Conform! or Be Scorched!

Or, Joe Biden Defends “Democracy!” in Front of a Fiery Furnace!

Every week I shop at a local chain-supermarket. Lately, I’ve noticed that the store’s employees- cashiers, greeters and some of PT shelf stockers – wear a “STRONGER TOGETHER” tee shirt.

Three things came to mind after seeing the ‘sloganized’ employees this week. The first, a scene from Office Space. Joanna (Jennifer Aniston) is being scolded for not having enough “flair”. Her commitment to unity with the other flair-wearing employees and to supporting diversity of “flair” was flagging.

The second: the groupthink messaging “We’re all in this together” by the media during the days of COVID adverts.

The third was a reminder of the greengrocer’s sign as described in Václav Havel’s 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless. From the opening of section III:

The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!” Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment’s thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?

I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions. That poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and carrots. He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be reproached for not having the proper decoration in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life “in harmony with society,” as they say

The greengrocer’s sign is intended to signal conformity and to avoid trouble. But it’s not the way you say it, it’s more the way you mean it. Havel translated the slogan as: “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient.”

As I learned, the “Stronger Together” tee shirt is part of the chain-supermarket’s campaign to encourage “teams to show their commitment to unity and supporting diversity”. Perhaps the tee shirt “flair” is also intended to signal conformity and to avoid trouble. The campaign, by its own admission, caters to identity politics. It also adds window-dressing “flair” – DEI & ESG signage- to its corporate websites.

What does a slogan do for you? No doubt, the company will benefit from the tee’s virtue signaling Wokeness in the form of goodwill and sales.

Come to think about it, don’t the slogans “We’re all in this together” and “Stronger Together” imply that something needs to be overcome? I wonder. Is non-conformity to be overcome? Hmmm. Communists demand conformity. And when the ‘official’ flair doesn’t get worn and the ‘official’ signs are not posted, then vilifying, intimidation and coercion follow.

“When you are not with where the majority of Americans are, then, you know, that is extreme” -WH press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre

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Something Wicked This Way Came

Leftists are bullies, as are their diktats “DEI” and “ESG”. They want their way with you. Conform or be called “extremist”. You see this acted out by disciples of Saul Alinsky, a Marxist community organizer and compiler of bullying tactics.

Hillary Clinton and Obama, now Biden’s handler, studied and practiced Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. And though it is common knowledge when dealing with people that it is more effective in being nice and amenable than being mean and spiteful, Alinsky’s Tactic of demonizing your opposition was used by them (“basket of deplorables”, “bitter clingers”)

“Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” (Rules for Radicals, Tactics, p. 127)

There is no defense for scorn. It’s irrational and it’s meant to be infuriating – to create anger and fear. It’s meant to provoke a heated response. It’s meant to pressure the enemy into concessions. Basically, it’s bullying.

The Biden regime continues to call 75 million of us Americans “extremists”, “semi-fascists”, “extremists”, a “threat to democracy” and, a “Threat to the country”.

Obama and the Leftists running the Biden regime are not happy that millions of us don’t conform. We don’t put on the required flair. Some of us wear MAGA and FJB gear. We don’t display the right signs. Some of us put “Let’s Go Brandon” in our windows and yards and on our bumpers.

Many of us refused the jab. Many of us showed up at school board meetings and denounced the curriculum and practices of the school board. Many of us voted – in democratic fashion – only to have our votes disenfranchised by the fraudulent acts of others. Most of us know without a doubt that the election was stolen.

Oh yes, the Left loves them some controlled opposition. They love the “good Republicans” – the Liz Cheneys, the Adam Kinzingers, the David Frenchs – and not the MAGA “extremists”. They promote milquetoast Republicans in elections. They love those who cower before them. They love those who put the conforming slogan/sign in the window and say to themselves “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient.”

“Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have. (Rules for Radicals, Tactics, p. 126)

I have long understood that Leftists do not care about hypocrisy. As self-referential nihilists, Leftists have no concept of shame. The Left does what it does by any means necessary. The Left says “to hell with truth, justice and the American way”. Hillary Clinton and Obama and the puppeteers of Biden have shown this to be true.

The Bulliest of Pulpits:

Continuing the ridicule and disenfranchisement of half the nation, community disorganizer Biden gave a menacing and divisive speech this past Thursday. With clenched teeth and fists, dictator Biden used his “Soul of the Nation” speech to trample on half the nation.

Biden stated that he “will not let anything tear us apart” but, c’mon man, the speech was intended to ridicule and stigmatize opponents and create an us-and-them- “extremists” continuum.

With Marines standing at attention behind and on each side of Biden, the optics were meant to instill angst and fear – “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.”

His handlers, the Central Executive Committee, wanted everyone to know that the Communist Party of America cares about Democracy! Social Democracy! Democracy! Social Democracy! Democracy!  . . . for those who conform to the will of the Party.

Here’s Biden in total projection mode:

And, here’s Biden BS-ing (what’s disturbing is that people are clapping for his spin on the state of the economy):

As I’ve said, the Left has no shame. Continuing the divisive rhetoric with blatant lies is one of the Left’s henchmen:

And now some commentary:

He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit is better than he who takes a city (Proverbs 16:32).

The optics of the speech instantly became a source of Internet chatter with the weird red background that made the President look like he was giving a stump speech from Dante’s Inferno. Indeed, it almost had that High Chancellor Adam Sutler look from V for Vendetta

-Jonathan Turley, Semper Sigh: Biden’s Use of the Marines Violated Long-Standing Federal Policies and Regulations – JONATHAN TURLEY

“People shouldn’t be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people.”
― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

Mr. Trump and his followers, believe it or not, are essentially antifascists: They want the state to stand aside, to impose the least possible interference and allow market forces and entrepreneurial energies to work. Freedom isn’t fascism. Mr. Biden and his vast tribe are essentially enemies of freedom, although most of them haven’t thought the matter through.

Biden’s Speech Had It All Backward – WSJ

The globalist world has no future. Or rather: the future it intends to give us is the darkest and most terrifying that the human mind can conceive. The future it presents to us is false and unrealizable. Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò

In everyone there is some willingness to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudo-life. This is much more than a simple conflict between two identities. It is something far worse: it is a challenge to the very notion of identity itself.Václav Havel

Conform or be scorned! Conform or be thrown into the fiery furnace! Conform or be thrown into the lion’s den! Conform or be sawn in two! Conform or be destitute! Conform or be flogged! Conform or be persecuted! Conform or lose your job, your business, your church, your military status.

Václav Havel told us what the greengrocer’s sign really said. I will tell you what Biden’s Democracy! Democracy! Democracy! Democracy! Democracy! Democracy! Democracy! Democracy! Democracy! Democracy! Democracy! Democracy! Democracy! Democracy! Democracy! Democracy! Democracy! Democracy! Democracy! Democracy! Democracy! Democracy! Democracy! Democracy! Democracy! Democracy! Democracy! Democracy! Democracy! Democracy! Democracy! speech really means:

Conform! Conform! Conform! Conform! Conform! Conform! Conform! Conform! Conform! Conform! Conform! Conform! Conform! Conform! Conform! Conform! Conform! Conform! Conform! Conform! Conform! Conform! Conform! Conform! Conform! Conform! Conform! Conform! Conform! Conform! Conform!

