Article by Kurt Schlichter in Townhall

 

A Rigged System Can’t Last

You can’t win, but that’s all part of the plan.

Reason, rules, processes – these are the foundations of a free society, which is why the cultural left is so dead set against them. A citizen needs to be able to rely on clear rules and fixed processes to vindicate his rights in order to have any rights. But the rights of free citizens – your rights – are an obstacle to the Lil’ Stalins who yearn to rule over us. If the liberal establishment can create a society where you can’t appeal to facts, evidence, or law, then – until the peasants' revolt – its poobahs can wield undisputed, undiluted authority. That’s their dream, a country where you live in terror of them because you can never be sure that what you are doing or failing to do is suddenly going to be criminalized.

Take the whole imbroglio about Stabby Girl, the teen psycho in Ohio who decided to filet a girl in front of a cop. Not surprisingly, to people who aren’t idiots, the officer ventilated her, saving the life of the innocent victim. But then, of course, the establishment and the media – including America’s #1 Matlock superfan – weighed in on how stopping this future felon was racist racism of racismness. Normal people were baffled, but then, it’s only if you haven’t been paying attention that you might think that non-criminal black lives matter to Black Lives Matter.

Now, let me put on my lawyer hat – no, I’m not your lawyer and consult one in your jurisdiction before you do stuff. There’s this basic Anglo-American premise in law – I know we’re supposed to pretend that our political and legal culture didn’t come down to us the British Isles but it did – that you can use deadly force in the defense of yourself or another when some bad actor is trying to cause death or great bodily harm. This is not subject to rational or honest dispute. With some minor tweaks, this is generally the rule and has been for over a thousand years. So, leaving aside that this is not only morally proper but a moral imperative, we have a clear law saying you can shoot someone to stop him, her, or xir from killing someone else. 

Now, we take the facts (as revealed by the evidence) and apply them to the law. And here we have some pretty remarkable facts, all documented by unimpeachable evidence. Ma’Khia the Knife was caught on candid body camera in mid-slash when the officer, after calling out for her to stop, made his incredible four shots. So, there’s no meaningful dispute about how the evidence applies to the law. The facts and evidence disclose that he acted completely within well-established law. 

Now, you might think this would present a problem for the fascists, but if you do you need to get woke. There’s no law anymore. Reason is a bourgeois conceit. They have figured out that you can simply deny the existence of law, evidence, and facts. And they figured out that Democrats like Grandpa Badfinger and the slobbering media hacks who engage in a perpetual media tongue bath of their lefty overlords will back them up.

See the problem? If you can’t rely on the law or the evidence, then you are at the mercy of the whims of the liberal elite. Sure, the cop did the right thing, and the evidence is indisputable that he did the right thing, but it doesn’t matter at all. The cop is wrong and subject to all sorts of sanctions not because he violated any rule but purely because it is useful for him to be guilty of something.

The Rule of Law has become the Rule of Power, which the bad guys possess for the moment. And they are so arrogant about it that they do not even bother to make a straight-faced argument against cops saving black children’s lives. Hey, it’s just a routine kid knife fight – no biggie. We all remember back in the day, hacking up other suburban teens with machetes and scimitars, and how the cops never bothered us. Not allowing black teens to be gutted is worse than Jim Crow – it’s Jim Eagle. Heck, it’s Jim Rodan.

And we all know if that punk planted a shiv in the other girl’s gut on the bodycam tape, the cop would be lynched for not stopping her. You can’t win, which is the idea.

You can’t have a society where normal people can’t possibly prevail by obeying well-established rules. You’re not wrong because you did something wrong but because you're being wrong is handy for the people who hate you. 

Today, we normal people can no longer rely on the law or the facts to protect us. We’re seeing this again and again. Scumbag losers threaten a family in St. Louis, who arm up to defend themselves, and they get charged. Some guy just wants to go home, get blocked by scumbag losers, and get arrested. On the macro tip, people who never owned slaves now somehow owe a huge debt over slavery to people who were never slaves. Guilt is determined not by law and evidence but by its convenience to the would-be tyrants. There’s no justice, just arbitrary exercises of power designed to reinforce the liberal paradigm. No matter how you act, no matter what you do, you are wrong, and if that requires tossing out the rules or ignoring the evidence, fine. 

This is how our oppressors like it. But this is not how we like it. Normal people can only take getting bopped on the noggin by the southpaw monkey in the Nairobi Trio for so long before they hit back. You cannot have an enduring status quo where one side is firmly bound to rules and obligations while the other gets to make it up as they go along. Eventually, you will inevitably reach a breaking point. And that’s coming. Then the bad guys are going to miss the rules that they still expect to protect them.

