A Second Term for Emmanuel Macron while Russia Bombs and Batters Ukraine?

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A Discussion with Nidra Poller.

French Presidential elections in the two stage First Round, April 10, 2022, and Second Round April 24th appear to be influenced by the European security crisis with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, impact on both domestic issues and concern over lack of active campaigning by incumbent President Macron-seeking a second term. He has earned mixed reactions for his adroit handling of the COVID pandemic. His rotation as the current EU President, direct diplomatic efforts with Russian President Putin in Moscow over the Ukraine invasion crisis ,and ‘narrow passage’ handling of EU sanctions against Russia is tempered by the difficulty posed by the more than $13 Billion investments by major French businesses there. That was cited by embattled Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in his virtual speech before the French National Assembly and Senate when he cajoled major French automobile, energy, and retail businesses in Russia:

“French companies must leave the Russian market … Renault, Auchan, Leroy Merlin and others … must cease to be sponsors of Russia’s military machine, sponsors of the killing of children and  women, sponsors of rape, robbery and looting by the Russian army.

“All companies must remember once and for all that values are worth more than profit, especially profit on blood. We must already think about the future. About how we will live after this war.”

Notwithstanding these remarks, Zelensky appears to be held in high regard by the French for his resolute Churchillian oratory in defense of his people and requests for military aid. Zelensky was applauded by French political leaders, media and is held in high esteem by the majority of the French public for his resolute defense of his country against the Russian onslaught.

That paralleled similar virtual addresses to the US Congress, UK Parliament and German Bundestag.

Zelensky’s virtual speech to the Israeli Knesset caused disquiet there over his reference to the Nazi Holocaust being the equivalent to the “holocaust” confronting Ukraine. This despite both Zelensky and Ukrainian PM Groysman being Jewish. Zelensky’s family included relatives killed during the Nazi “holocaust by bullets” that took the lives of upwards of 1.5 million Jews. Zelensky had beseeched Israel for military assistance but applauded Israeli PM Naftali Bennett efforts at mediating the dispute directly with Russian President Putin. Israel’s nuanced relations with Russia reflect the deconfliction agreement with Russia giving Israel free of action to undertake pre-emptive air attacks against Iranian targets in Syria, Iraq and more recently, Iran, itself.

Macron’s promotion of European security arrangements in collaboration with NATO has gotten attention in French polling. The latest IFOP poll indicated 88% of French sampled are clearly worried about impact on Europe from Putin’s war in Ukraine. 40% of those polled indicated that may influence their vote in the upcoming First and Second Round of the Presidential Elections. Our conversation will focus on the way the leading contenders are reacting to the crisis in Ukraine, and how that influences voter intentions.

There is one contender in the looming French Presidential race who may end up facing Macron in the second round. Marine Le Pen of the National Rally who in the recent past had boosted Putin, taken large loans from Russian banks, and even had campaign flyers featuring profiles of her and Russian President Putin. She has segued in her campaign to focusing on domestic issues like the cost of living–occasioned by inflationary pressure from the European security crisis—and modest support for the EU. Currently pre- first round polling show Macron favored at 28 percent, with Le Pen trailing at 20 percent, with others across the political spectrum from far right to greens trailing at half those levels to single digits. Zemmour, who fell by four points and favors visas for Ukrainian refugees, but not asylum for other religions—meaning Muslims. Prior to entering the Presidential campaign, he fashioned himself as a “French Putin.”

French Jews have concerns over rising antisemitism, with over 85% in recent polls expressing that view. That was evident in remarks by Valerie Pécresse candidate of the center right Les Republicans party at a memorial on the 10th anniversary in Toulouse of the Al Qaeda inspired massacre by Mohammed Merah who killed a teacher and three young students at Jewish day School. It was also evident in remarks by French President Macron and visiting Israeli President Israel Herzog over the issue of French views on the emerging Iranian nuclear deal with leaked disquieting provisions on release of an estimated $100 billion dollars of impounded oil revenues and delisting of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps from terrorist lists. Macron commented that he had “Israel’s security Interests” in mind.

Against this background we held our sixth in a series of discussions with American ex-pat in Paris, Nidra Poller in the final prelude to the French Presidential elections, First Round on April 10th, Second Round on April 24th.

Jerome Gordon: We’re here today for another stellar discussion with American ex-pat in Paris, Nidra Poller. It comes at a time of the NATO summit over Putin’s war against Ukraine. It also comes in the final strokes of the campaign for the French presidential elections, with the first round on April 10th and the second round on the 24th. There are some interesting developments relative to the French position on Ukraine. Embattled Ukraine President, Volodymyr Zelensky, gave a virtual speech to the French National Assembly on March 23rd. What was the reaction to his criticism of billions of euros of French investment in Russia “placing profits over human lives”? Further, what is the French opinion of this Jewish President of the Ukraine?

Nidra Poller: Well, opinion is highly favorable. The majority attitude in France is recognition of what’s at stake and great appreciation for President Zelensky’s leadership and the courage of the Ukrainian people and army. There is a forgiving attitude to anything that might be a bit controversial. I would say, with the exception of the ultra-nationalists and some of the far left, there is very great respect and consideration. President Zelensky had a standing ovation, as every time he speaks. As for French companies, it’s a mixture of understanding that some of them can pull out from one day to the next. But all of them recognize that they can’t go on cooperating with Russia. The separation process is underway. As for weaning away from Russian gas and oil, there is a general recognition, with the exceptions that I mentioned, that it has to be done.

Let me put it this way, Jerry: this is a complete break with the entire European security system that has been in place since the fall of the Soviet Union. The very notion of mutual deterrence has suddenly disappeared. A small, very courageous country is being invaded, pummeled with bombs aimed at the civilian population, things that haven’t happened in Europe since the Second World War. And, of course, we could all help, whether or not Ukraine is in NATO. Why aren’t we doing more? If we could give them that no fly zone, they would win, instead of being tortured day and night, and hanging on by a thread. We can’t do that for a simple reason: nuclear blackmail. What puzzles me, especially coming from certain conservative quarters I know very well, that we’ve worked with in the past, is that they don’t seem to understand that.

They don’t seem to see the difference between the kind of childish Black Lives Matter consciousness raising that went on after George Floyd was killed, and the sweeping reaction to the total disruption of any system of security in Europe. For some of the reality-deniers, the solution is, “We have to sit around the table.” That’s very French. We’ll sit around the table, and we can have good food, good wine and discuss what should be done. We have to sit around the table and put together a new European security structure. And Russia must be included. Well, I think that’s preposterous.

How can Russia be included in the security plan? Russia has to be precisely excluded, and the security has to be built against Russia. This is a total paradigm shift in modern history. In the coming years, people will be judged for their ability to understand it. I’ll give you some details soon about the range of positions taken here in France. But I’d like to stress, for our American audience that might or might not be concerned, his is happening around the corner from us here in Europe. We know that one false move and it hits home. The Third World War they talk about will be in Europe. Like the Second one.

Jerry Gordon: Nidra, you were on an online webinar when the subject of Zelensky’s speech to the Israeli Knesset came up, which was disquieting to some Knesset members. The guest on the webinar was a famous Soviet-era Jewish Human Rights Icon, Natan Sharansky. What were his views about the Israeli criticism of Zelensky and what was the surprising comment from a relative of yours in California, who we both hold in high esteem, who participated in this very interesting episode?

Nidra Poller: That’s the world of Zoom! I’m following the program here in Paris and suddenly there’s a question from my cousin in California. She asked Sharansky the question that Israelis have raised—some cautiously and others with severe criticism and, sometimes, angry comments: “He can go to hell. What is he talking about? Doesn’t he realize how vulnerable we are, and Ukraine didn’t even vote against the Anti-Zionist UN Resolutions.” Sharansky stands up for democracy in many difficult situations when others say it’s a lost cause. I always trust him on essential questions of conscience.

Sharansky said that Zelensky is admirable in leading his country, the army is admirable, the population is admirable. What is happening to them is unforgivable, and the fact that we can’t stop it is unbearable. If the president made a mistake and said something which wasn’t exactly true about the way the Ukrainians helped Jews during the Shoah—though there are a lot of righteous gentiles from Ukraine … Sharansky was kind, forgiving, and thoughtful. He doesn’t think we absolutely have to call Zelensky on those, however valid, complaints from Israelis. But it’s better to watch the podcast and listen to Sharansky’s answer in full. It should be available soon on the ISGAP site. .

Jerry Gordon: Thank you for that. French President, Macron, is in a very interesting position. He showed up at the NATO Ukraine summit, supportive of certain actions that NATO wanted to entertain, but he’s also on rotation as the EU President. That raises questions of “Does he support tougher sanctions against Russia”? Moreover, “what is France doing in the context of extending humanitarian aid and possible sanctuary for Ukrainian refugees”?

Nidra Poller: We’ve already received about 20,000 refugees. They are warmly welcomed. I would say that Macron is strong on accepting refugees, strong on giving military and humanitarian aid. Strong on cutting commercial ties with Russia, strong on sanctions. It puts his political competitors in the upcoming elections in a tough position. Sometimes they express it awkwardly, saying it’s not fair. What isn’t fair? The outgoing president is playing an important role in an existential crisis. How can they compete with that? In fact, the president does have to deal with an existential threat. And he’s doing quite well. Voters, with some obvious exceptions, will ask themselves if the other candidates could do as well. Zelensky has been praising Macron for his role. Some were saying that Macron stepped up but didn’t get good results. They’ve gone quiet now.

When the country faces an existential threat, you need national union. It’s not debatable. You have to stand behind your President. On this question, I’m talking again about some of our American conservative friends. Today, they think it’s more important to trash Biden than to encourage him to do the most he can do to save Ukraine. They will even lie to make their point. They claim that when Trump was president, there were no problems in Ukraine, Russia never attacked, everything was fine. Now, by the fault of the voters, or the fault of election fraud, he’s no longer president. I asked a friend who is a fervent Trump supporter why, if Trump is so strong, he doesn’t he call up Putin and tell him to stop? The answer was, he can’t do it, he’s not in a position of power anymore.

Well, if he’s so strong and he doesn’t do it, history will judge that.

Jerry Gordon: At the NATO summit, President Biden made a great play about the US providing natural gas to those suffering EU states now that the Nord Stream 1 and 2 Russian pipelines have been taken offline. Strategically Macron has supported—even before this Russia invasion of Ukraine—France’s reliance on climate-correct nuclear power, in sharp contrast to former German Chancellors Merkel and Schroeder, who stressed renewable and clean gas energy after the 2012 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan.

Nidra Poller: What happened is, the Greens had strong influence on national energy policy during the previous administration. President Hollande gave in to their demands that we get weaned from nuclear power, reducing it to half of the total, then a quarter, etc. Macron inherited that. He closed one nuclear plant that had already been halfway shut down. Then, he reversed the policy. Now he’s very happy that we have nuclear power and are only dependent on a small amount of Russian gas and oil. The same is true for the United States, though I see that the US was importing Russian oil. The EU had previously supported the Mid-East gas pipeline, involving Israel, Cyprus, and Greece. that Biden opposes.

If I look at the general direction in the most responsible places, I would say they’re going to work on all of these things. It took time and a shock, but they suddenly face up to something they had been denying for so long. If you look back at the whole relationship with Russia, you can ask who understood, before Russia invaded Ukraine, the full extent of this threat to energy resources?

Jerry Gordon: Where do the French Presidential candidates stand on Putin’s War in Ukraine? What are the prospects of Zemmour, Le Pen, Pécresse, Mélenchon versus Macron in the first and second Rounds, April 10th and 24th?

Nidra Poller: What I’m looking at now is, who can react fast enough and understand what’s at stake in the national elections in April. And there you have some glaring failings. As to Macron’s standing– if the polls mean anything, he’s been given as the winner since the beginning. What changes in the electoral result is the percentage of his plurality. What might change, given the current situation with Russia and Ukraine, is which candidate will survive to face him in the first round. The polls are like see-saws! You can go to one TV channel and Valérie Pécresse (Les Républicains) is in the basement. You switch to another channel, and it’s Eric Zemmour in the basement.

This is probably the hardest election to call in modern times in France. The factor of abstention is considerable. There’s no way to know if people that express their preference will actually vote. We’ve had examples where one candidate was high in the polls, but the voters didn’t turn out. Let’s go down the line and see how it’s playing out. Marine Le Pen’s voters might care about what’s happening in Ukraine, but it’s not their main problem. She has a troubling proximity to Putin and Russia. She has a large loan from the Russian Bank. She had to skittle out of that issue as fast as possible. Her program now is focused on how the French people will suffer from the sanctions and her job is to protect them, to insure they have no loss in buying power and won’t be exposed to runaway inflation.