“If the world hates you,” Jesus went on, “know that it hated me before it hated you. If you were from the world, the world would be fond of its own. But the world hates you for this reason: that you’re not from the world. No: I chose you out of the world.

“Remember the word I said to you: servants are not greater than their masters. If they persecuted me, they will persecute you too. But they will do all these things to you because of my name, because they don’t know the one who sent me.” Jesus, as recorded in The Gospel According to John 15:18-21

Informed Dissent:

Ivermectin: The Truth (rumble.com)

Trends in COVID Anxiety – by Robert W Malone MD, MS (substack.com)

Here’s how the vaccine is causing those weird “blood clots” (substack.com)

(REPORT) Germany: 1 in 25 insured individuals treated for Covid shot adverse reactions | Sharyl Attkisson

(UPDATED) Exclusive Summary: Covid-19 Vaccine Concerns | Sharyl Attkisson

Stop CDC Expansion!

The CDC costs Americans too much. | Stand for Health Freedom

The Corruption of Medicine – Heather Mac Donald

“The post–George Floyd racial reckoning has hit the field of medicine like an earthquake. Medical education, medical research, and standards of competence have been upended by two related hypotheses: that systemic racism is responsible both for racial disparities in the demographics of the medical profession and for racial disparities in health outcomes. Questioning those hypotheses is professionally suicidal. Vast sums of public and private research funding are being redirected from basic science to political projects aimed at dismantling white supremacy. The result will be declining quality of medical care and a curtailment of scientific progress. (Emphasis mine)

I readily imagine that by placing barely competent or even incompetent doctors and clinicians on staff based on DEI initiatives, that health care costs and insurance costs will skyrocket because of malpractice. All for the malpractice of DEI.

De-Energize the Insanity:

“the Green New Deal means poverty” “The real threat to people is not global warming, but global cooling, otherwise known as winter.” (8:24)

Start at 7:30

The Collapse is Coming to a Town near You:

Tucker Carlson: Things are falling apart every quickly – Bing video

Western leaders are madder than I thought – The Post (unherd.com)

Colorado utility company locks 22,000 thermostats in 90 degree weather due to ‘energy emergency’ | Fox Business

Farmers are Under Attack by the Greenies:

Sounds About Right:

Women Are Disproportionately Hurting Our Country, by Dennis Prager | Creators Syndicate

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò:

‘Never expect the truth from the Great Reset advocates. For where there is no Christ, there can be no Truth, and we know how much they hate Our Lord.’

‘Through the Great Reset, they want to erase Western Christian society in order to establish a liberal-communist synarchy on the model of the Chinese dictatorship, in which the entire population is controlled and maneuverable at will.’

‘ . . .  the globalist world has no past to show us to confirm the greatness of its ideas, its philosophy, its faith.’

Abp. Viganò: Globalist doctrine is essentially ‘satanic’; we must ‘rebuild’ Christendom – LifeSite (lifesitenews.com)

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Christian Nurse Sues CVS After It Fires Her for Not Distributing Abortion Pills – LifeNews.com

No One expects the California Inquisition:

California COVID misinformation bill targets doctors spreading false information (axios.com)

No One expects the Canadian Inquisition:

According to a recently posted Indeed.com ad, the Ministry is searching to recruit a battalion of Climate “Pollution” Officers, a unit within the coldly named “Environmental Enforcement Directorate.” (1984 Alert!)

EXCLUSIVE LEAK: Trudeau installing weapons armouries, interrogation rooms for Ministry of Climate Change – The Counter Signal

Enforcement Officer – Environmental (pollution) Enforcement – Development Program – inventory – Calgary, AB – Indeed.com

“I’m the canary in the coal mine”

De-Transitioner testifies on ‘medical horror’… – CITIZEN FREE PRESS

Lori Bigfoot – Come to Chicago to abort your children:

Science Says:

The World as It Shouldn’t Be

Barack knows that we are going to have to make sacrifices, we are going to have to change our conversation; we’re going to have to change our traditions our history, we’re going to have to move into a different place as a nation to provide the kind of future we all want desperately for our children.” -Michelle Obama, during the 2008 presidential campaign in a speech given in San Juan, Puerto Rico on May 14, 2008. (Emphasis mine)

Michele’s words scared the heck out of me. They should have terrified every American who heard them. Michelle Obama, in a brief moment of candor, expressed in hopey-changey terms the radical transformation of life as we know it (as the high priests of Marxist social stratification and dialectical materialism dictate).

To bring about change that undoes all the worked-out good that has gone on before and which ignores the evil that such idol worship brings to bear on humanity, the pagan priests of the conflict theory idols work to invoke animus and segregation among people groups. Theirs’ is a religion of stratification struggle. Stratification struggle, they believe, will lead to revolution and revolution will lead to “the kind of future we all want desperately for our children”.

Using identity politics and divisive COVID and climate scientism, the priests of Marx-Baal-Gaia divide people into stratum of race, gender, sexuality, vaccination status, and climate crisis belief. You are considered an infidel and a “denier” if you do not bow and pray three times a day to the “right side of history” where these religious fanatics claim to be. For, they are waging an unholy war against western civilization and against humanity itself in the service of their idols.

Serving conflict theory idols, of course, benefits politicians, professors, and talking heads. Each group requires victims and a cause to save from oppressors. And, each group seeks the self-righteousness halos generated in the process. Most important for these pagan priests, though, is the power they believe is conferred onto them by the gods to force others into worship of their gods.

“It is not the truth of Marxism that explains the willingness of intellectuals to believe it, but the power that it confers on intellectuals, in their attempts to control the world. And since…it is futile to reason someone out of a thing that he was not reasoned into, we can conclude that Marxism owes its remarkable power to survive every criticism to the fact that it is not a truth-directed but a power-directed system of thought.”
― Roger Scruton, A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism

High priestess Michelle O said we are going to have to make sacrifices. Tell me, what sacrifices have Barack and Michelle made? None whatsoever. And that is because the priests of Marx-Baal-Gaia do not make sacrifices. For, they are our betters, and we are just mouth breathers. You and I are to make sacrifices, especially of our offspring.

As we have witnessed lately, the priests and servants of the prince of darkness are very concerned about the abolition of the continual human sacrifice – especially of black children – to Molech. The latest abortion ruling has them scrambling to set up new altars. There are, of course, many other ways “we” make sacrifices to the idols Michelle worships.

For example, we can let our children be exposed to sexual deviancy and critical race theory in schools. We can speak non-sense pronouns to address others. We can allow males to participate in our daughter’s sports.

We are going to have to make sacrifices. So, forsake the family unit and make the state the parent. That requires bypassing common sense, letting go of any firmly-held Christian belief and pooh-poohing any fact-checking effort. Just accept whatever the state says about COVID and climate change . . . about anything.

We are going to have to make sacrifices, ergo, we must endlessly affirm homosexuality and be accepting of depravity so as to not come across as phobic and judgmental (Only the high priests of Marx-Baal-Gaia are allowed to be judgmental). We certainly must not fuss about our borders being open to opportunists and felons and gangs and terrorists. We must never balk at the mass immigration flooding the job market and depressing the wages the lower class depends on – let them eat food stamps!

