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About theartfuldilettante

The Artful Dilettante is a native of Pittsburgh, PA, and a graduate of Penn State University. He is a lover of liberty and a lifelong and passionate student of the same. He is voracious reader of books on the Enlightenment and the American colonial and revolutionary periods. He is a student of libertarian and Objectivist philosophies. He collects revolutionary war and period currency, books, and newspapers. He is married and the father of one teenage son. He is kind, witty, generous to a fault, and unjustifiably proud of himself. He is the life of the party and an unparalleled raconteur.

Government Employees to Oppose Trump Agenda

A surprising number of federal government employees admit they are gearing up to act like a deep state, opposing the incoming second administration of Donald Trump.

Most Americans, even many of the elites who voted for Vice President Kamala Harris, are willing to support Trump’s administration, according to an RMG Research survey commissioned by the Napolitan Institute. Yet 42% of federal government managers who work in the Washington, D.C., swamp intend to work against the administration.

RMG Research conducted three surveys in mid-December to study three different segments of the population. The polling firm focused on what it calls the Elite 1% who have postgraduate degrees, earn more than $150,000 annually, and live in densely populated areas; Main Street Americans who meet none of these three criteria and who represent between 70% and 75% of the U.S. population; and Federal Government Managers—federal employees who live in the National Capitol Region around Washington and earn at least $75,000 annually.

Main Street Americans tend to have less faith in government and want more freedom for Americans, while the Elite 1% tend to have more faith in government and say Americans have too much freedom. Main Street Americans tend to look down on the idea of a deep state opposing the people’s elected president.

Favorable Headwinds for Trump, With One Exception

The poll found that many Americans are willing to support the new administration, even among the elites and those who voted for Harris.

The survey asked, “Looking ahead to the next four years, will your political efforts be primarily to support the Trump administration or resist the Trump administration?”

Most Main Street Americans (59%) said they would support the new administration, while only 28% said they would resist it. Even the Elite 1% proved more likely to support (48%) than resist (39%) the administration.

Even some of those who said they voted for Harris in November said they would support the new administration. Twelve percent of Harris voters said they would work to at least somewhat support the new administration.

On Election Day, 64% of the Elite 1% voted for Harris, while only 34% voted for Trump. Yet among the Elite 1% who voted for Harris, a quarter (26%) said they are working to support the new administration.

Federal Government Managers, however, proved evenly split, with only 44% saying they would support the administration and 42% saying they would resist it.

Government Employees Joining the Resistance

Unsurprisingly, Federal Government Managers proved more gung-ho about resistance when they identified as Democrats.

While the vast majority of government employees who identify as Republicans plan to support the administration (89% “somewhat support” or “strongly support”), almost three-quarters of Democrat bureaucrats plan to resist (73% “somewhat resist” or “strongly resist”). More than half of Republican managers (52%) said they would “strongly support” the administration, while 40% of Democrats said they would “strongly resist” it.

A quarter of all managers (26%), whether Democrat or Republican, plan to “strongly support” the administration, and only a slightly smaller portion (23%) say they will “strongly resist” it.

The survey also asked federal government managers what they would do if Trump gave them a lawful order they considered bad policy. Only 17% of Democratic managers who voted for Harris would follow Trump’s order. Three times as many (64%) said they would ignore the order and do what they thought was best. This amounts to a declaration that they plan to act like a deep state, opposing the people’s elected president.

Voters did not look kindly on the idea of bureaucrats refusing to follow orders, however.

More than half (54%) of Main Street Voters said that a bureaucrat who refuses to follow a lawful order from the president should be fired, and even most of the Elite 1% (52%) agreed.

Most Republican managers (74%) say a bureaucrat should be fired for refusing a presidential order, while only 23% of Democratic managers agree.

The Death of Communism in California

The Bass mentor, Oneil Cannon, was described by the communist paper as a member of the Communist Party USA “who became the education director in the Southern California District, and a member of the Party’s Southern California and National Central Committees.”

The paper continued, “Oneil Cannon counted among his friends many leaders and later elected officials of the African-American community. Paul Robeson was one of his valued friends; he would see him whenever he came to Los Angeles.”

Regarding his role in California, it said he “was committed to electing Black and Latino representatives at all levels of government” and helped to elect Augustus “Gus” Hawkins, Tom Bradley, Ed Roybal, Diane Watson, Maxine Waters, and Karen Bass.

Paul Robeson was a black communist actor and singer who was a member of the Moscow-funded Communist Party, had professed love for Soviet mass murderer Joseph Stalin, and supported the Hitler-Stalin Pact that paved the way for World War II.

There was a time when Karen Bass was being considered a vice-presidential candidate on Joe Biden’s ticket. In the end, of course, Kamala got the job.

