act of domestic terrorism, fueled by hatred for Republicans. Hodgkinson “liked” SPLC on his Facebook page.

Antifa, the new name for anarchist left street rioters, has made explicit threats of violence. After chasing Sen. Ted Cruz and his wife out of a local restaurant, an Antifa DC chapter threatened on Twitter, “You are not safe.” And more: “This is a message to Ted Cruz, Bret
Kavanaugh, Donald Trump and the rest of the racist, sexist, transphobic,and homophobic right-wing scum: You are not safe. We will find you. We will expose you. We will take from you the peace you have taken from so many others.”

Another Antifa member, a professor at the City University of New York, tweeted, “Reminder that if Trump does end up winning this stupid thing to assassinate Mike Pence *first*.”

AntiFa “protesters” terrorized Fox News personality’s Tucker Carlson’s family with impunity.

In 2010, Laird Wilcox penned an article titled “The Practice of Ritual Defamation,” that describes the process. The most salient points are quoted here:

  1. In ritual defamation the victim must have violated a particular taboo in some way, usually by expressing or identifying with a forbidden attitude, opinion or belief…
  2. The method of attack… is to assail the character of the victim… Character assassination is its primary tool…
  3. An important rule in ritual defamation is to avoid engaging in any kind of debate over the truthfulness or reasonableness of what has been expressed, only condemn it…
  4. The victim is often somebody in the public eye – someone who is vulnerable to public opinion…
  5. An attempt, often successful, is made to involve others in the defamation…
  6. In order for a ritual defamation to be effective, the victim must be dehumanized to the extent that he becomes identical with the offending attitude, opinion or belief, and in a matter… where it appears at its most extreme.
  7. Also to be successful, a ritual defamation must bring pressure and humiliation on the victim from every quarter, including family and friends. If the victim has school children, they may be taunted and ridiculed as a consequence of adverse publicity.
  8. Any explanation the victim may offer, including the claim of being misunderstood, is considered irrelevant. To claim truth as a defense for a politically incorrect value, opinion or belief is interpreted as defiance and only compounds the problem…

This defamation tactic has a long and ignoble history. It was first systematically developed by a regime whose primary governing method was terrorism. One hundred years ago, the first Soviet leader, Vladimir Lenin, announced:

We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing truth… We can and must write in a language that inspires hate, revulsion and scorn toward those who disagree with us.

His goal, adopted and practiced by the world’s communist parties, was to vilify, isolate, and destroy anyone who opposed their political goals, for any reason. In subsequent years, the Soviets told the world’s Communist parties to magnify this criticism:

Members and front organizations must continually embarrass, discredit and degrade our critics. When obstructionists become too irritating, label them as fascist or Nazi or anti-Semitic… constantly associate those who oppose us with those names that already have a bad smell. The association will, after enough repetition, become ‘fact’ in the public mind.

In1965, Frankfurt School Communist Herbert Marcuse argued that, even though America has the First Amendment, the left could never get its agenda adopted because we are an unrepentantly repressive, imperialist, capitalist country. So of course America would never voluntarily adopt the “liberating”tenets of communism. Marcuse argued for what he called “liberating tolerance,” i.e. silencing the left’s critics and allowing leftist ideas only:

Not ‘equal’ but more representation of the Left would be equalization of the prevailing inequality… Given this situation, I suggested in ‘Repressive Tolerance’ the practice of discriminating tolerance in an inverse direction, as a means of shifting the balance between Right and Left by restraining the liberty of the Right, thus counteracting the pervasive inequality of freedom (unequal opportunity of access to the means of democratic persuasion) and strengthening the oppressed against the oppressors.

Marcuse further described the types of people who needed to have their freedom curtailed:

[It] would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc.

In other words, pretty much anyone who disagrees with them. Can you visualize the Internal Revenue Service making up an “enemies list” of those who opposed Obamacare, for example? They did. Significantly, Marcuse referred to opponents as the “party of hate” in opposition to humanity.

The media,particularly, is to blame. It is insufficient to describe the media as “in the tank” for Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Obama,Nancy Pelosi, or whoever. The left media is a leader of the opposition, and has been for decades. It sets the narrative for the day, which is often word-for-word across news outlets; it pushes Democrat talking points and cultural Marxist priorities; it suppresses news adverse to the left and misinforms on the news it does report; it weaponizes language and acts as a self-funded intelligence agency for the left, researching, outing, doxing, and vilifying its enemies.

Anti-slavery activist Frederick Douglass is quoted as saying; “A man’s rights rests in three boxes: the ballot-box, the jury-box and the cartridge-box, and the man who is outside these boxes is in a bad box.” You might add to that a fourth box, “the soap box” or right of free speech.

Law-abiding, patriotic, God-fearing citizens have been censored from the soap box, hamstrung by those controlling the jury box and disenfranchised at the ballot box. Enough is enough. It is, perhaps time to prudently consider the final box before we are boxed out of our heritage and our republic.


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This page and its links contain opinion. As with all opinion, it should not be relied upon without independent verification. Think for yourself. Fair Use is relied upon for all content. For educational purposes only. No claims are made to the properties of third parties.

(c) 2018 Uriel Press

Balkanization in the United States

The dire prediction is one that is easy to see coming: An eventual economic failure is the lit match, while the total lack of national cultural identity is the gasoline. The media and governmental apparatchiks stand by to stoke the fires.

We are Yugoslavia circa 1980’s.

Rebloged with permission
Rights are not gifts from government

Many people, the opinions of whom I greatly respect, have written on the state of politics and society in the US in such a way as to suggest the possibility of the US moving into a period of similar to what was seen in the former republic of Yugoslavia from the mid 1980’s through to the late 1990’s, referred to by many as Balkanization. I’m certainly in agreement with these bloggers and writers, Matt Bracken being just one example.

The political, sociological, ethnic and racial trajectory in the US is eerily similar to that of the former Yugoslavia in many ways. In the coming years, this could even expand into the sphere of religion, though for now there doesn’t seem to be such widespread religious friction as much as there is racial/ethnic and political.