We are going to have to make sacrifices, so, let’s give away America’s sovereignty and security. And, let’s become liberty-and-mind-devoid serfs of the elite class – globalists. Change We Can Be Lost In.

Such is the “fundamental transformation” that Barrack Obama -the Saul Alinsky community agitator – and Michele we’re talking about. And you should know by now that the American Marxist’s goal isn’t to implement policies that promote individualism and self-sufficiency (or prosperity, for that matter). The goal is to move into a different place as a nation by fostering government dependency and collectivization. And, that was the same goal of murderous communist regimes. Each regime, of course, had to break a few eggs to make an omelet. But where is the omelet?

For the kind of future we all want desperately for our children, Progressive priests of Marx-Baal-Gaia go backward into history. They go there to reclaim the ideology that tears down, alienates, scourges, purges, ‘gulags’, and generates show trials like the Jan. 6 commission. They claim authority over history, the present, the future, and nature.

The megalomaniacal Barry Soetoro (aka Barrack Obama) decided that the earth needed his “fundamental transformation” special touch. To entice the dull of mind and grab the attention of thousands of universities students re-birthed through a denier-or-believer stratification process into climate activists, the Marxist Moses promised to slow the rise of the oceans.

Upon winning the Democratic nomination for presidency in June 2008, Obama promised to hold back the seas and heal the planet. After his election, though, he decided not to slow the seas and heal the planet. Instead, he proceeded to show Jeremiah Wright “God Damn America” contempt for the world as it was.

During his presidency, Barack recited the “world as it should be” mantra in every nation he visited. On tour, he blamed the United States for the world’s woes and promised a future where the planet would heal from American domination.

What Obama failed to articulate was that in his “world as it should be” there is a class of power elite that rule over useful eaters who possess limited rights, are unarmed, are forced to share the wealth, and whose numbers are controlled via abortion and government-run healthcare. Obama never disclosed that his anti-American world would be gender neutral, militarily weak, antagonistic toward white males, Western Civilization, and prosperity, Muslim friendly, success adverse, and racially volatile.

Barack Obama’s ‘World as It Should Be’ by Jeannie DeAngelis

In a June 6th 2021 interview, Barack Obama said that Joe Biden was finishing what he started. And so it is that the “fundamental transformation” revolution is now devasting America. The Biden regime is finishing off America. The Biden regime is more of a threat to Americans than Vladimir Putin or COVID:

The Biden regime mandated federal employees to get the COVID jab against their will.

The Biden regime told us to shut down businesses and our churches.

The Biden regime restricted Americans’ breathing on federal transportation through

unscientific mask mandates.

The Biden regime weaponized the Department of Justice to target parents at school board meetings and label them as “domestic terrorists”.

The Biden regime is at war with fossil fuels. Biden imposed a draconian green agenda that crippled domestic production of oil and natural gas. His energy policy sent prices soaring. “Price gougers”, and not dictator Biden, are to blame for the high costs.

The Biden regime is determined to save the planet by culling CO2-producing humans through abortion and by culling business that are not ESG compliant.

The Biden regime “recently sold roughly 1 million barrels from the emergency fund to a Chinese government-owned gas giant that continues to purchase Russian oil.

The Biden regime is more concerned about what the Chinese Communist Party thinks than what Americans think.

The Biden regime and its cabal of global grifters care more about what the World Economic Forum, the U.N., and international laws says than what the U.S. Constitution says.

The Biden regime signed several multi-trillion-dollar spending packages that have led to a four decade high in inflation and increased the national debt to over $30 trillion.

The Biden regime allowed and continues to promote voter fraud and stolen elections.

The Biden regime continues to promote racism by insinuating that Black Americans are incapable of getting an ID for voting and are unable to take care of themselves and therefore they must vote Democrat.

The Biden regime uses identity politics – social stratification politics – to divide and denigrate Americans. Example: “This a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”

The Biden regime’s American Rescue Plan “would provide a $90 billion bailout to multiemployer unions, “guaranteed” to keep eligible pension plans solvent until 2051.” While we struggle, our tax dollars are being used to bailout union pension plans (and Democrat voters).

The Biden regime’s open-border policy is profiting cartels and enabling human trafficking, smuggling, rape, death and . . . the flooding the U.S. job market to lower wages.

The Biden regime has involved American money in the Ukraine-Russia conflict even though America has no vital interest in this war.

The Biden regime is prolonging the war in Ukraine with shipments of weapons to Ukraine at a cost of $800 million U.S. taxpayer dollars and another $300 million more in military aid. And again! President Joe Biden signed a $40 billion aid package to Ukraine. Ukraine is the 3rd most corrupt country in the world. Who is the money going to? That money is needed here in America!

The Biden regime’s Reckless Words Underscore the Dangers of the U.S.’s Use of Ukraine As a War Proxy

 . . .the Biden administration is doing exactly that which former President Obama warned in 2016 should never be done: risking war between the world’s two largest nuclear powers over Ukraine. Yet if any pathology defines the last five years of U.S. mainstream discourse, it is that any claim that undercuts the interests of U.S. liberal elites — no matter how true — is dismissed as “Russian disinformation.” 

The Biden regime on May 15 celebrated Peace Officers Memorial Day by blaming cops for fueling “distrust” in minority communities.

(The above list includes points from Yes, Biden And Company Are Intentionally Destroying America – COSAction (conventionofstates.com))

The campaign slogan Change We Can Believe In became the impulse for many to abandon critical thinking, capitalism, the Constitution, and Christ. For them, a hopey-changey future was in the offing. So, the load-bearing beams America rested on would just have to be replaced with found boards – reaction-based ad hoc social justice – until, until, until . . .

And while the state media continues to promote Change We Can Believe In policies, OBiden’s legacy will be seen as one of failure, exceedingly poor judgment, and staggering incompetence. And worse! When you serve idols, you make decisions that degrade and dehumanize yourself and those around you. (e.g., Hunter Biden and the god of hedonism). You make the world as it shouldn’t be – like the idols you worship.

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To whom will you liken me and make me equal
    and compare me, as though we were alike?
 Those who lavish gold from the purse
    and weigh out silver in the scales—
they hire a goldsmith, who makes it into a god;
    then they fall down and worship!
 They lift it to their shoulders; they carry it;
    they set it in its place, and it stands there;
    it cannot move from its place.
If one cries out to it, it does not answer
    or save anyone from trouble.

-Isaiah 46: 5-7

The idols of the nations are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have mouths, but do not speak; they have eyes, but do not see; they have ears, but do not hear, nor is there any breath in their mouths.

-Psalm 135:15-17

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You know what’s coming, right?

Now that many, out of fear, bent the knee to the ill-conceived COVID mandates, “the world as it should be” conjurers will expand their breadth of control. They will certainly produce more fear porn (“This latest variant is the mostest baddest lethalest worsetest yet!”; “If we don’t act now on climate change, we are toast!). In keeping with the bloody history of totalitarianism, the intelligentsia – politically connected radical socialist atheists – continue to tend to the extremes.

