Tag Archive for: Marxism

CHAPTER 3: Birdman and the Reality Revolution—Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is

Globalism is a replacement ideology that seeks to reorder the world into one singular, planetary Unistate, ruled by the globalist elite themselves. The globalist war on nation-states cannot succeed without collapsing the United States of America. The long-term strategic attack plan moves America incrementally from constitutional republic to socialism to globalism to feudalism. The tactical attack plan uses psychological, informational, asymmetric warfare to destabilize Americans and drive society out of objective reality into the madness of subjective reality. The primary target of the globalist predators is America’s children. 


The ability to distinguish between fact and fantasy is an essential survival skill. If a man believes he can fly and jumps off a twenty-story ledge, he falls to his death because gravity is a fact, an objective truth. Birdman’s fantasy, a subjective reality, cannot compete with the objective reality of gravity.

Let’s break down the process of thinking and doing. Thinking is a private matter and human beings are free to think their thoughts at any time in any place. Birdman is free to think he can fly, without consequence to himself or others. It is the moment he steps off the ledge that his subjective reality collides with objective reality.

Adults and children are evaluated differently in society. The fantasies of children are an accepted part of the growth process. In a sane society, adults who are out of touch with reality are deemed insane. In our example, Birdman would be considered insane.

Civil society and the laws that govern it are based on the acceptance of objective reality by its citizens. What would happen if there was a movement that deliberately rejected the teaching of objective reality and taught subjective reality instead? What would be the purpose of driving a society insane?

Remember, the ability to distinguish between fact and fantasy is a survival skill, because thought precedes action. Birdman thought he could fly and jumped to his death. Critical thinking is the objective analysis of facts in order to form a judgment, and is the foundation of rational thought.

Feelings, on the other hand, are the foundation of beliefs. Birdman’s feeling that he is a bird that can fly cannot compete with the fact that he is a human being who cannot. Critical thinking, based on facts, is necessary in an adult society.

An insistence upon objective reality is what made America great, powerful, and undefeatable in World War II. At the end of the war, America’s enemies did not go quietly into the night. They reconstituted themselves to fight another day, in another way.

America’s enemies simply put down their guns, picked up their books, and concentrated on the future. They studied the human mind and decided to exploit the existence of the unconscious to defeat America psychologically. The strategic goal was to infantilize Americans. Children’s psychological growth would be paralyzed with educational indoctrination that interrupts their developing critical-thinking skills. Adults would be pressured out of the adult world of objective reality and regressed back into the childish world of feelings.

Vladimir Lenin infamously said, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”

The leftists have taken a page out of Lenin’s communist playbook and indoctrinated two generations of Americans toward collectivism using public/private education, along with mainstream media including television programming and movies. The radical leftist/Marxist War on America is a sinister effort to shatter objective reality and destroy critical-thinking skills. When critical thinking is destroyed and a society is reduced to childish emotional thinking, that society is easily exploited.

In order to stop the radical leftists/Marxists, we need a Reality Revolution. This Revolution would restore objective reality by dismantling the infrastructure of subjective reality that has been established since the end of World War II.

In objective reality, the striving to become an adult, with all its attendant responsibilities, is rewarded with the freedom of adulthood. Children are not free in any society—they are dependent upon their parents/caretakers or the government. The choice between the collectivism offered by socialism/communism, and the individualism offered by the constitutional republic envisioned by our Founding Fathers, is the choice between childhood dependence and adult independence. It is the difference between servitude and freedom.

What young people in America need to understand is that the promise of socialism is never the reality of socialism. Cradle-to-grave government care exacts an exorbitant price. When you accept the powerless position of childhood for the rest of your life, the government happily appropriates your freedom and liberty. In socialism/communism you become a permanent ward of the state.

Americans who proudly wear Che Guevara T-shirts display their ignorance. Real people living in actual communist countries risk their lives escaping TO the real freedom of America. No one is trying to escape FROM Miami to Havana. The romanticized version of socialism/communism propagandizing American students is subjective reality.

These young people need to consider the reality of collectivism, but they must be in objective reality in order to do so. Otherwise, like Birdman, they will think they can fly. The death of Birdman is the metaphorical death of freedom.

©2024. Linda Goudsmit. All rights reserved.

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BOB EHRLICH: It’s Not All Doom And Gloom. Here Are Some Signs Of Progress Against The Woke Onslaught

So much has gone wrong over the past three years that it is easy to simply ignore good news, including signs of progress against the woke onslaught.

And so, a brief, happy reminder that inflection points still exist – that there are increasing numbers of people ready, willing and able to contest the Obama/Biden led “transformation” of America. A sampling:

  • A recent Wall Street Journal story (“Sustainable Investing Craze Fades”) informs that the market’s enthusiasm for sustainable funds and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) mandates is on the wane. Indeed, some funds are literally dropping “sustainable” from their titles. Here, enough investors are demanding a return to fiduciary duty that even woke investment types are getting the message.
  • The U.S. military has returned to old school patriotism. You know, the “Be all you can be” brand of recruiting pitch with depictions of tanks and field artillery and fighter jets screaming overhead. Seems that while all the woke outreach and PC advertising was plenty good enough for peace time, there is now a realization that potential hot wars in the Middle East and over Taiwan may require actual warriors…rather than the HR police. Jus’ sayin’.
  • The American public (per recent polling results) recognizes the ever-spiraling cost of living, despite the very best efforts of the White House and mainstream media to paint a picture of a Bidenomics-induced era of moderating prices and economic growth. The weekly grocery and energy tabs are simply too high for the average American to buy what Mr. Biden is selling.
  • A federal judge’s decision in Biden vs. Missouri – and subsequent appeals upholding that decision – has given new hope to First Amendment types that the Biden era’s preoccupation with “disinformation” and infatuation with heavy handed censorship has hit a major roadblock.
  • As injuries and lost opportunities for female athletes begin to mount, more women are speaking out about the unfairness of biological men competing in women’s athletics. The really good news: These new critics come from all over the ideological spectrum.
  • Around the world, right-wing and pro-legal immigration parties are on the upswing – a tide seen in recent election results in the Netherlands, Finland, Italy, Germany, and of course the recent shocking presidential election result in Argentina.

Note that I continue to live in the real world, that I understand there remain plenty of negative storylines out there as well. (See, e.g., The “mostly peaceful” pro-Palestinian demonstrations in world capitols and the outbreak of virulent antisemitism in America and Europe and never-ending waves of illegal migrants overwhelming the southern border.) But the fact remains that weak-woke-and wobbly is not standing up to increased scrutiny as election time rolls around.

You see – despite all the positive reviews it receives on American campuses and through left-leaning media outlets around the world – secular progressivism / socialism / Marxism never quite work out. The proletariat never quite rebels. Collectivism never quite produces enough consumer goods. Attacks on the nuclear family never quite overcome biology. And identity politics never quite trumps content of character.

A word of warning: Resist the inclination to get comfortable with this recent outbreak of positive news and common sense. There is no guarantee it will maintain itself for a sustained period of time. Something for nothing and class warfare and the war against the family and biological men playing women’s sports and speech codes on campus are simply not going away overnight. But how satisfying it is to see real progress on the front lines.

AUTHOR

BOB EHRLICH

Bob Ehrlich is a former Governor of Maryland, Member of Congress, and State Legislator. He is the author of five books on American politics and opinion pieces that have appeared in America’s leading newspapers and periodicals. He and his wife, Kendel, can be seen and heard on their weekly podcast, “Bottom Line with Bob & Kendel Ehrlich.”

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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Just 3 Companies Are Leading The Charge In The Marxist Takeover Of America

For nearly nine out of 10 companies listed on the S&P 500 stock exchange, their largest single shareholder is one of the “Big Three” investment firms: BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street. Managing more money than most small countries, these firms have an invisible foothold in virtually every sector of American society. But how did these paragons of capitalism turn into a Marxist Trojan Horse?

Two trends emerged in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. One was a new type of investment that concentrated capital among a small number of firms. The other was left-wing activism in the style of Occupy Wall Street. Combined, these trends helped empower three firms to push much of the corporate wokeness that is so common today.

The financial meltdown precipitated a transition from active to passive investment. Active investment is what one typically thinks of as investing — making risky stock purchases in an attempt to beat the market in the short-term. Passive investment, on the other hand, requires much less effort. According to Investopedia, it is a long-term strategy where investors try to “replicate market performance by constructing well-diversified portfolios” (e.g. mutual funds) typically based on a “representative benchmark” like the S&P 500 index.  In other words, it bets on the market rather than against it.