That seems to work with her voters. So, she might make it to the second round. But she won’t win. The question is, will some that said they would vote for Zemmour figure out that a vote for Zemmour means Macron will be reelected? Some might switch to Pécresse. Valérie Pécresse has an image problem. The same people that claim to defend our wonderful French culture, the elegance, refinement, the art and literature– and she’s quite elegant refined and cultivated—find her too bourgeois to be president. They claim she doesn’t understand the little man. In fact, as president of the largest region in France, Ile-de-France, she’s constantly dealing with the problems of the little man. But she has a problem getting her message across. We’ve never had a female president. As it looks now, she probably won’t make it to the second round.

Zemmour is in a tight situation. He’s lost too much in the polls. His image of the candidate that comes out of the blue and soars to the heights is not holding up. The next question will be the respective roles Les Républicains and Reconquêe in the legislative elections and, eventually, in reshaping the Right. Zemmour’s position on Ukraine is incoherent. On the one hand, he’ll say that Russia has no justification for attacking Ukraine. But he follows with … you have to understand that Russia has been humiliated and constantly targeted by NATO, they have a right to say they don’t want NATO on their border. Zemmour would like us to forget that at the beginning of this crisis, he gave the Putin/Russian version of history: the western part of Ukraine is Galicia, it’s Poland; on the east, it’s Russia. Ukraine has to compromise.

Donetsk and Luhansk, the breakaway republics that Putin created in Eastern Ukraine, are like a two-state solution. Claiming the right to limited autonomy, Putin uses them to try to destroy Ukraine. That’s what he’s been doing for the last eight years. He got away with it, so he thought he could get away with even more. Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden all have a share in this. The Europeans too. What we need to look at now is: how are they reacting to the new situation?

Germany suddenly increased its military budget by tens of billions of euros, and is sending lethal weapons to Ukraine. It’s a complete break with the past. None of the center to far right candidates– Marine Le Pen, Eric Zemmour, Valérie Pécresse –give the impression, in their approach to European security in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, that they would handle the situation better than the outgoing president. The issues where they disagree with Macron that will be a problem for France over the next five years, are related to jihad, Islamization, immigration, crime, domestic security… On some of those issues, Macron has to move to the right. In fact, he has picked up elements of Valérie Pécresse’s platform.

There’s an incident that occurred with Zemmour this week. We have a terrible problem now with crack-heads. This is not a country where people can be parked off in the hinterland, everything is next-door to everything else. So, the crack-heads are next-door to costly apartments in gentrified neighborhoods. Zemmour went to one of these trouble-spots to show he would be tough on this kind of thing. And he was physically attacked. His usually discrete bodyguards had to come out in the open and get him out of there. It’s not the first time that a candidate has been attacked, but he didn’t look very strong. It’s nice to perform at a big rally with people that worship you. You say you’ll know how to deal with the problem. But when you get up close to it, you can’t even defend yourself, let alone defend France. So, incidents like this are detrimental to Zemmour’s campaign. And he has not gleaned any support from the Les Républicains. His idea of making the new right, which would include what’s called the far right, is not going anywhere.

Jerry Gordon: How do the French Jews feel about this election? There have been a couple of disturbing polls– one indicated that an overwhelming number of French Jews who were polled said that antisemitism is a problem for them. And there’s also a question of who they would prefer to vote for in this election.

Nidra Poller: Well, I don’t know of any polls that give a clear picture. There is not a Jewish vote per se, but the Jewish vote in France is, generally speaking, on the right. The Jewish vote for the left would be very limited.

On the question of Ukraine, there’s fierce debate, on an international scale, among Jewish commentators. One commentator, who has been very brilliantly distinguished in other aspects, wrote an article about “Zelensky the warmonger” who exploited the Shoah. I know people were upset by the Ukraine President exploiting the Shoah–in which he lost relatives–but Zelensky the “warmonger”?

Sarah Cattan, the editor-in-chief of Tribune Juive, where I publish regularly, has been very good at publishing a wide variety of viewpoints. Some of the writers are totally defending Ukraine and others go all the way back to the 17th Century Cossacks to undermine its reputation. They talk about the neo-Nazis, I ask you, how many neo-Nazis do you have in the United States and how many do we have in France” What about the January 6th invasion of the Capitol in Washington, DC? What prompted the February 24th Russian invasion of Ukraine ? It’s not the time, in my opinion, to pick nits out of the heads of the brave Ukrainians fighters. Because what we’re seeing …this is one of the main questions of our time… Will democracies fight for their freedom? The democracies were reluctant to fight in the Second World War. Finally, they took on the fight for freedom, and they won. Today, again, they are reluctant, or want to fight from a safe distance.

I understand people that say “anything but war,” but then it’s “anything but destruction.” How do you choose? That is the big question of our time. The way we answer that challenge will determine our future as democracies. Today, the contributions in military aid and humanitarian aid and every kind of support have been extraordinary. We’ve never seen anything on this scale. But they don’t seem to understand communications.

You can criticize Zelensky, but he is the one who is leading his country, defending it. Remember, not only Americans but many others thought they would have to exfiltrate him to a safe place where he would lead a government-in-exile, let his people die, and then make a deal. When people saw who he is and how he is, they couldn’t help but admire him. On our side, there is a lot of very defeatist talk. Like, we can’t do a no-fly zone because then it’s going to be all out war. We can’t send Ukraine airplanes because then Putin is going to use nuclear weapons.

We can’t influence reality exclusively by what we say, but it helps. I think it would help to say, wait a minute, if this goes any further, we’re going to just let lose all of the constraints and we’re stronger and we’ll smash Putin. You know the Israelis do that way with Iran.

Jerry Gordon: Right.

Nidra Poller: They don’t say, Iran is so big and what if they attack us and maybe they’ll win. They say, “Don’t you dare, because we’ll smash you to smithereens and no one will ever know where you were.” And it matters. I don’t know if it’s too late to change it. But there are some commentators and specialists here, serious people, who say we should call Putin’s bluff. Because otherwise we’re sitting there watching him destroy this country.

Jerry Gordon: Nidra, this was the 10th anniversary of something that was riveting for me and certainly for you when it occurred. That was the Toulouse Massacre in 2012 where a teacher Jonathan Sandler, his two sons, and the daughter of the director of the Jewish day school were murdered. One of the candidates, Valérie Pécresse, talked about that.

Nidra Poller: Yes. She’s strong on this question.

Jerry Gordon: And also, the occasion for a visit by Israel’s new president, Isaac Herzog who, along with Macron attended a Memorial for the Toulouse victims. Macron assured Herzog that he had Israel’s security in mind. That was a reference to what is emerging in terms of this contrived new nuclear pact with Iran. There are commentators in Israel, the United States, perhaps in Europe, who say this is going to be a disaster. The issue is whether Israel now finds itself in the peculiar position, on the one hand, trying to balance between nuanced behavior to Putin on the one hand, because of the de-confliction agreement that Israel has had for several years now giving it the freedom to attack Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iran in Syria, versus, on the other hand, taking action as the strong horse in the Middle East to deal with the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran. That is the range of commentary that has popped up, not only here in the United States but in Israel among some of the knowledgeable commentators. Then there is Israel’s dilemma: hang in there as a mediator of a possible settlement in Putin’s war against Ukraine. A poll in Israel found most Israelis sampled think that Prime Minister Bennett will fail in his role as mediator between Ukraine’s President Zelensky and Russia’s President Putin.

Nidra Poller: Of course, at this point, everyone will fail, that’s clear.

Jerry Gordon: Yes.

Nidra Poller: Mediation doesn’t succeed during war; it comes after it ends.

Jerry Gordon: Yes, that’s correct.

Nidra Poller: Yes, war is bad. But somebody wins, somebody loses, and then they try to negotiate for peace. You don’t succeed in the middle of a war; you just start negotiations. Besides, Putin has shown that he’s not even interested in a cease fire. We can compare Putin with regard to Ukraine and Iran with regard to Israel. Or the Palestinians with regard to Israel. The Palestinians do the same thing as Putin. They start a war and when they lose, they say, “Oh, it’s not fair. Now, here’s what I wanted, and you have to give it to me because if not I’ll start another war.” In the past, there was the Age of Absurdity. Today, we are living in the Age of Incoherence. If they go through with this Iran deal, it’s going to be similar to what a French person felt when he turned on the radio and found out the Nazis were marching into France.

What I mean is, you turn on the television and you discover that you’re being delivered into the hands of another tyrant. It is totally incoherent… Today, I checked rapidly, and didn’t see anything in French media about the Iran deal. If I remember correctly, Russia is in the JCPOA. So how can they make a deal, including Russia, to allow Iran to attack Israel freely while claiming they’d love to help Ukraine, but can’t do it because it’s going to set off a Fourth and a Fifth World War before they’re finished. I can’t believe them; I can’t believe it. The situation in Ukraine is the smoke screen. Could they just go ahead with the Iran deal while no one is looking? But if I understand correctly, the original JCPOA was not signed. If they had signed it, they would have had to go to the US Senate for approval as a treaty. They didn’t. I think the American congress can do something to stop it. It’s simply incoherent. Macron says anti-Zionism is antisemitism, and then France votes in favor of anti-Zionist UN resolutions. And sticks to an official two-state solution policy. But the two-state solution, whether for Ukraine or for Israel, is a form of suicide.

I’ve been following the Vienna negotiations all year, attentive to all the consultations and strong statements. Remember? Nothing is settled until everything is settled. And now they’re going to take the Revolutionary Guard off of the list of terrorist organizations? There can’t be any rational basis for that agreement. Macron will have to discuss it after the elections but, as I said, nobody is talking about it now. We fear that they’re just going to go ahead and do it. Can’t stop Putin, can’t stop the Iranians.

Jerry Gordon: That is the conundrum of the moment now. It would appear to me as a former US Army intelligence officer who six decades ago used to brief commanding officers on Russian military prowess and doctrine during the Cold War. The message was that Ivan is not 10-feet tall. This war in the Ukraine is an illustration of how badly Russia’s armed forces are trained and equipped. The facts are that there is no combat leadership at what we consider the unit level, which was the brilliance of General Marshall during World War I that carried over to World War II and subsequent conflicts. In a discussion with another commentator, I pointed out that nothing has changed in six decades virtually since the end of the Stalin era, the end of the Cold War. As evidenced by the brutality of Russian operations in Ukraine that have stalled.

Nidra Poller: Same techniques and same impasse. When I was a student in the late ’50s… I was at the University of Wisconsin and we had real Communists, because we were perhaps…believe me… the only important left-wing university. All the universities in the United States were conservative in those days. We had real Communists and we had Russians grooming people up, down, and sideways. They hitched onto the civil rights movement, whatever, they were everywhere, and McCarthy was as right as he was wrong. So, they’re doing the same thing now.

By the way, I wanted to tell you that when Valérie Pécresse talks about a long-range policy with Russia, and whether we missed early signs of what is happening today, she always mentions the Wagner mercenaries in Mali and how they pushed us out of Mali. We just took it on the chin, she said,

Jerry Gordon: Pécresse is dead spot on. My colleague and co-author, former US -trained Chadian Lt. General Abakar M. Abdallah who is a Darfur native and Chair of the Sudan United Movement, noted that Putin’s Wagner group is training a Free Arab Army in the Sudan to overthrow neighboring Chad, all amid violence erupting in Senegal. Macron and the EU are not addressing the Russian threat destabilizing the important region of Sahel in Africa.

Nidra Poller: Pécresse speaks Russian. She was in Russia for a year or so when she was a student. She speaks a little Japanese too. She’s very bright and, I think, honest. But it doesn’t seem to help her in the presidential race. The Russians have been getting a foothold here and there. And now they come with their “great” army. I’m sure you’ve heard the stories of our central European grandparents… One of the reasons they left the Pale of Settlement is the that the men would be drafted into the army for 25 years.

Today, you can see, they don’t care. I’ve seen reports from Ukrainian sources …they say the Russians don’t pick up the wounded and dead soldiers. The Ukrainians set up a hotline, I suppose it still works, where Russian mothers, sisters, wives, sweethearts could call and ask for information. They don’t know what’s happened to their own soldiers that were sent there. They weren’t told they were going to war. You can’t have a good army with that kind of disregard. They say the soldiers were given rations unfit for consumption after 2015. These guys are cannon fodder. But, of course, there’s fear of what might be behind them.