Theywill use digital technology, including your smartphone and/or an impregnated digital device, to monitor and control your body, your money, and your behavior. Did you really think that the rollout of 5G UW was so that you could know what your sous vide machine or refrigerator was doing? The Ultra-Wideband is the harness that will soon rein you in.

The coming ‘social credit score’ system will mandate that all social media users be given a ‘truth score’ that pre-determines the accuracy of their posts. With face recognition, you will not be able to buy anything if your face matches someone with a bad social credit score.

In “the world as it should be”, Artificial Intelligence will be controlling you. You will be a slave to AI that is programmed by the worshippers of Marx-Baal-Gaia. The disconnected from reality will be connected to and controlling your reality.

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Informed Dissent:

EXCLUSIVE: Paramedics speak out about empty hospitals, probable vax injuries during COVID | News | westernstandard.news

Changes to periods after Covid vaccines may be common, survey suggests (nbcnews.com)

“A How-To Guide in Subverting a Democratic Superpower from Within” – Reviews of Dr. Birx Book Reveal Her Deceiving Ways and Incompetence in the White House (thegatewaypundit.com)

11 Times The World Economic Forum Proved It Was Sketchy AF | Evie Magazine

Sunday Strip – by Robert W Malone MD, MS (substack.com)

Understanding Inflation – Milton Friedman

Freedom – Everywhere in Chains

Are you less free now than a year ago?

Are you currently free to flourish as a human?

Are you currently told to wear a mask, stay home and wait for release from house arrest?

Are you being told how you can gather with your family and your church?

Are you being told that you will need a vaccine passport so that you can travel and participate in society once again?

Has your business license become a noose around your neck?

Do you feel free to make choices about dealing with COVID-19?

Do you feel free from coercion? From arbitrary power?

Are you being told how to live your life by those who do not know you?

Do you agree with the following?

“It is true that the virtues which are less esteemed and practiced now–independence, self-reliance, and the willingness to bear risks, the readiness to back one’s own conviction against a majority, and the willingness to voluntary cooperation with one’s neighbors–are essentially those on which the of an individualist society rests. Collectivism has nothing to put in their place, and in so far as it already has destroyed then it has left a void filled by nothing but the demand for obedience and the compulsion of the individual to what is collectively decided to be good.” (emphasis mine)

― Friedrich August von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom

Collectively decided to be good is principle the 18th century Swiss philosopher and French Revolution muse Jean Jacques Rousseau was after: the “general will”, as penned in his 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

Some equated Rousseau’s “general will” with an agreed upon rule of law that would ensure freedom and equal treatment in society. This, at first glance, appears to be beneficial for society. Yet, freedom can be quickly disposed of when the “general will” becomes a demand for obedience and conformity to its rules and laws. Dictators and totalitarian leaders – Democrats, specifically – and their media amplifiers have no problem creating a “general will” and dispensing with your freedom.

As you have witnessed, the Democrats/Left define and perpetrate “general will” in their own ideological (and theological – “social justice”) terms. The Left has no desire for input from anyone else.

The Left’s concocted “general will” is hawked by the predominately Leftist corporate media as the generally accepted will of the people. And, since the lie is in the NYT and on MSNBC, CNN and now on Fox News, people get the impression that what they are being sold is the real deal. The critical race theory based “1619 project” is just one example of what is being peddled. Mask wearing is another. Salvation from COVID-19 by vaccine is another

Those who do not abide by the “general will” Groupthink are rubes, “bitter clingers”, “deplorables”, “racists”, and not worthy of a social media voice in the controlled “general will” narrative.

Does any of this sound familiar in light of this past year of politics playing medicine, of mandates, lockdowns, the stolen election, and the stolen “general will”? Freedom – everywhere in chains because of the imposition of “general will”.

Collectivist’s lies may make you feel like you are in sync with the “general will.” Therein, you may feel safe. Collectivism talks of multiculturalism, of humanism, of a “better world for everyone.” Individual freedom is of no importance to collectivists.

If you care about your freedom, then throw off any attachment to the collectivist “void”. Put to death the collectivist impulse once and for all. Resurrect the human that is you. I return you to the words of Friedrich Hayek.:

“Freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us, and responsibility for the arrangement of our own life according to our own conscience, is the air in which alone moral sense grows and in which moral values are daily recreated in the free decision of the individual. Responsibility, not to a superior, but to one’s own conscience, the awareness of a duty not exacted by compulsion, the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and to bear the consequences of one’s own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name.”


And

“Probably it is true enough that the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beliefs or another. In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority. But this does not mean that anyone is competent, or ought to have power, to select those to whom this freedom is to be reserved. It certainly does not justify the presumption of any group of people to claim the right to determine what people ought to think or believe.”

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The opening sentence to Rousseau’s The Social Contract:

“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.”

Rousseau, like many since, assumed that man is by nature a free and innocent being. He would tell you that man is not the problem. In The Social Contract he stated “Men are not naturally enemies”. He pointed to social institutions as the problem. Fast forward. Remember Barack Obama talking about the “fundamental transformation of America?”

Such a distorted vision of man is behind the ruinous ideology, i.e., Marxism, which has devasted and destroyed the lives of millions. In the effort to produce equality of results, the only equal result has been death by ideology.

Such a distorted vision of mankind is also behind the ad hoc justice being dispensed to today as “social justice.” Accordingly, people are not to be held accountable for crimes against another because of their social situation – environment is the problem, not the man. Yet, as anyone can see under ad hoc justice, a socially “just result” for the criminal does not produce an equally socially “just result” for the victim. The Left cares for one result but not the other.

As I write this, more and more of American institutions are becoming corrupted to serve the coming globalist collective. Man, who is “born free”, is willingly taking on the “chains” supplied by the institutions of the globalist collective.

To learn more about the “unconstrained vision” and before you read anything else this year, read …

A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggle by Thomas Sowell

*****

Here are two men who have shown “readiness to back one’s own conviction against a majority” (“general will” majority):

Economist Thomas Sowell:

A word about the COVID-19 hysteria from Pathologist Dr. Roger Hodkinson

Added 2-1-2021. The truth about COVID-19, masks and the lies we are being fed …

This informative video is found at the following link:

Unmasking The Truth – Dr. Lee Merritt -Omaha, Nebraska

“the right to be unhappy”

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.’

‘In fact,’ said Mustapha Mond, ‘you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.’

‘All right then,’ said the Savage defiantly, ‘I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.’

‘Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.’ There was a long silence.

‘I claim them all,’ said the Savage at last.

Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. ‘You’re welcome,” he said.”

This conversation between John the “savage” and Mustapha Mond, Resident World Controller of Western Europe, takes place in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian science fiction novel Brave New World.

Mond had explained to John the World State’s system of castes, control and consumerism established to create order, stability and happiness. Under the World State the world’s population, economy, technology and culture are made to serve the mission statement: “Community, Identity, Stability”.

John, reared on the Savage reservation and raised on Shakespeare, rejects Mond’s world as described here:

Everyone in Mond’s society belongs: nobody experiences the pain, loneliness, and rejection that has been part of John’s character formation. Nobody in the World State ever suffers any material want, such as hunger or overcrowding. Everyone lives in a clean, new, sterile, sanitary, and bright world with lots of things to buy. Everybody is conditioned or drugged to be happy…

To John, those elements of life Mond has jettisoned are exactly what make us human. Life for John is not worth living without the possibility of deep relationships and intellectual exploration and discovery.

