Tag Archives: MSM

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Indoctrinated to be inoculated

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Sorry for the lack of posting lately, been busy, too busy for a man my age. LOL The fact is my computer was in the shop for a much-needed health checkup. All’s well now and am back. While there is so much going on in the new world order and in our beloved country, I find today’s post to be of import to many.  To be upfront and honest, as I always try to be, I had my first vaccine shot (Pfizer and Moderna type) two weeks ago with no side effects at all, and will get my second in two weeks. So, the decision is all yours. Good luck!

Meanwhile our move towards a Socialist third world sh*t hole continues at a fast pace supported by the MSM, the rich and famous, and everyone else who stands to benefit from such a move. Of course, you and I do not stand a chance of gaining anything from it. I see in my area gasoline has already risen $0.40 per gallon.  My uneducated guess is it will cross the $3.00 mark before summer is out.

Meanwhile, I await my $1,200 stimulus check to arrive, and must decide what I shall do with it. Any suggestions?  Have you read what is included in the  trillion dollar stimulus package? I suggest you do so. I had to actually search for something that had anything to do with COVID. And how about the nine GOP senators who crossed the aisle and voted to impeach {President Trump? I wonder what their constituents think about that? Oh well, have a great day and it’s good to be back! Semper Fi Devil Dogs!

By: Greg Maresca

 

Most COVID-19 cases have had mild symptoms and despite an average mortality rate north of 75 years and a 99.6% survival level, vaccination is a must.  The virus’ ability to infect political tyrants more concerned with their “great reset” than Constitutional rights continues to metastasize.

The hype and fear campaign continues unabated despite a thousand-fold risk difference between young and old.  To “flatten the curve,” lockdowns, masks and social distancing went vogue and those who stray are shamed and ridiculed.

None of this is a panacea.

Neither is a vaccine.

A Gallup poll says 40% are unwilling to vaccinate and unlikely to change their minds. A Kaiser Family Foundation report said nearly one-third of hospital staff “would not get vaccinated.” Over half of the members of New York’s Uniformed Firefighters Association would also refuse.

The reasons are legion with unknown side effects, genome manipulation, and high-tech chip branding leading the charge. The British government warned pregnant women not to vaccinate because there is “no or limited data on the effects to the child and to fertility.”  The CDC agrees, “… only limited data are available on the safety of COVID-19 vaccines administered during pregnancy.”  Are long-term infertility issues in a Western world with already declining birthrates just another function of the great reset?

Other reports say the Moderna, and Pfizer vaccines could cause blood clots, brain inflammation and heart attacks and its effects on compromised immune systems remain suspect.  Despite a plethora of concerns, the vaccine received “emergency authorization” from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Even smokers still have the right to smoke despite the known dangers. What is the real motivation for attempting to vaccinate millions of healthy people?

No need to fear because the vaccine success rate increased from 80% to 95% after the numbers were run by Dominion and any chip implant will be a Spicy Nacho Dorito.

Sarcasm aside, concerns about the vaccine’s safety and ethics are understandable considering its unprecedented development and distribution that normally would take years. Were cells from aborted babies used in its development and what procedures were circumvented to get it to the market so quickly?

The practice of medicine has been lobbied with Uncle Sam governing nearly two-thirds of healthcare.  It is evident that since COVID began, a simple, cost-effective solution would never be allowed.  When science is politicized, we all lose as the medical malpractice of the pandemic will continue, especially when the only medical opinion permitted is Uncle Sam’s.

The Great Barrington Declaration, that can be found online, has been signed by over 55,000 medical and public health scientists.  They have affirmed that due to the relatively mild hazard of COVID-19 to the vast majority, “those who are at minimal risk” should be permitted “to live their lives normally [and] build up (herd) immunity to the virus.”

Research Dr. Michael Yeadon with over 30 years with Pfizer said in LifeSite news: “There is absolutely no need for vaccines to extinguish the pandemic. You do not vaccinate people who aren’t at risk. You also don’t set about planning to vaccinate millions of fit and healthy people with a vaccine that hasn’t been extensively tested on human subjects.”