Jerry Gordon: True. In many ways, I thought that the resilience on the part of the Ukrainians under these dire circumstances almost paralleled what Israel had to go through in several wars fought from its Independence in 1948, the June 1967 Six Day War, the grueling October 1973, the First and Second Intifada, Operations in 2008-09, 2012, 2014 and 2020 against Hamas in Gaza and the War between the Wars against Iran in Lebanon and Syria.

Nidra Poller: Maybe if Zelensky weren’t in the situation he’s in, he might have been able to make more valid comparisons. We can tell him later, after he survives this terrible ordeal. Yes, of course, there are similarities.

Jerry Gordon: Yes. No one’s written about it.

Nidra Poller: Not the comparisons that some conservatives are throwing at us. Another conservative friend told me he didn’t want to admit the Russians bombed the maternity hospital in Mariupol because it will validate accusations against Israel the next time Hamas hides in the hospital… The Ukrainian troops weren’t hiding in the hospital! It was pregnant women. If you can’t make a distinction between these things…

But I have often written about this: if the West wants to save democracy, they have to stop hammering on Israel. Or saying how much they love Israel but doing everything to undermine Israel’s security. And they have to understand that Israel, like Ukraine…these are the people that fight for their freedom. And that’s the only way they can be free, the only way they can maintain their national integrity.

If you’re sitting in a big comfortable country far away from the battlefield, you might think that your freedom is secure. But in the United States, you have to fight internal enemies too. Why would anyone think that suddenly, after all the centuries and millennia of human life, suddenly you don’t have to fight for your freedom? In everyday life you have to fight for your freedom, and it demands coherence and utility.

We try our best to help and I’m open to debate, but with the people I’m telling you about, there’s no debate. You publish an article, and they say, take me off your list.

Jerry Gordon: On that note, I want to conclude another brilliant wide ranging conversation with you. We will soon know what the results are of the French election, as the first round occurs in just a few weeks followed by the second round to see who is going to get the nod.

Nidra Poller: You can tell your listeners I’m bad at predicting the vote. I never believed the French would elect François Hollande. And they did! But this one is really up for grabs (for the 1st round candidate that will face Macron). We’ll know the result before our next conversation. By then, we’ll be going into the legislative elections. This is important because if Macron wins but doesn’t get a legislative majority, it will be “cohabitation.” And that might be a stumbling block. You know, it’s like a situation in the U.S. where the president doesn’t have a congressional majority. It’s hard to pass legislation.

Jerry Gordon: I want to thank you again an engrossing discussion on France, Russia’s dangerous provocative war against Ukraine, Israel’s dilemma on how best to deny Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons.

Nidra Poller: Thank you.

What happened is, the Greens had strong influence on national energy policy during the previous administration. President Hollande gave in to their demands that we get weaned from nuclear power, reducing it to half of the total, then a quarter, etc. Macron inherited that. He closed one nuclear plant that had already been halfway shut down. Then, he reversed the policy. Now he’s very happy that we have nuclear power and are only dependent on a small amount of Russian gas and oil. The same is true for the United States, though I see that the US was importing Russian oil. The EU had previously supported the Mid-East gas pipeline, involving Israel, Cyprus, and Greece. that Biden opposes.

If I look at the general direction in the most responsible places, I would say they’re going to work on all of these things. It took time and a shock, but they suddenly face up to something they had been denying for so long. If you look back at the whole relationship with Russia, you can ask who understood, before Russia invaded Ukraine, the full extent of this threat to energy resources?

Jerry Gordon: Where do the French Presidential candidates stand on Putin’s War in Ukraine? What are the prospects of Zemmour, Le Pen, Pécresse, Mélenchon versus Macron in the first and second Rounds, April 10th and 24th?

Nidra Poller: What I’m looking at now is, who can react fast enough and understand what’s at stake in the national elections in April. And there you have some glaring failings. As to Macron’s standing– if the polls mean anything, he’s been given as the winner since the beginning. What changes in the electoral result is the percentage of his plurality. What might change, given the current situation with Russia and Ukraine, is which candidate will survive to face him in the first round. The polls are like see-saws! You can go to one TV channel and Valérie Pécresse (Les Républicains) is in the basement. You switch to another channel, and it’s Eric Zemmour in the basement.

This is probably the hardest election to call in modern times in France. The factor of abstention is considerable. There’s no way to know if people that express their preference will actually vote. We’ve had examples where one candidate was high in the polls, but the voters didn’t turn out. Let’s go down the line and see how it’s playing out. Marine Le Pen’s voters might care about what’s happening in Ukraine, but it’s not their main problem. She has a troubling proximity to Putin and Russia. She has a large loan from the Russian Bank. She had to skittle out of that issue as fast as possible. Her program now is focused on how the French people will suffer from the sanctions and her job is to protect them, to insure they have no loss in buying power and won’t be exposed to runaway inflation.

That seems to work with her voters. So, she might make it to the second round. But she won’t win. The question is, will some that said they would vote for Zemmour figure out that a vote for Zemmour means Macron will be reelected? Some might switch to Pécresse. Valérie Pécresse has an image problem. The same people that claim to defend our wonderful French culture, the elegance, refinement, the art and literature– and she’s quite elegant refined and cultivated—find her too bourgeois to be president. They claim she doesn’t understand the little man. In fact, as president of the largest region in France, Ile-de-France, she’s constantly dealing with the problems of the little man. But she has a problem getting her message across. We’ve never had a female president. As it looks now, she probably won’t make it to the second round.

Zemmour is in a tight situation. He’s lost too much in the polls. His image of the candidate that comes out of the blue and soars to the heights is not holding up. The next question will be the respective roles Les Républicains and Reconquêe in the legislative elections and, eventually, in reshaping the Right. Zemmour’s position on Ukraine is incoherent. On the one hand, he’ll say that Russia has no justification for attacking Ukraine. But he follows with … you have to understand that Russia has been humiliated and constantly targeted by NATO, they have a right to say they don’t want NATO on their border. Zemmour would like us to forget that at the beginning of this crisis, he gave the Putin/Russian version of history: the western part of Ukraine is Galicia, it’s Poland; on the east, it’s Russia. Ukraine has to compromise.

Donetsk and Luhansk, the breakaway republics that Putin created in Eastern Ukraine, are like a two-state solution. Claiming the right to limited autonomy, Putin uses them to try to destroy Ukraine. That’s what he’s been doing for the last eight years. He got away with it, so he thought he could get away with even more. Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden all have a share in this. The Europeans too. What we need to look at now is: how are they reacting to the new situation?

Germany suddenly increased its military budget by tens of billions of euros, and is sending lethal weapons to Ukraine. It’s a complete break with the past. None of the center to far right candidates– Marine Le Pen, Eric Zemmour, Valérie Pécresse –give the impression, in their approach to European security in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, that they would handle the situation better than the outgoing president. The issues where they disagree with Macron that will be a problem for France over the next five years, are related to jihad, Islamization, immigration, crime, domestic security… On some of those issues, Macron has to move to the right. In fact, he has picked up elements of Valérie Pécresse’s platform.

There’s an incident that occurred with Zemmour this week. We have a terrible problem now with crack-heads. This is not a country where people can be parked off in the hinterland, everything is next-door to everything else. So, the crack-heads are next-door to costly apartments in gentrified neighborhoods. Zemmour went to one of these trouble-spots to show he would be tough on this kind of thing. And he was physically attacked. His usually discrete bodyguards had to come out in the open and get him out of there. It’s not the first time that a candidate has been attacked, but he didn’t look very strong. It’s nice to perform at a big rally with people that worship you. You say you’ll know how to deal with the problem. But when you get up close to it, you can’t even defend yourself, let alone defend France. So, incidents like this are detrimental to Zemmour’s campaign. And he has not gleaned any support from the Les Républicains. His idea of making the new right, which would include what’s called the far right, is not going anywhere.

Jerry Gordon: How do the French Jews feel about this election? There have been a couple of disturbing polls– one indicated that an overwhelming number of French Jews who were polled said that antisemitism is a problem for them. And there’s also a question of who they would prefer to vote for in this election.

Nidra Poller: Well, I don’t know of any polls that give a clear picture. There is not a Jewish vote per se, but the Jewish vote in France is, generally speaking, on the right. The Jewish vote for the left would be very limited.

On the question of Ukraine, there’s fierce debate, on an international scale, among Jewish commentators. One commentator, who has been very brilliantly distinguished in other aspects, wrote an article about “Zelensky the warmonger” who exploited the Shoah. I know people were upset by the Ukraine President exploiting the Shoah–in which he lost relatives–but Zelensky the “warmonger”?

Sarah Cattan, the editor-in-chief of Tribune Juive, where I publish regularly, has been very good at publishing a wide variety of viewpoints. Some of the writers are totally defending Ukraine and others go all the way back to the 17th Century Cossacks to undermine its reputation. They talk about the neo-Nazis, I ask you, how many neo-Nazis do you have in the United States and how many do we have in France” What about the January 6th invasion of the Capitol in Washington, DC? What prompted the February 24th Russian invasion of Ukraine ? It’s not the time, in my opinion, to pick nits out of the heads of the brave Ukrainians fighters. Because what we’re seeing …this is one of the main questions of our time… Will democracies fight for their freedom? The democracies were reluctant to fight in the Second World War. Finally, they took on the fight for freedom, and they won. Today, again, they are reluctant, or want to fight from a safe distance.

I understand people that say “anything but war,” but then it’s “anything but destruction.” How do you choose? That is the big question of our time. The way we answer that challenge will determine our future as democracies. Today, the contributions in military aid and humanitarian aid and every kind of support have been extraordinary. We’ve never seen anything on this scale. But they don’t seem to understand communications.

You can criticize Zelensky, but he is the one who is leading his country, defending it. Remember, not only Americans but many others thought they would have to exfiltrate him to a safe place where he would lead a government-in-exile, let his people die, and then make a deal. When people saw who he is and how he is, they couldn’t help but admire him. On our side, there is a lot of very defeatist talk. Like, we can’t do a no-fly zone because then it’s going to be all out war. We can’t send Ukraine airplanes because then Putin is going to use nuclear weapons.

We can’t influence reality exclusively by what we say, but it helps. I think it would help to say, wait a minute, if this goes any further, we’re going to just let lose all of the constraints and we’re stronger and we’ll smash Putin. You know the Israelis do that way with Iran.

Jerry Gordon: Right.

Nidra Poller: They don’t say, Iran is so big and what if they attack us and maybe they’ll win. They say, “Don’t you dare, because we’ll smash you to smithereens and no one will ever know where you were.” And it matters. I don’t know if it’s too late to change it. But there are some commentators and specialists here, serious people, who say we should call Putin’s bluff. Because otherwise we’re sitting there watching him destroy this country.

Jerry Gordon: Nidra, this was the 10th anniversary of something that was riveting for me and certainly for you when it occurred. That was the Toulouse Massacre in 2012 where a teacher Jonathan Sandler, his two sons, and the daughter of the director of the Jewish day school were murdered. One of the candidates, Valérie Pécresse, talked about that.

Nidra Poller: Yes. She’s strong on this question.

Jerry Gordon: And also, the occasion for a visit by Israel’s new president, Isaac Herzog who, along with Macron attended a Memorial for the Toulouse victims. Macron assured Herzog that he had Israel’s security in mind. That was a reference to what is emerging in terms of this contrived new nuclear pact with Iran. There are commentators in Israel, the United States, perhaps in Europe, who say this is going to be a disaster. The issue is whether Israel now finds itself in the peculiar position, on the one hand, trying to balance between nuanced behavior to Putin on the one hand, because of the de-confliction agreement that Israel has had for several years now giving it the freedom to attack Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iran in Syria, versus, on the other hand, taking action as the strong horse in the Middle East to deal with the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran. That is the range of commentary that has popped up, not only here in the United States but in Israel among some of the knowledgeable commentators. Then there is Israel’s dilemma: hang in there as a mediator of a possible settlement in Putin’s war against Ukraine. A poll in Israel found most Israelis sampled think that Prime Minister Bennett will fail in his role as mediator between Ukraine’s President Zelensky and Russia’s President Putin.

Nidra Poller: Of course, at this point, everyone will fail, that’s clear.

Jerry Gordon: Yes.

Nidra Poller: Mediation doesn’t succeed during war; it comes after it ends.

Jerry Gordon: Yes, that’s correct.