Passive investing took off after the financial crisis when investors realized it wasn’t worth trying to beat the market. Why pay a broker a one to two percent fee every year to actively manage your assets, especially when the downturn revealed they often under-performed the regular market returns? Many opted for passive asset management that cost a fraction of a brokerage fee.

One study found that between 2008 and 2015, active funds lost $800 billion while passive funds gained over $1 trillion in new investment. As of 2019, more money is now invested in passive than in active funds.

This empowered the rise of the Big Three firms, which all specialize in passive asset management. Combined, the three firms have a total of $22 trillion in assets under management, much of which comes from large institutional investors like pension funds.

These firms invest in passive index funds on behalf of their clients, but the sheer volume has allowed them to become major shareholders in nearly all public American companies. With this comes out-sized voting power on corporate boards.

At the same time passive investing took off, social leftism was escaping from college campuses into the real world.

Occupy Wall Street represented legitimate outrage against the wild mismanagement of Wall Street finance. However, what started out as an ostensibly class-based protest quickly devolved into dysfunctional identity politics.

As one former Occupy protester reflected, the movement “fell apart largely because of the endless bifurcation of members’ agendas. Whenever a task force of leading members was proposed to discuss some almost-consensus working-class issue like support for an increased minimum wage, the call would immediately come for a women’s task force. Then, what about a Black women’s task force? A Black gay women’s task force? Very often, 37 quarreling proposals about what to do would eventually be made, and nothing would ever get done.”

Occupy provided its own foil for elites to replicate. The best way to neuter a class-based revolution is to divide the middle and working classes into factions, and have them fight among each other rather than unite against the financial and political elites. Identity politics — what’s really just American Marxism — became a sure-fire way to insulate elite power.

Like Marxism, identity politics pits victim against oppressor, except in the American case it is based on racial categories rather than economic class. The Big Three weaponize the framework of Marxism to keep the lower classes occupied without actually having to give up any of their power or wealth. 

Thus, it’s not surprising that the Big Three have used their shareholder power to impose an Environmental Social Governance (ESG) agenda on corporate America that makes companies bend the knee to identity politics. The “E” focuses on climate issues and supposed externalities; the “S” factors in identity concerns like diversity and inclusion; and the “G” requires structuring corporate leadership to reflect the previous two components. If companies want to be included in vaunted ESG funds, they must meet the often arbitrary benchmarks.

Just one of many egregious examples shows how this scheme plays out in practice.

After George Floyd’s death, BlackRock decided it wanted all the companies it invests in to put greater effort into diversity and inclusion. They forced American companies to disclose the “racial, ethnic and gender makeup of their employees.” This was then used as a benchmark to force companies to re-make their boards of directors so that the “board’s composition reflects . . . the diversity of the company’s key stakeholders.” BlackRock pledged to vote against any directors who refused to do so.

At virtually the same time, Vanguard and State Street imposed similar diversity mandates across their portfolios, making it near impossible for companies to avoid. The number of companies now releasing their diversity data tripled in the year after the new requirements were imposed.

This formula has been replicated on numerous left-wing priorities. Additionally, as industry leaders, the Big Three serve as respectable actors for smaller firms to emulate — even those they lack the direct power to coerce.

Elites like BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink have recently attempted to distance themselves from the ESG name and the “woke” connotation it now carries. However, don’t be fooled — ESG by any other name is just as destructive.

AUTHOR

GAGE KLIPPER

Contributor.

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

The Source Of The Marxist Takeover Of American Institutions Is So Obvious It Hurts

It is impossible to deny how far left all of America’s institutions have shifted in the past few years. Corporate board rooms, the media, sports teams and even the military all chant the same dogma and insist that you comply.

How did that happen? As Ernest Hemingway wrote on how one goes bankrupt, “gradually, then suddenly.” Indeed, our leading institutions face a moral bankruptcy unprecedented in American history.

This could not have happened without the left’s successful “long march through the institutions.” This term, made famous by radical academics in the 1960s, refers to the strategy used by “New Left” students of that era. They aimed to achieve long-term social and and political change by infiltrating and subverting key institutions, particularly the elite universities they often attended.

These radicals were the progenitors of the critical theories that plague our offices and our children’s schools today. They knew these ideas could never be sold democratically to the American public, so they instead sought to disrupt disciplines — sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and cultural studies — that were more amenable to their critical perspectives. 

Through their research, teaching, and activism, they eventually came to dominate entire departments or even university leadership. This power was then used to launder their ideology to a new generation of students who would unquestioningly carry it with them into the “real world.”

A new Harvard survey on faculty political leanings reveals that the left’s long march was more successful than they likely ever dreamed. A whopping 75% of Harvard faculty identifies as “liberal” or “very liberal,” while only 2.5% identifies as conservative. A minuscule 0.4 percent identifies as “very conservative.”

As law professor Jonathon Turley points out, these figures massively overrepresent liberals compared to society overall. Roughly equal portions of Americans identify as conservative or moderate, while only 26% identify as liberal. More Harvard faculty identify as “very liberal” (32%) than Americans overall identify as “liberal.”

The figure is representative across large swathes of American academia. In 1969, one in four college professors was at least moderately conservative. Now, liberals outweigh conservatives on campus by roughly 12 to one.

Yet Harvard’s stark disparity stands out more than the rest because it is the best that American education has to offer — or at least it used to be.

Nevertheless, its name is still intrinsically associated with excellence and prestige that few other universities are accorded. If you are a Harvard graduate, you are likely to impact the highest levels of American power in whichever field you choose to pursue.

That is precisely the point. By capturing the Harvard banner, radical activists then got to decide what constituted excellence and prestige. Their radical ideologies gained the legitimacy associated with the Harvard name and serve as an example for lesser universities to follow. Molded by these new definitions, Harvard graduates carry them out to the world where they shape the halls of power in business, government, and media.

Harvard boasts the most alumni who later became CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. With 41 alumni CEOs, Harvard dwarfs the nearest runner up, the University of Pennsylvania, by almost double.

Harvard also has the largest number of Nobel Prize winners at 161. It boasts the largest number of Supreme Court justices in history, with four Harvard graduates currently on the bench.

Harvard also has the largest number of U.S. military Medal of Honor recipients (18) for any non-military school. This included 8 generals throughout history.

Given this legacy, Harvard will continue to recruit America’s brightest and most ambitious young minds. Many of them are likely pre-existing liberals, but many of them will not be. Blinded by the allure of the Harvard name, they will make themselves vulnerable to the ubiquitous leftism of their professors.

Even those who see what’s happening will likely go along to get along. If they do not bend the knee, all their hard work will be for naught, and their aspirations will crumble beneath them.

Conservatives must accept that the purpose of academia — to foster intellectual curiosity and challenge rigid ways of thinking — no longer exists as we all once imagined. The long march, which occurred gradually over decades, hit suddenly in the Trump era. There is no sign the radicals will allow dissent within Harvard or any other university any time soon.

AUTHOR

GAGE KLIPPER

Contributor.

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

Exiled Cuban Journalist: ‘Socialism Is Institutionalized Envy’

Approximately 36% of young Americans, ages 18 to 22, hold a positive view of socialism. However, for exiled Cuban journalist Yoe Suárez, this positive view of socialism is not based on reality. On a recent episode of the Outstanding podcast hosted by Joseph Backholm, Suárez and Washington Stand Editor-in-Chief Jared Bridges discuss their firsthand experiences with socialism and its wide-ranging consequences.

“The first time I ate a tangerine in years was here in [the] USA,” Suárez said. “It’s amazing because Cuba is a tropical island, you know? It should have fruits there. That’s an image that can maybe portray what’s happening in Cuba.” Suárez went on to discuss the various crises Cubans endure, including blackouts, inaccessible medicine, and a lack of necessities like food and milk for families. When Backholm asked Suárez what the government’s objective was, he replied, “The principal goal is political control. And then they have to build a narrative of goodness behind that.”

Bridges shared his experience living under a socialist government in Minsk, Belarus. “At the time, the things I ran into was just seeing how that system for that long a time oppressed people,” he said. He discussed his inability to find prescribed medicine after going to seven different pharmacies. “To put it in perspective today, here in America, I’ll go to the drug store and get upset if I have to wait 15 minutes.” Bridges further noted that his experience shed light on how, rather than everyone being equal in their belongings and opportunities under socialism, people are stripped of basic needs including medicine. “What became evident to me was that something is not what it says it is,” Bridges stated.

