The Man Who Could Save CNN

If CNN’s new owners really intend to reorient the network’s focus toward straight news reporting again, they would do well to take advantage of institutional memory.

by Chuck de Caro for American Greatness

John Malone, the 81-year-old billionaire CEO of Liberty Media, appeared on CNBC Thursday to discuss CNN’s recent travails. Malone’s company owns a sizable share of Discovery Media, which is set to be the new owner of Ted Turner’s old network. Malone is going to have a large say in CNN’s future. So my interest was piqued the other day when I spotted Malone bloviating about how selling CNN now would be the coward’s way out. 

Well, obviously. But if the great white business shark Malone wants to step up and really fix what’s ailing CNN, here’s what he might do: 

1) Dump CNN’s entire anchor staff, their producers, and any editorial staffer hired by Jeff “Mother” Zucker. No exceptions.

2) As a stopgap, replace domestic broadcasts with CNN International, with its familiar “classic CNN” news package style. Over time, work in more unaccented reporters and anchors.

3) Promote Senior Vice President Jack Womack to be HMFIC (head man forcefully in charge) of CNN. 

4) Give Womack his marching orders and get the hell out of the way.

Womack and I go back to 1985 when he was a newbie and I was a special assignments correspondent. I was an adrenaline junkie who liked commuting to guerrilla war zones and jumping out of airplanes with the U.S. Army Rangers, while Jack was a multipotentialite, doing every different job at the network.

Just imagine Jack Womack as one great big rosy-cheeked Eagle Scout with every CNN merit badge known to man. So many merit badges that he needed two sashes!

Jack Womack via Pinterest

The guy has done every job from news editor to anchorman to vice-president-of-this-that-the-other-and-the-gigahertz-thingabob-at-the-antenna-farm. He learned the latter from the best there ever was, our mutual friend, the late Dick Tauber, CNN’s vice president for transmission systems and new technology. (It was Dick’s foresight alone that brought CNN to prominence during the first Gulf War, but that is a story for another time.)

Another thing about Jack Womack: He’s not a grandstander. He keeps a low profile. He’s like a snow leopard who inhabits the rocky outcroppings of steep cliffs: invisible, unless you happen to trip over him.

Womack has consistently found an office on the highest floor and farthest away from all the standard, groveling, power-jockeying executive pukes who think they are in charge, and then runs the entire electronic soul of all the CNN networks from his snow leopard lair.

We had a falling out a couple of years ago when he failed to wear a necktie for a ceremony honoring our founder, friend, and leader, Ted Turner.  

Look, I’m an old-school American of Italian extraction. So I pointed out to Jack that we were there to pay our respects to our old boss, and it was bad manners to show up sporting the California casual open-collar look—as then-WarnerMedia chief John Stankey, alleged newsman Jeff Zucker, and Jack, an actual CNN news guy, had done. He gave me the snow leopard snarl about not “getting the memo” and said this was the new way. 

“Not in front of Ted Turner, Jack!” (And Turner, of course, was wearing his old, old CNN tie.) We haven’t spoken since.

With that said, I can think of no one anywhere at CNN who surpasses Womack’s knowledge of how the network functions. And as a former anchorman himself, he knows the editorial side very well.

If CNN’s new owners really intend to reorient the network’s focus toward straight news reporting again, they would do well to take advantage of institutional memory. 

Give Womack the job, John Malone. But tell him to wear a damned tie.

X22, On the Fringe, and more-Feb 20

 

Evening. Here's tonight's news:

Justin Trudeau and the Alchemy of Irony

Canada’s prime minister won a skirmish but lost his credibility, which means that he has also lost legitimacy and will lose the war.

by Roger Kimball for American Greatness

As the philosopher Bertie Wooster was wont to observe, “it’s always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping.” Authorities are divided on whether Bertie was correct in attributing the observation to Shakespeare. Perhaps it has its origin in the reflections of some other sage. But regarding the pertinence of the phenomenon to the conduct of human affairs there seems to be general agreement. The Greek tragedians analyzed it as a cosmic interplay of ὕβρις and ἄτη, arrogance followed by infatuation and ruin. I am not sure whether little Justin Trudeau, prime minister pro tem of Canada, has given much thought to the operation of this awful (in the old sense) dialectic, but I suspect that he is about to make its close and palpable acquaintance.

Trudeau—or, as the great Sarah Hoyt denominates him, “Trudescu” or “Castreau”—initially responded to Canada’s “Revolt of the Masses,” a.k.a. the truckers’ Freedom Convoy, by skedaddling out of town and cowering in some presumably secure and definitely unidentified place. 