The similarities begin where Yugoslavia’s end did: With the economy. It’s always the economy. Yugoslavia was totally socialist in their economic model. For you on the left, yes, it was indeed “real” socialism, complete with the never-ending litany of financial Band-Aid’s designed mainly to keep the rigged carnival game going for as long as possible for whomever was sitting at the top getting rich. The US economy may not appear to be socialist in the same way, for whatever reason many Americans maintain the idea of some bastardization of capitalism corrupted by, well, socialists.

Both Yugoslavia and the US endlessly investigated and studied how best to fix the economic woes, and some decent ideas, even some great ideas, were formulated… And then were largely ignored, either due to a lack of will to implement them or a lack of ability. Probably it was lack of political will, since in both country’s cases, the ideas that would have worked best included laundry lists of major money cuts and reductions of federal power. The politicians in power are generally never going to go for a plan like that. They’d rather drive the train straight off the cliff themselves before letting someone else drive it to safety.

The idea so far is that the economic system in the US is simply not sustainable. The Band-Aid of borrowing more money from the US public, China, Japan, etc. and periodically raising the debt ceiling to allow it is not going to work forever, and it doesn’t require one to have any advanced understanding of economics to grasp this. You don’t need to be an expert economist to realize that $20 trillion in debt and hundreds of trillions more in unfunded liabilities is virtually insurmountable at this point. The fact that the US dollar is the currency of the world is not going to shield us from the inevitable forever. The economic problems that Yugoslavia faced in the early 1980’s, and that the US now faces, are like a lit match being held over a barrel of gasoline.

And that leads me to discuss that gasoline.

Yugoslavia had an extremely diverse country racially, ethnically and religiously. The geographic location and the early economic prosperity (or the illusion of it) attracted a lot of people from all sorts of backgrounds. After a while, the government began to show heavy favor toward certain ethnicities at the expense of others. Rigorous controls were put on employment and educational systems, favoring one ethnic group over the other with claims that there was history of abuse that needed to be atoned for. Criminal behavior by members of certain ethnic or racial groups were largely ignored by the media and law enforcement apparatus, while even the most benign actions of other groups were seized upon and used for narrative building.

Does any of this sound familiar? In the US we have a long list of “protected” groups who are favored with advantages in employment, educational and entitlement systems. Race alone is often used by the media and government, often one and the same, to build a narrative of victimization.

In Yugoslavia circa 1980’s, and in the US today, you’d see a very socially diverse people from numerous ethnic, racial, economic and religious backgrounds. When these diverse groups mingle and mix, everyone has to accept that different cultures will have friction arise when the “negative” aspects of a particular culture become unacceptable to another. In times such as those, it’s necessary for the opposing cultures to have the freedom and ability to separate for a peaceful outcome. Problems arise, always, when incompatible cultures are forced to mix in society with no avenue for voluntary separation, and these problems are heavily exacerbated when government and media get involved to force one culture to accept and integrate what they feel are the “negative” aspects of the opposing culture. An obvious and perhaps overly-simplistic example is when white, Christian American citizens are forced to accept and live alongside immigrants who wish to practice Sharia law and alter their own lives and habits in order to accommodate some of these sensitivities. A very basic example, yes, but I think it makes the point.

We are meant to swallow the lie that says “diversity is our strength” without consideration for merit, performance, ability, intelligence or actual results.

This is not meant to be an indictment on any specific culture or ethnicity, but more of a history lesson, a social observation and a dire prediction.

The history lesson is the continued failure of all socialist based economic models, whether we want to consider them “real” socialism or not. The sort of hard socialism seen in 1980’s Yugoslavia and the crony-capitalist soft socialist version seen in the US today are both examples of that failure system. As I stated earlier, it does not take any level of economic expertise to understand that our current system is insolvent and that we have passed the point of no return on a future crash of our financial system. Now that less than half of the people in the US are net-taxpayers and over half of the people in the US are receiving some sort of government assistance simply to survive, we have become a welfare state, with only decreasing numbers of producers with increasing numbers of consumers. Mathematically, it is not sustainable. Historically, it is disastrous.

The social observation is that such a mass of diverse peoples must have a voluntary pressure outlet in order to maintain peace. We must accept reality that not all cultures are able to be forced together with peaceful results. Forced proximity, with advantages, disadvantages and blame doled out to certain peoples, with a lack of opportunity to separate peacefully will always result in strife and eventual violence.

The dire prediction is one that is easy to see coming: An eventual economic failure is the lit match, while the total lack of national cultural identity is the gasoline. The media and governmental apparatchiks stand by to stoke the fires.

We are Yugoslavia circa 1980’s.

My advice? Stay out of Sarajevo.

The Gray Man is a Southern born and raised Christian American, Army combat veteran and former intelligence collector. He has worked in many foreign locations, including Afghanistan, South Korea and Germany. He has deployed with or worked alongside US Army special operations units and Cav LRS units. He is currently working as an ER nurse living in the rural Deep South, preparing for whatever man and nature can dish out.

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This page and its links contain opinion. As with all opinion, it should not be relied upon without independent verification. Think for yourself. Fair Use is relied upon for all content. For educational purposes only. No claims are made to the properties of third parties.

(c) 2018 Uriel Press

Money Talks (especially to politicians)

Government programs replaced deprivation with idleness, stifling human flourishing. It happened just as President Franklin Roosevelt said it would: “The lessons of history,” he said in 1935, “show conclusively that continued dependency upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber.”

Washington Pigs

“the poor you have with you always…”
–John 12:8

Fifty-four years ago, President Lyndon Johnson declared “unconditional war” on poverty.

“The War on Poverty is not a struggle simply to support people,” declared President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. “It is an effort to allow them to develop and use their capacities.” During the 20 years before the War on Poverty was funded, the portion of the nation living in poverty had dropped to 14.7% from 32.1%. Since 1966, the first year with a significant increase in antipoverty spending, the poverty rate reported by the Census Bureau has been virtually unchanged.

40 million Americans live in “squalor and deprivation. Welfare and the criminal justice system is effectively a system for keeping the poor in poverty according to “Progressive” think-tanks.

The Census Bureau counts as poor all people in families with incomes lower than the established income thresholds for their respective family size and composition.

The thresholds, first set in 1963, are based on a multiple of the cost of a budget for adequately nutritious food, adjusted for inflation.

While the Census Bureau reports that in 2016 some 12.7% of Americans lived in poverty, it is impossible to reconcile this poverty rate, which has remained virtually unchanged over the last 50 years, with the fact that total inflation-adjusted government-transfer payments to low-income families have risen steadily.