Backholm wondered how to change the phenomenon happening “here in the United States where you have a growing number of young people who actually seem enthusiastic about socialism,” with Bridges adding how this enthusiasm takes place amongst Christians as well.

“The saddest thing is that socialism takes a lot from envy,” Suárez said. People want what they can’t have, and, for Suárez, socialism feeds the flame of envy toward those who have more. “Socialism is institutionalized envy. It’s that. Socialism is just that.” He went on to observe that the fundamental issue is when too much power is centralized in one place. Sharing is good, but it must come from a place of voluntary charity. As Suárez stated, “If it’s voluntary, it’s charity. And charity is good.” But as Backholm added, “Compelled generosity is not generosity, it is theft. It is totalitarian. It is robbery.”

Backholm further pointed out how our sinful nature, whether living under capitalism or socialism, leads to the exploitation of others and often manifests into greed. “If our hearts are unregulated, we will take advantage of other people to our own benefit,” Backholm stated. “What a biblical worldview argues for is a decentralization of power. … The free marketplace, by nature, decentralizes power.” In response, Bridges reflected on how a free market society also gives us the ability to speak out.

When the discussion turned to equality, it was noted that the desire for ultimate equality does not have an end because nothing will ever be enough to satisfy. Suárez, for instance, was kicked out of his home country for speaking out against socialism. As Bridges pointed out, this socialist view of equality does not lead to actual equality, but rather a totalitarian sense of political control where the government tells you what you can and cannot do with your goods, needs, and opinions.

For Backholm, Suárez, and Bridges, the ability to distinguish between voluntary charity and compelled generosity is the difference between socialism and capitalism. Neither is without flaw, but as Suárez stated, “The solution to a headache is not cancer.”

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Joseph Goebbels’ Own Words Show He Loved Socialism and Saw It as ‘the Future’

Socialists will continue to argue that Nazism was not “real” socialism, but the Nazi propaganda despised capitalism and spoke like Karl Marx.


One of the comforts of growing older is knowing that some things will never change.

Sports fans will always argue over the designated hitter rule and over who was the best heavyweight boxer of all-time (Muhammad Ali). Movie fans will never agree which Godfather movie was better, the first or the second (the first.) And the trumpets will sound at the Second Coming before capitalists and socialists agree on whether the Nazis were “really socialists.”

The last item has always puzzled me, I confess, and not just because the word is right there in the name: National Socialism. If you read the speeches and private conversations of the Nazi hierarchy, it’s clear they loved socialism and despised individualism and capitalism.

In his new book Hitler’s National Socialism, the historian Rainer Zitelmann gives a penetrating look into the ideas that shaped men like Hitler and Goebbels. While it’s clear they saw their own brand of socialism as distinct from Marxism (more on that later), there is no question they saw socialism as the future and despised bourgeoisie capitalism.

Consider, for example, these quotes from Joseph Goebbels, the chief propagandist for the Nazi Party:

  1. “Socialism is the ideology of the future.” – Letter to Ernst Graf zu Reventlow as quoted in Goebbels: A Biography
  2. “The bourgeoisie has to yield to the working class … Whatever is about to fall should be pushed. We are all soldiers of the revolution. We want the workers’ victory over filthy lucre. That is socialism.” -quoted in Doctor Goebbels: His Life and Death
  3. “We are socialists, because we see in socialism, that means, in the fateful dependence of all folk comrades upon each other, the sole possibility for the preservation of our racial genetics and thus the re-conquest of our political freedom and for the rejuvenation of the German state. – “Why We Are Socialists?” Der Angriff (The Attack ), July 16, 1928
  4. “We are not a charitable institution but a Party of revolutionary socialists.” -Der Angriff editorial, May 27, 1929
  5. “Capitalism assumes unbearable forms at the moment when the personal purposes that it serves run contrary to the interest of the overall folk. It then proceeds from things and not from people. Money is then the axis around which everything revolves. It is the reverse with socialism. The socialist worldview begins with the folk and then goes over to things. Things are made subservient to the folk; the socialist puts the folk above everything, and things are only means to an end.” -”Capitalism,” Der Angriff, July 15, 1929
  6. “In 1918 there was only one task for the German socialist: to keep the weapons and defend German socialism.” -”Capitalism,” Der Angriff, July 15, 1929
  7. “To be a socialist means to let the ego serve the neighbour, to sacrifice the self for the whole. In its deepest sense socialism equals service.” – diary notes (1926)
  8. “The lines of German socialism are sharp, and our path is clear. We are against the political bourgeoisie, and for genuine nationalism! We are against Marxism, but for true socialism!” – Those Damn Nazis: Why Are We Socialists? (1932)
  9. “We are socialists because we see the social question as a matter of necessity and justice for the very existence of a state for our people, not a question of cheap pity or insulting sentimentality. The worker has a claim to a living standard that corresponds to what he produces.” – Those Damn Nazis: Why Are We Socialists? (1932)
  10. “England is a capitalist democracy. Germany is a socialist people’s state.” – “Englands Schuld” (the speech is not dated, but likely was given in 1939)
  11. “Because we are socialists we have felt the deepest blessings of the nation, and because we are nationalists we want to promote socialist justice in a new Germany.” – Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken (1932)
  12. “The sin of liberal thinking was to overlook socialism’s nation-building strengths, thereby allowing its energies to go in anti-national directions.” – Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken (1932)
  13. “To be a socialist is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole. Socialism is in its deepest sense service.” – as quoted in Escape from Freedom, Erich Fromm
  14. “We are a workers’ party because we see in the coming battle between finance and labor the beginning and the end of the structure of the twentieth century. We are on the side of labor and against finance. . . The value of labor under socialism will be determined by its value to the state, to the whole community.”-Those Damn Nazis: Why Are We Socialists? (1932)

These quotes represent just a smattering of Goebbels’ views on and conception of socialism. One can see that in many ways the Nazi spoke much like Karl Marx.

Phrases like “we are a workers’ party,” “the worker has a claim to a living standard that corresponds to what he produces,” “money…is the reverse with socialism,” and “we are against the political bourgeoisie” could easily be plucked from Marx’s own speeches and writings—yet it’s clear Goebbels despised Marx and saw his brand of “national socialism” as distinct from Marxism.

So what sets National Socialism apart from Marxism? There are two primary differences.

The first is that Hitler and Goebbels fused their socialism with race and German nationalism, rejecting the international ethos of Marxism—workers of the world unite!—for a more practical one that emphasized Germany’s Völkischen movement.

This was a clever tactic by the Nazis. As the Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek pointed out, it made socialism more palatable to many Germans who were unable to see Nazism for what it truly was.

“The supreme tragedy is still not seen that in Germany it was largely people of good will who, by their socialist policies, prepared the way for the forces which stand for everything they detest,” Hayek wrote in The Road to Serfdom (1944). “Few recognize that the rise of fascism…was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.”

The second difference is that National Socialists were less concerned with directly controlling the means of production.

In his 1940 book German Economy, 1870-1940, Gustav Stolper, an Austrian-German economist and journalist, explained that though National Socialism was anti-capitalist from the beginning, it was also in direct competition with Marxism following World War I. Because of this, National Socialists determined to “woo the masses” from three distinct angles.

“The first angle was the moral principle, the second the financial system, the third the issue of ownership. The moral principle was ‘the commonwealth before self-interest.’ The financial promise was ‘breaking the bondage of interest slavery’. The industrial program was ‘nationalization of all big incorporated business [trusts]’. By accepting the principle ‘the commonwealth before self-interest,’ National Socialism simply emphasizes its antagonism to the spirit of a competitive society as represented supposedly by democratic capitalism . . . But to the Nazis this principle means also the complete subordination of the individual to the exigencies of the state. And in this sense National Socialism is unquestionably a Socialist system . . .”

Stolper, who fled from Germany to the United States after Hitler’s rise to power, noted that the Nazis never initiated a widespread nationalization of industry, but he explained that in some ways this was a distinction without a difference.

“The socialization of the entire German productive machinery, both agricultural and industrial, was achieved by methods other than expropriation, to a much larger extent and on an immeasurably more comprehensive scale than the authors of the party program in 1920 probably ever imagined. In fact, not only the big trusts were gradually but rapidly subjected to government control in Germany, but so was every sort of economic activity, leaving not much more than the title of private ownership.”

In his 1939 book The Vampire Economy: Doing Business Under Fascism, Guenter Reimann reached a similar conclusion, the economic historian Richard Ebeling notes.