Nidra Poller: Yes, war is bad. But somebody wins, somebody loses, and then they try to negotiate for peace. You don’t succeed in the middle of a war; you just start negotiations. Besides, Putin has shown that he’s not even interested in a cease fire. We can compare Putin with regard to Ukraine and Iran with regard to Israel. Or the Palestinians with regard to Israel. The Palestinians do the same thing as Putin. They start a war and when they lose, they say, “Oh, it’s not fair. Now, here’s what I wanted, and you have to give it to me because if not I’ll start another war.” In the past, there was the Age of Absurdity. Today, we are living in the Age of Incoherence. If they go through with this Iran deal, it’s going to be similar to what a French person felt when he turned on the radio and found out the Nazis were marching into France.

What I mean is, you turn on the television and you discover that you’re being delivered into the hands of another tyrant. It is totally incoherent… Today, I checked rapidly, and didn’t see anything in French media about the Iran deal. If I remember correctly, Russia is in the JCPOA. So how can they make a deal, including Russia, to allow Iran to attack Israel freely while claiming they’d love to help Ukraine, but can’t do it because it’s going to set off a Fourth and a Fifth World War before they’re finished. I can’t believe them; I can’t believe it. The situation in Ukraine is the smoke screen. Could they just go ahead with the Iran deal while no one is looking? But if I understand correctly, the original JCPOA was not signed. If they had signed it, they would have had to go to the US Senate for approval as a treaty. They didn’t. I think the American congress can do something to stop it. It’s simply incoherent. Macron says anti-Zionism is antisemitism, and then France votes in favor of anti-Zionist UN resolutions. And sticks to an official two-state solution policy. But the two-state solution, whether for Ukraine or for Israel, is a form of suicide.

I’ve been following the Vienna negotiations all year, attentive to all the consultations and strong statements. Remember? Nothing is settled until everything is settled. And now they’re going to take the Revolutionary Guard off of the list of terrorist organizations? There can’t be any rational basis for that agreement. Macron will have to discuss it after the elections but, as I said, nobody is talking about it now. We fear that they’re just going to go ahead and do it. Can’t stop Putin, can’t stop the Iranians.

Jerry Gordon: That is the conundrum of the moment now. It would appear to me as a former US Army intelligence officer who six decades ago used to brief commanding officers on Russian military prowess and doctrine during the Cold War. The message was that Ivan is not 10-feet tall. This war in the Ukraine is an illustration of how badly Russia’s armed forces are trained and equipped. The facts are that there is no combat leadership at what we consider the unit level, which was the brilliance of General Marshall during World War I that carried over to World War II and subsequent conflicts. In a discussion with another commentator, I pointed out that nothing has changed in six decades virtually since the end of the Stalin era, the end of the Cold War. As evidenced by the brutality of Russian operations in Ukraine that have stalled.

Nidra Poller: Same techniques and same impasse. When I was a student in the late ’50s… I was at the University of Wisconsin and we had real Communists, because we were perhaps…believe me… the only important left-wing university. All the universities in the United States were conservative in those days. We had real Communists and we had Russians grooming people up, down, and sideways. They hitched onto the civil rights movement, whatever, they were everywhere, and McCarthy was as right as he was wrong. So, they’re doing the same thing now.

By the way, I wanted to tell you that when Valérie Pécresse talks about a long-range policy with Russia, and whether we missed early signs of what is happening today, she always mentions the Wagner mercenaries in Mali and how they pushed us out of Mali. We just took it on the chin, she said,

Jerry Gordon: Pécresse is dead spot on. My colleague and co-author, former US -trained Chadian Lt. General Abakar M. Abdallah who is a Darfur native and Chair of the Sudan United Movement, noted that Putin’s Wagner group is training a Free Arab Army in the Sudan to overthrow neighboring Chad, all amid violence erupting in Senegal. Macron and the EU are not addressing the Russian threat destabilizing the important region of Sahel in Africa.

Nidra Poller: Pécresse speaks Russian. She was in Russia for a year or so when she was a student. She speaks a little Japanese too. She’s very bright and, I think, honest. But it doesn’t seem to help her in the presidential race. The Russians have been getting a foothold here and there. And now they come with their “great” army. I’m sure you’ve heard the stories of our central European grandparents… One of the reasons they left the Pale of Settlement is the that the men would be drafted into the army for 25 years.

Today, you can see, they don’t care. I’ve seen reports from Ukrainian sources …they say the Russians don’t pick up the wounded and dead soldiers. The Ukrainians set up a hotline, I suppose it still works, where Russian mothers, sisters, wives, sweethearts could call and ask for information. They don’t know what’s happened to their own soldiers that were sent there. They weren’t told they were going to war. You can’t have a good army with that kind of disregard. They say the soldiers were given rations unfit for consumption after 2015. These guys are cannon fodder. But, of course, there’s fear of what might be behind them.

Jerry Gordon: True. In many ways, I thought that the resilience on the part of the Ukrainians under these dire circumstances almost paralleled what Israel had to go through in several wars fought from its Independence in 1948, the June 1967 Six Day War, the grueling October 1973, the First and Second Intifada, Operations in 2008-09, 2012, 2014 and 2020 against Hamas in Gaza and the War between the Wars against Iran in Lebanon and Syria.

Nidra Poller: Maybe if Zelensky weren’t in the situation he’s in, he might have been able to make more valid comparisons. We can tell him later, after he survives this terrible ordeal. Yes, of course, there are similarities.

Jerry Gordon: Yes. No one’s written about it.

Nidra Poller: Not the comparisons that some conservatives are throwing at us. Another conservative friend told me he didn’t want to admit the Russians bombed the maternity hospital in Mariupol because it will validate accusations against Israel the next time Hamas hides in the hospital… The Ukrainian troops weren’t hiding in the hospital! It was pregnant women. If you can’t make a distinction between these things…

But I have often written about this: if the West wants to save democracy, they have to stop hammering on Israel. Or saying how much they love Israel but doing everything to undermine Israel’s security. And they have to understand that Israel, like Ukraine…these are the people that fight for their freedom. And that’s the only way they can be free, the only way they can maintain their national integrity.

If you’re sitting in a big comfortable country far away from the battlefield, you might think that your freedom is secure. But in the United States, you have to fight internal enemies too. Why would anyone think that suddenly, after all the centuries and millennia of human life, suddenly you don’t have to fight for your freedom? In everyday life you have to fight for your freedom, and it demands coherence and utility.

We try our best to help and I’m open to debate, but with the people I’m telling you about, there’s no debate. You publish an article, and they say, take me off your list.

Jerry Gordon: On that note, I want to conclude another brilliant wide ranging conversation with you. We will soon know what the results are of the French election, as the first round occurs in just a few weeks followed by the second round to see who is going to get the nod.

Nidra Poller: You can tell your listeners I’m bad at predicting the vote. I never believed the French would elect François Hollande. And they did! But this one is really up for grabs (for the 1st round candidate that will face Macron). We’ll know the result before our next conversation. By then, we’ll be going into the legislative elections. This is important because if Macron wins but doesn’t get a legislative majority, it will be “cohabitation.” And that might be a stumbling block. You know, it’s like a situation in the U.S. where the president doesn’t have a congressional majority. It’s hard to pass legislation.

Jerry Gordon: I want to thank you again an engrossing discussion on France, Russia’s dangerous provocative war against Ukraine, Israel’s dilemma on how best to deny Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons.

Nidra Poller: Thank you.

PODCAST: ABC News Couldn’t Blow Our House Down

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Here’s this week’s episode of Shout Out Patriots:

​ABC News huffed and puffed but couldn’t blow our house down:

​

The Southern Poverty Law Center, once again, has released its annual report of notorious ‘hate groups’ in America.

As usual, Christian Action Network, which produces Shout Out Patriots, is listed.

The ABC News affiliate in Lynchburg, WSET, was excited to see our name and furiously posted a story naming our group as one of five ‘hate’ groups in the area.

Who do we hate? Who knows? And ABC News isn’t saying.

WSET claims we have “general hate,” whatever that means. They don’t elaborate or explain.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that WSET never bothered to call or email our organization (we’ve been located in their area for 33 years!) so we could at least defend ourselves against the accusation.

But how would that conversation go?

“Sir, your group has been accused of ‘general hate,’ would you like to respond?”

“Sure. Where’s the evidence?”

“The Southern Poverty Law Center IS the evidence; they’re accusing you of hating everything.”

“We hate the killing of defenseless unborn babies. We hate allowing men to destroy female sports. We hate labeling mothers as ‘birthing people.’ We hate that all white people are labeled as ‘inherently racist.’ Will you print that?”

Indeed, I would hear a click in my ear before I could further inject that an SPLC employee has accused the civil-rights organization of being “a highly profitable scam.”

“We were part of the con,” Bob Moser wrote for The New Yorker in 2019, “and we knew it.”

But ABC didn’t call us, email us, or give us our day in court. They didn’t have the courage.

If they had, I would have reminded ABC that the LA Times wrote an article several years back citing more than two dozen SPLC employees that accused the organization of “mistreatment, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and racism.”

I long for the old days when the media simply hated us rather than wholly ignoring after running their conservative-bashing, hit-and-run stories.

A kangaroo court would have given us fairer treatment than today’s scandalous journalism.

In this episode of Shout Out Patriots, we also take on Joe Biden’s claim that no constitutional amendment is “absolute.” And our discussion wraps up with our take on a raucous protest at Yale Law School that disrupted a free speech event.

Remember to share our podcast with your friends; it’s one of our last remaining bridges to fight back against censorship of conservative viewpoints.

Also, for the best viewing or listening experience, download the episode to prevent buffering delays.

©Martin Mawyer and Shout Out Patriots. All rights reserved.

CULTURAL TERRORISM: The War On Parents Is Heating Up

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The War on Parents is heating up.  A public middle school in Connecticut suspended a school nurse for revealing online the school was secretly gender-transitioning kids without their parents’ knowledge.  The nurse said the school was giving puberty blockers to kids and starting the process of confusing kids about their gender in kindergarten.  Teachers, social workers, and school administrators are all part of the program.  In suspending the nurse, the school said some remarkable things:  It is the school’s job, not the parents’ job, to be the caretakers of children. Further, schools and not the parents must provide for the health, well-being, and social and emotional development of children.  That’s just stunning.  The job of the parents, I guess, is to just shut up and pay the taxes that make all this insanity possible.  Not to mention, as ‘birthing persons’, to turn out new lab rats for professional left-wing activists’ social engineering experiments.

Connecticut isn’t the only place where this insurrection is taking place.  New reports have come in about public schools in New Jersey forcing students to learn about transgender hormone therapy without their parents’ knowledge or consent, and secret gender-transitioning occurring in schools in California, Wisconsin, and Florida.  Federal support for this began in the Obama administration.  The Biden administration just yesterday picked up where Obama left off, affirming puberty blockers and irreversible sex-change surgery for children.

In Texas, the state Attorney General informed the Austin school district it was breaking state law by holding Pride Week events that provided sex education to students without parental consent.  The schools encouraged students to keep the content of the instruction secret from their parents.  “What we say in this room stays in this room,” pre-K through second graders were told. The schools fired back against the Attorney General, telling him they want their “LGBTQIA+ students to know that we are proud of them and that we will protect them against political attacks.”

So public schools in Texas and Connecticut are NOT SORRY for driving wedges between children and their parents, or for signing kids up for political agendas, specifically, the sexual revolution and the fundamental transformation of this horrible rotten place we call America. Public schools in Eau Claire, Wisconsin aren’t sorry, either.  According to them, parents are not entitled to know about their child’s sexuality at all, UNLESS the parents are fully on board with the schools’ left-wing agenda to completely destroy society in order to save it.  If the parents will support the political agenda, then and only then can they be brought into the loop and be told about their children.

Here are the consequences of keeping parents in the dark and claiming it’s not their job to worry about the mental health of their children:  A California teen committed suicide after being coached by her high school on how to get hormone treatment and sex-change surgery when she should have been referred for treatment for her depression.  The mother blames the school, which kept everything secret, for her daughter’s death.

Anybody who opposes any of this insanity is branded a domestic terrorist by our federal government.  Schools in Fairfax County, Virginia asked for proposals to collect intelligence on parents.  The contract calls for monitoring social media posts, identifying parents by their real names, and mapping out all their associations.  The funny thing about Fairfax is, all the school board members are professional left-wing activists.  There is not even one parent on that school board.

