fox files

THERE WAS NO INSURRECTION. NONE! IT WAS ALL A DISTRACTION,

The Democrat impeachment case against President Trump began with the false claim that “President Trump incited a violent mob to attack the United States Capitol during the Joint Session” and concluded with the false claim that he had engaged in “insurrection or rebellion.”

In between these two false claims lay a multitude of lies, misstatements of law, exaggerations of events, false conclusions, and fundamental attacks on our entire political system.

It’s no wonder that despite the media hysteria and political pressure, President Trump was acquitted of a baseless charge based on arm-waving, pulpit-pounding, zero witnesses and fewer facts. The Democrats littered their case with terms like “incitement”, “insurrection”, and “sedition” using them in the way that totalitarian regimes do to mean opposition to the regime.

President Trump’s defense team had the facts on their side while the Democrats had the lies.

The Democrat impeachment case falsely claimed that President Trump “imperiled” Congress.

The alleged peril came from an “armed, angry, and dangerous” crowd whose members, according to the Democrats, were waving “many American flags wielded” because “they believed they were performing a patriotic act in the service of their President.”

Only Democrats could use American flags and patriotism as evidence of a threat.

Meanwhile, poll numbers showed that in September, 41% of Democrats believed that there could be justification for violence if President Trump won.

Left-wing groups had been prepared to “flood the streets” with protesters.

The Working Families Party had, according to the New York Times, had “been in touch with bail funds that could be activated in response to mass arrests” and even had a “fund to raise money for the families of anyone killed in violence on or around Election Day.”

Preparing for protests so violent that people would die is angry and dangerous. So does 4 in 10 Democrats believing that violence could be justified if President Trump won the election.

But the Democrats and their media have built a false narrative to smear Republicans as violent.

Democrats, from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez on down, have claimed without evidence that they were on the verge of being murdered. While AOC’s claim is particularly absurd, there were no shots fired during the battles between police and rioters. The only weapons used were the familiar ones from many riots: fists, shields, poles, assorted bludgeons, and chemical sprays.

President Trump addressed a crowd that he knew “was armed and primed for violence,” the House Democrat impeachment managers wrote in their rebuttal.

In their original impeachment, they contend that, “armed insurrectionists breached the Capitol.”

It’s an odd sort of insurrection and coup in which the rebels never actually fire a shot in a country with some 400 million firearms. The Capitol Police drew guns and in one case used them, but nobody actually took any shots at them. Democrats, their media, and their political allies have repeatedly claimed without evidence that Senator Mitt Romney and others were on the verge of being killed. Yet the only violence that took place was between rioters and police.

The impeachment managers claim that “many feared for their lives”, but showed no basis for it.

Journalists and photographers were able to capture photos and videos of the rioters, most notably the QAnon Shaman, without being assaulted. The one single incident of an attack on a journalist involved an AP photographer attacked outside when he was mistaken for Antifa.

No one seems to have touched a reporter inside Congress, despite partisan hostility, leaving little basis for believing that anyone was going to physically assault House or Senate members.

Let alone kill them.

The Democrats have repeatedly played on the idea that Senate members, including Romney, were within minutes of being killed in order to bias the jury. That’s cynical and dishonest.

“President Trump is personally responsible for inciting an armed attack on our seat of government that imperiled the lives of the Vice President, Members of Congress and our families, and those who staff and serve the Legislative Branch,” the Democrats concluded.

The only arms were physical bludgeons used in exchanges with Capitol police. The Democrat misuse of “arms” to refer to poles and shields is deliberately misleading. The Democrats insist on claiming that the lives of everyone were imperiled, but they never actually proved it.

There was no insurrection. Nor was there a coup. Once inside, there was nothing more than vandalism. A group of protesters had made a strategic move to breach the Capitol, but once inside no efforts were made to secure the premises, to set up a defensive perimeter, let alone any of the fantastic claims that hostages would be taken or executions would be carried out.

Once inside, there was no plan. Offices were broken into. Some petty vandalism occurred. A few rioters posed for photos. Others cooperated with Capitol Police. The atmosphere was indistinguishable from student occupations of campuses in the sixties with no one having much of a clue what to do once they were inside the building itself and there was no one to protest.

There’s no excuse for violently assaulting police officers. But that’s a riot, not an insurrection.

The Democrat impeachment falsely transforms a protest and a riot into an insurrection with no actual evidence that the protesters were there to do anything more than protest a stolen election beyond a few people chanting violent slogans that they made.no attempt to actually carry out.

President Trump couldn’t be convicted of an insurrection that never happened. Redefining protests and riots as insurrections and support for them as incitement would mean impeaching nearly every Democrat who has held elected office in the last 60 years.

And the evidence for the incitement was even thinner than the evidence for the insurrection.

“He launched into an inflammatory speech that was bound to result in the violence that followed,” the Democrat rebuttal argued.

Democrats keep mixing inflammatory and incitement together. Political speeches, including their own impeachment histrionics, are frequently inflammatory. They’re not incitement.

The Democrat impeachment case hinged on President Trump using the word “fight” to his supporters, while ignoring the fact that he told them to protest peacefully. Democrat politicians repeatedly urge people to fight for their agendas. If using “fight” in a speech is incitement, then every politician in the country is guilty of incitement and can be impeached over it.

That’s a point that President Trump’s defense team made with a video highlight reel.

The Democrat impeachment case falsely claimed that President Trump had made “a militaristic demand that they must fight to stop what was occurring in the Capitol at that very moment.”

If telling people to “fight like hell” is “militaristic”, then what of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s “Now is the time to fight like hell” speech, and former Senator Barbara Boxer praising Senator Harry Reid for being willing to “fight like hell”? Is fighting like hell “militaristic” only when Trump says it?

The Democrat case accusing President Trump of incitement even began by noting that, “President Trump praised Giuliani, saying ‘he’s got guts, he fights.’” Does that mean that Giuliani physically assaults people, or that fighting refers to aggressively working toward a political goal?

It’s bad enough that the Democrats insisted that fighting is literal when Trump said it, but a figure of speech when they say it, but they also have to insist that when President Trump said it, it was both a figure of speech and a militaristic call for violence whenever it’s convenient for them.

“President Trump said that those marching toward the Capitol should do so ‘peacefully,’” the Democrats conceded, but then argued that he then spoke “using highly inflammatory rhetoric—exactly the kind of language calculated to incite violence”. What sort of rhetoric?

“Fight like hell”.

The Democrat argument for incitement ignored the literal meaning of what President Trump said, insisting that the Senate shouldn’t take him seriously when he called for a peaceful march, but should assume that when he said, “fight like hell”, he was calling for a violent insurrection.

“The tenor of his speech (and his repeated demand that they ‘fight like hell’ and ‘show strength’ to save their country) belied any desire for a peaceful demonstration,” the Democrats argued.

Their case for incitement rested on the indefinable “tenor” which is a wholly subjective argument that ignored what President Trump actually said. The Democrats then made the even more dangerous argument that Trump incited the violence because violence then took place.

“The insurrectionists themselves made clear that they understood that they were following President Trump’s commands,” the Democrats argue. Also, the Son of Sam believed that he was following the commands of a dog. Charles Manson believed that a Beatles album was telling him to start a race war. Democrats claimed to be following the will of the Framers by unconstitutionally impeaching President Trump. The deranged criminal behavior of the Son of Sam, Manson, and the Democrats is not the fault of the dog, the Beatles, or the Framers.

“Videos of the crowd eliminate any doubt that President Trump’s words in fact incited the crowd to commit violence,” the Democrats argued, because some people responded with, “take the Capitol right now!” That’s in line with the New York Times’ ethos that intent doesn’t matter. But the Democrats are making the even worse argument that President Trump’s intent can be inferred from the response of some members of the crowd who called for taking the Capitol.

President Trump had never called for taking the Capitol. He had called for a peaceful protest outside the Capitol. Nor did the Democrat managers ever explain how he would have benefited from anyone breaking into the Capitol, let alone “taking the Capitol”.

“President Trump’s speech did not promote election security—it exhorted a mob to attack Congress in order to overturn a free and fair election,” the Democrats falsely claimed.

At no point in time did President Trump exhort anyone to attack Congress. And how would breaking into the Capitol even possibly overturn an election? It wouldn’t and it didn’t.

The Democrat case rested on a complete disconnect between what they accuse President Trump of wanting to do and what any possible outcome of doing so would actually accomplish.

That is its fundamental structural weakness. It’s why impeachment had to fail.

