Monthly Archives: February 2024

Current Events

Black Lives Matter “Too”

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Another must read gem from Greg Maresca

Sign of the times

By: G. Maresca

The political signage has sprouted among the inescapable roofing, paving, and real estate placards, as November’s election count down is underway.  On my daily jaunt, there was even one “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) sign among them nearly equaling the support for Joe Biden in a neighborhood as ethnically diverse as the Augusta National Golf Club.

Unlike the two Biden signs, the BLM one is sequestered away from the road and practically hidden from view.  The sign situated just off their manicured lawn and in the shadow of their well-upholstered Wayne Manor facade, appears to be a first-degree case of virtue signaling serving as free publicity for the Pied Pipers of Marxism.

What’s in a name?

Shakespeare’s Juliet may have believed, a rose by any other name is still a rose, but it was the Romans trusted “nomen est omen” — a name is a destiny because names, do in fact, matter.  If BLM had instead labeled themselves, Black Lives Matter, Too, perhaps they would have had a more benevolent welcoming.

BLM sounds like a social justice crusade for blacks, but they actually represent very few.

Perhaps the folks with the signage and those in professional sports fail to realize how BLM has hijacked George Floyd’s death in order to stage a second and perverted sexual revolution.

BLM was founded by a trio of Marxist lesbians whose online manifesto: “What We Believe,” seeks to “disrupt” the “Western-prescribed” family (traditional mother and father), who have emancipated themselves from “heteronormative thinking” (anti-heterosexual).  They also demand “reproductive justice” (abortions) and “foster a queer‐affirming network” (pro-gay/transgender) that is the core of their creed to remake America in their image.

When anyone takes a knee or plants a sign, they pay homage to BLM’s anti-Christian credo.

More proof was when BLM activist Sean King tweeted: “All murals and stained glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother, and their white friends should also come down. They are a gross form of white supremacy.”  Christian churches and statues are desecrated with the BLM campaign as its cover.

Their phrase “Black Lives Matter” emphasizes the duality of convenience.  In one instance, it’s a slogan.  However, when someone tries to extend it to all of humanity it becomes exclusive.

Objecting to painting BLM on the street is unassailable.  BLM’s fanatic platform cannot be questioned because, after all, “black” is in its name.

Bestselling black author Shelby Steele said BLM is a “distraction” from the real issues.  If black lives really mattered, they would be tearing down abortion mills and crack houses instead of statues and burning Bibles.  Likewise, they would address the high murder rate perpetrated by blacks against blacks.  By focusing on police racism, which by every available statistic has been in decline for decades, they reveal their true agenda: nullify the police so that chaos reigns over civic comity without which a unified republic cannot endure.

BLM demands that racism is systemic and that you either support them or you are racist.  The only thing systemic is leftism as BLM completely ignores the greater quantity of crime, deprived education, and fatherless homes infecting black communities.

By claiming to fight bigotry, they not only excuse, but abet it, which is just another form of bigotry.  You cannot simultaneously fight against violence while endorsing it.

Despite such radical ambitions, many folks stop at nothing to coddle and praise BLM.  Such is the consequence of today’s remorseless zero-sum politics.

When BLM supports charter schools and educational vouchers, fights against the tens of thousands of black abortions annually, and promotes that families with both a mother and father are the best chance of a child succeeding in life, their mantra and theatrics is just more divisive and violent political theater.

By displaying BLM signage, you not only sympathize with their cause, but provide license for them to engage in wanton violence and destruction.

Whether they can figure it out or not, but BLM are the heirs of the Jim Crow racists as they continue to mock everything the American nation was founded upon.

What really matters is how and why BLM wars against the Christian values of Western Civilization, and does so by sawing away at the very limb they stand on.

 

Originally posted 2020-08-21 12:31:48.

Current Events

PLEASE READ!!!!!!!!

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and then pass it on. This article needs to go viral. This writer is one of my FAVS; he’s intelligent, knowledgeable, backs up his opinions with researched facts, and is unafraid to speak the truth. This article is dated about a month, so some of you may have seen it. I was gone and off the net in July. A friend had sent it to me, but I had finally waded through the 100’s of emails I had received while in hibernation and found it yesterday. WOW, it is the blueprint of exactly what the left is planning. Victor has once again given us fair warning, a glimpse into the future should the left win in November. Call me a conspiracy theorist nut if you will, but I can see the very things he is pointing out and personally believe everything he says. Please read and make it go viral by sharing with nonevent in your email folders. PLEASE, for the sake of America.

