Article by Jeffrey Folks in The American Thinker

 

The Left's Idea of a Happy Future

Liberals are fond of predicting the future, and their predictions, which are always dire, then become the pretext for more government.  Otherwise, they say, we'll all starve, a class war will break out, or the Earth will come to an end.

Liberals are wrong about the future because their theories are based on ideology, not on the facts.  Unlike conservatives, whose ideas are grounded on prudence and a clear view of human nature, liberals really have no conception of what drives human beings: their thinking is built on a handful of fixed ideas that can be traced to a number of shallow-minded philosophers including Rousseau, Malthus, Marx, Dewey, and Gore.  What all of these thinkers have in common is the misconception that a centralized, planned economy can transform society into a utopia.

In every case, they've been wrong.  The Earth's population did not starve (Malthus); capitalism was not replaced with a socialist utopia (Marx); the earth has not been consumed by storm, drought, and rising seas (Gore).

Collectivist ideology has produced poverty, starvation, enslavement, and mass murder.  The Soviet Union sent at least 18 million to the gulags, and few returned from the worst of these camps.  Stalin practiced a crude form of authoritarian rule based on Marxist ideology.  He believed that, given supreme power, the State (in the person of Stalin himself) could transform a backward and inefficient economy into a world leader.  The key to this process was a ruthless and inhuman exercise of power.

As Richard Pipes and others have stressed, Stalin was not a highly intelligent or subtle human being, but he did have one quality that distinguished him from others: the willingness to employ unlimited cruelty in the service of an idea.  There are others today, including Chairman Xi in China, who appear willing to employ violence and coercion in support of the utopian goal. 

Like Stalin, Biden has sat patiently in the background, awaiting his chance to rule, and now that he has power, he and those around him are determined to "transform" America to correspond with their idea of the future.  Biden is not Stalin, and there are not yet gulags in America's far north (though perhaps some along our southern border), but he shares Stalin's devotion to liberal ideology.  And like Stalin, Biden believes he has been called to transform society.

Like all liberal utopias, Biden's vision is that of a perfect society created by the planning and control of an authoritarian state.  And like all liberal thought, Biden's thinking is based on an ideology that promises a totally ordered and efficient future with the State regulating and directing the means of production and controlling the private lives of its population.

While we have no gulag or death camps as yet, we do have a dangerous new instrument of state control — a national system of censorship and virtual "re-education" in support of the progressive state.  This system appears to control the traditional media of television and print journalism and the newer forms of social media.  Like Stalinist censorship of books and newspapers, its purpose is to ensure permanent power for the progressive regime.

A good example is last week's 60 Minutes hit job on Ron DeSantis.  This is nothing new for 60 Minutes (recall their use of unsubstantiated documents in Dan Rather's 2004 "reporting" on George W. Bush's National Guard service, just ahead of the 2004 election), but what is new is the breadth of today's censorship.  Everything from daily newspapers to evening news, internet news, search results, Twitter, Facebook, and thousands of other venues is working to advance a collectivist, authoritarian idea of the future.

It would be interesting to know why this progressive ideology is so widely shared by those in the media.  Is it the appeal of a bright, new future that relieves the tedium of our daily lives?  Or is it the allure of a society of perfect order, with billions of human beings laboring like robots and passively accepting what they are told?  Is it the superior status that those in the media expect to acquire in a society ruled by censorship and force?  Or is it simply a matter of pride — the smug assurance that they, the self-appointed clerisy of the secular state, are smarter and more "woke" than any one of their readers or listeners?

Whatever the motive, the liberal media are leading us toward enslavement and destruction.  It is terrifying to think that America may become the ally of Russia and Communist China in the service of global tyranny — and that a majority of Americans may have voted in favor of their own enslavement.

That is the future toward which we are headed.  In doing so, we are losing contact with the fundamental truths of human nature: the fact that human beings seek security, freedom, improvement in living standards, and meaning in their lives.  Those who still cherish these fundamental truths are the enemies of the totalitarian state and of the media that support it.  Like Ayn Rand's John Galt, they know that the promise of collectivist utopia is a lie set forth to enslave us, and they know they must preserve their own integrity and the knowledge of human nature upon which it rests.

We are now seeing the worst assault on liberty in our nation's history — broader, more ruthless, and more determined than anything we have seen in the past.  Sleepy Joe Biden plays the fool, but he is a ruthless practitioner of progressivism.  The happy future that he promises is an illusion; the reality is regimentation and control.  That future will steer the country toward global alliances with collectivist states that oppress their people as ruthlessly as Stalin did in the 20th century.  Xi Jinping has reportedly detained 1.5 million people in "re-education" camps.  How long will it be until America's progressive state detains white Christians for re-education?  Compulsory workplace sensitivity training is only just the beginning.