To buy the Democrat case is to contend that the alleged insurrection would have overturned an election. The Democrats never actually explain how it could have done so. They’ve constructed a foolish and dishonest house of cards in which words mean whatever they want them to, evidence never actually needs to be presented, and motives never have to line up with reality.

President Trump wanted an election protest. He did not want an assault. And he certainly didn’t benefit from the violent confrontations between some protesters and police. Just the opposite.

Democrats had protested the 2016 election certification, both legislatively and physically, to disrupt the count without being accused, as the Democrat Impeachment managers accused President Trump of placing his “own political ambition above our Nation’s commitment to democracy” and thus having become guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors”.

If challenging an election is a high crime and misdemeanor, the Democrats are guilty.

But, once again, whether it’s fighting like hell or challenging an election, it’s not a crime when Democrats do it. The very same case in which Democrats claimed that challenging an election is somehow a crime, they repeated the false claim that, “Gore and many of his political supporters thought he would have won the Presidency had all of Florida’s votes been properly counted.”

Democrats can imply that Florida’s votes were not properly counted and that the election was stolen in the same breath in which they contend that claiming an election was stolen is an attack on the country and incitement to violence. But that’s the animating hypocrisy of the Democrats.

Impeachment failed. But then it was always going to fail because it was meant to fail.

Just like the Russia hoax, impeachment served as a pretext for national security abuses. It allowed them to deploy troops in D.C. until March. And now they’re plotting to extend it until the fall.

The troop deployment is itself theater. Much like impeachment, it creates the atmosphere of a national emergency that allows the Democrats to investigate political opponents as enemies of the state.

The Democrats have wrongly described a riot as an insurrection. That is the lie that goes to the heart of their case because it also depends on accusing President Trump of plotting to benefit in some way from the riot. But it’s also their justification for a national emergency.

Like their previous Russia smear, the accusations depend on outrage and false claims of an urgent threat because the Democrats have no actual evidence to back up any of their charges.

The Democrats falsely claimed that the 2016 election had been stolen by a Russian conspiracy. After four years of threats, smears, and riots, they belatedly declared that election conspiracies are an incitement to violence. That’s because they were the ones inciting the violence all along.

The Russian hoax and the insurrection hoax are both pretexts for a state of emergency.

Impeachment, like the Russia election hoax, never proved anything, never explained how one thing led to another, and never laid out credible motives. Instead, it followed the Democrat pattern of declaring an emergency and accusing anyone who questions it of treason.

And that has always been the underlying motive.

The Democrats went from attacking an election on false grounds to criminalizing challenging an election. But their one consistent theme has been to accuse their political opponents of posing a national security threat, pushing a state of emergency, and moving to criminalize dissent.

Impeachment, like the thousands of soldiers occupying D.C., was political theater. The reality behind the theater is meant to sweep away the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, due process and free elections as if they had never existed under the guise of fighting domestic extremism.

And that is a true emergency.

Frisco’s Folly

There is an axiom known as “Hanlon’s razor” that holds “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” It is similar to the more well-known “Occam’s razor,” the principle that the simplest explanation is typically the correct one. As an instinctual conservative, and as someone who strives not to be constantly outraged, I find these rules of thumb quite useful for moderating my thinking. It is simply better, and oftentimes more accurate, to first assume that our political or ideological opponents are ignorant but well-meaning rather than the opposite.

Yet stupidity is not without consequence, and while preferable to malevolence, it can be just as harmful. Take, for instance, the San Francisco public school board. Most people don’t pay much attention to any school board other than the one directly involved with their children (if even then), but the San Francisco Unified School District board has managed to make national news multiple times over the past two weeks for several controversial actions, highlighting the way school boards across the country, with little scrutiny, have a big effect on what and how students learn. Each of these moves was made with an explicit purpose of pursuing so-called “anti-racism” and far-left notions of social justice, which, while bad for students’ education, is not altogether unusual. What made these local decisions become national points of discussion was how utterly inane the reasoning behind these and other similar decisions revealed themselves to be.

Put frankly: There isn’t much thought put into many decisions that shape American education from an early age. San Francisco gives us a window into how this happens.

Late last month, the school board voted 6-1 to change the names of 44 district schools, including those named after George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and San Francisco mayor and longtime California Sen. Dianne Feinstein. According to the board, anyone who had “engaged in the subjugation and enslavement of human beings; or who oppressed women, inhibiting societal progress; or whose actions led to genocide; or who otherwise significantly diminished the opportunities of those amongst us to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” should not have schools named after them. Washington and Jefferson were axed for owning slaves, Lincoln because of the treatment of Native Americans during his presidency. Feinstein’s name was removed because when she was mayor of San Francisco in the ’80s, her administration replaced a Confederate flag at a civic center historical display after it was torn down by a protester.Recommended For YouThe COVID-19 restrictions in every state

To be clear, changing the name of a public school is different than, say, tearing down a statue, and school names are routinely changed to honor particularly influential teachers, principals, or community figures. But the reason for renaming matters, and the school district’s fails on all counts. Reducing Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln to a single disqualifying sin is a blatant erasure of history and of each one’s positive contributions to our country, something I believe most reasonable people outside of certain Ivy League graduate school classrooms would agree with. The criterion for Feinstein’s removal is just as hollow, albeit for a different reason, as the incident she was apparently punished for boils down to executing simple mayoral duties. Willie L. Brown Jr. Middle School, named after the longtime San Francisco mayor, was also changed because, according to the committee, he was “responsible for much of gentrification in SF while he was mayor.”

It gets worse. The district board committee published its reasoning for each of the 44 name changes in a Google doc publicly available online. Several of them rely on singular sourcing from Wikipedia — you know, that website teachers tell students not to get their information from without verifying elsewhere — and several of these disqualifying “facts” are provably wrong. For instance, as Joe Eskenazi recounted in San Francisco’s Mission Local, “While reading out a Wikipedia entry on the beliefs of 19th-century poet and diplomat James Russell Lowell, a committee member stated that ‘he did not want Black people to vote.’ In point of fact, a scholarly biography of the high school’s namesake states that … he ‘unequivocally advocated giving the ballot to the recently freed slaves.’”

Paul Revere’s name was removed from another school, nominally because of his connection to the Penobscot Expedition. This was a somewhat disastrous Revolutionary War naval mission against the British in 1779, but the committee inaccurately convinced itself during the meeting it was somehow related to the “colonization” of the Penobscot Indian tribe. “This is a telephone game-like invention of fact, and never happened,” reports Eskenazi.

One might think that consulting a historian would have been beneficial to this process. Yet committee chairman Jeremiah Jeffries openly scoffed at the idea. “What would be the point? History is written and documented pretty well across the board. … Based on our criteria, it’s a very straightforward conversation. And so, no need to bring historians forward to say — they either pontificate and list a bunch of reasons why, or [say] they had great qualities. Neither are necessary in this discussion.” Much of history is indeed documented “pretty well across the board,” yet that didn’t stop these pompous cretins from getting easily verifiable facts wrong.

In an interview earlier this month, the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner asked San Francisco Board of Education President Gabriela Lopez about the obvious flaws in this adjudication process, including why the committee did not ask any historians to testify. The interview is worth quoting extensively because it reveals the staggering depth of idiocy at play here.

When asked about whether historians should have been involved due to the fact that the committee got facts wrong, such as Revere’s involvement with the Penobscot Expedition, Lopez replied:

“I see what you’re saying. So, for me, I guess it’s just the criteria was created to show if there were ties to these specific themes, right? White supremacy, racism, colonization, ties to slavery, the killing of indigenous people, or any symbols that embodied that. And the committee shared that these are the names that have these ties. And so, for me, at this moment, I have the understanding we have to do the teaching, but also, I do agree that we shouldn’t have these ties, and this is a way of showing it.”

This is, of course, not an answer to Chotiner’s question, but just a regurgitation of woke buzzwords. And to his credit, Chotiner continued with this line of questioning, explaining, “Part of the problem is that the ties may not be what the committee said they were. That’s why I brought it up.” To which Lopez replied:

“So, then you go into discrediting the work that they’re doing, and the process that they put together in order to create this list. So, when we begin to have these conversations and we’re pointing to that, and we’re given the reasoning, and they’re sharing why they made this choice and why they’re putting it out there, I don’t want to get into a process where we then discredit the work that this group has done.”