Are you starting to get the picture?  I’ve documented several times the communist roots of all this. I’ll tell you who the real terrorists are – professional left-wing activist teachers, school administrators, and school board members who will stop at nothing – even espionage – to pursue their left-wing agendas and tear everything down until there’s nothing left.  It’s no accident communist theorists like Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich were the ones who ushered in the sexual revolution.  And it’s no accident another communist theorist Georgi Lukacs called it “cultural terrorism”.

None of this has anything to do with education or children’s well-being.  it all has to do with a communist program to destroy America.   If that doesn’t bother you, and you just keep sitting on your couch eating bonbons, I guarantee you, pretty soon, you won’t have an America left to eat bonbons in.

Visit The Daily Skirmish and Watch Eagle Headline News – 7:30am ET Weekdays

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

‘Inflation Tax’ Will Cost Families This Many Thousands This Year, Bloomberg Analysis Warns

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There goes $433 a month from your family’s budget…

Another day, another alarming inflation metric. We just got the numbers for the Personal Consumption Expenditures index (PCE), the Federal Reserve’s favored inflation metric, and they’re jaw-dropping. The PCE hit a 40-year high in February, with the measured prices rising 6.4% year-over-year.

What does this mean in real life?

A new Bloomberg analysis sheds some light on this key question. It finds that this year, inflation will cost the typical US household an additional $5,200 just to afford the same goods as last year. That’s $433 a month taken out of the average family’s budget.

Why is this happening?

Inflation is a Policy Choice

In the mainstream media and among progressive economists, price inflation is often portrayed as an abstract force beyond our control, like the weather. But in reality, it is directly caused by reckless government policies.

The Federal Reserve decided to “stimulate” the economy amid the pandemic by (digitally) printing trillions of new dollars out of thin air. But scarcity and trade-offs are the defining reality of economic life, so their actions had consequences. By putting trillions of new dollars out into the economy, they made the dollars Americans currently held less valuable—inflating away our savings and wealth.

Just consider the below graph, which shows the number of US dollars in circulation over the last 5 years:

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE GRAPH

What’s more, the federal government flooded the economy with “stimulus” money.

It ran up massive, multi-trillion-dollar budget deficits—at the very time various levels of government were restricting economic life and constraining supply. Through trillions in debt, Congress signed us up for grave economic costs in the future in order to artificially inflate consumer demand in the short term, which doesn’t work as “stimulus” to begin with.

Yet when you do this at the very same time you are constraining the economy and hindering the supply chain, it’s inevitable that price levels overall will surge as demand so far outpaces supply.

So, no, inflation isn’t an abstract phenomenon. But it is, essentially, an indirect tax on everyday Americans.

Inflation is a ‘Stealth Tax’

What is a tax, after all, other than a cost forcibly imposed on the citizenry to finance/enable government expenditures? And that also perfectly describes the inflation currently hitting Americans in the wallet.

The government wanted to engage in reckless money-printing and spending without bearing the political brunt of directly raising peoples’ taxes. As a result, our savings were inflated away.

That’s the textbook definition of a “stealth tax.”

Even John Maynard Keynes, hardly a free-market economist, famously acknowledged this reality.

“By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens,” Keynes once said.

Keynes found agreement on this point from across the spectrum. Nobel-Prize-winning free-market economist Milton Friedman similarly quipped that “inflation is taxation without legislation.”

Ultimately, Americans shouldn’t fall for this financial sleight-of-hand.

“Inflation” isn’t really what will cost families $5,200 extra this year. The government is what’s truly imposing that burden upon us all.

AUTHOR

Brad Polumbo

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and Policy Correspondent at the Foundation for Economic Education.

RELATED ARTICLE: 54% of Hispanics Disapprove of Biden – Early Indicator of the Freight Train Coming for Dems

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

DeSantis Takes Aim At Disney — Here’s How Orlando Should Revoke Disney World’s Privileges

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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been getting a lot of heat in recent weeks over the state’s controversial ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill (HB 1557). Disney joined the fray on Monday, the same day DeSantis signed the bill into law, with a statement condemning the legislation.

But while the controversy surrounding the bill is what’s been making headlines, a new controversy is brewing specifically with respect to Disney, and it centers on the legal structure surrounding Walt Disney World.

On Wednesday, Florida State Rep. Spencer Roach tweeted that he has been discussing with fellow legislators the possibility of repealing the 1967 Reedy Creek Improvement Act, which allows Disney World to be effectively self-governing and exempts the jurisdiction from many state laws, specifically regarding land use. “If Disney wants to embrace woke ideology, “Roach said, “it seems fitting that they should be regulated by Orange County.”

DeSantis himself weighed in on the proposed repeal during a press conference yesterday.

“What I would say as a matter of first principle is I don’t support special privileges in law just because a company is powerful and they’ve been able to wield a lot of power,” DeSantis said. “I think what has happened is there’s a lot of these special privileges that are not justifiable, but because Disney had held so much sway, they were able to sustain a lot of special treatment over the years.”

“I think in this particular case with Disney,” he continued, “I just don’t think you have very many people in the legislature anymore who are going to be able to defend a lot of what has been done over many years to really have them almost govern themselves in some of these things. That was probably never appropriate to start, but is certainly not appropriate now at this point.”

DeSantis is being tactful with his language, but the threat is clear. If Disney wants to push back on his agenda, he’s not afraid to revoke their legal privileges.

The laws surrounding the Reedy Creek Improvement District (i.e. Disney World’s land) are actually quite fascinating. The 1967 act creating the district basically gave it the powers of an incorporated city, and also gave it immunity from any current or future county or state land-use laws.

“Without those powers,” Richard Foglesong explains in his book Married to the Mouse, “they would be forced to submit to building inspections and planning and zoning controls by Orange and Osceola counties.” With those powers, however, they could make magic happen.

Foglesong continues:

“Integrating the company’s government and development arms made possible an efficient system of building regulation. Under Potter, the Reedy Creek government developed a floor building code with its own department to supervise the code…The arrangement allowed building officials to work directly with the theme park designers…Commenting on this arrangement, Potter said ‘It saved us from a lot of problems because when a design came here we knew that it was a competent design.’ The standards were stringent, such as requiring a fire sprinkler in every room, an uncommon safety feature in the 1960s. Yet, the performance standards were also flexible.”

In short, the fact that the Reedy Creek government had so much autonomy was a major key to Disney World’s success. The flexibility allowed them to create plans that prioritized visitor experience, because they didn’t have to focus on appeasing lawmakers and rival special interest groups.

So, on the one hand, these legal privileges have been tremendously beneficial, and the success of Disney World is a testament to their utility. But the other factor here, which DeSantis is drawing attention to, is that this is basically cronyism. Disney World was given an unfair legal advantage over its competitors, one that it continues to enjoy to this day.

This presents us with a dilemma. How can we preserve the benefits of self-governing districts without the cronyism that so often goes along with them?

The answer, in a word, is decentralization. Rather than removing the exemption from Disney World, the “privileges” should be extended to Disney’s competitors. Every jurisdiction in the state should be as self-governing as the Reedy Creek Improvement District. In other words, the land use laws should be scrapped altogether.

Now, some may predict that chaos and disaster would ensue if these regulations were suddenly dropped across the state. But that’s highly improbable. Look at Disney World. It certainly hasn’t suffered for lack of these restrictions. In fact, we can almost think of Disney World as a little experiment in deregulation. Lo and behold, the experiment has been a great success. Why, then, should we not expand the scope of this freedom far and wide, seeing as it has proven so beneficial?

To sum up, Ron DeSantis is right to call out the “special privileges in law” that give big players an unfair advantage, and it’s encouraging that he sees fair competition as “a matter of first principle.” But if we’re going to address cronyism, we need to do it the right way, by scrapping the laws that make it possible in the first place. For those who believe in decentralization, deregulation, and free markets, this is a great opportunity to put these principles into practice.

This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter. Click here to sign up and get free-market news and analysis like this in your inbox every weekday.

AUTHOR

Patrick Carroll

Patrick Carroll has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and is an Editorial Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The ‘Laptop from Hell’ Burns Our Devilish Elites

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UPDATE: The Left Admits Hunter Biden’s Laptop From Hell is Real.

The pretend-media buried the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election. Poll results now show almost half of Americans believe Trump would have been re-elected if the media hadn’t suppressed the story.  Among media sources guilty of hiding the story were CNN’s Brian Stelter, other CNN analysts, Twitter, Facebook, and MSNBC.

They parroted the line concocted by complicit Left-wing swamp creatures from the nation’s intelligence agencies who claimed the story was just “Russian disinformation” when they had no basis for saying so.  Fifty-one former intelligence officials signed a public letter to that effect in the month before the election.  Joe Biden relied on this letter in repeating the phony ‘Russian disinformation’ narrative in a presidential debate before the election.  The Biden administration has continued to push this line ever since.  NBC and the Washington Post were among many media outlets repeating the lie.  [more here]

But just recently, the New York Times admitted email evidence from Hunter’s laptop is real, not Russian disinformation.  The Washington Post has authenticated thousands of emails from the laptop giving the gory details about Hunter Biden’s influence peddling schemes in Ukraine and China.  The Washington Post story described how Hunter Biden and his uncle were paid almost $5 million by an energy company linked to the Chinese government.  The Post commented these facts “illustrate the ways in which his family profited from relationships built over Joe Biden’s decades in public service.”  CBS now also admits the scandal is real.

So where are the apologies for deliberately misleading the American public?  No apologies were forthcoming from the media which now has egg all over its face. And no apologies have been issued by the swamp creatures from the intelligence agencies.  Most are not talking, understandably, and some are doubling down. A former CIA agent isn’t sorry in the least. He bragged about it on Twitter:  “I take personal pride in personally swinging the election away from Trump.  You’re welcome.” The Assistant FBI director of cybersecurity claimshe doesn’t know where the laptop is.

You may not know where it is, Mr. G-Man, but the laptop is real and the scandal is real.  Hunter Biden’s problems are just beginning. Prosecutors are looking into his activities and some people believe he is close to indictment.  More on the extent of the Biden family corruption on another day, but we now see how the Left stacks its numerous capabilities on top of one another to keep scandals from breaking out and to put the American people to sleep with soothing phony narratives like ‘oh, that’s just Russian disinformation’.  Congressman Jim Jordan said, “the mainstream press, along with Big Tech and Democrats, all colluded to keep this important information from the American people just days before our most important election, the presidential election.”  That about sums it up.  Had enough from our arrogant elites, yet?  Or are you going to let them trick you into voting for this level of corruption again?   And if you like all these tricks because it means your side wins, there’s a special place in hell for you.

Visit The Daily Skirmish  and  Watch Eagle Headline News – 7:30am ET Weekdays

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

Our Left-Feathered Friends Have Truly Lost Their Minds

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It’s amazing how fast I’m back to this subject.  But the stories about crazy leftists keep piling up.

This week, a Disney actor called Senator Tom Cotton an ‘f***ing white slaver piece of s***’ for Cotton’s questioning of Ketanji Brown Jackson.  So much for civil discourse.

AOC recently blamed oil companies for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Native American women across the U.S.   Wild accusations are easy to make; now let’s see you prove them.  Did you know that watching AOC on TV causes tooth decay?

A Democrat congressman from New Jersey said people who talk about parental rights are just the crazy fringe, want to ban books, seeking power, support gun violence, and a distraction from fighting climate change.  He forgot ‘racists’ and ‘white supremacists’, but that’s OK, they were filled in by a leftist sex education guru who advocates ‘porn literacy’ for children.  Johnny and Jane can’t read, but they sure know how to gawk at pictures, thanks to people like him.

Racists and white supremacists, huh?  Only being able to see your opponents as cartoon characters and caricatures is what you get for believing your own propaganda.  That’s why Kamala Harris can’t tell the difference between Republicans wanting voter ID laws today and the state troopers who attacked black protesters in Selma in the 1960s.  And Pramila Jayapal thinks voter ID requirements are the same as Putin invading Ukraine.  How crazy is that?

Nancy Pelosi claimed Joe Biden has reduced the national debt by a trillion dollars. Actually, the debt has gone up two-and-a-half trillion dollars since Biden took office.  Not being able to accurately perceive reality is a sign of mental illness.  When they put her in the loony bin, Pete Buttigieg will be in the padded cell next to her. He claimsincreased government spending reduces the national debt. How does that work?

Another leftist with no grasp of economic realities is Rashida Tlaib who thinks there is no real inflation, it’s just the evil corporations jacking up prices and extorting people.  Gee, why didn’t the evil corporations think of that BEFORE Joe Biden became President?