A couple of days later, Trudeau popped his head up over the top of the fox hole and nothing happened. So he climbed out, shook his soft and tiny fists, and plumped his hairdo. “I’m in charge here,” he shouted, and the truckers nodded and kept dancing and singing their songs about peace, love, and freedom. They also kept blocking little Justin’s roadways. This made him very angry. He couldn’t drop those thousands of truckers and their many supporters, children, and pets, into a tank full of piranhas, as he remembered someone he admired once doing. So he invoked the Emergencies Act, a law framed in the 1980s to provide the government of Canada with extraordinary powers to deal with extraordinary situations: wars, invasions, massive terrorist attacks, that sort of thing. 

Trudeau is the first prime minister to invoke that law. That must have put mousse in his coiffure. At last he was first. Legislation such as the Emergencies Act is seldom hauled out and implemented in pacific Canada. Its predecessor, the War Measures Act, was invoked three times. Once for World War I. Once for World War II. Once for the so-called October Crisis in 1970, when a separatist group called Front de libération du Québec kidnapped a couple of diplomats, including a Quebec provincial cabinet minister who was later murdered. 

You might think that a convoy of truckers protesting Canada’s soon-to-be-revoked vaccine mandate did not rise to the level of a world war or even to the level of a terrorist incident. You would be right about that. But to understand what just happened in Canada, it is important to keep two things in mind. 

First, the vaccine mandates, which, as I just said, are just about to be revoked, were never more than the pretext for the truckers’ revolt. The real casus belli was the highhandedness of the government in imposing the mandates, along with all the other COVID theater we’ve been treated to: the shutdowns, the masks, the “social (i.e., anti-social) distancing,” the ubiquitous swabs, sanitizers, hand wipes, and general atmosphere of hysteria. 

These expedients don’t actually do anything to contain the virus, which is now endemic and markedly less potent than it was when China first shipped it out to the world. On the contrary, they are predominantly ritualistic, almost religious, gestures. The little paper masks, for example, do nothing to “slow the spread” of a virus that can leak like James Comey’s FBI through those porous and baggy fibers. 

No, the masks served different functions. Like the yellow stars worn by certain populations in an earlier age, they were in part badges of submission and compliance. Unlike the yellow stars, however, they also have a virtue-signaling function. They say to the world, “See! I declare my greater virtue by wearing this pointless mask, which, among other things, certifies my appreciation of the unprecedented health threat we face and the fact that I care enough about other people to pretend to do something to protect them from any diseases I may be carrying.”

The second function of the COVID rituals also brings me to the second and more important catalyst for the truckers’ revolt: its blatant declaration of arbitrary government power. 

It’s arbitrary in several ways. For one, the prohibitions and prescriptions come and go seemingly without reason. Indeed, it sometimes seems that the arbitrariness is the point: “See, we do this—make this pointless rule—because we can and because you, the plebs, will obey because you always have.” 

Another aspect of this arbitrary rule is its directedness: these rules, like so many rules these days, are for the little people. With regard to masks, for example, everywhere one looks one sees examples of what one writer calls “mask apartheid.” The masses are masked and must be masked. The elites do not have to be masked and so parade around in public without them. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez paraded around, maskless, in a custom-made “tax the rich” dress at the Met Gala, but all her attendants were masked up.

All this was fueling the truckers’ revolt. After all, some 90 percent were already vaccinated. It’s not that they objected, most of them, to being vaccinated. They object to being told by little Justin that they had to be vaccinated in order to earn their livelihood. And the vaccines, they implicitly understood, were synecdoches for so much more: for all the COVID rituals, of course, but also for the two-tier rule by elites and administrative fiat that has infected and is dismantling almost every Western so-called democracy. Not for nothing is the truckers’ mantra “Freedom.” They wanted, they want, freedom. Little Justin could not abide recognizing their freedom. So he invoked the Emergencies Act, called out the troops, and ordered the mounted police (among other things) to trample protestors underfoot.

Most people, I believe, can understand why countries maintain legislation like Canada’s Emergencies Act on the books. There are exceptional situations that require exceptional remedies. A world war, for instance, might well require that a government abrogate certain peacetime rights and freedoms. But a truckers’ convoy that was thoroughly, one might even say, ostentatiously peaceful? Was that a legitimate reason to freeze people’s bank and social media accounts, confiscate or destroy their property, break into their homes and arrest them? 

As with the U.S. government’s response to the January 6, 2021, protest at the Capitol, government powers were mobilized far in excess of the threat that was posed. Yes, it is important that the government has the means to quell an insurrection. But that does not give it license to regard every challenge to its authority as an insurrectionary behavior. We’ve seen a lot of “insurrection creep” recently, a vast expansion of what counts as “extremism” or “terrorism.” Politicians like Justin Trudeau (or Gretchen Whitmer or Andrew Cuomo) aid and abet that definitional expansion because it brings with it an expansion of their powers.