The Trump Campaign issued a press release, “Will Joe Biden Put Castro-Loving Communist Karen Bass A Heartbeat Away from the Presidency?” on August 1, 2020.

With Hollywood liberals angry about losing their homes and belongings, the time may have come for a reckoning. The once communist-dominated Hollywood may have had enough of communism, at least to the extent it has affected them. It may be time to examine how California became a communist state in America and why it’s imperative to re-establish congressional committees on internal security and un-American activities.

Such a committee wouldn’t have to start from scratch. The report, “Un-American Activities in California,” was published in 1970 by a California Senate Fact-finding Subcommittee and devoted almost 300 pages to analyzing the growth of communism and other Marxist groups in the state and how they organized protests on campuses and then manipulated the electoral process to achieve power.

Cliff Kincaid is president of America’s Survival, Inc. usasurvival.org.

Looters are emboldened as fires rage across Los Angeles

As wildfires rage across Los Angeles, which some say is the worst they’ve seen, looters have been emboldened, taking full advantage of the out-of-control region to plunder homes and businesses that have burned down. With LA police officers and private security guards pushed to the brink, the criminal element in the city is running rampant, showing just how fragile the fabric of society has become in this once-thriving metropolis. Unfortunately, the frightening sight of entire neighborhoods overtaken by wildfires has quickly turned southern California, including the Pacific Palisades, into an unrecognizable hellscape.

Los Angeles city leaders called in the National Guard to help control the havoc wreaked by the fires as looting and possible civil unrest loom in the distance. LA District Attorney Nathan Hochman warned residents of looters and vowed to hold them accountable. Looters have reportedly tried taking advantage of the increasingly fragile environment, which is said to have cost the city $150 million in damage and economic loss.

“While the community rallies to support one another, we are also aware of the individuals who are targeting vulnerable victims to preying on this misfortune, seeking to exploit the vulnerability of those who have already endured so much,” Hochman said. “Let it be clearly known that those who seek to illegally profit from the pain and suffering of others—whether through looting, fraud, theft, burglary, or any other form of criminal activity—will not go unpunished.”

Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) echoed similar warnings, saying that looting would not be tolerated.

However, some of California’s most prominent former residents accuse Newsom of “personally ruining” the state.

Why Are Our Campuses Seething with Antisemitism ?

Why Are Our Campuses Seething with Antisemitism?

Short answer: That’s the way radical professors want it.

Jan 8, 2025

John M. Ellis

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The scale of support on college campuses for militant antisemitism and even for Hamas barbarism has alarmed most Americans, but there’s something else here that ought to trouble us, too: a startling ignorance of the most basic facts of Middle Eastern history. These are college students being educated on renowned campuses—yet they know virtually nothing about the matter they are protesting.

How can that be?

Let’s begin by asking what a serious education about the conflict in the Middle East would look like. At a minimum, we would expect students to have a basic grasp of the case made by each of the two sides. They should be able to evaluate both sets of claims, but that would require knowledge of the major historical events that each side appeals to when justifying its position.

Professors are withholding anything that might interfere with their radical ideology, which means keeping students ignorant.FacebookTwitterEmailPrintShareA grasp of both sides is education; exposure to only one is propaganda.

Unfortunately, propaganda regarding Israel is now routine on our campuses. College teachers are withholding from their students anything that might interfere with their radical ideology, which really means keeping their students ignorant of what they’re supposed to be teaching.

Consider a few examples of the huge gap between the slogans that students have been taught to chant and the facts of Middle Eastern history.

A constant refrain of the students is that Israelis are “settler colonialists,” that is, people without any intrinsic connection to the area. But Hebrew and Arabic are closely related languages that both originated in roughly the same area. Hebrew probably arose in what is now Israel, Arabic in what is now Syria. Of the two, Hebrew actually has a much longer recorded history in the area. Despite periods of forced exile, Hebrew speakers have had a verifiable presence there for more than 3,000 years, over 1,000 years longer than Arabic.

One professor among many who repeat the nonsensical “settler colonialist” line is Columbia University’s Joseph Massad. After the October 7 attacks on unarmed citizens in Israel, he expressed his approval, saying that Hamas’s attacks were justified as resistance to “settler colonialism.”

Furthermore, the union that represents the entire professoriate of the City University of New York recently issued a statement that repeated this charge.

Next, undergraduates are ignorant of the status of the area in dispute. “Palestine will be free,” chant the students. But there never was a nation state called “Palestine.” The area was part of the huge Ottoman empire for four centuries, and, when that empire collapsed following the First World War, territory including what is now Jordan, Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, containing both Arabs and Jews, was placed under temporary British stewardship as the “Palestine Mandate.” Eighty percent of that territory was soon given to the Arabs to form what is now known as Jordan, and the rest was later divided by the United Nations between Arabs and Jews.

