Why Is the Middle Class Shrinking? 2 Arguments in Favor of Economic Inequality by Steven Horwitz

/in , , , , /by

Economic inequality continues to be a major political issue even as the headlines scream about terrorism and climate change. Bernie Sanders has made it a centerpiece of his presidential campaign, and other candidates have addressed it along the way. And a recent study by the Pew Research Center has added new, though misplaced, fuel to the fire of those concerned about inequality.

The Pew study has been discussed in the media, and one key point has been grossly misunderstood. Among other things, the study found that the American middle class is shrinking and is now just under half of the population. Commentators quickly began to refer to the “hollowing out” of the middle class and to tie this study to the concerns about growing inequality.

However, a close look at the data shows that the middle class has shrunk since 1971 because more members of the middle class have moved up the income ladder than down it.

Don’t believe me? Look for yourself at the terrific graphic that the Financial Times created to illustrate the data:

You can watch as the folks on the left slowly slide to the right over 44 years. When you compare the 1971 distribution with the 2015 one, what do you see? A growth in households earning around $80,000 or above, adjusted for inflation, since 1971 and a significant decline in those making less than that amount (with the exception of the folks right around $0). It’s true that there’s not a fat middle class anymore, but why should that trouble us if there are more high-income households and fewer low-income households overall?

The funny part of this is that if you read the story in the Financial Times that accompanies this graphic, it’s as if they never actually looked at the graphic they produced. Their narrative is at odds with it, as the narrative proclaims the doom-and-gloom story that the graphic actually refutes. As they say, never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

This growth in household income may, to some extent, be a by-product of the same economic processes that have produced the concerns about inequality, illustrated in this graphic by the significant growth of the ultra-rich.

There are far more very rich people today than there were 44 years ago, but the growth of the upper class has gone hand in hand with the enrichment of a large number of less-well-off households. Are there ways in which economic inequality is good, then? I think the answer to that question is yes. If so, then, what are they? Here are two defenses of economic inequality that proponents of the free market could make.

First is the more obvious one: growing inequality is good because it might be a consequence of economic institutions that produce all kinds of results that we think are desirable. For example, if competitive markets lead to peace and rising prosperity for all but also create inequality along the way by allowing some folks to get very rich, then we should at least tolerate that inequality because the things that produce it also produce other things we like.

This is the usual defense libertarians invoke, and it’s a good argument. The critic, however, might say that even if the defense is true, it doesn’t prove that inequality is necessary for that result. There’s a difference between saying, “Good economic institutions will produce inequality while creating good economic outcomes for all,” and saying, “Good economic outcomes for all can’t be produced without inequality.” The critic would likely ask how reducing the inequality that markets produce will harm their ability to produce those good results.

And here is where we come back to the Pew study and get a second defense of inequality. One way the middle class (and all of us) has become richer in the last generation is that the cost of so many goods and services has dropped in terms of the number of hours we have to work at the average wage in order to purchase them. The lower price of basic goods has enabled more and more people to afford things like large TVs, smartphones, and new, cheaper medications.

One thing that has made this process happen is inequality. In The Constitution of Liberty, F.A. Hayek argued,

A large part of the expenditure of the rich, though not intended for that end, thus serves to defray the cost of the experimentation with the new things that, as a result, can later be made available to the poor.… Even the poorest today owe their relative material well-being to the results of past inequality.

Having a group of very rich people is what enables yesterday’s luxuries to become today’s basics.

There are two parts to this process: cost bearing and discovery. The very rich are able to afford the high prices of new technologies, thereby providing an incentive for firms to market new and expensive products. Once the rich pay the high initial price and cover the fixed costs of research and development, sellers can begin to price closer to the much lower marginal cost of producing additional units, making the good much more affordable to more people.

But the rich are also an economic canary in the coal mine that informs producers whether they are getting it right.

For example, a critic of inequality might complain that no one “really needs” a $100,000 luxury car with all kinds of new high-tech gadgets on it. But the fact that some can afford it and want to buy it helps the car companies figure out which new features might be popular. Rear-view cameras were once only available on top-end cars, but they have slowly become a standard feature. The same may soon be true of collision warning systems now available on high-end models of some cars.

In fact, everything we think of as basics today was once the province of only the well-off. The first microwaves were expensive and bought mostly by the rich. I can remember my parents paying about $900 for a VCR in the late 1970s. VCRs, of course, fetch a price close to zero these days. The rich who bought the early LCD TVs helped manufacturers defray the fixed production costs and figure out what people wanted, and now these TVs are in the vast majority of houses at a more affordable price.

The inequality at any point in time is a key part of the process that creates wealth for the rest of society over the years to follow. The very rich enable producers to experiment and cover their costs, and that makes more goods more affordable for the rest of us, from fun toys to life-saving necessities.

The inequality produced by the market is a key part of how the market moves forward, enriching all of us in the process. And that’s why the middle class is shrinking: the rich, through the competitive market, have helped make the middle class richer.

Steven HorwitzSteven Horwitz

Steven Horwitz is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Economics at St. Lawrence University and the author of Hayek’s Modern Family: Classical Liberalism and the Evolution of Social Institutions.

He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.

On the ‘White Privilege’ movement

/in , , , /by

We close out the year with more protests and demands than ever, as our intellectuals engage in more and more “conversations” about race.

The protests spilled over to restaurants and shopping venues, even as Americans celebrated Christmas.  The incubators are the schools and college campuses, where students are taught about injustices invisible to the common man.  Textbooks offering lessons for deep classroom discussion include the sociology textbook, Color Lines and Racial Angles, published by Norton.  It includes such thought-provoking gems as “Asian American Exceptionalism and ‘Stereotype Promise,'” “The Fascination and Frustration with Native American Mascots,” “White Trash: The Social Origins of a Stigmatype,” and “Thinking about Trayvon [Martin, of course]: Privileged Responses and Media Discourse.”

Another gem from the once esteemed textbook publisher is Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century, with offerings from professors in various fields, such as biology, history, anthropology, sociology…and education, with a contribution by Bill Ayers’ choice for Obama’s Secretary of Education, Linda Darling-Hammond.  The Obama education transition team leader and developer of one of the two national Common Core tests offers her thoughts on education in an essay titled, “Structured for Failure: Race, Resources, and Student Achievement.”

At the K-12 level, materials for sensitizing students to oppression abound.  There is  (Re)Teaching Trayvon: Education for Racial Justice.  Curriculum materials on “teaching the ongoing murders of black men” are also readily available at Rethinking Schools.The George Soros-funded Teaching for Change also has some incendiary curriculum materials for the tykes.

White Privilege: All these materials are intended to instill an understanding of “white privilege,” which arose as more obvious methods such as slurs and discrimination disappeared.  White privilege is a kind of unconscious superiority that must be reviewed constantly–replacing the Puritan scouring for sin.  To gain an understanding, students can read “Beyond the Big, Bad Racist: Shared Meanings of White Identity and Supremacy” in theirColor Lines textbook.