Transfers targeted to low-income families increased in real dollars from an average of $3,070 per person in 1965 to $34,093 in 2016.

The measured poverty rate has remained virtually unchanged only because the Census Bureau doesn’t count most of the transfer payments created since the declaration of the War on Poverty.

The bureau measures poverty using what it calls “money income,” which includes earned income and some transfer payments such as Social Security and unemployment insurance. But it excludes food stamps, Medicaid, the portion of Medicare going to low-income families, Children’s Health Insurance, the refundable portion of the earned-income tax credit, at least 87 other means-tested federal payments to individuals, and most means-tested state payments.
If government counted these missing $1.5 trillion in annual transfer payments, the poverty rate would be less than 3%.

The stated goal of the War on Poverty was not just to raise living standards, but also to make America’s poor more self-sufficient and to bring them into the mainstream of the economy.

In that effort the war has been an abject failure, increasing dependency and largely severing the bottom fifth of earners from the rewards and responsibilities of work.

The War on Poverty has increased dependency and failed in its primary effort to bring poor people into the mainstream of America’s economy and communal life.

There are three other factors:

1. A severe decline in the number of jobs that can be done by an unskilled or uneducated person, along with technologies that make it increasingly difficult for people on the margins to even apply for them.

2. The much greater gap between how far one income goes in terms of spending power and what it costs to actually live.

3. Badly handled programs that instead of encouraging part-time work and self-employment (the way most people who actually get out of poverty manage to do it) punish it; both by harsh regulations that discourage any sort of part-time work for fear of losing what benefits a person/family has and/or insane amounts of regulations and fees to set up any sort of small business or be “certified” for traditional jobs like hairdresser, home sewer, cookie baking or even taxi driver.

The idea of “Universal Basic Income” was supposed to “solve” this last problem but so far hasn’t worked very well (the idea is there are no penalties for making more money).

Government programs replaced deprivation with idleness, stifling human flourishing. It happened just as President Franklin Roosevelt said it would: “The lessons of history,” he said in 1935, “show conclusively that continued dependency upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber.”

There is an economic truism; “You can’t get rid of something by subsidizing it.”

After fifty-four years of intense combat and the expenditure of almost uncountable wealth it would be accurate to say, the war is over. Poverty won.

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“A Republic, if you can keep it”                  “A Wake of Vultures”

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This page and its links contain opinion. As with all opinion, it should not be relied upon without independent verification. Think for yourself. Fair Use is relied upon for all content. For educational purposes only. No claims are made to the properties of third parties.

(c) 2018 Uriel Press

The Fences Keep Closing In

I think if you’re honest, you will see movements like Antifa, and Black Lives Matter, along with white racialist groups and Islamist organizations as nothing more than violent cults. And they have a lot in common.

They want our minds narrowed. Focused. Stripped down, purged, blinkered and honed to obsession. Punished, bribed, and conditioned to perfect obedience.

REPOSTED FROM PJ MEDIA

There’s an old expression, we’ve all used it: “It’s a free country!” Now, sometimes people abuse it. If you catch somebody spraying graffiti on the side of your house, he might just say that. Which, of course, is stupid.

But people only hijack an expression because it’s powerful and true. This is a free country, that’s what defines it. It’s what made America great.

But will America stay free? Or are powerful forces eating away at our freedoms? I won’t say nibbling, because they’re tearing off great big chunks of it at a time. Our freedom of speech, of religion, our right to back political candidates and stand up for what we believe in. All that’s now threatened. I think you know that.

Would you feel comfortable wearing a MAGA hat? Or would you worry you might get assaulted? That happened to 16-year-old Hunter Richard in Austin, Texas, last month. An adult man confronted him, ripped the hat off his head, screamed profanity at him, and threw a drink in his face.

But don’t worry, Austin is on it. They’re getting ready to change the name of the city because Stephen Austin owned slaves. I wonder how long it will be until the Washington, D.C., city council gets around to renaming our capital. Seriously, I think we should start a pool. Ten years? Five? Maybe two? That slope’s getting pretty slippery. If you ever want to see Mount Rushmore while it’s still intact… I think you should book your tickets now. Be sure to take lots of pictures, so you can show your children. The same with the Jefferson Memorial, Monticello, and most of the statues in Richmond. They’re on the List. You know they are.

The Democrats are now embracing “democratic socialism.” Their activists are dressing up in hoods and masks and terrorizing citizens. Assaulting cops and reporters. Trashing government buildings in Portland and occupying them for weeks. Lawmakers are actually having to use old anti-Klan laws to stop the violent radicals of Antifa from terrorizing Americans.

But we’re not supposed to complain about it. It’s getting dangerous to speak your mind. Dangerous to your career, and even to your safety.

What’s fueling outrages like that? Maybe it’s statements like the one from Rep. Maxine Waters. Just three days before the mob harassment of Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ family she told an angry crowd of Democrats:

Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.

Violent mobs of hooded extremists can storm the offices of ICE in Portland. Can stop their crucial work of arresting drug dealers, human traffickers, child smugglers, and killers. And the Democrats treat them like heroes, like members of the Resistance. And those faithful, blue-collar Americans of every race just trying to do their jobs? Well, by this logic they’re the Nazis. One leftist hacker even published the names and addresses of ICE employees so that members of MS-13 and other cartels could find them and target them. Would you still want to work for ICE after that? That’s okay, because the leaders of the Democratic Party want to abolish that agency. To leave all of us defenseless, and our borders open.

I worry about how free America still will be in six years because the Democrats … they’ve got an agenda. They want to narrow the range of acceptable opinions. To cow us, restrict us, make us scared to speak. From day to day, Americans are getting bullied, browbeaten, and herded like sheep. The Democrats are driving us into the narrow, reeking pen of political correctness. Its fences are constantly moving, and in only one direction. They are closing in on us.

Questions that were open to free debate ten years ago, or five years, or even one year ago? Now they’re suddenly “settled” for us by tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg. Or the opinion police at Google.  Did you know that YouTube has purged hundreds of straight-ahead Christian videos by pastors? Just for teaching traditional Christianity. It has purged or demonetized dozens of mainstream conservative videos by Dennis Prager.

