Tag Archive for: politics

Why Do People Become Communists, and Why Do They Stick With It?

So if there is no rational case for communism as such, why do people go for this stuff?


For as long as I can remember, I’ve puzzled about why people become communists. I have no doubt about why someone would stop being one. After all, we have a century of evidence of the murder, famine, and general destruction caused by the idea. Ignoring all this takes a special kind of willful blindness to reality.

Even the theory of communism itself is a complete mess. There is really no such thing as common ownership of goods that are obviously scarce in the real world. There must be some solution to the problem of scarcity beyond just wishing reality away. Perhaps ownership and trade? Slogans and dreams are hardly a suitable substitute for a workable program.

But how communism would work in practice is not something they want to talk about. They just imagined that some magical Hegelian shift would take place in the course of history that would work it all out.

So if there is no rational case for communism as such, why do people go for this stuff?

The Red Century

The New York Times has been exploring that issue in a series of remarkable reflections that they have labelled Red Century. I can’t get enough, even the ones that are written by people who are—how shall I say?—suspiciously sympathetic to communism as a cause.

The most recent installment is written by Vivian Gornick. She reflects on how her childhood world was dominated by communists.

The sociology of the progressive world was complex. At its center were full-time organizers for the Communist Party, at the periphery left-wing sympathizers, and at various points in between everything from rank-and-file party card holders to respected fellow travelers….

When these people sat down to talk, Politics sat down with them, Ideas sat down with them; above all, History sat down with them. They spoke and thought within a context that lifted them out of the nameless, faceless obscurity into which they had been born, and gave them the conviction that they had rights as well as obligations. They were not simply the disinherited of the earth, they were proletarians with a founding myth of their own (the Russian Revolution) and a civilizing worldview (Marxism).

While it is true that thousands of people joined the Communist Party in those years because they were members of the hardscrabble working class (garment district Jews, West Virginia miners, California fruit pickers), it was even truer that many more thousands in the educated middle class (teachers, scientists, writers) joined because for them, too, the party was possessed of a moral authority that lent shape and substance, through its passion for structure and the eloquence of its rhetoric, to an urgent sense of social injustice….

The Marxist vision of world solidarity as translated by the Communist Party induced in the most ordinary of men and women a sense of one’s own humanity that ran deep, made life feel large; large and clarified. It was to this clarity of inner being that so many became not only attached, but addicted. No reward of life, no love nor fame nor wealth, could compete with the experience. It was this all-in-allness of world and self that, all too often, made of the Communists true believers who could not face up to the police state corruption at the heart of their faith.

Sounds fascinating, if bonkers (Marxism is hardly a “civilizing worldview”). It sounds less like an intellectual salon of ideas and more like a religious delusion. Those too can be well intentioned. The key here is a dogmatic ideology, which serves as a kind of substitute for religion. It has a vision of hell (workers and peasants exploited by private-capital wielding capitalist elite), a vision of heaven (a world of universal and equal prosperity and peace), and a means of getting from one to the other (revolution from below, as led by the vanguard of the proletariat).

Once you accept such an ideology, anything intellectual becomes possible. Nothing can shake you from it. Okay, that’s not entirely true. One thing can shake you of it: when the leader of the cult repudiates the thing you believe in most strongly.

Khrushchev’s Heresy

She was 20 years old in 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev spoke to the Soviet Communist Party about the crimes of Stalin. Apparently the unrelenting reports of famine, persecution, and mass death, from the early years of Bolshevik rule – and even the revelation of the Hitler-Stalin pact – would have demoralized them earlier. But no:

The 20th Congress report brought with it political devastation for the organized left around the world. Within weeks of its publication, 30,000 people in this country quit the party, and within the year it was as it had been in its 1919 beginnings: a small sect on the American political map.

Amazing.

The Early Reds

And speaking of this small 1919 sect, I’m reminded of one of my favorite movies: Reds (1981). I could watch it another 20 times. It explores the lives of the American communists of the turn of the 20th century, their loves, longings, and aspirations. The focus is on fiery but deluded Jack Reed, but it includes portraits of a passionate Louise Bryant, the gentile Max Eastman, an edgy Eugene O’Neill, and the ever inspiring Emma Goldman.

These people weren’t the Progressives of the mainstream that history credits with having so much influence over policy in those days. These were the real deal: the Communists that were the source of national frenzy during the Red Scare of the 1920s.

The movie portrays them not as monsters but idealists. They were all very talented, artistic, mostly privileged in upbringing, and what drew them to communism was not bloodlust for genocide but some very high ideals.

They felt a passion for justice. They wanted to end war. They opposed exploitation. They longed for universal freedom and maximum civil liberty. They despised the entrenched hierarchies of the old order and hoped for a new society in which everyone had an equal chance.

All of that sounds reasonable until you get to the details. The communists had a curious understanding of each of these concepts. Freedom meant freedom from material want. Justice meant a planned distribution of goods. The end of war meant a new form of war against the capitalists who they believed created war. The hierarchies they wanted to be abolished were not just state-privileged nobles but also the meritocratic elites of industrial capitalism, and even small land owners, no matter how small the plot.

Why be a communist rather than just a solid liberal of the old school? In the way the movie portrays it, the problem was not so much in their goals but in their mistaken means. They hated the state as it existed but imagined that a new “dictatorship of the proletariat” could become a transition mechanism to usher in their classless society. That led them to cheer on the Bolshevik Revolution in its early stages, and work for the same thing to happen in the United States.

The Dream Dies

Watching their one-by-one demoralization is painful. Goldman sees the betrayal immediately. Reed becomes an apologist for genocide. Bryant forgets pretending to be political and believing in free love, marries Reed, and tends to his medical needs before his death. O’Neill just becomes a full-time cynic (and drunk). It took Max Eastman longer to lose the faith but he eventually became an anti-socialist and wrote for FEE.

The initial demoralization of the early American communists came in the 1920s. They came to realize that all the warning against this wicked ideology – having been written about for many centuries prior, even back to the ancient world – were true.

Eastman, for example, realized that he was seeking to liberate people by taking from them the three things people love most in life: their families, their religion, and their property. Instead of creating a new heaven on earth, they had become apologists for a killing machine.

Stunned and embarrassed, they moved on with life.

But the history didn’t end there. There were still more recruits being added to the ranks, generations of them. The same thing happened after 1989. Some people lost the faith, others decided that socialism needs yet another chance to strut its stuff.

It’s still going on today.

As for the Communist Party in America, most left-Progressives of the Antifa school regard the Party as an embarrassing sellout, wholly owned by the capitalist elite. And when we see their spokesmen appear on television every four years, they sound not unlike pundits we see on TV every night.

It would be nice if any article written about communism were purely retrospective. That, sadly, is not the case. There seem to be new brands of Marxian thought codified every few years, and still more versions of its Hegelian roots that take on ever more complex ideological iterations (the alt-right is an example).

Why do people become communists? Because human beings are capable of believing in all sorts of illusions, and we are capable of working long and hard to turn them into nightmares. Once we’ve invested the time and energy into something, however destructive, it can take a very long time to wake us up. It’s hard to think of a grander example of the sunk-cost fallacy.

AUTHOR

Jeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is a former Director of Content for the Foundation for Economic Education.