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2021/04/26/a-rigged-system-cant-last-n2588500 

 

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The Deep State Targets Matt Gaetz

Americans should know how this story emerged, 

who is really behind it, and in whose interest it remains 

for America First firebrands like Gaetz to disappear. 

by Dave Reaboi for American Greatness

It’s now been over three weeks since a torrent of sensational headlines about U.S. Representative Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) blared from corporate media newsrooms. It sounded about as bad as it could get for the representative from Florida’s 1st Congressional District; breathless claims that he was “under investigation for underage sex trafficking” touched off a media frenzy.

No stranger to controversy, Gaetz’s initial instinct was to confront the allegations live on Fox News with Tucker Carlson. While many saw it as a bizarre interview, it may at least have been the right move in terms of staring down a bloodthirsty establishment. 

As several weeks have passed, though, the controversy seems to have generated more light than heat. Indeed, this might be the longest running “sex scandal” in the nation’s history without an accuser. 

But the media has been busy. Since the original story broke, there’s been a drip of follow-on stories at outlets like the Daily Beast, Politico, the Washington Post, and CNN—all using a shady collection of off-the-record and dubious government sources. 

Unsurprisingly, given that sourcing, none of the stories have contained anything close to serious detail or evidence. Reporters keep dropping tidbits of evidence likely to be emanating from within the Justice Department, yet none of which confirms any of the headline-grabbing allegations.

Few of these articles even attempt to deal with the wild allegations first made about the congressman. Writing in Politico on Tuesday, Betsy Woodruff Swan stated: “[Gaetz] has not been charged with a crime, and no women have publicly accused him of sexual misconduct in the three weeks since the New York Times first reported on the investigation. He has denied any wrongdoing.”

Note how—after making a sensational media splash for maximum public relations damage—the accusations against Gaetz have shifted, from shocking and unsupported claims of underage sex trafficking and pedophilia to the less scurrilous (and still unsupported) accusation that Gaetz had sex at parties. Crucially, there has not been any evidence of payments, prostitution, or underage girls.

Journalists Collude With the Government

As Scott Adams recently said, while some may first cringe at hearing too much about the sex life of a politician, deep down, they’re more likely to be indifferent. CNN even had to note in a recent report:

One of the women who spoke to CNN said she did so in part because the picture of Gaetz as potentially connected to sex trafficking that has emerged in recent days does not align with what she saw. Both women said that they never saw anyone at the parties who appeared to be underage.

It’s hard to believe that much of this reporting isn’t being weaponized against Gaetz—the hard-charging America First Member of Congress and top Donald Trump defender—for purely partisan reasons. This seemed to be the case as illustrated by Nate Nelson, a disabled veteran who worked in Gaetz’s congressional office. Early on in the saga, Nelson held a press conference outside his home in Florida. It didn’t get much media attention, probably because the subject of the presser was, in large part, the media. 

He detailed how he was visited by the FBI in the week before the first story appeared in the New York Times. “They told me that members of the media reached out to them, asserting that I had previous knowledge of Congressman Gaetz’s illegal activities,” Nelson said. 

What is the FBI doing running down a tip from a reporter? Our most competent domestic law enforcement agency is interviewing possible witnesses based on the hearsay of a reporter. 

“This baseless claim against me leaves me further convinced that the allegations against Congressman Gaetz are likewise fabricated,” Nelson concluded. “They’re merely an attempt to discredit a very vocal conservative.” This seems to fit with what CNN Technical Director Charlie Chester inadvertently told Project Veritas’ hidden camera: 

If the agenda, say, is to like get, like Matt Gaetz right now, he’s like this Republican. He’s a problem for the Democratic Party because he’s so conservative and he can cause a lot of hiccups in passing of laws and what not. So, it would be great for the Democratic Party to get him out. So, we’re going to keep running these stories to keep hurting him and make it so that it can’t be buried and just like settled outside court just and like, you know, if we keep pushing that, it’s helping us.

Russiagate Set a Dangerous Precedent

For the media, the regular drip of government leaks serves to keep the controversy alive in some form while they silently walk back their most outrageous and sensational claims. Reporters do this so often—and often so elegantly—you’d think they were born to do it. If this sounds like a familiar script, that’s because it is the state of political warfare in America today. 

In 2016, the media hyped a massive conspiracy that implicated President Trump, his team, and his family in a stunning takeover of America by the Russian government. If true, it would be among the most serious examples of treason in modern history. Of course, it was no such thing; after years and millions spent on investigations, the conspiracy turned out to be nothing but partisan fakery. 