What brought this novel to mind is the Left’s concerted effort to produce a similar globalist World State via the Great Reset. The “public health crisis” and the (illegitimate) 2020 election are the Left’s “gain of function” mutation of our rights and laws to bring about a World State.

Leftist professors, politicians, media provoking agents, Progressives, and even the Pope would have us believe that differences of class, race, income or XYZ can be resolved  and that equality and freedom can be won by A system of government in which the state plans and controls the economy and a single, often authoritarian party holds power, claiming to make progress toward a higher social order in which all goods are equally shared by the people.”

The Pope after the 2016 election:

It it has been said many times and my response has always been that, if anything, it is the communists who think like Christians. Christ spoke of a society where the poor, the weak and the marginalized have the right to decide. Not demagogues, not Barabbas, but the people, the poor, whether they have faith in a transcendent God or not. It is they who must help to achieve equality and freedom”. [emphasis added]

So, are we to believe that communists think like Christians (based on the communist seizure of Acts 4:32)?

Are we to choose to live under a flag of “Community, Identity, Stability”, where the people, the poor … achieve equality and freedom, and then (theoretically) be free of worry, material want, hate, isolation, disease, and would then be happy!?

I have tried to understand the heuristic behind those choosing freedom and those choosing to be free of freedom and desirous of living in a communist state. The Brave New World suggests to me that there are those who choose fail-prone freedom over happiness and those who choose fail-safe happiness over freedom. These two views are at odds. I see the difference going to the very nature of what it means to be human.

As we heard in John’s response above and from your own experience, you know that freedom involves choice.  And, being able to choose goes to the very essence of being human, does it not?

A material object cannot choose. Artificial Intelligence cannot know the sense of adventure and surprise inherent in the act of choosing. Objects and AI cannot know a sense of failure or of happiness or of worry or of hope that a choice may bring about.  

For those who choose fail-prone freedom, life is tragic, romantic and the sum of all human potentialities. Value is created through freedom and choice: love, goodness, charity, etc. These, taking the initiative freely, will say, “I see what needs to be changed, and it starts with me.”

(Now, you don’t want to make the same choices John “the savage” did. You’ll end up in a very dark place. But you get the gist of what I am saying.)

Those who choose fail-safe happiness over fail-prone freedom, it seems to me, trade their freedom and choices for a doled-out life of (theoretical) material security and certainty. These lay the burden of responsibility for their happiness on the World State. You can see this in the growing welfare state.

These seek to avoid pain and suffering and any effort that might bring about pain and suffering inherent in a choice. These seek the material comfort and surety promised by socialism’s “workers’ paradise.” These, lacking the initiative to choose, will say “I see what needs to be changed and it starts with you.”

For, those who choose fail-safe happiness over freedom, in order to obtain fail-safe happiness, go on to coerce, cancel and control the lives of those who do not conform to the manifesto of the World State of Happiness.

Tragically, fail-prone freedom outliers are considered less than human by the World Staters and are sent to internment camps. You either live in the ‘civilized’ World State of the ‘enlightened’ ‘real’ people or you live as barely human on the Savage Reservation.

There are no families and no religion in the World State. Babies are engineered and hatched in the World State. Babies occur naturally within families on the Reservation. There is a syncretic religiosity on the Reservation. Those of the World State voyeuristically watch the savages and worship the assembly line developer Henry Ford.

When the World State requires you to give up your freedom along with your rights and your property so that it can mete out happiness in the form of physical well-being and solidarity with others in similar chains, what will happen to you? Years ago, I wanted to understand the World State of Happiness, aka, communism, and the threat it imposed on humanity.

During the early eighties I read the three volumes of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s’ The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. (I doubt that Pope Francis has ever read these accounts of the devastation to human beings under communism. He prefers messaging that affirms his Marxist World State religion.)

As I learned from my reading, communism dehumanizes. And, as humans are wont to do, Solzhenitsyn rebelled against the imposition of inhumanity – a communist rule.  The rule had begun as an ideology to put things right and ended as an institution of purges, mass murders and gulag camps.

“Communism is as crude an attempt to explain society and the individual as if a surgeon were to perform his delicate operations with a meat ax. All that is subtle in human psychology and in the structure of society (which is even more complex), all of this is reduced to crude economic processes. The whole created being—man—is reduced to matter. It is characteristic that Communism is so devoid of arguments that it has none to advance against its opponents in our Communist countries. It lacks arguments and hence there is the club, the prison, the concentration camp, and insane asylums with forced confinement.”

― Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West

What is certain if you choose fail-prone freedom over happiness is that you are “claiming the right to be unhappy.”

What is certain if you choose fail-safe happiness over freedom: your claiming the right to be happy will not be heard. For, you will have been “reduced to matter”.  Your human nature will be eradicated in your quest for security and stability, aka, happiness.

Further reading:

George Orwell’s 1984, Animal Farm

C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength

Theodore Dalrymple’s The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World

Trump’s Top-10 Triumphs: A Last Look At A Remarkable Presidency – Issues & Insights

Added 1-25-2021:

Let’s Talk Turkey

Let’s Talk Turkey

But first, a word from our sponsors ….

Map of the New World 1600s
Sam Adams

“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace….We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.” ― Samuel Adams

“Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Alexis de Tocqueville

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” ― Alexis de Tocqueville

While I was on Twitter, a few years ago, I would jump in on threads where socialism and capitalism were discussed (Better, the terms were tossed about.). The anti-capitalists would denounce capitalism as “unfair” and the rich as “greedy” while insinuating “equality” and “fairness” occurred naturally within the materialist realm of socialism. As an example, they pointed to Scandinavian countries (where, amazingly, none of them had the gumption to take up residence. That would take initiative and responsibility and money on their part.)

The anti-capitalists, assuming a superior moral position, never talked in-depth about the mechanics of socialism other than it being a redistribution of wealth from “rich” to “poor” via confiscatory taxation. And, whether they were oblivious to or welcoming of the growing soft despotism in America that gives people the illusion that they are in control, I could not determine.

On Twitter there were also those who proclaimed Jesus to be a “Progressive”. They offered a litany of “Progressive” attributes assigned to Jesus, among them “anti-rich”, their presumed antithesis to “Blessed are the poor” [“…in spirit”]. There were those, too, who said that the early church was an example of socialism because the early Christian shared everything in common. Apparently, these folks had never read that Jesus warned about the dangers of the love of riches and not that someone who was rich shouldn’t be. Did these folks also not comprehend that the early church did what they did out of love and not out of coercion?

In the current hopped-up milieu of socialism as social justice*, what is the mystique and lure of socialism, central planning, and top-down government when …

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing.

For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances – what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself.

-from “Democracy In America” by Alexis De Tocqueville, Chapter VI: “What Sort Of Despotism Democratic Nations Have To Fear

Long before social media came around fostering populist socialism, I inured myself against the idea of a free lunch. In the 80s I watched Milton and Rose Friedman’s Free to Choose Series on TV. The following video is part of that series.

