Thursday, September 10, 2020
A Bridge Too Far?
Article by J. Robert Smith in The American Thinker
A Bridge Too Far?
Fox News had an interview posted on Labor Day with conservative filmmaker and commentator Dinesh D’Souza. D’Souza has a new film, Trump Card, which will be digitally released on October 9.
The article’s headline was “Dinesh D’Souza says recent riots and political unrest could lead to ‘rise of citizen militias around the country.” Anyone with a shred of common sense isn’t surprised.
When Democrats neuter police, refuse to impose strict curfews, and refuse to call up the National Guard, lawlessness, involving violence, ensues. Why should looters and rioters stand down when they routinely confront police whose hands are tied? Why wouldn’t emboldened mobs take their violence and destruction out of Democrat cities?
Marauders and thugs invading the ‘burbs have happened erratically, to date. But suburbanites best not think their communities immune. City riots are leftist arson. Once sparked, they can spread like wildfires. Mobs still have plenty to do torching Portland and other blue cities. But as forest fires crown and spread rapidly, so, too, may mob action if not halted.
Imagine firefighters being ordered to stand down when fires are raging. What alternative do citizens have then? Step into the breach or else. If leftist mobs move out to menace suburbs, why wouldn’t we expect citizens to band together to form militias, neighborhood by neighborhood, if only?
It’s not a bridge too far to expect sober citizens to exercise their ancient right to self-defense when governments cannot or will not meet their responsibilities to protect and defend. Government exists principally for that purpose. When governments fail to do so their legitimacy melts away. But that fact is too elemental, too grounded in the realities that govern human affairs. The upside-down morality that infects the Ted Wheelers and Jenny Durkans is a perversity, which has been rarely encountered so brazenly in America. It informs Democrat policies and governance. Right is wrong, wrong, right.
As things now stand, citizens banding together for their safety isn’t a bridge too far. It isn’t what anyone wants but may be. On the other hand, the differences between left and right are dramatic and growing.
D’Souza poses a critical question, one that patriots need to mull. He asks, “The real question is, how do we coexist with each other. That's the real question of the future."
That’s actually the question today. Let’s backfill. From Nick Gavis, who reported on D’Souza for Fox News:
When asked how the divisiveness today compares to the mood during the American Civil War, he [D'Souza] expressed optimism about the U.S. finding a way to unite again. [snip]
"The circumstances are very different from 150 years ago. In no way is civil conflict inevitable," D'Souza said. "There are many other solutions. There are different ways in which groups that are very different can coexist, but all these ways are going to be tested. The left is looking to create a coalition of minority victims that equals 51 percent so they can loot and oppress the other 49 percent. Our model is, one way or the other stop them from doing that... We will be essentially undoing 200 years of development of Western civilization.
D’Souza is right, in that civil war isn’t inevitable. We have free will and make choices. There were alternatives to the Civil War.
The War Between the States would look tame compared to the carnage and destruction that would occur in Version 2. Only fools are eager for conflict.
While there are clear distinctions between the 1850s (which were the runup to war) and now, there’s a striking similarity: the gulf between Americans -- between patriots and leftists -- appears as unbridgeable as the chasm between the industrializing, generally anti-slavery North and the agrarian, slave-dependent South. Perhaps the breach is greater. Here’s why: despite profound differences over slavery and states’ rights, Northerners and Southerners shared similar values and beliefs. Both having dinner table conversation would find much in common personally.
As Lincoln said of citizens, North and South, in his Second Inaugural Address: “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God[.]” Not so today. The left is increasingly godless and is hostile toward faith, while traditional America hews to faith. There are other major differences. Growing divides over abortion, free speech, gun rights, gender, family (the left deconstructs family), traditional morality, crime and criminals, capitalism, the meaning of America, and so on.
Another distinction is that the South aimed to secede -- when it couldn’t prevail politically in slavery’s extension. The left today wishes a revolution, in which America as conceived, and the Constitution that undergirds our experiment in liberty, are effectively scrapped. The South, in part, at least, rationalized its rebellion as striving to be truer to founding principles and the Constitution. For the left, both are anathema, the products of privileged white men, among whom were slaveholders. The 1619 Project boldly and fraudulently asserts that America was founded for slavery.
Lastly, this from the D’Souza article, which makes us wonder how patriots and leftists are to find an accommodation:
"This is why the Democrat party relies on force," he continued. "Ultimately, they can only win if they can force us to live their way. Now, I don't think we're going to. We are no more going to submit to them and change our ways then perhaps they are going to submit to us. This raises the deeper question of how do we find a way going forward... We don't want the America they want and they don't want the America we want. [snip]
So, how might we coexist as a people?