“…while most of the means of production had not been nationalized, they had nonetheless been politicized and collectivized under an intricate web of Nazi planning targets, price and wage regulations, production rules and quotas, and strict limits and restraints on the action and decisions of those who remained; nominally, the owners of private enterprises throughout the country. Every German businessman knew that his conduct was prescribed and positioned within the wider planning goals of the National Socialist regime.”

The historical record is clear: European fascism was simply a different shade of socialism, which helps explain, as Hayek noted, why so many fascists were “former” socialists—”from Mussolini down (and including Laval and Quisling).”

Like Marx, the Nazis loathed capitalism and saw the individual will and individual rights as subordinate to the interests of the state. It should come as little surprise that these different shades of socialism achieved such similar results: poverty and misery.

Socialists will continue to argue that Nazism was not “real” socialism, but the words of the infamous Nazi propaganda minister suggest otherwise.

AUTHOR

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. (Follow him on Substack.) His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune. Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

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

Recovering a more perfect union: A rebuke of the 1619 Project

A new book describes the importance of memory, history, and national identity in saving America from desolation.


One of the worst sins of the present — not just ours but any present — is its tendency to condescend toward the past, which is much easier to do when one doesn’t trouble to know the full context of that past or try to grasp the nature of its challenges as they presented themselves at the time.
— Wilfred M. McClay, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story

Jay Leno used to do a regular schtick, Jaywalking, in which he would interview random persons on the street, often young ones, and ask them questions about American history, such as: “Who did America fight in the Revolutionary War?” “How many branches of the U.S. government are there?” “What year was the War of 1812?” Invariably, they could not answer the question, standing mute with Leno’s impertinent microphone pointed at their gaping mouths, or they gave a ridiculous answer.

As deflating as these performances were, it turns out that the state of American education is even worse than Leno documented. Not only does ignorance characterise so much of the citizenry, but Americans are now also imbibing, i.e., being taught, pernicious lies or partial truths about the founding and history of the United States from a tendentious, ideological, and solidly left-wing perspective.

Twisted narrative

This sorry state of affairs is documented in excruciating detail in Timothy S. Goeglein’s enlightening, depressing, and, ultimately, hopeful new book, Toward a More Perfect Union: The Moral and Cultural Case for Teaching the Great American Story.

The distortion of history now routinely fed to elementary and high school students, as well as those attending hopelessly “woke” universities and colleges, has produced many young people who are “cynical, entitled, and aggrieved.” Continues Goeglein:

Rather than being thankful, they are indignant. Rather than proud, they feel ashamed. Rather than feeling free, they feel oppressed. Rather than wanting to fix America’s faults, they want to burn America down. Rather than asking what they can do for their country, they demand to know what their country can do for them — and the answer is increasingly to “cease to exist.”

We have created “a citizenry divorced both intellectually and emotionally from its heritage.” Further, “[w]hen we disassociate history — and memory — from facts, we are lost,” writes Goeglein, a former special assistant to President George W. Bush, a former Senate staffer, and, presently, vice-president of external and government relations for Focus on the Family.

Our predicament is exemplified by the absurd, anti-historical 1619 Project of the New York Times, an initiative repudiated by many respectedliberal historians. It is being taught in roughly 4,500 schools nationwide.

In a feat of historical and moral inversion, it maintains that the American Revolution was designed primarily to protect the institution of slavery from being destroyed by the British Empire.

Such a one-sided view of history will alienate Americans from one another, given the dissolution of a common identity and love of country, and disregards those who struggled to make the Declaration of Independence a reality in spite of its obvious flaws, such as slavery.

On the matter of slavery, always a leading complaint against America’s founding, the Washington Post’s George Will has rightly observed that the founders’ Constitution “gave slavery no national validation. It left slavery solely a creature of state laws and therefore susceptible to the process that, in fact, occurred — the process of being regionally confined and put on a path to ultimate extinction. Secession was the South’s desperate response when it recognized this impending outcome that the Constitution had facilitated.”

So, it comes as no surprise that, as “a 2020 Pew Research study found a month before the presidential election, roughly eight in ten registered voters in both camps said their political disagreements with others were about core American values, with roughly nine in ten — liberal and conservative — worried [that] a victory by the other would lead to ‘lasting harm’ to the United States” [emphasis added]. We are now in a situation in which tribe is pitted against tribe, race against race, rich against poor, red against blue states.

We have succumbed to the “termites of self-loathing,” to use a term coined by Ben Stein. There is hardly a historic personage — Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, Columbus, St Junípero Serra — who is not vilified, “cancelled,” and banished into outer darkness by woke activists and educators. One should be grateful that at least Frederick Douglass and Dr Martin Luther King Jr are spared such treatment, given their devotion to American ideals in the Declaration of Independence, classical literature, and Scripture. They are just ignored.

Dearth of patriotism

Recently, a friend whose daughter attended one of the tonier prep schools in Washington, DC, related that his conversations with her on US and Western history were disappointing. She, and her friends, showed no “piety” toward her country or heritage.

It was an interesting word choice and recalled my own school days studying Virgil’s Aeneid, an epic poem written between 29 and 19 BC. It tells the story of the Trojan Aeneas, who fled the destruction of his city, travelled to Italy, and would later become the ancestor of the Romans.

I remember my Jesuit instructor lauding “pius Aeneas,” “pious” being the most used adjective throughout the poem. In following the will of the gods — he even left the captivating Dido in Carthage — Aeneas demonstrated pietas, a virtue in the eyes of Virgil and my teacher, in his devotion to family, country, and mission. Such piety is no longer encouraged in our educational institutions, or so it would seem.

Major culprit

What brought America to this sorry state? In the beginning there was the “Original Zinn” — Howard Zinn, that is, a Boston University professor of political science and “the godfather of the radical attack on America’s history”, as Goeglein outlines in a pivotal chapter of Toward a More Perfect Union.

Zinn’s “epic screed,” A People’s History of the United States (1980), and his supplemental book for high schoolers, A Young People’s History of the United States (2007), have had an unparalleled impact on social studies teachers. The historian refram[ed]” and “reimagin[ed]” facts to fit a Marxist critique of the US and a Western civilisation marred, claimed Zinn, “by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money.” For Zinn, “standards of historical analysis are merely ‘technical problems’ to be dismissed.”

“You wanna read a real history book?” Matt Damon’s titular character, Will, asks Robin Williams’ Dr Sean Maguire in the movie Good Will Hunting (1997). “Read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. That book’ll f***ing knock you on your ass.” Indeed, it does. It also boggles the mind.

Zinn claims that the nation “has been taken over by men [the founders] who have no respect for human rights or constitutional liberties.” Again, in service to ideology, Zinn does not believe in objective history as documented by Mary Grabar, PhD, a refugee of communist Yugoslavia, on whom Goeglein draws heavily.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the main author of the 1619 Project, backtracked after respected historians critiqued her work. She claimed that the project was not about history but about “memory.” This is not historically grounded memory, but memory saturated with ideology and politics. This is pure Zinn in methodology. Hence, noted historians such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Eugene Genovese, and Michael Kammen — hardly a crowd of right-wingers — criticised Zinn as a “polemicist, not a historian.”

“His ultimate goal is not a historical one but a political one,” writes Goeglein. “[H]e wanted to depict the United States as an illegitimate enterprise, one demanding a revolution.”

Pushback

According to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, today, only 18 percent of colleges require that students take a US history or government class to graduate. Maybe that is a blessing, given what passes for “history” in today’s woke environment. Ultimately, however, this is devastating to national unity.

Goeglein describes survey after survey that all indicate Americans’ ignorance of their rights under law and history. When the Constitution is taught, it is derided as being not radical enough in terms of the outcomes desired by left-of-centre teachers and advocates.

Toward A More Perfect Union does not specify a political agenda for reform, although it does note efforts made by some governors to reign in educational bureaucracies on, say, critical race theory. It does make a plea for parents to make a concerted effort to teach and counsel their children on the history of the nation and to pay close attention to what their schools are teaching.

It points to excellent resources available with which parents can educate themselves and their children on the complete story of American exceptionalism, not excluding the darker chapters. Parents who can afford the cost should look for alternatives to public schools that sacrifice true learning for the sake of ideology. “Classical” schools, home schooling, and parochial schools — all of which boomed during the COVID lockdowns — are possible options.