Finally—and this brings me to the irony I mention in my title—although Justin Trudeau has stomped on the truckers, bringing the essentially unlimited police power of the state down upon their heads, he has merely dispersed this one wave rolling in from the sea. A single, nonviolent convoy was shattered by state violence. More than 100 people have been arrested. But many thousands simmer out of reach. Who knows whether they will climb back into the cabs of other 18-wheelers. 

You can be sure, however, that their demands for freedom will continue to resonate. And one strand of that cry will demand the head, in political terms, of little Justin Trudeau. In fact, it is already happening. Trudeau won a skirmish but lost his credibility, which means that he has also lost legitimacy and, ultimately, that he will lose the war. 

Good riddance, I say, since he has just shown himself to be a petulant, thin-skinned tyrant who cannot exercise power without abusing it. At the moment, he doubtless feels bucked, having just squashed an embarrassing public challenge to his reign. Just offstage, however, that figure you see rustling in the wings is fate, ἄτη, fitting the lead lozenge into the velvet glove. 

America Is Not Divided; It’s Being Hijacked

We must break the propaganda spell and realize that 

we have the strength of numbers on our side.

by Alexander Zubatov for American Greatness

It seems lately like everywhere, on both the Right and the Left, we are hearing a chorus of voices tell us America is hopelessly divided and on the brink of a second civil war. 

The level of rancor and incivility characterizing much of our contemporary political dialogue appears to confirm as much on a daily basis. It appears Left and Right have arrived at irreconcilable worldviews, disagreeing on first principles, core convictions, specific policy choices and ultimate ends. Increasingly, they seem unable to see eye to eye even when it comes to pure matters of fact. 

But what if the appearance of a great, insuperable divide is vastly overstated or even being deliberately amplified by forces that benefit from division? The gulf on certain significant matters is substantial, to be sure, and yet when we turn to look one by one at some of the most high-profile issues, we see that the split may be greatly overstated.

There is a great deal of talk about transsexual athletes, especially when men and boys seek a shortcut to the awards podium by competing against women and girls. The reality, however, is that a strong majority of Americans—62 percent—hold the commonsense view that athletes shouldn’t get to compete in categories other than those corresponding to their birth genders, while only 34 percent have a different view.

The streaming of illegal immigrants across the U.S.-Mexico border has become the subject of apparently fierce debate, and yet, looking behind the headlines, a clear 71 percent of Americans believe it is unacceptable for people to enter this country illegally.

“Defunding the police” is a policy proposal that has been headline news ever since the BLM protests and riots of summer 2020. However, this one isn’t even close: 84 percent of Americans oppose defunding, with 47 percent believing that funding for police should actually be increased. Only 15 percent favor less funding. This may be in no small part because, as another recent poll found, 77 percent of registered voters are “extremely” or “very” concerned about rising crime, including, for example, 74 percent of voters in traditionally liberal bastions such as New York City.  

President Lyndon Johnson’s disastrous “Great Society” programs were expressly envisioned by Johnson as a method of reparations, i.e., to try to get historically disadvantaged black Americans to the same starting line enjoyed by some other Americans. Yet our current breed of “racism” and “white supremacy” fanatics keeps pushing for yet further reparations. Thankfully, however, most of us won’t be fooled again: 62 percent of Americans oppose reparations, with 46 percent being definite in that view, while only 17 percent are strong proponents of the view that reparations should definitely be paid. 

Amidst all the hubbub over critical race theory in our schools, clear majorities of Americans believe that schools should be teaching the truth about both slavery (78 percent) and racism (73 percent). But 86 percent of Americans also believe that schools are going beyond the facts and pushing a problematic political agenda, with 63 percent considering this a major problem; relatedly, 74 percent of Americans believe that race has become too much of a focus in our schools, with 49 percent deeming this a major problem as well. 

If we listen to the media propagandists, Biden’s commitment to nominating a black woman for the Supreme Court seat being vacated by the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer is an A-OK, even progressive, thing to do. More than three-quarters of Americans surveyed, however, know better: 76 percent believe Biden should be considering “all possible nominees” and not just a black woman, while only 23 percent want him to stay committed to his current plan. 

While the most unapologetically vulgar identity politics have been normalized in America, it says something—indeed, it says a lot­—when 57 percent of voters in California, arguably the most liberal state in the country, vote “no” when affirmative action is put to a plebiscite—this despite the 2020 proposition carrying the momentum of the radical racial frenzy unleashed by the death of George Floyd and despite the support of high-profile celebrities and politicians, with $31 million in donations to the cause, against only $1.6 million raised to defeat the proposition. 