Plain-spoken Milton Friedman, economist of the Chicago School of Economics, addresses the issue of social responsibility that seems to be the motivation behind a rejection of capitalism and the attraction of socialism. He also presents the fundamental difference between capitalism and socialism: capitalism – an economic market operating under the incentive of profit; socialism – the government market under the incentive of power. Included are his thoughts on collectivism, social justice, moral values, individual responsibility, the doctrine of social responsibility, and philanthropy.

For the many of you around the world who live in disparate circumstances and who read my blog, I pray that you will benefit greatly from this video.

A final word from our sponsors ….

It’s not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the ‘right’ to education, the ‘right’ to health care, the ‘right’ to food and housing. That’s not freedom, that’s dependency. Those aren’t rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.
― Alexis de Tocqueville

What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish? ― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

When I refuse to obey an unjust law, I do not contest the right of the majority to command, but I simply appeal from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of mankind.
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

The liberties of our country, the freedoms of our civil Constitution are worth defending at all hazards; it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors. They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring a mark of everlasting infamy on the present generation – enlightened as it is – if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of designing men. ― Samuel Adams

Let each citizen remember at the moment he is offering his vote…that he is executing one of the most solemn trusts in human society for which he is accountable to God and his country. ― Samuel Adams

The utopian schemes of leveling and a community of goods, are as visionary and impractical as those which vest all property in the crown. These ideas are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government unconstitutional. ― Samuel Adams

* Pope Francis is Envisaging and Engendering an Open World:

“On the other hand, if we accept the great principle that there are rights born of our inalienable human dignity, we can rise to the challenge of envisaging a new humanity,” he proposes. “We can aspire to a world that provides land, housing and work for all.”

As one can surmise, Francis welcomes the populism of socialism and “for the good of all” envisages a communist version of Catholicism. For example, if you are a Catholic in China, (or the world for that matter) in his vision you’ll be provided land, housing and work provided that you are the Chinese Communist Party’s version of a “good citizen”.

The above helps explain why Pope Francis deplores the populism that elected Trump. A movement of “free people” is hostile to coercive top down rule and to non-democratic central planning and to the liberty-annihilating communism the Pope dreams of and so desires so as to reshape the world into his Let Us Dream image. The Pope/CCP desires the Ring of Power to conform all men to its will.

The Trump movement seeks to take back life, liberty, and country –identity – from the Ruling Class Obama-Clinton-Biden-Cuomo types who talk down to Americans, considering them “bitter clingers” and “deplorables” and rubes. The Trump movement detests the privileged elites (including Francis), and the unelected bureaucrats, and, essentially, those who are “more equal than others” and deign to tell them who they are and what they are to think and what they are to do. The Trump movement fights to keep America from becoming a third world country, as Democrat mayors prove it is possible with their “Open World” policies.

The Trump movement deplores the overreach and suffocating control of globalism. The movement seeks to remove the tentacles of the “Open World” beast that wants to devour the U.S. – our individual rights, our liberty, our Constitution and our identity  – to feed its One World Fratelli tutti chimera. “We the people” reject the Great Reset.

  The One World forces and the purple and scarlet dressed Whore of Babylon are gathering to fight against the Lord, as foretold.

“The board is set, the pieces are moving. We come to it at last…
The great battle of our time.”

Gandalf, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Added 11-26-2020:

Podcast:

Totalitarian Democracy Roger Kimball in conversation with Mark Bauerlein

Roger Kimball is Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion

Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University.

The Way They’ll Do Your Life

 

May 1 – the Day of Solidarity of workers around the world

 

 

The Left’s dalliance with Socialism, redolent with wooing – “Money is in the wrong hands”, “You show me a capitalist, and I’ll show you a bloodsucker”, Workers of the world unite! A future to believe in!” – is not a relationship with socialism’s destructive life-wrecking persona as history accords. Rather, the Left speaks in highly charged (and romanticized) words of a life-saving relationship with socialism using the likes of the moral sounding “From each according to his ability; To each according to his needs”. The match-makers of the Left hype the ‘good-side’ of socialism to their ‘clients’ as one of REVOLUTION! CHANGE! EQUALITY! These beguiling words and many more are enticements for a marriage to politicized envy. They are words of an appeal to dance with the devil (and his details). Millennials who court socialism don’t realize the monster they are dating.

The reality: “From each to the State. Your needs are subject to the State.” Democratic socialism: Pull a lever and vote for socialism; Pull the lever and vote your will; Pull the lever and your needs and your will are submitted to the State.

Personal histories, as in the podcast below, expose “for the people” ideologies and economic systems. As you will learn, socialism dehumanizes the people… “for the people”. Here’s the intro to the podcast from the post She Survived China’s Forced Labor Camp. Now She’s Urging Americans to Reject Socialism.

Jennifer Zeng grew up admiring the Communist Party of China and adhering to its stringent rules. But her life changed forever when she embraced religion and was swept up in a government crackdown on Falun Gong. Arrested four times as a young adult and held in as a prisoner in a labor camp, she quickly woke up to the horrors of living in a socialist state. After being subject to brutal torture, Zeng managed to escape China and now tells about the evils of socialism and communism.

At a time when more Americans are embracing Karl Marx’s teachings, Chris Wright has helped Zeng share her story as part of a network called the Anticommunism Action Team. They recently spoke to The Daily Signal along with Darian Diachok, who escaped from Soviet-era Ukraine as an infant and has helped former Soviet satellite states democratize and overcome their failed communist systems.

 

 

The goal of socialism is communism. Vladimir Lenin 

The legacy of socialism is one of devastation “for the people”.  Beside the accounts in the podcast, personal stories via literature recount the actual eye-witness history. They have the greatest impact on the reader and certainly over myriads of facts. (I will write about the Left’s selective memory in a future post The Mau-Mauing of History.)

The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.

-Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

Required reading w/quotes. These are first-hand personal accounts of life under the heavy fist of socialism:

“Apart from the massacres, deaths and famines for which communism was responsible, the worst thing about the system was the official lying: that is to say the lying in which everyone was forced to take part, by repetition, assent or failure to contradict. I came to the conclusion that the purpose of propaganda in communist countries was not to persuade, much less to inform, but to humiliate and emasculate.”

Anthony Daniels, The Wilder Shores Of Marx: Journeys In A Vanishing World

Three books by Alexzander Solzhenitsyn reveal the grizzly details of Life under Communism via his experience. (I read the complete volumes of Gulag and the The Life…  in the 80’s. I just finished reading the stories of Apricot Jam:

The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956 (Abridged version)

“My life is over, a little early to be sure; but there’s nothing to be done about it. I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die – now or a little later. But later on, in truth, it will be even harder, an so the sooner the better. I no longer have any property whatsoever. For me those I love have died, and for them I have died. From today on, my body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious and important to me.”

~~~~~

“The separation of church and state was so construed by the [Soviet] state that the churches themselves and everything that hung in them, was installed in them and painted in them, belonged to the state, and the only church remaining was that which … lay within the heart.”

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

“A tub was brought in to melt snow for mortar. They heard somebody saying it was twelve o’clock already.
“It’s sure to be twelve,” Shukhov announced. “The sun’s over the top already.”
“If it is,” the captain retorted, “it’s one o’clock, not twelve.”
“How do you make that out?” Shukhov asked in surprise. “The old folk say the sun is highest at dinnertime.”
“Maybe it was in their day!” the captain snapped back. “Since then it’s been decreed that the sun is highest at one o’clock.”
“Who decreed that?”
“The Soviet government.”
The captain took off with the handbarrow, but Shukhov wasn’t going to argue anyway. As if the sun would obey their decrees!”