Yeadon underscored 30 to 40% had T-cell immunity prior to the virus, and with nearly 30% having already been infected means we have reached the 65 to 72% level of herd immunity and that “the pandemic is effectively over.”

Dr. Joseph Meaney, president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center said since long-term effects remain unknown due to the lack of extended testing, coercion to vaccinate is “ethically unacceptable.”

The resolve that vaccination is somehow a social responsibility is not a self-evident truth.  No matter how noble, it is limited.  As immunity builds, the risk of infection drops.  Herd immunity certainly fits as we stampede into hysteria too easily. The ends do not justify immoral or unethical means.

A dishonest press and rampant censorship by social media regarding the inexpensive, safe and effective therapies like ivermectin, colchicine, fluvoxamine and hydroxychloroquine could have prevented many from dying.

The cure should never be more invasive than the disease.

When a vaccine to protect us from Leftism is developed, I will consider.

 

 

Originally posted 2021-02-18 13:32:31.

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Who is in Control?

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This post is a follow on from the one I posted yesterday but adds more facts and knowledge as to what is going on in our country concerning Freedom of Speech. It is a long read, but I would encourage everyone to read it as it is jampacked with FACTS, not false narratives. And if you will, please pass it on.

Allum BokhariAllum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is a graduate of the University of Oxford and was a 2020 Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy. In 2018, he obtained and published “The Google Tape,” a recording of Google’s top executives reacting to the 2016 Trump election and declaring their intention to make the American populist movement a “blip” in history. He is the author of #Deleted: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal the Election.

The following is adapted from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College on November 8, 2020, during a Center for Constructive Alternatives conference on Big Tech.

In January, when every major Silicon Valley tech company permanently banned the President of the United States from its platform, there was a backlash around the world. One after another, government and party leaders—many of them ideologically opposed to the policies of President Trump—raised their voices against the power and arrogance of the American tech giants. These included the President of Mexico, the Chancellor of Germany, the government of Poland, ministers in the French and Australian governments, the neoliberal center-right bloc in the European Parliament, the national populist bloc in the European Parliament, the leader of the Russian opposition (who recently survived an assassination attempt), and the Russian government (which may well have been behind that attempt).

Common threats create strange bedfellows. Socialists, conservatives, nationalists, neoliberals, autocrats, and anti-autocrats may not agree on much, but they all recognize that the tech giants have accumulated far too much power. None like the idea that a pack of American hipsters in Silicon Valley can, at any moment, cut off their digital lines of communication.

I published a book on this topic prior to the November election, and many who called me alarmist then are not so sure of that now. I built the book on interviews with Silicon Valley insiders and five years of reporting as a Breitbart News tech correspondent. Breitbart created a dedicated tech reporting team in 2015—a time when few recognized the danger that the rising tide of left-wing hostility to free speech would pose to the vision of the World Wide Web as a free and open platform for all viewpoints.

This inversion of that early libertarian ideal—the movement from the freedom of information to the control of information on the Web—has been the story of the past five years.

                                                              ***

When the Web was created in the 1990s, the goal was that everyone who wanted a voice could have one. All a person had to do to access the global marketplace of ideas was to go online and set up a website. Once created, the website belonged to that person. Especially if the person owned his own server, no one could deplatform him. That was by design, because the Web, when it was invented, was competing with other types of online services that were not so free and open.

It is important to remember that the Web, as we know it today—a network of websites accessed through browsers—was not the first online service ever created. In the 1990s, Sir Timothy Berners-Lee invented the technology that underpins websites and web browsers, creating the Web as we know it today. But there were other online services, some of which predated Berners-Lee’s invention. Corporations like CompuServe and Prodigy ran their own online networks in the 1990s—networks that were separate from the Web and had access points that were different from web browsers. These privately-owned networks were open to the public, but CompuServe and Prodigy owned every bit of information on them and could kick people off their networks for any reason.

In these ways the Web was different. No one owned it, owned the information on it, or could kick anyone off. That was the idea, at least, before the Web was captured by a handful of corporations.

We all know their names: Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Amazon. Like Prodigy and CompuServe back in the ’90s, they own everything on their platforms, and they have the police power over what can be said and who can participate. But it matters a lot more today than it did in the ’90s. Back then, very few people used online services. Today everyone uses them—it is practically impossible not to use them. Businesses depend on them. News publishers depend on them. Politicians and political activists depend on them. And crucially, citizens depend on them for information.