 

Will 2021 Be 1984?

It’s all about the power, not the equality.

Victor Davis Hanson July 19, 2020

Elections

Cultural revolutions are insidious and not just because they seek to change the way people think, write, speak, and act. They are also dangerous because they are fueled by self-righteous sanctimoniousness, expressed in seemingly innocuous terms such as “social activism,” “equality,” and “fairness.”

The ultimate aim of the Jacobin, Bolshevik, or Maoist is raw power—force of the sort sought by Hugo Chavez or the Castro dynasty to get rich, inflict payback on their perceived enemies, reward friends, and pose as saviors.

Cubans and Venezuelans got poor and killed; woke Chavezes and Castros got rich and murderous.

Leftist agendas are harder to thwart than those of right-wing dictators such as Spain’s Francisco Franco because they mask their ruthlessness with talk of sacrifice for the “poor” and concern about the “weak.”

Strong-man Baathists, Iranian Khomeinists, and the German National Socialists claimed they hated capitalism. So beware when the Marxist racialists who run Black Lives Matter, the wannabe Maoists of Antifa, the George Soros-paid activists, “the Squad” and hundreds of state and local officials like them in cities such as Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis, and Big Tech billionaires take power. These are “caring” people who couldn’t care less about the working classes or the hundreds of African-Americans murdered in America’s inner cities.

Vice President as President

If Joe Biden is elected, the effort to remove him by those now supporting him will begin the day after the election and it will not be as crude as rounding up a Yale psychiatrist to testify to his dementia in Congress or shaming the White House physician to give him the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test in the manner that the Left went after Donald Trump.

It will be far more insidious and successful: leaked stories to the New York Times and Washington Post from empathetic White House insiders will speak of how “heroically” Biden is fighting his inevitable decline—and how gamely he tries to marshal his progressive forces even as his faculties desert him. We would read about why Biden is a national treasure by sacrificing his health to get elected and then nobly bowing out as he realized the cost of his sacrifice on his person and family.

In the past until now, there was zero chance that the hard Left would ever win an American election. No socialist has ever come close. Even Bernie Sanders accepted that the Democratic establishment for six years broke rules, leveraged candidates to drop out, and warped the media to ensure that he would remain a septuagenarian blowhard railing at the wind from one of his three houses. George McGovern was buried by a landslide. Most Democrats, after Kennedy and until Obama, never won the popular vote unless possessed of a Southern-accented hinting at centrism.

Only the Great Depression and World War II ensured four terms of FDR, who still knew enough not to let his house socialists ruin the wartime U.S. economy.

But in perfect storm and black swan fashion, the coronavirus, the lockdown, the riots, anarchy and looting, all combined with Trump Derangement Syndrome to be weaponized by the Left—and the media far more successfully than with their failed pro forma, legalistic efforts with Robert Mueller and impeachment to destroy the Trump presidency—have pushed socialism along.

Yet even that chaos and anarchy by itself would not have been able to bring the radical Left into power. Only a “candidate” like Joe Biden could do that.

“Good ‘ole Joe from Scranton” could offer the trifecta formula for a socialist ascension: a reassuring pseudo-centrism, decades’ old establishment familiarity, and his current cognitive decline. In a rare time of virtual campaigning, virtual conventions, and perhaps even virtual debates, Biden alone could successfully massage the virus/quarantine/rioting and panic to win the election, and then nobly exit.

This is not the analysis of a conspiracy theorist but the operating principle behind the Democrats’ and Biden’s basement strategy. It is for that reason that his vice presidential selection is shaping up like none other in memory. In short, Joe Biden of all people is now the face of a cultural revolution, although even he may not fully realize it.

Fundamentally Transforming Everything

What should we expect then if Biden wins and either steps down or more or less is left as a diminished figurehead controlled by the hard Left?

First, there is one theme that unites “the Squad,” Black Lives Matter, the globalist technocracy, and the international Left: unapologetic anti-Semitism. We will see overt anti-Semitism in a way this country has not seen since the early 20th century, all couched in ideological and politically correct attacks on “Zionists” and “the rich” and “Wall Street”—and why Israel has no business being a “Jewish state.”