Consider a full restoration of federalism, involving significant devolution of powers and authority from the national to state governments. That would allow states and localities to enjoy greater variation in policies and governance. Trouble is, why would Democrats and the left agree to a new, robust federalism?
The movement on the left since the Progressive Era has been toward concentrating power in central authority, in Washington, D.C., with top-down control of the nation. Why would the left, given its lust for power, abandon so basic an aim? Then, too, all Americans enjoy rights under the Constitution. If California wished to create something like a “People’s Republic of,” it would violate citizens’ constitutional rights, even if only a minority objected.
How about something approximate to the Articles of Confederation, wherein states are loosely joined? But, then, where states are loosely joined, they can be more easily disunited. How long before the nation dissolved, giving way to competing -- if not hostile -- nations where the United States once was?
Perhaps coexistence as one people is unachievable. Maybe the best we can hope for is an amicable divorce, though that seems unlikely. How would factions resolve differences over turf, resources, infrastructure, assets, and debts without conflict?
Said Winston Churchill: "I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest."
For the left, with its relentless march for power and dominance, we wonder what interest would compel it to honestly seek resolution with an American majority that supports the existing framework of law, government, and liberty?
“We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth,” said Lincoln. We wonder: What shall be the fate of our United States?
Dame Diana Rigg: Avengers, Bond and Game of Thrones actress dies at 82
Actress Dame Diana Rigg, famous for roles including Emma Peel in TV series The Avengers and Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones, has died at the age of 82.
Her daughter, actress Rachael Stirling, said she died of cancer, after being diagnosed in March.
"She spent her last months joyfully reflecting on her extraordinary life, full of love, laughter and a deep pride in her profession," she added.
Dame Diana also played the only woman who became Mrs James Bond.
She played Tracy, who married George Lazenby's 007 in the 1969 film On Her Majesty's Secret Service.
Lazenby said he was "so sad" to hear of her death, while Bond producers Michael G Wilson and Barbara Broccoli also paid tribute.
Dame Diana's other recent roles included the Duchess of Buccleuch in ITV's Victoria and Mrs Pumphrey in Channel 5's new adaptation of All Creatures Great and Small.
Samuel West, who plays Siegfried in the show, said: "Doesn't really make sense to think of her having died. She generally lived the hell out of everyone."
Stirling earlier announced the news by writing: "My Beloved Ma died peacefully in her sleep early this morning, at home, surrounded by family. I will miss her beyond words."
Others paying tribute included Sir Tom Stoppard, who remembered her "luminous" talent, while fellow playwright Sir David Hare said the actress had a "dazzling change of direction in middle age as a great classical actor".
'She swept all before her'
He said: "When Emma Peel played Euripides' Medea, Albee's Martha and Brecht's Mother Courage she swept all before her."
Her four Tony Awards nominations resulted in a win for her searing portrayal in the leading role in the stage play Medea in 1994.
Game of Thrones star Nikolaj Coster Waldau, who played Jaime Lannister, said the actress "always raised the bar with her incredible talent, intelligence and wit. An absolute joy and honour to work with".
Sherlock writer and actor Mark Gatiss fondly recalled working with her, while Stephen Merchant remembered her in a scene from his show Extras.
It’s Time for the Samuel Adams Option
Retreat is not an option.
Choose the Sam Adams Option
and fight back—intelligently.
In 2018, Rod Dreher published The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians Living in a Post-Christian World. In it, he argued that Christians needed to recognize that this is a post-Christian society, and that they should withdraw as much as possible from it and build up private Christian communities. His inspiration for this concept is Saint Benedict of Nursia, who founded 12 different communities for monks, which became repositories of learning and civilization during the barbarism that ensued after the collapse of the Roman Empire.
Ayn Rand, in 1957, suggested something similar in Atlas Shrugged. She too, foresaw a sclerotic and decadent United States in which individualism, excellence, and market forces were subjected to collectivist views of equity and “fairness.” She envisioned the creative and business geniuses of America withdrawing to a valley called Galt’s Gulch and going on strike.
There is something deeply attractive about withdrawing from a sick culture and society. Why bother with people who do not share your values and don’t understand or appreciate your point of view? Countries rise and fall all of the time. Many mainstream Americans are well-off and do not want to rock the boat in any way. Maybe the storm will burn itself out and Christianity, constitutionalism, and the American Dream will make a comeback organically.