The common wisdom in academe is that all white people are racist because they have white privilege.  An exponent of this theory, George Yancy, was recently hired by Emory University to teach philosophy.  His letter to “White America” appeared on Christmas Eve in the New York Times. Following in the footsteps of Ta-Nehisi Coates, a MacArthur Genius Grant winner and National Book Award winner for his stream-of-consciousness racial complaint in the style of James Baldwin, Yancy invoked James Baldwin.

“Dear White America,” wrote Yancy, as he set out to berate her,

I have a weighty request. As you read this letter, I want you to listen with love, a sort of love that demands that you look at parts of yourself that might cause pain and terror, as James Baldwin would say. Did you hear that? You may have missed it. I repeat: I want you to listen with love. Well, at least try.

Yancy, here, managed to combine demand and insult.  No doubt, millions of white masochistic Americans did just that: they tried very, very, very hard to listen, with love (as difficult as it is for them to grasp the concept).

This man who occupies an office once occupied by a real philosopher, continued,

We don’t talk much about the urgency of love these days, especially within the public sphere. Much of our discourse these days is about revenge, name calling, hate, and divisiveness. I have yet to hear it from our presidential hopefuls, or our political pundits. I don’t mean the Hollywood type of love, but the scary kind, the kind that risks not being reciprocated, the kind that refuses to flee in the face of danger. To make it a bit easier for you, I’ve decided to model, as best as I can, what I’m asking of you. Let me demonstrate the vulnerability that I wish you to show. As a child of Socrates, James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, let me speak the truth, refuse to err on the side of caution.

Now, the Dissident Prof has taken some classes in philosophy, but never has she heard a professor declare himself a “child of” any historical figure, much less of such a disparate triad as Socrates, James Baldwin, and Audre Lorde.  Furthermore, they told their students that philosophy is the love of wisdom and that according to Socrates, the beginning of wisdom comes with the admission of ignorance.

Professor Yancy, however, declares that he speaks the truth, or at least a truth that does not hold back, has no doubt.

Lest anyone get the impression that Professor Yancy feels himself in any way superior to White America, or to anyone else, he confesses his own sin of sexism, or male privilege.  But then again that must mean he is superior because he confessed his privilege.  So unless you, White America, confess the privilege that Professor Yancy says you enjoy (because he knows), you are guilty.

Richard WrightRichard Wright I will not claim to be a child of Richard Wright, just someone who, in spite of her white privilege, read and taught (at Emory) his autobiographical account of a show trial put on by the American Communists in the 1930s.  Wright got entangled with them in his efforts to break into writing.  The poor soul who is the target, his friend Ross, is NOT a privileged white American, but a black American, one of many targeted and exploited by the communists.

Wright is asked to come to the trial so that he might “learn what happened to ‘enemies of the working class.'”

The following day, a Sunday, Ross is confronted by his accusers.  Over the course of three hours, the accusers describe “Fascism’s aggression in Germany, Italy, and Japan,” “the role of the Soviet Union as the world’s lone workers’ state,” and the “suffering and handicaps” of the Negro population on Chicago’s South Side and the relation to “world struggle.” The direct charges against Ross are made, with dates, conversations, and scenes.

Then it is time for Ross to defend himself:

He stood trembling; he tried to talk and his words would not come.  The hall was as still as death.  Guilt was written in every pore of his black skin.  His hands shook.  He held on to the edge of the table to keep on his feet. . . .

“Comrades,” he said in a low, charged voice.  “I’m guilty of all the charges, all of them.”

"TheGodThatFailed" by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia“TheGodThatFailed” by Source. Licensed under Fair use via WikipediaIn a similar manner, those of us benefiting from “privilege,” must confess as we are blamed for such things as the “school to prison pipeline” and the deplorable conditions on the South Side of Chicago.  Those who wish to be in the good graces of those like Professor Yancy must confess these over and over and over.

Fortunately, there are still a few legitimate philosophy professors around, such as Jack Kerwick, one of the contributors to the Dissident Prof collection, Exiled.  Kerwick, who keeps a very busy schedule teaching, also is a frequent contributor to such sites as Townhall and American Thinker.  Those who have enjoyed his application of logic to the issues of the day can now enjoy his razor sharp analyses in a new collection, The American Offensive: Dispatches from the Front, where he tackles such topics as Immigration, Academia, Religion, and Race.  As a matter of fact, I think George Yancy should read it.  I cannot think of anyone who would benefit more.

A couple reminders: The deadline for public comment on the U.S. Dept. of Education’s “family engagement” plan is Jan.4.  The deadline for 2015 charitable contributions is Dec. 31.

Best wishes for a Happy New Year!

Heartbreaking: Photos of Drowned Yezidi Refugee Children

/in , , , , , , /by

As Canada and other countries make their claims that they are helping refugees, there are those who have lost their lives who remain unseen, unreported and forgotten.

The plights of Yezidis have been forgotten and ignored by the United States, the United Nations, the Liberal government of Canada, the Main Stream Media and the rest of the free world when Alan Kurdi’s photos went viral to help the Liberal government of Canada win the election by landslide which prompted the acceptance of over 50.000 Sunni Muslim Syrians to this country which according to experts vetting would be impossible.

Please see the photos below provided by Khaled Khalaf​, a Yezidi activist. WARNING GRAPHIC IMAGES:

Shabnam Assadollahi's photo.
Shabnam Assadollahi's photo.
Shabnam Assadollahi's photo.

Mr. Khalaf told us: “These are all Yezidi children who were drowned but no media gave any attention to them because they were from the Yezidi faith.”

Khalaf continues: “These picture were taken a couple weeks ago. These kids and their family were fleeing from Turkey to Greece for a safer, better and more promising life but no media has given any publicity to this horrifying news..”

The Kurds, Christians and Yizidis are facing massacres and yet are being ignored. Did the Liberals and their media including the Islamic State had an agenda showing Alan Kurdi, the drowned Syrian boy?

RELATED ARTICLES:

Canada mainly accepting Sunni and not Izidi (Yizidi) refugees – Jerusalem online

Workshop on converting non-Muslims held at the University of Calgary

RELATED VIDEO: The genocide of Yizidis in broad daylight:

Democrats Move to Criminalize Criticism of Islam

/in , , , , , /by

In FrontPage today I explain how lumping together violence with “hateful rhetoric” is a call to destroy the freedom of speech:

clinton-oic

December 17, 2015 ought henceforth to be a date which will live in infamy, as that was the day that some of the leading Democrats in the House of Representatives came out in favor of the destruction of the First Amendment. Sponsored by among others, Muslim Congressmen Keith Ellison and Andre Carson, as well as Eleanor Holmes Norton, Loretta Sanchez, Charles Rangel, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Joe Kennedy, Al Green, Judy Chu, Debbie Dingell, Niki Tsongas, John Conyers, José Serrano, Hank Johnson, and many others, House Resolution 569 condemns “violence, bigotry, and hateful rhetoric towards Muslims in the United States.” The Resolution has been referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary.