That frenzy served to divide the nation, destroy bipartisanship, and weaponize parts of the American government against its own citizens. Within weeks or months of wall-to-wall, partisan media hysteria about Donald Trump and Russia, half the country was persuaded, without evidence, that the president of the United States was effectively a traitor, and that a foreign enemy was in control of the American government at the highest levels. There has perhaps never been anything even remotely as corrosive to social cohesion and national unity, at least in this country’s modern history.

From start to finish, Russiagate was an information operation. It was weaponized in the press, but it emerged from the bowels of the national security branch of the administrative state—what some have called the deep state. We must remember how complicit the apparatus of government was throughout that situation. Media introduces misleading, incomplete or outright false information from elements of national security and law enforcement bureaucracies. 

Americans don’t expect the people who are supposed to be defending them from criminals or foreign enemies to abuse their powers to settle personal scores or to commit themselves to a clandestine media jihad against domestic political opponents. But we’ve seen it happen repeatedly in the last several years. And the leaks from the Justice Department or within law enforcement indicate that the deep state might again be up to its Russiagate tricks, this time against Matt Gaetz. 

Knowing what we know about the deep-state leaks to the press so far about Gaetz, we should ask some questions: 

First, who is furnishing the Daily Beast and other media outlets with tidbits of information to drag this “scandal” on, without any real evidence of wrongdoing?

Second, who is leaking information about an ongoing criminal investigation, and why?

It took years of diligent and thankless effort by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), Kash Patel and others within government to get to the bottom of the deep state’s malfeasance during Russiagate. And this was during the Trump years, when the president (theoretically) controlled the executive branch, of which the Justice Department is a part. Unfortunately, under the Biden-Harris Administration, the deep state doesn’t meet even the slightest resistance; getting answers about who is taking shots at Matt Gaetz will be difficult. Still, it’s worth pulling the threads here. Americans should know how this story emerged, who is really behind it, and in whose interest it remains for America First firebrands like Gaetz to disappear. 

Rand Paul Discusses Big Picture Ramifications From Current JoeBama Policy

posted by Sundance at Conservative Treehouse

Senator Rand Paul appears on Maria Bartiromo to discuss the ongoing ramification from current leftist policy as being produced on Capitol Hill.  The interview begins with Senator Paul discussing the leftist definitions of ‘infrastructure’ and how left-wing groups are beneficiaries of trillions of taxpayer funds.

On the economic ramifications Senator Paul notes the impact of massive capital gains increases and how increasing corporate income taxes only provides incentives for national companies to establish themselves overseas to avoid tax liability.  The multinational corps, those already positioned overseas, do not have the same risk exposure to corporate tax increases, thus they do not oppose legislation that hurts national business and small U.S. corporations.

Overall the points made by Rand Paul are all valid; however, those in DC still hold back from pointing out the intent of the JoeBama group – that’s frustrating.  This game where incompetence is claimed under the guise of ‘benefit of doubt’ is a severe weakness within the GOP.  The refusal to aggressively confront Obama 3.0 is beyond frustrating.

Anyone who believes Democrats own exclusive opposition to the America First principles are completely ignoring the deliberate construct of the republican party.  There are just as many -if not more- natural enemies within the Republican apparatus as there are within the Democrat group. “America-First” is antithetical to the UniParty.

The frustration amid the MAGA community is valid.  Everything about it is righteous.  The mechanisms that run the system in DC must be deconstructed if we are to win the battles and the war against this massive enemy.  We have the largest coalition of American patriots on our side; however, there are only a handful of representatives willing to confront with the needed ferocity.

Multinationals want control; some call that corporatism…. but the names are moot. Multinationals want control, and capitalism does not allow them control; that is why multinationals do not want capitalism. Multinationals use lobbyists to generate regulations that stall competition.

Multinationals do not want competition; they are, by nature of their interest, anti-capitalists.

This misunderstanding is everywhere.

Most people think when they vote for a federal politician -a House or Senate representative- they are voting for a person who will go to Washington DC and write or enact legislation. This is the old-fashioned “schoolhouse rock” perspective based on decades past.

There is not a single person in congress writing legislation or laws. In modern politics not a single member of the House of Representatives or Senator writes a law, or puts pen to paper to write out a legislative construct. This simply doesn’t happen.

Over the past several decades a system of constructing legislation has taken over Washington DC that more resembles a business operation than a legislative body.

The for-profit groups (mostly multinational corporations) have a purpose in Washington DC to shape policy, legislation and laws favorable to their interests. They have fully staffed offices just like any business would – only their ‘business‘ is getting legislation for their unique interests.

These groups are filled with highly-paid lawyers who represent the interests of the entity and actually write laws and legislation briefs.