This is not the America I grew up in or that I believe in, and the censorship, the voter fraud, the fake news, the corruption of public education, the assault on life and on the Second Amendment now taking place seem irreversible.  We may awaken in some dark future with Big Brother monitoring our every thought and with only a dim memory of the land of liberty and opportunity that we once knew.  We may already have awakened there.

Perhaps, by some miracle, our children and grandchildren will regain the truth that man has always sought liberty, opportunity, and security, and that a God exists to redeem us and instill meaning.  The truth that life requires courage, and that individuals in a free society have the obligation to contribute to the good of all.

We have arrived at that crucial point where we must choose between democratic capitalism — a system based on the human desire for freedom and opportunity — and the false promise of a communist utopia based on state control.  Biden seeks to expand the size of government beyond anything we have known in the past, and with it the power that government has over our lives.  That sort of control does not suggest a happy future.  The left is determined to enslave us.  Peacefully but resolute, we must resist.

 https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/04/the_lefts_idea_of_a_happy_future.html

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Trump's back on the campaign trail! Former President holds Mar-a-Lago event to endorse Sarah Huckabee Sanders in her bid to become the next governor of Arkansas

 

• Trump held an event for Sanders at his Florida country club on Friday afternoon
• She is running for governor in Arkansas; he threw his weight behind her earlier this week in an emailed statement
• Trump has rarely been seen or heard from since he left office in January 
• He is banned from Twitter and videos of him speaking have been scrubbed from Facebook 
• On Friday, he greeted fans and said Sanders was the 'easiest endorsement he has made'
•  
•  
  

  President Donald Trump held a campaign event for his old press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders at Mar-a-Lago on Friday to endorse her gubernatorial run in Arkansas.

  The former president, who has been seldom seen since leaving office and being banned from social media, appeared before a cheering crowd to endorse Sanders. 

  He praised her and boasted about how he won Arkansas 'by so much' in 2016 and 2020
• A special woman, this was so easy for me. This has to be the easiest endorsement that I made,' he said.

 

'You're going to be a great governor. The governor got involved the other night in something that was quite controversial for him to handle.

'That was not situation but he is not a good friend of the people in my opinion. I don't think he was a good friend ever.

'But you are going to be the greatest governor of that incredible state. I tell you, I won it by so much.

'Sarah said, "the people love you." 

After the event, she thanked him for hosting it on social media. 'Thank you President Trump for hosting an amazing event for my campaign last night!' she said.

 

 

 

Earlier this week, Trump sent out an email throwing his weight behind Sanders. Trump has rarely been seen or heard from since he left office in January. 

He is banned from Twitter and videos of him speaking have been scrubbed from Facebook. 

Sanders launched her campaign in January. She served with Trump from 2017 until 2019, replacing Sean Spicer as Trump's press secretary before becoming an adviser. 

On Thursday, Trump emailed a statement to subscribers to endorse Sanders and trash the current governor of Arkansas. 

He said Gov. Asa Hutchinson 'supported the chemical castration of children' because he vetoed a bill banning hormone treatment for transgender children.  

'Asa Hutchinson, the lightweight RINO Governor of Arkansas, just vetoed a Bill that banned the CHEMICAL CASTRATION OF CHILDREN. 

'Fortunately for the Great State of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders will do a fantastic job as your next governor.   

'Bye-bye Asa,' that's the end of him!' he added.

 

 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9456907/Trump-holds-Mar-Lag-event-endorse-Sarah-Huckabee-Sanders.html?ito=social-twitter_dailymailus 

 

 

 

Fire-ravaged Bonhomme Richard will be decommissioned, then towed away for scrapping

 

The amphibious assault ship was declared a total loss after an inferno raged on board in July while the ship was in port in San Diego

SAN DIEGO — 

After extensive cleanup and reclamation in the wake of a July inferno, the amphibious assault ship Bonhomme Richard will be decommissioned in San Diego next week before being towed elsewhere to be scrapped, the Navy said in a statement.

Navy officials said in November that while Bonhomme Richard was salvageable, the time and price of repair — five to seven years at an estimated $2.5 billion to $3.2 billion — were too steep to warrant saving the 22-year-old ship.

The Navy plans to hold a small decommissioning ceremony Wednesday with limited attendance. Then the ship will be towed to a scrapyard, said Cmdr. Nicole Schwegman, a Naval Surface Force Pacific spokeswoman.

Schwegman said the ship could be bound for Galveston, Texas, but the Navy has not finalized its decision. “A contract award is imminent,” Schwegman said Friday.

Schwegman said most of the roughly 1,000 sailors assigned to Bonhomme Richard have either been reassigned or are in the process of transferring.