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

Green Berets Launch PAC To Put ‘Warrior-Diplomats’ In Congress

Veterans who served in special operations units announced the formation of a new political-action committee (PAC) to elect fellow “warrior-diplomats” to Congress in the wake of last year’s Monday, Fox News reported Monday.

“It is no coincidence that we are launching on Memorial Day, less than a year after we witnessed the Biden administration’s failed leadership contribute to the loss of American lives in Afghanistan,” Jason Bacon, a former Green Beret and previous congressional candidate said, according to Fox News. “It is imperative that we elect real leaders to Congress with the knowledge and experience to prevent this kind of travesty.”

The political action committee was formed in response to the chaotic withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan, during which a bomb attack killed 13 U.S. military personnel, which prompted criticism and calls for the resignations of senior Biden administration military and foreign policy officials, Fox News reported.

Bacon described Green Berets as “warrior-diplomats” who bring an understanding of foreign cultures, language skills and years of experience implementing American foreign policy on the ground, according to Fox News.

“They have a breadth of experience that surpasses that of a typical Congressional candidate,” Bacon said. “We are proud to support these outstanding candidates for Congress.”

The PAC endorsed nine candidates, eight of whom are former Green Berets, including Republican Rep. Michael Waltz of Florida, Joe Kent in Washington state’s 3rd Congressional District and Don Bolduc for the U.S. Senate in New Hampshire in the 2022 election cycle, according to its website. The PAC also endorsed former Navy SEAL Eli Crane in Arizona’s 2nd Congressional District.

Green Berets PAC did not respond to a request for comment from The Daily Caller News Foundation.

AUTHOR

HAROLD HUTCHISON

Reporter. 

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

INDEPENDENCE DAY TRUTH: Equal People Are Not Free and Free People Are Not Equal

“Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., from the “I have a dream” speech in Washington, D.C.


Today we are hearing about equality, equity, along with the big lies of “Wokeism.” These words are Marxist false flags that force, via government mandate, the elevation of one group over another group for political purposes.

MAKING PEOPLE EQUAL

The goal of Marxism is to make everyone equal as humans, as workers and as a people. The problem is when this is put into practice the individual is replaced by the state. As the powers of the government increase the freedoms of the individual shrink or disappear completely.

History tells us repeatedly that as government grows the individual shrinks. Just look at the former Soviet Union to understand what is now happening in America.

QUESTION:  Will Independence Day 2021 go down in history as the day we the people lost our freedom?

In The Revolution Betrayed Leon Trotsky wrote:

The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced with a new one: who does not obey shall not eat. Exactly how many Bolsheviks have been expelled, arrested, exiled, exterminated, since 1923, when the era of Bonapartism opened, we shall find out when we go through the archives of Stalin’s political police. How many of them remain in the underground will become known when the shipwreck of the bureaucracy begins.

The people are replaced by government bureaucrats. The laws change from defending individual liberties to taking away the individual and replace the people with crushing state mandates, take the Covid pandemic as a recent example.

Covid shifted power from the individual to that state overnight. The pandemic was used by bureaucrats to take away individual freedom to assemble and replaced it with lockdowns and social distancing.

Covid took away the rights of business to remain open and prosper. It took away individual livelihoods and replace it with government hand outs.

Rev. William J. H. Boetcker spoke of the “Seven National Crimes.”

  • I don’t think.
  • I don’t know.
  • I don’t care.
  • I am too busy.
  • I live well enough alone.
  • I have no time to read and find out.
  • I am not interested.

These seven crimes are the fundamental laws of Wokeism writ large. When we stop thinking, understanding, caring and find ourselves alone, bored and uninformed then our freedom is lost!

A FREE PEOPLE ARE NOT EQUAL

In a truly free society people are never equal. They are different and do things differently throughout their lives. From birth people are influenced by both nature and nurture. No two people are exactly the same when born. The same is true about people who have different life experiences. Even biological twins do not have the same life experiences.

It is fundamental that society understand that it must create opportunities that encourage and use these natural inequalities for the good of all.

The following sentiments were created by the Rev. William J. H. Boetcker, who lectured around the United States about industrial relations at the turn of the twentieth century. They are all the truth.

  • You cannot bring prosperity by discouraging thrift.
  • You cannot help small men by tearing down big men.
  • You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
  • You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
  • You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich.
  • You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.
  • You cannot further brotherhood of men by inciting class hatred.
  • You cannot establish security on borrowed money.
  • You cannot build character and courage by taking away man’s initiative and independence.
  • You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.

There are those who are hell bent on tearing down big men, weakening the strong, destroying the rich, inciting class hatred and taking away man’s initiative and independence.

The founding fathers understood this and that is why they wrote the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution.

CONCLUSION

QUESTION: How many American patriots have been expelled, arrested, exiled, exterminated, since the 2020 election?

As we Americans approach Independence Day 2021, let us reflect on our freedoms and defend our liberties. If we fail to do so then American, as we have known it, will cease to exist as One Nation Under God and become one nation under big government.

Is this what we want for our children and grandchildren?

I think not.

Have a blessed July 4th.

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

RELATED TWEET:

Federal Judge: ‘The increased power of the press is so dangerous today because we are very close to one-party control of these institutions’

The American press is the enemy of the people and has done incalculable, irrevocable harm to our Constitutional Republic.

Federal judge pens dissent slamming decades-old press protections

D.C. Circuit Senior Judge Laurence Silberman’s diatribe amounted to an assault on a Supreme Court decision
Politico reports: A federal appeals court judge issued an extraordinary opinion Friday attacking partisan bias in the news media, lamenting the treatment of conservatives in American society and calling for the Supreme Court to overturn a landmark legal precedent that protects news outlets from lawsuits over reports about public figures.

D.C. Circuit Senior Judge Laurence Silberman’s diatribe, contained in his dissent in a libel case, amounted to a withering, frontal assault on the 1964 Supreme Court decision that set the framework for modern defamation law — New York Times v. Sullivan.

D.C. Circuit Senior Judge Laurence Silberman’s diatribe amounted to an assault on a Supreme Court decision that set the framework for modern defamation law.

Could the Courts Wheel on the Press?

Special to the NY Sun, March 20, 2021:

Could the United States federal courts turn against the press that emerged in the Age of Trump? Feature the dissent uncorked Friday by one of America’s greatest judges, Laurence Silberman of the District of Columbia circuit. In an otherwise prosaic libel case, the judge seems to have taken a satisfying swig of the ink of liberty before issuing a blistering rebuke of a press that he reckons has become dangerous to our democracy.

Pass the flask, we say. We bow to no one in our fealty to the press. We get that the First Amendment was designed to protect an irresponsible press (the non-irresponsible press, after all, has never really needed protecting). Yet we’ve never seen anything like the nihilism that has entwined our biggest newsrooms with the woke Democratic Party. At some point our courts are bound to take notice.

The case that ignited Judge Silberman was levied by two former officials of Liberia. They claimed that a human rights organization called Global Witness defamed them by publishing a report, as the court put it, “falsely implying that they had accepted bribes in connection with the sale of an oil license.” The District Court allowed them to shelter under the Supreme Court precedent known as Times v. Sullivan.

That case, decided in 1964, involved an advertisement that was run in the Times by supporters of the Reverend Martin Luther King. The police commissioner of Birmingham, Alabama, L.B. Sullivan, won a $500,000 libel judgment. It was overturned by a U.S. Supreme Court that, at the time, was all too willing to proclaim rules that hadn’t been passed by any legislature and didn’t appear in the Constitution.