In the modern era this is actually the origination of the laws that we eventually see passed by congress. Within the walls of these buildings within Washington DC is where the ‘sausage’ is actually made.  Again, no elected official is usually part of this law origination process.

Almost all legislation created is not ‘high profile’, they are obscure changes to current laws, regulations or policies that no-one pays attention to.  The passage of the general bills within legislation is not covered in media.  Ninety-nine percent of legislative activity happens without anyone outside the system even paying any attention to it.

Once the corporation (multinational) or representative organizational entity has written the law they want to see passed – they hand it off to the lobbyists.

The lobbyists are people who have deep contacts within the political bodies of the legislative branch, usually former House/Senate staff or former House/Senate politicians themselves.

The lobbyist takes the written brief, the legislative construct, and it’s their job to go to congress and sell it.  “Selling it” means finding politicians who will accept the brief, sponsor their bill and eventually get it to a vote and passage.

Corporations (special interest group) write the legislation. Lobbyists take the law and go find politician(s) to support it. Politicians get support from their peers using tenure and status etc. Eventually, if things go according to norm, the legislation gets a vote.

Within every step of the process there are expense account lunches, dinners, trips, venue tickets and a host of other customary financial way-points to generate/leverage a successful outcome. The amount of money spent is proportional to the benefit derived from the outcome.

The important part to remember is that the origination of the entire process is EXTERNAL to congress.

Congress does not write laws or legislation, special interest groups do. Lobbyists are paid, some very well paid, to get politicians to go along with the need of the legislative group. When a House or Senate member becomes educated on the intent of the legislation, they have attended the sales pitch; and when they find out the likelihood of support for that legislation; they can then position their own (or their families) financial interests to benefit from the consequence of passage. It is a process similar to insider trading on Wall Street, except the trading is based on knowing who will benefit from a legislative passage.

When we understand the business of DC, we understand the difference between legislation with a traditional purpose and modern legislation with a financial and political agenda.

If you know a better solution to this mess than repeal of the 17th amendment, I am all ears.

If, as the constitution outlined, the Senate were still a place where all legislation required a 2/3 majority for passage; and if, as the constitution outlined, the Senate were a body filled with representatives selected by State Houses instead of popular election – then perhaps Senators could not be purchased by multinational interests.  Alas it is not.

Passage of the 17th amendment took away the very intentional roadblock of the Republican framework that Jefferson spoke of when he called it a saucer to cool the hot emotional tea of short-sighted legislation.  The constitution outlined consent as “two-thirds” (66), which was progressively watered down to become “three-fifths” (60) as the majority rule; and substantively, as it now stands according to democrats objectives, one-half plus one (51).

We are on the precipice and the GOP operate as if the constitution burning can be restored if they just reach across the aisle more.

.

 

Article by Rob Jenkins in The American Thinker

 

Why politicized science is dangerous

First, a confession: I borrowed this title from an essay by the late Michael Crichton, appended to his 2004 novel State of Fear. I’m also going to borrow rather liberally from both the essay and the novel itself, since I doubt most of you have read it or intend to, even though you should. I will attempt to provide a brief synopsis, one relevant to both his point and mine, without giving too much away (you know, in case you do want to read it).

The politicization and commercialization of science is something of a recurring theme in many of Crichton’s best-known novels, like Congo, Timeline, and Jurassic Park. A Harvard-trained MD, Crichton consistently used his thrilling plots to argue that humanity must embrace science as a tool but not allow it to become our master. As a novelist, he specialized in demonstrating the chilling consequences of the latter, usually quite dramatically, with people getting eaten by dinosaurs or gorillas or microbes or whatever.  

In the essay cited above, Crichton writes about a scientific theory that emerged early in the last century. It was widely and enthusiastically embraced by “Progressives” in government, from Woodrow Wilson to Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis. Famous people from other walks of life -- what we would today call “celebrities” -- were also quick to get on board: Alexander Graham Bell, Leland Stanford, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw. 

So was academia, as big corporate money, via “charitable organizations” like the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations, flowed into “research” to promote the theory. That research was carried out at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins, among other top universities. A national center, the Cold Springs Harbor Institute, was created specifically to further those efforts, which had the full support of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council.  

Perhaps you have guessed by now that the theory in question was eugenics, which postulated “a crisis of the gene pool leading to the deterioration of the human race.” As we all now know -- well, perhaps not all of us -- eugenics turned out not to be a science at all but rather a grotesque pseudo-science. “Its history is so dreadful,” notes Crichton, “and, to those who were caught up in it, so embarrassing, that it is now rarely discussed.”