It has already begun with an NFL player voicing Hitlerian tropes and praising Louis Farrakhan, and then being seconded by an array of rappers, woke Black Lives Matter activists and “Free Palestine” demonstrations. To smear “the Jews” no longer is grounds for an immediate and expected apology, but more “So what are you going to do about it?” Anti-Semitism is deeply embedded within the DNA of the BLM movement—and professional sports as well, as we saw recently from the warnings of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Charles Barkley.

“Eat the rich” sloganeering and plans for a wealth tax, and jacking up capital gains and income tax rates, all seem like they are aimed at the super-rich. But don’t think weaponizing the tax code, the government bureaucracies, and the culture itself will do much to the immense wealth of Jeff Bezos, the heirs to Steve Jobs, the Google zillionaires, George Soros, the Walmart fortunes, the lesser tech billionaires, the Facebook clan, or Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet. None of them will be touched.

Why would any socialist go after the sympathetic mega-funders of the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Google or Apple News, Twitter, or Vox?

Left-wing billionaires are not so strange as we might think. After all, they can afford to be socialists. They like the idea that fewer may follow in their footsteps. They think social activism offers them penance for their hard-driving acquisitiveness. Most of all, they feel their knack for making money is proof that they have the wisdom, the right, and the need to redirect the lives of less successful others—and for the good of all.

Otherwise, the plutocratic class will spend hundreds of millions—a proverbial drop in the bucket in their fortunes—to consult with lawmakers about how to avoid their own progressive legislation and policies. It will hire phalanxes of tax lawyers, trust evaders, and philanthropy scammers that will make the architects of the Clinton Foundation seem a poor joke.

The real enemy in 2021 would be the upper-middle-class as it always is, the kulaks—and not really the professionals such as the lawyers, media grandees, and professors—although many should expect to become collateral damage.

The special targets will be the self-employed successful business class. The enemies of the people will be mostly those striving to be millionaires who run local insurance agencies, the store owners, salespeople, the successful medical practices, car dealerships, large family farms, the millions who keep the country competitive, innovative, and prosperous.

All of them lack the romance of the poor and the cultural tastes of the rich, but for the most part, they are just too damn informed and stubborn to be tolerated. They need to be marginalized by taxes, regulations, and a second-wave cultural assault that renders the prior “you didn’t build that,” “spread the wealth,” “no time to profit,” and “at some point you’ve made enough money” mere sandbox chatter.

The Coming Segregation

Race? We already see the new contours of the always changing commandments of the anointed posted on the Animal Farmbarnyard wall. A new segregation and apartheid will be sold as needed justice and enlightenment. Admission quotas and hiring on the basis of race will no longer be subtle but overt and triumphant. Separate facilities predicated on race will be common on campuses. What will happen if someone of the wrong race drinks from a fountain in a racially-segregated safe space?

Equality or superiority of result for the favored will be “justice.” Reparations will follow. The sort of creepy anti-white propaganda we saw at the Smithsonian Museum of African-American History and Culture will become orthodoxy. Some of the U.S. GDP won’t be devoted to production but rather toward ferreting out “racism” as they reconstruct society in order endlessly to punish “racists.”

Merit will soon become a dirty, counterrevolutionary word.

Discrimination and the one-drop racial rules of the Old Confederacy will be re-branded as woke, hip, and progressive. Expect more Rachel Dolezals and Ward Churchills. In Seattle, the city conducted whites-only, segregated reeducation sessions, teaching the naive how to undo their “whiteness.” It was overseen by an office of “civil rights” and sought to ensure that white employees give up their “comfort,” and even their supposed “guaranteed physical safety.” They were to curb any “expectations or presumptions of emotional safety,” or “control over other people and over the land,” and probably end “relationships with some other white people.”

All that was missing were the Maoist dunce caps.

In 2020 we call racism and segregation “civil rights.” I doubt very many graduates of Seattle’s reeducation efforts decided to dismantle their home security system, will vote to defund the police, will declare their mortgaged home community property, or plan to shun their suburban neighbors if they appear too white looking. But that’s not the point. Instead, the state is joining the racists by institutionalizing venomous tribalism. An Oregon County tried to demand masks for all its residents except African-Americans—the sort of apartheid policy no one in his right mind four months ago would have imagined could be tried in the United States.