The justice who wrote up Sullivan, William Brennan, would later craft the most famous farrago of judicial law-writing in American history, Roe v. Wade. In Sullivan, the rule the Court produced did not involve trimesters of pregnancy and the like. What Sullivan established was a system of unequal justice, where private citizens had an easier time suing for libel than public figures.

Public figures would have to prove any libel had been uttered with “actual malice.” That is, the libel would have to be not only untrue and defamatory but also made with “with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard of whether it was true or false.” We newspaper roughnecks loved that license, since we could accuse public officials without knowing what was true. Henceforth, the press ruled the roost.

In Global Witness, Judge Silberman spent the first part of his dissent arguing that the court majority had tried to “stretch the actual malice rule like a rubber band.” He then announced outright that he was “prompted to urge the overruling of New York Times v. Sullivan.” He proceeded to do so with astonishing bluntness, even while acknowledging the uphill nature of the legal contests ahead.

In one footnote, Judge Silberman likened the precedent on libel to the Brezhnev Doctrine, named after the Soviet party boss who proclaimed that, as Judge Silberman paraphrased the point, “once a country has turned communist, it can never be allowed to go back.” Wrote Judge Silberman: “Apparently, maintaining a veneer of infallibility is more important than correcting fundamental missteps.”

The Sullivan precedent, Judge Silberman warned, has allowed the press “to cast false aspersions on public figures with near impunity.” That, he averred, would be one thing were it a two-sided phenomenon. The “increased power of the press,” he averred, “is so dangerous today because we are very close to one-party control of these institutions.” He singled out the Washington Post, the Times, and even National Public Radio.

“Our court was once concerned about the institutional consolidation of the press leading to a ‘bland and homogenous’ marketplace of ideas,” Judge Silberman warned. “It turns out that ideological consolidation of the press (helped along by economic consolidation) is the far greater threat.” He doesn’t map out how he thinks all this can be won, but he seeds his opinion with grist for the Supreme Court to focus on.

It is a moment to remember that our doctrines on libel, as on other things, can change. When America’s first great libel case, was brought by New York’s colonial governor, Wm. Crosby, against the printer John Peter Zenger, the doctrine was the greater the truth of a defamation, the greater the libel. Zenger began the process of turning truth into a defense of libel. A time of reckoning could well be at hand where truth gets the premium part.

RELATED ARTICLE: Jewish groups condemn CNN’s Don Lemon for vile antisemitism in remarks suggesting Black and Brown Jews don’t exist

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TRAILER: Trump vs Hollywood Here!

Documentary filmed during Corona crisis in America with 24 Hollywood stars, musicians, rappers and others of similar stature.

All talking about Donald J. Trump, the 45th president of the United States of America and his impact so far.

Half of the celebrities are pro, the other half are Democrats.

Producer Erbil “Bill” Gunasti and Director Daphne Barak of the Documentary somehow brought so many together with incendiary comments, yet to have a productive dialogue.

Click here to get a sense of what it is. Documentary is released prior to the presidential elections for a sneak view before it is removed until when it will be on most online platforms by December 14th, 2020.

ABOUT Fighting 4 ONE AMERICA!

We have set our sights to fight for ONE AMERICA. Unfortunately today, there are two Americas. Divided America is a by-product of domestic and foreign forces but unless Americans talk to one another with common sense this division will never end. Here the goal is to establish a dialogue so that DIVIDED AMERICA can become ONE AMERICA again. We began this task with a two hour long video when we brought together 24 famous Hollywood stars, rappers, musicians, and others from both side of isle. We called it: “Trump vs Hollywood. And they talked, with common sense, like an American would.

©Fighting 4 ONE AMERICA!. All rights reserved.

The Politics of Heaven and Hell

Robert Royal: Heaven is in Heaven and the New Jerusalem cannot be brought to Earth by our efforts; only God will bring perfect justice at the Second Coming.


Shortly after I arrived in Washington years ago, I reviewed a book with the same title as this column. A friend warned about reviewing books by that particular author – our late lamented colleague James V. Schall, S.J. – because if you start, he said, you won’t have time for anything else. And that was before the supernova of titles that Schall the Great turned out in his seventies, eighties, and even nineties.

Ignatius Press is republishing The Politics of Heaven and Hell this fall with an introduction by another incisive and prolific writer, Robert Reilly. A good thing, too, because in our current chaos, when it seems almost impossible to get sure footing about anything, this relatively neglected volume not only uncovers sure foundations. It explains the ways by which we’ve mixed up eternal and temporal things – and put the times out of joint.

Schall’s central insight is that our central traditions of both faith and reason agree that politics is an important, but circumscribed realm. If we were the highest beings, politics would be the highest science, said Aristotle. That wise pagan – Dante calls him “the master of those who know” – knew that we are not the highest beings. There’s God, for starters, and His Creation, to which we owe deference. Ignore them, and the inevitable result is chaos, suffering, servitude, tyranny, and death.

The ancient Hebrews learned this well before Aristotle. Schall notes how little attention political theorists pay to the Old Testament, the history of a small and obscure nation – Israel – that survived, improbably, down to our own time, with incalculable influence on the history of the whole world. It did so not because of any special policies or virtues: Jewish history is a record of graces given and refused, of return and consequent flourishing, of many rounds of ignoring God, decline, and renewal through Him.

The overall lesson: nations are great not because they accumulate power or wealth. Power and wealth come and go. And aren’t all they seem anyway. Nations are made great, however insignificant they may be in earthly terms, because God makes them so and they conform themselves to God.

Christianity, of course, limited politics in a special way, beginning with Jesus’ famous distinction between the things that are Caesar’s – the arrangements necessary to human flourishing (even, sadly, taxes) – and the things that are God’s. Those few words had immense, cascading effects in the Christian tradition.

And not only in thinkers like Augustine, Aquinas, Suárez, Bellarmine, etc. Countries historically touched by Christianity still mostly protect beliefs about ultimate things from control by politics – indeed, believe that right can and should challenge might. That separation is absent from Muslim societies, ideological regimes like China, or traditional societies where the ruler is regarded as a kind of mortal god.

But it’s not only on high intellectual or social planes that these truths prove themselves. As we’ve seen only too clearly in modern times, when politics becomes the “highest science” men become not philosopher kings, but beasts. The totalizing political systems of Communism, Nazism, and Fascism were killing machines on an unprecedented scale.

And recent decades have given birth to what the Polish philosopher Ryszard Legutko calls the “demon in democracy,” a new totalitarian temptation wherein everything is defined by political ideology. We worry over “polarization,” but there’s a deep geological fault in our politics, far more radical than that. The absence of religion in the public square, with its moderating effects, is a large factor in this development, since once the true God departs the false god of the state arrives.

Even good public impulses then become poisonous – and unlimited. For example, we’ve just seen what can happen when a proper effort to right racism, a historic wrong, is made the measure of everything. Everything becomes “racist” that is not explicitly “anti-racist” – according to someone’s definition, which may differ from someone else’s. Not surprisingly, demands for absolute political justice then turn into “canceling” and anathematizing people who show the slightest deviation from an ideological line – i.e., injustice.