Parents who cannot afford private schools or who have special-needs children “must be extra vigilant and expect to receive the full wrath of Leftist activists if they stand up and demand that civics be taught while also standing against the indoctrination their children are receiving.” Specifically, they need to insist on the rights to inspect curricula, to opt out of the teaching of certain subjects, and to insist that controversial issues be discussed impartially. No easy tasks these.

Goeglein concludes:

[W]e must rededicate ourselves to the teaching of history — true, verifiable, factual history, with all its glories and tragedies. We need not fear to teach the ugly truths about America alongside the beautiful ones, because America’s founding vision is pure and her ideals are noble. Our failures do not change that.

Toward a More Perfect Union makes a compelling case that the country’s future, as one nation, demands a reclamation of our educational system and a recovery of the authentic teaching of history and constitutional government rightly understood.

This article has been republished from The American Spectator with permission.

AUTHOR

G. Tracy Mehan III

G. Tracy Mehan, III, was Assistant Administrator for Water at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the Administration of President George W. Bush. He is an adjunct professor at Scalia Law School,… More by G. Tracy Mehan III

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

Biden Regime Unleashes ‘Total Transformation [Destruction] of the [Federal] Government’ With ‘Equity Action Plans’

This. Is. Happening. Our universities, colleges, public schools, intel agencies (all government agencies, for that matter) – every sphere is being subsumed by this 21st century quasi-Nazism.

Woke Pentagon rolls out ‘equity’ plan | Fox News

The Department of Defense issued an equity report, aiming to equalize outcomes of employees and partners across racial, sexual and gender lines.

Biden Admin Unleashes ‘Total Transformation Of Government’ With ‘Equity Action Plans’

By Tim Meads • Daily Wire • Apr 20, 2022 •

On April 14, the Biden administration unleashed a “total transformation of government” — as described by the Department of Energy — arguably based on principles of Critical Race Theory.

Toward that end, more than 90 federal agencies announced “equity action plans” to supposedly address inequality in American society — but critics say that the plans will create a coercive bureaucracy intent on punishing certain Americans based on racial marxism and other progressive ideas that champion victimhood.

The White House recently noted that on his first day in office, President Joe Biden “signed Executive Order 13985, Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government” which “directed the whole of the federal government to advance an ambitious equity and racial justice agenda” focused on creating “prosperity, dignity, and equality” for underserved communities.

Ryan Girdusky, founder of 1776 Project PAC, a non-profit focused on electing school board members opposed to Critical Race Theory-inspired curriculum, told The Daily Wire that Biden administration’s “plan towards equity is race-based Marxism with a different word.”

“The entire program is set to lower standards, dilute meritocracy, and have the first large-scale government-supported laws that discriminate against people based on their race since before Eisenhower was President,” Girdusky added.

Indeed, the Department of Energy explained in its equity action plan released last week that it has already started considering factors other than technical merit when doling out financial assistance via a pilot program through its Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) office.

Starting back in March 2021, applicants seeking research and development funding from EERE have had to issue diversity, equity, and inclusion statements for their projects on their applications.

The purpose of such statements are to explain how their project would help and include “underserved communities” — which is taken to mean minority, non-white, non-heterosexual, non-male groups — in order to be considered for the taxpayer-funded grants……

Keep reading.

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Islamo-Leftism [Part 8]

Editor’s note: The following is a translation by Ibn Warraq and Robert Kerr of Michel Onfray’s L’Art d’Etre Francais (The Art of Being French, Bouquins, 2021), published here for the first time. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here. Part 4 is here. Part 5 is here. Part 6 is here. Part 7 is here.


This essentialization finds its theory in long discourses on “the Other” (p. 141) with a capital letter… One can’t do more essentializing than with this hollow, empty, pretentious concept, redolent of the philosophical jargon of phenomenologists! What is this Other that some people who quote Levinas go on about? What though is the ‘Other’ than the ‘same entity’ (Même), repeatedly recast from the same mould, duplicated ad nauseam for the particular needs of the cause on hand. The Other is nonexistent, just an idealized figure, a notion, a Platonic ideal that can never become manifest because there are only multiplicities, diversities, otherness. Plenel writes at one point: “This Other who, in our societies, has taken the figure of the Muslim” (p. 143). There can be no better proof that this Other is nothing but a ‘Sameyness’ (Même) conceptualized as an archetype, allowing for all possible journalistic and pamphleteering variations.

Plenel is a realist, in the medieval philosophical sense of the term, in other words someone who believes in the reality of ideas more than in the truth of multiplicities. He does not believe what he sees, but he sees what he believes. And there is little difference between the realist in this sense and the ideologue, for whom reality never materializes because the idea imposes the law in its place. Plenel’s Muslim does not exist, except as an allegory by means of which all ideological variations are possible.

Secondly: godwiner. I propose this neologism based on Godwin’s observation[16] which describes the tendency of people to invoke the Holocaust [or Nazis] to prevent any subtle analysis in order to preclude any complex reflection. This criminalization of the interlocutor forbids us to debate with him. He is de facto a monster comparable to the Nazis.

Edwy Plenel’s title is not by chance: Pour les musulmans. Since Émile Zola published Pour les juifs (p. 67) during the Dreyfus affair, Edwy Plenel, in response to this new Dreyfus affair, namely the assertion that there is “a problem with Islam in France” (p. 39), must take up the torch and be the Zola of his time.

Muslims are allegedly stigmatized, despised, hated and persecuted in France, just as the Jews were in the course of the 20th century. They are seen as an “enemy from within (the Jew yesterday, the Muslim – or, indiscriminately, the Arab today)” (p. 54) – the upper and lower case letters are the author’s.

If today’s Muslims are yesterday’s Jews, then where are the Drumonts[17] and Maurras[18] of today? Finkielkraut[19], answers Plenel…  Where is the media in which hatred against Muslims is spewed out every day? Plenel can produce no culprit worse than France Inter, specifically the Matinales program of this radio station, which by all accounts supports most of his theses – the book opens with a denunciation of this state broadcasting station, as it serves “lark’s pâté” every day, inviting an Islamophile horse[20] and [what offends Plenel] a lark critical of Islamophilia (p. 39). There was even a time, on France Inter, under the leadership of Patrick Cohen, when there was a blacklist of people not to be invited, most of whom could have played the role of the lark in a pâté that was then frankly more horse, with the blessing of the management of this public service that lives on taxpayers’ money and that declined to comment when this became known…

Is there a newspaper that would be the equivalent of L’Action française?[21] Yes. It’s Libération… No laughing matter… First, Edwy Plenel points out “the responsibility of the media” (p. 60), which itself is then essentialized, he claims that they construct, convey, and trivialize “the stigmatization of a population of men, women and children, on the pretext of their religious, spiritual or community identity” (p. 60). Libération? Le Monde? L’Humanité? L’Obs? L’Express? France Inter, France Culture, France infoFrance 2? Media that propagate a bad image of Muslims – yea right, get real.

But where then are the anti-Muslim laws, such as those passed by Vichy on October 3, 1940, antisemitic laws which prohibited Jews from being judges, teachers, doctors, civil servants, soldiers, journalists, film-makers, directors, administrators or theater managers? What is the counterpart of the law of June 2, 1941, which racialized Jews on the basis of their ancestry? Which forbade them from receiving decorations, including the Legion of Honor? Which expanded the work bans to [Jewish] craftsmen, merchants, industrialists, librarians, bankers, advertisers, real estate agents, traders, brokers, foresters, publishers? Which civil service is working to concretely discriminate against Muslims, as did the General Commissariat for Jewish Questions created by the law of March 29, 1941?

The proposal to revoke nationality (of Muslims) following the attacks was indeed foolishness intended to produce a media effect, but that is not enough to conclude that the Muslims of today are the Jews of yesterday. To which I should not be so presumptuous to add that, even among the most vehement opponents of Islam, Jean-Marie Le Pen, no one has envisioned or proposed the equivalent of the Vel’d’Hiv Roundup,[22] of a mass deportation of Muslims to concentration camps, let alone extermination. Just as one would look in vain for a massive plan to destroy Europe’s Muslims in gas chambers, which, need we remind you here? alas yes, remains synonymous with the Jewish people. That is why this moment in history should not be invoked or referred to so lightly.

COLUMN BY

 

REFERENCES:

[16] Godwin’s Law (also known as Godwin’s Rule of Nazi Analogies) is a saying made by Mike Godwin in 1990. The law states: “As a discussion on the Internet grows longer, the likelihood of a person‘s being compared to Hitler or another Nazi, increases.” That means that as more people talk on the Internet for a longer time, it becomes more and more likely that someone will talk about Hitler or the Nazis.”