That’s right: “violence, bigotry and hateful rhetoric.” The implications of those five words will fly by most people who read them, and the mainstream media, of course, will do nothing to elucidate them. But what H. Res. 569 does is conflate violence — attacks on innocent civilians, which have no justification under any circumstances – with “bigotry” and “hateful rhetoric,” which are identified on the basis of subjective judgments. The inclusion of condemnations of “bigotry” and “hateful rhetoric” in this Resolution, while appearing to be high-minded, take on an ominous character when one recalls the fact that for years, Ellison, Carson, and his allies (including groups such as the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR) have been smearing any and all honest examination of how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to incite hatred and violence as “bigotry” and “hateful rhetoric.” This Resolution is using the specter of violence against Muslims to try to quash legitimate research into the motives and goals of those who have vowed to destroy us, which will have the effect of allowing the jihad to advance unimpeded and unopposed.

That’s not what this H. Res. 569 would do, you say? It’s just about condemning “hate speech,” not free speech? That kind of sloppy reasoning may pass for thought on most campuses today, but there is really no excuse for it. Take, for example, the wife of Paris jihad murderer Samy Amimour – please. It was recently revealed that she happily boasted about his role in the murder of 130 Paris infidels: “I encouraged my husband to leave in order to terrorize the people of France who have so much blood on their hands […] I’m so proud of my husband and to boast about his virtue, ah la la, I am so happy.” Proud wifey added: “As long as you continue to offend Islam and Muslims, you will be potential targets, and not just cops and Jews but everyone.”

Now Samy Amimour’s wife sounds as if she would be very happy with H. Res. 569, and its sponsors would no doubt gladly avow that we should stop offending Islam and Muslims – that is, cut out the “bigotry” and “hateful rhetoric.” If we are going to be “potential targets” even if we’re not “cops” or “Jews,” as long as we “continue to offend Islam and Muslims,” then the obvious solution, according to the Western intelligentsia, is to stop doing anything that might offend Islam and Muslims – oh, and stop being cops and Jews. Barack “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam” says it. Hillary “We’re going to have that filmmaker arrested” Clinton says it. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, certain that anyone who speaks honestly about Islam and jihad is a continuing danger to the Church, says it.

And it should be easy. What offends Islam and Muslims? It ought to be a simple matter to cross those things off our list, right? Making a few sacrifices for the sake of our future of glorious diversity should be a no-brainer for every millennial, and everyone of every age who is concerned about “hate,” right? So let’s see. Drawing Muhammad – that’s right out. And of course, Christmas celebrations, officially banned this year in three Muslim countries and frowned upon (at best) in many others, will have to go as well. Alcohol and pork? Not in public, at least. Conversion from Islam to Christianity? No more of that. Building churches? Come on, you’ve got to be more multicultural!

Everyone agrees. The leaders of free societies are eagerly lining up to relinquish those freedoms. The glorious diversity of our multicultural future demands it. And that future will be grand indeed, a gorgeous mosaic, as everyone assures us, once those horrible “Islamophobes” are forcibly silenced. Everyone will applaud that. Most won’t even remember, once the jihad agenda becomes clear and undeniable to everyone in the U.S. on a daily basis and no one is able to say a single thing about it, that there used to be some people around who tried to warn them.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Egypt: Salafi party bans Muslims from greeting Christians during Christmas

Hugh Fitzgerald: The “Ask A Muslim” Girl

Muslim Student Association demands ‘zero tolerance policy for Islamophobic speech’

/in , , , , , /by

Here again we see how Leftist and Islamic supremacist groups use the term “Islamophobia” for both attacks on innocent civilians, which have no justification under any circumstances, and for honest examination of how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to incite hatred and violence. These groups use the former to quash the latter, which will have the effect of allowing the jihad to advance unimpeded and unopposed.

Is that what the MSA wants? Probably, since it is a Muslim Brotherhood organization. According to Discover the Networks, “The Muslim Students Association of the United States and Canada, or MSA (also known as MSA National), was established mainly by members of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in January 1963 at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Nyack College theologian Larry A. Poston writes that “many of the founding members of this agency [MSA] were members of, or had connections to,” the Muslim Brotherhood or Jamaat-i-Islami. The three most significant founders of MSA were Hisham al Talib, Jamal Barzinji, and Ahmed Totanji, and all of whom were MB leaders of Iraqi descent. Other noteworthy individuals who served as early co-founders of MSA were Mahboob Khan and Malika Khan.”

Meanwhile, our nation’s universities are increasingly becoming thuggish centers of Leftist indoctrination where opposing views are forcibly silenced. This holds true across the country, from ostensibly Catholic entities such as Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire to secular ones such as San Diego State University.

“Muslim Student Association demands all ‘Islamophobic speech’ be punished,” by Alec Dent, College Fix, December 28, 2015:

The Muslim Student Association at San Diego State University is demanding that administrators combat Islamophobia by developing a “zero tolerance policy explicitly for Islamophobic speech and actions.”

The demands, modeled after similar ones issued by black student associations at campuses across the nation, were lodged after a female Muslim student was allegedly attacked by a white man in a campus parking lot on the afternoon of Nov. 19, about a week after the Paris terrorist attacks, which killed 130 people.

At SDSU, despite reports that several witnesses stood by and did nothing as the attacker grabbed the woman’s hijab, as well as a police sketch of the alleged attacker, a police investigation could not identify a suspect, according to the San Diego Union Tribune.

Meanwhile, the female student who said she was attacked has not been identified. But she told Hanif Mohebi, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations-San Diego, that her attacker grabber her from “behind,” called her a terrorist, “choked her with the hajib” and told her to “get out of this country,” the Union Tribune reports.

Several comments on the article expressed incredulity over the attack, questioning whether it is a hate-crime hoax.

Yet less than a week after the alleged hate crime, SDSU’s Muslim Student Association held a protest against Islamophobia on campus that attracted hundreds of students.

Yasser Kaziha, a member of the Muslim Student Association, said that he personally knew the victim of the attack, and “when the attack on our Muslim sister happened here at SDSU, she felt alone after bystanders and witnesses who watched the attack did nothing,” he told the Union Tribune.

At the rally, the Muslim Student Association issued its list of demands, which members claim will help prevent future acts of bigotry against the Muslim community.

They demanded that the university adopt a zero-tolerance policy toward “Islamophobic speech,” mandatory bystander training, develop more courses on Islam, and increase funding for The Center for Intercultural Relations. Moreover, they demanded that “the SDSU administration address, alleviate, and eliminate systems of oppression that disproportionately target students of color, womyn, and all marginalized students on campus.”

Beth Chee, a representative for the university, told The College Fix in an email that the university has not issued a formal response to the demands, but members of the administration have reviewed the list and are currently “meeting internally and with the students to discuss their concerns.”…

RELATED ARTICLES:

Islamic State has department of “war spoils,” in accord with the Qur’an

Toronto Sun: Robert Spencer “held up for his views while refugees (whose views we don’t know) are welcomed like heroes”

Trumpites are fundamentally changing the Democratic and Republican Parties

/in , , , , /by

Trumpites are fundamentally changing the Republican Party into the New American Party. Blue Dogs are moving away from the Democratic Party and becoming independents, with some registering as Republicans in order to support Trump in the primary (see below).