But there is no remote monastery. There is no Galt’s Gulch. Rather, choosing the Benedict Option ultimately leads to destruction, marginalization, ridicule, or silence—because for the Left, Christians, conservatives, and mainstream Americans in general are the enemy. As long as America is committed to liberty and has a robust middle class, it will naturally oppose statism, crony capitalism, and corruption. It will inherently oppose unchecked power.
Instead of the Benedict Option, mainstream Americans who are interested in preserving their country should consider the “Samuel Adams Option.”
In the 1760s, the British Empire was the most powerful political and military force in the western world. The British navy, treasury, and technology were second to none. Like an anaconda, the king and parliament were slowly strangling the rights of the colonists, reducing them to second-class citizen status with their restrictions on American commerce, currency, and self-determination. They were aided and abetted by up to 30 percent of the colonists who called themselves Tories.
So what did Samuel Adams and other patriots do?
- They formed Committees of Correspondence—connecting patriots to each other across the different towns and villages within individual colonies and with each other.
- They developed their own media to promote “the rights of the colonists, and of this province [Massachusetts] in particular, as men, as Christians, and as subjects; to communicate and publish the same to the several towns in this province and to the world as the sense of this town.”
- They protected themselves from the “cancel culture” of their era by often using pseudonyms and forming secret societies.
- They used symbolic acts of resistance like the Boston Tea Party to mobilize public opinion.
- They worked within the system as much as possible—petitioning allies within the British government.
- They published the names and exposed the merchants who imported British goods and undermined American industry.
The conditions are not exactly the same today. Instead of a monarchy, the radical leftist ideology that has swept through the commanding heights of academia, Hollywood, the media, and big business basically aspires to establish what Tocqueville might have called a “soft despotism” through one-party rule.
Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira in 2018 outlined the idea of emulating California’s Democratic super-majority across the country. The project is incomplete, but the country has moved from its historic center-right orientation to one where conservative students in even a historically conservative state such as North Carolina feel the need to self-censor. Americans have to realize they are facing a different kind of anaconda.
The Samuel Adams Option has to be deployed at the ideological level first. The injustices and undermining of liberty of the Leftist Establishment have to be exposed, documented, and circulated. This entails that the manipulative Orwellian use of language and framing of the Left needs to be rejected and confronted. Concepts like “privilege,” “love,” “racism,” and “sexism,” have been weaponized. Instead of being defensive, mainstream Americans have to push back on leftists to prove their ideas will actually improve society. It is the leftists who are seeking to undermine the intellectual engines that have made the United States the greatest country in the world today.
If America is going to be free, the leftist grip on education through the teachers’ unions, Hollywood, the media, and the human resources departments of almost every major corporation needs to be broken. In some cases, this may mean the creation of new institutions and new businesses. In others, it may be through the application of antitrust law. In still others, it may be by creating a consumer union, using research by groups like Second Vote.
The comedian Greg Gutfeld recently summarized the need to confront, band together, and retaliate against leftist media trolls, not just out of self-defense, but as a matter of setting the record straight and pushing back against injustice. For too long, mainstream Americans who just want to go about their daily lives, do their jobs, love their families, practice their faith, and enjoy the blessings of this country have ignored the warning signs. They have been confused by leftists masquerading as liberals, and they have not realized that they have been targeted, manipulated, and divided in order to advance an ideology designed to transfer power and control from the people according to the dictates of an unaccountable leftist establishment.
The time has come to wake up. Know your enemy. Retreat is not an option. Choose the Samuel Adams Option and fight back—intelligently.
It’s Not a Conspiracy If It’s Out in the Open
As the global neoliberal corporatists openly tell us what they are up to, there are a few inconvenient truths we cannot ignore.
The party line used to be there is no such thing as globalism—no one wants to eliminate nations and only conspiracy theorists believe in a New World Order, one-world government campaign going on. If you were to say you opposed globalism, the response would be “What size tin-foil hat do you wear?”
That was then. This is now. The globalists no longer hide their plans.
While everyone else is asked, cajoled, or shamed into wearing masks, the globalists have let theirs slip.
The crowd from Davos—the World Economic Forum, a.k.a. the High Church of Globalism—now openly pushes something they call “The Great Reset”—essentially the Great Globalist Reset. According to its promoters, it will end inequality, racism, climate change, and, of course, coronavirus. Make no mistake, this is about more than vaccines.
“The world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions,” the oligarchs of the World Economic Forum helpfully advise. “Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed.” (Emphasis added.)