Historic racial inequities need to be fixed, but does injustice only involve race – with occasional bows to gender and class? Andrew Sullivan, a brilliant writer, recently resigned from New York magazine because it couldn’t bear his criticism of “cancel culture,” despite his being gay and liberal on some issues, conservative on others (and somehow also aspiring to be Catholic).

He pointed out that it’s places like the New York Times that really don’t understand a just “diversity.” The Times seems poised to cave in to employee demands that staff reflect the racial makeup of New York City: 24 percent black and more than half “people of color.” And there must be “sensitivity training” – i.e., ideological indoctrination – for everyone.

Sullivan notes that there are other underrepresented groups at the Times. Only 37 percent of New Yorkers, for example, are college graduates – who are overrepresented in the newsroom – as are Asians and Jews. Should some of them resign?  If you wanted fairer proportions of New Yorkers, 10 percent of staff would have to be Republicans, 6 percent Hasidic Jews, and 33 percent Catholic.

It may be a long wait for that because ideologues only care about certain “facts” and rarely have a sense of irony – or humor.

Which takes us back to the politics of Heaven and Hell. Heaven is in Heaven and the New Jerusalem cannot be brought to Earth by our efforts; only God will bring perfect justice at the Second Coming. The road to human hells, however, always lies wide open.

The larger perspective that religion affords us – including elements like human imperfection, sin, forgiveness, tolerance, the limits of earthly politics – does not mean that we need to be any less passionate in pursuing justice and fairness. But it does mean we have to be vigilant and measured about our own motives and the results of our actions. We have on good authority: “Therefore take heed that the light which is in you is not darkness.” (Lk. 11:3)

Robert Royal

Dr. Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing, and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent book is A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century, published by Ignatius Press. The God That Did Not Fail: How Religion Built and Sustains the West, is now available in paperback from Encounter Books.

EDITORS NOTE: This The Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2020 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.

Is it better for people to mingle and allow them to be infected with COVID-19?

There are numerous national, state and local policies that require, and in some cases laws, that require Americans to self-quarantine and for businesses to shut down in order to reduce the spread of the Wuhan Flu also known as COVID-19.

I have now lived thru four pandemics.

According to the U.S. Center for Disease Control they are:

  1. 1957 – 1958 Pandemic (H2N2 virus)
  2. 1968 – Pandemic (H3N2 virus)
  3. 2009 – H1N1 Pandemic (H1N1pdm09 virus)
  4. 2019 – Cronavirus Disease of 2019 (COVID-19 or Wuhan Flu)

This is the first time in my lifetime that Americans have been required to self-quarantine and businesses to shut down.

In my county Sarasota, state of Florida and the United State and World wide as of July 4, 2020:

Cases overview
Sarasota County
Confirmed
1,707
Recovered
Deaths
98
Florida
Confirmed
190K
+11,458
Recovered
Deaths
3,702
+18
United StatesUnited States
Confirmed
2.89M
+50,445
Recovered
872K
Deaths
132K
+273
WorldwideWorldwide
Confirmed
11.2M
+212K
Recovered
6.03M
Deaths
528K
+5,134
QUESTION: Is it better to allow people to be infected with COVID-19?

There are three categories of COVID-19 infections:

  1. A-symptomatic infections. Those who have the COVID-19 virus but show no symptoms. This group has the antibodies that resist COVID-19.
  2. Symptomatic infections. These are people who are hospitalized and require medical care to recover. Some must be placed in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) before they recover and are released.
  3. Those who die because of COVID-19. This group of people are most likely suffering from other physical anomalies that weaken their bodies auto immune system.

This CDC chart shows the infection rates in America by age:

Age Group Cumulative Rate per 100,000 Population
Overall

102.5

     0-4 years

8.9

     5-17 years

4.0

     18-49 years

62.6

  18-29 years

34.7

  30-39 years

62.5

  40-49 years

98.6

    50-64 years

155.0

    65+ years

306.7

  65-74 years

222.5

  75-84 years

370.1

  85+ years

573.1

The idea is to allow people to become infected means that those infected will most likely recover and have the necessary antibodies to all them to resist COVID-19 and remain healthy.

Why haven’t we shut down America for previous pandemics?

ANSWER: Bad politics and bad science.

Jon Miltimore in an article titled Modelers Were ‘Astronomically Wrong’ in COVID-19 Predictions, Says Leading Epidemiologist—and the World Is Paying the Price reports:

Dr. John Ioannidis became a world-leading scientist by exposing bad science. But the COVID-19 pandemic could prove to be his biggest challenge yet.

In a wide-ranging interview with Greek Reporter published over the weekend, Ioannidis said emerging data support his prediction that lockdowns would have wide-ranging social consequences and that the mathematical models on which the lockdowns were based were horribly flawed.

Ioannidis also said a comprehensive review of the medical literature suggests that COVID-19 is far more widespread than most people realize.

“There are already more than 50 studies that have presented results on how many people in different countries and locations have developed antibodies to the virus,” Ioannidis, a Greek-American physician, told Greek Reporter. “Of course none of these studies are perfect, but cumulatively they provide useful composite evidence. A very crude estimate might suggest that about 150-300 million or more people have already been infected around the world, far more than the 10 million documented cases.”

So, if COVID-19 is far more widely spread then why don’t we stop the lockdown and allow Americans to get back to work?

Dr. Ioannidis stated:

“Major consequences on the economy, society and mental health” have already occurred. I hope they are reversible, and this depends to a large extent on whether we can avoid prolonging the draconian lockdowns and manage to deal with COVID-19 in a smart, precision-risk targeted approach, rather than blindly shutting down everything. Similarly, we have already started to see the consequences of “financial crisis, unrest, and civil strife.” I hope it is not followed by “war and meltdown of the social fabric.” Globally, the lockdown measures have increased the number of people at risk of starvation to 1.1 billion, and they are putting at risk millions of lives, with the potential resurgence of tuberculosis, childhood diseases like measles where vaccination programs are disrupted, and malaria. I hope that policymakers look at the big picture of all the potential problems and not only on the very important, but relatively thin slice of evidence that is COVID-19.”

Under President Trump our hospitals have the necessary equipment and personnel to deal with COVID-19.

Blue States lead the nation in COVID-19 deaths

Jon Miltimore in an article titled Blue States Have Been Hit Much Harder by COVID-19. Why? reports:

Eleven of the 12 states (including the District of Columbia) with the highest COVID-19 fatality rates are traditional blue states. Leading the way, unsurprisingly, is New York, which posted the highest deaths, total (31,346) and per capita (1,611 per 1M).* New Jersey is not far behind New York, however (1,478/1M). These states are followed by Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and the District of Columbia. Just one red state—Louisiana, seventh highest with 680/1M—cracked the top twelve.

[ … ]

The question is, why?

After all, blue states tended to have the most stringent lockdowns. Indeed, eight red states—Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah and Wyoming—declined to issue stay-at-home orders at all (though some took less severe measures).

None of these states were among the states hardest hit by COVID-19.

CONCLUSION

As more people mingle more will become infected, however more will survive with the antibodies needed. As more people are tested for COVID-19 we will have more positives results for the virus. Most of those tested positive will recover completely from the virus.

So, is it better to allow people to mingle and get infected or not? This is a personal decision on each American. Government should not be mandating. Rather government should get out of  the way.

If you have symptoms of COVID-19 go to the hospital. If you don’t feel well because you have the flu, or any other notable social diseases, stay home.

©All rights reserved.