Today, Big Tech doesn’t just mean control over online information. It means control over news. It means control over commerce. It means control over politics. And how are the corporate tech giants using their control? Judging by the three biggest moves they have made since I wrote my book—the censoring of the New York Post in October when it published its blockbuster stories on Biden family corruption, the censorship and eventual banning from the Web of President Trump, and the coordinated takedown of the upstart social media site Parler—it is obvious that Big Tech’s priority today is to support the political Left and the Washington establishment.

Big Tech has become the most powerful election-influencing machine in American history. It is not an exaggeration to say that if the technologies of Silicon Valley are allowed to develop to their fullest extent, without any oversight or checks and balances, then we will never have another free and fair election. But the power of Big Tech goes beyond the manipulation of political behavior. As one of my Facebook sources told me in an interview for my book: “We have thousands of people on the platform who have gone from far right to center in the past year, so we can build a model from those people and try to make everyone else on the right follow the same path.” Let that sink in. They don’t just want to control information or even voting behavior—they want to manipulate people’s worldview.

Is it too much to say that Big Tech has prioritized this kind of manipulation? Consider that Twitter is currently facing a lawsuit from a victim of child sexual abuse who says that the company repeatedly failed to take down a video depicting his assault, and that it eventually agreed to do so only after the intervention of an agent from the Department of Homeland Security. So Twitter will take it upon itself to ban the President of the United States, but is alleged to have taken down child pornography only after being prodded by federal law enforcement.

                                                                   ***

How does Big Tech go about manipulating our thoughts and behavior? It begins with the fact that these tech companies strive to know everything about us—our likes and dislikes, the issues we’re interested in, the websites we visit, the videos we watch, who we voted for, and our party affiliation. If you search for a Hannukah recipe, they’ll know you’re likely Jewish. If you’re running down the Yankees, they’ll figure out if you’re a Red Sox fan. Even if your smart phone is turned off, they’ll track your location. They know who you work for, who your friends are, when you’re walking your dog, whether you go to church, when you’re standing in line to vote, and on and on.

As I already mentioned, Big Tech also monitors how our beliefs and behaviors change over time. They identify the types of content that can change our beliefs and behavior, and they put that knowledge to use. They’ve done this openly for a long time to manipulate consumer behavior—to get us to click on certain ads or buy certain products. Anyone who has used these platforms for an extended period of time has no doubt encountered the creepy phenomenon where you’re searching for information about a product or a service—say, a microwave—and then minutes later advertisements for microwaves start appearing on your screen. These same techniques can be used to manipulate political opinions.

I mentioned that Big Tech has recently demonstrated ideological bias. But it is equally true that these companies have huge economic interests at stake in politics. The party that holds power will determine whether they are going to get government contracts, whether they’re going to get tax breaks, and whether and how their industry will be regulated. Clearly, they have a commercial interest in political control—and currently no one is preventing them from exerting it.

To understand how effective Big Tech’s manipulation could become, consider the feedback loop.

As Big Tech constantly collects data about us, they run tests to see what information has an impact on us. Let’s say they put a negative news story about someone or something in front of us, and we don’t click on it or read it. They keep at it until they find content that has the desired effect. The feedback loop constantly improves, and it does so in a way that’s undetectable.

What determines what appears at the top of a person’s Facebook feed, Twitter feed, or Google search results? Does it appear there because it’s popular or because it’s gone viral? Is it there because it’s what you’re interested in? Or is there another reason Big Tech wants it to be there? Is it there because Big Tech has gathered data that suggests it’s likely to nudge your thinking or your behavior in a certain direction? How can we know?

What we do know is that Big Tech openly manipulates the content people see. We know, for example, that Google reduced the visibility of Breitbart News links in search results by 99 percent in 2020 compared to the same period in 2016. We know that after Google introduced an update last summer, clicks on Breitbart News stories from Google searches for “Joe Biden” went to zero and stayed at zero through the election. This didn’t happen gradually, but in one fell swoop—as if Google flipped a switch. And this was discoverable through the use of Google’s own traffic analysis tools, so it isn’t as if Google cared that we knew about it.