Their sole objective is to make America great again.

They have a leader named Trump, who in fact, follows their lead. The Republican and Democratic Parties need to take heed of this committed and energetic group of voters.

Sun Tzu wrote, “Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster.”

Trumpites know their enemies, which include but are not limited to: Obama Democrats, establishment Republicans (a.k.a. GOPe), the media, Muslims, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, George Will, Jeb Bush, and on and on.

Trumpites believe they can win the battle for the White House with the only candidate who is actually following the Department of Homeland Security’s policy of when you see something, say something – Donald J. Trump.

When Trump sees something, he says something and more American voters love him for it.

The New York Post’s Marisa Schultz writes:

Donald Trump ratcheted up his attacks on Hillary Clinton Sunday, blasting her for playing the “woman’s card” and saying her notoriously philandering husband would be “fair game” when he hits the campaign trail for his wife.

Bill Clinton was a “liability” when Hillary ran against President Obama in 2008, and it will be no different this election cycle, Trump predicted on “Fox and Friends.”

Read more.

Now that’s saying something. An establishment Republican would never say that for fear of being labeled an anti-woman bigot. Trumpites eat up this kind of directness and confrontational attitude with glee. Trumpites love the truth and anyone who speaks it in plain, simple terms.

Trump is a master of the sound bite and speaks the language of Joe and Jane six-pack.

trump democrats

Trump Democrats registering as Republicans.

I saw this post on Twitter today:


 TRUMP WORLD (@trump_world)
12/28/15, 8:30 AM

“Today we went and changed our party from Democrat to Republican so we can vote for @realDonaldTrump“

In a Politico column titled “Trump ties with Pope Francis in U.S. poll for second most-admired man in the world” Nick Gass writes:

On the list of most admired men, Pope Francis and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump tied for second place with 5 percent each. Meanwhile, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders earned 3 percent, with Bill Gates at 2 percent.

A mix of religious and political figures, including the Dalai Lama and George W. Bush, rounded out the top 10, with 1 percent each. For Trump, this is his fifth finish in the top 10, the other instances coming in 1988, 1989, 1990 and 2011.Read more.

The frustration with both political parties has fueled the rise of the Trumpites.

Trumpites are those from all parties, every walk of life and every economic class. Trumpites are sick and tired of politics as usual, hate career politicians and feel the government is totally corrupt and oppressive. This is the core that will fundamentally transform the Republican Party, and those 115 Republicans who voted for the Paul Ryan omnibus budget.

Trumpites are nationalists but not socialists. They are the former silent majority, who now have a national spokesman – Donald J. Trump.

Their leader is Donald Trump, their goal is to win the White House in 2016, not for any political party but for America.

In 1776 those who broke away from the ruling class were called patriots and it was they who fundamentally changed America from a subservient colony of King George III to a Constitutional Republic based on individual freedom and liberty.

Today these anti-ruling class voters call themselves “Trumpites.”

RELATED VIDEO: Trump Supporter Nessun Dorma Video – Trump Versus the Liberal Media:

RELATED ARTICLES:

Minorities line up behind Donald Trump

What most concerns GOP ‘elites’ about Donald Trump? Online Poll

Topic over dinner: What to do with Mr. Trump

The Sci-Fi Fantasy of Central Planning

Wrong: Muslim Migrants are not like Jewish Holocaust Survivors

/in , , , , /by

Dr. Michael Welner has spoken out against the complicit calumny of American Rabbis and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, one the voluntary agencies that stands to gain from the influx of Syrian Refugees, who compare the their plight with those Jews who survived the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust or Shoah.

Dr michael welner

Dr. Michael Welner, Chairman of The Forensic Panel.

His Algemeiner article, We Cannot Allow Comparisons of Mideast Refugees to Holocaust Survivors is a veritable Jeremiad  from this renowned Forensic Psychiatrist, Founder of the Manhattan – based The Forensic Panel,  expert witness at many high profile cases of mass shootings and developer of an evidence based standard for measuring depravity and evil.  He is also the son of Holocaust survivors. We have written about his remarkable mother Barbara who has a deep, abiding reality based assessment of the heinous barbaric treatment of Jews from her own experience during the Shoah and those evident in the extremism of radical Islam.

See our April 2015 Iconoclast post, “On the Eve of Yom Ha Shoah a Courageous Survivor Speaks of the Islamist Threat Facing Israel and Jews”. Dr.  Welner makes several valid points about why the comparison of the Jewish Holocaust survivors’ experiences versus those of the Syrian and other Muslim refugees is at best myopic.  Among these are:

  1. Jewish refugees were not warring with anyone, and were no threat to anyone. Refugees attributed to Syria are fleeing a war within their own land in which they are on one side or another.
  2. Jewish refugees were hunted down to be killed wherever they were. This is not happening to all (or most) Muslims of Syria and neighboring countries who seek emigration.
  3. Jewish refugees were literally fleeing for their lives with nowhere in their countries to go. Syrian refugees are fleeing a country with degraded infrastructure for a safer and more normal existence. They also have the option of traveling to neighboring Arab countries — something Jews of the Holocaust did not have.
  4. Jewish refugees had no conflict or grievance with the West. The Arab world is in the midst of an open conflict with the West. The United States has been sponsoring some of the fighters operating in Syria. There is no way of knowing whether refugees have allegiance to one faction or another.
  5. Jewish refugees were not accompanied by any terrorist problem in America. Islamist terrorism has already expressed itself through those who have immigrated here legally and illegally.
  6. Jewish refugee traffic was never exploited to embed people who were simply taking advantage of chaos to slip across borders with criminal or terrorist motivation. That has already been demonstratively the case with the Syrian-Turkish Muslim migration.
  7. Jewish refugees had no Jewish homeland to go to. They were stateless people who were unsafe everywhere. The “Syrian” refugee problem overlooks that there are areas all over the Muslim world which could accommodate them culturally, but many of those countries have refused them.

Welner takes particular scorn of a HIAS letter signed by 139 Rabbis endeavoring to comparison the plight of the 900 Jewish souls on board the SS St. Louis who were denied sanctuary by anti-Semitic elements in the FDR State Department in  the late 1930’s, only to have one third ultimately perish in Nazi concentration and death camps during the Shoah. He writes:

This letter overlooks is that the very source of the current American controversy is that, by admission of even trusted intelligence persons in the Obama administration, the United States indeed cannot tell the difference between the enemy and the victims of the enemy. That is the source of our current national security problem. To compare this real dilemma to a climate of 1939 that was nothing more than just visceral hatred for Jews for nothing more than their religion is obscene. That many rabbis are willing to abet such misunderstanding demonstrates, once again, a deep failure of those rabbis to take responsibility for teaching and protecting the fidelity of Jewish history. The horrors of the Holocaust remain unthinkable, even as memories fade with the dying off of elderly survivors. So why is it that rabbis, so designated as leaders of Jewish thought, could display such derelict idiocy in making comparisons of Holocaust refugees to migrants from the Arab world?