It is still more telling, in fact, that despite nearly 25 years of identity politics running amok in the interim, the 57 percent vote against affirmative action in 2020 actually marked a slight increase from the 54 percent who voted to end affirmative action in California when the issue was first put to the popular test in 1996. 

Expanding the lens beyond deep blue California to the nation as a whole, the results are more damning still: 76 percent of us are done with affirmative action by race in university admissions, and an even higher 81 percent oppose gender-based admissions. Shocking as it may sound to some, most of us believe that scarce slots should be awarded based on merit rather than melanin or other inborn traits. 

Even when it comes to the question of policing speech, a solid majority of us (57 percent) believe that “people today are too easily offended by what others say,” while only 40 percent feel that “people should be careful what they say to avoid offending others.”

For the same reason, moreover, that polls consistently failed to capture the true level of voters’ support for President Trump in the 2016 and 2020 election cycles, I would be willing to bet that more than a few poll respondents are loath to reveal their true beliefs on questions of race and diversity, such that support for anti-identitarian consensus views is actually understated. 

But if so many of these pressing matters which we have been conditioned to think of as hot-button issues spurring widespread dissent are, in reality, the subjects of widespread consensus, where is the disconnect? The answer is depressingly simple: massively overrepresented in media, academia, and among social influencers of every other sort, screeching “progressive” elites are driving our dialogue, sending us into a sharp left turn off the straight and narrow path. 

Many of these people—whether bestselling celebrity academics such as Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi, or journalists working for publications such as New York Times that knowingly monetize tall tales of “racism” and “white supremacy” to trigger the emotions of their liberal readers and drive ad sales—have a financial incentive to further racial and other identitarian hysteria.

Some of the high-profile individuals contributing to the divisive rhetoric on such issues may be sincerely committed to their causes, of course, but this does not make them any more representative of the nation as a whole. According to the comprehensive 2018 “Hidden Tribes” report from More in Common, an organization dedicated to fighting political polarization, just 8 percent of the country falls into the tribe the authors dub “Progressive Activists.” Here is the report’s summary paragraph describing these folks, their general views and proclivities and their disproportionate influence when it comes to matters of public concern: 

Progressive Activists have strong ideological views, high levels of engagement with political issues, and the highest levels of education and socioeconomic status. Their own circumstances are secure. They feel safer than any group, which perhaps frees them to devote more attention to larger issues of social justice in their society. They have an outsized role in public debates, even though they comprise a small portion of the total population, about one in 12 Americans. They are highly sensitive to issues of fairness and equity in society, particularly regarding race, gender, and other minority group identities. Their emphasis on unjust power structures leads them to be very pessimistic about fairness in America. They are uncomfortable with nationalism and ambivalent about America’s role in the world.

Consistent with the report’s findings, it is no secret that politically engaged Democrats and liberals are massively overrepresented in media and academia, both of which are progressively becoming even more heavily skewed left with the passing years. In 1971, 26 percent of all journalists identified as Republicans, while 36 percent were Democrats; by 2014, Republicans were just 7 percent, with Democrats now outnumbering them four to one. The numbers are undoubtedly still more skewed today, in a time when journalists are, moreover, eager to let their biases show through and unwilling to uphold even the pretense of journalistic objectivity. 

The numbers for academia today are just as stark: 44 percent of the American professoriate identifies as liberal, while just 9 percent identifies as conservative, but in the influential social sciences and humanities, those respective numbers are 58 percent versus 5 percent and 52 percent versus 4 percent, respectively. Not so long ago—in 1984—liberals comprised 39 percent of academics, and conservatives were 34 percent. That is a seismic shift.  

Not to be forgotten is the large dollop of toxic bias being stirred into our collective cauldron by Big Tech’s skewed search algorithms and increasingly heavy-handed speech censors; like these others important sectors of society, Big Tech has a pronounced leftward tilt, with only 1 percent of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft employee contributions to political campaigns going to Republican candidates for office (as of 2018). The largest recipient of Big Tech’s political contributions that year (receiving $1 billion) was ActBlue, a fundraising platform for “progressive” candidates.       

With this much sludge clogging up our political arteries, why should we be surprised that when it comes to the kinds of issues that matter to our ruling elites, it looks to us that we are far more divided than we actually are? 