 

 

 Fire broke out on the vessel around 8:30 a.m. on Sunday, July 12. Noxious black smoke darkened otherwise clear San Diego skies as the fire raged out of control. Temperatures on board topped 1,200 degrees F at times, making it all but impossible for firefighting crews to access burning spaces to extinguish the fire.

 

 

More than 400 sailors from 16 San Diego-based ships joined federal firefighters to battle the blaze day and night. Helicopters from Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron 3 dumped more than 1,500 buckets of water onto the ship in nearly round-the-clock operations.

The fire burned for four days before the Navy officially declared it extinguished.

Navy officials said at the time they believed the fire began in the 844-foot ship’s lower vehicle-storage area, a part of the ship with an ample supply of fuel and oxygen for a fire.

According to an ABC 10News report, Navy Criminal Investigative Service agents searched the home of a Bonhomme Richard sailor in August. No charges have been filed in the case. Cmdr. Myers Vasquez, a U.S. Pacific Fleet spokesman, said the Navy’s investigation into the cause of the blaze is ongoing and he declined to say when it might be completed.

Amphibious assault ships are the largest amphibious ships in the Navy and are used to deploy Marines and their equipment during amphibious landings. Their flight decks are capable of handling operations with helicopters and the F-35B Lightning fighter jet.

At the time of the fire, Bonhomme Richard was nearing the end of a two-year, $250 million upgrade to accommodate F-35B operations. It is the largest U.S. naval warship lost since World War II.

 

 

 

Updates

1:03 PM, Apr. 09, 2021: An earlier version of this story said the ship will be towed to Galveston, Texas to be scrapped. A Navy spokeswoman clarified that the Navy has not yet decided where to send the ship after it is decommissioned but that a decision is imminent.

 

 https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/military/story/2021-04-09/decommission-bonhomme-richard?_amp=true&__twitter_impression=true   

The Wall Between Civilization And Our Innate Savagery Is Weakening

Despite being surrounded by 

material abundance and wondrous gadgetry, 

human depravity still finds a way.

by Nathanael Blake writing at The Federalist

Civilization is difficult.

Civilization is especially difficult if it means not just political stability and material advancement, but also a decent moral order. We’re all born into this world as tiny barbarians. Without care, we will grow to be larger, more dangerous barbarians. 

The murder of Mohammad Anwar, an immigrant working as an UberEats driver, allegedly by two teenage girls attempting to carjack him, is a case in point. Following the fatal accident, video footage shows one of the accused girls complaining that her phone was still in the wrecked car. A man was dead or dying next to her, apparently by her hand, and she was focused on retrieving her technological bauble.

Unfortunately, this horrible event is already receding from our consciousness, slipping out of the headlines and away from our attention. Still, it’s worth more reflection before it fades away, as it shows the frailty of our modern hopes of taming the savagery that lies within us, and the need to remember where our real hope lies.

To begin with, the event illustrates that science cannot save us. Surrounded by material abundance and wondrous gadgetry, human depravity still finds a way. Having enough is not sufficient to make us good. Indeed, humans will often commit evil acts simply out of boredom. Ironically, contained within innumerable texts, podcasts, and videos, the phone the accused was so concerned about retrieving provided free access to the moral wisdom of the ages. Yet, the availability of moral teaching is insufficient to inculcate virtue — indeed, without guidance, we lack even the rudimentary virtue needed to know that we are morally deficient and have much to learn and practice.

Children need personal instruction and examples to develop into good men and women, but our culture no longer shares the same moral vision. Morality is, of course, always contested to some degree, but ours is particularly an age of fractured moral consensus and seemingly intractable moral disagreements. Those who mourn what they see as moral decline must recognize that many symbols and rituals of the older consensus were losing power even before they were discarded, and they will not be efficacious if restored. Official but superficial school prayers, observing the national anthem before games, and other civic or religious ceremonies are no longer representative of a united moral and social order. 

The modern illusion that we can leave people to develop their own moral codes is fading, and the need for a shared understanding is becoming clear. Thus, a new moral order is attempting to assert itself — the still-cooking stew of wokeness, intersectional ideology, critical theory, and left-wing social justice claims. Though it lacks a settled name, it makes bold claims about being able to identify and address the evils the plague us.

Unfortunately, while this ideology is a poisonous substitute that erodes society, it has, nonetheless, captured much of our leading institutions as well as America’s upper class. In particular, it is in control of the education system. What we teach children is largely a function of who is doing the teaching, and teachers are increasingly the acolytes of the new moral order. They may not be a majority, but few are willing to resist their programs and priorities.