Did you know that freedom is just a white thing?  That’s according to an editorial in the Washington Post whichclaimed the Canadian truckers were just white supremacists and their belief in freedom is “a key component of White supremacy.”  So the slaves didn’t want to be free?  I wonder what Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington would have thought about that?  So much for the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.  I’m going to start a national campaign to paint the Statue of Liberty white because only white people want to be free.

Then there’s the abortion crowd who are going completely bonkers at the prospect of Roe v. Wade being overturned.  They’re now claiming that all babies who might be born in poverty should be killed in abortions even though their parents might win the lottery the next day. They also claim killing babies in abortions is pro-child. That’s how warped these people have become. Don’t expect any rational thinking out of them any time soon.

Unhinged leftists would be amusing, if they weren’t so violent.  A teacher in Texas said conservative Christians all need to get COVID and die.  A CNN analyst was so mad at the Canadian truckers, she urged people to slash their tires and empty their gas tanks.  Another Disney miscreant, ESPN, celebrated a cop-killer character in an HBO show.

If you’re having violent thoughts like these, I suggest you seek professional help – you are going off the rails.  And, if you find yourself in sympathy with any of the crazy Leftists I’ve discussed here today, stop and ask yourself:  Why would you want to hang around with these people?  They’re nuts.

Visit The Daily Skirmish and Watch Eagle Headline News – 7:30am ET Weekdays

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: The LGBT Agenda is to Destroy America by Sterilizing Our Youth

Pentagon Negotiating Deal to Save 9/11 Mastermind From Death Penalty

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Pentagon Negotiating Deal to Save 9/11 Mastermind From Death Penalty

  • Pentagon prosecutors are reportedly in talks with attorneys for alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his four co-defendants about a plea agreement that could eliminate the prospect of the death penalty.
  • Prosecutors instigated discussions with the terrorist’s defense teams, proposing they discuss “whether pretrial agreements are possible in all five cases.” Defense attorneys listed the removal of the death penalty as a requirement for guilty pleas.
  • The al-Qaeda terrorists have been charged with terrorism, hijacking aircraft, conspiracy, murder in violation of the law of war, attacking civilians and more.

ISIS Militant Goes on Trial

  • The trial of former Islamic State (ISIS) militant El Shafee Elsheikh, 33, is set to begin in a Virginia federal court.
  • Elsheikh is one of the four ISIS militants accused of the killings of U.S. journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, and aid workers Peter Kassig and Kayla Mueller.

Exclusive: Clarion Reports ISIS Supporters to Police

  • The Clarion Intelligence Network has recently identified several supporters of the terrorist group ISIS and has reported them to our law enforcement partners.
  • Clarion has uncovered an ISIS supporter living in Florida who uses his social media to call for a Caliphate and talks about buying land to build an “off the grid” compound.
  • Help us identify and track more extremists on American soil by donating here.

RELATED ARTICLE: U.S. Releases 20th Hijacker

EDITORS NOTE: This Clarion Project column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

PODCAST: Team Biden’s Endgame – “No USA At All”?

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“No borders. No walls. No USA at all.” That’s the rallying cry – and the agenda – of the radical leftists who have worked with fellow travelers in the Biden administration to open America’s southern border.

Now, they are celebrating the announcement that Team Biden is going to remove at the end of May the last significant impediment to illegal entry to this country. A Covid-19 pandemic-related provision known as Title 42 will be dispensed with, clearing the way for millions of single men, many of them military age, to join the invasion now well underway.

Government officials from President Biden on down are violating their oaths of office. Far from protecting our Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, they are actively collaborating in those enemies’ efforts to ensure there is no USA at all. Will the rest of us tolerate such betrayals?

This is Frank Gaffney.

The Secure Freedom Minute – the most interesting, informative and life-saving 60 seconds of your day 

EDITORS NOTE: This Center for Security Policy podcast is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Our Disastrous Failure to Follow the Science

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Anthony Esolen: The Church might join her voice to our cultural madness, except that her divine Founder will not permit her to, despite prelates who worship at the altar of Belial.

Consider these statements:

“The earth revolves around the sun.”
“Women, as a group, do not possess the physical strength to make good soldiers.”
“The earth rotates upon its axis.”
“It is a biological absurdity to pretend that a man can marry a man, or a woman a woman.”
“The tilt of the earth on its axis is responsible for the seasons.”
“A child needs a father and a mother.”
“The orbit of the earth around the sun is an ellipse.  In summer in the northern hemisphere, the earth is at its farthest from the sun.”
“It is wrong to do the child-making act if you are not married and thus prepared to take care of the child, providing him with a well-established family for the rest of his life.”
“Venus shines upon earth in phases, like the moon.”
“Boys naturally gravitate toward rough and sometimes dangerous or destructive play, while girls do not.”

I have heard all my life what a great sinner against the truth and scientific inquiry the Church has been, because she comported herself poorly in the Galileo affair, sentencing that irascible genius to house arrest in a posh villa in Florence.  If anyone has the means, my family and I would be pleased to know which crime against a consensus opinion I must commit to earn a similar sentence.

For the American academy commits more crimes against the truth, and more egregiously, in a single week than the whole Church committed in the entirety of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.  An exaggeration?  Let us think about the matter.

Galileo had no proof for his heliocentric thesis.  One of the arguments he adduced, that the revolution of the earth around the sun was responsible for the tides, was feeble, and the pope’s astronomers knew better.  What Galileo insisted upon could not be seen.

None of the astronomical assertions I have made above is obvious.  Indeed, I have found that very few college students can explain to me why the sun appears, to us northerners, in the southern hemisphere. Or where the sun will be at noon on the equinox, given that they are standing on the earth at a particular latitude. Or what the elliptic orbit has to do with the speed of the earth’s revolution. Or that the earth does not move at a constant speed. Or why Venus shows in phases if you view it in a telescope, but Mars does not. Or what the position of Polaris has to do with where you are, and so on.

They do not know that the main argument against the heliocentric position had to do with parallax – the apparent shift in the relative positions of objects depending upon the angle of your vantage point, so that if the earth moved around the sun, the stars should seem to alter their pattern slightly from spring to autumn, unless those stars were so tremendously far away that the parallax could not be discerned.  Nor was there at that time any clear reason to suppose that the stars were so distant.

But the things I have said regarding men and women, and boys and girls, will lose you your livelihood if you say them almost anywhere in academe in the decadent western world.  Dare anyone deny it?  Those who are angered by what I am saying about current sins against truth will be the first to denounce you and drive you out of the academy if you say them in a classroom, or a faculty lounge, or on social media.  Perhaps you can say them alone in your bathroom, for now.

There is more.  Those things about the sexes were uncontroversial until a few cultural and historical seconds ago. That is because they are immediately obvious. Boys grow to be men, and girls grow to be women.

The boys have bodies that cry out for action and rough play – the metabolism, the endocrine glands, and the musculature determine the direction of play, in boys as in other physical creatures.  The girls have bodies directed toward the bearing and the nurture of children.  Everyone knows it.  That is why it must be energetically and vociferously denied, with obvious and severe punishments for anyone who would deny it.

If a man lies bleeding on the battlefield, the female soldier next to him, except in the rarest of circumstances, will not be able to lift him up and carry him away.  Even if she could, because of an exceedingly lucky combination of a big-boned woman and a man of small stature, he still must pay a price for the absurdity, because another man would be able to carry him more readily and make quicker work of it.

And here we are talking about only one of a thousand ways in which the greater strength of men, and their greater speed afoot, and their more fully oxygenated blood come into play in war.

It is a clown show that a man pretending to be a woman should compete against women in swimming – a sport in which the woman’s greater percentage of body fat makes her naturally more buoyant, so that she has to do less work to move the same weight than the man does. It is a perfect bedlam of drunken raving clowns to send the same women into combat against men; of no military advantage, and a harm to both sexes, not to mention to the unborn children those women may be carrying.

In many places, the Church hangs by a thread of sanity and commitment to the truth.  She would join her voice also to the madness, and cheerfully go on persecuting people who tell the truth, except that her divine Founder will not permit her to, regardless of the superstitions of those prelates who believe that one more round of worshiping at the altar of Belial will bring happiness instead of confusion, cultural decay, infidelity, and death – betraying men and women, and making a holocaust of children.

You may also enjoy:

Robert Royal’s Science and Religion, Rightly Understood

Fr. Timothy V. Vaverek’s Mixed Messages from the Vatican and Bishops

AUTHOR

Anthony Esolen

Anthony Esolen is a lecturer, translator, and writer. Among his books are Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, and Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World, and most recently The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord. He is a professor and writer in residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts, in Warner, New Hampshire.

EDITORS NOTE: This The Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2022 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

‘The Gods of the Copybook Headings’ by Rudyard Kipling.

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“The Gods of the Copybook Headings” is a poem by Rudyard Kipling, characterized by biographer Sir David Gilmour as one of several “ferocious post-war eruptions” of Kipling’s souring sentiment concerning the state of Anglo-European society. 

Last weekend my wife and I were invited to our old friends Joe and Debbie Clarks lovely home in Plant City. They were members of the original Save America Foundation of which I was president. They drove a good distance to attend our monthly meetings in Clearwater, Florida. After an incredible dinner (Pig! Never saw one I didn’t wanna eat!) he bought the following out for me to read. Needless to say I was fascinated and was impressed with the work this patriot had done. I asked him if I could publish it and he gracefully agreed I could. I hope all of you who take the time to read the poem and the analysis that is enclosed within the blog and enjoy it as much as I did. Great job Joe!

“It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere” – Voltaire

Interesting and relevant to the world today, this analysis of Kipling’s poem, the work of myself and several other individuals who also see it as a prediction of inevitable hills and valleys in the future of mankind. Written a hundred years ago but could have been written today about the United States.

The Gods of the Copybook Headings by Rudyard Kipling

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,

I Make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market-Place.

Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn

That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:

But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,

So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,

Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market-Place.

But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come

That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch

They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch

They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings.

So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.

They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.

But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,

And the Gods of the Copybook Heading said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life

(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)

Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,

By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;

But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew,

And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true

That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four —

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man —

There are only four things certain since Social Progress began —

That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,

And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire —

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins

When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Kipling, astute in his observation of human nature, in this poem he captures the past and future of the human race should man continue to arrogantly ignore the lessons learned by past generations and cast aside by the newest generation who are intent on destroying what past generations have built because future generations have always and will always see themselves as more intelligent and more educated than the forbearers who built the civilization they view with contempt.

The “Gods of the Copybook Headings” refer to the tradition of writing words of wisdom and morality on the top of pages of 19th century student notebooks.  These headings were used to practice penmanship, spelling, punctuation, vocabulary, comprehension and instill time tested wisdom and values in the student.

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,

I Make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market-Place.

Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

An important thing to note as we begin is that the “Gods of the Market Place”,  are the latest progressive thoughts viewed by present day elites/intellectuals as more advanced, more intelligent than the old-fashioned  time proven principals that guided past generations to productive, fulfilling lives.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn

That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:

But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,

So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

This clearly describes the tendency among newer generations to quickly abandon the source of knowledge, and fall into the trap that leads us to the conclusion that we are more intelligent than those who proceeded us and the standards that they used to achieve an elevated culture have become obsolete and no longer useful.  Instead of pursuing deeper studies of the world and history, we abandon proven dogma for the more  “visionary”.  The applications of this to modern society are uncountable.  The number of educators who insist on abandoning classical education that focuses on “How to Think” for the newest and popular educational fad, “What to Think”,

The “March of Mankind” humanity as a constant necessity to “progress” to some new stage, throwing out values and knowledge gathered by passed generations and recycling the destructive concepts of Marxism and Fabian socialism concepts that have proven over and over again to be destructive but for some reason never loose their allure.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,

Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market-Place.

This is evidence that this poem is about the cycle of civilizations, and how it’s all very predictable.  As a society reaches increasing heights, it becomes more and more likely to lose touch with the fundamental values upon which it was built.  The story of 20th century United States is very telling.  The conclusion becomes that the basic knowledge of how societies work, while during long periods being forgotten, always returns, but not until a civilization has died, and a new one emerges.  We are currently living immediately prior to the period when the empire falls, and Western civilization ends.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch

They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch

They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings.

So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

Again, a reference to how culture goes from a dedication to the values that are the foundation of society, and how these traditions and values become “utterly out of touch”.  Instead people begin pursuing narcissistic dreams and fancies, completely ignoring the fundamentals that has enabled them to do so.  And along always comes politicians, the intellectuals, the merchants of ignorant dream-fulfillment and the lies that the masses want to hear.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.