Harry Reid and Dianne Feinstein once defended national borders. Now they play along as their party increasingly pretends that controlling our borders is “racist.” Or “hateful.” Is that what they always secretly believed?

The fences keep closing in.

Billion-dollar tech corporations collude with dubious civil rights organizations to blacklist people. Look at the Southern Poverty Law Center. It once did valuable work forty years ago. Now it’s a fundraising scam that goes around libeling people. In fact, it had to settle several cases with innocent people it smeared, including a Muslim reformer it labeled as a hatemonger.

But Amazon still uses that organization to report on which churches or conservative policy thinktanks to smear as “hate groups.” So the Family Research Council and the Alliance Defending Freedom get lumped in with deranged and hateful extremists. And banned. And silenced. And banished from “neutral” platforms. You know who used to do things like that? The Apartheid regime in South Africa. They’d smear their mainstream opponents as communists and try to silence them.

The fences keep closing in.

Born as free Americans, you are being treated as sheep.

Raised as proud Americans, you are learning the lessons of shame.

Schooled as thinking Americans, now you’re told to abandon open debate, objective truth, even the scientific method and mathematics. They are somehow “racist.” They’re the products of “privilege.”

What do the brilliant minds in the Democrat Party want to replace them with? A set of stern, angry dogmas that have taken over our colleges and our corporate human resource departments. And dogmas like “intersectionalism,” which demonize whole groups of people such as Christians and conservatives. They want to say that their voices shouldn’t be heard and they shouldn’t be protected from hate and discrimination. You should be able to spew hate about them for years, as tech reporter Sarah Jeong did and then still get hired for the editorial page of the New York Times. Andrew Sullivan, a liberal gay writer, warned us in New York magazine that the Democrats have been hijacked by a new, puritanical cult, and it’s already running witch hunts. So Sarah Jeong called him a racist and tried to get him fired. If that can happen to famous, liberal, gay writers, what do you think they’re planning for your pastor? For conservatives who teach school? For you and your children?

The witch hunters can’t afford to let you question them because their excuses will fall apart. So they impose them instead by legal action, by harassment, by collusion and blacklisting. Unable to defend their new creed with reason, these ideologues instead forbid our questions. They isolate, target, and try to destroy dissenters. They spray them with social and professional plutonium as “an example to the others.” That tactic is straight from the playbook of totalitarian movements. We have seen all this before.

Historians remind us how Stalin would give a speech and the first person who stopped clapping went to the Gulag. Or they just shot him in the back of the head. So the Party members applauded, sometimes for more than an hour, till their palms cracked and bled. I think anyone who writes off the extremism that’s being unleashed should try that some time. Stand up, set a timer, and try to clap for one whole hour.

That is the level of compliance expected of Americans today. If you don’t believe me, look at what happened to singer Kanye West. He said that he was open-minded about President Trump. He recognized the explosion of jobs in minority communities and the record-low unemployment numbers for black and Latino Americans. The outrage mob went wild. The media, filled up with denunciations, calls for boycotts of his albums — with racist abuse, in fact. To Mr. West’s credit, he stood strong. And his next album broke sales records. But how many of us have the resources of Kanye West?

Not Candace Owens. She’s a young, brilliant black conservative who’s a leader in Turning Point USA. She tried to have breakfast with her colleague, Charlie Kirk, and a flash mob of angry white men linked to the hood-wearing thugs of Antifa surrounded her. They dumped water over Kirk’s head and the pair had to flee the restaurant. Who protected them? Mostly black policemen. Then Antifa came after them, and sprayed the cops with racist abuse.

The fences are closing in.

Do you want to protect unborn children? Stop Planned Parenthood from cutting them up and selling them as baby parts? To save viable infants from abortion, right up to the moment of birth? Then you are bigoted against women.

Do you want to offer women and girls privacy in bathrooms and locker rooms? Then you are a “transphobic” bigot. Deny that men menstruate, or women have penises? You are just another hater. The Southern Poverty Law Center will lump you in with Holocaust deniers and white supremacist cranks. In 2016, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) denounced Vice President Pence as a bigot for supporting normal safe spaces for women. Even the ladies’ room isn’t safe anymore.

The fences keep closing in.

Maybe you’re worried when you hear that 147 million adults want to immigrate into America. That’s what they told the Gallup poll. You realize that we don’t have jobs to offer them, that our machine for assimilation is broken. Then you, too, are a hate-monger. Our new high priests will teach you what you should really be afraid of: The annihilating wrath which they will bring down on your head. The fear of Facebook is the beginning of wisdom.

The fences keep closing in.

Do you still love your country? Do you consider America as an exceptional nation, one with an imperfect, and all-too-human history, but nevertheless quite special? Are you proud of our nation’s Founding? Attached to the symbols and monuments of men who struggled, disagreed, and made mistakes, but who nevertheless made AMERICA? Do you think that we should preserve the markers of that history, including those mistakes, so the next generation can learn from them and argue about them?

That is what I believe. And that is why I defended and will continue to defend the historic monuments that grace so many Virginia cities and towns. I won’t let this deranged and self-righteous generation do to our history what Hillary Clinton did to her email server. Doing so doesn’t help anyone, and in fact, it makes things worse. Instead of confronting history, we sanitize it.

All across America lovely historic statues of men who fought bravely in a partly misguided cause still stand. Should we tear them all down? Let angry mobs deface them, behead them?

Absolutely not. Instead, we should make room nearby for equally prominent, beautiful statues of civil rights workers, African-American war heroes, and others whose real achievements were once obscured by racism.

Let those monuments complement each other. Let them stand in tension. We should look at all sides of the history. We should learn that good and great men, like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee, could also do wicked things like owning slaves. That should remind us that we in our modern righteousness are also quite imperfect. What will our descendants be ashamed of us for allowing?

How about the abortion clinics run by the racist-founded organization Planned Parenthood? Its founder, Margaret Sanger, boasted about speaking to the Ku Klux Klan. Those who carry on her legacy now target African-American babies. But Sanger’s statue still stands at the Smithsonian Institution. I don’t want to tear that down. I don’t want to tear anything down. But I want us to learn from it.