He cites the twisting pathology of Taken Olam that is behind Jewish compassion towards Muslim refugees that defiles the memories of Shoah survivors:

In my professional opinion, these behaviors actually reflect on the sickening pathology among Jews of even the most highly educated pedigrees to feel the need, even by resorting to the grotesque, to display their non-denominational compassion. Tikkun Olam, to many, reflects upon the Jewish imperative to help the world beyond those who are Jewish. Others interpret that phrase differently. But it cannot be disputed by anyone that Jewish non-discriminatory philanthropy and with no strings attached is unmatched among religions. We need not prove that we are kind. And for those who feel that Jews need to do a better job of demonstrating this to the Muslim world, consider how much Jewish charity has been offered to Iran and Turkey after natural disasters, only to be refused in order to preserve narratives that demonize Jews. Jews are pilloried not for lack of charity, but because Muslim Arab intolerance is extreme, implacable, and emanates from countries that control their media and can control their peoples by creating fictions of Jewish bogeymen. The purveyors and consumers of said fictions couldn’t care less about the bill boarding of Jewish advocacy for Muslims.

How is it then, that the signatory rabbis degrade the special history of their own people? Because flaunting public perception of their sensitivity to others enables them to make personal political statements, massage their vanities for being part of letters published in full page ads, and announce their own bona fides. But while those public personas are their own, no rabbi owns Jewish history such that they have the right to reinvent it.

It would be far more responsible for such rabbis and other prominent Jews to feed their self-interests without resorting to defiling the Holocaust by diluting it or by distorting any of its searing lessons. How pathetic it is that in this day and age, we truly have many Christians who have a greater sensitivity for the legacy of baseless hatred towards Jews than certain rabbis themselves. President Obama can hardly be blamed for insulting the legacy of the Holocaust when so many rabbis utterly fail to respect their own Shoah.

Welner concludes:

If Holocaust denial bothers you, this crass misuse is not something to overlook without strong response. Like the BDS movement, silence only enables greater latitude. Assertions by Jews that dilute and therefore desecrate the Holocaust must stop. Holocaust trivializing should be limited to Iran and the other visceral haters, rather than daily parlance of the educated in America. The teaching of accurate Jewish history must remain, across all denominations, a litmus test for suitability to minister to others as would be expected from any religion.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review. The featured image is of U.S. troops with giving water to a Holocaust survivor.

Secession, Civil Disobedience or Nullification

/in , , , , /by

On October 30, 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama stood on a platform in Carnahan Quadrangle at the University of Missouri.  Speaking to a crowd of several thousand starry-eyed students and Democrat Party faithful, Obama said, “After decades of broken politics in Washington, and eight years of failed policies from George W. Bush, and 21 months of a campaign that’s taken us from the rocky coast of Maine to the sunshine of California (presumably, all 57 states), we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

Then, with a straight face, he segued to a list of Republican talking points.  He said, “In five days, you can put an end to the politics that would divide a nation just to win an election, that tries to pit region against region and city against town, and Republican against Democrat, that asks us to fear at a time when we need to hope…  So, as president, I’m going to go through the federal budget line by line, ending programs we don’t need, making the ones we do need work better and cost less.  We’ve got to make sure that we are not charging a credit card to the next generation, borrowing from China just to pay off our dependence on foreign oil.”

Now, after just over seven years of Obama’s leadership, we find a nation that is more divided along racial, religious, and economic lines than ever before; a nation in which elections are decided, not by what is best for the nation as a whole, but by votes purchased with money borrowed from China.  When Obama took office on January 20, 2009, the national debt stood at $10.6 trillion.  In just seven years in office, Obama has used the national credit card to increase the debt by an additional $8.2 trillion, to $18.8 trillion..

Clearly, the federal government caters to the demands of the cities, where Democrats rule, at the expense of our rural areas, which are predominately Republican.  In spite of the fact that the 2012 electoral map of the United States appeared to be almost totally red, with an occasional splotch of blue indicating the major urban areas, Barack Obama was able to win reelection by an electoral vote of 365-173.  In that election, of the 3,100 counties in the United States, Obama won a majority of the popular vote in only 653 counties (21.06%), while Mitt Romney won the popular vote in 2,447 counties (78.94%).

Some 239 years ago, another man, Thomas Jefferson, also promoted a historic transformation of government.  He wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it,  and to institute new government…”

Jefferson understood the necessity of creating a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”  Yet, experience tells us that what Jefferson had in mind was the exact polar opposite of what Obama had in mind when he promised to “fundamentally transform” our nation.  After nearly seven years of oppressive rule by the Obama regime, a lawless regime for which constitutional principles and the rule of law are seen as mere annoyances, it’s time we considered whether or not our republic can ever be restored to its former greatness.

There is evidence that liberals and Democrats are using the Immigration Reform Act of 1965 as a means of importing a ruling majority of the poor and uneducated from the Third World, whose allegiances are easily purchased by a corrupt and lawless political party with access to the public treasury.  As Democratic strategist Patrick Reddy is quoted as saying, “The 1965 Immigration Reform Act promoted by President Kennedy, drafted by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and pushed through the Senate by Ted Kennedy, has resulted in a wave of immigration from the Third World that should shift the nation in a more liberal direction within a decade.  It will go down as the Kennedy family’s greatest gift to the Democratic Party.”

In other words, what Democrats have done, methodically, over the past 50 years is to import sufficient votes to offset those they are unable to attract among white professionals and blue-collar European-Americans.  It causes one to wonder how many years we have left as the freest, most prosperous nation on Earth.

A retired United Airlines pilot compared what the passengers on Germanwings Flight 9525 must have felt to what it feels like living through the Obama era in American politics.  He said, “It is hard to imagine the growing feelings of fear and helplessness (they) felt as the unforgiving landscape rushed up to meet them… We feel the descent in the pits of our stomachs.  We don’t know where we’re going anymore, but we do know it isn’t good.  And above all, we feel helpless because a man very few Americans had heard of ten years ago (Barack Obama) has locked us out (of the cockpit).”

So, if our constitutional republic has been savaged to the point where it is beyond repair, what are our alternatives?  In a previous column I have suggest three alternatives with the order of preference being: a) massive civil disobedience, b) widespread 10th Amendment nullification by states and local communities, and finally, c) dissolution of the Union, otherwise known as secession… the most draconian of the three alternatives.  However, upon further reflection I have concluded that our first reaction to the heavy-handedness of the Obama regime should not be civil disobedience.  We have always been a nation of laws, and to suggest that we should resort to unlawful tactics such as street protests, marches, riots, and sit-ins is to suggest that we should become a nation of law breakers.

It is not the sort of undisciplined behavior that we should be teaching our children.  Nor should we be agitating for dissolution of the union, although a new nation comprising the 26 most heavily Republican states of the Old South, the Far West, the Great Plains, the Southwest, and the Midwest would make a very fine country… the greatest nation on Earth.