Lopez believes that pointing out factual errors is somehow “discrediting the work” done by the committee, when, in fact, it is those errors made by the committee that discredit the work. Imagine being a student and telling the teacher grading your exam that marking wrong answers is “discrediting your work” and thus unacceptable. Worse still is that Lopez and the committee are completely uninterested in the work being factual, thorough, or thoughtful, but rather simply that it was done, and done by members of certain communities — that is, with a focus on identitarian box-checking rather than expertise.

“So, none of the errors that I read to you about previous entries made you worried that maybe this was done in a slightly haphazard way?” asked Chotiner. She replied:

“No, because I’ve already shared with you that the people who have contributed to this process are also part of a community that is taking it as seriously as we would want them to. And they’re contributing through diverse perspectives and experiences that are often not included, and that we need to acknowledge.”

An increasingly common observation is that “anti-racism” is treated like a religion by its woke adherents. This is undoubtedly true, but oftentimes, it is more blind and thoughtless. Christians and Jews and Muslims hold their beliefs to be true, but they do not assume that others must believe them too simply via fiat; instead, they marshal arguments to defend or convert. The way that Lopez and others of her ilk employ empty, anti-racist dogma is more like magic than religion.

In the interview, Lopez doesn’t seem to understand why Chotiner continues to question her on whether it matters if the committee’s facts are accurate because she already said the magic words: “We did the work.” Magic does not have to have internal logic because it’s inherently a cheat; it trumps the normal operating procedures of reality. It’s not a thing you question; it’s a thing you accept and move on from.

Like magic, these anti-racist tropes and woke buzzwords are employed, almost purposefully, to cheat the need to explain yourself beyond invoking the special words. But in the real world, words mean things (at least for now). Vague assertions without fact or acknowledgment of process or error are not how education is meant to function.

Will Wilkinson, formerly of the Niskanen Center, recently tweeted, “I don’t understand why people get so hyperbolically distressed about a school board somewhere they don’t live changing the names of schools for dumb reasons. It’s embarrassing to see.” For starters, pointing out that something stupid is, in fact, stupid is not the same as getting “hyperbolically distressed.” But more importantly, people have focused on this issue because they understand that slippery slopes are the way of our world. The slipshod method and specious reasoning employed by the San Francisco school district to remove Washington and Lincoln from schools is straight out of the anti-racist playbook and is not limited to one district or state or to the issue of school names.

These bumbling activist educators are more than happy to make sweeping changes on what is and is not acceptable to teach students based on nothing more than their inaccurate and unverified notions. Along with renaming the schools, the district also voted recently to abandon the academic admissions standards for Lowell High School, the city’s highest-achieving public school. The resolution explicitly sought to move the school’s focus away from academic excellence toward anti-racism, instead “framing its work around questions” such as “Where do we see tenets of white supremacy culture and patriarchy showing up … at Lowell High School?” and “How can we leverage Ethnic Studies, Equity Studies and Black Studies in this work?”

In October, the San Francisco Board of Education’s vice president, Alison Collins, spoke about the need to move away from ideas of “meritocracy” and academic achievement: “When we’re talking about … meritocracy, especially meritocracy based on standardized testing, I’m just going to say it, in this day and age we can’t mince words: Those are racist systems,” said Collins. “If you’re going to say that merit is fair, it’s the antithesis of fair, and it’s the antithesis of just.” Claiming that meritocracy and achievement are somehow related to whiteness is a preposterous yet pervasive idea in anti-racist circles. The KIPP charter school network recently abandoned its founding “Work Hard, Be Nice” motto because, it claimed, it was at odds with being “actively antiracist.” And marshaling such arguments, leftist reformers have taken aim at standardized tests and admissions criteria in schools from San Francisco to New York. Never mind that admissions methods that don’t rely on standardized test scores are actually often more discriminatory and subject to abuse — magic words spoken, analysis over.

In the background of all this leftist moralizing nonsense is the crucial fact that district leaders in San Francisco and elsewhere still refuse to open schools. As San Francisco Mayor London Breed stated following the school board vote to rename the schools, “What I cannot understand is why the School Board is advancing a plan to have all these schools renamed by April, when there isn’t a plan to have our kids back in the classroom by then.” Meanwhile, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, the district’s black, Asian, and Latino students are suffering tremendous academic learning setbacks at the hands of ineffectual online remote learning.

These are blatant ideologues, yes, but even the most ardent zealot can be interested in what is in students’ best interest. The bigger issue for parents to realize is that a great many of the people in charge of their children’s education are simply too stupid to know what that is.

CANCEL CULTURE – SCHOOLS, THE BIRTHING PLACE OF CANCEL CULTURE

In parts of “Aufheben der Kultur”, different aspects of Cultural Marxism have been explained. A thought that comes to mind after reading about Cultural Marxism is, how in the world did America succumb so quickly and thoroughly to this evil? The short answer: our children were/are vaccinated against liberty from the day they start kindergarten. I will expand and try to elucidate this below.

One person who doesn’t get quoted much in the discussion of early education designed by the Frankfurt School is Mary Parker Follett, yet, she lays out, in black and white, what she sees as the new state (which is the title of one of her books). This is an excellent example:

The training for the new democracy must be from the cradle – through nursery, school and play, and on and on through every activity of our life. Citizenship is not to be learned in good government classes or current events courses or lessons in civics. It is to be acquired only through those modes of living and acting which shall teach us how to grow the social consciousness. This should be the object of all day school education, of all night school education, of all our supervised recreation, of all our family life, of our club life, of our civic life. (Mary Parker Follett 1918, The New State, p. 363)

Follet believed that there is no such thing as an individual conscience, that, “We can have no true moral judgment except as we live our lives with others. . . our individual conscience must be incorporated in a national conscience as one of its constituent members.”

And what does she think of individualism and nationalism? “. . . as we see now that a nation cannot be healthy and virile if it is merely protecting the rights of its members, so we must see that we can have no sound condition of world affairs merely by the protection of each individual nation – that is the old theory of individual rights. Each nation must play its part in some larger whole. (National rights) are as obsolete as the individual rights of the last century. . . In our present international law, a sovereign nation is one that is independent of other nations – surely a complete legal fiction.”

Follett’s book, The New State, tells us what kind of community we will have and where individuals fit in (not). It is the outline of what will be taught (or not) to our children. That is shown, quite openly, by Brock Chisholm, the First Secretary General of World Health Organization (WHO):

“To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family tradition, national patriotism, and religious dogmas.

We have been very slow to rediscover this truth and to recognize the unnecessary and artificially imposed inferiority, guilt and fear, commonly known as sin . . . which produces so much of the social maladjustment and unhappiness in the world. For many generations we have bowed our necks to the yoke of the conviction of sin. We have swallowed all manner of poisonous certainties fed us by our parents, our Sunday and day school teachers, our politicians, our priests.

“Thou shalt become as gods, knowing good and evil”, good and evil, with which to keep children under control, with which to prevent free thinking, with which to impose local and familial and national loyalties and with which to blind children to their glorious intellectual heritage.

Misguided by authoritarian dogma, bound by exclusive faith, stunted by inculcated loyalty, torn by frantic heresy . . . and loaded down by the weight of guilt and fear engendered by its own original promises, the unfortunate human race, deprived . . . of its reasoning power and its natural capacity to enjoy the satisfaction of its natural urges, struggles along under its ghastly self-imposed burden. The results, the inevitable results, are frustration, inferiority, neurosis and inability to enjoy living, to reason clearly or to make a world fit to live in.

Man’s freedom to observe and to think freely . . . has been destroyed or crippled by local certainties . . . moralities . . . personal salvation . . . frequently masquerading as love. Brock Chisholm, Psychiatry, February 1946, pp. 7-8.

John Dewey, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, the Rothschilds, the British Royal family, the Frankfurt School, and many others had their hands in the building of our public school system to achieve the goals of molding our nation into one of useful idiots and useless eaters.

Exactly what John Dewey heralded at the onset of the twentieth century has indeed happened. Our once highly individualized nation has evolved into a centrally managed village, an agora made up of huge special interests which regard individual voices as irrelevant. The masquerade is managed by having collective agencies speak through particular human beings. Dewey said this would mark a great advance in human affairs, but the net effect is to reduce men and women to the status of functions in whatever subsystem they are placed. Public opinion is turned on and off in laboratory fashion. All this in the name of social efficiency, one of the two main goals of forced schooling. Dewey called this transformation “the new individualism.”  John Taylor Gatto.