The angry activists and elitists who drive the Democrat agenda? They don’t want us to learn from history. Like the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, they want to hit the “reset” button. To start the calendar again at Year Zero. To paint the past as a dark and appalling void from which we can learn absolutely nothing, except the pre-cooked and pre-packaged mini-lessons that our new masters distribute to us. They’ve read their George Orwell. They know that to control the past is to dominate the future.

They want to shove the past, the entire past, into the memory hole. To delete it. To leave the pedestals empty, the statues beheaded or wrecked, the inscriptions sandblasted and vacant. In that bleak empty space where history once stood, they’ll scrawl instead the crude and easily memorized slogans they would force us to live by.

Tradition is the “democracy of the dead.” It calls on us to learn from our ancestors and to take thought for our descendants. The power-hungry zealots, the puritanical witch-hunters … they know that. And they hate it. They won’t allow any locus of loyalty outside their movement. They’re like cult leaders.

I think if you’re honest, you will see movements like Antifa, and Black Lives Matter, along with white racialist groups and Islamist organizations as nothing more than violent cults. And they have a lot in common.

They want our minds narrowed. Focused. Stripped down, purged, blinkered and honed to obsession. Punished, bribed, and conditioned to perfect obedience.

In the end, if they have their way, it will be like Winston Smith at the end of 1984. We really will “love” Big Brother.

 Available on Amazon.com

A Wake of Vultures (Tales from the Deep State Book 1) Kindle Edition

Wake of Vultures-Front

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This page and its links contain opinion. As with all opinion, it should not be relied upon without independent verification. Think for yourself. Fair Use is relied upon for all content. For educational purposes only. No claims are made to the properties of third parties.

(c) 2018 Uriel Press

Civil (?) War redux?

And so it came to pass that in the late days of empire, both Rome and America waged remote control wars through vassal states and provincial “citizens”, wars…

war coming soon

There are people, (I would refer to them as idiots, but that would be an insult to idiots) who are not only predicting a second civil war, but are beating the drums saying; “Bring it on!” That is not only unfortunate, it is terminally stupid.

We are all Tony Soprano today. We’ve tried to reason with Phil Leotardo. We’ve tried to compromise. We’ve tried to maintain the cooperative institutions of Our Thing. But the guy won’t take “yes” for an answer. He wants it ALL.

Do we settle with the guy we hate? Do we voluntarily pay the heavy price for breaking the “norms” of conflict with a guy who we suspect wouldn’t hesitate to break any norm at all? We are at the precipice of an enormous crossroad in American politics.

But what if it’s not a choice at all? What if the choice has already been made for us? What if we are immersed in a competitive equilibrium of a competitive game, where the only rational choice is to go to the mattresses? To do unto others as they would do unto you … but to do it first. What then? You know what’s like a civil war?

Go to Wikipedia and look up Biafra, look up Kosovo, look up South Africa. Consider the following narrative:

“And so it came to pass that in the late days of empire, both Rome and America waged remote control wars through vassal states and provincial “citizens”, wars that were no longer debated by the Senate but were announced by administrative fiat alongside a schedule of entertaining games and pleasing economic distributions, wars that could last for decades in farther and farther flung corners of the empire, wars that were all about naked commercial interest even as they were gussied up with strong words of patriotism.

It took the Romans about four centuries to officially exhaust themselves.

Four centuries of mostly ridiculousness. Four centuries of profitable revenge. Four centuries of a competitive equilibrium in a competitive game.

Has this happened before in American history? Hard to say for sure but I think yes. The  first time in the lead-up to the first Civil War over the  issue of slavery and States Rights. Then again in the period leading up to World War II over the issue of the Great Depression. I really don’t think it was an accident that both of these widening differences of belief in American politics ended in a big war.

I think that’s how this widening difference in political beliefs ultimately resolves itself, too. In a big war, on American soil, neighbor against neighbor and brother against brother.

There will be no winning centrist politician bringing us together. There will be no consensus policies around which the entire body politic can coalesce. We have been played, programmed and polarized into an “Us” vs “Them” and it will come down to needing to vanquish “THEM”.

We’ll need a big war with an Other to get out of this.

So one way or another, that’s what we’re gonna get. It’s no longer “if” but “when”.

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Nothing to see here…move along

…in this case, broad daylight was the setting and it seems pretty clear that this wasn’t a Department of Defense affair. Instead, it looks like a federal operation:

nothing to see here

I’m sure there is nothing to this… no connection to any of the past week’s events or anything. Nothing to see here…move along citizen.

Black Hawk Flying Around Chicago Was Just Training

Commandos fast-roped from helicopters to many Chicago rooftops this week, and some were worried, but they were just training.
It’s unclear which agency the commando team is with. Rogoway said such sightings in Chicago often the 160th Special Operations Air Regiment, or the Night Stalkers.
…in this case, broad daylight was the setting and it seems pretty clear that this wasn’t a
Department of Defense affair. Instead, it looks like a federal operation:
The UH-60M Black Hawk photographed and filmed all over Chicago does not appear to belong to the United States Army. The configuration of its antennas is unique and it does not have any Army titles or serials on it.
Over the last decade, a number of UH-60s of various sub-types have been transferred from the DoD to federal agencies like the Department of Justice. The DOJ has also bought UH-60Ms by piggybacking the Army’s buys. This appears to be one of those aircraft.
I seem to remember a training exercise was scheduled a few years ago on September 11, 2001… Nah, couldn’t be…

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A Second Civil War?

the sheep might want to consider that the sheepdog works for the shepherd and keeps the sheep safe until the shepherd decides it’s time to slaughter them.

American Civil War

From celebrities calling on citizens to take to the streets, to members of Congress calling for the public harassment of White House officials, to mob justice at restaurants — is the US heading toward a new kind of Civil War?

Well, some people think the seeds of a new Civil War have already been sown — and in a recent article, University of Tennessee Law Professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds argued in a USA Today column that this new war is indeed “well underway.”

Reynolds was echoing similar comments from political scientist Thomas Schaller who wrote in a recent Bloomberg column that America is “at the beginning of a soft civil war,” and author Tom Ricks who agreed that the country seems to be “lurching” in that direction.

  1. ‘God is on our side!’

Representative Maxine Waters (D-California) caused a huge stir when she encouraged critics of the White House’s immigration policies to go out and harass members of the Trump administration in public. Waters made an impassioned call for citizens to ensure there would be “no sleep, no peace” for White House officials.