~~~~~

“He ate his supper without bread. A double helping and bread–that was going too far. The bread would do for tomorrow. The belly is a demon. It doesn’t remember how well you treated it yesterday; it’ll cry out for more tomorrow.”

Apricot Jam: And Other Stories

 

Added 7/15/2019:
Here’s Democratic Socialism in action – mandatory action on your part. You must submit your will:
Venezuela calls for mandatory labor in farm sector

“Trying to tackle Venezuela’s severe food shortages by forcing people to work the fields is like trying to fix a broken leg with a band aid,” said Erika Guevara Rosas, Americas director at Amnesty International, in a statement.

 

The Bill of Rumored Rights

 

Retired prison psychiatrist Anthony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple) speaks and writes with keen insight gathered from his experience of the human condition and of its surrounding culture. Here is a short introduction of Daniels from the website Goodreads:

Anthony Malcolm Daniels, who generally uses the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, is an English writer and retired prison doctor and psychiatrist. He worked in a number of Sub-Saharan African countries as well as in the east end of London. Before his retirement in 2005, he worked in City Hospital, Birmingham and Winson Green Prison in inner-city Birmingham, England.

Daniels is a contributing editor to City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, where he is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow. In addition to City Journal, his work has appeared in The British Medical Journal, The Times, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Salisbury Review, National Review, and Axess magasin.

In 2011, Dalrymple received the 2011 Freedom Prize from the Flemish think tank Libera!.

Not only is Anthony Daniels a prolific writer and well-read, as you’ll discover, he is also well-traveled. His accounts of staying in five countries (North Korea, Albania, Romania, Vietnam and Cuba), all five of which operate under leftist-ideology based regimes, is recorded in The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World. Would-be fellow travelers in the long march of cultural Marxism, both young and old, would do well to read about life in the totalitarian state under centralized government. Daniel’s accounts would be especially revelatory for the would-be fellow travelers promoting ‘democratic’ socialism, the ‘gateway drug’ to full-blown addiction to life under top down government. Democratic socialism is currently being promoted as the means to secure peace of mind (aka happiness) by coercively and exhaustively taxing the wealthy and then having unelected central planners redistribute the take. The uninformed traveler could also read about the state of Venezuela.

I first encountered Anthony Daniels via his essays in The New Criterion, a monthly literary magazine I subscribe to. His extensive bibliography is listed in the Wikipedia entry Theodore Dalrymple.

Having read several of his books, I recommend, for starters, the book noted above and the two books shown below.

Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (start with this book)

Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality

Numerous articles written by Anthony Daniels appear in the Law and Liberty blog.

Below is a video of Anthony Daniels speaking at the Property and Freedom Society Annual Meeting last year (2018). His talk on multiculturalism begins with the subject of rights as misunderstood and misapplied today. My take: rights-gatherers employ victim status leveraged with inalienability to secure advantages in society. With their Bill of Rumored Rights they seek to bypass “the pursuit of happiness” and go directly to happiness.

 

How did our culture get turned on its head? “German Marxists”…”Marx and Freud”…”the Frankfurt school… left-wing academics… Columbia University”…

[Italian communist Antonio] Gramsci also looked to culture. If the Left truly wanted to win, it needed to first seize the “cultural means of production”: the culture-forming institutions such as the media and universities and even churches. He saw societal transformation coming about by a “march through the institutions.”…

Gramsci insisted that leftist intellectuals needed to question everything, including moral absolutes and the Judeo-Christian basis of Western civilization. They needed to frame seemingly benign conventions as systematic injustices that must be exposed. This is where we got professors fulminating against everything from “the patriarchy” to “white imperialism” to “transphobia.”

Marx at 200: Cultural Marxism’s Long Happy March Through the Institutions

 

How is the Cultural Revolution brought to bear on others? Enforceable Subjectivity (article by Theodore Dalrymple):

According to the Metropolitan Police, “evidence of the hate element is not a requirement. You do not need to personally perceive the incident to be hate related. It would be enough if another person, a witness or even a police officer thought that the incident was hate related.”

Example given:

Had a message from Guildford police tonight about my tweets following an appearance on @GMB with Susie Green and Piers Morgan. Susie Green has reported me for misgendering her daughter.

https://twitter.com/CF_Farrow/status/1107779340723515392

“A British police force is investigating @CF_Farrow, a journalist, because of words that she published,” writes @jameskirkup

https://twitter.com/SpectatorUSA/status/1108144367716302848

One Nation Under a Bed of Roses

 

Our current notion of cultural diversity — trumpeted as the repudiation of racism and biological essentialism — in fact grew out of and perpetuates the very concepts it congratulates itself on having escaped. The American love affair with race — especially when you can dress race up as culture — has continued and even intensified. Almost everything we say about culture (that the significant differences between us are cultural, that such differences should be respected, that our cultural heritages should be perpetuated, that there’s a value in making sure that different cultures survive) seems to me mistaken. We must shift our focus from cultural diversity to economic equality to help alter the political terrain of contemporary American intellectual life.

The Trouble With Diversity by Walter Benn Michaels, August 13, 2006

 

 What do you make of the above quote from the web article? What do you make of “We must shift our focus from cultural diversity to economic equality to help alter the political terrain of contemporary American intellectual life.”?

 

 

I thought of how everything the Left offers as societal ‘fix’ is off-kilter. I thought of how the Left seeks to alter the political and cultural terrain so as to espouse the “For the people” narrative for their own Ruling Class benefit.

Has dictator literature a future? If the absence of a sense of humor in public life is anything to go by, it very well might. Indeed, dictator-like literature seems to be increasingly common in academe, as a genre to be imitated rather than eschewed. It is either self-imposed or a manifestation of ideological conformism in the face of social pressure. – Author Authoritarians: The literary talent (or lack thereof) of tyrants at the typewriter by Anthony Daniels

I also was reminded of some of the clarion words of Thomas Sowell, economist:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Regarding the initial quote, there are certainly cultural differences and they are certainly not of equal worth to humans. A culture of cannibalism or animism or Voodoism or a culture of abortion where human life is deemed an inconvenience or a culture of hedonism where self-pleasure is god or a culture of enforced slavery to a socialist political state or a culture of ‘red in tooth and claw’ materialism…none of these are worthy of humans.

We must maintain what is worthy of humans. That would include the cultural heritages that have sustained and benefitted humans down through time: mother and father families, transcendent art, music, and literature, the rule of law, and Christianity. There are without doubt differences between us that are more significant than cultural. These differences come down to whether one believes in the one True God and His kingdom way of life. One cannot equalize light and dark

Regarding the income inequality narrative, promoted as “For the people”: the benefit is solely for those pushing it – the ruling class who want to maintain control of their narrative and of you to flesh out their narrative. But, income inequality should not be an impetus driving anyone to do anything. Income inequities like cultural inequities should be resolved by the free individual and not by coercion.