Speaking of flipping switches, I have noted that President Trump was collectively banned by Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, and every other social media platform you can think of. But even before that, there was manipulation going on. Twitter, for instance, reduced engagement on the President’s tweets by over eighty percent. Facebook deleted posts by the President for spreading so-called disinformation.

But even more troubling, I think, are the invisible things these companies do. Consider “quality ratings.” Every Big Tech platform has some version of this, though some of them use different names. The quality rating is what determines what appears at the top of your search results, or your Twitter or Facebook feed, etc. It’s a numerical value based on what Big Tech’s algorithms determine in terms of “quality.” In the past, this score was determined by criteria that were somewhat objective: if a website or post contained viruses, malware, spam, or copyrighted material, that would negatively impact its quality score. If a video or post was gaining in popularity, the quality score would increase. Fair enough.

Over the past several years, however—and one can trace the beginning of the change to Donald Trump’s victory in 2016—Big Tech has introduced all sorts of new criteria into the mix that determines quality scores. Today, the algorithms on Google and Facebook have been trained to detect “hate speech,” “misinformation,” and “authoritative” (as opposed to “non-authoritative”) sources. Algorithms analyze a user’s network, so that whatever users follow on social media—e.g., “non-authoritative” news outlets—affects the user’s quality score. Algorithms also detect the use of language frowned on by Big Tech—e.g., “illegal immigrant” (bad) in place of “undocumented immigrant” (good)—and adjust quality scores accordingly. And so on.

This is not to say that you are informed of this or that you can look up your quality score. All of this happens invisibly. It is Silicon Valley’s version of the social credit system overseen by the Chinese Communist Party. As in China, if you defy the values of the ruling elite or challenge narratives that the elite labels “authoritative,” your score will be reduced and your voice suppressed. And it will happen silently, without your knowledge.

This technology is even scarier when combined with Big Tech’s ability to detect and monitor entire networks of people. A field of computer science called “network analysis” is dedicated to identifying groups of people with shared interests, who read similar websites, who talk about similar things, who have similar habits, who follow similar people on social media, and who share similar political viewpoints. Big Tech companies are able to detect when particular information is flowing through a particular network—if there’s a news story or a post or a video, for instance, that’s going viral among conservatives or among voters as a whole. This gives them the ability to shut down a story they don’t like before it gets out of hand. And these systems are growing more sophisticated all the time.

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If Big Tech’s capabilities are allowed to develop unchecked and unregulated, these companies will eventually have the power not only to suppress existing political movements, but to anticipate and prevent the emergence of new ones. This would mean the end of democracy as we know it, because it would place us forever under the thumb of an unaccountable oligarchy.

The good news is, there is a way to rein in the tyrannical tech giants. And the way is simple: take away their power to filter information and filter data on our behalf.

All of Big Tech’s power comes from their content filters—the filters on “hate speech,” the filters on “misinformation,” the filters that distinguish “authoritative” from “non-authoritative” sources, etc. Right now these filters are switched on by default. We as individuals can’t turn them off. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The most important demand we can make of lawmakers and regulators is that Big Tech be forbidden from activating these filters without our knowledge and consent. They should be prohibited from doing this—and even from nudging us to turn on a filter—under penalty of losing their Section 230 immunity as publishers of third party content. This policy should be strictly enforced, and it should extend even to seemingly non-political filters like relevance and popularity. Anything less opens the door to manipulation.

Our ultimate goal should be a marketplace in which third party companies would be free to design filters that could be plugged into services like Twitter, Facebook, Google, and YouTube. In other words, we would have two separate categories of companies: those that host content and those that create filters to sort through that content. In a marketplace like that, users would have the maximum level of choice in determining their online experiences. At the same time, Big Tech would lose its power to manipulate our thoughts and behavior and to ban legal content—which is just a more extreme form of filtering—from the Web.

This should be the standard we demand, and it should be industry-wide. The alternative is a kind of digital serfdom. We don’t allow old-fashioned serfdom anymore—individuals and businesses have due process and can’t be evicted because their landlord doesn’t like their politics. Why shouldn’t we also have these rights if our business or livelihood depends on a Facebook page or a Twitter or YouTube account?