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Pavlovian Politics

We have all seen people on both sides of the political aisle use catch phrases routinely in response to political topics, but it seems the Democrats have honed this skill to razor sharpness. For example, in her recent “60 Minutes” interview, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was asked by Anderson Cooper if she thought President Trump was a racist, to which her reflexive response was, 

“Yes, no question. When you look at the words that he uses, which are historic dog whistles of white supremacy, when you look at how he reacted to Charlottesville incident where neo-Nazis murdered a woman, versus how he manufactures crisis, like immigrants seeking legal refuge on our borders, it is night and day.”

Her response seemed almost robotic. I found her use of words like “dog whistles,” “white supremacy” and “manufactures crisis” illuminating as if she had been programmed to use such expressions on command, kind of like Pavlov’s dog. Say a certain word or ask a question, and the person begins to salivate automatically. Frankly, it’s kind of scary.

The expression “dog whistles” is particularly interesting as it is now commonly used by the Left to denote how they believe conservatives respond. Now I will admit I have seen Republicans use catch phrases, such as “Lock her up” and “CNN sucks,” but I have found conservatives more inclined to engage in honest debate as opposed to Democrats trained in Pavlovian responses.

Do you want to stop a left-wing Democrat in his/her tracks? Just tell them you have voted for a Democrat in the past, as you thought the person was the right candidate for the job, and then ask if they ever voted for a Republican. A wild-eyed expression comes over their face and they are at a loss for words.

I had a Democrat friend who recently told me point blank, “I will never go to any meeting where a Republican is speaking.” So much for open-mindedness. I also guess I will not see him in any of my audiences any time soon.

What I am finding with Democrats is there is less courteous debate and more conditioning in terms of talking points. Whenever I get in an argument with them, I feel I am dealing directly with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow or CNN’s Don Lemon, et al. Interestingly, if you ask them to explain their rehearsed talking points, they are at a loss. This speaks volumes about the power of the main stream media. Further, they tend to turn up the volume as if you cannot hear them. I have found both young and older Democrats becoming excessively passionate and less inclined to hear opposing views, thereby emboldening them to attack their opponents.

Now there is a movement in the media to label Republicans as racist, hate-filled liars. This is all being done as a prelude to the 2020 elections to condition their constituents to believe Republicans are evil and must be eliminated. Through the use of identity politics, the media is creating stereotypes intended for character assassination. I don’t think Hitler could have done it any better.

As to racism, let us never forget not one Republican ever owned a slave. In fact, the Republican Party was created to abolish slavery (anyone remember a guy named Lincoln?). The Left conveniently overlooks the fact that the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow laws were all Democrat inventions, and somehow try to blame the Republicans for their creation. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nonetheless, by training people to repetitively chant “Racist, Racist, Racist,” they are hoping people will develop a reflexive action against the Republicans.

By religiously parroting the talking points of the Left, the Democrats have become a party of lemmings controlled by the news media who has plotted them on a course to tear their opponents apart. More likely though, they will end up in the abyss.

Keep the Faith!

RELATED VIDEO: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper

EDITORS NOTE: This column with images is republished with permission. All trademarks both marked and unmarked belong to their respective companies. The featured photo is by Charles Deluvio 🇵🇭🇨🇦 on Unsplash.

Kavanaugh Allegations: Aimed at Justice or at a Justice?

Why would someone sit on an allegation for nearly six weeks, if were about a subject that everyone is supposed to be concerned about? Perhaps it’s because they are more concerned about how to use the allegation than whether or not the allegation is true.

Welcome to Washington, DC where such political theater is regularly on display, the latest episode being Senate Democrats’ efforts to derail Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh with an eleventh-hour allegation of inappropriate behavior from more than thirty years ago. Whether or not the allegation is true is one thing. We should always be concerned about the truth. But how it is being used is another — and methods have the right to be questioned.

“It’s disturbing that these uncorroborated allegations from more than 35 years ago, during high school, would surface on the eve of a committee vote after Democrats sat on them since July,” a Senate Judiciary Committee statement read. “If Ranking Member Feinstein and other Committee Democrats took this claim seriously, they should have brought it to the full Committee’s attention much earlier.”

Quite true. Instead, writes the committee, Democrats “said nothing during two joint phone calls with the nominee in August, four days of lengthy public hearings, a closed session for all committee members with the nominee where sensitive topics can be discussed and in more than 1,300 written questions. Sixty-five senators met individually with Judge Kavanaugh during a nearly two-month period before the hearing began, yet Feinstein didn’t share this with her colleagues ahead of many of those discussions.”

At the same time, many (including many women who knew him years ago) have firmly vouched for his character and integrity. Additionally, as my friend Franklin Graham noted, “Judge Kavanaugh has been through 6 incredibly thorough FBI vettings and a multitude of other inquiries, and nothing even related to these 36-year-old allegations has ever come up.” We know that many progressives and opponents of our Constitution as it is written would love nothing more than for this whole process to be derailed. Given the way this has unfolded, we have every reason to believe Kavanaugh’s opponents don’t care about justice; they care about a justice — specifically, that he not make it onto the Court.

As Franklin reminds us, we must “[p]ray for Judge Kavanaugh, Mrs. Ford who is making this accusation, their families, and for wisdom and discernment for Senate leadership dealing with these post-hearing, previously unreported, allegations from his distant teenage years.” Indeed, in a situation like this, let us all pray — for the good of our Constitution and our nation — that truth, justice, and righteousness would prevail.


Tony Perkins’ Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.


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CARTOON VIDEO: Hillary’s ‘Crime Isn’t Criminal’ Children’s Book

Jimmy Kimmel sure likes to lampoon but only for one side, well we think fair play is called for in this election. We whipped up a little Children’s Book of our own for everyone’s favorite political gangster, ole Machine Gun Clinton.

HAT TIP: Semi Respectable – Cartoons

New Republican Party: The Red, Purple and Parchment Troika

In my column New Democrat Party: The Red-Green-Rainbow Troika we took a look at the Democratic Party and how President Obama has fundamentally changed it by forming political alliances, creating a Troika. The members of the Red-Green-Rainbow Troika are certainly strange bedfellows but politics makes for strange bedfellows.

Now let’s look at the Republican Party.

Who has fundamentally changed it, why and is it for the better or worse? Who are members of the New Republican Party Troika (NRPT)? These are questions that may help voters understand what happened during the presidential primary of 2016 and what will happen in the lead up to November 8th.

Just like the Democratic Party, the GOP is make up of a Troika. The Republican Troika consists of three major factions:

  1. Conservative Republicans (a.k.a. the reds). These are the Grand Old Party elite (GOPe). They joined the party after the Goldwater years and have gained in power and prestige due to their unwavering party loyalty. They normally vote the Republican ticket.
  2. Republicans In Name Only (a.k.a. the purples or RINOs). These are individuals who joined the Republican party solely to win a political seat or appointment. A perfect example is former Florida Governor, former Republican and now Democrat Charlie Crist. The purples do not hold conservative values, rather they change as does the weather in the Sunshine State. The RINOs will not necessarily vote for the Republican ticket. Some have joined movements to undermine Republican nominees for president dating back to the days of Barry Goldwater.
  3. Constitutional Conservatives (a.k.a. the TEA Party). They embrace the parchment upon which the Constitution and Bill of Rights are written and signed by the Founding Fathers. This group includes Libertarians.