Who was John Dewey? A Fabian Socialist, member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Marxist, and created the Progressive Education Association in 1919, and co-authored Humanist Manifesto I, in 1933. In his Manifesto, he states:

Today man’s larger understanding of the universe, his scientific achievements, and deeper appreciation of brotherhood, have created a situation which requires a new statement of the means and purposes of religion. Such a vital, fearless, and frank religion capable of furnishing adequate social goals and personal satisfactions may appear to many people as a complete break with the past. While this age does owe a vast debt to the traditional religions, it is none the less obvious that any religion that can hope to be a synthesizing and dynamic force for today must be shaped for the needs of this age. To establish such a religion is a major necessity of the present. It is a responsibility which rests upon this generation. We therefore affirm the following Human Manifesto (which is found at the bottom of this document).

John Dewey taught “Functionalism”; that “man is without purpose and he is a product of his or her experience and nothing else. Thus, all values must be found within the social context. Values therefore are relative and ethics are based on custom, inclination, or utilitarianism.”

What has it taken that we have almost reach this state now? The cultural Marxists have put enormous amounts of time, money, and effort into molding the American people – as well as much of the rest of the world — into compliant, submissive, spineless, empty-headed beings. Key foundations here in the U.S. took charge of un-educating our children. The Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford Foundations were at the start and at the heart of the corruption of our school system. Conclusions from the Reece Committee’s 1954 investigations of tax-exempt foundations using their funds for other than originally intended purposes, i.e., to subvert U.S. education:

The committee’s final report concluded that with a few exceptions (such as the Institute for Pacific Relations) these tax-exempt institutions had not directly supported organizations that supported communism, but that institutions including the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and Carnegie Endowment were using funds to promote causes that were “subversive” by the committee’s (and the Brookings Institute’s) definition of the term. Namely, causes that would promote a form of oligarchical collectivism.

Among the most notable findings of the Reece Committee:

From “1933–1936, a change took place which was so drastic as to constitute a ‘revolution’. They also indicated conclusively that the responsibility for the economic welfare of the American people had been transferred heavily to the Executive Branch of the Federal Government; that a corresponding change in education had taken place from an impetus outside of the local community, and that this ‘revolution’ had occurred without violence and with the full consent of an overwhelming majority of the electorate. In seeking to explain this unprecedented phenomenon, subsequent studies pursued by the staff clearly showed it could not have occurred peacefully, or with the consent of the majority, unless education in the United States had been prepared in advance to endorse it” (Dodd, 6). Thus, influencing educational curriculum is of the utmost importance to advancing revolutionary policies.

Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations had used their funds for grants with the following agendas in mind:

“Directing education in the United States toward an international viewpoint and discrediting the traditions to which it [formerly] had been dedicated.

Decreasing the dependency of education upon the resources of the local community and freeing it from many of the natural safeguards inherent in this American tradition.

Changing both school and college curricula to the point where they sometimes denied the principles underlying the American way of life.

Financing experiments designed to determine the most effective means by which education could be pressed into service of a political nature” (Dodd, 7).

The American Historical Association had issued a report in 1934 “which concluded that the day of the individual in the United States had come to an end and that the future would be characterized, inevitably, by some form of collectivism and an increase in the authority of the State” (Dodd, 10).

The Social Science Research Council and the National Research Council pushed educational curriculum that serves to indoctrinate American students to forego the freedom of the individual and “substitute the group, the will of the majority, and a centralized power to enforce this will – presumably in the interest of all” (Dodd, 11).

At a later meeting of the head of the Ford Foundation, Rowan Gaither, said to Norman Dodd:

Mr. Dodd, all of us here at the policy making levels of the foundations have at one time or another served in the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, CIA forerunner) or the European Economic Administration, operating under directives from the White House. We operated under those same directives. The substance under which we operate is that we shall use our grantmaking power to so alter life in the United States that we can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.”

Looking at today’s textbooks is not enough to understand what is going on in our schools. While reviewing many of them can actually make you ill, when you see the how and why these things are being taught (and have been taught for decades now, gradually working up to the outright lies, omissions and brainwashing) you will have a better understanding of the evil behind our public-school instruction.

Our teacher’s associations and others involved in education have been dumbing down our children for a hundred years. In 1928 at a Progressive Education Association meeting with John Dewey and others, a teacher named O.A. Nelson comments:

The sole work of the group was to destroy our schools! We spent one hour and forty-five minutes discussing the so-called “Modern Math.” At one point I objected because there was too much memory work, and math is reasoning; not memory. Dr. Ziegler turned to me and said, “Nelson, wake up! That is what we want . . . a math that the pupils cannot apply to life situations when they get out of school!” That math was not introduced until much later, as those present thought it was too radical a change. A milder course by Dr. Breckner was substituted but it was also worthless, as far as understanding math was concerned. The radical change was introduced in 1952. It was the one we are using now. So, if pupils come out of high school now, not knowing any math, don’t blame them. The results are supposed to be worthless. ( Charlotte Iserbyt Deliberately Dumbing Down of America, p. 38.)

In 1965, The Department of Health, Education and Welfare commissioned Michigan State University to write a report, Behavioral Science Teacher Education Program (BSTEP), that is designed not to only change our children’s values, attitudes and beliefs, but with far more malevolence (if you can conceive something even more evil than that) this program will make most of them into brain-dead slaves.

Description

Page 255 of BSTEP (288 of the PDF) has a chart “Detailing the Controlling Elite,” the Overview reads:

The Protestant Ethic will atrophy as more and more enjoy varied leisure and guaranteed sustenance. Work as the means (illegible) end of living will diminish in importance except for a few with exceptional motivation, drive, or aspiration. No major source of a sense of worth and dignity will replace the Protestant Ethic. Most people will tend to be hedonistic, and a dominant elite will provide “bread and circuses” to keep social dissension and disruption at a minimum.

Consequences

A small elite will carry society’s burdens. The resulting impersonal manipulation of most people’s lifestyles will be softened by provisions for pleasure seeking and guaranteed physical necessities. Participatory democracy in the American-ideal mold will mainly disappear. The worth and dignity of individuals will be endangered on every hand. Only exceptional individuals will be able to maintain a sense of worth and dignity.

I could stop here and you would have read more than you need to comprehend what our government plans for us. Don’t even say “conspiracy theory” here. This is an official document. You have to admit, they have chutzpah; they put it out there for us to see. Not immediately after they wrote it, but now you can download the entire document. SEE IT. Go to the links and read it. “No major source of a sense of worth and dignity will replace the Protestant Ethic.” This is one of their goals. Can they be anything other than evil? Every sentence in those two paragraphs is damning.

But I won’t stop yet. On page 251 (p. 284 of PDF) we see Hitler’s progeny:
Greater need to be able to work with children who are biologically superior (years needed before biological improvements will be reflected in the kinds of persons in the professions.)

Page 252 (285 of PDF)

Need to help students develop attitudes compatible with societal needs . . .

You don’t mind the government, through our schools, changing the values, attitudes and beliefs of your children?

On page 247 (280 of PDF) you will read:
For those who wish some structure, the following is provided. There are five broad categories with several sub-categories:

1. Futurism as a social tool and decision making by an elite
   2.Population factors
   a. Population concentrations
   b. Increasing youthfulness of the population and generational gap
   3. Biological capabilities
   a. Biological capabilities in controlling inherited characteristics and potentialities
   b. Body repair and health improvements
   4. Man and interaction dynamics
   a. Shifting social values
   b. Governance and services by varied agencies, organizations, and enterprises.
   c. A controlling elite
   d. Conflict and cooperation among peoples at home and abroad
   e. International arrangements and nationalism
   5. Man’s technical and natural resources
   a. Knowledge explosion and means of analyzing, processing, storing, and retrieving ideas and information
   b. Systems approach and cybernetics
   c. Diffusion of prosperity and increased social mobility
   d. Communications capabilities and potentialities for opinion control
   e. Transportation capabilities (supplemented by communications capabilities.
   f. Nuclear power
   g. Space and underwater explorations
   h. Environmental pollution

Planning to overturn the values of the Great American Experiment, the writers of this document have conceived a Brave New World that no longer sees values in the works of our Forefathers. They are renouncing the Judeo-Christian/Western Culture values that gave freedom to all who resided here and are inculcating the anti-human, anti-freedom values promoted through so-called social justice and global government.

There is little doubt that environments do change. To recognize present and future environments one must know the sources of change which create a new environment. Technology is the major source of change. It opens up possibilities of manipulating, mastering and transforming nature, resources, time and space. It offers a systematic disciplined approach to objectives, permits precision and measurement and a systems concepts that may be quite contrary to traditional religious, esthetic and intuitive modes. Because of technology, decision-making can be based on such techniques as simulation model construction, linear programming, and operations research.