Of course, AT readers recognize that this thoroughly deplorable and utterly discredited theory is still alive and flourishing in at least one American institution. Among its earliest and most vocal proponents was Margaret Sanger, who founded Planned Parenthood specifically to carry out the goal of the eugenics movement. She, along with other purveyors of the pseudo-science, believed the only way to save humanity was to rid it of “human weeds,” as she called them, including mentally disabled people and Blacks. At Planned Parenthood, that mission continues unchecked, despite the organization’s recent attempt to distance itself from its founder.  

But I digress. While an important point, that is not the focus of this column nor of Crichton’s novel. 

The actual subject of State of Fear is the environmental movement, especially as it relates to “global warming” or “climate change” -- whichever is the label du jour. I can’t keep track. I actually think it depends on the season: In summer, it’s “global warming,” while in the midst of a frozen winter, or following a late-spring snowfall, or during the fall hurricane season, it’s “climate change.” 

Nevertheless, Crichton’s novel is not specifically anti-warming. Rather, it is what we might call skeptical, in the healthy scientific sense of that term. What Crichton objects to, as the title of his essay suggests, is the way the “science” surrounding global warming has become so utterly politicized, in much the same way the “science” surrounding eugenics became politicized. Today’s movement, he observes, follows the same pattern as that earlier movement, with the same kinds of people behind it, the same push by governments, universities, and corporations, the same big money driving it. 

The reason for all this, Crichton argues through a character in the novel (but it’s one of the good guys, so we know it’s Crichton speaking), is to keep the population in a constant state of fear, so they can be more easily manipulated. “Every sovereign state,” the character insists, must “exert control over the behavior of its citizens, to keep them orderly and reasonably docile….  And of course we know that social control is best managed through fear.” Eugenics served that purpose in the early 20^th century, as did the “red scare” in the middle part of that century (which was real enough, but still useful) and global warming at the end of the century and on into the 21^st. 

The implications of this observation for our current situation are profound. Of course, climate alarmism is still around, and still serves the same purpose, but it has recently taken a back seat to an even more pressing “crisis”: the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s not to suggest the pandemic isn’t real -- although we will probably never know the full truth -- but to say that governments around the world are indisputably using it to further control us, just as Crichton prophesied 17 years ago. 

In fact, if you read State of Fear and substitute “coronavirus” for “global warming,” you will have a very contemporary story indeed -- right down to the way skeptics are treated in the book. (Spoiler alert: Big Enviro attempts first to discredit and then ultimately eliminate them, which may again be a bit dramatic, but perhaps not. Time will tell.) 

Ultimately, what Crichton emphasizes is the importance of rejecting politicized science and insisting that governments and researchers follow the actual science to its conclusions, whatever those may be. Doing so will likely not benefit the powers-that-be, which is why they so vigorously resist the idea, but it will certainly benefit the rest of humanity.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/why_politicized_science_is_dangerous_.htm

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Article by Brian C. Joondeph in The American Thinker

 

Democrats Blaming Everyone but Themselves

An old expression notes that when you point one finger at someone, there are three fingers pointing back at you. This aphorism may have originated in the Bible when Jesus said, “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?”

Modern Democrats and the left embody this sentiment, quick to blame anyone and anything for problems that they largely created. They offer no thoughtful consideration of their own roles in starting the never-ending dumpster fires that they blame on their political enemies.

The psychologists call this projection, “unconsciously taking unwanted emotions or traits you don’t like about yourself and attributing them to someone else.” In the case of the left, I doubt this is unconscious; more likely, a deliberate Alinsky-style approach to winning the war of ideas, something the Republican Party remains clueless about.

The current example is the demonization of law enforcement along with calls for police departments to be abolished, as the harpies of “The Squad” demanded in response to the recent death of Daunte Wright in Minnesota.

But police defunding only affects you and me. While the Squad points a finger at us, their three fingers are pointing back at themselves, to the tune of the $32,000 they spent on private security for themselves while championing defunding the police.

Democrats tell us that law enforcement is evil, yet earlier this year Congress surrounded itself with a fortress of fences and troops. We should be on our own in a cop-less world, the message goes, but not elected officials, confiscating our money via taxes to keep themselves safe. One finger pointing out, three back at themselves.

Since Minnesota may soon be changing its nickname from the “land of 10,000 lakes” to the “land of 10,000 protests,” let’s look at who is running the show up there, in the land where cops are apparently out of control, shooting innocent black men for sport.

Minnesota has a Democrat governor, Tim Walz, who succeeded another Democrat governor, Mark Dayton. Minneapolis has had Democrat mayors since the 1960s, with one independent in the late 60s, and one Republican, who served only one day in office.

Minneapolis has a 13-member city council, 12 of whom are members of the Soviet-sounding “Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party” and one a member of the “Green" party. No Republicans.

