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.
The inverse of Ayn Rand’s quote is also true: The more irrational and even psychopathological a culture becomes, the more its people succumb to every form of totalitarianism (green, COVID, socialism, etc).
That’s why elections and politics alone will not save us.
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In early April, it emerged that a Marxist, pro-Hamas, anti-American guest speaker gave a two-hour-long lecture at the UCLA Geffen School that included an invocation to kneel in prayer to momma earth and stand up and scream for Hamas. This proves that Marxist ideological argot, the canons of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), intersectionality, and critical race theory have infiltrated American medicine.
[T]he Harvard and UNC admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause.
[snip]
Many universities have for too long done just the opposite. And in doing so, they have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.
Large institutions such as UCLA grab the headlines, but this is a problem across American medicine.
The Charles Drew University Medical School (CDU), a private medical school in Willowbrook, California (which is really Watts), was founded in response to political pressure after the Watts Riots of 1966. The school is small (approximately 550 students) and doesn’t offer medical science classes. Instead, students UCLA for the basics, with CDU providing some clinical exposure for third- and fourth-year students, but has no decent teaching hospital. It does race-based, postgraduate research and has physician’s assistants and nursing programs.
The programs are also black-centric to the point of illegality, something that an organization called Do No Harm (DNH) brought to light. DNH is a medical advocacy group that Dr. Stanley Goldfarb founded after the University of Pennsylvania forcibly “retired” him when he wrote an essay for the Wall Street Journal challenging medical schools’ focus on social justice rather than medicine.
In the essay, Dr. Goldfarb argued that medicine must remain a science-guided profession that is color-blind and focuses solely on treating illness. He condemned how medical schools’ obsession with “diversity” negatively affected medical research and scientific practices. In other words, Dr. Goldfarb has the old-fashioned idea that physicians should pay attention to good medical care for their patients and not be recruited to be soldiers for a Marxist socialist cultural conquest.
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In July 2023, DNH filed a complaint against Drew with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. It did so
[I]n response to the University’s operation of a discriminatory program. Specifically, CDU ran a scheme known as “EDGE-PA”, which offers “resources and support” only to “Black men” facing difficulty in getting accepted into a physician’s assistant program.
Included in the long list of “resources” offered exclusively to black men are mentorships, workshops, tutoring, scholarships, guest speakers, and much more.
[snip]
If that was not bad enough, CDU was not just looking for “black men” to participate in the EDGE-PA program—it was looking for black men who demonstrate, among other things, “a passion for social justice”. In other words, the program was not just racially discriminatory but also sought candidates who fit a very particular ideological mold.
This archived page shows how the Drew program discriminated in favor of black men. Since then, however, Drew has scrubbed the page, and it’s not the only one to have done so. Indeed, it turns out that lots of medical schools, showing consciousness of wrongdoing, hide the evidence when called out. As DNH explained in a post on Friday,
CDU is not the first educational institution to try and delete the evidence after learning they were under a civil rights investigation. For example, in 2023, the University of Colorado School of Medicine (CUSOM) scrubbed its website following the submission of an OCR complaint by Do No Harm regarding discriminatory scholarships run by the school. Similarly, the University of Nebraska College of Medicine (UNCOM) quietly removed two discriminatory programs from its website following the initiation of an OCR investigation.
In other instances, colleges and universities have substantially altered the criteria for certain programs after an OCR investigation began but before it was concluded. Deleting or modifying evidence of discrimination is a typical response by schools after being notified they are under a federal civil rights investigation, and implicates the school with discrimination that they know is legally indefensible.
Despite the medical school’s chicanery, DNH is optimistic that its complaints (40 in 2023 and 7 this year, so far) will help end illegal DEI programs in medical schools. However, DNH is naïve to think that leftist fanatics for CRT and DEI will just stop their programs to push Marxist ideology into American medical care.
By taking down material, the medical schools showed they knew that they were in the wrong, but fanatics lead these schools. They’re just shifting tactics, not repenting.
In 2022, Heather MacDonald wrote about the Marxist “Corruption of Medicine.” Medical schools and professional organizations are pushing nihilistic, utilitarian, social-justice identity politics, and they’re not going to stop. They are doing this to vulnerable students who are selected not based on merit but based on race, sex, sexual identity, or other preferred leftist status. These students are incapable of pushing back against the nonsense they are taught. Her essay is invaluable information about the magnitude of the socialist conquest of medicine.