What differentiates these three factions is their commitment to “conservative values”, which are defined differently by each faction.

Arizona Republican Senator Barry Goldwater and presidential candidate in his book “The Conscience of a Conservative” wrote:

I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is “needed” before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents’ “interests,” I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.

This statement, to many Republicans, defines Conservative values at every level of government. The idea of limited government as envisioned by the Founders and enshrined in the Constitution. States rights are paramount and trump efforts to impose government laws and regulations upon the population.

But not all members of the Troika embrace Goldwater’s statement. For you see there has been no true Conservative leader of the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan. How do we know? The American Enterprise Institute’s  in a column titled A reality check about Republican presidents measured the growth of government (i.e. regulations) over the past fifty years. Murray writes:

…I think it’s useful to remind everyone of the ways in which having a Republican president hasn’t made all that much difference for the last fifty years, with Ronald Reagan as the one exception.

First, here’s the history of the most commonly used measure of growth in the regulatory state, the number of pages in the Federal Code of Regulations.

murray_05132016

We can fairly blame LBJ’s Democratic administration for the initial spike in regulations, and Jimmy Carter’s years saw another steep rise. But using number of pages as the measure understates what happened during the Nixon years, when we got the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, plus much of the legislation that gave regulators the latitude to define terms such as “clean” or “safe” as they saw fit.

After the Carter years, the slope of the trendline was shallowest in the Reagan and Clinton administrations (with the Clinton result concentrated in his second term, when a Republican House imposed a moratorium on some new regulations). The increase during the Obama years remained on the same slope as the one during George W. Bush’s years. And if you’re thinking about the Democrats’ most egregious regulatory excess, Dodd-Frank in 2010, recall that Sarbanes-Oxley passed in 2002, when Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate.

I should add that presidents don’t bear a lot of blame for failing to reduce regulation — their power to restrain the activities of the regulatory agencies is limited — but neither has electing a Republican president done any good, with Reagan as a partial exception.

Read more.

With the GOP nominee process ending and Donald Trump as the nominee, what has changed? Who is now the leader of the GOP?

Many would say Trump, as the nominee, will be driving the policy and politics of the Republican Party. However, their are those who write and speculate that their remains an internal discord within the party between one of the three factions. The most likely faction to cause this discord are the purples/RINOs. The other two factions have begun uniting behind Trump.

Ayn Rand wrote, “The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other – until one day when they are suddenly declared to be the country’s official ideology.”

What are the uncontested absurdities of the Republican Party elite? Here’s a short list:

  1. Fear. Republican elites fear being called out by Democrats, the media and at times by fellow Republicans. The fear is palpable.
  2. Political correctness. Republicans succumb to the pressures of being politically correct (see #1 above).
  3. Compromise. Republicans are prone to compromise their values when it is unnecessary or by dint of constant pressure from the Democrat Troika. Compromise is the art of losing slowly. Something the GOPe is accustomed to.
  4. Elitism. The Republican elite (GOPe) has consistently ignored the voices of primary voters in 2008, 20012 and in 2016.
  5. Old guard career politicians. The old guard is not focused on retaining the core values of the party of Abraham Lincoln, rather it is focused on winning re-election.
  6. Lack of leadership. The GOP has controlled Congress for the past 4 years yet has failed to stop the agenda of the Democrat Troika. The leadership of McConnell/Boehner and now McConnell/Ryan have failed to make headway.
  7. Politics by press release. Republicans have become the party of the press release. They send out press statements that sound good on the surface but seldom become political reality, law or have an impact on public policy or Main Street Americans.
  8. Ignoring the base. The GOPe believe they can win presidential elections with old guard, politically correct, compromising, career politicians.
  9. Going along to get along. The best way to win re-election is to go along with the GOPe and Democrats. Shutting down the government to keep from increasing the national debt or reducing the size of government spending goes against the grain of the GOPe.
  10. The GOPe eats its own. The GOPe in the name of items #1-#9 will attack candidates and elected Republicans. Moderate means purple.

So what’s the solution to all of these Republican absurdities? As Newt Gingrich wrote in an article in The Washington Times on January 8, 2016 titled “Donald Trump”:

You’re sick of politicians, sick of the Democratic Party, Republican Party, and sick of illegal’s. You just want this thing fixed. Trump may not be a saint, but doesn’t have any lobbyist money influencing him, he doesn’t have political correctness restraining him, all you know is that he has been very successful, a good negotiator, he has built a lot of things, and he’s also not a politician, so he’s not a cowardly politician. And he says he’ll fix it. You don’t care if the guy has bad hair. You just want those raccoon’s [rabid, messy, mean politicians] gone. Out of your house!

Donald J. Trump has changed the political paradigm. Will the purples follow or become the thorn in the side of Trump. That is the question.

lincoln quote

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Why Do We Believe These Pathological Liars? by B.K. Marcus

How do you feel when someone lies to you?

It probably depends on who is doing the lying. A stranger’s fabrications may not phase you, but dishonesty from a friend or lover can end the relationship. The more you feel the liar is supposed to be “on your side,” the more his or her deceptions feel like betrayal — unless, it turns out, the lies come from a politician you support.

When I shared a link on Facebook to Rick Shenkman’s article “Why Are Trump Voters Not Bothered by His Lies?” someone immediately replied by asking, “Why are Hillary voters not bothered by her lies?” Why, in other words, focus on only one mendacious candidate when lying to voters seems like a prerequisite for running for office?

Shenkman, who is the editor of HistoryNewsNetwork.org and the author ofPolitical Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics, might respond with his claim that Trump “has told more lies than any other leading political figure probably ever has.” But his article is in fact about neither Trump’s astonishing number of fibs nor his supporters’ astonishing tolerance for them; it is about how widespread both such lying and such tolerance are across party lines and throughout the era of mass-media mass democracy.

Shenkman is writing for a left-leaning readership, thus his headline’s righteous indignation toward a right-wing candidate, but most of the examples he gives are of deliberately deceitful Democrats. He starts with candidate Kennedy’s campaign claim that the Soviets had more nuclear missiles than the United States:

He continued to insist that there was a missile gap to the Soviet’s advantage even after he was briefed by General Earl Wheeler that there wasn’t. After the election his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, told the press on background that a study had found there was no missile gap, leading to blaring headlines the next morning.

JFK’s reaction? He ordered his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, to tell the media that there had been no study and that there was a gap. The truth was that JFK himself didn’t take his own rhetoric about the missile gap seriously. At cabinet meetings he cracked on numerous occasions, “Who ever believed in the missile gap” anyway?

Four years later, President Johnson “told the American people that the North Vietnamese were guilty of making repeated unprovoked attacks on [US] naval vessels in the Tonkin Gulf.” As with Kennedy, we know that Johnson was being dishonest, not mistaken. “Hell,” LBJ told an aide, “those dumb stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish.”

Shenkman barely touches on Nixon’s perfidy in Watergate and never mentions Nixon aide John Ehrlichman’s 1994 interview, admitting that the war on drugs was not about crime or health but was rather a politically motivated attack on war protestors and American blacks. “Did we know we were lying about the drugs?” said the president’s former domestic affairs advisor. “Of course we did.”

And while he may have given Ms. Clinton a pass, Shenkman does mention the millions of supporters who refused to believe the allegations against her husband “until prosecutors revealed they possessed [Monica Lewinsky’s] infamous blue dress.”