[17] Édouard Drumont [1844 -1917] was  a journalist, writer and right wing politician, who was an antidreyfusard and antisemite.

[18] Charles-Marie-Photius Maurras [ 1868 – 1952) was a French author, politician, poet, and critic. He was an organizer and principal philosopher of Action Française, a political movement that was monarchist, anti-parliamentarist, and counter-revolutionary. Maurras’ ideas greatly influenced National Catholicism and integral nationalism.

[19] Alain Finkielkraut [born 1949] philosopher, whose parents were Polish Jews, defines himself as being “at the same time classical and romantic”. Finkielkraut deplores what he sees as the deterioration of Western tradition through multiculturalism and relativism.

[20]   “To make a lark pie, take a horse and a lark …”. In this list of ingredients, the size disproportion between horse and lark is striking. The contrast makes us say that it would have been intellectually more honest to name such a dish (if we had to find a name for it), paté of horse with lark.

This exaggerated imbalance between two substances “packaged and sold” together under the same name, a disparity that the lark pie idiom perfectly highlights. Lark pâté is a Machiavellian trap in the place of a product or a proposition that has been misleadingly highlighted. The recipe is well known to advertisers and politicians. It consists of highlighting one of the secondary characteristics of a product, a law or a proposal, in order to present it in its best profile; the goal being to make up, minimize or even make people forget the dominant, uninteresting, harmful or liberating characteristic of the object in question.

[21] Action française is a French far-right monarchist political movement. The name was also given to a journal associated with the movement. The movement and the journal were founded by Maurice Pujo and Henri Vaugeois in 1899, as a nationalist reaction against the intervention of left-wing intellectuals on behalf of Alfred Dreyfus. Charles Maurras quickly joined Action française and became its principal ideologist..

[22]  The Vel d’Hiv Roundup (an abbreviation of Rafle du Vélodrome d’Hiver) in Paris was a mass arrest of Jewish families who were herded into this stadium, used for cycling tournaments during the winter, by French police and gendarmes on the orders of the German authorities in July 1942. Over 13,000 Jews were arrested, including more than 4,000 children. They were all later sent to Auschwitz.

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

Islamo-Leftism [Part 3]

Editor’s note: The following is a translation by Ibn Warraq and Robert Kerr of Michel Onfray’s L’Art d’Etre Francais (The Art of Being French, Bouquins, 2021), published here for the first time. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here.


Foucault went on a second trip in November of that year, and a new series of articles appeared. On February 13, 1979, when Khomeini left for Iran, the philosopher, who had made the trip to Neauphle-le-Château, was present at the airport.

What arguments do the articles he published in the Italian newspaper at the end of 1978 make?

That Islam is the answer to the Shah’s westernization of Iran; that, for want of justice, the Mullahs provide charity in response to the regime’s imperialism; that a Muslim killing another Muslim is scandalous – which is however to ignore the history of Shiite-Sunni relations for almost a millennium and a half; that Israel backed the Shah along with the United States and France (but then so did the Soviet Union); that, paradoxically for a normalien, modernity is archaism – and thus tradition is the true modernity; that the regime was corrupt and that the Shah was imposing on his people “a regime of occupation” comparable “to all colonial regimes” (III, 683).

– therefore, to oppose this is to resist; secularism and industrialization are no longer relevant

-and consequently, theocracy and feudal economy represent the true modernity; the Shah’s regime stands for archaism while that of the Mullahs  is modernity; that the traditional life defended by the Mullahs is preferable to the modernity advocated by the Shah; that “Islam, which for so many centuries has so carefully regulated daily life, family ties, and social relations” (III, 685), is most capable of offering “protection” against the regime – “didn’t its rigor [sic], its immobility [re-sic] determine its success?” Accordingly, “the Islamic government” and the left make common cause without any difficulty  (this is the genealogy of Islamo-leftism); that the Qur’an legitimized the struggle against the Shah, the Americans, “the West and its materialism”; that Islam is fascinated by death and martyrdom (and it is understandable that this proved irresistible to Foucault, who shared this fascination); that the Islamist sermons broadcast in the streets by loudspeaker reminded him of Savonarola – who headed the Catholic theocratic dictatorship in Florence without our philosophy professor being troubled about it; that the Shiite clergy disregards hierarchy, but that one must follow ‘the great ayatollahs’ because they crystallize the will of the people; that Islam is opposed to state power (a notion that a thousand years of Islamic politics refutes); and “that one fact must be clear: By ‘Islamic government’ no one in Iran means a political regime in which the clergy would play a leading or supervisory role” (III, 691) – Everyone will appreciate the philosopher’s immense foresight; that Islam once in power would protect freedoms, minorities, the equality of men and women, that the people could hold those who govern them to account; that this same political Islam would make it possible to reinsert spirituality, that is to say religion, into politics – which means abolishing secularism and restoring the theocratic order that the French Revolution had suppressed in order to favor the democratic order; that a ‘political spirituality’ (III, 694) is a project that ‘impressed’ (that’s his own word) Michel Foucault.

In speaking of this “political spirituality” as something we had forgotten “since the Renaissance and the great crises of Christianity” (though all counter-revolutionary thought was full of it in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one only has to read Joseph de Maistre[4], Louis de Bonald[5], Blanc de Saint-Bonnet[6]), Foucault writes: “I can already hear the French laughing, but I know they are wrong” (III, 694).

The philosopher, however, was also wrong on this subject: many French people did not laugh, many of them even subscribed to this reactionary and theocratic thinking, since it came from a man who called himself a leftist. I am thinking of Serge July in Libération or Jean Daniel in Le Nouvel Observateur, who also thought along these lines. The same applies to the Parti socialiste. Or with Le Monde, which, since the war in Lebanon in 1975, pitted the “Islamo-progressivists” against the “conservative Christians”. This has since become the dominant ideology of what presents itself as the Left and claims to be progressive.

Islamo-Gauchism was thus born in the wake of this Iranian revolution when Foucault believed that Islamic traditionalist thought, that is to say its anti-Semitism, its phallocracy, its misogyny, its theocracy, its homophobia, were susceptible to become the truth of the future.

He was certainly not wrong to write: “The issue of Islam as a political force is a crucial matter for our time and for the years to come” (III, 708). But why on earth did he think that abolishing secularism, suppressing democracy, renouncing progress, that is, restoring the power of the religious, rehabilitating theocracy, and re-establishing tradition, were the political answers to the crisis of the Western world? The ghost of Foucault hovers over European decadence.

COLUMN BY

REFERENCES:

[4] Joseph de Maistre [1753-1821] was a key figure of the Counter-Enlightenment. He regarded the monarchy both as a divinely sanctioned institution and as the only stable form of government. Maistre argued that the rationalist rejection of Christianity was directly responsible for the disorder and bloodshed which followed the French Revolution of 1789.

[5] Louis de Bonald [1754-1840], was a monarchist who opposed the French Revolution, and wished France to return to the principles of the Roman Catholic Church.

[6] Blanc de Saint-Bonnet [1815-1880] was a counter-revolutionary, anti-liberal who favored social Catholicism. He wrote, “You who separate reason and religion, know that you destroy both. Religion is the health of reason; reason is the strength of religion. Religion without reason becomes superstition. Reason without religion becomes disbelief” (L’Unité spirituelle)

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

EXPOSED: Agenda 21 – 2030/2050

This blog subject was suggested to me by a dear friend, a fervent patriot, a Save America Foundation founder member and a conservative activist, Deb C. She and I plus thousands of others have been preaching about Agenda 21 and the Great Reset. Both are real. Both are here. Both need to be stopped. Unless we do America is doomed. No iffs or buts about it. Done. Finito. Destroyed. The video links I have pasted below need you to register but I suggest you do. There is a massive wealth of information on that site. As always we need to get the information out. One way is by the sharing this blog to everyone you know. Read on …

May God rest her soul, Rosa Koire explains Agenda 21. Everyone should pass this on . We must wake up the people.

Once we were tin foil hat wearers, NO MORE . WE ARE LIVING THE NIGHTMARE. Agenda 21  2030 and 2050 are activated. My friends, everything I told you was TRUTH, believe it now??

WE MUST NOT COMPLY!

WE MUST NOT LET THEM ENFORCE THE PASSPORTS!