Commie theorist Antonio Gramsci advocated in the 1930s for the next step in the Marxist revolution: Overrun a country’s institutions and culture, its schools and education, media, and entertainment. And then, through those vehicles, destroy the pillars of Western civilization, i.e., Judeo-Christianity, family, and government by consent.
Medicine is just one of western civilizations great achievements that the Marxist true believers have captured. Their success is as much a malignancy as cancer itself.
John Dale Dunn is a 50-year physician and 40-year attorney in Brownwood, Texas.
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School choice laws advance in five more states, and 11 states now have universal or near-universal private school choice laws, so far.
by Jude Schwalbach
Last year, 14 states signed 16 strong public and private school choice proposals into law, making it the year of universal choice. Yet policymakers are continuing this trend in 2024, as five state legislatures have advanced strong private school choice proposals so far. Notably, one of these proposals, Alabama’s CHOOSE Act, was signed into law, expanding the number of universal or near-universal private school choice laws to 11.
While strong school choice laws ensure that students can attend the school they choose free of charge, accessibility often remains a problem. Some states’ solution is mandating that districts transport private school kids rather than giving parents options to receive transportation funding. Consequently, the transportation provided often doesn’t meet students’ needs. For instance, some states limit transportation to the area inside district boundaries or only provide it along existing bus routes.
Similarly, cross-district transfer students using open enrollment are not guaranteed transportation to their new school. In some cases, such as Colorado, state law lets school districts prohibit other districts from transporting transfer students across their boundaries.
Many families are willing to drive their children to schools that are a better fit. In fact, a new EdChoice report by Mike McShane reviewed polling data from a representative sample of more than 1,500 parents. Notably, 29% of respondents said they were willing to drive up to 20 minutes and 24% said they were willing to drive 30 minutes so their children could attend a school that was the right fit. Only four percent of parents said they would drive for no more than five minutes.
Unfortunately, not all students’ families can afford to provide their own transportation to the school that’s best for them. Some states, such as Florida, try to address this disparity by letting parents use their child’s education savings account to pay for eligible transportation costs. Similarly, in Wisconsin, the state can reimburse parents of students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch up to $1,218.54 in mileage expenses.
During the 2024 legislative session, both Florida chambers passed House Bill 5101, establishing a travel stipend for K-8 students attending a Florida public school other than their residentially assigned one.
Other states are also trying to eliminate barriers and make schools accessible to students. For instance, the Iowa House passed House File 2278, which would let receiving school districts travel two miles into other school districts to transport transfer students.
In Idaho, policymakers introduced H.B. 447, which aimed to establish a refundable tax credit valued up to $5,000 that parents could use to pay for transportation to a non-public school.
The proposals aren’t perfect, but they are steps in the right direction that make schools more accessible to students. As robust school choice policies become more common, policymakers need to reconsider traditional transportation models used in K-12 education and explore innovative options.
More State News
In other important education and school choice developments across the country, Alabama policymakers passed a major education savings account proposal, Tennessee’s Education Freedom Scholarship Act made legislative headway, and the Wyoming legislature passed an income-based ESA.
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed the CHOOSE Act into law, establishing education savings accounts (ESAs) valued at $7,000 per student. Eligible students are supposed to gain access to these funds in 2025 and can use them to pay for approved education expenses, such as private school tuition. According to the bill, all Alabama students should become eligible to receive an ESA at the beginning of the 2027-28 school year.
In Tennessee, the Education Freedom Scholarship Act, which would establish a private school scholarship that could be used to pay for private school tuition, was approved by the state Senate’s education committee. The companion bill in the House was approved by the House Education Administration Committee. If signed into law, the proposal would provide 20,000 students with scholarships. Gov. Bill Lee said he supports the proposal.
The Wyoming legislature approved H.B. 116 which would establish education savings accounts. All students can apply for scholarships, but the amounts are based on families’ income. NextSteps’ Travis Pillow reported that students whose families income is 150% of the federal poverty level would be eligible for scholarships valued at $6,000, while students from families whose income was 500% of the federal poverty level would be eligible for scholarships valued at $600.
A constitutional amendment aiming to make private school choice laws constitutional was approved by the Kentucky House and Senate last week. This amendment is needed because the Kentucky Supreme Court struck down the state’s tax-credit scholarship as unconstitutional in 2022. The amendment will be included on the November ballot for voter ratification. Gov. Andy Beshear said he does not support the amendment.