This is an issue that goes beyond partisanship. What the tech giants are doing is so transparently unjust that all Americans should start caring about it—because under the current arrangement, we are all at their mercy. The World Wide Web was meant to liberate us. It is now doing the opposite. Big Tech is increasingly in control. The most pressing question today is: how are we going to take control back? 

Epilogue. Okay what can we as Americans do about this. Good question and I don;t really have the answer. However, I know what I did and will continue to do is write letters, emails, and texts to all of my elected officials at every level. Thankfully, I live in a red state where mine listen and reply. Even if you are in a blue state write, write, and write. And encourage everyone of your relatives and friends to do the same.  Continually flood them with letters telling them they HAVE to do something about this, be relentless and don’t take their standard BS and quit.

Originally posted 2021-02-05 12:14:06.

Current Events

USSA

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You ask what does USSA stands for? Read on!

Unityville, USSA

By: Greg Maresca

 

America has endured the worst public health crisis in a century, 70 million claims for unemployment, trillions of dollars in borrowed “stimulus,” civil unrest, a belligerent communist China, convoys of illegal immigrants on their way to the border, which begs the question what exactly is the priority of the Biden administration?

Apparently, impeaching the former president in an attempt to divide the GOP by splintering the MAGA and establishment Republicans, while simultaneously signing a record number of presidential executive orders is.

Call it unity – Biden style, which offers platitudes about bipartisanship and national harmony, while delivering leftist executive orders on a historic scale.

Our cognitively challenged executive order signer-in-chief is ratifying whatever his leftist minions put in front of him as your next president in waiting Kamala Harris is seemingly pulling the strings standing in the shadows.

With thousands of National Guard troops from every state in the union present for Biden’s inauguration, you can put to rest the notion that no one ever shows up for Biden.  Then again, perhaps they were there to ensure that Biden does not flee back to his basement campaign bunker.

How can signing so many executive orders on his first day in office – more than any other president – truly desire unity?  Talk of unity is one thing, but to govern, as the cliché goes, is to choose.  Biden’s choice is clear – govern by executive fiat. Biden’s calls for unity are strictly virtue signaling and intended to shame all who disagree.

Recall Biden’s October interview with ABC News honcho George Stephanopoulos where candidate Biden emphasized how “executive orders are the response of dictators.”  Biden talked up consensus, but since becoming president he has done the exact opposite.

Biden’s executive orders include wrecking women’s sports by allowing a man who identifies as a woman can now compete against them.  Ending thousands of jobs by stopping the Keystone Pipeline, and terminating the deportation of illegal immigrants who have committed serious crimes – all extreme measures.  In 1984, President Reagan established the Mexico City Policy, which forbids American tax dollars from supporting international abortions.  In 1993, President Clinton rescinded it. Since then, the policy has been re-enacted by every Republican president and rescinded by every Democrat.  Biden desires to revoke it permanently.

The Wall Street Journal is calling Biden’s executive order jamboree the biggest expansion of federal power since the Great Society with more on the way.

Democrats and their allies throughout the mainstream media have insisted that conservatives need to be “reprogrammed and reeducated,” a phrase out of Nazi Germany, which has only fueled hateful rhetoric throughout social media.

Welcome to 21st century America where the literary works of George Orwell continues to spook our fruited plain.  One wandering soul pontificated how they are looking forward to political reeducation classes because they always wondered what college would have been like sober.

When I get back from my re-education camp, I will grasp that Unityville is not just a township in Pennsylvania’s Lycoming County, or a hamlet in South Dakota, but budding from sea to shining sea.  In my new reprogrammed unifying self, I will forever congratulate Joe Biden for winning the 2020 presidential election and Bobby Bonds for breaking Major League Baseball’s home run record, Lance Armstrong for his numerous Tour de France victories and those Tinsel Town actors for getting their darling progeny into elite universities.

If the Biden administration was serious, they would consent Congress to legislate, while promoting a spirited public discourse – stimulating the democratic process on a national level.