The good news is, we are catching on. One particular area of widespread consensus that the media is likely none-too-interested in disseminating is the general public’s view of the media itself. While President Trump was widely demonized for calling the media “fake news” and the “enemy of the people,”the people, it seems, actually agree with him. In a July 2021 Rasmussen poll, 58 percent of likely voters agreed that “the media is truly the enemy of the people.” And in a still more recent Gallup poll from October 2021, the percentage of Americans who trusted the media was a meager 7 percent. Scandal-plagued CNN’s 90 percent ratings free-fall over the course of the past year may be not a mere aberration but part of a broader trend in which people have begun to tune out all of these ratings-driven spreaders of sensationalized “breaking news,” profit-driven racial hysteria, thinly veiled regime propaganda, polarizing political bias, and mass misinformation. 

Universities are similarly attracting our ire. Though Republicans and Democrats may have some disagreement when it comes to the details of why universities are becoming problematic, regardless of whether the issue is exorbitant tuitions, overly politicized administrations, professors, and classrooms or the inadequate teaching of essential skills, 61 percent of us agree universities are headed in the wrong direction, and enrollment is on the downswing.  

The reputation of Big Tech is, likewise, starting to take a hit in the public eye. As of approximately one year ago, 45 percent of Americans had a negative view of these firms, as compared to only 34 percent with a positive view, and 57 percent of us wanted more government regulation of these many-tentacled monstrosities. And that was largely before tech platforms began to play the part of government lackeys administering an escalating mass censorship campaign in which backroom technocrats take it upon themselves to stifle public debate and purport to resolve difficult questions of what is or is not good science while deplatforming leading credentialed virologists and elected politicians alike.

We must break the spell and realize that we have the strength of numbers on our side. Then, we need to overcome the collective action problem that afflicts all diffuse majorities and band together to fight a culture war to take back our institutions from the sinister forces that have co-opted them. Those of us fortunate enough to see here and now where it is we stand have a responsibility to illuminate the path, to spread our words of warning and our good word far and wide until the dark veil that has descended upon the land is lifted and a chorus of hosannas can again ring out from sea to shining sea. 

Does the Rise of Black Conservatives Signal a Turning Point for the GOP?

Jeff Charles reporting for RedState 

It has often been said that the Republican Party is the “party of old white men.” Indeed, when one looks at the party’s makeup, one can easily see why this moniker has persisted for so many decades. However, there are signs that times are a-changing, and the conservative movement is beginning to look a little different.

Newsweek’s Steve Friess wrote an article titled “GOP Bets on Black Conservatives As Key to Victory: ‘We Change or We Die,’” in which he detailed the increasing prevalence of black conservatives running for office as Republicans.

Ten years after its “autopsy” of Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss to Barack Obama concluded that the Republican Party’s biggest problem was its failure to appeal to voters of color, 2022 is shaping up as a breakthrough year for the GOP on at least one diversity front: Black candidates.

The author noted that in several recent races, black Republican candidates “drew slightly larger, potentially decisive shares of Black votes compared to the white Republicans running alongside them for other offices in their states.” This could be an indicator that the GOP might finally realize they can win when running black candidates. Even further, Republican leadership seems to be coming around to the idea that the party can increase its share of black votes, if they put forth a genuine effort.

Professor Leah Wright Rigueur, who teaches political science at Johns Hopkins University, and is the author of “Loneliness of the Black Republican,” told Newsweek: “Some Republicans are savvy enough to understand that if they win 10 to 15 percent of Black voters in state and local elections, they can win—and there are ways to actually do this.”

As it stands currently, there are only three black Republicans in the legislature. Friess wrote:

The three Black Republicans now in Congress—South Carolina Senator Tim Scott and Representatives Burgess Owens of Ohio and Byron Donalds of Florida—are the largest number to serve simultaneously since Reconstruction. Virginia Lt. Governor Winsome Sears, sworn in last month, brings the number of Black Republicans in statewide elected offices to five. By contrast, 14 Black Democrats hold statewide elected office and 55 Black Democrats serve in Congress (excluding Washington, D.C. and the U.S. Virgin Islands).

The article also noted a significant number of prominent black Republican candidates seeking office in the November midterm elections. He wrote:

What’s more, the RNC expects a record-setting number of Black nominees for the House. They may include John James, who joined the race for a new seat in the Detroit suburbs this month after his losing his last Senate bid by just 1.7 percentage points; if elected, he would be Michigan’s first Black Republican member of Congress. Also running in GOP primaries: former Army helicopter pilot Wesley Hunt, the first Black Republican nominee for Congress in Texas in 2020, when he lost by 3 points in a Houston-area district; former Scott legislative aide Shay Hawkins of Akron, Ohio; businessman Quincy McKnight of Nashville; and ex-Trump aide Rod Dorilás, a 31-year-old Navy veteran in Palm Beach County, Florida.

This is an important step in the right direction for the GOP and the conservative movement, and it appears at least some within the party understand this. A high-ranking GOP official, who happens to be white, told Newsweek: “We can’t be the party of white men anymore. There aren’t enough of us. There won’t be enough of us in a decade. We change or we die.”