The Idaho House Revenue and Taxation Committee killed a proposal to establish tax-credit scholarships, valued at $5,000 per student, which families could’ve used to pay for private school tuition.
In Indiana, Gov. Eric Holcomb signed H.B. 1380, which prohibits public schools from charging tuition to transfer students using open enrollment.
The Georgia House passed Senate Bill 233, which would establish the Georgia Promise Scholarship Act to provide $6,500 scholarships to eligible students. Scholarship recipients could use them to pay private school tuition or other approved education expenses. The bill has the support of Gov. Brian Kemp but must return to the Senate for concurrence.
Conservatives simply have a more robust instinct to recoil than liberals do when confronted with ugliness in their midst. And we have the research to prove it.
Liberals and conservatives typically differ in many of their psychological characteristics, personal predilections, and life choices, but few of these differences stand out to me as starkly as this one: Conservatives’ taste may be generally … conservative, but at least they tend to be fond of beauty and beautiful things. Liberals tend to resent beauty, often to the point of knee-jerk iconoclasm. They have a soft spot for the hideous in every aspect of life.
One way of getting at the issue is to consider the way liberals commonly deform and desecrate their own bodies. They go around sporting unsightly piercings, body modifications, and bizarre hairstyles or hair dyed all sorts of stupid colors, and they wear vulgar clothes that display body parts, unsightly flab notwithstanding, that really should stay covered for the sake of all concerned. True, they typically start out less attractive than conservatives, but then they do themselves no favors by leaning into their God-given deficits instead of working to ameliorate them.
Conservatives tend to focus on higher things, while the liberal gaze always finds a way of wandering downward.
But this goes far beyond bodies. As research has revealed, conservatives tend to dislike things that are disgusting, and so when presented with images of blood, feces, or vomit, they are quicker than liberals to look away. Such results track with New York University psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s “moral foundations” research showing that conservatives have, among other things, a far more developed sense of purity/sanctity/degradation, strongly rooted in disgust motivated by an evolutionarily advantageous avoidance of pathogens.
In short, conservatives simply have a more robust instinct to recoil than liberals do when confronted with ugliness in their midst.
Research has also repeatedly shown that conservatives prefer less busy, more realistic art, while liberals prefer work that is more complex and abstract. Conservatives, in other words, have a preference for art and architecture that is more traditional and classical. Whatever else one might want to say about such art, it is surely more universally thought to be conventionally “beautiful.”
At least some of the examples in the latter category, such as “Guernica,” possess a kind of sublime “terrible beauty,” to use Yeats’ phrase. But harmonious beauty that inspires and attracts and dissonant, terrible beauty that shocks and repels — i.e., ugliness perfected and elevated to the realm of art — are not at all the same thing. It is that first category of art objects toward which conservatives gravitate, while liberals are far more comfortable with ugly work, such as the body-baring oeuvre of performance artist Karen Finley or Andres Serrano’s juvenile exercises in transgression and blasphemy.
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As the Catholic theologian and podcaster Trent Horn recently argued, another significant factor informing the liberal-conservative divide as far as aesthetic matters are concerned is the direction in which their attention typically goes. Notwithstanding Michelle Obama’s notorious remark that “when they go low, we go high,” conservatives tend to focus on higher things, while the liberal gaze always finds a way of wandering downward.
While we’re on the topic, to set the record straight: Even when it comes to politics, Obama was dead wrong. A recent Rasmussen poll revealed that, in contrast with 7% of the general population, 69% of people like Michelle Obama — politically engaged individuals with postgraduate degrees making more than $125,000 — are willing to cheat to win an election, the political prosecutions of one Donald J. Trump illustrating that fact.
Profaning the sacred
As the critic George Steiner has argued, and as I also made clear in a recent essay, art is, or ought to be, all about focusing on something outside of the self. At its best, art expresses soaring, transcendent visions that elevate our minds. Conservatives, who have disproportionately retained that transcendence-seeking religious sensibility, are far more naturally attuned to such modes of expression, while the liberal’s anti-spiritual mind is wont to go diving into humanity’s gutter.