“If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. You push back on them. Tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere,” she said.

But her comments were so extreme and incendiary that it prompted a former secret service agent to call them “dangerous” and warned they “go beyond breaking the norms” of civil discourse and criticized her for “endorsing mob-rule to satisfy a political goal.”

Not long after Waters’ comments, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders was asked to leave a restaurant in Virginia because she works for the Trump administration.

  1. ‘Surround their homes and schools in protest!’

Celebrities are getting in on the action, too, encouraging Americans to take to the streets in the millions to protest the Trump administration.

Comments by actor Peter Fonda put the secret service on alert when he suggested that Trump’s 12-year-old son Barron should be taken from his mother Melania and put “in a cage with pedophiles” and that citizens should “surround the schools” of administration officials’ children in response to the child-separation policy.

Somewhat less dramatically, other Hollywood figures have called for protests and change. Actor John Cusack accused the Trump administration of “fascism” and “torturing” children — while musician Serj Tankian wrote on Instagram that the US is in a state of “utter regression” and that it is time for a “peaceful revolution.”

  1. Confederate monuments controversy

The fierce debate over the removal of confederate monuments and symbols across the US epitomizes the current political and social divide and the competing interpretations of American history, with one side believing the monuments revere figures who fought to maintain slavery while the other side believes they honor great patriots.

When white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine black Americans attending a prayer service in Virginia in 2015, it prompted a movement to have Confederate monuments removed from public spaces across the country. More than 100 publicly-supported monuments and symbols have been removed since 2015 — but not without controversy and counter-protests. While monuments are being removed across the US, other groups are pushing for new ones to be erected.

  1. Media wars, polarization of opinion

All of this social discord is playing out, magnified, on Americans’ TV screens in a way that appears to be exacerbating the problem. Eager to up their ratings, news networks invite the most polarizing of guests for daily screaming matches to be beamed into people’s homes. Traditional “News” organizations such as CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and Washington Post as well as modern “informational” outlets on the internet like Twitter, Google and Facebook have abandoned informational reportage in favor of  “fake news” and “propaganda.”

In his article, Reynolds wrote that news media which “promote shrieking outrage in pursuit of ratings and page views, are making the problem worse” and reminisced about a time when Americans could disagree with each other without hating each other.

  1. Stratification of society

While all this is being played out on TV screens and social media, those at the fringes of society are feeling the effects of a sick system perhaps more than anyone. The socio-economic stratification of American society appears more obvious than it has at any time in recent years.

Alleged inequality and supposed police violence against African-Americans is the given “reason” that prompted the NFL kneeling protests, which turned into a nationwide controversy between Americans who are proud of their flag and national anthem and all they stand for — and those who claim true freedom and justice have not yet come to America. Manufactured crises such as an opioid crisis, child poverty rates, and a constant drumbeat to pit Black against White; poor against wealthy; labor against business, have all inflamed anger and division in America from a simmer to a boil.

Americans don’t feel social ties which transcend politics. It’s all us vs. them — and nothing in between. Churches, fraternal organizations and neighborhoods used to cross political lines, American cohesion has “shrunk and decayed” and people are increasingly finding their identity only in victimization politics.

Marriage counselors say that a relationship is doomed to fail when the couple begin to view each other with contempt — and in America today, there seems to be nothing but feelings of contempt felt on both sides of the political spectrum.

If possible, we need to step back and ask some pertinent questions;

  • “Who gains power or advantage from the fomented chaos?”
  • “Who gains wealth or influence from the fomented chaos?”
  • “Who would lose power, advantage, wealth or influence if the American people were to coalesce and unite once again in common purpose?

There are, unfortunately, members of our society who look upon media, political parties and government as protectors of society. Something like sheepdogs who protect the sheep. Perhaps so, but the sheep might want to consider that the sheepdog works for the shepherd and keeps the sheep safe until the shepherd decides it’s time to slaughter them.

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Gang wars and government

As the political soap-opera that is referred to as governance in the United States continues to spin crazily out of control it becomes obvious that the vast majority of our political “leaders” have less collective intellect that gerbils and the leadership instincts of lemmings.

Gang War 01

The defining feature of gang life is personal loyalty trumps all else. This is true for low level street gangs, as well as highly complex organized crime gangs. The rules are not written down or agreed to by consensus. They are imposed top-down by a group of men loyal to one man. The head of a drug cartel has lieutenants to enforce discipline on the the sub-groups down the line. The rules within those groups are similarly enforced by lieutenants loyal to the guy in charge of the group. This continues down to the street level gangsters.

 

The effect of this is a chaotic lawlessness. The punishment for the exact same transgression may be wildly different in two different cases. It all depends upon the relationship between the boss and the offender. While all criminal organizations have rules against betraying confidences, there’s no hard and fast rule on the punishment, despite what you see on television. Baltimore gangsters rat on one another all the time to get better prison terms, without facing a universally applied death penalty for snitching.

 

Consider what we are watching with our government. News brings word that the US Attorney is dropping charges against the terrorists, who went on a rampage during the inauguration last year. They announced this in a holiday week, so it would get the least amount of news coverage. Now, they certainly could have looked into who financed the riot, who helped organize it and then went after the shot callers, but they never bothered to do that. Instead, they sat on it until people forgot about it and then dropped the case.

 

Now, we have mountains of laws for dealing with self-defined criminal groups. The Feds could go after a Lacy MacAuley, who details her activities on-line, in order to figure out who pays her rent. Then they could go after that person or group. This is basic police work. At the very minimum, the people financing these terrorists would know they have some exposure, but that never happens. You see, everyone knows who finances Antifa and other terrorists operations and they have friends in high places.

 

Here’s another example. Peter Strozk is the focus of a very serious criminal conspiracy to subvert the last election. A mountain of evidence pointing to his guilt has been in the public domain for a year, yet he was just recently fired from the FBI. He has not been charged with anything and it appears he will never be charged. In fact, he is now telling Congress he has no intention of testifying. It is not that he plans to take the fifth. He is not going to show up. Their silly laws no longer apply to people in his gang.