People, though born equally human, are not equal in ability, desire or will. What should happen: each inequity should be the impetus for us to assess our personal values and goals in the light of loving God and our neighbor. Coercive income redistribution, whether via taxation or increased minimum wages, does not enable human flourishing. Rather, coercion supports further dependence, class animosity and the intellectual’s narrative that goes toward tenure consideration in the ivory tower.

 

The Left’s focus on materialism under the guise of ‘righting’ the Left’s storied wrong (“income inequality”) will have the same devastating effects as defining our culture down to the lowest common denominator for equality’s sake: humans acting as irrational animals to survive.

By seeing every human being as a soulless captive to impersonal economic forces, socialism kills human dignity. After that, as we have witnessed too vividly and too frequently, killing the human body becomes inevitable.Socialism Disregards Human Dignity, Eugénio Lopes

  In its attempts to “alter the political terrain”, the Left demands that there should be no work effort without income equality. Red clenched fists (an ersatz bed of roses) is the Left’s social justice poster.

 As a follower of Jesus in his kingdom on earth, I have no doubt whatsoever that the Evil One wants a social justice where people ‘love their neighbor’ vicariously through an impersonal government program. The Evil One does not want anyone to give directly to their neighbor. That is what Jesus wants – agape love. The Evil One would rather you move your mouse to virtue signal than do any heavy lifting for your neighbor. On the receiving end, the Evil One would rather you be one of the nine lepers would did not return to Jesus and give thanks to him for what he did for ten neighbors. The Evil One would rather you get what you want and not be grateful.

If the Left’s income equality narrative ever becomes reality you can be sure that we will become one nation under a bed of red-fisted roses.

 

 

 

Added 7-23-2018:

 

Michael Novak – Catholic Scholar and “celestial philosopher”

 

“Capitalism forms morally better people than socialism does,” Mr. Novak said in a 2007 interview with Crisis, a magazine he and the scholar Ralph McInerny founded in 1982. “Capitalism teaches people to show initiative and imagination, to work cooperatively in teams, to love and to cherish the law; what is more, it forces persons not only to rely on themselves and their own moral qualities, but also to recognize those moral qualities in others and to cooperate with others freely.”- Michael Novak, Catholic Scholar Who Championed Capitalism, Dies at 83

“At the heart of the Novakian vision is freedom—free people, free markets, free institutions. But Novak’s vision of freedom, like [Irving] Kristol’s, is not the doctrinaire libertarianism that the word evokes for many today. Much less is it the “me generation” liberal counterfeit of freedom that licenses people to do whatever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, with whomever they want, so long as there is no immediate palpable harm to others.

Rather, it is the idea of unleashing the human spirit for the creative pursuit of excellence.”

” –Michael Novak, 1933–2017, by Robert P. George, On the life and influence of the prolific Catholic philosopher

 

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On February 17, 2017, we lost a great Catholic intellectual and “celestial philosopher.”

This Acton Institute video introduces Ambassador Novak and offers a conversational look at his life and work. Novak’s valuable experience and his wealth of wisdom makes this video well worth viewing.

Novak’s masterpiece:  The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Pope John Paul II was one of many admirers of Michael Novak. It would be worth your while to read this entire encyclical written in 1991. It addresses social issues, Marxism, socialism and capitalism.

CENTESIMUS ANNUS, JOHN PAUL II

42. Returning now to the initial question: can it perhaps be said that, after the failure of Communism, capitalism is the victorious social system, and that capitalism should be the goal of the countries now making efforts to rebuild their economy and society? Is this the model which ought to be proposed to the countries of the Third World which are searching for the path to true economic and civil progress?

The answer is obviously complex. If by “capitalism” is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a “business economy”, “market economy” or simply “free economy”. But if by “capitalism” is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality, and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative.

 

“New Things”:

43.…Man fulfils himself by using his intelligence and freedom. In so doing he utilizes the things of this world as objects and instruments and makes them his own. The foundation of the right to private initiative and ownership is to be found in this activity. By means of his work man commits himself, not only for his own sake but also for others and with others. Each person collaborates in the work of others and for their good. Man works in order to provide for the needs of his family, his community, his nation, and ultimately all humanity.

 

Centesimus annus

Marx the Merciless and the Deadly Socialist Ray

 

…Kulaks to conquer, Kulaks to enslave in Clay, property to plunder…

flash gordons trip to mars 1

THIS JUST IN!!

A mysterious beam has been focused on Earth’s citizens. It is sucking the wealth out of people!  The ray is said to be coming from the dead planet Marx. But wait. Professor Zharkov had miscalculated.  The deadly beam is coming from the planet Ruling Class.

It seems that there is a new emperor in town:  Marx the Ideologically Merciless!  And he is using a powerful integrated Collectivist Ray against the people of earth.  The deadly Supreme Socialist Ray or SSR is focused directly on Earth’s citizenry and right on their property. The citizens of earth are fleeing, taking their possessions and hoping not to feel the burn.

I am being told that the wicked Queen Hillary Azura has formed a partnership with the evil emperor Marx the Merciless on planet Ruling Class.  This witch’s powers include the ability to transmute people into figures of living clay, condemning them to live in darkened caves.  She employs the incense of forgetfulness to subdue her enemies.  She is hated and feared by the country class.

Marx the Merciless has also allied himself with other nefarious characters and groups:  the Red Hammer of Sanders organization, the unscrupulous Queen Rubia E. Warren, BHO the shape shifter and the Carnage Corporation. With his life altering ray focused directly on you, Marx the Merciless hopes that “individual economic actions and individual property, rights will be altered and abridged” forever.

 

dale arden 1—Reporting for the Daily Altoid, this is Happy Hapgood’s daughter Snappy Hapgood.

(Snappy has video of the Ruling Class Planet’s attack on the Country Class Planet and the valiant efforts being made to stop Marx the Merciless in his tracks…) Flashs_Ship_movie

 

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“In any event the Commission is convinced by its interpretation of available empirical data that the actually integrating economy of the present day is the forerunner of a consciously integrated society, in which individual economic actions and individual property, rights will be altered and abridged.”

“Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies, Carnegie Corporation, 1934.”

The Supreme Socialist Ray’s unearthly effects are being directed at your children in the classroom…

From Investigation of the Social Studies in the Schools

“8. Under the molding influence of socialized processes of living, drives of technology and science, pressures of changing thought and policy, and disrupting impacts of economic disaster, there is a notable waning of the once widespread popular faith in economic individualism; and leaders in public affairs, supported by a growing mass of the population, are demanding the introduction into economy of ever wider measures of planning and control.

9. Cumulative evidence supports the conclusion that, in the United States as in other countries, the age of individualism and laissez faire in economy and government is closing and that a new age of collectivism is emerging. “

 

Earth must find a way to destroy Marx’s Socialist ray before the Earth is doomed!!!

Caution: A Faraday shield will only protect your electronic gadgets from Electromagnetic Pulses (EMPs). It won’t protect you from Egregious Redistribution Impulses (ERIs)!!!