Among their priorities is bringing demon worship into public schools. When we see, California’s new mandatory ethnic studies program includes prayers to Aztec gods — or, to be more accurate, to Aztec demons — who were worshipped by human sacrifice, including torturing children to death, we’re reminded civilization is no guarantee of good.

While human sacrifice is not (yet) part of the curriculum, its designers are open about wanting to reverse the replacement of native gods by Christianity. Whatever we call this ideology, it is leading to depravity, not virtue. This embrace of evil is, as Cameron Hilditch notes, an attempt to out-Christian Christianity itself, taking Christian concern for the downtrodden to the point of sympathy for the devil. 

This ideology is not particularly coherent. The Aztecs, after all, were imperialists who enslaved and murdered the peoples around them, which made it easy for the Spanish conquistadors to recruit indigenous allies. To mourn the demise of the Aztecs’s bloodthirsty gods is to take sides against the indigenous people sacrificed to those gods.

This curriculum also reveals a complacency about civilization; it forgets the demons that haunted humanity for so much of our history. The world is still sinful, but it is better with the demonic gods of the Aztecs on the ash heap of history. This bitter, incoherent ideology that seeks a renewal of the Aztec gods will not form children into moral men and women. Rather, it resummons, in name, if not yet, in fact, the demons that have haunted humanity.

Against this, we must remember that the demons have been defeated. Around two thousand years ago, another empire, powerful, magnificent, and sometimes cruel, casually crucified a man. He was one of many it condemned, and with little thought. He had taught remarkably and even performed miracles, but He still died an agonizing, ignominious death.

And then something happened. He rose from the dead. Not as a ghost, not as a spirit, but bodily, with a heart pumping blood and lungs breathing oxygen. And the demons retreated as word of the resurrection spread, for He had conquered sin and death, by which man had been bound to the demons. Unlike the demons, He did not demand human sacrifice to earn favor, for He had become human to be sacrificed on our behalf. 

This is a revelation that goes beyond making us moral, for it transforms our being. Before the perfection of the Divine Victim, moral remonstrances are both affirmed and humbled. We are, at best, like the blessed criminal crucified with Christ, acknowledging his own guilt and need for mercy even while rebuking his companion for reviling Christ.

Like that man, for whom civilization could no longer give anything but death, we may look to Christ’s promise of something better than civilization — the kingdom of heaven.

Nation Braces For Most Peaceful Protests Yet

Babylon Bee🐝

MINNEAPOLIS, MN—As the Derek Chauvin trial continued this week, the nation began bracing for the most peaceful protests so far. 

"We're getting ready for some really peaceful protests," said one business owner as he boarded up his storefront. "We ain't seen nothin' yet when it comes to just how peaceful Black Lives Matter can be."

While last summer, BLM unleashed their mostly peaceful brand of protests, they said at the end of this trial, they will be unleashing their most powerful weapon: entirely peaceful protests, involving even more peaceful bricks, Molotovs, and more peaceful deaths.

Black Lives Matter representatives announced that that they will definitely be rioting if Derek Chauvin is acquitted. They also said they would riot if he is convicted. Additionally, they said they would just be rioting no matter what so everyone should get ready.

"We will riot if Chauvin is acquitted," said one spokesperson for the movement gathered outside the courthouse in Minneapolis. "And also, you know, if he's convicted. Yep, we'll still be rioting then. In fact, we'll be rioting no matter what happens, so buckle up, America. You thought last summer was bad? Get ready for peace."

Why The Iconoclastic Left Are On The Wrong Side Of History

 

 

Article by Steven Watts in The Federalist

 

Why The Iconoclastic Left Are On The Wrong Side Of History

Approaching history with condescending arrogance, as the woke movement does, merely highlights the smallness of the examiners.

 

 

“In times of change and danger,” wrote the novelist John Dos Passos, “a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present.” For the battalions of social justice warriors battling for racial and gender politics, nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, it demonizes the American past as a story of unrelenting injustice and recently has launched a series of campaigns against it.

The California Board of Education just nixed its history curriculum due to a purported stain of white supremacy, replacing it with an ethnic studies model rooted in critical race theory. In early 2021, the San Francisco Board of Education voted to rename 44 district schools, removing historical figures such as George Washington, Paul Revere, James Monroe, James Russell Lowell, Theodore Roosevelt, and Herbert Hoover because of their supposed ties to slavery, the oppression of women, and genocide.

Last fall, a Washington D.C. city committee recommended renaming a host of public monuments and government buildings, replacing Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Francis Scott Key with “more women, people of color, and LBGTQ Washingtonians.”

In the summer of 2020, protests after the death of George Floyd triggered a nationwide assault on historical monuments and statues. The year before, the 1619 Project established the template with its dubious insistence that racial oppression, not freedom or democracy or opportunity, defined the American experience from the earliest colonial days.