This is part of why liberals generally feel so much more at home in contemporary art’s morass. While pre-romantic art saw the artist as a vessel for higher truths, the romantic philosophy of art turned the focus inward, on art as a vessel for our self-expression. But romantic artists still largely retained the ability to create beautiful things because the romantic artist, in the process of becoming a creator, elevated himself to the level of a kind of stand-in for the divine creator he sought to emulate or displace.
With modernism, and especially postmodernism, even that saving grace — the aspiration upward — receded. All that was left, as Rockford University philosophy professor Stephen Hicks has stressed, was the all-too-human level of operations: the self, the body, the political, social, sexual, biological, and scatological dimensions of our being and, today, the various identitarian categories that we attribute to ourselves.
No longer able to pursue without irony flights into those higher realms of old, modern and contemporary artists often made or make an art of “sour grapes” iconoclasm, trying, as Andy Warhol did with his various Mona Lisas, to banalize, de-pedestal, and even desecrate the works of their predecessors, while like-minded leftist critics like Walter Benjamin and John Berger made a virtue of technological techniques of easy reproduction threatening to strip art objects of their once-forbidding “aura” of originality and uniqueness.
Such considerations offer an additional reason why conservatives opt for older art over more recent contributions.
But liberals’ disdain for old classics often goes beyond merely expressing opinions. Through the ages, a certain type of anti-intellectual social conservative has consistently waged war on avant-garde culture. This conservative has sought to censor elements deemed too outré, crass, or profane.
Similarly, many contemporary progressives, who also can be seen as anti-intellectual, take a stand against classical and traditional culture. They aim to bowdlerize or remove from the canon great works of art. Their criteria? The perceived identities of the creators, judged as too white, too male, or too heterosexual. They base these judgments on fleeting social justice standards. According to these progressives, the creators or their creations violate these standards.
Furthermore, they argue that certain high art is too challenging. Therefore, they label it elitist, implying it’s inaccessible to the general public — those whom the progressive priesthood claims to represent. Along similar lines, in a kind of left equivalent to the fundamentalist Taliban’s destruction of priceless Buddhist monuments, progressive extremists think nothing of desecrating timeless works of art to protest climate change.
BORIS HORVAT/Getty Images
What lies beneath
Moving beyond art, the liberal attack on beauty and harmony also extends to liberals’ full-throated embrace of ugly behaviors.
Until quite recently, the consensus among sane people held that those who eat and sit themselves into obesity are making poor choices that should be, in one way or another, discouraged by medical professionals and society at large. The political divide, if any, was more when it came down to the question of how to go about addressing the issue, whether the best policy was to leave the matter to the domain of individual discretion and advise people on proper diet and exercise or else to target Big Food’s death merchants and the corrupt politicians collaborating with them to permit the poisoning of America’s food supply from school cafeterias to nursing homes and at every point in between.
But in the past several years, with the rise of the movement that goes by the absurd euphemism of “body positivity,” many liberals have crossed the line from merely not stigmatizing or casting blame upon grossly overweight people to perversely holding up the morbidly obese (including in such things as Victoria’s Secret ad campaigns) — with a higher risk of nearly every notable adverse health outcome, COVID included — as not only an acceptable but desirable social outcome.
What fuels liberals’ visceral aversion to beauty? The true explanation is a deep-seated resentment of things as they are.
In the same category of normalizing ugly behaviors, liberals have promoted devil-may-care policies that have allowed our cities to degenerate to the point where all manner of mayhem, mischief, filth, and disorder have become routine.
Defecation and urination in public places, open drug scenes, the ubiquitous miasma of marijuana, tent encampments on sidewalks, benches permanently occupied by addicts and other bums, thugs blasting their music out loud in trains and on buses, freeloaders not bothering to pay fares to ride public transit, and the looming threat of street crime all around — these have all become daily realities in “blue cities.”
In these strongholds, liberals go so far as to prioritize the rights of socio-culturally malformed individuals, elevating the rights of thugs and perpetrators over those of law-abiding citizens, victims and those acting in self-defense, the rights of squatters over those of legitimate tenants and owners of real estate, and the rights of sexual and gender deviants over those of well-adjusted, normal members of society.
But we come to the underlying psychological question of why we see this pattern repeat over and over. What is it that fuels liberals’ visceral aversion to beauty?
A higher disgust threshold, which I have mentioned above, is insufficient to give us the full picture, as the mere fact that one is not quite as readily grossed out by all manner of ugliness does not in any way imply an affirmative disdain for the beautiful.