Minneapolis police Chief Medaria Arradondo is described by Wikipedia as the “first black chief of the Minneapolis Police department” but that he is of “Colombian heritage.” Does that make him a “black Hispanic”? Perhaps he is related to George Zimmerman, whom CNN and the New York Times described as a “white Hispanic,” although his Peruvian great-grandfather was black.

The chief was appointed by Betsy Hodges, a past Minneapolis mayor, and another member of the Soviet-sounding “Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party.” From the governor on down to the police chief, everyone is a Democrat. No Republicans. No Donald Trump. No Charlottesville. No white privilege or supremacy. The Democrats, party of KKK Exalted Cyclops Senator Robert Byrd, own this free and clear.

Who runs the city and state? Who hires and trains the police force? Who sets the rules of engagement? Who is responsible for the police force culture? The Soviet-sounding “Democrat-Farmer-Labor” party in Minnesota runs the show, yet the left blames Trump and Republicans for these shootings, whether in Atlanta, Ohio, or Minnesota. One finger pointing at Republicans, three fingers pointing back at Democrats.

It’s not just Minneapolis. Look at Portland, which has been a war zone now for almost a year since George Floyd died. Oregon has a Democrat governor, the last Republican governor leaving office in 1987. Portland’s last full-term Republican mayor served in the 1950s. Notice a pattern?

As John Nolte at Breitbart observed,

All the terrible problems the Democrat party and their media allies go on and on and on about — racism, gun violence, policing, etc. — those problems happen almost exclusively in Democrat-run cities.

Democrats and the corporate media attack Trump supporters as violent and racist and anti-environment, and yet out where we all live, out here in Rural America, out here in MAGA Land, most of us own guns and yet, we have no gun violence crises. Oh, and our air and water and streets are safe and clean and we have no racial tensions.

Protests and riots, crime and property destruction, murder and mayhem, all seem to find a home in Democrat-run cities. Failing public schools, too.

Brightbeam, an education nonprofit, wants “a better education and a brighter future for every child.” How is that working out in Democrat-run cities?

They observed:

Students in America’s most progressive cities face greater racial inequity in achievement and graduation rates than students living in the nation’s most conservative cities.

Progressive cities, on average, have achievement gaps in math and reading that are 15 and 13 percentage points higher than in conservative cities, respectively.

In San Francisco, for example, 70% of white students are proficient in math, compared to only 12% of black students reaching proficiency — a 58-point gap.

Imagine that. Democrat ruling-class elites point the finger at racist conservatives and Trump supporters as the cause of education failure in the cities they run. Yet the three fingers point back at them, as these are their cities, all run by Democrats, instituting the latest woke education curriculum of critical race theory and social justice.

Just like with calls to defund the police while they have their own private security, the leftist elites send their own kids, not to the dangerous and failing public schools they preside over, but to elite private schools where their children are educated in a safe environment, a stepping stone to an elite university and future employment within the ruling class. Not a life ending in tragedy as the lives of George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, or Daunte Wright ended.

Yet Democrats continue to point the finger at anyone but themselves, not realizing or caring that three fingers are pointed back at themselves and their failed policies. When will voters say enough is enough and vote the finger pointers out?

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

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A New American Divinity – Part I: Scientism

FAUCI IN THE MACHINE

by Noelle Garnier for The National Pulse

On the Monday before Easter 2021, Gallup published a poll indicating that membership of a church, synagogue, or mosque had dropped below fifty percent of U.S. adults for the first time in eight decades. 

For six of those decades, the number hovered around 70 percent. It has since dropped to just 47 percent, with the sheerest decline occurring in the past two decades.

Religion In America Is Hollowing Out.

The study noted:

“The decline in church membership… appears largely tied to population change, with those in older generations who were likely to be church members being replaced in the U.S. adult population with people in younger generations who are less likely to belong. The change has become increasingly apparent in recent decades because millennials and Gen Z are further apart from traditionalists in their church membership rates (about 30 points lower) than baby boomers and Generation X are (eight and 16 points, respectively).”

Similarly, Pew Research has found that more Americans (41 percent) reported the global pandemic strengthening family bonds, compared to the 28 percent who reported it had strengthened their personal religious faith. 

Despite that, America led other advanced economies by 12 percentage points in believing their faith had been strengthened.

Religion in America is hollowing out—but impassioned appeals to moral authority permeate the media environment. Where do these value systems derive—and where is all the fervent belief going?

A Tale of Two Huxleys.

Aldous Huxley is best known as the author of Brave New World, a dystopian examination of a future where the state regulates childbearing through the use of artificial wombs and controls the minds of citizens with drugs. His brother, Julian Huxley, is known as the father of transhumanism—belief in the use of advanced technology to enhance the human condition.