They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.

But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,

And the Gods of the Copybook Heading said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

The Cambrian Measures, the first period of the Paleozoic Era, another reference to the beginning of the principals that would bring success to human interaction.

This is an astonishing verse, which quite obviously refers to the fact that every time a brutal dictatorship like Nazi Germany, the Italian fascists or something similar has emerged, the first thing they do is take away the peoples means of protecting themselves (even though these two specific examples lie into the future when this poem was written),  Without guns, there will be no violence is what we are told.  They forget to tell us that the violence we should most fear is that which comes from the governing class.  Without the means to protect itself, a population will always be at risk of being sold into slavery by its masters.  The price we pay for avoiding being enslaved by the system, is having to face the possibility of every man being armed.  Freedom is not free, it requires that you are willing to take risks.  A promise of safety is a promise of future slavery.

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life

(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)

Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

Geological Time

The idea of social communism, where everyone shares everything, inevitably ends with you have to share even you wife.  This was in fact how Plato saw the ideal society, a communist state where all property was communal, including wives.  Another interpretation is how the idea that all should be shared and everyone equal, ends with nothing but more of the jealousy and moral decay that it was intended to stop.  Man is by birth a property of owner, claiming exclusive ownership of his own body.  Any negation of the principle of ownership negates the existence of a free society.  And being free to create and homestead all that which is previously unowned, man will in the end find himself not among equals, rather among other men which own in accordance to their capabilities, and their willingness to work.

The second last sentence is of great interest-“Till our women had no more children and the most lost reason and faith”.  This is in fact the stage that the West had found itself in.  Thanks to the destruction of traditional values, women are having fewer and fewer children.  Our dying western culture is becoming barren, and our homes are being taken over by other cultures.  Meanwhile the “men lost reason and faith”, which hardly needs any explanation if we simply look at how much honest work is being done, and how many dedicate their life to crime, destruction or decadent behavior and all becomes acceptable behavior by society.  Through the loss of our cultural heritage, we have lost that which makes us civilized, and the spiral downwards will continue.

Society, as we know it, is dying.

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,

By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;

But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

The reference to socialism hardly needs any further explanation.  What is interesting is the interpretation of “though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy”, which is a very astute observation of what happens when less and less or real value is produced.  Whether of not Kipling foresaw a future where money would become worthless paper is maybe a bit unclear, but the fact remains that many experiments with flat paper money had been made long before his time, and they all ended in monetary destruction.  A clear sign of decadence is when money is decoupled from value, and the control of it is given to the political class.

The final sentence brings a message that is the essence of what I am trying to say.  All those dependent on the effort and money of others, to be given to them by the State, are going to find themselves destitute and starving, unless they again learn to work.  When things come crashing down, there is no wealth to redistribute.  There will be no “social security” or “welfare”.  When everyone finds themselves impoverished, only a fool will expect to be handed free sustenance.  Those of us able and willing to work  will survive, others may not.

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew,

And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true

That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four —

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

Inevitably, reality sets in.  The “Gods of the Market” will tumble, and their smooth talk and chicanery will be for naught.  They will head for the door, tail between their legs, desperately preparing to dodge any bullets, as the common man reaches for his gun.  And finally, as all that most held dear and everlasting has come crashing down, old wisdom returns, slowly and steadily.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man —

There are only four things certain since Social Progress began —

That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,

And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire —

History inevitably repeats itself, and “Social Progress” is always a progression first towards ever-increasing wealth and prosperity, and as the people become complacent and decadent, a likewise inevitable collapse and reset of the system.

From the Proverb Peter 2:22, The Dog returns to his vomit and the Sow returns to it mire, after being cleansed by a higher standard of behavior we will eventually return to the vile behavior that we originally abandoned in search of a better life.

The burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wobbling back to the Fire.  Man is destined to repeat his mistakes, and our efforts to root out of society ignorance and foolishness will never be completely successful.  Civilization will continue to come, and go, and when the book on mankind is finally closed, our experience will be nothing but a small blot of ink, among the innumerable pages that have been written.

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins

When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

The “Brave New World”, inevitably turns into the “Decadent Old World” once more.  Another reference to socialism is rather clear-cut.  What “no man must pay for his sins” means needs no explanation, taking it literally will move straight into the early 21st century.  And 

The Gods of the Copybook Headings…….with Terror and slaughter return.

©Fred Brownbill. All  rights reserved.

CHILD ABUSE: New Emails Show CDC Was Corrupted by Political Coordination with Teacher’s Unions and Activist Groups

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“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ignored the science that showed children are at statistically insignificant risk from Covid.”

Unimaginable child abuse on a monumental level – the repercussions to be suffered for decades to come.

New Emails Show CDC Was Corrupted by Political Coordination with Teacher’s Unions and Activist Groups

By: Becker News, March 30, 2022:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ignored the science that showed children are at statistically insignificant risk from Covid and issued policies based on close consultation with political activists in teacher’s unions, Republican lawmakers assert in a revealing new report.

The CDC’s guidance was used as the basis for closing schools and forcing children to wear masks throughout the Covid pandemic. An exclusive Fox News report on Wednesday provides yet another glimpse of the CDC’s politically motivated coordination with teacher’s unions.

“Republican lawmakers who sit on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis are releasing a report Wednesday revealing a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) official’s testimony claiming that the agency coordinated with teachers’ unions at an extraordinary level in crafting its school reopening guidance, despite the agency’s earlier claims that such coordination was routine and nonpolitical,” Fox News reported in its exclusive…

[Emphasis added]

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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California Democrats To Cut Gas Tax For 3rd Time, Raise Taxes Instead

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The brutalist party HATES you.

They actually raised taxes on gas suppliers to use as rebates (Fox 40). From Republican Vince Fong:

California Bill to Cut Gas Tax Fails 3rd Time

By Vanessa Serna, The Epoch Times, March 29, 2022:

SACRAMENTO—The effort to temporarily halt California’s 51-cent gas tax failed for a third time in a state assembly committee as lawmakers instead proposed changing the bill completely by adding a new tax on fuel suppliers to feed a rebate program for gas consumers.

Assembly Bill 1638 by Assemblyman Kevin Kiley (R-Rocklin) was accepted to be heard on a last-minute basis by the state Transportation Committee on March 28, after being shut down by lawmakers on March 14 and March 24.

Assemblyman Alex Lee (D-San Jose) opposed Kiley’s bill while blaming the high gas tax on fossil fuel corporations—such as Chevron and Vallero—which he said pocketed billions in a record profit last year.

“I definitely sympathize and I understand how hard it is right now, and how hard it is at the pump,” he said. It’s not because we are paying for roads. It’s because there are corporations out there who are fracking the hell out of this planet.”

Lee further highlighted the funds from the gas tax that go towards fixing roads while claiming the surplus can not ensure these projects continue to proceed if the gas tax is suspended.

“If we are to find ourselves in [an] economic deficit, the money that goes directly to constituents and roadways and transportation can evaporate,” he said.

Rather than simply voting on AB 1638, Lee decided to strike out all current contents of the bill and fill in multiple amendments, including taxing fuel suppliers more to offset their “windfall profit” and turning that tax revenue into gas rebates for consumers.

At this point, it is still unclear whether Lee’s “vehicle fuel windfall profit tax” would affect the gas prices at the pump for consumers and how the proposed rebate program would look.

While Lee urged for his amendments to be made, he refused to add his name as an author to the bill.

Assemblyman Vince Fong (R-Bakersfield) opposed Lee’s amendments, questioning the motion that would raise taxes on residents rather than providing relief.

“A bill to temporarily suspend the state’s tax for six months [and] provide immediate relief to Californians is being hijacked … to raise taxes even more,” Fong said.

Assemblywoman Janet Nguyen (R-Huntington Beach) echoed her disappointment in Lee’s decision to drastically attempt to amend the bill rather than simply vote no.

“Why are we just being silent and prolonging this pain for all these families?” Nguyen forcefully questioned. “Putting more taxes on Californians is the wrong thing to do.”

RELATED TWEETS:

RELATED ARTICLE: 21 states sue to block mask mandate on public transportation from happening again

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Quick note: Tech giants are shutting us down. You know this. Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Adsense, Pinterest permanently banned us. Facebook, Google search et al have shadow-banned, suspended and deleted us from your news feeds. They are disappearing us. But we are here. We will not waver. We will not tire. We will not falter, and we will not fail. Freedom will prevail.

Subscribe to Geller Report newsletter here — it’s free and it’s critical NOW when informed decision making and opinion is essential to America’s survival. Share our posts on your social channels and with your email contacts. Fight the great fight.

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Remember, YOU make the work possible. If you can, please contribute to Geller Report.

The Abraham Accords Have Outpaced the Most Optimistic Predictions

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Since 2020, when four Arab states – the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan – joined the Abraham Accords and normalized ties with Israel, there have been major developments in the economic ties between the Jewish state and these Arab members of the Abraham Accords. Business deals, involving trade, technology, tourism, and agriculture have been signed. With the UAE alone – which has enthusiastically engaged with the Jewish state — Israel has signed deals worth $675 million. Israel’s Minister of Intelligence, Eli Cohen, has said that annual trade between Israel and the UAE is expected to reach $4 billion in three to five years. The UAE ‘s Minister of Trade, Abdulla Bin Touq, said that Abu Dhabi was projecting to grow economic ties with Tel Aviv to the tune of $1 trillion over the next decade.

The UAE has also been discussing buying weapons from Israel, now deciding between the Barak 8 or Spyder air defense missile systems, as well as the Iron Dome anti-missile defense systems. The UAE’s buying spree of weapons seems likely to end with the lion’s share of its purchases – save for the 80 Rafale fighters it has bought from France – coming from Israel.

Trade between Israel and Bahrain reached close to $280 million in 2021. Israel has so far been exporting diamonds and refined metals for chemicals to Bahrain and importing oil and aluminum from Bahrain.

In early February, Israel signed a security cooperation agreement with Bahrain, the first such agreement it has signed with a Gulf state. Israel has agreed to sell weapons to Bahrain.

Israel has also signed trade and tourism deals with Morocco. More than a million Israelis claim descent from Moroccan Jews, and many are eager to return as tourists. Bilateral trade between Israel and Morocco is growing quickly, especially in the agritech and health care sectors. From trade worth less than $30 million in 2020, according to Aviv Baruch, the chairman of the Israel Export and International Cooperation Institute, “the target now is to exceed over $1 billion in trade over the next three years.”

Morocco principally exports clothing and textiles, fruit, electric components and inorganic chemicals. Israel’s exports to Morocco center on agriculture, water technology, machinery, healthcare, and security. Israel has signed an agreement to sell drones and “advanced weapons” to Morocco.

Deals between Israel and Sudan, the fourth Arab member of the Abraham Accords, have so far been less impressive, limited to Israel sharing its knowhow in wastewater management, drip irrigation, desalination, and water production from the air. Future trade is likely to continue to focus on agriculture.

What all this means is that the Abraham Accords have outpaced the most optimistic predictions, and Israeli trade will continue to grow, and there will be more sales of Israeli weapons to the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco, as well as greater cooperation on intelligence with the UAE and Bahrain on Iran, and with Morocco on the Muslim Brotherhood.

As time passes, and the benefits of belonging to the Abraham Accords become ever more evident to other countries, one can expect more Arab and Muslim states to join. King Salman of Saudi Arabia is not in favor of joining the Accords, “as long as there is no Palestinian state,” but he is 86 and in poor health. Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, who will soon succeed him, has signaled that he looks with favor on Saudi Arabia’s adhesion to the Abraham Accords. Other likely candidates include Oman and the most populous Muslim nation, Indonesia.

Every year brings improvements in Israel’s defenses against terrorist attacks. Time in this, as in so much else, is on Israel’s side. Israel won all its wars, big and little, learned to defeat terrorist groups, and discovered how to locate and destroy the terror tunnels built by both Hezbollah and Hamas. Israel built a security fence separating Gaza from Israel. In December 2021, Israel announced the completion of the Gaza barrier. It is 40 miles long, and cost an estimated $1.11 billion to build. The barrier features a sensor-equipped underground wall to prevent terrorists from digging tunnels into Israel. It also has a nearly 20-foot high above-ground fence with remotely controlled weapons systems and an array of radar systems with cameras that cover the entire territory of the Gaza Strip. In addition, a barrier at sea has sensors to detect incursions from the water. It will be nearly impossible for terrorists to enter Israel from Gaza.