The true explanation, as the anthropology professor and YouTuber Edward Dutton has suggested, is a deep-seated liberal resentment of things as they are. It’s also the reason for the average liberal’s attenuated disgust reflex.
Dutton notes that liberals are higher in the personality dimension known as “neuroticism,” which, broadly speaking, is an overall propensity to experience negative emotions such as anger, anxiety and depression.
Let’s unpack that a bit because there is a good deal of research grounding that conclusion. A great marshaling of such research appears in a March 2023 article from the Stony Brook University sociology professor and Heterodox Academy fellow Musa al-Garbi. I will summarize some of his most pertinent observations, though the interested reader would be well-advised to go through his article from start to finish to understand liberal psychology, with links to the underlying research.
There is, moreover, a vicious circle at work. “In many liberal, affluent, highly educated spaces one increasingly gains moral status through association with formerly stigmatized identities — for instance by identifying as a racial, ethnic, or religious minority, a sexual minority, or as a person with a mental or physical disability.”
So, there we go: Children who, for whatever reason, grow up maladjusted and angry at the world, disproportionately grow up to become adults whose psychological condition goes political. They come to feel anger and resentment — Nietzschean “ressentiment” — at things as they are and all those who seem to be doing OK. To ground their resentment, they identify some real injustices and inequities in need of remediation, as real injustices and inequities are certainly present in spades in our imperfect society, and many liberal causes have some measure of validity.
But seething resentment still lurks just beneath the surface. Like Milton’s Satan, who rebels against God’s order and proclaims, “Evil, be thou my Good,” they recoil from the established order and invert categories, finding beauty in things, people, and behaviors traditionally considered disgusting, ugly, or otherwise unsavory and finding defects in and reasons to run down all that was long thought beautiful, harmonious, and true. In the process, even as their efforts succeed in combating a few genuine instances of injustice, they gradually and then suddenly succeed in reforging society in their image, making it mirror the ugliness lurking in their souls.
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“We have two parties, and only two,” the legendary journalist and conservative political activist M. Stanton Evans liked to say: “One is the evil party, and the other is the stupid party. I’m very proud to be a member of the stupid party. Occasionally the two parties get together to do something that’s both evil and stupid. That’s called bipartisanship.” I couldn’t help but think of that line on Friday when the House passed the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) on Friday. 149 Republicans and 126 Democrats voted in favor of this act that does not include a requirement for warrants when authorities want to search American citizens’ data.
This is indeed both evil and stupid. It was FISA lawlessness that allowed the DOJ to spy on the Trump campaign via Carter Page. And, so that readers understand that this kind of abuse is not reserved merely for Donald Trump but for all of us, we might consider that it was less than one year ago that it was revealed that the FBI had misused FISA searches nearly 278 thousand times over 2020 and 2021. This is no mere “right-wing talking point.” You could have read about it in left/regime sources such as Reuters and the New York Times.
That improper searches targeted not only people at January 6 but also those at George Floyd protests is small comfort, as is the fact that the FBI started to pull back on its FISA requests starting in 2022. After all, we were assured by then-Attorney General William Barr in 2020 that changes to the FISA program would limit the problems already being observed. That clearly didn’t happen.
It’s not that there wasn’t a chance to stop this bill from passing as is. Arizona GOP Representative Andy Biggs proposed an amendment to the bill requiring warrants for searches of U. S. citizens. It tied 212-212—and was defeated because House Speaker Mike Johnson cast the deciding vote against it. As Biggs said on X (Twitter), “86 Republicans voted with Joe Biden and the Uniparty to allow the FBI to continue spying on Americans without a warrant. The Swamp is deep.”
Of course, Johnson doesn’t think of it that way. Earlier in the week he told reporters that when he was a member of the House Judiciary Committee, he too saw the massive violations. But, he said last week, he: “got the confidential briefing on sort of the other perspective on that to understand the necessity of section 702 of FISA and how important it is for national security. And it gave me a different perspective.” Unfortunately, the perspective it gave him was the one shared by the Biden Administration, the FBI, and the Intelligence Committee. In short, it was the perspective of those who most need to see that, because bad guys exist, our Fourth Amendment guarantees against “unreasonable search and seizure” and warrants only “upon probable cause” do not cease to exist.