Seeing the demise of the US’s prestige in the world, these writers see most humans as resources now like trees and oil and cotton, just not as valuable. In the next to the last sentence below, the canons the Occident (the Western World), are to be replaced by those of the globe. In other words, moral relativism at its zenith. Instead of sovereign countries choosing the values they wish to exemplify, all countries will have all values – at least all the values promoted by the UN, i.e., no values with a moral absolute: (p240 or 273 PDF)

Other sources of change in society exist. These include the diffusion of existing goals and privileges in society, the structural development in society, and the relationship of the United States to the rest of the world. Human capital rather than financial capital is considered urgent; sociological questions about relationships of new technological modes of decision-making to the political structures of society are raised; and there tends to be a shift from the product sector of economy to that of service.

That is BSTEP, and that was almost 50 years ago. I don’t know if you can even imagine how deeply this is embedded in our school system. But that was just one of the steps to bring about global citizens whose entire beings are to protect the state and to sacrifice their lives if necessary to achieve the goal of a cultural Marxist world dominated by the Globalists.

More recently, now that the goals of BSTEP are at, or next to, completion, social justice issue are being inculcated into our school children’s psyches. Besides the issues I mentioned in Part 4 of the Cancel Culture articles, our children are being, literally, brainwashed to accept things that would have been unacceptable to almost every parent even 20 year ago. And it is all to wipe out the student’s moral values and replace them with Cancel Culture vacuity.

Social Justice and multiculturalism are major tools in the Cancel Culture arsenal. In Crimes of the Educators, Samuel Blumenfeld and Alex Newman explain the Common Core standards on multiculturalism:

The standard . . . does not call for the Americanization of all these diverse students from different countries and cultures. What it also means is that the traditional Judeo-Christian model of American values is no longer to be upheld as the model for children to adopt in the public schools. A multicultural society is made up of many equally valid ideals that could serve as equally valid models for young Americans. No one is required any longer to conform to the once-dominant Judeo-Christian patriotic ideal. That culture is to be virtually erased from the minds of American students. . . . “As a descriptor, multiculturalism points to a condition of numerous lifestyles, values and belief systems. By treating diverse cultural groups and ways of life as equally legitimate, and by teaching about them in positive ways, legitimizing differences through various education policies and practices, self-understanding, self-esteem, intergroup understanding and harmony, and equal opportunity are promoted.”

Thus, multicultural education embraces much more than mere cultural pluralism or ethnic diversity. It legitimizes different lifestyles and values systems, thereby legitimizing moral diversity – which is simply moral anarchy. The concept of moral diversity directly contradicts the biblical concept of moral absolutes based on the Ten Commandments, on which this nation was founded.

How is multicultural education taught? It is not a course that is taught separately from the rest of the subject matter. It is, in reality, a worldview, that in the words of Theresa E. McCormick, a multicultural specialist at Emporia State University, “must permeate the total educational environment.’”

This is just an iota of the evils perpetrated on the youth of our nation in the desire to achieve a cancelled culture and, thus, bring us to full cultural Marxism.

How do we stop it? Can we? We certainly best try.

The first step would be to shut down the Department of Education. That would take away the total control of education in this country from the globalists running Washington. Next, we need to take back our schools in our towns and cities. Get rid of those school board members who are working for the globalists, and get parents and community residents who believe in the Great American Experiment.

The schoolbooks need to be burned (I never thought I would ever be in favor of burning even one book), but these need to be burned – all but one of each to remind us never to slip into this evil again. This is probably the hardest part, but we could reprint textbooks from the ‘50s for a stop-gap measure until we can get new ones with authentic history, true mathematics, and NO sick and twisted sexual education.

In 2013, along with many other parents, teachers and concerned citizens of Tennessee, I spent days reviewing the ‘proposed’ textbooks for introduction in 2017. I won’t go into the lies and brainwashing that we found in every book; and, yes, we took our findings to the State Legislature to ask them to reject these books. What did we get from it? I believe there were many people who had little or no inkling of what they were going to find in the books; that was good – a wake-up call for some. But, other than that, it was a waste of time – exactly what those promoting the books like to see happen. But, to my original point, those books should burn.

In the short and medium run, every parent who can, should homeschool their children. There are great curricula out there, Ron Paul has an excellent one. And in the meantime, as I said before, we need to take back our schools and watch over them like hawks this time. Nothing will be easy, but we allowed this to happen over 100+ years. We cannot expect to fix it in a day. Or month. Or year.

——————————————————–

John Dewey’s Humanist Manifesto

First: Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.

Second: Humanism believes that man is a part of nature and he has emerged as a result of a continuous process.

THIRD: Holding an organic view of life, humanists find that the traditional dualism of mind and body must be rejected.

FOURTH: Humanism recognizes that man’s religious culture and civilization, as clearly depicted by anthropology and history, are the product of a gradual development due to his interaction with his natural environment and with his social heritage. The individual born into a particular culture is largely molded by that culture.

FIFTH: Humanism asserts that the nature of the universe depicted by modern science makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values. Obviously humanism does not deny the possibility of realities as yet undiscovered, but it does insist that the way to determine the existence and value of any and all realities is by means of intelligent inquiry and by the assessment of their relations to human needs. Religion must formulate its hopes and plans in the light of the scientific spirit and method.

SIXTH: We are convinced that the time has passed for theism, deism, modernism, and the several varieties of “new thought”.

SEVENTH: Religion consists of those actions, purposes, and experiences which are humanly significant. Nothing human is alien to the religious. It includes labor, art, science, philosophy, love, friendship, recreation–all that is in its degree expressive of intelligently satisfying human living. The distinction between the sacred and the secular can no longer be maintained.

EIGHTH: Religious Humanism considers the complete realization of human personality to be the end of man’s life and seeks its development and fulfillment in the here and now. This is the explanation of the humanist’s social passion.

NINTH: In the place of the old attitudes involved in worship and prayer the humanist finds his religious emotions expressed in a heightened sense of personal life and in a cooperative effort to promote social well-being.

TENTH: It follows that there will be no uniquely religious emotions and attitudes of the kind hitherto associated with belief in the supernatural.

ELEVENTH: Man will learn to face the crises of life in terms of his knowledge of their naturalness and probability. Reasonable and manly attitudes will be fostered by education and supported by custom. We assume that humanism will take the path of social and mental hygiene and discourage sentimental and unreal hopes and wishful thinking.

: Believing that religion must work increasingly for joy in living, religious humanists aim to foster the creative in man and to encourage achievements that add to the satisfactions of life.

THIRTEENTH: Religious humanism maintains that all associations and institutions exist for the fulfillment of human life. The intelligent evaluation, transformation, control, and direction of such associations and institutions with a view to the enhancement of human life is the purpose and program of humanism. Certainly religious institutions, their ritualistic forms, ecclesiastical methods, and communal activities must be reconstituted as rapidly as experience allows, in order to function effectively in the modern world.

FOURTEENTH: The humanists are firmly convinced that existing acquisitive and profit-motivated society has shown itself to be inadequate and that a radical change in methods, controls, and motives must be instituted. A socialized and cooperative economic order must be established to the end that the equitable distribution of the means of life be possible. The goal of humanism is a free and universal society in which people voluntarily and intelligently cooperate for the common good. Humanists demand a shared life in a shared world.

FIFTEENTH AND LAST: We assert that humanism will: (a) affirm life rather than deny it; (b) seek to elicit the possibilities of life, not flee from them; and (c) endeavor to establish the conditions of a satisfactory life for all, not merely for the few. By this positive morale and intention humanism will be guided, and from this perspective and alignment the techniques and efforts of humanism will flow.

Biden, Pelosi Should Condemn Vandalism of Trump Attorney’s Home, Based on Impeachment Standard

House managers said much at former President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial last week about his supposedly failing to uphold the Constitution and allowing lawlessness to reign free.

Further, they argued, Trump should have condemned the Jan. 6 violence at the Capitol quicker that afternoon to help quell the violence.

The lead manager, Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, mentioned the Constitution in some form at least nine times in his closing and charged that Trump “failed to defend” the lawmakers.

By that same measure, President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should be condemning the vandals who attacked Trump attorney Michael van der Veen’s home outside of Philadelphia on Friday night.

The right to representation is guaranteed in the Constitution in the Bill of Rights as part of a system of fundamental justice.