Many jaws dropped over a recurring aspect of this campaign — the leftist blackballing of Abraham Lincoln. Indeed, the Great Emancipator, who led the Union war effort that crushed the Confederate slave-owning class in the Civil War and then pushed through Congress the Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery, failed their political purity test.

Rampaging Portland, Oregon protesters pulled down a Lincoln statue. In Chicago, a city commission, under pressure from leftist activists, is considering the removal of five Lincoln statues in order to “address the hard truths of Chicago’s racial history.”

San Francisco renamed Abraham Lincoln High School because, as a city apparatchik explained, of Lincoln’s insensitivity to Native Americans and his failure to demonstrate that “black lives ever mattered.” The Board of Education chairperson eloquently intoned:

I think Lincoln gets more praise than the . . . how can I say this? Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t think that . . . Lincoln is not someone that I typically tend to admire or see as a hero, because of these specific instances where he has contributed to the pain of the decimation of people.

Clearly, the political left has a significant problem with our national story. They don’t understand history, either the actual developments that made the United States or the field of study that seeks to make sense of that process.

Historians try to understand how and why human beings acted the way they did in the context of their circumstances and possibilities. But social justice warriors know better. For them, the past is a convenient arena in which to practice the latest exercise in cancel culture.

Abolishing History

The shocking ignorance of the past many social justice warriors display is all too evident. The 1619 Project overflows with untruthful assertions and gross distortions, beginning with its ludicrous claim that the American Revolution was launched to protect slavery. A clueless woke mob in Madison, Wisconsin dismembered a statue of an outspoken abolitionist and pulled down another symbolizing the advance of women’s rights.

One of the most egregious errors committed in San Francisco concerned poor Paul Revere, who was unhorsed from his midnight ride because he participated in the Penobscot Expedition of 1779. The school board decried this as a campaign to capture American Indian land when, in fact, it was a failed assault on a British fort during the American Revolution.

While this disdain for historical facts is distressing, even more troubling, however is the woke movement’s profoundly wrongheaded approach to history itself. Sometimes, they simply seek to abolish it.

Leftist disciples shrewdly sense (and fear) that history tends to create a sense of attachment and perspective, qualities that blunt efforts to remake the world anew. Revolutionary zealots have always targeted historical symbols as a key enemy in their crusades for purification. In the French Revolution, Jacobins sought to erase the centuries-old influence of Christianity by installing the Cult of the Supreme Being to harness religious feeling without the danger of religious content.

The Cultural Revolution in Mao’s China targeted the “Four Olds” of the pre-Communist era — old ideas, old culture, old habits, old customs — as the Red Guard ransacked the country forcibly renaming streets, shops, and monuments, destroying classical Chinese architecture and paintings, desecrating Confucian temples, and exhuming, convicting, and burning the bodies of Ming Dynasty emperors.

In the Middle East, Islamist militants wielding everything from pickaxes to dynamite have attacked numerous historical sites, including the tomb of Queen Hatshepsut in Egypt, the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria, and the Mosul Museum in Iraq. Revolutionaries instinctively sense that memory, which is sentimental and prudential, summons experience and perspicacity rather than cultivating virtue. So it has to go.

The Pitfalls of ‘Presentism’

When not destroying history, awakened zealots try to manipulate it to ratify what they already believe. Thus they embrace several misguided principles.

The awakened believe that the past is just like the present and its inhabitants should be judged by contemporary standards. This is mistaken. Early on, the student of history learns to beware of “presentism,” or judging the past by the standards of the present. If not, you end up condemning Charlemagne for not endorsing women’s rights or Susan B. Anthony for insensitivity to transgenderism. The awakened believe that the past is a pantheon of heroes and villains to be lionized or condemned.

Although a few angels and devils flitted through its corridors, the past was inhabited largely by human beings just like us, complex creatures filled with virtues and flaws, insights, and blind spots. For example, civil rights hero Martin Luther King, Jr., relentlessly womanized with dozens of female “parishioners,” and Margaret Sanger, the iconic advocate of access to birth control, promoted eugenics and cultivation of the “new race.”

The awakened believe that the past unfolds according to conscious decisions and intent, and historical actors must be held to account. Yet, even the novice student of history quickly sees that historical evolution often produced unintended consequences. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, for example, launched well-meaning welfare initiatives to stem the tide of single-parent families in the 1960s. Yet instead, those programs economically incentivized single mothers to remain unmarried and promoted a steady rise of illegitimate children and fatherlessness.