In a December 6, 2015 column, titled, “Secession or War – America’s West Against the East,” the President of the National Association of Rural Landowners, Ron Ewart, described the problems created by federal government ownership of land in the western states.  According to Ewart, of the 2.27 billion acres of landmass in the U.S., the federal government owns 28%, or

635.6 million acres.  Of that 635.6 million acres, 572 million acres are in the 18 western states.

Ewart suggests that the 18 western states form an alliance, warning the federal government that “they are on thin ground,” and that the only solution to the unwarranted and unconstitutional federal power grab is capitulation by the federal government… including the release of all federal lands (other than national parks and national forests) to private ownership.  He warns that, if the federal government fails to agree, the result might be an effort toward secession.

However, our first alternative should be the widespread use of nullification by states and local governments, as envisioned by the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  The 10th Amendment states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”  

Liberals and Democrats might argue that the 180 American cities who have declared themselves to be “sanctuary” cities are examples of nullification.  But nullification is not about systematic disobedience to federal law that is, constitutionally, the province of the federal government.  Nullification represents a decision by state and local governments to refuse to yield to federal laws that are, under the 10th Amendment, solely the province of state and local governments.

In a December 16, 2015 report by the Tenth Amendment Center, we are told of a bill prefiled in the Missouri legislature, HB1791, which would require the Missouri General Assembly to “adopt and enact any and all measures as may be necessary to prevent the enforcement of regulations, rules, and memorandums issued by a presidential executive order.”  The bill describes executive orders not justified by federal law, or the limited constitutional authority of the president of the United States, as “repugnant to the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of Missouri.”  Language in the bill declares such executive orders to be “null, void, and of no effect” in Missouri.

The Tenth Amendment Center notes that “HB1791 rests on a well-established legal principle known as the anti-commandeering doctrine.   The cornerstone of that doctrine is found in the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898 (1997).  In that decision the court ruled, “We held in New York (v. United States) that Congress cannot compel the States to enact or enforce a federal regulatory program.  Today we hold that Congress cannot circumvent that prohibition by conscripting the States’ officers directly. The Federal Government may neither issue directives requiring the States to address particular problems, nor command the States’ officers, or those of their political subdivisions, to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program.  It matters not whether policy making is involved, and no case by case weighing of the burdens or benefits is necessary; such commands are fundamentally incompatible with our constitutional system of dual sovereignty.”

Republicans now control 32 governorships and both legislative bodies in 30 states.  Armed with the words of the 10th Amendment and the anti-commandeering doctrine, those governors and those legislators are capable of reasserting their state sovereignty by engaging in massive acts of nullification.   Since we cannot rely on Republican majorities in Congress to reverse the trend toward federal supremacy, the states represent our only hope for restoring our constitutional republic as the Founders conceived it.  Nullification is the answer, secession is an alternative.

America: Are You being Schlonged?

/in , , , , /by

Great orators have a way of using a word to make a point that resonates with the masses. Some of these words later become part of a dialogue and perhaps even are added to Webster’s dictionary.

Donald Trump is a master at using simple words to explain complex issues. His latest is the use of the noun schlong as a verb when referring to Hillary Clinton.

Charles Hurt in his column “The Nuclear Option: Donald Trump Schools Rivals on ‘The Art of the Schlong” writes:

If you think “The Art of the Deal” was a yuuuuuuuuuuge success — and it was — just wait until Donald Trump comes out with his latest masterpiece, “The Art of the Schlong.”

[ … ]

“The Art of the Schlong” is a political treatise, like “The Art of War,” only more devastating and infinitely more entertaining. It is more psychologically sinister than Machiavelli’s “The Prince.” It is like Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” only the opposite. Except for the influence part.

The treatise is a tactical primer for anybody thinking of getting into politics, especially as a Republican these days. Tough world out there right now.

It is a schlong or get-schlonged world, so you’d better learn how to schlong. [Emphasis added]

Americans increasingly believe they are getting schlonged.

gallop government corruptionIn September a Gallop poll confirmed that 75% in U.S. see widespread government corruption. Gallop reports:

Three in four Americans (75%) last year perceived corruption as widespread in the country’s government. This figure is up from two in three in 2007 (67%) and 2009 (66%).

While the numbers have fluctuated slightly since 2007, the trend has been largely stable since 2010. However, the percentage of U.S. adults who see corruption as pervasive has never been less than a majority in the past decade, which has had no shortage of controversies from the U.S. Justice Department’s firings of U.S. attorneys to the IRS scandal.

Add to this list: The Fast and Furious government gunwalking scandal, the Benghazi and Extortion 17 cover-ups, the revelation that Obamacare is unsustainable by Professor Jonathan Gruber and most recently Hillary Clinton’s email scandal.

Donald Trump in one word has captured the essence of all of these examples of government out of control. Will his use of schlonged, along with Grubered, be added to the political lexicon? Only time will tell.

If you feel you are being schlonged please take our confidential survey and leave a comment and tell us how government has schlonged you.

RELATED VIDEO: Who are the biggest crooks in America?

RELATED ARTICLES:

To use Schlonged or not to use Schlonged, that is not the question!

Sanders: Trump is ‘bombastic’ so he can get media coverage

Islamic State Warns Iraqi Beauty Queen: Join Us or We Kidnap You [+Video]

/in , , , , /by

Iraq crowned its first beauty queen in 40 years, 20-year old Shayma Qassim on Saturday Dec. 19. Three days later Qassim received a threatening phone call from the Islamic State, telling her to join the terror group or they will kidnap her

According to the organizers of the contest, Qassim, who is originally from Kirkuk, vowed she will not be deterred, saying she would “continue forward despite any obstacles.” The beauty queen plans to represent Iraq in the next Miss Universe competition.

The Miss Iraq pageant was originally scheduled for October, but was moved to December after tribal leaders demanded no women from their families participate. Organizers reported two women bowed out after receiving death threats. In addition, the swimsuit competition was cancelled and a competition in a more modest outfit was substituted. Hijabs were banned for participants.

The final competition – the only part open to the media — was held in a hotel in Baghdad. Eight contestants in evening gowns vied for the title.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Terrorists Ask Instagram Users to Vote on Killing

New Horrific ISIS Video – Do You Really Want to Watch?

Horrifying Moment When ISIS Snatches Girls from Families

San Bernardino Terrorists Planned Attacks for Years

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of Miss Iraq Shaima Qassem reacting during the Miss Iraq Pageant in Baghdad, December 19, 2015. © Ahmed Saad / Reuters

Do you hear what I hear?

/in , , /by

Christmas carols are inspirational and one of my favorites is the Little Drummer Boy. Here is the Harry Simeoni Chorale singing the original version of a carol that sends the right message – the celebration of God’s greatest give to mankind – birth of baby Jesus.

Please enjoy this wonderful song. A very Merry Christmas to all of you from all of us at DrRichSwier.com.

Connecting the Dots in Chicago: Most 2015 shootings in Black Neighborhoods

/in , , , , , /by

Chicago has some of the most restrictive gun ownership laws in the United States. So where do most of the shootings in Chicago occur? In black neighborhoods.