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Because he fulfilled this function in the impeachment trial — from the Senate floor, no less — vandals smashed windows and spray-painted “TRAITOR” on the sidewalk with an arrow pointing to van der Veen’s house, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?creatorScreenName=RandyDeSoto&dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1361322871918886915&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.westernjournal.com%2Fbiden-pelosi-condemn-vandalism-trump-attorneys-home-based-impeachment-standard%2F&siteScreenName=WestJournalism&theme=light&widgetsVersion=889aa01%3A1612811843556&width=550px

If Biden and Pelosi truly cared about the Constitution and upholding the rule of law, they should be condemning the vandalism.Should Biden and Pelosi condemn the vandalism of van der Veen’s home?Yes No  Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

It is a form of intimidation, with the subtext, “We know where you live.”

Van der Veen became emotional when asked about the attack during a Fox News interview following Trump’s acquittal on Saturday.

“My home was attacked. I’d rather not go into that,” he said. “To answer your question, my entire family, my business, my law firm are under siege right now. I don’t really want to go into that, though. What I’d really like to do is talk about the merits of the case.”

“I’m not a controversial guy,”  van der Veen added. “I’m not politically minded, so to speak.”

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“I’m a trial lawyer, and I represent people’s interests in court,” he said. “And I’m disappointed that this is the result of just me doing my job.”

The Inquirer reported that van der Veen represented a client suing the Trump administration last year over changes to the U.S. Postal Service that the attorney argued would suppress mail-in votes.

The paper quoted another former client of van der Veen as saying he came off as fairly anti-Trump.

Regarding the partisan nature of the impeachment trial, the attorney told Fox News that he would like to see the country “come into the middle.”

“It’s so polarized on the left and on the right,” van der Veen argued.

One of the main themes of Biden’s inaugural address was the importance of unity.

“For without unity, there is no peace, only bitterness and fury,” he said. “No progress, only exhausting outrage. No nation, only a state of chaos.

“This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge, and unity is the path forward.”

How hard would it be for Biden and Pelosi to say the vandalism of van der Veen’s home is unequivocally wrong?

It would likely increase the Democratic politicians’ stature in the eyes of most sane Americans.

Biden and/or Pelosi could say something to the effect of, “As much as I disagree with Trump and what he said about November’s election, fundamental fairness dictates that he needed representation during the impeachment trial. It’s what our Constitution guarantees.

“Trump’s attorneys should not be attacked for fulfilling this vital role. I condemn all vandalism and violence against them and promise any who engage in it will be punished to the fullest extent of the law.”

I can picture many former presidents — Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter, John Kennedy, either of the Bushes and perhaps even Bill Clinton — saying something like that.

If Biden or Pelosi were to do so, it would be like rain falling on the dry desert ground of the nation’s current political discourse.

Alas, I don’t anticipate they will, based on the recent history van der Veen so powerfully highlighted in his closing argument on Saturday.

“The House managers argued this week that an alleged brief delay in issuing a public statement from Mr. Trump on Jan. 6 was somehow evidence that he committed incitement or supported the violence,” he said.

“Yet for months last year, Joe Biden, Vice President [Kamala] Harris and countless of other Democrats repeatedly refused to condemn the extreme as riots were occurring daily, as businesses were being ramshackled, as neighborhoods were being burned, as bombs were exploding,” van der Veen continued.

“They repeatedly refused to tell their violent supporters to stand down. Some even suggested that the mob’s actions were justified.”

Van der Veen noted that Harris, in fact, urged her supporters to donate money to bail out violent rioters so they could go on with their lawless conduct, as she stated they should.

While condemning the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, van der Veen questioned what lesson those rioters took from the several months leading up to it based on what they saw in the establishment media and from Democratic politicians.

“They apparently believed that violent mobs, destruction of property, rioting, assaulting police and vandalizing historic treasures was somehow now acceptable in the United States,” he said. “Where might they got, have gotten that idea?”

If Biden and Pelosi have any interest in dialing back the temperature in America and upholding constitutional norms, one small step they could take is disavowing the attack on van der Veen’s home.

But don’t hold your breath.

‘He’s lost his mind’: Levin TORCHES CNN’s Jake Tapper in fiery defense of Trump supporters

https://www.theblaze.com/shows/levintv/mark-levin-torches-jake-tapper?rebelltitem=1#rebelltitem1

Aim of Trump Impeachment Is to ‘Chill and Criminalize Speech’ that Opposes Leftist Agenda: Tom Fitton

Tom Fitton, President of Judicial Watch, in Washington on Nov. 1

Tom Fitton, conservative activist and president of Judicial Watch, told The Epoch Times’ “American Thought Leaders” in an interview that he believes the aim of bringing an incitement of insurrection charge against former President Donald Trump is to “chill and criminalize speech” that opposes the agenda of those on the political left.

Calling Trump’s second impeachment trial “anti-constitutional,” Fitton remarked that it amounts to an attempt to silence the voices of those raising issues of concern that run counter to certain political objectives.

“It’s really an attack on civil rights and President Trump, the civil rights of his supporters who share his concerns about the issues he’s raised,” Fitton said.

“And what the left is trying to do is outlaw opposition to its agenda. Number one on the list is concerns about election integrity,” he said. “If you raise concerns about it, you need to be de-platformed, or worse.”

House Democrats making the case for impeachment have argued that Trump set the stage for violence through repeated claims that the election results were fraudulent.

On the second day of the trial, Democrat impeachment managers laid out the case that the Jan. 6 Capitol breach was not caused by a single speech but was rather the outcome of a months-long model of messaging that sowed doubt about the election and fueled anger among Trump voters by reinforcing the view that they had been cheated out of a win and disenfranchised due to fraud.

They also alleged that Trump summoned a mob to Washington, gave the crowd its marching orders, and did nothing to stop the violence as it played out on television.

Trump’s defense lawyers have argued that Trump urged the crowd to demonstrate peacefully, and his Jan. 6 remarks about “fighting” were mere figures of speech no different from the kind that politicians typically make, and anyway allowable under First Amendment protections.

“To claim that the president in any way wished, desired, or encouraged lawless or violent behavior is a preposterous and monstrous lie,” Michael van der Veen, one of Trump’s lawyers, said Friday.

They also accused Democrats of waging a campaign of “hatred” against Trump, of using the impeachment trial to settle political scores, and of hypocrisy. On Friday, Trump’s lawyers played a montage of clips showing Democrats, some of them senators now serving as jurors, also telling supporters to “fight,” seeking to establish a parallel with Trump’s rhetoric.

“This is ordinary political rhetoric that is virtually indistinguishable from the language that has been used by people across the political spectrum for hundreds of years,” Van der Veen said. “Countless politicians have spoken of fighting for our principles.”

David Schoen, one of the attorneys representing Trump, said Friday that “this unprecedented effort is not about Democrats opposing political violence. It is about Democrats trying to disqualify their political opposition. It is Constitutional cancel culture.”

Asked to comment on Schoen’s remarks, Fitton said he believes they accurately reflect the intention behind the impeachment push.

“This is an effort to de-platform the president from our nation’s political life,” he said. “And to try to remove a player from the chess board who would be an effective advocate, a leader against their agenda.”

ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF THE DC SWAMP

FACT CHECKED!

“Things you must know to be informed: YES, THE GOVERNOR OF MICHIGAN USED TO WORK FOR GEORGE SOROS. *YES, CALIF GOV. GAVIN NEWSOM IS NANCY PELOSI’S NEPHEW. * YES, ADAM SHIFF’S SISTER IS MARRIED TO ONE OF GEORGE SOROS’ SONS. * YES, JOHN KERRY’S DAUGHTER IS MARRIED TO A MULLAH’S SON IN IRAN. * YES, HILLARY’S DAUGHTER CHELSEA IS MARRIED TO GEORGE SOROS’ NEPHEW. * YES, ABC NEWS EXECUTIVE PRODUCER IAN CAMERON IS MARRIED TO SUSAN RICE, OBAMA’S FORMER NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER. * YES, CBS PRESIDENT DAVID RHODES IS THE BROTHER OF BEN RHODES, OBAMA’S DEPUTY NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER FOR STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS. * YES, ABC NEWS CORRESPONDENT CLAIRE SHIPMAN IS MARRIED TO JAY CARNEY, FORMER OBAMA WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY. * YES, ABC NEWS AND UNIVISION REPORTER MATTHEW JAFFE IS MARRIED TO KATIE HOGAN, OBAMA’S FORMER DEPUTY PRESS SECRETARY. * YES, ABC PRESIDENT BEN SHERWOOD IS THE BROTHER OF ELIZABETH SHERWOOD, OBAMA’S FORMER SPECIAL ADVISER. * YES, CNN VP VIRGINIA MOSELEY IS MARRIED TO TOM NIDES, FORMER HILLARY CLINTON’S DEPUTY SECRETARY. THIS IS WHAT YOU CALL A “STACKED DECK”. IF YOU HAD A HUNCH THE NEWS MEDIA WAS SOMEWHAT RIGGED AND YOU COULDN’T PUT YOUR FINGER ON IT, THIS MIGHT HELP YOU SOLVE THE PUZZLE.