No one should be shocked by the frequency of politicians’ duplicity, but it is frustrating when a candidate is caught in an undeniable falsehood and his or her supporters never waiver.  Our political culture expects politicians to perjure and prevaricate left and right, but that doesn’t make their deceptions defensible. So where is the outrage?

“Our brains are partisan,” Shenkman writes:

While we are quick to seize on the misstatements of other candidates, we give them a pass when it’s our own. When the social scientist Drew Westen put voters in an MRI machine he discovered that their brains quickly shut off the flow of information contrary to their beliefs about their favorite candidates. The neurons actively involved in the transmission of this information literally went inactive.

It’s not just the political candidates who are lying. So are the voters. “We lie,” Shenkman points out, “about our unwillingness to put up with lies.”

If politicians keep lying and voters keep shrugging it off, isn’t that an indictment of democracy? Aren’t voters supposed to act as a check on the people in power?

In theory, an election is supposed to be more than a popularity contest. Candidates are supposed to represent an approach to policy making, which is in turn supposed to reflect both facts and a theory of cause and effect. What we have instead is a formalized tribalism, us versus them, facts be damned.

Shenkman assures the reader that the liars don’t get away with it forever, but his evidence for that conclusion is questionable. Johnson and Nixon are remembered as liars by both Democrats and Republicans, but the reckoning for Gulf of Tonkin and Watergate are outliers in the steady stream of deception flowing out of DC and the state capitals. Meanwhile, Mssrs Kennedy and Clinton will be remembered more for deceiving their wives than the voters.

Westen’s research on cognitive dissonance and party politics is troubling, but well before there was any hard data on how voters process unwanted facts, the theory of rational ignorance told us why so many facts are so unwanted: to the individual voter, the cost of acquiring the relevant knowledge far outweighs the practical benefits of knowing the truth when casting a ballot.

In contrast, the benefits of supporting a candidate accrue, not from any actual effect on the electoral outcome, but largely from the signaling that it provides the voter: this is the sort of person I am, and these are the sorts of causes I support. Symbolic affiliation isn’t dependent on the truth of any particular facts, so why should we expect inconvenient falsehoods to change anyone’s political alignment?

As I wrote in “Too Dumb for Democracy?” (Freeman, spring 2015), “getting an issue like the minimum wage terribly wrong takes no work and has the immediate payoff of feeling like you’re on the side of the angels. It also solidifies your standing within your own ideological tribe. Bothering to understand supply and demand … offers no practical reward after you pull the lever in the election booth.”

The lies we care the least to uncover are precisely those for which the cost of caring outweighs the benefits of our vigilance. That describes almost anything we may ever be asked to vote on. But when knowing the truth directly matters to the decisions we make every day — the truth about our jobs, our homes, our families and loved ones — the relative benefits of knowing the truth are far greater, and we therefore penalize the liars in our lives. Cognitive dissonance may be a barrier to accepting hard truths, but even cognitive dissonance is price sensitive.

The more decisions we cede to the political process, the less we should expect anyone to protect our interests. Even we don’t bother to do it, because the rules of the game — majority rules — render our efforts ineffectual. Worse than that: we’re not even rewarded for knowing what policies really are or aren’t in our best interest.

The truth can win out, but it’s a lot less likely in an election.

B.K. MarcusB.K. Marcus

B.K. Marcus is editor of the Freeman.

Trump Campaign Dismisses America First Controversy

George Santayana’s careworn expression may be invoked yet again over the meme adopted in Trump’s first Foreign Policy speech delivered at the Center for National Interest (CNI) in Washington, DC on Wednesday April 27, 2016. America First.  Santayana said: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Trump in his CNI speech issued his emphatic clarion call to the remaining primary voters across America:

It’s time to shake the rust off America’s foreign policy. It’s time to invite new voices and new visions into the fold, something we have to do. The direction I will outline today will also return us to a timeless principle. My foreign policy will always put the interests of the American people and American security above all else. It has to be first. Has to be.That will be the foundation of every single decision that I will make. America First will be the major and overriding theme of my administration.

He did have this welcomed comment on Israel:

Israel, our great friend and the one true democracy in the Middle East has been snubbed and criticized by an administration that lacks moral clarity. Just a few days ago, Vice President Biden again criticized Israel, a force for justice and peace, for acting as an impatient peace area in the region.

That gave rise to criticism by the ADL’s Greenblatt cited in a Ha’aretz article:

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) urged Trump to reconsider the phrase Thursday citing its “anti-Semitic use in the months before Pearl Harbor by a group of prominent Americans seeking to keep the nation out of World War II.”

According to a statement released by the Jewish watchdog, the most prominent leader of the “America First Committee” was Charles Lindbergh, who “sympathized with the Nazis and whose rhetoric was characterized by anti-Semitism and offensive stereotypes, including assertions that Jews posed a threat to the U.S. because of their influence in motion pictures, radio, the press, and the government.”

Nonetheless, ADL chief Jonathan A. Greenblatt said “the undercurrents of anti-Semitism and bigotry that characterized the America First movement … are fortunately not a major concern today.”

“However, for many Americans, the term ‘America First’ will always be associated with and tainted by this history,” he said, adding that “in a political season that already has prompted a national conversation about civility and tolerance, choosing a call to action historically associated with incivility and intolerance seems ill-advised.”

For those of us old enough to have some knowledge of the isolationist anti-Semitic American First movement championed by Hitler admirer, Charles Lindbergh, who was given a personal award by Der Fuhrer for his aviation exploits, Trump’s use of it was jarring.

When I read the transcript of his speech, I asked a source in the Trump campaign about Dr. Walid Phares, one of Trump’s foreign policy advisers, who I knew personally from a decade of interaction including co-hosting radio shows on common subjects dealing with the Middle East, Israel and Jihad. I asked whether he had written Trump’s  America First speech. The answer was,” no.”  instead  I was directed to Phares’ Fox News opinion article that purports to lay out Trump’s foreign policy vision. There was no America First meme presented in his discussion. Lots of suggestions on changes in the traditional Americans alliances, prevention of Iran getting the nuclear weapon, that it may already possess, getting our allies in the NATO alliance to ante up the required annual defense budget allotments, dealing with ISIS and its global affiliates and the Muslim Brotherhood both here and abroad. Phares’ ringing conclusion:

A new popular majority is sweeping the country during these primary elections and another greater national current will legitimize these new principles with the election of Donald Trump as president in November. These new foreign policy directions will have a deeply informed public backing them, so that President Trump can muster the energies of the American people to create a sustainable defense, encompassing clear objectives coupled with a strong international presence.

Now more than ever, confident American leadership is vital for a world in disarray.

The meme of new policy directions figured prominently in a PBS News Hour  discussion on the merits of Trump’s Foreign Policy speech with Phares and former State Department official, now Hoover Institute scholar, Nicholas Burns. Burns found what he deemed lots of contradictions in Trump’s CNI speech. Phares demurred saying it was really about replacing old worn out failed policies with new ones.

Watch the PBS News Hour interview with Phares and Burns.