The awakened believe that the past is a morality tale to be ransacked for lessons illustrating good and evil. Yet even a cursory look at past events discloses a whirl of motivations, often conflicting or ambiguous, at work in shaping outcomes. Henry Ford’s adoption of the assembly line in 1911, for instance, a move that reshaped the modern world, combined idealism (lowering costs to make the automobile available to average people), interest (boosting profits from an increased volume of sales), and unforeseen developments (such as overly repetitious labor workers often resented or rejected).

The awakened, however, believe that an overarching theory — class conflict or modernization not long ago; whiteness, the patriarchy, heteronormativity, intersectionality currently — offers a tidy explanation for everything. This is mistaken. The incredible complexity of human history demands multicausal explanations and vigorous debate among competing interpretations, not a conga line of liberationist theorists sent snaking through the past shimmying and shaking to the rhythm of revolution.

‘Interrogate the Past, But Don’t Bully It’

Judicious students of the American experience steer clear of these mistakes and approach it cautiously, seeking wisdom, not weaponization. They understand that history does not repeat, but instead unfolds as a process that produces the present. They understand that historical facts matter to provide credible evidence in support of reasonable judgments along with all the facts, not just those cherry-picked for ideological reasons.

Careful and thoughtful students of the past understand history is constantly rewritten to meet the needs of the present, but reject the wholesale extrapolation of present circumstances into archaic contexts. They understand that historical evolution does not always mean progress; change can bring loss as well as benefit. They understand that while objectivity is probably impossible in examining the past, fairness in judging historical actors is not. Interrogate the past, but don’t bully it.

So as Americans search our national heritage for help in solving modern problems, we should embrace humility, not hubris. Being on “the right side of history,” as the awakened often say, does not mean being on the left side of history. It means realizing that our past, like our present, is imperfect. Approaching it with condescending arrogance, as the woke movement does, merely highlights the smallness of the examiners.

Edmund Burke observed that human society is a contract between “those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born,” and urged citizens to beware those who “should act as if they were the entire master.” In that spirit we should ponder American history as a pursuit of political participation, individual equality, constitutional order, social opportunity, and economic freedom, however imperfectly realized and full of ambiguities it has been.

We should celebrate what is worthy in our past and chastise what is reprehensible. We should submit our history to rigorous, fair-minded analysis and see what it can tell us about the human condition and how we got where we are.

This important task demands thoughtful examination and nuanced judgments, not a frenzied kangaroo court convened by wokesters jacked up on ideological amphetamines and spouting slogans. Confronting the imperfections of the past — as well as the human beings who inhabited it — should heighten an awareness not of our superiority but our shortcomings. In the end, such a careful investigation of history can provide the key inspiration for us to overcome them.

Steven Watts is a Professor of History at the University of Missouri

 

https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/08/why-the-iconoclastic-left-are-on-the-wrong-side-of-history/ 

 

 

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Biden’s ATF Pick Mocked Americans As Zombie Preppers For Buying Guns During Government Lockdowns

Tristan Justice reporting for The Federalist

President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) made fun of first-time gun owners who bought up weapons during mass government lockdowns as cartoon doomsday preppers.

During an interview with Cheddar in April last year, gun control activist David Chipman, who was nominated Thursday to the executive post at ATF, said those purchasing firearms put “themselves and their families and danger.” Chipman also compared them to Joe Exotic, the Oklahoma zookeeper profiled on Netflix’s “Tiger King.” 

“Most of the new buyers who went out to the gun store and bought a gun have no training whatsoever,” Chipman said. “In their mind they might be competent, they might think they’re die-hard and ready to go, but unfortunately they’re more like Tiger King.”

Chipman’s recommendation as a longtime government bureaucrat who served 25 years at ATF was for new gun owners to “secure that gun locked and unloaded and hide it behind the cans of tuna and beef jerky that you’ve stored in the cabinet, and only bring that out if the zombies start to appear.”

The administration’s latest nominee to the bureau tasked with enforcing the nation’s gun laws comes with a long resume of aggressive activism for stricter restrictions on Americans’ Second Amendment rights. After two and a half decades in the ATF, Chipman worked as an adviser to the anti-gun group launched by former Arizona Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords after she was shot in a 2011 Tucson shooting.

After the news broke of Chipman’s impending nomination on Wednesday, Chipman took cues from past nominees in the Biden administration and locked his Twitter account to prevent anyone from searching his prior posts.

Biden made the nomination in a Thursday press conference in which the Democrat launched a new effort to implement stricter gun control in the aftermath of deadly shootings in Georgia and Colorado last month. Biden called gun violence in America an “epidemic” and an “international embarrassment” at the White House.

At the afternoon event, Biden employed doomsday language to raise hysteria around firearms with terms such as “ghost guns” to warn Americans of rampant gun violence, which, in Biden’s eyes, can only be deterred through government restrictions on the firearms — as if criminals followed the law.