 

Again, this gets to the way in which gang life operates. There may be rules, but what matters is who enforces the rules and on whom the rules are to be applied. In this case, the wide ranging criminal organization known as the Democratic Party will never let their people get punished by the Republicans. Those rules about complying with a subpoena from Congress only apply when the gangsters with power can enforce them and they will only enforce them when it suits their interests. This is gang life. This is the gangster state.

 

This becomes more obvious when looking at the whole criminal enterprise that is currently called the FBI. There’s no question that the people at the top engaged in a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy to spy on the Trump campaign and engineer a criminal investigation of his administration, for the purpose of removing him from office. This is the one explanation that explains the mountain of evidence piled up in the public domain. This is so obvious that no one bothers to deny it. Instead, the game is to avoid discussing it in public.

 

Lurking in the secret FBI files can be only three possibilities, with regards to this conspiracy. One, there is proof they cooked the whole thing to help get Hillary Clinton elected. The other is some out of left field explanation for the mountain of data, that points to an innocent motive. The final option is a massive hole in the system where the damning proof used to exists, but has now been destroyed as part of the cover-up. To date, the FBI and DOJ refuse to comply with Congressional subpoenas to answer this question.

 

Again, we’re back to the gangster model. The people inside these agencies have a primary loyalty to the gang, not to the laws of the country or the alleged institutions charged with promulgating and enforcing the laws. In gang life, you are first loyal to the gang and that’s what we see with this case. Rod Rosenstein was sent to Congress in order to deliver a threat to Congress, if they persisted in their interference with the gang’s business. In a prior age, Devin Nunes would have found a black palm print on his door.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley late Friday night. September 21st,  granted another extension to Christine Blasey Ford to decide on whether she will testify to the committee regarding her 37 year old sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee, Bret Kavanaugh. Shame on you Senator Grassley, I have to wonder who got to you. Did you learn drawing red lines in the sand from former president Obama?

As the political soap-opera that is referred to as governance in the United States continues to spin crazily out of control it becomes obvious that the vast majority of our political “leaders” have less collective intellect that gerbils and the leadership instincts of lemmings.

Sadly, regardless of what some of us who actually were taught US history and government before public “education” became collectivist indoctrination, our government and the bedrock document, the Constitution, have been prostituted to establishing the notion of reasonable foolishness and foolish reason as a generic principle of an old French farce.

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Frankly my dear…

We’ve never stood in your way but we don’t really care if you have good neighborhoods or not.

woodpile report

The following is a Guest Post from Ol’ Remus of the late and greatly missed Woodpile Report.

With all the recent troubles we’re again being invited to an honest and open conversation about race, or said differently, the browbeatings will be resumed. Try this for honest and open: many of us, probably most of us, are tired of your whining, your so-called grievances, your violence and crime, your insults and threats, your witless blather and pornographic demeanor—all of it. You’re not quite 13% of the population yet everything has to be about you, all day, every day. With you, facts aren’t facts, everything’s a kozmik krisis, and abusive confrontations are your go-to.

Here’s the thing: some of us despise you, although fewer than you believe, but most of us plain don’t care about you or your doings. There was a time when we did care, but you betrayed our good will and played us for fools. We laugh about it now, but we actually believed you wanted equal opportunity and mutual respect and to live in harmony—all that stuff. Ain’t it a hoot? Imagine our embarrassment.

We talk among ourselves just like you do. It’s true, we have “frank and open discussions” when you’re not around. Why? Partly because it’s exhausting to tippy-toe around you. Partly because you think it’s your celestial right to tell us what we can say. And partly because you’re alarmingly aggressive or painfully dim-witted by turns. We never know which “you” will pop out of the box, or when. But mainly because you’ve revealed yourself as grasping opportunists without honor or principle. There’s your deal-breaker. There’s more.

During the recent riots you expected us to believe heisting snack food then torching the place was “standing up for justice”. When we didn’t buy it, you told us the looting and arson wasn’t done by the rioters after all, no, all the bad stuff was done by rioters from out of town. Apparently you think it makes a difference to us. And if we don’t fall for that one, you tell us you’re the real victims, you’re the ones “hit hardest” because the neighborhoods you looted and burned are, um, looted and burned.

We’ve never stood in your way but we don’t really care if you have good neighborhoods or not. The evidence says you don’t care either, unless we build and maintain them for you, what your enablers call “investments in urban communities.” They don’t mention the return on our past “investments”. Our former neighborhoods weren’t improved by your arrival. Your contempt for ordinary civility tells us no level of “investment” would make a difference. Listen up. It’s simple. Just like our neighborhoods are our responsibility, so are your neighborhoods your responsibility, not ours. Your clownish leaders will tell you otherwise but they’ve always been your responsibility and they always will be your responsibility. Accept it or don’t, you’re the ones who live in them. There’s more.

Your air conditioned, smart phone equipped, EBT-financed “poverty” doesn’t wash to begin with, yet you’d have us believe poverty causes crime. There’s no payday for assault and rape and random killing. Police say 20% of your criminal violence is related to dope-dealing, okay, business disputes of a sort, but it says the rest of it is largely pro bono. We also notice you have a working knowledge of jury nullification and take pride in not “snitching”, typical gang behavior.

We say “what you think, you do. What you do, you are.” We know what you think—we hear it every waking minute. We know what you do. How could we not know what you are? Just so it gets said, crime causes poverty. It drives away productive people, their businesses and the opportunities you said you wanted. More bad news: you’re free to accuse them of anything you wish but they’re not coming back.

Schools haven’t been educating our kids for a long time. They’re too busy conjuring up new ways to teach yours, in fact, we’re beginning to think yours are the only ones who matter. There’s always some new scheme claiming dazzling success which, in the end, amounts to handing out the answers with the tests, or taking the annoying hard stuff out of the coursework, or entering unearned grades by hand. Whatever they’re doing they’re doing it wrong. Your kids are telling us, in every way they know how, they have neither the interest nor the inclination for academics. Perhaps we should listen. If what they want is “out” it’s worth considering and probably worth encouraging.

You tell us the schools have “failed to meet their needs.” And what are their needs, pray tell? Higher standards and tougher tests? Stricter rules and a dress code? Or some alternate universe where credit is earned for putting teachers in the ER, or for a string of abortions before the tenth grade? If you’d tell us what their needs are we’d at least know what needs we’re failing to meet. Until then we’ll mark it down for what it is, another lame excuse. They’re supposed to be schools, not day care or orphanages or theme parks.