Right now the Agenda is the Depopulation portion of the Agenda 21. VAXXED, UNVAXXED stand for individual liberty , STAND TOGETHER AND JOIN IN THE STREET PROTESTS WHEN THEY BEGIN. I went to one on Saturday in Tallahassee, not enough people are showing up. NUMBERS ARE STRENGTH, SHOW UP.

Only we can save our children . DO NOT VAX the kids! Take them OUT OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS. SORRY, YOU MUST HOME SCHOOL Or the child will be damaged in many ways , sterilization, heart issues and possibly death.

This is a Perfectly done video for all ages. SHARE THIS!!

I think we are winning only because we are not complying .

Many that took the jab can also be saved by not taking any more shots and taking supplements and Ivermectin ( once weekly). Vitamins C (1000-2000 daily)  Vitamin D ( 5000units minimum daily) ZINC ( 30-50 units daily)

Quercetin, NAC (600units daily), vitamin A and K2.  This is for future immunity because the shot has attacked the immune system . That is why the shot is not working to protect the jabbed . Do NOT TAKE a FLU SHOT!

God save Humanity!

NEWS WORLD ORDER: EPISODE 3: TRANSITION TRANSLATION AND REFLECTION

Where the NWOs plan is today on 2021. Explaining the Great Reset – Agenda 21 – and how it all ties in with some unexpected turns.

The most rare clips compiled in a unique fashion that completely exposes the New World Order. It wont seem so crazy anymore after experiencing this series. This is a great place to start for anyone new or advanced.

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Banned Video Archive

8GOLDEN0KNOWLEDGE2

©Fred Brownbill. All rights reserved.

RELATED VIDEO: MSNBC FINALLY Reports The “Scary” Truth: “Americans Have Lost Confidence” In Biden.

Capitalist Giant American Express: Capitalism Is Racist

My latest in PJ Media:

What could be more capitalist than American Express? After all, the credit card behemoth made $2.3 billion in profit last quarter alone.  Since the social media giants are massive corporations, too, and they seem to be all in on the woke corporate nanny state, why not Amex? Christopher F. Rufo of the Manhattan Institute revealed in the New York Post Wednesday that Amex invited Khalil Muhammad, a professor at Harvard Kennedy School and the Radcliffe Institute and the great-grandson of the founder of the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad, to give a lecture to employees on “race in corporate America.”

Yes, Amex is pushing critical race theory (CRT) in a big way. Rufo notes that the company established an “Anti-Racism Initiative” last year after the death of George Floyd, and since then has been “subjecting employees to a training program based on the core CRT tenets, including intersectionality, which reduces individuals to a tangle of racial, gender and sexual identities that determine whether he is an ‘oppressor’ or ‘oppressed’ in a given situation.”

Employees were made to enter their “race, sexual orientation, body type, religion, disability status, age, gender identity [and] citizenship” onto “an official company worksheet” and use this data to determine whether they were “privileged” or “marginalized,” no doubt in full accord with the Left’s hierarchy of good to evil, in which white American males are the carriers of the original sin of racism. Amex offers resources (including, of course, the timeless classic writings of Ibram X. Kendi) to “learn about covert white supremacy” and take up “the lifelong task of overcoming our country’s racist heritage.” Some of the featured resources call for efforts to “force white people to see and understand how white supremacy permeates their lives.”

As in other places, the CRT training at Amex identifies even the renunciation of racism as racist, stigmatizing as “microaggressions” phrases including “I don’t see color,” “We are all human beings” and “Everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough.”

Everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough, but Khalil Muhammad, Harvard professor, was having none of that and was determined to make sure the Amex employees, or at least the white male ones, became aware that they were racist oppressors. He told his captive audience of credit card wonks that capitalism was “founded on racism” and that the Western world had been profoundly influenced by “racist logics and forms of domination” for centuries. “American Express,” he declared, “has to do its own digging about how it sits in relationship to this history of racial capitalism.” He laid the guilt on extra thick: “You are complicit in giving privileges in one community against the other, under the pretext that we live in a meritocratic system where the market judges everyone the same.”

There is more. Read the rest here.

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Trump’s ban on Critical Race Theory, explained

Does Critical Race Theory promote racial harmony or does it “sow division” as the Trump administration claims? And what is its relation, if any, to Marxism?


With the November election just around the corner, it’s only to be expected that President Trump would seek to rally conservative voters and drive his supporters to the polls. So, when his administration, on September 4, instructed the federal government to eliminate all training in “Critical Race Theory,” some thought it was just a red-meat stunt to excite the Republican base. Others saw it as an act of right-wing censorship and an obstruction of racial progress.

In truth, there’s much more to this development than mere politicization and censorship.

Here’s a breakdown of what the administration is doing and why it’s a welcome move.

The executive memo

“It has come to the President’s attention that Executive Branch agencies have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to date ‘training’ government workers to believe divisive, anti-American propaganda,” Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought wrote in the executive memorandum.

“Employees across the Executive Branch have been required to attend trainings where they are told that ‘virtually all White people contribute to racism’ or where they are required to say that they ‘benefit from racism,’” Vought explained. “According to press reports, in some cases these training [sic] have further claimed that there is racism embedded in the belief that America is the land of opportunity or the belief that the most qualified person should receive a job.”

The order instructed federal agencies to identify and eliminate any contracts or spending that train employees in “critical race theory,” “white privilege,” “or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil.”

The exposé

How did it “come to the President’s attention,” and what press reports is Vought referring to?

Well, President Trump is known to watch Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News. And days before the memo was issued, Carlson had on journalist Christopher Rufo to discuss his multiple reports uncovering the extent to which Critical Race Theory (CRT) was being used in federal training programs.

“For example, Rufo claimed, the Treasury Department recently hired a diversity trainer who said the U.S. was a fundamentally White supremacist country,” wrote Sam Dorman for the Fox News web site, “and that White people upheld the system of racism in the nation. In another case, which Rufo discussed with Carlson last month, Sandia National Laboratories, which designs nuclear weapons, sent its white male executives to a mandatory training in which they, according to Rufo, wrote letters apologizing to women and people of color.”

Rufo challenged President Trump to use his executive authority to extirpate CRT from the federal government.

The debate

CNN’s Brian Stelter (as well as Rufo himself) traced Trump’s decision directly to the independent investigative journalist’s self-proclaimed “one-man war” on CRT, of which the recent Carlson appearance was only the latest salvo.

Selter characterized Trump’s move as a reactionary attack on the current national “reckoning” on race. He cited the Washington Post’s claim that, “racial and diversity awareness trainings are essential steps in helping rectify the pervasive racial inequities in American society, including those perpetuated by the federal government.”

So which is it? Is CRT “divisive” and “toxic” or is it “rectifying” and “anti-racist”?

Intellectual ancestry

To answer that, it would help to trace CRT to its roots. Critical Race Theory is a branch of Critical Theory, which began as an academic movement in the 1930s. Critical Theory emphasizes the “critique of society and culture in order to reveal and challenge power structures,” as Wikipedia states. Critical Race Theory does the same, with a focus on racial power structures, especially white supremacy and the oppression of people of color.

The “power structure” prism stems largely from Critical Theory’s own roots in Marxism—Critical Theory was developed by members of the Marxist “Frankfurt School.” Traditional Marxism emphasized economic power structures, especially the supremacy of capital over labor under capitalism. Marxism interpreted most of human history as a zero-sum class war for economic power.

“According to the Marxian view,” wrote the economist Ludwig von Mises, “human society is organized into classes whose interests stand in irreconcilable opposition.”

Mises called this view a “conflict doctrine,” which opposed the “harmony doctrine” of classical liberalism. According to the classical liberals, in a free market economy, capitalists and workers were natural allies, not enemies. Indeed, in a free society all rights-respecting individuals were natural allies.

A bitter inheritance

Critical Race Theory arose as a distinct movement in law schools in the late 1980s. CRT inherited many of its premises and perspectives from its Marxist ancestry.

The pre-CRT Civil Rights Movement had emphasized equal rights and treating people as individuals, as opposed to as members of a racial collective. “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” Martin Luther King famously said.

In contrast, CRT dwells on inequalities of outcome, which it generally attributes to racial power structures. And, as we’ve seen from the government training curricula, modern CRT forthrightly judges white people by the color of their skin, prejudging them as racist by virtue of their race. This race-based “pre-trial guilty verdict” of racism is itself, by definition, racist.

The classical liberal “harmony doctrine” was deeply influential in the movements to abolish all forms of inequality under the law: from feudal serfdom, to race-based slavery, to Jim Crow.