Some credit former President Donald Trump with the Republican Party’s seeming change of heart in regards to courting black voters. Republican National Committee spokesman Paris Dennard explained that the shift “started with President Trump and how vocal he was about the Black Voices for Trump movement being fully funded and staffed at the campaign.”

Indeed, Trump was the first Republican president since Richard Nixon to actually make a concerted effort to reach black voters. During his re-election campaign, the RNC opened Black Voices 4 Trump offices in 15 major cities with high black populations in battleground states. After the election, the offices were closed, but RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel pledged $2 million last February to reopen them. “At least three—now called Black American Community Centers—have already opened, in Milwaukee, Cleveland and College Station, Georgia,” Friess explained.

The failure of the GOP to engage with black voters has vexed many – including myself – because conservatives have important values in common with the black community. Friess wrote:

Cases in point: A 2019 Pew poll found that 49 percent of Black Americans oppose same-sex marriage versus 32 percent of whites; a 2020 Gallup survey reported that 54 percent of Black respondents do not believe abortion is morally acceptable; a 2018 Harvard-Harris survey found 85 percent of Black Americans favor restricting legal immigration, more than any other demographic group; and 73 percent of Black voters support school choice, according to a 2021 RealClear survey.

I’m cautiously optimistic about some of the trends I’m seeing in the conservative movement. I’ve been advocating for years for the GOP to start taking black voters seriously, and this could be the start of what could be a serious paradigm shift – as long as the party’s leadership is willing to take a long-term approach. Winning over black voters is not impossible for the right. Indeed, Jalen Johnson’s victory in Albany, Georgia, is the template many of these candidates should follow.

But this can’t be the type of situation in which the party gives up after not seeing immediate returns. It took the GOP a long time to break trust with the black community after it stopped courting their votes. Earning it back won’t happen overnight, and Republicans must be willing to persist for the long haul. Hopefully, this truly is a sign that the conservative movement and the former Party of Lincoln are ready to finally start building that big tent.

 "It is the large population — psychologically abused and tormented by their government — that wield power when they choose.  Once the powerless have this epiphany, they alone control their destiny."

 

Article by J.B. Shurk in The American Thinker

The Power of the Powerless Is Real

One of the most challenging obstacles working against ordinary citizens in the West is the self-satisfying presumption that Western institutions and philosophies are inherently immune from the rise of totalitarianism.  This is an understandable blind spot.  Their identities have been forged, to various degrees, in the great traditions of Enlightenment notions of liberty, free speech, and natural rights.  Surely the victors over communism, fascism, and Nazism cannot then fall victim to the madness of those same philosophies collapsing their systems from within.  This "Us/Them" self-delusion has kept the citizenry from recognizing tyranny inside its gates.

It is good for people to take pride in the achievements and histories of their nation states.  It is natural for the inhabitants of countries founded in fights for freedom to assume that the costs of obtaining that freedom are behind them and not ahead.  It is easy to self-define the victors of WWII as cultures standing firmly opposed to authoritarianism, to believe that nations not bound by the Iron Curtain would never choose to build their own, and to assume that millions of graves and monuments attesting to the great human sacrifices over the last century in the defense of freedom are sufficient safeguards against future generations ever detouring from the blessings of human liberty.  But all of these good and natural and easy mental prisms become mental prisons when they keep us from seeing what is happening in our own backyards.

The growing tyranny in the West has not happened overnight.  It did not suddenly arrive at our doorsteps with the Chinese Flu.  It has been a nightmare decades in the making.  The difference today is that previously slumbering citizens once sublimely content in the normal humdrum of their lives are waking up to realize that the enemies from our past have returned with a vengeance.  Free speech is treated as dangerous.  Western governments, corporations, and social media platforms engage in rampant censorship.  Race and sexual identity are used as the defining attributes of a person to the exclusion of talent, character, and achievement.  Teachers' unions openly demand the right to indoctrinate children according to the interests of the State.  Parents are threatened for believing that their children belong to them.  The criminal justice system is used as a place to punish political opponents and to protect political friends.  Religious expression is outlawed.  Leftists' "secularized religion" is imposed.  Freedom is disparaged as "right-wing."  Coercion has replaced consent.  Victimhood has replaced virtue.  Conformity has replaced individuality.  "Correct" thinking has replaced freethinking.  "Social justice" has replaced real justice.  And the protection of government has become more important than the protection of human rights.