You pester us with the “civil rights movement” of fifty years ago as though it happened last week, with tedious 1960s footage and cloying voice-overs, in an endless loop, like Groundhog Day, decade after decade. It’s understandable, you haven’t met any real resistance since those days. Breaking news: none of it matters any more, it all devolved into just another swindle, an extortion racket, “pay up or we’ll make a stink—and the bad optics are on you”.

Schools now teach something called White Privilege, which claims no overt act is necessary for us to be racist, in fact, absence of such acts is said to be direct evidence. It’s the “original sin” concept in a different wrapper, meaning our putative racism is bone deep and can’t be discharged by good works. Even so, they say we must atone in perpetuity for being white. They suggest we devote our lives in selfless service to you. No. Sorry. Whatever white privilege there may be, it isn’t enough. In fact, being subjected to White Privilege prattle is worth a couple of privileges.

Speaking of privilege, 60% of your college grads—and 20% of all of you—are employed by government. The intent is to create an artificial middle class of course, hence the trivial positions with imaginative titles and weighty salaries. In the lower reaches it’s the quota hires, typically unqualified. It’s a great offer. You pretend you’re doing something useful and we pretend to believe you. The rest of your grads are largely diversity directors, window dressing, teachers of dubious “studies” and improbable “histories”, and similar warehousing schemes for the otherwise unemployable. It’s as good as it’s ever going to get, except for those on the skinny end of the bell curve—for whom we have genuine, i.e., earned respect. You’d be a fool to leave it on the table, for as long as it lasts.

So here’s the deal. If you want to know what we really think of you, the answer is we don’t, unless you’re making yourself unavoidable or we’re cleaning up your latest mess. We can safely rely on you to make astonishingly irresponsible choices and blame us for the consequences. And you’ll demand we make good on them for you. We won’t take a chance on your sincerity ever again. Take it somewhere else, you have no credibility left with us. You’re a net liability, predictable to the point of surety. So we attend to our own lives and our own problems. It’s as it should be. We recommend it. As for you, frankly my dear, we don’t give a damn.

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Newspeak

When Justice Anthony Kennedy asked the Department of Justice if the Obama administration was truly arguing that, according to the Constitution, book sales could be prohibited, the Justice official replied, yes, “if the book contained the functional equivalent of express advocacy.”

Its fake news

Reblogged from Front Page Magazine

We’re rightly upset at the censorship of the big social media platforms, and our morale wasn’t improved when something north of three hundred newspapers wrote editorials in virtual unison, or when Mastercard, in cahoots with the Southern Poverty Law Center, attempted to shut down our Center.  Thankfully, we won and they lost. But the efforts to silence conservative spokesmen seem to be intensifying, which makes strategic political sense to me.  If you can’t win an argument on the merits, then either discredit or silence your opponents.

The Left has lost most of the substantive arguments—from health care to taxation, from foreign policy to defense spending–and their best political chance is to silence the opposition.  This campaign rages throughout the society, from social media to the educational system, from publishers to movie makers.

There is seemingly no limit to their zeal in silencing their opponents, even to changing our Constitutional system.  Did you know that the Democratic Party is on record against the First Amendment?  Officially, publicly, and, in the United States Senate, unanimously.  They tried to rewrite it in 2014, and introduced a Constitutional Amendment that would have enabled federal and state governments to prohibit various kinds of political spending, broadcasting or publishing.

This remarkable measure, which flew in the face of the Bill of Rights and the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, had no chance of being approved by the requisite majorities in Congress and the states.  It was, therefore, a purely political maneuver, laying down a marker for voters and opinion-makers.  Still, the numbers are astonishing:  49 Senators voted for it, and not one—not a single one—voted to preserve the First Amendment.

It gets worse.  Outraged by the Democratic stance against freedom of speech and press, Senator Ted Cruz introduced his own amendment, which consisted of the First Amendment itself.  Once again, the numbers were remarkable.  Not a single Democrat voted for it, either in committee or in the full Senate.

So the Democrats have put us on notice:  they are fully prepared to undo the First Amendment if they gain enough political power to accomplish it.  Cruz aptly calls them “Fahrenheit 451 Democrats,” after the book by Ray Bradbury featuring book-burning “firemen,” and one couldn’t ask for a better label.

As Senator Cruz observed:

When Justice Anthony Kennedy asked the Department of Justice if the Obama administration was truly arguing that, according to the Constitution, book sales could be prohibited, the Justice official replied, yes, “if the book contained the functional equivalent of express advocacy.”

That was a shocking exchange. The government made an unabashed argument for the government being able to stop a book from being sold.

That’s what silencing your opponents is all about.

Did you expect them to engage in an open debate?  They regard that as a sucker’s game, because they invariably lose.  Far better, if your mission is to win elections, to peddle your ideology without fear of contradiction.

Most Americans don’t realize that the Democrats are quite willing to undo the Bill of Rights, ban books, and block conservative ideas in all possible ways.  It seems preposterous in a society as wide open and enthusiastically contentious as ours, and yet, in many ways, they are succeeding.  Silencing dissent is blatantly rampant in the printed and virtual media, the schools, the movies, even book publishing.

What to do?  My impression is that the tide is turning, as censorship becomes more visibly absurd.  When an 8-year old gets punished in a schoolroom for calling his teacher “ma’am” the censors have crossed a line—good manners are now banned—I believe most Americans want preserved.  The remedy is political, and therefore local:  replace the censors, throughout the society, and at all levels, with tolerant people.  We need new school boards, new directors at universities, new directors and managers at social media companies, and new representatives in Congress and the Senate who will reject the calls of the Fahrenheit 451 Democrats.  Turn the November elections into a referendum on the First Amendment.  Throw out the anti-American censors, let’s vote for a free society.

Or lose it.

Yes, this sounds like the Tea Party all over again.  As well it should.  The censors shut down the Tea Party when they saw their domination challenged, and used the instruments of power—notably the IRS—to paralyze the movement.  I don’t think Trump’s IRS would do the same (although his inability to properly staff his administration is often very unsettling).  So it’s a good time to challenge the censors, restore free speech to its rightful place, and restore real debate, on the urgent matters that we must deal with, to the mainstream.

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