Now you know why no one is investigated. They all have their hands in the cookie jar! You might remember James Comey who investigated the Clinton email scandal and the Clinton Foundation, and made the final decision to not recommend prosecution by the DOJ. It turns out that the Clinton Foundation was audited by the law firm DLA Piper. One of the executives there was in charge of the Clinton Foundation audit. Who was it? Peter Comey, James Comey’s brother. Peter Comey held an executive position with the Washington law firm that did the audit of the Clinton foundation in 2015. Peter Comey was officially DLA Piper “Senior Director of Real Estate Operations for the Americas,” in 2015 when the Clinton Foundation scandals first broke and Hillary was preparing her Presidential campaign. Not only was DLA Piper, the firm where Comey’s brother worked involved in the audit of the Clinton Foundation, but according to the foundation’s donor records, DLA Piper has given between $50 – 100k to the Foundation. It gets even cozier. DLA Piper executive Douglas Emhoff is taking an extended leave of absence from the firm. Who is Douglas Emhoff? He is the husband of KAMALA HARRIS! Just a coincidence? Amazing if it is. You can’t make this stuff up! Another example of the DC swamp.”

A Caution to Americans: Nordic Countries Are Not Socialist Paradises

Stockholm, Sweden, on July 27, 2020.

I am often asked questions about socialism and communism. Not always being able to answer them, I have to do extensive research. I guess this is the situation many encounter: having to discuss these topics with family and friends.

One comment I received: “Yeah, I know communism is bad. But I want socialism, like the kind in Sweden or other Nordic countries.”

Indeed, Nordic countries are often used as models of “good” socialism by leftists, like Bernie Sanders, the Clintons, and Barack Obama. In 2010, National Public Radio praised Denmark as “a country that seems to violate the laws of the economic universe.” Although having high taxes, it had “one of the lowest poverty rates in the world, low unemployment, a steadily growing economy, and almost no corruption.”

In 2003, Sweden’s social democratic former Prime Minister Göran Persson used a bumblebee as an example to illustrate his country’s economy: “With its overly heavy body and little wings, supposedly it should not be able to fly—but it does.”

Dr. Nima Sanandaji, a Swedish researcher and author, wrote the book “Scandinavian Unexceptionalism: Culture, Markets and the Failure of Third-Way Socialism,” which provides a very good explanation of the realities in Nordic countries. Let me summarize the book for you in case you don’t have time to read it.

Culture—Not the Welfare State—Lead to Nordic Countries’ Success

“A Scandinavian economist once said to Milton Friedman (American economist, 1976 Nobel Prize laureate in economics): ‘In Scandinavia, we have no poverty.’ Milton Friedman replied: ‘That’s interesting, because in America, among Scandinavians, we have no poverty, either.’” —Quoted by Joel Kotkin, Chapman University professor

The welfare state is not the reason for the Nordic countries’ success. The Scandinavian societies had achieved low income-inequality, low levels of poverty, and high levels of economic growth before the development of the welfare state.

Before the implementation of welfare state policies, between 1870 and 1936, Sweden’s growth rate was the highest among industrialized nations. However, as the welfare state was gradually adopted between 1936 and 2008, the growth rate of Sweden fell to 13th.

According to Dr. Sanandaji, “High levels of trust, a strong work ethic, civic participation, social cohesion, individual responsibility and family values are long-standing features of Nordic society that predate the welfare state. These deeper social institutions explain why Sweden, Denmark, and Norway could so quickly grow from impoverished nations to wealthy ones as industrialization and the market economy were introduced in the late 19th century. They also played an important role in Finland’s growing prosperity after World War II.” (All quotations in this article are taken from Sanandaji’s book unless otherwise noted.)

The book indicates that religion, climate, and history all seem to have played a role in forming these special cultures. These countries have homogeneous populations with similar religious and cultural backgrounds. Protestants tend to have a very strong work ethic; a very hostile natural environment make Scandinavia a difficult place to survive unless a farmer works exceptionally hard; many farmers own their own land and have complete control over the fruits of their labor, so it has been financially rewarding to work hard.

Culture matters. It is the culture, free-market capitalism, and the rule of law that has made the Nordic countries prosperous, and made it possible to implement welfare policies without serious adverse consequences. It is also the culture that has fostered the success of the descendants of Scandinavian immigrants to America. Most of those migrants came to America in the 19th century before the implementation of welfare state policies. They were not elite groups, but their descendants are more successful than their cousins in Scandinavia, which suggests that the welfare state policies have impeded the growth of economy.

Southern European countries, such as Italy, France, and Greece, have adopted similar welfare state policies as Nordic countries, but have had much less favorable outcomes. Again, this strongly suggests that culture really matters.

Welfare State Policies Weaken the Nordic Cultures and Values

“It took time to build up the exceptionally high levels of social capital in Nordic cultures. And it took time for generous welfare models to begin undermining the countries’ strong work ethic.” —Dr. Nima Sanandaji, Swedish Researcher

Policies help to shape the character of a society. As Scandinavians became accustomed to high taxes and generous government benefits, their sense of responsibility and their work ethic gradually deteriorated.

When asked during a 1981–84 survey if “claiming government benefits to which you are not entitled is never justifiable,” 82 percent of Swedes and 80 percent of Norwegians agreed. But in a similar survey in 2005–08, only 56 percent of Norwegians and 61 percent of Swedes agreed with the statement.

Generous welfare benefits reduce the incentives for taking a job or working hard. It also weakens parents’ incentives to teach their children to work hard. More and more people have become dependent on government welfare payments. And the dependency would pass from one generation to the next. This growing population in turn voted to support more welfare and bigger government, and therefore higher taxation, which has pushed the Nordic countries toward more extremes of socialism.

Are Scandinavians More Tolerant of High Taxes? No.

“Fiscal illusion distorts democratic decisions and may result in ‘excessive’ redistribution.” —Jean-Robert Tyran, Swiss Economist, and Rupert Sausgruber, Austrian economist

Scandinavians have not been fully aware of the cost for a bigger government. Politicians have created a “fiscal illusion” in which a large portion of taxes is indirect or hidden, like those in effect before wages are paid, in the form of employers’ fees or employers’ social security contributions, and those included in the listed price of goods, like VAT. These taxes eventually fall on all people, but they are not aware of them.

Dr. Sanandaji described a survey conducted in 2003: “The Swedish public was asked to estimate the total amount of taxes they paid. The respondents were reminded to include all forms of direct and indirect taxation. Almost half of the respondents believed that the total taxes amounted to around 30–35% of their income. At the time of the survey, the total tax rate levied on an average income earner, including consumption taxes, was around 60%.”

According to a database of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Dr. Sanandaji’s calculations, from 1965 to 2013, all Nordic nations’ tax burdens have increased significantly, but most of their visible taxes have decreased, except in Denmark.

This has successfully created an illusion that government expansion would not cost much. So why not elect politicians that expand government size and increase welfare?

A Failed Socialist Experiment in Sweden

“Sweden is the world champion in ‘jobless growth’.” —Headline of a 2006 article in the Swedish business daily Dagens Industri

From the beginning of the social democratic era in the 1930s until the 1960s, Nordic countries had remained relatively free-market-oriented, and had similar tax levels as other industrialized nations.. It was at the beginning of the 1970s when radical social democratic policies were adopted, and the fiscal burden and government spending reached high levels.

Sweden went the furthest toward socialism among Scandinavian nations since the late 1960s. The basic idea was to replace free markets with a model closer to a socialist planned economy. “Not only did the overall tax burden rise, but the new system also discriminated heavily against individuals who owned businesses. As politics radicalized, the social democratic system began challenging the core of the free-market model: entrepreneurship.”

According to Swedish economist Magnus Henrekson, in 1980, “the effective marginal tax rate (marginal tax plus the effect of inflation) that was levied on Swedish businesses reached more than 100 percent of their profits.” This means that a private entrepreneur would actually lose money if he or she made a profit. Henrekson draws the conclusion that the tax policies were “developed according to the vision of a market economy without individual capitalists and entrepreneurs.”