The Chicago Tribune released a graphic of shooting victims to date in 2015. In 2015 to date there have been 2,901 shootings. In 2014 there was a total of 2,587. Shootings are up by 314 and the year is not over.

The map below left shows where people were shot in Chicago, broken down by community area. Darker shades of blue indicate a greater numbers of victims in those community areas. The map on the right is of the African American population in Chicago according to the 2011 census.

Do you see the correlation?

black population in chicago map

Blacks in black neighborhoods are most likely to be involved in a shooting. Perhaps it is time to arm the law abiding black citizens of Chicago? Perhaps the Black Lives Matter people in the featured image need to talk to blacks in Chicago?

Guns don’t shoot people, people shoot people. In Chicago it is black people shooting black people.

RELATED ARTICLE: What Rising Murder Rates in U.S. Cities Mean for 2016

2015: The Year of Leftist Speech Codes? The New Left’s monstrous movement turns on its own!

/in , , , , , /by

In 2015, leftists in the media and academia began criticizing the leftist mobs seeking to shut them down.  Kirsten Powers, the left-of-center commentator at Fox News, came out with a book titled, The Silencing: How the Left Is Killing Free Speech.

Northwestern University film professor Laura Kipnis, after being slapped with a Title IX lawsuit for her essay “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe,” made it to The Chronicle of Higher Education’s “2015 Influence List.” The 1972 law was intended to protect against sexual discrimination and misconduct.  Kipnis’s crime was to criticize new consensual-relations codes governing professor-student dating.  For opining that the codes infantilized students and increased the power of administrators, she was accused of creating a hostile environment and was greeted by mattress-carrying protestors (following Columbia art student, Emma Sulkowicz who claimed an ex-boyfriend raped her).

leftist students speech codesAfter the kangaroo court proceedings, Kipnis wrote “My Title IX Inquisition” for the Chronicle, expressing surprise that students would protest someone like herself, a feminist who hadn’t sexually assaulted anyone.  Kipnis had assumed that “academic freedom would prevail.”

“The whole thing seemed symbolically incoherent,” she mused, claiming that most of her academic colleagues, including “feminists, progressives, minorities, and those who identify as gay or queer,” live “in fear of some classroom incident spiraling into professional disaster.”

This rang true.  A piece in Vox titled “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Students Terrify Me” by an anonymous professor had gone viral.

Kipnis noted, “It’s astounding how aggressive students’ assertions of vulnerability have gotten in the past few years. Emotional discomfort is regarded as equivalent to material injury, and all injuries have to be remediated.”

Todd Gitlin, proud veteran leader of the 1960s “youth movement,” also criticized the youth, after some students at Columbia had proposed that syllabi contain “trigger warnings.”   He told them “You Are Here to Be Disturbed.”  By “here” he meant the college classroom, a place where many veterans of the 1960s campus takeovers found themselves comfortably ensconced with tenure.  Gitlin himself is at Columbia.  In character with those of his generation, he referred back to the “changes for good” they had instituted, including recognizing that speech acts can lead to a hostile environment and accordingly changing word usage, for example, replacing “girl” with “woman,” and “Negro” with “African-American.”  But, Gitlin warned, that does not justify “censorious policy.”

Kirsten Powers, who was born at the height of the “youth movement,” in 1969, believes the grizzled veterans, and writes, “While watching the illiberal left in action, it’s easy to forget that it was the political left that championed free speech in America.  During the Vietnam War era, the targeting of left-wing anti-war activists at the University of California-Berkeley for their dissent launched what came to be known as ‘The Free Speech Movement.’”

Powers takes the self-defined “free speech movement” at Berkeley as true to its name,  perpetuating myths promulgated in school lessons and in the media—by veterans of the movement, Todd Gitlin, being one of the most influential.  What we are seeing today as we close out 2015 with the forced or attempted ouster of insufficiently politically correct faculty and administrators, is a continuation of the policies of the 1960s New Left.

“Silencing” is in the DNA of the New Left and its progeny, today’s student protestors.

Mario Savio, the Berkeley student credited with beginning the free speech movement, admitted that the issue of “free speech” was a “pretext” to “arouse the students against the existing role of the university.”  That existing role is the search for truth through reasoned debate and evidence, and the appreciation for higher and beautiful things.

The acquiescence to Savio’s demands to use university space for political mobilizing led to waves of student protests.  But “debates” were conducted through bullhorns.  Negotiations were conducted by commandeering buildings and taking hostages.  Scientific labs and scholarly papers were destroyed.  People were hurt, sometimes killed.

The goal was to subvert the academy, and its methods, and make it into an adjunct for activism.  Todd Gitlin easily segued from leader of the largest student activist group, SDS, to teaching a self-glorifying history of the SDS.  History professor Howard Zinn did the same.  Today, City University history professor Angus Johnston describes himself as both a “historian and advocate of American student organizing.”

In his recent article in the Chronicle, “Student Protests, Then and Now,” Johnston attributes the resurgence of student protest to racial discrimination, sexual assault and harassment, and rising tuition and debt.  He and the student protestors, however, give little empirical evidence of discrimination or harassment.  He states, “The origins of today’s student complaints are deep and in many cases intractable, and the more accustomed activists become to protesting, the more readily they will mobilize in response to new provocation.”  Indeed.

It is a wonder that left-wing professors should complain now that their intellectual progeny have turned the p.c. microscope on them, and increasing its magnification.

The tenured leftists ignored or disparaged warnings of those like New York University Philosophy Professor Sidney Hook, who wrote in 1968, “If the university is conceived as an agency of action to transform society in behalf of a cause, no matter how exalted, it loses its relative autonomy, imperils both its independence and objectivity, and subjects itself to retaliatory curbs and controls on the part of society on whose support and largesse it ultimately depends.”

Hook, in that same article, stated a truth that few dare utter today: “it is preposterous for callow and immature adolescents who presumably have come to the university to get an education to set themselves up as authorities on what research by their teachers is educationally permissible.” Yet, many of the 1960s student protestors retain their youthful arrogance into old age.

One of these is Mark Rudd, leader of the Columbia takeover in 1968, co-founder of the terroristic SDS offshoot group Weatherman, and retired math professor.

Writing in his 2009 memoir, Underground: My Life in SDS and the Weathermen, the then 61-year-old Rudd sees nothing wrong with his actions as an undergraduate student who refused to listen to professors who were refugees from Nazi Germany.  They pled for free speech as students planned to block CIA recruiters on campus.  Believing in the “’neutral’ and ‘objective’ character of the university,” the refugees “identified SDS’s antiwar activities with the actions of Nazi students at German universities in the thirties.”

Rudd recounts, “This was a frightening image, even to us in SDS.  ‘What if every small group had the power to silence whomever they wanted—such as you?’ asked the old liberals.  ‘Isn’t there an absolute right to free speech?’”

Rudd, however, aligns CIA recruiters with the Nazi SS, citing the Nuremberg Trials that “established that it is the legal and moral responsibility of the individual not to comply with orders that constitute war crimes.”  Blazing forward with the false analogy, Rudd bars further discussion.  The intervening decades have brought him no enlightenment or humility.