Borders? The wall will stop dead in its tracks, and what has been built likely dismantled. Citizenship and residency will be further blurred, with the rights of citizens insidiously transferred to resident aliens. Perhaps the word “citizen” will disappear as discriminatory. Illegal immigration will be favored over legal immigration, in that the latter is too diverse, too meritocratic, and too politically unpredictable.

Farewell to Institutions, Hello to “Progress”

The military? A progressive’s dream. It will transcend its current race and gender edicts in a way no elected slow-coach legislature could imagine. Virtue signaling and quotas will be the quickest route to flag-officer rank, and with it a nice retirement as a woke lobbyist, a wise-man member on an enlightened defense contractor board, a Wall Street “security analyst,” or a cable TV paid woke pundit. How a colonel handled “diversity,” not whether he understands tanks, planes, choppers, or guns will determine his chances at generalship. The Pentagon budget will be re-branded, as “national security” is no longer defined in anachronistic terms like hardware, missiles, ships, and planes, but by diversity and ending implicit bias—a sort of vast ongoing city of Seattle training session.

Finance? The country is broke. Yet the Left wants to borrow trillions for the New Green Deal, reparations, and massive new and expanded old social projects.

It can do that only through one of three ways. It can institutionalize zero or negative interest for a decade or so until the debt crushes the United States. Or it can inflate the economy, eroding accumulated wealth and paying off debt in funny money.

Or it can follow the Chrysler creditor model of the Obama Administration, and begin selectively renouncing debt obligations or reordering the priorities of various creditors. At first, the effort will appear noble and popular by canceling all student debt. But soon the Left will extend such exemptions to minority mortgages and credit card obligations. Debt cancellation and “starting over,” based on race, will be a cornerstone of the “transformation” as it has been since the age of Catiline.

High tech? Like the media, it will formally fuse into the progressive party, as elites go back and forth between jobs in Washington and those at Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. Everything from the order of internet searches to censoring ads and videos for their political content will be green-lighted. Silicon Valley will be seen as the most important asset of the Left, both for its political utility in blocking conservative expression, and its enormous wealth that fuels leftist campaigns.

Finally, if the Senate and House go progressive along with the presidency, the filibuster will end. And we will see fundamental constitutional changes never quite envisioned. Expect legislation to make the Electoral College inert without the use of a clumsy constitutional amendment process.

The Supreme Court will be enlarged and packed on a majority congressional vote to neuter existing conservatives until reinforcements of progressive new justices arrive.

Some will wish to make senators popularly elected on the basis of demography or the Senate expanded into the hundreds—anything to do away with the paleo-idea of two senators from Montana or Wyoming standing in the way of the bending arc of history.

Such are the wages of a global pandemic, national quarantine, sudden recession, cultural revolution in the streets—and an impaired Joe Biden.

Add it all up, and 2020 may be the first, best, and last chance for “1984”—and the Left knows it.

 

Amen! Thank you Victor, I pray America is awake and listening to you!

Originally posted 2020-08-20 11:03:05.

Current Events

A Poem

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A man went to the Great Lakes Military Cemetery in Holly, Michigan. He took some photos while reflecting on what’s going on in our country today.

Then he wrote this simple poem:

          I don’t see any color here,
          The headstones look the same;
          No black no brown no white skin tone
          There’s no one here to blame.

          These soldiers fought and died for you;
          Their color you can’t see;
          Your rights are still protected;
          Here’s the place to take a knee.

Originally posted 2020-08-19 09:55:02.

Current Events

Why Trump Should Win

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And why the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Bruce Thornton

Aug 14, 2020

Less than three months from election day, Democrats and NeverTrump Republicans keep telling us (and themselves) that President Trump “is in trouble” in his bid for reelection. Trump’s enemies chant poll numbers like incantations, even though that juju failed spectacularly in 2016. They harp on Trump’s media-manufactured “failures” like his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and his response to the ongoing riots instigated by Black Lives Matter and its Antifa brown-shirts. And as has been true from the start, the bulk of their criticisms are really about subjective and self-serving standards of “comportment” and “decorum” and “norms”  that reflect the bipartisan “cognitive elite” and big-government functionaries.

But a more sober analysis suggests that the president has a faithful and energized base and a record of accomplishment compared to the Dems’ lunge to the lunatic left. Moreover, the spectacle of civic destruction, increasing violent crime, and nakedly partisan and authoritarian excesses on the part of blue-state governors and mayors will give Trump a decided edge with the bulk of ordinary Americans.