 

Article by Patricia McCarthy in The American Thinker

 

Biden is the Most anti-American President in US History

Barack Obama made it abundantly clear that he not only loathed these United States, but he was also embarrassed by his own nation and its citizens.  He did tremendous damage over his eight years in office.  He treated our enemies like allies and our allies like enemies.  He set race relations back at least fifty years having been indoctrinated in the odious Jeremiah Wright brand of anti-Americanism.  

But who among us could have predicted how much damage a Biden administration could and would do in just a few months?  All of us who revered President Trump and the tremendous strides he made on the economy, unemployment, Middle East peace, border security, and trade issues with China are gobsmacked by the destructive record of the Biden administration in just over two months.  Trump was pro-American, an America-first modern day Founding Father.  Trump loves this nation like the Founders did; they hoped their Constitution would prevail.  Donald Trump was and is determined that it will remain the reigning document, the prescription for a free nation’s survival even when under attack by the totalitarian left that means to remake it into something resembling China.  

The ruling left of today is actively undermining every aspect of our founding. We no longer enjoy free speech.  We no longer are allowed the freedom of assembly or religion.  The conservative embrace of Judeo-Christina values enrages the Democrats.  From the Frankfurt School to Black Lives Matter, Western values are anathema to the left.  

It did not use to be this way.  There was a time when the Democrat party was pro-America.  JFK loved his country.  LBJ was as corrupt as Joe Biden but Jimmy Carter loved America.  Even the careless and womanizing Bill Clinton did not set out to destroy the country.  

But Obama set the left on a new and insidious course, the Cloward-Piven, Alinskyite path to totalitarianism.  The Democrat party of today is overtly anti-American and having captured our educational system decades ago, has indoctrinated several generations who now believe that hating their own country is synonymous with virtue, with being sufficiently woke. 

The left in America today opposes every single Judeo-Christian value this civilized nation was built upon, including the nuclear family.  They eschew MLK’s wise and common sensical prescription that we be judged by the content of our character, not the color of our skin.  The left today is consumed with identity politics, the notion that skin color and sexual orientation are primary and that any minority, racial or sexual, is superior, deserving of elevation in society.  

This is why they encouraged and defended the riots of BLM and Antifa throughout the summer but pretended that the demonstration of January 6th was an “insurrection.”  It was nothing of the kind. It was an obvious set-up. They, Pelosi and her power-mad colleagues, are only disappointed that the Antifa/BLM recruits who infiltrated the pro-Trump people that day did not do more damage that could be blamed on all those peaceful Trump fans. 

Biden has grossly abused his ability to govern and is doing it by decree.  He issues Executive Orders like the church of old issued indulgences.  Biden is doing this to reward his radical left supporters and/or payback to donors.   Now he has announced six  gun control “actions.”  He said these orders do not infringe on the Second Amendment!  Of course, they do.  He said “[N]o amendment is absolute,” more proof that the left of today has nothing but contempt for our Constitution.  

Cities run by Democrats have stopped confiscating guns from the criminals they’ve released onto their streets but want to deprive law-abiding citizens of their legally-purchased guns.  No wonder people want to escape from New York, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Baltimore and DC.  The left has determined that only the criminals should have guns.  Use a gun in the commission of a crime?  No cash bail.  And in each of those cities (and others), the police have been demonized, demoralized and defunded.  That is the left’s recipe for certain disaster.  Is it a surprise to anyone that crime has escalated drastically in all these cities?  

As for Covid, leftists are the shameless fearmongers.  Despite the fact that lockdowns and mask mandates can do little or nothing to stop the spread of the virus, they use their propaganda media outlets to frighten and coerce the public to blindly obey their nonsensical restrictions.  

The lockdowns have done far more damage than the virus, which has a nearly 98% recovery rate. Tens of thousands of small businesses have been shuttered while the big box stores and Amazon have become fabulously wealthier over the past year.  

And exactly what is behind the irresponsible push to vaccinate every American, young and old, with an emergency-authorized, experimental, never-before-used-on-humans vaccine?  Given the track record of those involved, Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci, the possibilities are many, none of them good.  Dr. Michael Yeardon, a former CEO at Pfizer,  is suspicious. 

The most serious damage Biden has done is to our border security.  He opened the southern border on his first day in office and a catastrophic humanitarian crisis is the ongoing result.  He was warned by the outgoing administration what would happen if he ceased the completion of the wall, but he ignored those warnings and began building new “shelters” on his third day in office.  His administration knew what would happen.  They planned on it.  They are doing business with the drug cartels who control the human trafficking, the sex trafficking of children and the flow of all drugs, especially fentanyl, into the US.  