Whereas Aldous feared mind control, Julian feared an improper balance between what he called “death control”—modern medicine—vis-à-vis birth control, leading to overpopulation.

Julian Huxley was a eugenicist who believed in the inferiority of certain races, and espoused the use of immigration protocols to exclude undesirables. He was an enthusiastic early adopter of new media, making television and film appearances in the 1930s in a bid to reconfigure public opinion of eugenics—and preach that good character, as well as moral defects, are inheritable traits. 

SIR JULIAN AND ALDOUS HUXLEY

He worked to seize what he considered a constructive vision of eugenics from the jaws of Nazi race theory, trading out the more explicit word “race” for the phrase “ethnic groups.” While Huxley did not believe the unfit should be slaughtered, he did believe in separating them from society and discouraging their reproduction.

An Oxford-educated First World War veteran, Huxley’s main contention with Communism and Nazism seems to have been that they were destructive social movements of a religious nature, at odds with his desire to reconfigure the field of biology as a means of social reconstruction for a post-religious era. As the first Director-General of UNESCO, Huxley put population control on the agendas of the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and other international assemblies. 

His true life’s work was not scientific research, but developing a creed he called evolutionary humanism: faith in mankind and its potential. 

His February 16, 1975 obituary in The New York Times records that “in the early thirties Huxley’s writings took a marked philosophical tack as he strove to formulate the implications for man of the rapid increase of scientific knowledge… He suggested that a religious spirit did not require belief in mysticism or in the supernatural, and indeed was circumscribed by such beliefs.”

“Of all Huxley’s views, his evolutionary humanism was the most far‐ranging and the most disputed, for it sought to offer a field theory of evolution as well as a set of behavioral, ethical and religious tenets for modern man. The core of his theory is that man now has the capacity to be ‘the sole agent of further evolutionary advance on this planet.’” 

This belief caused Huxley to become known as the father of transhumanism. According to him, in order for man to truly drive his evolution forward, a reconfiguration of religious belief was necessary. 

Christianity – in Huxley’s view – would pass away. A secular religion, where knowledge and relationship with self was as crucial as knowledge and relationship with God, would take its place. 

In his essay The New Divinity (1965), part of Essays of a Humanist, Huxley proffered his theory on the future of religion in an age of rapid scientific advancement: obsolete, monotheistic faiths must, and will, be supplanted by evolutionary humanism in order to sustain progress.

“The radical evolutionary crisis through which man is now passing can only be surmounted by an equally radical reorganisation of his dominant system of thought and belief . . .

“The central long-term concern of religion must be to promote further evolutionary improvement and to realise new possibilities; and this means greater fulfilment by more human individuals and fuller achievement by more human societies . . .

“A religion of fulfilment must provide bustling secular man with contacts with all that is permanent and enduring, with the deeper and higher aspects of existence; indeed, with every possible opportunity of transcending the limitations not only of his day-by-day existence in the equivalents of shared worship, but of his little secular self in acts of meditation and self-examination and in retreats from the secular world of affairs….Christianity is a universalist and monotheist religion of salvation. Its long consolidation and explosive spread, achieved through a long period of discussion and zealous ferment, released vast human forces which have largely shaped the western world as we know it. An evolutionary and humanist religion of fulfilment could be more truly universal and could release even vaster human forces, which could in large measure shape the development of the entire world. But its consolidation and spread will need a period of discussion and ferment, though with modern communications this is likely to be much shorter than for Christianity.”

A Culture Of Narcissism Puts Its Faith In Science.

Just 15 years after Huxley published his “New Divinity,” social critic Christopher Lasch traced the development of a new personality structure of the post-war generation in his 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism.

Lasch’s pocket definition of narcissism was “a disposition to see the world as a mirror, more particularly as a projection of one’s own fears and desires.” 

For the narcissist generation, Lasch wrote, the ailments of human existence became projects for professionals.

An unlimited spectrum of anxieties, fears, and challenges required medical observation and intervention. Even parenting required expert guidance at the risk of doing irreversible damage to offspring. Amoral “values” such as achievement, social survival, and a pleasing personality have replaced true allegiances and non-performative beliefs. 

Afraid of old age and little-connected to the next generation, no project is more crucial to the narcissist than improving his health and extending his lifespan, Lasch wrote.

”The fear of death takes on a new intensity in a society that has deprived itself of religion and shows little interest in posterity… The denial of age in America culminates in the prolongevity movement, which hopes to abolish old age altogether. But the dread of age originates not in a ‘cult of youth’ but in a cult of the self. Not only in its narcissistic indifference to future generations but in its grandiose vision of a technological utopia without old age, the prolongevity movement exemplifies the fantasy of ‘absolute, sadistic power’ which… so deeply colors the narcissistic outlook. Pathological in its psychological origins and inspiration, superstitious in its faith in medical deliverance, the prolongevity movement expresses in characteristic form the anxieties of a culture that believes it has no future.”