First, Trump’s economic success has been stalled not because of any missteps by his administration, but by a pandemic originating in totalitarian China and worsened by its willful obscuring of the virus’s origins and lethality. Voters with common sense and fairness know that the current recession is not Trump’s fault, and that having rescued the economy once, he can do so again. They also can see that blue-state governors have needlessly exacerbated the economic damage by imposing draconian and arbitrary lockdown orders based not on science, but on their increasingly obvious desire to wound the president politically even if it means immiserating their own citizens.

In contrast to Trump’s successful economics, over the last few months the Democrats have abandoned their traditional center-left governing philosophy and embraced a socialist ideology that for over a century has serially failed everywhere it has been tried. Indeed, during this year’s Democrat presidential primaries, the party establishment was trying to neuter Bernie Sanders and his faction just as they did in 2016. They know that socialism and its growth-killing policies like the Green New Deal are not a winning platform for the mass of voters outside the bi-coastal blue enclaves.

Yet the Dem standard-bearer Joe Biden has endorsed wacky proposals like eliminating cheap carbon-based energy, restoring punitive taxes, and increasing the redistribution of wealth through handouts like free college tuition and Medicare for all, which more centrist Democrats know are electoral poison. It’s hard to imagine that in just six months the same voters who the Dems thought would be repelled by such policies have suddenly develop affection for them.

So on that score, come November voters will have a choice between returning to the policies that created an economy that reduced unemployment to historic levels, elevated GDP to a level Obama’s court-economist claimed was impossible, increased growth in wages, and brought back manufacturing jobs that Obama sneered would require a “magic wand”; or trying once again failed policies of intrusive job-killing regulations, bloated and overweening federal bureaucracies, tax-rates that punish the productive, and an ever-expanding roster of citizens dependent on government overlords rather than looking to their families, communities, churches, states, and own characters for support in managing their lives.

Next, Donald Trump has fiercely waged war on the political correctness and the toxic “cancel culture” it engenders. He excoriates with brutal wit the preposterous charges of thought-crimes like “racism” or “xenophobia,” exposing their vapidity and hypocrisy. He shrewdly contrasts the Democrats’ neglect of average black citizens whose vote they take for granted, with his own achievements such as sentencing reform, increased aid to Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and historic rates of black employment. And he mocks the prissy, pearl-clutching dudgeon of the “woke” left who ransack American history for grievous offenders to condemn, even as the monstrous crimes and genocides of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and their imitators like Castro, Chavez, and Maduro, are ignored or celebrated.

Additionally, Trump has called out the Dems for endorsing the “woke” culture’s totalitarian intolerance and opposition to free speech, not to mention their eagerness to gut the Bill of Rights. On November 3, voters will have a choice between a president who defends their unalienable rights like freedom of speech, assembly, and worship, along with the right “to keep and bear arms”; or a party that wants to limit or eliminate all of them by passing ever-more onerous gun laws, imposing censorship through “hate speech” laws, and privileging casinos and violent riots over churches and temples.

Finally, he has battled the Salemite persecutions of men falsely accused of “sexual assault.” He vigorously supported Bret Kavanaugh in 2018 when the Democrats turned his televised Supreme Court confirmation hearings into a Democrat star-chamber prosecution of the jurist for an alleged 36-year-old sex crime his accuser could not substantiate with a speck of evidence. And he has ended some of the same sort of unjust, unconstitutional practices rife on college campuses for decades––an early and particularly malevolent form of “cancel culture” that has destroyed the lives of hundreds of college students.

All that would be enough to put Donald Trump back in the White House. But that’s not all.

On top of Trump’s record, the Democrats’ candidate is one of the most disastrous since George McGovern in 1972. In nearly fifty years of  “public service,” Joe Biden has no record of legislative accomplishments to run on, and the few he used to brag about, such as the 1994 “tough on crime” bill, he has disowned, denounced, and desperately apologized for. The bulk of his time in the Senate has been spent tending to the interests of banks chartered in his home-state of Delaware. It was Biden who made sure government-backed student loan debt cannot be discharged through bankruptcy. Biden’s and his family’s sketchy financial dealings with China are even more troubling given that we clearly are in a cold war with that totalitarian thug-state. No surprise that the intelligence community has determined China prefers Biden in the upcoming election.