“Palestine will be free” suggests that Israelis invaded and occupied a country called Palestine, where only Arabs had lived—rather like what Germans did to France in the Second World War. None of this is true, but that did not stop Professor Marc Lamont Hill from demanding a “free Palestine from the river to the sea” in a speech he gave at the United Nations. The students evidently don’t know enough to understand that what they think of as a call for justice is actually cheer-leading for murderous tribal aggression. The real meaning of the slogan is: “no compromise—we want everything.”

One historical fact immediately disposes of several of the student chants: It is that Israel has always been on a wartime footing since its founding in 1948. It has been invaded several times and has repelled the invaders, and when fighting stopped the defeated invaders always vowed to continue it at some later date. The students call Gaza an “open-air prison,” because Gazans are denied freedom of movement across their border into Israel. But when did any country ever allow free movement throughout its territory to people who are in a permanent state of war with it?

How could students not know that the people they champion want nothing to do with their humane values?FacebookTwitterEmailPrintShareSadly, very few students have been taught the history of this conflict.

The charge that Israel is an “apartheid state” similarly ignores Israel’s permanent wartime footing. Arab Israelis enjoy virtually full civil rights, but Israel is wary of Arabs serving in its military. They can volunteer but are not required to serve as Jews are. But how could Israel not be wary given the permanent state of war with its Arab neighbors? What is even more absurd about the “apartheid” accusation is that the Arabs who live in Israel have more civil rights than they do anywhere in the Arab world. And it’s beyond question that Arabs in Israel are better treated than are Jews in the Arab world.

Do the students who make their chant know anything about the state of human rights in Israel or the Arab countries? Their professors eagerly brand Israel as a terrible human-rights violator without saying anything about the high degree of tolerance and respect for difference that exist in Israel.

Perhaps the most foolish of all the student chants are those that criticize Israel’s conduct of the war as genocide, as well as slaughter of innocent civilians. How could students not know that the people they are championing want nothing to do with the humane values that they invoke here?

On the contrary, they are enthusiastically in favor of genocide and the murder of civilians. They routinely launch rockets at civilian areas of Israel and have been doing so for years. They make no secret of the fact that they want to annihilate all Jews. Do the students even understand what genocide means? The October 7 attack on Israeli civilians was only a more successful version of what Hamas and Hezbollah have long been trying unsuccessfully to do with their rockets.

Israel’s enemies don’t have their formidable defenses, and so Israelis could easily kill large numbers of “innocent civilians” if they wanted to—but they don’t. They are children of the European Enlightenment, which their adversaries are not. So why do the students parrot Enlightenment values on behalf of people who have complete contempt for them?

Why are college students, of all people, so ignorant of simple historical facts that make nonsense of their slogans?

Short answer: That’s the way their radical teachers want them. The point of higher education has always been to turn out students who were better informed, more thoughtful, and with a more humane outlook than they would have been without it. But higher education now produces students who are more narrow-minded, more ill-informed, and more foolish than they would otherwise have been—and that’s true about much more than Israel.

For radical professors it’s more important to create angry zealots for a poorly understood cause than to produce educated people.

John M. Ellis is a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of California-Santa Cruz, chair of the California Association of Scholars, and the author of several books, including, most recently, A Short History of Relations Between Peoples: How the World Began to Move Beyond Tribalism.

Trump to Re-name Dozens of Names

With less than two weeks remaining before his triumphant return to the Oval Office, Trump is already making big moves, including declaring that the Gulf of Mexico will be renamed the Gulf of America. What other new names does he have up his sleeve?

The Babylon Bee has obtained the following list of other things Trump plans to rename:

  1. All USB ports in the country will be renamed “USA Ports”: Only patriotic connections for electronic devices from now on.
  2. The Statue of Liberty will now be “Lady Melania”: The only proper name for the biggest, most beautiful woman in the world.
  3. French Fries will now be known as “Florida fries”: All restaurants must comply or face the consequences.
  4. South America will now be known as “Worse Mexico”: There’s only room for one America in this world. The right one.
  5. New Mexico will be required to call itself “West Texas”: No part of the United States should ever be called Mexico.
  6. Greenland will now be called “AmericaLand”: So much better.
  7. Georgia will be required to rename itself South South Carolina: That’s for 2020, Georgia.
  8. The first country that agrees to rename itself “Trumpistan” gets free NATO membership: Any nation should see the value in this.
  9. China will now be spelled “Chy-na” on all world maps: We all say it that way anyway.
  10. Tex-Mex cuisine will now be simply “Tex-Tex”: Nachos are American now, folks. It’s not even January 20th yet, and America can’t stop winning. Have your ideas for new names Trump should consider? List them below in the comments.