Like many of his generation, Rudd spent his career proselytizing to the young, captive audiences in his classroom.  He brags about it in his memoir.  His website features photos of his 1968 mug shot and the Columbia takeover, and description of his work organizing student activists for environmental justice, unionization, and Palestinian rights, and against “war and militarization.”

The eight-day occupation of Columbia University was repeated metaphorically in faculty votes in the ensuing decades. As dissenting professors like Sidney Hook retired they were replaced by hires who put up barricades to traditionalists. They even held workshops on how to get past the old “mossbacks” on hiring committees.  I experienced this as a graduate student at the University of Georgia in the 1990s.  The Chronicle of Higher Education gave space in the 1980s and 1990s to “Ms. Mentor” for a column in which she advised aspiring feminist academics on how to get through the academic gates with subterfuge that ranged from altering modes of dress to scholarly papers.  As a result, the humanities have been transformed.  History specialization that focuses on the environment, gender, and sexuality predominates.  My field, English, is now an auxiliary for gender and ethnic studies.

Ironically, on the Chronicle’s “influential list,” next to Kipnis, are such notables as “Trigger-Warning Catalyst” Bailey Loverin, “Sexism Fighter: Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett,” and “Silence Breaker: Concerned Student 1950.”  The last is a group that used megaphones to make “demands” at the University of Missouri, which spurred a nationwide rash of similar “demands,” so far at 73 campuses.  They forced out the president.  The clenched fist is their symbol.

I must admit to feeling a bit of schadenfreude as I read about leftist professors and administrators being in fear of their students.  As a traditionalist and an adjunct professor, I lived in fear too—of department chairs and administrators.  These fears proved real, when I was told no classes were available for me, after my dissenting views became known to higher-ups.

In contrast, Kipnis, rather than losing her job, received kudos from fellow liberals. Conservative outlets came to her defense.  It was a conservative publishing house, Regnery, that published Kirsten Powers’ book.

But without fundamental changes, we can expect to see more inquisitions.  Another inquisition is underway against Harvard University professors for daring to question the accuracy of a documentary about rape on campus.  But I wonder: Will liberal academics defend the free speech of conservatives and allow them on campuses?

Or will the mobs of “callow and immature students” finally shut down the little fiefdoms that leftist academics have carved out for themselves?  I would not be sad about that.

Argentina starts flushing the Communists

/in , , , , /by

In Buenos Aries, Argentina today the new capitalist freedom loving government is beginning the process of flushing the Marxists out to sea. They are opening the gates to the newly installed rotor rooter septic tank Communist removal system out to the Pacific Ocean.

Mauricio Macri, President of Argentina.

Meet the new Capitalist freedom loving President of Argentina.  Senor Mauricio Macri. He is the guy in the suit.

Mr. Donald Trump is really excited  that the new capitalist team in Argentina is singing off the same sheet of music as he is.  Time to clean up the mess in South America.  Brazil is next.   They will enjoy working together in 2017.

Today the land fill clean up begins in Argentina.  Next year in the USA.

Argentina’s new government has  just fired the country’s chief media regulator.

They told him him his services as the “Marxist propaganda machine”, a.k.a. head of the AFSCA television and radio watchdog commission, were terminated.

Comrade Martin Sabbatella was openly working against Argentina’s new  center-right freedom loving capitalist President Mauricio Macri.

So he was ceremoniously  thrown out the back door of his former office in his PJ’s clutching a copy of the Karl Marx manifesto given to him perhaps by BHO and his Winnie the Poo bear?

The President of Argentina also shredded the Socialist central bank chief’s employment record by forcing him out of a job. Comrade Alejandro Vanoli was forced to resign.  Adios buddy maybe President Obama has a job someplace at the U.S. Federal Reserve for you?

President  Macri’s  is firing these miscreants and replacing them with a team willing to implement his free-market policies.

Obama’s puppet hand maiden the former Communist leader of Argentina  is fired.  She is terminated.  All together boys and girls…..  say…. ADIOS COMRADES.

A new era of freedom and free market capitalism is about to turn Argentina into a happy, free and prosperous country.

RELATED ARTICLE: Venezuela Attacks U.S. Website for Telling the Truth about Inflation

Give Yourself a Great Gift for Christmas: Liberation From Political Correctness

/in , , , /by

truth and political correctnessThe dictionary defines a phobia as “an abnormal or irrational fear of a specific thing…” Therefore, a phobia is a mental illness. I am fed up with the Left being allowed to decree that everyone repulsed by two men kissing on national TV is mentally ill; abnormal and irrational (homophobic).

In response to SCOTUS ruling in favor of same sex marriage some Americans said, “What’s the big deal? Who cares if homosexuals marry?” These naive Americans did not realize the ruling was only the beginning of government forcing Americans to condone homosexuality. Despite not having the authority to do so, in essence, SCOTUS made it a crime to choose not to actively participate in the normalization of homosexuality.

Regardless of religious or moral convictions, non-compliance with government mandated embrace of homosexuality has resulted in putting people out-of-business and even jailed; a Vermont pastor sentenced to a year in jail for refusing to marry a homosexual couple. 

Yes, the Left uses the tactic of attaching the word “phobic”, telling us we are stupid, bigoted or crazy, whenever we reject them forcing its radical anti-God and anti-American agenda down our throats.

To the majority of Americans who realize that America and Christians are under attack by Islamist, the Left (Obama) says we are Islamophobic. In other words, we are mentally ill, irrational and abnormal – crazy. 

In 2016, to save the lives of Americans and restore our great nation, it is crucial that Americans have a “Network” moment. As instructed in the movie, “Network”, Americans must throw open their windows and yell, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” 

Rush Limbaugh recently pointed out that not long ago, political correctness demands were laughed at; thought too absurd to be implemented. Today, PC dictates are mainstream, enforced with an iron-fist and wrecking havoc across America; endangering and enslaving Americans.

When I was a black kid growing up in the projects of Baltimore, anyone who allowed a bully to push them around was called a “chump.” My fellow Americans, we have been allowing the Left to make chumps of us for far too long. Frankly, I am sick of it. In 2016, “Screw PC!” And, I’m not crazy!

Just before Christmas, I made a deposit at my bank’s drive-through. My favorite teller (a middle-age Hispanic woman) greeted me with, “Happy Holidays.” Then she asked, “Do you say the right (PC) thing, Happy Holidays?” I replied, “I say, Merry Christmas.” A huge smile of relief swept over her face. She responded with a hearty, “Merry Christmas Mr Marcus!”

Patriots we have had a very challenging, heartbreaking and yet hopeful year. Atop my grown up Christmas list is that we who love freedom and America grasp the seriousness of what we are up against. I pray that we are gifted with the courage to liberate ourselves from the bullying of PC; enabling us to restore liberty and save our God given freedoms which includes free speech.

Here’s me singing, “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.” 

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas performed by Lloyd Marcus from Lloyd Marcus on Vimeo.

Enjoy and May God Bless Us Everyone!