For the newly awakened, there is a tendency to see all this carnage for the first time with fresh eyes and become overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the rot.  The corruption, criminality, and chaos have infiltrated everything once held dear, and the future seems hopelessly lost.  That hopelessness, however, is not based in reality but rather the "Us/Them" self-delusion that tyranny could not happen here.  It's not easy to accept that the great sacrifices of the past made in the struggle for human freedom have once again been squandered by a new generation of despots.  It is a necessary first step, though, before the righteous can throw themselves into the fight and get back to work.  And once people come to terms with the fact that tyranny not only could happen here, but that it is happening here, then they will realize that the struggle has only really begun in earnest.

Does anyone think the perverse and heavy-handed responses by the American government to the January 6 election protesters is a sign of strength?  Does anyone believe that the Canadian government's decision to enact emergency powers and martial law to manhandle peaceful demonstrators protesting medical mandates showcases institutional confidence?  Do the U.K. government's attempts to paint Brexit as a "Russian operation" project healthy trust in elections?  When French president Emmanuel Macron feels compelled to go politicking with tear gas and heavily armored vehicles near his side, does he strike yellow vest–wearing Europeans as fully in control?  Does the Department of Justice's habitual harassment of conservatives across the United States for their beliefs or its repeated attempts to put President Trump in criminal jeopardy really seem like the actions of a federal system secure in its future?  Of course not!

Western governments are terrified of their people today.  They are terrified of what their people believe, or else they wouldn't feel compelled to criminalize thoughts as "hateful."  They are scared to death of what their people might say to each other, or else they wouldn't engage in mass surveillance and blatant censorship.  They are fearful of free and fair elections, or else they wouldn't work so hard to manipulate and undermine them.  And they are absolutely petrified of a future where cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies free their citizens from the consolidated control imposed by central banks and spendthrift treasuries.  If discouraged and demoralized Westerners doubt that they have more power right now than their governments could ever possess, then take a hard look at the obscene lengths to which those governments have gone in order to maintain and preserve their jurisdiction.  Embracing tyranny under the sickening pretense of "preserving democracy" betrays just how weak these governments have become!

Václav Havel — dissident, political prisoner, and eventual president of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic — wrote a sledgehammer of an essay in the late '70s entitled "The Power of the Powerless."  In that indictment against the oppressive nature of communist regimes, he demystified totalitarianism as a system that forces citizens to "live within a lie."  What each citizen secretly believes does not matter.  Whether a citizen privately contests in his mind the State's constructed truths is irrelevant.  What is crucial for totalitarianism, however, is that each citizen repeat the State's lies, live within the system based on those lies, and perpetuate that system of lies in everyday life.  He uses the example of a grocer displaying a Workers of the World, Unite! sign because failure to do so could be seen as a sign of disloyalty to the State.  By displaying it, the grocer isn't expressing truth or personal enthusiasm for a cause, but rather proving his humiliating submission to a system of control.  

Now consider all of the slogans we daily encounter from government and corporate mouthpieces alike: Black Lives Matter!; Build Back Better!; Trans Rights Are Human Rights!; The Science Is Settled!; Save the Earth!; Stop Global Warming!; The War on Women Is Real!; We're All in This Together!; Abortion Is Health Care!; My Body, My Choice!  It doesn't matter how vapid, factually incorrect, or contradictory the political slogan.  What matters is that all of us repeat them obediently to prove our allegiance to and faith in the system.  And therein lies the key to our salvation.  

Question the lies, and you question the system.  Push back against the State's monopoly over truth, and you cripple the State's legitimacy.  Celebrate individuality, and you fracture the mental prison of groupthink.  Live "in truth," and you erode the control of State dogma.  When people realize that they individually strengthen the State by submitting to its lies, people then understand that the whole artifice of the system survives purely through their individual consent.  At that point, it becomes obvious that the small number of people at the top of the system are not really in control at all.  It is the large population — psychologically abused and tormented by their government — that wield power when they choose.  Once the powerless have this epiphany, they alone control their destiny.  

Identify tyranny.  Question lies.  Resist oppression.  Assert truth.  Empower the powerless.  Destroy the system's illusion of control.  Be not afraid.  It's that simple.

 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/02/the_power_of_the_powerless_is_real.html 

 

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Canada Has Become a Banana Republic, but With Crappier Weather

Duke reporting for RedState

Canada has officially slipped into the abyss of countries that claim to want to care for and protect their citizens, by arresting them on charges that sound like they were read off a Chinese fortune cookie. Yet how they treat those citizens is anything but caring — more like a temper tantrum by a child.

This is why the image I picked for this post is a cartoon done by Red State contributor Jim Thompson and was originally featured here with his post, “Justin Trudeau Expands His Tyranny With ‘No-Go Zones.'”