And don’t forget Biden’s history of plagiarism, gaffes, lies, and specious fabrications in anecdotes about his past. He serially accused the driver of the truck involved in the car accident that killed his wife and daughter of being drunk, thus ruining the man’s life, when in fact he wasn’t and Biden’s wife was responsible for the crash. And he has lied about his law-school career. As Derek Hunter writes on Town hall,

Everything Joe said in that exchange [with a voter in 1987] was untrue. He didn’t have an academic scholarship; he hadn’t won a moot court competition; he wasn’t listed as an outstanding student. Even though his claim of being in the “bottom two-thirds” of his class and finishing in the “top half” makes no sense because there’s enormous overlap between the two, he actually finished 76th in a class of 85 students. 

From facing down a gang-banger named “Corn Pop,” to attempting to visit Nelson Mandela in prison, Biden has repeatedly told preposterous lies. And don’t forget, there are yards of footage of Joe inappropriately putting his hands on women and girls and sniffing their hair, offenses that if committed by a Republican would have sparked a national spasm of MeToo hysteria.

And if that troubling record of duplicity and unwelcome fondling isn’t enough, it has been clear for months that Biden suffers from the early stages of dementia. FOX News has made a number of video catalogues of Joe’s lapses in memory and bursts of anger of the sort typical of people with dementia. This bodes ill for Biden, as David Catron has pointed out. Reviewing the collapse of Mike Dukakis’ presidential campaign against George H.W. Bush in 1988, Catron writes, “[T]he liabilities of [Biden] in 2020 involve the same issues that dogged [Dukakis] in 1988 — mental fitness to handle the duties of the presidency, difficulty connecting with the minority voters without whose support he can’t win, and the willingness to brand any opponent a racist who dares to bring up ‘law and order.’”

Finally, the “law and order” issue that Catron mentions, one the Republicans have owned since 1968, has been daily advertised in the coverage of killings, injuries, vandalism, and looting springing from “woke” protests and riots, which have led to forced police stand-downs and violent crime rates skyrocketing in blue-state cities­­­––in the first six months of this year, Chicago’s murder rate increased 38%, with 440 deaths including four children under 10 murdered over five weeks. Worse, the Democrats have endorsed and rationalized the violent protests, nor has candidate Biden, the alleged “moderate,” forcefully condemned it. This state of affairs is reminiscent of 1968, when the “silent majority” expressed its anger at the riots and bombings of the Sixties by electing Richard Nixon.

Biden’s handlers know all this, and so have sequestered him in his basement, letting him out only briefly and reducing his opportunities for impromptu speaking. And they’re working mightily to get the presidential debates cancelled, for they know that in an unscripted, personal encounter, the street-fighting orator Donald Trump will beat Biden like a rented mule. It seems highly improbable that anyone can become the leader of the most powerful free country in history by hiding from the voters.

Nor will Biden’s pick for vice-president, California senator Kamala Harris, help him overcome these challenges and deficiencies. Harris is one of the most progressive and aggressively “woke” members of the Senate. She has endorsed the far-left policies of the Sanders-AOC wing like the Green New Deal, Medicare For All, forgiving student-loan debt, free college tuition, and restoring the tax-and-spend excesses of the Obama years that gave us one of the most sluggish recovery from a recession ever. And she is a clumsy, off-putting campaigner, with little appeal for the moderates Biden supposedly attracts.

But Harris will be a problem for leftists as well. Seeking future votes, as a prosecutor and AG Harris took a tough-on-crime tack that saw high incarceration rates for low-level drug offenders, a sore point with the BLM faction of the party. And don’t forget her vicious attacks on Biden during the primary campaign: She clearly implied that he is a racist for saying nice things about segregationist senators like Strom Thurmond, and said that she believed the woman who has accused Biden of sexual assault. Her cringing, treacly acceptance speech graphically highlights her career-long opportunism and hypocrisy, and no doubt will make effective ads for the Trump campaign.

So what will be the saner choice in November: an incumbent president with a style that puts some voters off, but cheers others, who battles against the intolerant and illiberal “cancel culture,” and who has one of the best records of achievement in a president’s first term? Or a mediocre career pol with no record of achievement, a long history of gaffes, corruption, and lies, an economy-killing policy program imposed by the party’s extreme left, and a “woke” ideology that sanctions violence not just against people and property, but America itself and its unique virtues and achievements?