Phares was interviewed by Steve Inskeep of NPR’s Morning Edition. I have to issue a disclaimer on my part. I had found NPR’s news biased against Israel back in 2003. I participated in coordinating a national one day protest against NPR local affiliates in more than 40 locations, including the one I led in Connecticut. That led to a series of abrupt exchanges with the VP for News at the DC headquarters for several weeks following that protest. Notwithstanding, my attention was drawn to the transcript of NPR interview with Phares. Inskeep of NPR pressed  Phares on what Trump’s speech was all about with alleged contradictions upending the old policies in favor of new directions.  Phares pushed back on that until the inevitable occurred. Inskeep asked him about the American First meme as it brought memories of the pre-WWII American Firster isolationists led by Lindbergh. Here is the transcript exchange:

INSKEEP: Dr. Phares, one other thing. And we’ve just got about 30 seconds here. He uses this phrase, America First. It’s got a particular historical resonance. He’s borrowing a phrase that was used by people who opposed U.S. Involvement against Germany in World War II – 1939, 1940, 1941. Very, very briefly, is there a message here?

PHARES: If you are criticizing Mr. Trump, you will find all the bad connections.  He is very optimistic, and he is very positive none of these sentences that he pronounces go back to dark ages or go back to negative aspects at all.

I returned to the Campaign source and asked about that history. The response:

“America First” is a simple phrase that Mr. Trump uses to describe his approach to all aspects of American relations with the world, including trade, immigration and national defense. Under President Trump, the interests of the American people will be paramount. Putting it in the old category of the isolationists of the past who fought against American involvement in WWII is a mistake.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review.

VIDEO: The Rise of America’s First Muslim Brotherhood Political Party

star spangled shariahThe wolves have been at work for a while preparing for such a time as now. These wolves are cunning, patient, low profile, and terribly focused like a laser beam on their target; only their target is not simply a herd of sheep but an entire country that daily becomes increasingly like a herd of sheep. The country is the United States, and the wolves that have been at work are members of the Muslim Brotherhood and affiliate Islamic groups sworn to fulfill the Quran’s commandment to establish a Caliphate; a One-World Muslim religion, culture, law, and maniacal allegiance to their Prophet Mohammed. Any obstacle standing in their way of total achievement and domination is to be fully and completely eliminated – not tampered with, coddled or made friends with, but eliminated.

While a prodigious number of elected officials work diligently to make nice to all people everywhere, and struggle to bring about “political correctness” to win favor and reelection rather than lead for the sake and safety of the citizens to which elected them, and many citizens mumble and resent political correctness but go along with the ever multiplying tentacles, the wolves continue to pick off an institution or significant politician here and there, as they never once stray from their intended target, the elimination of our country! Many law enforcement senior commanders and chiefs have become politically neutered from being the once strong, respected, and proud sheepdog that historically stood post placing himself between the vulnerable flock and the wolves. Add the many facets of “transformation and change” Obama has brought forward, and very few have aggressively opposed, and the public herd is all the more confused and overwhelmed, and simply returns to eating and enjoying life for the moment. Thinking past the moment is too difficult, too scary, too mind boggling so the herd simply continues to enjoy the moment. All the while the wolves continue to focus on their target(s). One target in particular that has been illuminated is the American political process. The wolves’ intention is to become their own political force, but only insofar as to use this force to establish the Islamic Faith form of government and law supplanting the Constitution of the United States with Sharia Law!

You scoff and say this can’t happen! My very good colleague, Clare Lopez, Senior Vice President of The Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. shares the evidence to demonstrate otherwise. Watch the five minute YouTube presentation below. Please take steps to understand what is transpiring all around you as the culture and fabric of America is deliberately being shredded. Some of us “sheep dogs” have already engaged in the fight against the wolves consumed with diabolical schemes to eliminate the whole herd, America. While a remnant of the herd have heeded our warnings and have responded to being educated on the clear and present danger, most of the herd continues to eat placidly with not a care on their mind – just as the wolves would like.

Star Spangled Shariah: The Rise of America’s First Muslim Brotherhood Political Party

“The U.S. Muslim Brotherhood’s stated goal in America is to ‘destroy the Western civilization from within.’ Star-Spangled Shariah: The Rise of America’s First Muslim Brotherhood Party reveals the newest weapon in their arsenal for doing so – a self-described Political Party called the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO). This new monograph connects the dots between the Muslim Brotherhood’s secret plan to impose Sharia in America, and the insidious use it intends to make of our democratic political system to that end.”

EDITORS NOTE: The Muslim Brotherhood centrist US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), which is holding a Muslim Capital Day during the week of April 18th is made up of: American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), Muslim Alliance in North America (MANA), Muslim American Society (MAS), Muslim Legal Fund of America (MLFA), Muslim Ummah of North America (MUNA), The Mosque Cares (Ministry of Imam W. Deen Mohammed).

Two-Thirds of Americans Believe Money Buys Elections by Daniel Bier

Everybody knows that money buys elections. That’s what opponents of theCitizens United decision have been ominously warning us for six years, and their message resonates. A CNN poll found that 67 percent of Americans think that “elections are generally for sale to the candidate who can raise the most money.”

The trouble is that there is very little evidence for this. Even though the candidate with the most money usually wins, the general rule is that moneychases winners rather than creates winners. People give to candidates they think are likely to win, and incumbents (who almost always win) and candidates in safe districts still raise money, even if they’re not challenged. On the flip side, donors and parties don’t waste support on long-shot races.

More importantly, money never guarantees any election. For instance, billionaire Meg Whitman spent $144 million of her own money on the California governor’s race; Jerry Brown spent just $36 million but crushed Whitman, 53 percent to 40 percent.

Mitt Romney, the GOP, and their PACs outspent Barack Obama and friends by over $120 million, and we know what came of that. Anthony Brown (D) outspent Larry Hogan (R) almost five to one in the 2014 Maryland governor’s race and lost, in a state that is two to one Democrat.

We can likely add Jeb Bush’s candidacy to this list. The Jeb! campaign and pro-Jeb groups have collectively raised $155 million. Only Hillary Clinton has raised more. According to the New York Times, he’s dominating “the money race” among Republicans.

But in the actual race, he got a dismal sixth place in Iowa, with 2.8 percent of the vote. Polls put Jeb fifth in New Hampshire and fifth nationally. Currently, Betfair places his odds of winning the nomination at 5.2 percent.

In fact, the whole Republican race shows that money can’t simply buy votes. Scott Walker raised $34 million in three months, spent all of it — and then dropped out, five months before Iowa. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has dominated news coverage and polls for months with only $19 million.

When you plot money vs. poll numbers, what jumps out is how little correlation there is:

… And money vs. Iowa caucus votes:

… And money vs. odds of winning the nomination:

Jeb and Jeb-PACs have spent $89.1 million so far and received 5,238 votes — over $17,000 per vote received. Trump has spent just $300 per vote.

This is not to say that money doesn’t matter — you can’t run a campaign without it, and campaign finance laws are designed to make it difficult for upstart challengers to become competitive. But after a certain amount (about $500,000 for a typical congressional race), there are rapidly diminishing returns, and dumping more money on a failing campaign will not save it.

There’s a lot of baseless fears about free speech, but the idea that the people with the most expensive microphone will always get their way is one of the easiest to disprove. More speech, more discussion, and more competition in the field of ideas is not what’s wrong with American politics — but they might be part of the solution to it.

Daniel Bier

Daniel Bier

Daniel Bier is the editor of Anything Peaceful. He writes on issues relating to science, civil liberties, and economic freedom.