Instead, Biden has doubled down on “identity politics” and resuscitating “critical race theory,” while promoting equity over equality that divides people into victims and villains by race, gender, income, and education, ad nauseam.

Whatever happened to just being an American?

Over the next four years forget about the nation’s Fourth Estate of holding the Biden administration accountable. Only the next election can do that and given the severe lack of historical and civic knowledge of your average American that is unlikely to happen. Moreover, any semblance of unity will not be possible if we cannot agree that an inflated government is no universal panacea.

We are not yet the United Socialist States of America – but certainly on our way.

Gang, if you don’t think we are on our way to becoming the USSA, you’ve been living under a rock. We, as conservatives, MUST continue the fight or we will become the USSA.  Someone has even developed the country’s flag when it happens. DO NOT donate to the RNC or the GOP; they are not our friends. Donate to individual candidates even if they are not in your State, but vet them thoroughly! God help us!

 

 

 

 

Originally posted 2021-02-03 19:31:58.

Recent Posts

Don’t Give up Patriots

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Like many who made comments on this, where were the MSM during his arrival. Be sure to read the comments, they are heartwarming to say the least. Please fellow Patriots, don’t count him out yet! It is time for his country to develop a viable and honest third party!!! Trader Joe will surely have a four year honeymoon from the MSM, something President Trump never had not even one day.

 

https://thepatriotjournal.com/moments-trump-florida-crowd/?utm_source=2020newsletter&utm_medium=email

Originally posted 2021-01-22 12:57:10.

Current Events

Soviet Politics, American Style

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The above photo is of Young Communists saluting as they pass Lenin’s Tomb in the U.S.S.R., May 1, 1924. Many of you are probably going to consider I have gone off the deep end and finally crashed into insanity. Hell, I don’t know, maybe I have? However, I cannot help but believe my country that I love more than anything. The country that gave a dumb shit Baltimore HS drop out kid of 17 the chance to make something of himself and have a wonderfully, fulfilling, fantastically enjoyable career serving it is doomed due to the likes of the mentally sick, brainwashed, nitwitted young fools  who are convinced our country is sick. Below is a well written, easily interpreted essay of doom. Enjoy if you can. Be sure to read the Postscript.

On Christmas Day 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev, president of the Soviet Union, gave his farewell speech and more than seven decades of Russian revolutionary socialism came to an end. A generation later, the spirit of the Soviet Union has re-emerged with mass support in the U.S.

When I arrived in Moscow in 1976 to begin a six-year stint as a correspondent, I was struck by the red flags flying from government buildings and the somber streets devoid of advertising except for garish posters showing workers with clenched fists demanding an end to the arms race.

When the Soviet Union fell, it seemed the Soviet attempt to impose a deluded version of reality had died with it. Francis Fukuyama, in his 1989 essay “The End of History,” said that Marxism-Leninism was doomed as an alternative to liberal democracy. I argued at the time that the drive to make a religion out of politics had not disappeared.

For the past four years, potted histories have warned about the rise of fascism in the U.S. But the real danger is the transformation of “tolerance” into an ideology with its own courts, informers and punishments, all of them reminiscent of the Soviet Union.

One of the pillars of the Soviet Union was a controlled press in which all coverage was organized to confirm a mendacious ideology.

A friend of mine in Moscow, Vladimir Fyodorov, went to work for the TASS news service, which offered readers not news but a “correct” depiction of events, especially regarding the U.S. and the “ulcers of capitalism”—racism, crime and unemployment.

On his first day at TASS, Vladimir was handed a United Press International story about a U.S. company that was promoting a high-quality tire and offered to replace older tires free of charge. Vladimir wanted to kill the story but his boss rewrote it. The new version read: “In the crafty capitalist market, firms frequently offer low-quality products. This is why a well-known American firm was forced to replace tires that were of inferior quality.” The headline was “Deception of Buyer.”

A few weeks later, Vladimir was given a report that prisons in Fiji were so comfortable that people preferred to stay there than to be at liberty. He produced a report that life in Fiji was so unbearable that people preferred to live in prison. His colleagues congratulated him. He told himself: “I’m going to go out of my mind here.”