Trump should win on November 3, but as a philosopher once said, “Should ain’t is.” The stakes couldn’t be higher: saving our Constitutional order of unalienable rights, citizen sovereignty, and limited government; or watching it descend further into a technocratic despotism over dependent clients, as our safety and security are increasingly compromised.

Originally posted 2020-08-16 15:07:46.

Current Events

Comedic Lives Matter

2 Comments

Another great article filled with truths about the sick society in which we find ourselves today. Thank you Greg.

By: G. Maresca

 With the recent death of Carl Reiner, some perspective is in order.  The longtime actor, writer, director, and straight man for Mel Brooks believed humor fostered his longevity and his curtain call proved it by enduring two years short of a century.

For decades, Reiner’s witticisms and wisecracks were a perennial favorite that crossed generations.  He was the last regular of “Your Show of Shows” and “Caesar’s Hour” that had no hidden agenda other than obtaining laughs.  The comedians, writers and producers of Reiner’s era possessed intelligence, imagination and talent.

 Today’s comedic monologues, quips and routines have been lost to angry, political diatribes that are more lecture than laughter – Fractured Farley Tales, they ain’t.

 Late night television has devolved into ghastly versions of an agonizing Chris Cuomo and Maureen Dowd where self-righteous, condescension is the standard.

Comedy?

It departed with Johnny Carson.

Even David Letterman in his later years succumbed to spreading the butter of the leftist credo.  Proving that comedy, through political correctness, had become another weapon of leftism.

The entertainment industry promotes leftism and maligns anyone who disagrees.  One’s humor is another’s insult and the left has taken this to the extreme.  Leftists are anything but funny because their partisan snark and loathing is dispiriting and adds nothing to the conversation.

Once upon a time in America, we didn’t know the personal politics of Carson, Jack Parr, Bob Hope or Carl Reiner, nor did we really care.  Comics were not intimidated by anyone or anything and every person, place and thing was fair game and everyone was in on the jokes.

Today, any political satire from the conservative or libertarian side of the house that fails to meet leftist orthodoxy is deemed hateful.  You are “racist” if you joke about Barack Obama, a “homophobe” if you poke fun at gays, “transphobic” if you do an impression of PA Secretary of Health Dr. Levine, and “sexist” if you are not on board with the platoon of fuming feminists who populate The View.

Since the time of the ancient Greeks, free societies have used political satire as a means for introspection, while at the same time keeping government in check. Autonomous and unconstrained comedic talent has the trifecta capacity to make one laugh, contemplate and think about an issue(s).

The problem with today’s political satire is not that it derides and ridicules. Rather, our politically correct epoch has rendered it archaic and vain.  Lost is our collective sense of humor and the unrestricted resolve to actually be amused and enjoy a good laugh.

When things are difficult and challenging, we find the humor in it not because it will change the situation, but because it can help alleviate how we feel about it. Jokes are rarely singular in meaning as there is always an undefined nuance to every quip.

With the ability to laugh and make fun of ourselves lost, everyone loses.  Few, if any of the old great comedians, would exist today.  Plenty of comics, even those who are non-ideological make it a point to avoid college campuses, with their interrogational and hypercritical environment.

“We have become stupidly politically correct, which is the death of comedy,” Mel Brooks said in 2017.  This lack of humor is a legacy of the leftist orthodoxy that is sweeping the country.

In leftism’s utopia, nothing would be allowed to be funny unless they declared it so.  Think of the comedy talents of Yakov Smirnoff, or the minions leading North Korea.

Is this what we need, or worse, want?

Perhaps the joke is on us on how we used to laugh.

Psychologists tell us that possessing a sense of humor does indeed matter.  Sigmund Freud believed there was no better human interaction than two people laughing at the same joke.

Popular culture was once defined by its willingness to challenge, enlighten and awaken.  Artists, musicians, comedians and writers enriched us by delivering specific slights to the sensibilities of those who were cultural avatars and lawmakers.  Today’s performers mostly fall over each other to demonstrate how much they are “woke” with leftist bona fides.

They may believe to be woke, but in reality, they are on life support.

And we are all poorer because of it.

Amen!

Originally posted 2020-08-15 10:42:55.