Governments should improve “coordination” in tax, regulatory, and fiscal policy, and implement “long-overdue reforms that promote more equitable outcomes.” Such reforms include “wealth taxes,” eliminating “fossil-fuel subsidies,” and new regulations on intellectual property, trade, and competition.
These “long-overdue reforms” carried out in “coordination” will “advance shared goals, such as equality and sustainability … reimagine, and reset our world to create a healthier, more equitable, and more prosperous future … and urgently build the foundations of our economic and social system for a more fair, sustainable and resilient future,” a “new social contract centred on human dignity, social justice and societal progress.”
Sounds like an intersectional Green New Deal “new normal” on a global scale, what Hudson Institute scholar John Fonte has dubbed “transnational progressivism.”
An Old Idea in Slick New Packaging
On the practical governance level, the Reset is nothing other than rule by a global technocratic-corporate elite. Just as Brussels has stripped Europe’s national parliaments of decision-making powers, the Resetters would arrogate to themselves the authority to set economic, energy, immigration, and trade policies.
Their plan is not new.
George Ball, a Wall Street grandee who served in the State Department under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, laid out the globalist game plan before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress in 1967:
the multinational corporation must be able to operate with little regard for national boundaries—or . . . restrictions imposed by individual national governments . . . commercial, monetary, and antitrust policies—and even the domiciliary supervision of earth-straddling corporations—will have to be increasingly entrusted to supranational institutions.
This required “a considerable erosion of the rigid concepts of national sovereignty” and the elimination of the “antiquated political structures in which most of the world is organized”—in other words, sovereign nation-states—Ball told the lawmakers.
But even then, 53 years ago, the globalist plan was not new.
U.S. Representative Bertrand Gearhart (R-Calif.) was onto the game 20 years earlier, in 1947.
The State Department had been pushing an International Trade Organization headquartered in Geneva, something that indeed would come into being decades later as the World Trade Organization.
Gearhart described Foggy Bottom’s negotiators as “boatloads of smug diplomats, all-wise economists, experts, theorists, specialists and whatnots sailing gaily from our shores to barter away our economy, not in the interest of American prosperity, our standard of living, the welfare of our people, but in the interest of world uplift, of international do-gooding.”
“When the truth is told and the facts become known, the trade-agreements program will be revealed as . . . no less than a plot to merge the American economy with that of the world,” Gearhart predicted. “This, despite an inevitable destruction of our standard of living, our high wage scales, and our most favorable working conditions, in all of which is inextricably involved the American way of life… The danger at Geneva is a reckless disregard of America’s welfare . . . a determination to substitute international control for domestic control.”
The smart set dismissed Gearhart and his colleagues as kooks, or worse, as nativists and racists.
Coronavirus Is the Battering Ram
But even as elite opinion-mongers told the public dismantling national sovereignty was a fever dream of right-wing lunatics, amongst themselves they discussed how to do it. The Outer Party preached patriotism while the Inner Party practiced globalism.
Strobe Talbott served in Bill Clinton’s State Department when the World Trade Organization was founded. He now heads the Brooking Institution or the “we must cooperate with China” think-tank.
Talbott in 1992 described “The Birth of the Global Nation” in Time magazine: “Countries are . . . artificial and temporary. . . .Within the next hundred years . . . nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. A phrase briefly fashionable in the mid-20th century—“citizen of the world”—will have assumed real meaning by the end of the 21st.”
Richard Gardner, a respected diplomat and Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Spain, explained: “The ‘house of world order’ will have to be built from the bottom up. . . . An end-run about national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than a frontal assault.”
Now, after decades of erosion, the Resetters are ready to storm the ramparts.
Coronavirus has replaced climate change as the preferred battering ram.
“There are many reasons to pursue a Great Reset, but the most urgent is COVID-19,” Davos Man tells us. “There is an urgent need for global stakeholders to cooperate in simultaneously managing the direct consequences of the COVID-19 crisis.”
The pandemic has an immediacy whereas climate change lies in the future. But whatever the problem, the solution remains the same: greater global coordination and cooperation.
Or as the Resetters tell us, “stronger and more effective governments“ along with “private-sector engagement every step of the way.” Strong government working hand-in-glove with private capital? I seem to recall there’s a name for that setup.
Beijing Looms Large
And with whom is all this cooperation supposed to happen? The parties responsible for creating the problem in the first place? Well, naturally, it is the Chinese Communist Party and its enablers, the multinational corporations and banks.