But, with the rise of Critical Race Theory, the cause of racial justice became more influenced by the fixations on conflict, discord, and domination that CRT inherited from Marxism.

Social life was predominantly cast as a zero-sum struggle between collectives: capital vs. labor for Marxism, whites vs. people of color for CRT.

A huge portion of society’s ills were attributed to one particular collective’s diabolical domination: capitalist hegemony for Marxism, white supremacy for CRT.

Just as Marxism demonized capitalists, CRT vilifies white people. Both try to foment resentment, envy, and a victimhood complex among the oppressed class it claims to champion.

Traditional Marxists claimed that all capitalists benefit from the zero-sum exploitation of workers. Similarly, CRT “diversity trainers” require white trainees to admit that they “benefit from racism.”

Traditional Marxists insisted that bourgeois thoughts were inescapably conditioned by “class interest.” In the same way, CRT trainers push the notion that “virtually all White people contribute to racism” as a result of their whiteness.

Given the above, it should be no wonder that CRT has been criticized as “racist” and “divisive.”

Reckoning or retrogression?

Supporters of CRT cast it as a force for good in today’s “rectifying reckoning” over race.

But CRT’s neo-Marxist orientation only damages race relations and harms the interests of those it claims to serve.

In practice, the class war rhetoric of Marxism was divisive and toxic for economic relations. And, far from advancing the interests of the working classes, it led to mass poverty and devastating famines, not to mention staggering inequality between the elites and the masses.

Today, the CRT-informed philosophy, rhetoric, and strategy of the Black Lives Matter organization (whose leadership professed to be “trained Marxists”) is leading to mass riots, looting, vandalism, and assault. The divisive violence has arrested progress for the cause of police reform, destroyed countless black-owned small businesses, and economically devastated many black communities.

Those who truly wish to see racial harmony should dump the neo-Marxists and learn more about classical liberalism. (FEE.org is the perfect place to start.)

So much for CRT being a force for good. Of course, even horrible ideas are protected by the First Amendment. The government should never use force to suppress people from expressing ideas, speech, or theories it dislikes.

Critics insist that President Trump is engaged in this kind of censorship by targeting CRT.

Not so.

No one is banning White Fragility, the blockbuster CRT manifesto. No one is locking up those who preach CRT or ordering mentions of it stripped from the internet.

The memo simply says that taxpayer dollars will no longer be spent promulgating this theory to federal government employees. As heads of the executive branch, presidents have wide latitude to make the rules for federal agencies under their control. Deciding how money is spent certainly falls under their proper discretion—and it is always done with political preferences in mind, one way or the other.

It is not censorship for Trump to eliminate funding for CRT, anymore than it was “censorship” for the Obama administration to choose to tie federal contracts to a business’s embrace of LGBT rights.

Elections have consequences, one of the most obvious being that the president gets to run the executive branch. If we don’t want the president’s political preferences to be so significant in training programs, then we should simply reduce the size of government and the number of bureaucrats.

In the meantime, stripping the federal government of the divisive, toxic, and neo-Marxist ideology of Critical Race Theory is a positive development for the sake of racial justice and harmony.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

COLUMN BY

Dan Sanchez

Dan Sanchez is the Director of Content at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and the editor-in-chief of FEE.org. He co-hosts the weekly web show FEEcast, serving as the resident “explainer.” … 

Tyler Brandt

Tyler Brandt is a Senior Associate Editor at FEE. He is a graduate of UW-Madison with a B.A. in Political Science. In college, Tyler was a FEE Campus Ambassador, President of his campus YAL chapter, and… 

Brad Polumbo

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and the Eugene S. Thorpe Writing Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education. He was previously a Media and Journalism Fellow at… 

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AOC: ‘Freeing People’ From ‘Existential Havoc’ of Capitalism

In a conversation with the online Interview Magazine published Tuesday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) promoted fellow Democratic Socialist Jabari Brisport from New York as another candidate who hopes to fundamentally transform the country.

AOC asked the openly gay, black nominee for the New York State Senate what Democratic Socialist means to him, Brisport replied, “For me, it’s really about getting people out from underneath the thumb of capitalism, and freeing them from the very small group of people that manage—or I should say mismanage—our economy and our society for their own wealth and benefit. It’s about freeing up people to truly experience all the joys in life by making sure they don’t have to worry about whether or not they’ll be able to keep their home from month to month, or whether or not they’ll be able to pay for health care when they get sick.

“It’s about freeing people from all the existential havoc that capitalism wreaks on us, and allowing them to truly thrive,” Brisport added.

The duo didn’t offer any examples of where and when in history people have truly thrived under socialism.


Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

27 Known Connections

Lauding the Protesters and Rioters in America’s Streets

In an August 2020 photo essay in which Vanity Fair magazine “celebrat[ed] the founders of Black Lives Matter [BLM] … and more on the forefront of change,” Ocasio-Cortez called it “profoundly exciting” that the Marxist/anarchist revolutionaries of BLM and Antifa were “discovering their own power” by participating in the massive wave of protests and violent riots that had swept the country since late May. Some excerpts:

  • “I believe that people are really discovering their own power in a broader sense that we have not seen in a very long time. So, yes, we’re starting to see some of this emerging power at the ballot box and at the polls, but we’re also starting to see it in the streets, and people standing up for themselves in the workplace, in organizing themselves and their labor, and it’s profoundly exciting. And it’s really incredible to see how people are really taking the reins for themselves in the direction of systemic change.”
  • “I think that all these people in the streets that are educating others, that are engaging in this elevated and amplified way, have really emboldened me, and it’s given me a lot of courage and encouragement to try to match the energy of everyone else right now who’s really fighting for progressive change.”

To learn more about Ocasio-Cortez, click on her profile click here.

EDITORS NOTE: This Discover the Networks column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

De Blasio Quotes Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto in Discussion on Relationship with NYC Business Community

No pretense anymore. None. The Mayor of the capital of capitalism is imposing governance based on the most brutal, anti-human ideology in human history.

The Communists’ chief purpose is to destroy every form of independence—independent work, independent action, independent property, independent thought, an independent mind, or an independent man. Conformity, alikeness, servility, submission and obedience are necessary to establish a Communist slave-state. Ayn Rand

[…]

It is the Communists’ intention to make people think that personal success is somehow achieved at the expense of others and that every successful man has hurt somebody by becoming successful. It is the Communists’ aim to discourage all personal effort and to drive men into a hopeless, dispirited, gray herd of robots who have lost all personal ambition, who are easy to rule, willing to obey and willing to exist in selfless servitude to the State. Ayn Rand

Who will he quote next? Hitler?

De Blasio Quotes Marx’s Communist Manifesto in Discussion on Relationship with NYC Business Community

By: Zachary Evans,National Review, July 24, 2020

New York mayor Bill de Blasio quoted Karl Marx when outlining the relationship he wanted his office to have with the city’s business community, in an appearance on The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC.

Host Brian Lehrer asked de Blasio how the mayor was approaching businesses for help with recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. Lehrer said that the mayor was not known for extensive outreach to the business community given his focus on issues of wealth inequality.

“There’s an underlying truth in the fact that my focus has not been on the business community and the elite,” de Blasio said. “I am tempted to borrow a quote from Karl Marx here…”

“They’ll love that on Wall Street,” Lehrer interjects.

“Yes they will,” de Blasio laughs. “There’s a famous quote that ‘the state is the executive committee of the bourgeoisie,’ and I use that openly to say no, I read that as a young person and thought, well, that’s not the way it’s supposed to be.”

The quote comes from the first chapter of Marx’s Communist Manifesto, in which Marx outlines his theory of the progressive advancement of the class of the bourgeoisie at the expense of the proletariat.

The mayor continued in the interview, “We need to work with the business community, we will work with the business community, but the city government represents the people, represents working people….A lot of folks have just sort of hit a wall when I say guys, you’re gonna have to pay more taxes, and we’re gonna have policies that favor working people more.”

De Blasio ended by saying he knows that many businesses want to help with a “comeback” for the city, and that his administration “really appreciate[s] that.”

The interview was not the first time de Blasio has quoted a communist figure. In 2019, the mayor apologized after quoting communist revolutionary Che Guevara at a rally of striking airport workers in Miami.

“I did not know the phrase I used in Miami today was associated with Che Guevara & I did not mean to offend anyone who heard it that way. I certainly apologize for not understanding that history,” de Blasio wrote on Twitter after backlash from Miami’s Latino community, many of whom are Cuban exiles.


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