Similarly successful has been the security wall that Israel built between the Green Line – Israel’s pre-1967 border –and the West Bank. In 2002, there were 452 Israeli fatalities from terrorist attacks. Before the completion of the first continuous segment (July 2003) at the beginning of the Second Intifada, 73 Palestinian suicide bombings were carried out from the West Bank, killing 293 Israelis and injuring over 1,900. After the completion of the first continuous segment through the end of 2006, there were only 12 attacks based in the West Bank, killing 64 people and wounding 445. Terrorist attacks declined to 9 in 2010.

Israel, the Start-Up Nation that has never lost a war, has suffered assorted slings and arrows in one theatre of conflict – the kangaroo court of the United Nations.

In the U.N., Israel continues to be attacked in the General Assembly and, especially, in the U.N. Human Rights Council. At every session of the UNHRC, the group takes up the permanent Agenda Item #7, which is devoted to the “human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories.” More UNHRC resolutions have condemned Israel than have condemned the remaining 192 states put together. This past December, the General Assembly approved the establishment of an open-ended commission by the UNHRC to investigate Israeli “war crimes.”

While the UN can pass all the anti-Israel resolutions it wishes, they have had no practical effect on Israel’s wellbeing or determination to prevail over those who wish it ill. In the Middle East, at the very same time as these UN condemnations are passed, the Jewish state has broken out of its isolation, not only with the Abraham Accords, but in a warming of relations with both Egypt and Jordan, the two countries with which it has peace treaties but only a “cold peace.” It is no longer startling to read of Israeli ministers signing trade agreements in Abu Dhabi or Rabat, or meeting with counterparts in Manama or Khartoum. Israelis are pleased, but no longer surprised, that the history of the Holocaust will be taught in Emirati schools, or that Jewish history will now be taught in Moroccan schools. Meetings between Israeli ministers and their Arab counterparts are now a regular feature of Middle Eastern diplomacy. Israel is now being accepted. Time is in its favor.

The same oil producers who during the Yom Kippur War, by cutting production and issuing threats caused a quadrupling of oil prices, managed to use oil as a weapon to weaken foreign support for Israel, are now looking to Israel as their most effective ally in defeating a malign Iran, bent on establishing its hegemony in the Middle East. In the four campaigns Israel fought with Hamas in Gaza, and the three wars it fought in Lebanon – one against the PLO, and two against Hezbollah – Israel emerged the victor every time. The IDF also defeated the Palestinian terrorists who killed hundreds of Israeli civilians, as well as Israeli soldiers, during the five years (2000-2005) of the Second Intifada. Palestinian casualties outnumbered Israeli casualties three to one. The Palestinians were forced to sue for peace. Now the destruction of the terror tunnels from both Gaza and Lebanon, the completion of the security fence with Gaza and the security wall with the West Bank, and the extensive network of Arab informants whom the Shin Bet has enlisted, has brought terror attacks on Israelis to a historic low.

While votes against Israel at the UN annoy, they have had no real effect on Israel’s standing among the Western powers – the U.S., Canada, Australia, the U.K., Germany, and France – that count the most. Israel’s display of military prowess in the May war with Hamas reinforced respect for Israel, as did the performance of its Iron Dome anti-missile system, which intercepted 90% of the rockets Hamas hurled at Israel. Other countries have indicated their desire to buy this Israeli defensive marvel, that has proven itself in a real war.

They might want to wait. There is another defensive weapon that Israeli scientists have now come up with — a laser-based anti-missile system that is an astounding breakthrough. The laser-based interception, which is silent and invisible, is based on electric laser technology rather than the chemically based lasers used up to now. The cost is less than 10 shekels (about $3.50) per interception, in contrast with Iron Dome, which costs about 170,000 shekels ($49,000) per interception. This system will be operational later in 2022. Israeli innovations in weapons, offensive and defensive, keep being announced. And the world is impressed.

Israel also continues to amaze with its endless parade of high tech companies. Israel has more companies listed on Nasdaq than any foreign country except China. Israelis have more U.S. patents than any foreign country except Japan. The aggregate value of Israeli companies traded on Wall Street is more than $300 billion. It earns its title – “the Start-Up Nation” – every day. And Israeli entrepreneurs and inventors show no sign of slowing down. When it comes to innovation and market value, time is on Israel’s side.

And time is not on the side of the Palestinians. The Arabs of the four states that joined the Abraham Accords have demonstrated a willingness to pursue their own national interests and to ignore the demands of the Palestinians. Egypt and Jordan have yet to join them, but both countries have warmed up their previously “cold peace” with Israel. Egypt, In particular, does not hide its resentment of Palestinian ingratitude; the Egyptians, after all, fought in all three major wars against Israel – in 1948, 1967, and 1973 – and was defeated in all three, losing men, materiel, and money. Egypt has no intention of going to war with Israel again. Instead, Israel and Egypt are now collaborating on security in the Sinai, against regrouped fighters from various jihadi groups, including the Islamic State, and against the Muslim Brotherhood, to which Hamas belongs.

The other main historic threat to Israel has been Syria. But ten years of civil war have been catastrophic for Syria’s military. 200,000 Syrian soldiers have been killed. In 2011 Syria had 555 fixed-wing aircraft; now it has fewer than 200. More than 3,800 armored vehicles have been destroyed. Five million Syrians are internally displaced, and six million have fled the country. It will take $400 billion just to replace the infrastructure destroyed in the decade of war; Syria, meanwhile, is broke. It is hard to imagine it will ever again be a threat to Israel. The Golan, from which Syrian gunners used to rain down fire on Israeli farmers in the valley far below, has since 1981 been annexed by Israel; now Prime Minister Bennett has announced his intention to quadruple, from 25,000 to 100,000, the number of Jews on the Golan, to secure Israel’s hold on the area. Time is on Israel’s side.

But time has most definitely not been on the side of the Arabs. The source of the enormous wealth some Arab states have accumulated is entirely the result of oil sales. But the entire world is now mobilized to decrease the use of fossil fuels – which of course means, along with coal and gas, oil. The signs of such a decrease are everywhere. There were 17 million electric vehicles on roads in 2021, double the number in 2020. By 2025, analysts predict 20% of all cars sold in the world will be electric vehicles. There are 92.7 million solar panels now installed all over the world, with tens of millions now being added every year. The cost of solar power has decreased by 80% since 2010. As a result of the enormous and unforeseen increase in the use of electric vehicles and solar power, demand for oil continues to inexorably sink.

British Petroleum analysts believe demand for oil will decline substantially through 2050, due to government climate policies such as carbon pricing. According to BP, global oil demand could fall from about 100 million barrels/day in 2020 to a range of 30-55 million barrels/day by 2050. Meanwhile renewable energy will rise rapidly. Looking ahead, oil consumption as low as 30 million barrels/day in 2050 would mean a 70% drop-off from 2020. The world could manage quite well at that point without buying a single barrel of Arab – or Iranian – oil. Time is…well, you know.

Time is definitely on Israel’s side, once that problem called Iran is dealt with. And it will be dealt with, by Israel, with others if possible, but if necessary, all alone — like Gary Cooper in High Noon. If Israel were a stock, it would be a permanent “Buy.”

AUTHOR

HUGH FITZGERALD

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Self-Oppression of Identity Politics

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Which story will define and inform your lives?

In today’s world of exponentially less systemic discrimination, claiming its continued existence effectively compromises more crucial mental and spiritual freedoms.

“The mind moves in the direction of our currently dominant thoughts.”

Earl Nightingale, American radio-show speaker, author, human-potential pioneer

Who amongst us hasn’t attained some goal in life—from getting your first bicycle as a kid, to landing our dream job, and everything in between—by single-mindedly focusing on its realization? We all have. In fact, that exercise, embodied by the above quote, is at the heart of virtually every self-help prescription—mantras, affirmations, visualization, positive thinking—for improving one’s life in any number of arenas.

With the above Nightingale quote in mind, let’s look at identity politics, defined as:

“A tendency for people of a particular religion, race, social background, etc., to form exclusive political alliances, moving away from traditional broad-based party politics.”

The appeal of identity politics is undeniable and understandable. For members of groups that, historically, have been oppressed or marginalized to any extent, it’s sensible (not to mention downright heady) to join forces with like-minded souls, and fight to end that oppression. Over the past half-century, minorities, women, and gays have made enormous progress precisely because they systematically organized and fought against proactive discrimination.

As such, no one could seriously argue that the above groups aren’t far freer and have far more possibilities and opportunities than they did prior to the 1960s. Because of their efforts, there are bodies of law in place expressly prohibiting discrimination based on race, gender, religion, national origin, and sexual orientation. As well there should be.

So, what happens when an identity-politics mindset encounters a society that has made enormous strides in eliminating institutionalized forms of discrimination—i.e., Jim Crow laws, red-lining practices in real estate; racial/sex discrimination in businesses, restaurants, public transportation, clubs, organizations, etc.? Does it become a movement subject to the law of diminishing returns?

Consider the underlying sentiment expressed by most practitioners of identity politics: “I am not free to fully succeed in life, and if I indeed don’t succeed, it’s because I am surrounded by people and institutions committed to keeping me down.” In the not-too-distant past, for the above groups, that sentiment was a statement of fact.

But, in our vastly different times today, does such a mindset simply become a reliable path to victimhood?

It’s one thing to fight against true oppression, where there are active, codified, societally accepted measures that prevent you from realizing your dreams, but in a much freer society, where the laws are now on your side to a far greater extent, what does one end up fighting against?

Yes, there is, but that racism exists far more in the realm of personal beliefs and prejudices held by individuals, as opposed to institutionalized policies to keep people down. Shelby Steele, acclaimed black author, columnist and filmmaker, in a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece, obliquely underscored this point (emphasis mine):

“Of course this does not mean there is no racism left in American life. Racism is endemic to the human condition, just as stupidity is. We will always have to be on guard against it. But now it is recognized as a scourge, as the crowning immorality of our age and our history.”

Racism is endemic to the human condition. A bold statement on its surface, yet, given the history of human behavior across millennia, and the hard-wired tendency of groups—regardless of culture, race and nationality—to consider themselves superior to those different from themselves (i.e., the essential quality of “racism”), were truer words ever spoken?

So, given all the above, and particularly the personal (vs. systemic/institutional) nature of most racism today, if your goal is to “eliminate racism,” you’d need to enter the realm of mandating proper speech and thought. And one look at the insanely PC-driven attempts to curtail free speech at many of our universities (just one venue for this awful trend) is all it takes to see how dangerous and unconstitutional that exercise is.

Let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine two gay black women—people who are part of multiple “identity” groups.

One says, “Yes, I’m a gay black woman, but nothing and no one can stand in the way of my living my ideal life, and realizing my dreams.” In this day and age, with far more freedom to thrive than at any other time in history, is it even remotely far-fetched to imagine that this woman, if she worked hard enough, would, in fact, realize her dreams?

On the flipside, let’s take another gay black woman, who, immersed in the world of identity politics, aligns herself with other similar folks. To them, the world is a hostile place, replete with systemic oppression and institutionalized racism standing between them and what they want.

If those are the two respective worlds these two women inhabit, which of them is more likely to succeed? Who has more “agency”?

I can hear it now: “But you’re a straight, white male. What do you know about oppression?” Not much. But, what does my reality and opinion (ignorant and naïve?) have to do with your journey? Nothing. Given the extraordinary progress these groups have made, the far more relevant question for them is, “Which story will define and inform your lives?”

Will it be the one that essentially says, “The deck is stacked, and if I fail, it’s not my fault”? Or the one that says, “Sure, there’s still ignorant, bigoted, racist, sexist, homophobic people out there, but they no longer have the power to stop me from realizing my dreams. And if they try, I’ve got the law on my side”?

We’re all aware of plenty of people who are members of “aggrieved” groups, who’ve succeeded in life—some enormously—despite countless obstacles and hardships. By the same token, we all know of plenty from those same groups who haven’t.

Doesn’t the existence of that real-world dichotomy argue far less for discrimination, and far more for the incandescently self-evident fact that human beings are endowed with widely varying levels of intelligence, initiative, ambition, drive, vision, motivation, etc.?

We should all be prepared to push back against cases of real racism when we encounter them. But in a world that, legally, is far freer for all its citizens than at any point in history, more often than not, invoking identity politics amounts to little more than arguing for a life of limitation. And who would consciously choose that?

AUTHOR

Peter Bowerman

Peter Bowerman is an Atlanta-based freelance writer, and author of the acclaimed Well-Fed Writer series on commercial freelance writing.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.