Where Huxley had predicted that a new, secular religion would fuel the next evolution for humankind, Lasch saw a newly-secularized culture anxiously laboring in service of late capitalism under the illusion of self-improvement. 

Intense though their fear of death and fantasy of power may be, they have every reason to cheer up. 

The last several generations have witnessed extraordinary scientific advancements in their own lifetimes that point to the promise of understanding, correcting, and upgrading the human condition. 

To name only a few: Watson and Crick discovered the double helix; the contraceptive pill handed over control of reproduction; gene-editing technology is on the cusp of revolutionizing the future of genetic diseases; a vaccine for a global pandemic took not years, but months, to develop. More granular, but nonetheless stunning developments are happening every day. 

Within the month of March 2021, a synthetic model of a human blastoma was developed inadvertently in a lab in Australia. (For one writer, it was “safe and ethical.” For another, it “raised ethical questions.”) 

Israeli researchers gestated hundreds of mouse embryos in a synthetic womb, immediately prompting speculation on whether such technology might be used to “emancipate” women from giving birth themselves. 

On April 1, 2021, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first test therapy using CRISPR gene editing technology to directly correct the genetic mutation causing sickle cell disease in humans, the fruit of a decade of pioneering in CRISPR and the Cas9 enzyme. 

These “miracles” aren’t spurring mass conversion to monotheistic faiths, but religious conversions—indeed, tectonic shifts—are happening, as Gallup’s data indicate. 

A Mass Conversion Event.

Huxley believed mass media would spur faster acceptance of a new, secular religion; add a pandemic and a mass conversion event unfolds. 

The COVID-19 outbreak raised the authority of medical scientists—who appear to hold the confidence of most Americans, but with notable partisan and demographic differences—to quasi-religious dimensions. 

Behavioral protocols such as social distancing, isolating at home, wearing a mask, keeping schools closed, and receiving a vaccine derived moral significance from their purported basis in scientific data, a process that was accelerated by panic and blind faith that the mandates would in fact follow empirical evidence. 

In April 2021, more than one year into the pandemic, President Joe Biden made the religious character of COVID-19 mitigation efforts explicit when he described consenting to the Coronavirus vaccine as “a godly thing to do” and a “spiritual and patriotic” duty.

The shift in attitude is best illustrated by the cloying, coy, ethereal expression “believe in science,” favored by Democrat politicians and the very young. 

Before 2020, this phrase was used mostly by politicians to refer to acceptance of an anthropogenic climate disaster scenario. From 2020 onward, “believing the science” means placing full trust in the authority, capability, and intentions of the scientific establishment. 

The improperly-constructed rejoinder has nothing to do with actual knowledge of the science on any particular issue. “Believe in science” is an expression of scientism: a supplicant posture toward scientists and obedience to their decrees.

SCIENTISM AS POLITICS.

This posture treats science not as a method, but as a source of knowledge of good and evil, moral instruction, and even salvation. 

Take it from astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who tweeted on April 11, 2021: 

“The good thing about Science is that it’s true, whether or not you believe in it,” – deGrasse Tyson

Substitute any other discipline for “Science” in Tyson’s sentence—say, structural engineering or history—and the proposition is self-evidently simplistic and absurd. Substitute any other ideology—“The good thing about Christianity…”—and risk being called a fundamentalist. 

But the capital-S “Science” dogma—an abstract rendering of the real discipline, imbued with moral authority—has been launched into a league of its own, where no one can disbelieve, and everyone must obey. A sound method, empirical facts, and truth are three different things. Not so for capital-S “Science,” which exists for elites to understand, and for the masses to believe in. (Not accept—believe in.)

It’s no surprise that Tyson, like Huxley, also asks: “Are we wise enough to shepherd the future of our own civilization?” 

Implicit in the question is Huxley’s pretext for the new divinity: “Man is a product of nearly three billion years of evolution, in whose person the evolutionary process has at last become conscious of itself and its possibilities. Whether he likes it or not, he is responsible for the whole further evolution of our planet.” 

For the converts of scientism, capital-S “Science” is divinity without God, but with all of His authority.

History will judge whether the Coronavirus pandemic was indeed the mass conversion event to the “new divinity” that it seems to have been. But there are more pressing questions that must not wait on history to answer: Who is doing the science? What are their aims for the future of mankind? And what expression will scientism find when COVID-19 recedes into the past?