At the same time, we are told we should coordinate with the World Health Organization and collaborate with Beijing to create a vaccine against the China virus. Never mind, as the New York Times tells us, the Chinese have been rummaging through the files of the WHO to steal any information they can find to gain a national advantage in the vaccine race.
As the global neoliberal corporatists openly tell us what they are up to, there are a few inconvenient truths we cannot ignore.
The CCP is using the structures and institutions of the post-war international rules-based order as a Trojan horse to advance its goal of subjugating the industrial democracies of the West, foremost among them the United States.
Too many of the cheerleaders of that international order are blind to that fact, whether wittingly or unwittingly. While they have been dragged kicking and screaming into acknowledging the need to reform the WTO, for example, or to address the CCP’s multitudinous abuses, they remain unable to explain just how they would do it. “Dialogue” and “working with allies” are platitudes, not strategies.
The fact remains many of those internationalist cheerleaders are hopelessly compromised when it comes to China—financially, philosophically, or both.
The architects of the China engagement policy have yet to admit their error and issue full-throated apologies. We have heard no such mea culpas from Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, or the cadre of foreign policy “experts” likely to staff a Biden Administration.
Such apologies will not come easy. Their China policies were not one-offs, after all. They are cut from the same cloth as their grand design, which is the integration of sovereign nations into a seamless global economic order, its rules set by a central executive authority. Pull the China thread and the whole fabric unravels.
The undeniable fact is this: The apparatchiks of a Biden Administration would be down with the Great Reset; it’s what they were taught to believe and what they have worked to build for decades.
Conveniently, the new administration wouldn’t have to wait long to salute the new order. The Great Reset will be the theme of a summit in January 2021, convened by the World Economic Forum.
The Trump presidency is bigger than the Nobel Peace Prize
President Trump Nominated For Nobel Peace Prize For Work on Israel-UAE Deal
♦President Trump’s foreign policy approach brought North and South Korea together away from the table of conflict. ♦President Trump’s foreign policy approach brought Serbia and Kosovo together away from the table of conflict. ♦President Trump’s foreign policy rallied the Gulf Cooperation Council to stop Qatar’s support for Islamic extremists via the Muslim Brotherhood. ♦President Trump’s foreign policy brought Turkey and the Kurdish forces together away from war and conflict. ♦President Trump’s foreign policy created a ceasefire to stop the bloodshed in Syria. ♦President Trump mediated a cessation of hostilities between India & Pakistan in the Kashmir region. ♦President Trump’s foreign policy brought Israel and the UAE together…
These are just a few examples of Trump’s effective doctrine; previously Moon Jae-in said President Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize; and yet leftist jaws are agape as he is nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2021.(Jerusalem Post) US President Donald Trump was nominated for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in reaching the agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Fox News reported on Wednesday morning.Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a member of the Norwegian parliament and head of the Norwegian delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, submitted the nomination.
Tybring-Gjedde had previously submitted a nomination for Trump to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 for his Singapore summit, which hosted Kim Jong Un.“For his merit, I think he has done more trying to create peace between nations than most other Peace Prize nominees,” Tybring-Gjedde told Fox News.“It is for his contribution for peace between Israel and the UAE,” Tybring-Gjedde, a member of parliament for the right-wing Progress Party, told Reuters. “It is a unique deal.”In addition to the Israel-UAE deal, the nomination letter to the Nobel Committee cited Trump’s “key role in facilitating contact between conflicting parties… such as the Kashmir border dispute between India and Pakistan, and the conflict between North and South Korea.” (read more)
2. President Trump's foreign policy approach brought North and South Korea together away from the table of conflict. 
3. President Trump's foreign policy approach brought Serbia and Kosovo together away from the table of conflict. 
4. President Trump's foreign policy rallied the Gulf Cooperation Council to stop Qatar's support for Islamic extremists via the Muslim Brotherhood 
5. President Trump's foreign policy brought Turkey and the Kurdish forces together away from war and conflict in Northern Syria.
publicpool.kinja.com/subject-remark…
publicpool.kinja.com/subject-remark…
6. President Trump mediated a cessation of hostilities between India & Pakistan in the Kashmir region. 
7. President Trump's foreign policy brought Israel and the UAE together.. 
8. Two years ago South Korea's Moon Jae-in said President Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize.
reuters.com/article/us-nor…
reuters.com/article/us-nor…
9. Yet leftist media jaws are agape as President Trump is nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize again in 2021.
jpost.com/breaking-news/…
jpost.com/breaking-news/…
10. /END 