Biden is purposefully doing terrible damage to this nation.  He is purposefully importing a new and submissive electorate to replace and/or overwhelm the eighty million voters who supported Trump.  He is flying and bussing these migrants into the interior of the country, particularly to red states.  These people have no skills, little or no education, they’ve not been tested for Covid, but they are given money to begin their lives here.  Thousands of others are being put up in hotels at taxpayer expense.  And yet the always snarky but befuddled Jen Psaki and Nancy Pelosi claim “there is no crisis at the border.”   

These people are so disconnected from reality it is truly frightening.  Either that or they continue to assume the American people are very, very stupid when it is becoming clearer and clearer that it is the radical leftists who fraudulently got Biden into office and depend on him to read whatever they put on the teleprompter.  They have set about destroying the once-greatest nation that ever existed on this planet.  Trump had righted the country, put it back on the right course.  Biden and his cohorts set out to undo all the good that Trump set in motion.  Biden may think he is developing a legacy, but he will surely forever be known as the worst US president in American history.  Let us hope that the country survives his sure-to-be brief tenancy at the White House, but he will surely be remembered as the most anti-American president ever to assume the office. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/04/biden_is_the_most_antiamerican_president_in_us_history.html

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For Hating Trump So Much, Biden Sure Is Cloning A Bunch Of His Successful Policies

Here are some of the ways the Biden administration is embracing Trump's policies despite their professed vehement opposition to the former administration.

by Jordan Davidson for The Federalist

President Joe Biden ran on a platform that condemned former President Donald Trump as unfit, embarrassing, and reckless, but while Biden might complain that Trump will “go down in history as being one of the most irresponsible presidents,” his administration appears to be using the Republican’s decisions, policies, and stances to inform their own.

 

Here are some of the ways the Biden administration is embracing Trump’s actions and policies despite their professed vehement opposition to the former administration.

COVID Vaccines

Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain was quick to claim the Democratic administration was “inheriting a huge mess” when it came to the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, but that didn’t stop the president from relying on the campaign created for him by Trump’s Operation Warp Speed to ensure he reached his goal of distributing 100 million doses in his first 100 days in office.

Trump had similar vaccination goals and implementation plans regarding states, but the Republican’s efforts to popularize and facilitate the vaccine rollout was booed and written off by the corporate media as “disastrous,” “a mess,” and a “dismal failure.” Biden’s efforts, however, were hailed as “ambitious” and a “big goal” even though the United States was well on its way to accomplishing millions of doses distributed before he was inaugurated. Shortly after Biden assumed office, the country was administering more than a million vaccine doses a day.

As of Thursday, 940,000 shots a day were administered on average over a seven-day period, according to data from the Bloomberg Vaccine Tracker. The most recent two days topped a million doses.

Border Wall 

Biden was quick to pull back some of Trump’s biggest immigration reforms including issuing an executive order on his first day in office that terminated funding for a border wall. Now that the border crisis created by Biden’s rhetoric and policies is growing at rapid, record-breaking rates, the president’s administration is reconsidering some of his predecessor’s approaches to curb illegal crossings, including finishing parts of the border wall.

Despite the White House’s promises to handle the “border challenge” differently than Trump, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas signaled that the Biden administration is considering resuming border wall construction to address “gaps,” “gates,” and even areas “where the wall has been completed but the technology has not been implemented.”

Building a border wall was a big part of Trump’s campaign platform and was quickly made a priority on his list of things to do while in office. Just five days after he arrived at White House in 2017, the Republican issued an executive order directing the construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

China and Foreign Policy

It was long after Biden assumed office that his Secretary of State Antony Blinken admitted to the Senate that Trump was right to crack down on China. While Blinken said he “disagreed” with how the Republican president handled some things, he also acknowledged that a “tougher approach to China” was the “right one” for American foreign policy. 

He also praised the president for orchestrating peace between Israel and other countries in the Middle East, despite his own office’s downplaying of it later.

“I think there are a number of things, from where I sat, that the Trump administration did beyond our borders that I would applaud,” Blinken said.

Tariffs

While some Democrats frowned on the Trump administration’s use of tariffs, especially those imposed on China, Biden’s Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo recently told reporters that some of Trump’s tariffs “have in fact helped save American jobs in steel and aluminum industries.”

“What do we do with tariffs? We have to level the playing field,” Raimondo said. “China’s actions are uncompetitive, coercive, underhanded — they’ve proven they’ll do whatever it takes.” 

The Biden administration also defended Trump’s tariffs in March after some corporations argued they “illegally increased the number of Chinese goods subject to duties under Section 301 of the U.S. Trade Act of 1974.”

“The Court should not interpose” on the issue, the Biden administration stated in a legal brief.