The cartoon accurately shows how the boy Prime Minister was born into wealth and privilege via a political family, and sees himself as some sort of Central American dictator. Much like his close personal friend Fidel Castro. Jim references this in his post (linked above)…

(Fidel Castro’s son) Justin Trudeau has invoked emergency powers to crush Canadian truckers and he’s doing it not with a gun, but with a fountain pen. Never mind that Ontario is lifting mandates at the same time; his invocation of emergency powers is meant to send a message, not just to truckers but anyone who supports them.

Trudeau triggered this mess with his over-the-top mandates that anyone leaving Canada into the United States and coming back needed to be shot up with something that is, at best, an experimental therapeutic drug. When the truckers and others said enough is enough, Trudeau immediately went into his reflex, authoritarian position, and started having delusions of grandeur of being the brave dictator that Papa Fidel never was.

RedState was all over the events in Ottawa Friday, showing the thuggery on display at the orders of the leader of a democracy — and here are some of the examples…

Ottawa Police Excuse for Horses Running Over Freedom Convoy Protesters Departs From Reality.

Ottawa Police Start Carrying out Justin Trudeau’s Authoritarian Mandates Friday.

Canadian Stasi Snatch Freedom Convoy Organizers off the Street as Trudeau’s Crackdown Begins.

As the articles above clearly show, this is not how a well-functioning democracy works. Hell, you don’t need to read anything, being there are hours upon hours of video showing what was happening for three weeks before now, and then the government’s reaction yesterday.

If I could paraphrase a chant heard here in the States during contentious protests… This is NOT what democracy looks like. You don’t send in the cops to remove protestors for protesting, when they are NOT harming anything. The streets were filled and cars were able to navigate around the city, although it might have taken a bit longer due to the mass of people. Boo Hoo.

Trudeau and his empty-headed rhetoric of claiming these people were a “minority” and were racists and homophobic fell on deaf ears because once again, HUNDREDS OF HOURS OF VIDEO showed different scenes. However, this is what people like the boy dictator always resort to, lying and covering up the lies, and hoping no one notices.

Dammit, Facebook Live.

One of the people I have been following doing those Facebook Live videos is a guy by the name of The Real Pat King, and on Friday, he was arrested and got part of it on his live feed. You can watch that part right here

Remember what I said about people being charged with things that sounded like coming out of fortune cookies? Here is one of the charges that the Trudeau Government is giving out like candy.

counseling to commit the offence of mischief

This is all being done under the Canadian Emergency Powers Act, which gives the tinhorn dictator extraordinary powers to do what he is doing and charge people with counseling those to commit mischief. They can be held for up to two weeks with no bail hearing, and they will have to sit and think about how bad it is to commit mischief that the thin-skinned Trudeau does not find acceptable.

Canadian journalist Andrew Lawton wrote in his piece below exactly what the overall implications of Trudeau triggering this act to lash out with his temper tantrum mean to Canada and her citizens. I also had to appropriate part of the title of his piece for mine, being it perfectly fits the mood.

A banana republic without the warm weather

Ottawa under the Emergencies Act is quite a different place from even a few days prior.

Yesterday, police set up a “secure area” and vowed to block anyone without a “lawful” reason from entering. Participating in the protest peacefully, to the Ottawa Police Service, is apparently unlawful.

Moreover, they say it’s incumbent on those they detain and question to offer evidence that they are allowed to be there – to prove their innocence, in other words.

This morning, Ottawa police threatened to arrest journalists who don’t “keep a distance” from their crackdowns on protesters.

This is in addition to the ongoing freezing of bank accounts without due process or legal recourse, and threats of removing protesters’ children and pets.

Mobility rights, freedom of the press, freedom of peaceful assembly, the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. These rights were edited out of Trudeau’s version of the Charter the moment he invoked the Emergencies Act, his gaslighting notwithstanding.

“We will not be suspending fundamental rights,” Trudeau said, somehow with a straight face.

Andrew has been a long-time member of the press in Canada, and he received some pepper spray in the face yesterday for doing nothing more than reporting on what was happening. He obeyed all commands by the police and was not blocking streets or aiding anyone in the act of committing mischief. He was reporting the story for the people of Canada, and he was attacked by the Trudeau Honor Guard.

Banana republics are generally places where the weather is warm and you can get a tan quite easily. So easily, in fact, that Justin Trudeau would NEVER have to put black shoe polish on to take a look, he would just need to bake the rest of his addled brain to complete the job of losing all sense of rationality.

Yet, when a Fidel Castro wannabe is ruling north of the 38th parallel–and there are no bananas or palm trees in sight for that term to be used correctly–I believe we need another name.

Maybe ‘snowball republic,’ but I’m not sure. I’ll have to think about it. While I do, America, you better get ready.

You know this is coming here.