The result of the policy is obvious: the establishment of new businesses dropped significantly after 1970. In 2004, “38 of the 100 businesses with the highest revenues in Sweden had started as privately owned businesses within the country. Of these firms, just two had been formed after 1970. None of the 100 largest firms ranked by employment were founded within Sweden after 1970. Furthermore, between 1950 and 2000, although the Swedish population grew from 7 million to almost 9 million, net job creation in the private sector was close to zero.”

As for the jobs in the public sector, they increased significantly until the end of the 1970s. At that point, the public sector could not grow larger because taxes had already reached the highest possible level. “When the welfare state could grow no larger, overall job creation came to a halt—neither the private sector nor the public sector expanded.”

At the beginning of the 1980s, “employee funds” were introduced in Sweden. It was to take away a portion of companies’ profits and transfer them to funds controlled by labor unions. The purpose was to achieve socialism moderately by gradually transferring the ownership of private companies to the unions. “Although the system was abolished before it could turn Sweden into a socialist economy, it did manage to drive the founders of IKEA, Tetra Pak, H&M, and other highly successful firms away from the country.”

The dreadful policy of “employee funds” was finally abolished in 1991, which is around the time that Sweden faced its most severe economic crisis since WWII. It took almost two decades for the employment to reach its pre-1990 level. As a comparison, it took only seven years for Sweden to recover, in terms of employment, from the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Finally, Welfare Reform

“Sweden was the more socialist of the Scandinavian countries a few decades ago. It is also the country that has reformed the most.” —Dr. Nima Sanandaji, Swedish Researcher

Beginning in the 1990s, almost all Nordic nations realized that welfare reform is inevitable, except Norway. In 1969, one of the largest offshore oil fields in the world was found in Norwegian waters. The oil wealth makes it possible to sustain its generous welfare systems. Since Sweden and Norway are quite comparable in many ways except for welfare reform, it is a great experiment to see the impact of the reform.

The reform in Sweden includes reducing welfare benefits, lowering taxes, liberalizing the labor market, and implementing gate-keeping mechanisms for receiving sickness and disability benefits. After the reform, from 2006 to 2012, the population supported by government benefits decreased from 20 percent to 14 percent in Sweden. In comparison, the population supported by government benefits in Norway decreased by only less than 1 percent in the same period of time.

For young Norwegians, there is very little incentive to work hard. Employers are therefore turning to foreign labor, including from Sweden. Between 1990 and 2010 the number of young Swedes employed in Norway increased by more than 20 times because of higher wages in Norway brought by oil revenues. According to a survey of Norwegian employers, three out of four answered that Swedish youth work harder than Norwegian youth.

After the reform, during the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009, Sweden showed impressive economic performance. The reforms lead to greater economic freedom, stronger incentives for work, and less reliance on government welfare.

Denmark and Finland also reformed their welfare systems. Even in Norway, some market reforms have been made. More are likely to come.

A Caution to Americans

The Nordic nations are returning to their free market roots. They have learned their lessons through their forays into welfare states or even tentative socialism, and have turned around from a dead end. We Americans should not fall for leftist propaganda and rush into a future that is doomed to failure.

When Corporations Become More Powerful Than The Government, Our Definition Of “Big Brother” Needs To Change

Throughout human history, our God-Given liberties and freedoms have often been brutally crushed by oppressive governments, and that is still happening all over the world today.  But in our time, an additional threat to our liberties and freedoms has emerged.  Global corporations just continue to get larger and more powerful, and in recent years they have been increasingly using that power to shape society.  This is a very dangerous trend because in the western world many of the constraints that our national governments are forced to operate under simply do not apply to corporations.  This gives them an enormous amount of leverage, and they are using it.

Here in the United States, the federal government still has a monopoly on power in areas such as border security, national defense and foreign policy.

But when it comes to the things that matter the most in the day to day lives of most Americans, it could be argued that the giant corporations have now become more powerful than the federal government.

For example, our politicians like to brag about how many jobs that they have “created”, but the truth is that they don’t actually create any jobs unless you want to count useless government desk jobs.

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Our politicians can help to foster an environment that will be favorable for economic growth, but it is the corporations that really determine whether the economy will grow or not.

In fact, it could be argued that the corporations are the economy at this point.

Over time, it has become increasingly difficult for any American to become truly independent of the corporate system.  Even if you own a small business or you work for yourself, there is a good chance that you depend on the big corporations in many ways.

If you doubt this, just try to “go it on your own” without ever using any corporate products, without ever dealing with a big tech company, and without ever bringing in any income from any corporate source whatsoever.

These days, most of our lives are defined by our corporate overlords.  They decide what job you will have, what your pay will be, what hours you will work and what your health plan will look like.

Beyond that, now many large corporations have decided that there are certain beliefs, opinions and values that their employees are not permitted to have.

By now, you have probably heard that a certain actress was fired by Disney for having opinions that were not acceptable.  That was a very high profile case, but the truth is that this sort of thing is constantly happening all over the country at this point.

As we move into the future, being guilty of “thought crime” is going to eliminate large blocks of people from ever having certain types of jobs.  If you do not pledge fealty to the current version of political correctness, you simply will not be permitted to hold a prominent position in society.

If your beliefs are considered to be “offensive”, you may get to mop the floors for the elite if you are lucky.

Even when you are at home, the elite want to endlessly monitor and control what you do, say and think.  The primary way that they do this is through the Internet, and in recent months they have tightened their control considerably.  The following comes from an opinion piece that was just authored by former U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch…

Consider the events of the last month. Social media sites banned the sitting president of the United States from their platforms. A purge of conservative voices on Twitter ensued. Amazon Web Services expunged Parler, a conservative social media site, from the internet. Just days later, YouTube blocked public access to a Senate hearing on COVID-19.

These events confirmed what many of us have long known: true political power no longer resides in Washington, but in Silicon Valley. Big Tech now effectively decides who has the right to speak, who has the right to assemble online and who has the ability to build a business in the digital age. For many Americans, Twitter’s terms of service agreement now has more power over what they can and cannot say in the public square than the First Amendment does.

In the old days, Americans could go to the public square and say anything that they want.

But now the big tech companies are the public square.

Freedom of speech is a thing of the past on the Internet, and more voices are being “deplatformed” with each passing day.

On Wednesday, it was LifeSiteNews…

YouTube just completely removed the LifeSiteNews YouTube channel. This isn’t a temporary ban; every single one of our videos is completely gone.

This greatly grieved me, because so many other pro-life voices have already been silenced.  We desperately need those voices, because if we stay on the path that we are currently on, there is no future for America.

On Thursday, Twitter suspended Project Veritas.

Project Veritas would like to continue to share their information in the public square, and I would like to continue to share it with my readers.  In fact, I share Project Veritas videos on The Most Important News all the time.

But Twitter has decided that Project Veritas has become too offensive.

“Cancel culture” has gotten wildly out of control, and it is starting to infect every area of our society.  Here is more from Orrin Hatch…

The pattern of “canceling” individuals for social media posts is well established. This can result in deplatforming, termination of employment or—if you’re baseball legend Curt Schilling—even losing your health insurance. We’re used to seeing cancel culture on a micro-scale: a newspaper editor being fired here, a university professor being suspended there. But now, thanks to an assist from Big Tech, we’re seeing cancel culture on a much broader level. Take the mass cancelation of Parler’s more than 10 million users, or growing calls to ban Fox News, Newsmax and other right-leaning channels altogether. If successful, these efforts will shrink the window of acceptable viewpoints in American society until conservatives find themselves on the outside.

As we continue to go down this road, just think about what this would mean for the next generation of Americans.

Children that are guilty of “thought crime” won’t get into good schools, they will never be allowed to have good jobs, they will be shunned by banks and financial institutions, and they will be banned or marginalized by all of the major entities on the Internet.

Basically, they will have to find a way to survive on the fringes of society somehow.

All of this is designed to force people to believe what they are supposed to believe.

In fact, it is dangerous for you to be reading this right now.

They are always watching everything that you do on the Internet, and expressions of noncompliance are not acceptable in this so-called not so ‘brave new world’ that we live in. Period.

Tennessee: 37-Year-Old Surgeon Dies After Getting Second COVID Jab

Tennessee: 37-Year-Old Surgeon Dies After Getting Second COVID Jab

America’s Frontline Doctor Simone Gold Warns Of Risks In “Experimental COVID Vaccine” (Video)

https://sonsoflibertymedia.com/americas-frontline-doctor-simone-gold-warns-of-risks-in-experimental-covid-vaccine-video/