Soviet practices would have once been unthinkable in the U.S. media. But in August 2016, Jim Rutenberg, media columnist for the New York Times, wrote that if journalists believed that Mr. Trump was a “demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalist tendencies,” it was necessary to “throw out the textbook of American journalism.” The Times started to characterize Mr. Trump’s statements as “lies” in news stories and suppress news that worked to Mr. Trump’s advantage, such as the Hunter Biden story this fall.

The Times also advanced an ideological account of U.S. history, according to which the American Revolution was undertaken to defend slavery, and promoted it over the objections of historians and the paper’s own fact-checkers.

The Soviet system also relied on the complete liquidation of academic freedom. Marxism-Leninism was treated as a perfect science. But the ideology raised obvious questions: In a “classless society,” why were there special stores for officials? If socialism ended war, why did the Soviet Union and China go to war in 1969 over Damansky Island?

If a student tried to raise these questions, he was expelled from the Komsomol, the communist youth league. That ended any hope of a career. I knew a young man in Moscow who refused to be intimidated and continued to ask questions. He was committed to a mental hospital.

The Soviet style has become a reality in the U.S. Speakers are routinely canceled on ideological grounds: In July the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbour, Maine, canceled a virtual talk with Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society because of “the moment of reckoning our society is going through.” At my alma mater, the University of Chicago, the English department announced that it would “only accept applicants interested in working in and with Black Studies.”

The Soviet Union finally counted on the readiness of people to betray even family and friends. The regime held up Pavel Morozov (1918-32) as a martyr. He lived in a village in the Urals when the regime was collectivizing agriculture. When Pavel learned that his father was helping peasants hide grain, he walked 35 miles to the nearest town to report him to the secret police. His father was arrested and Pavel was stabbed to death by relatives.

I thought of Pavel Morozov when I read a June op-ed in the New York Times by Chad Sanders, a black writer. He told his white friends that he didn’t need their “love texts” and suggested that instead they cut off contact with family members until they sent money to Black Lives Matter or joined their protests.

When Mr. Gorbachev began the reforms that destroyed the Soviet Union, he said, referring to the U.S.: “We’re going to do something terrible to you. We’re going to deprive you of an enemy.” Twenty-nine years later, it’s clear he was right. Without the ideological challenge of the Soviet Union, we have become immersed in internal conflicts and have made an ideology out of them.

It is true that Marxism is a more coherent system of thought than “wokeism.” But even an intellectual hodgepodge can engender totalitarian habits if it fulfills an emotional need and becomes a device of interpretation.

The antidote is fidelity to higher values. But that requires a moral seriousness that a world at peace and in thrall to superficialities does not inspire. “The West does not know and does not want to know what shaped it,” writes Cardinal Robert Sarah, a Guinean prelate. “This self-asphyxiation leads to new barbaric civilizations.”

The Soviet Union is dead, but its ghost wanders an unsettled world. Finding a lodestar for society’s moral development is the most important challenge facing the U.S. today.

Mr. Satter is author of “Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union” and a member of the academic advisory board of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

Postscript from anonymous.

Franklin Graham said it right and so have I, this is the last free election if Donald Trump doesn’t win we will ever SEE in America . We are done here. Unfortunately we are too late to be effective with a vote. There will be only two alternatives left to us if Biden is seated as President. We have heard it once in our history loudly at Concord. The British are coming to take our guns. Then a shot was fired. The rest is history.

We may hear again a shot fired when someone is burning our town, or another family arrested for protecting their home standing on their steps. Or another old man or woman is hit to the ground for no reason other than walking on a public street. I ask you to think about that. If licensed to carry, do it. If not licensed, get licensed now! Be prepared to defend others in need. Lawlessness is coming on scale. We must decide to stand aside or to stand up. Not a pleasant decision. Get your head straight and make some decisions on how you will react. Be ready to defend your family and for some of us, the Constitution we have sworn to protect.

President Clinton started the ball of breakdown to socialism. I am proud that American’s stood up for a disrupter like Trump. I thought I was alone. I was SO proud of America . Today, Trump is all that is left holding the line. Give him what you’ve got. Prepare to defend yourself!!!

 

Originally posted 2020-12-23 10:38:57.