Including link: https://www.newsmax.com/

“Recently President Biden and some Democrat-controlled states have taken what they claim are decisive steps to combat climate change. But in the end, it was all nonsense, hypocrisy, and wasteful spending — with taxpayers picking up the tab. The Biden administration put the final touches on a new regulation that will ban most types of domestic water heaters that use natural gas.  Under the new regulations, approximately 40% of the tankless water heaters in production today would be banned by the year 2029 and replaced with less efficient models. The Department of Energy claims that the new regulations will reduce carbon dioxide emissions. However, natural gas is one of the cleanest fossil fuels in existence, and the regulation will increase consumer costs. Although the new rule was made on Dec. 26, it was done quietly, with no press release to accompany it as is standard. It wasn’t until The Washington Free Beacon reported on it Jan. 3 that it became public. Consumer are penalized in the end, affecting low-income households the most. “It’s one more example of an appliance regulation that raises costs and reduces choices,” Ben Lieberman, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), told the Washington Free Beacon. “It bans an entire category of tankless water heaters and the ones that are most affordable.” But the administration wasn’t finished. On Monday the president banned offshore drilling of oil and gas in most federal waters.  This was just the latest of more than 200 actions Biden has taken to limit the oil and gas industry, according to Ron Ness, president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council. “As American consumers we should all be very concerned, they take massive areas just off limits, taking those decisions out of states,” said Ness. And as government hampers the ability to extract gas and oil, it becomes more expensive, with the consumer paying the price. Meanwhile, Gov. Kathy Hochul, D-N.Y., announced that she’ll be assessing energy companies that legally sell gas, oil, and coal to the public $75 billion over the next 25 years under a new climate law. The fines will allegedly pay for the “damage” they create to the environment. Of course they will. But for the energy companies to remain in business, they’ll have to pass those fines along to the consumer. And as always, low income households will take the biggest hit. Hypocritically, Gov. Hochul turned out to be one of the largest individual consumers of fossil fuels, as she has spent $415,000 on private jets. But then again, she didn’t pay for that. It was paid by her campaign committee from public donations. A local pilot experienced in private aviation said, “It’s very wasteful, especially for an elected official. There is no reason why any elected official in New York should be taking a private jet. Nearly everywhere in New York or upstate has a [commercial] airport that will take you anywhere in the country. “New York is one of the most well-connected places on the planet.” Moving to the Midwest, last week the Michigan Department of Natural Resources announced plans to lease 420 acres of state forest in the northern part of the lower peninsula. The land would be leased to a solar energy provider, who would clear all 420 acres and replace the trees with a solar farm to meet a state climate goal of 100% clean energy by 2040. The announcement raised the hackles of Republican state lawmakers. “Mind-numbing decisions like this are absolute proof that the DNR is completely rotten to its core,” state Rep. Ken Borton, R-Gaylord, said in a statement joined by Rep. Mike Hoadley, R-AuGres, and State Sen. Michele Hoitenga, R-Manton. “This deforestation will destroy habitats and effectively kill wildlife,” Borton added. “Let me make that clear: the DNR is choosing to kill wildlife so they can build solar panels.” In addition, trees are nature’s own air cleaners. They take in carbon dioxide and replace it with pure oxygen. The Heritage Foundation announced late last month just how much the White House energy policy has hurt U.S. taxpayers. “The Harris-Biden administration energy rules and regulations have cost U.S. taxpayers $1.37 trillion since Biden and Harris took office, and all for no impact on the climate,” Heritage reported. “Vice President Harris’ policies are dangerously liberal.” Unfortunately, reversing the policies of the last four years isn’t going to be as easy as signing an executive order. And ultimately, extreme energy programs — whether state or federal — only hurt the people that government claims to serve. Michael Dorstewitz is a retired lawyer and has been a frequent contributor to Newsmax. He is also a former U.S. Merchant Marine officer and a Second Amendment supporter. Read Michael Dorstewitz’s Reports — More Here.” https://www.newsmax.com/michaeldorstewitz/gas-heaters-petroleum/2025/01/08/id/1194285/#:~:text=Recently%20President%20Biden,most%20federal%20waters.

Trump Says Success Will be His Revenge

Donald Trump wants success to be his revenge. He says his policies of deregulation, tax cuts, restoring America’s border and military might, and rolling back government bureaucracy will foster happiness and growth. I understand where he’s coming from. But of all people, Trump must understand that some people don’t want happiness and growth. They want destruction. They hate their fellow man, and many hate themselves. They won’t welcome success and prosperity.

Their response to success and prosperity last time around, in Trump’s first term? COVID fascism: The most widespread instance of temporary mass insanity in all of human history. They did it to get rid of Trump. They literally shut down the world for nearly two years. Nothing so bizarre has ever happened on planet Earth. It wasn’t just the media and Deep State. Millions of Democrat voters, leftist types — gullible, self-righteous sheep — followed and applauded it all. Do you think any of them have learned, grown or changed?

The next few years will be mighty revealing.

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