The good news is that the version of Section 702 that passed included a two-year sunset on this version of the act, rather than a five-year one, and a promise to give a stand-alone vote on Ohio Representative Warren Davidson’s bipartisan The Fourth Amendment is Not For Sale bill, which puts a great many barriers in the way of the government obtaining private citizens’ data.
The better news is this: there is still a chance to change this FISA reauthorization. After passage on Friday, a motion was made to reconsider the vote on the FISA reauthorization. Due to parliamentary maneuvers in response, the vote to reconsider will not take place until Monday. Texas GOP Representative Chip Roy, who voted against the FISA bill, observed that House members who supported the reauthorization without the extra safeguards now ought to “go home and tell constituents over the next 72 hours about why they are siding with the intelligence agencies in the deep state and the swamp over the rights and liberties of the American people.” And Utah Senator Mike Lee tweeted on Saturday, “If you don’t like the FISA bill as passed by the House yesterday, tell your representative! The House will be voting on a motion to reconsider on Monday. This isn’t over. #FISA702 #GetAWarrant.”
Indeed, you should contact your representative. The idea that we are going to keep going with warrantless FISA searches of our citizens after the revelations of the last decade is a massive blunder. Especially since 9/11, over twenty years ago, Americans have been told over and over that their civil liberties must be put on a backburner, usually with some sort of a warning such as that, if they don’t, “the terrorists will win.” While there is no doubt that our Constitution is not, as Justice Robert Jackson famously said, “a suicide pact,” and written laws have exceptions to them, the continuing erosion of our society and especially our liberties named in the Bill of Rights because of an ostensible threat to our “safety” has begun to be obnoxious.
The tendencies of the modern left and too much of the “national security right” have been to turn our entire society into the equivalent of a more relaxed military garrison or perhaps low-security prison. We’ve been showing our papers, subjecting ourselves to body scanners and pat-downs at the airport, making sure we throw out containers with more than a certain number of ounces of liquids, and hand over the pocket knives we forgot in our pockets for over two decades now. It’s not the worst thing in the world, but it’s been a kind of test for what the American people will put up with.
Over the last few years, we learned what people with power might do to an easygoing people. During the response to Covid, we discovered that there is a healthy portion of that Swamp that had no problems with turning our society into a literal police state where unauthorized surfing, boating, or playing in yards during “shelter-in-place” orders merited police intervention. We learned that many would use bureaucratic power and even the law to remove people from jobs because they refused to take a pharmaceutical product that was still largely experimental. And we learned that social media companies were effectively censoring Americans on behalf of, and reporting on them to, parts of our own federal government.
It’s been ugly. And in blue states, such tyranny continues. Rather than enforce the laws of the land in the face of a crime wave, New York would rather place National Guard troops inside the subway system.
The Grand Old Party has a grand old opportunity now to be the party that doesn’t just do stunts like reading the Constitution in public but make laws that actually reflect what that supreme law of the land says. We can be the party that brings law and order; by doing so, we can be the party of true liberty.
Too often, Republicans have ended up being the echo and not the choice; a junior party in the uniparty and not a challenger to it; a slightly cleaned up puddle that still smells of the swamp. These failures have bred distrust—and trust is the ultimate currency of politics.
Donald Trump urged Republicans to “kill” the FISA bill as it stands this week. He was surely right. If Republicans want to win in November, they need to win back the trust of the American people. They need to show Americans that they aren’t stupid and won’t deal with evil. They should get their act together this weekend and figure out how to protect Americans from our enemies while also protecting them from searches without warrants. Definitely call or write your representative today.
Don’t believe me? What will it take, then? We have a Constitution and Bill of Rights; but they are NOT active.
Eighty-six House Republicans vote for warrantless surveillance of Americans. The Speaker of the House — a “conservative” Republican — cast the tie-breaking vote, upholding the repeal of the American Constitution with regard to search and seizure.
In essence, they’ve decided the Bill of Rights does not apply to modern electronic technology. Put another way: They have deleted the parts of the Bill of Rights they do not like.
America fought the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War II and everything else in order to uphold the very thing all Democrats and most Republicans have now torn down. In principle and in practice, it’s going to be a very ugly place for your children and grandchildren.
Hopefully you can rest well, knowing you did everything you could to speak out and prevent it all.
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The U.S. regime sends billions and billions to Iran. It treats Iran like an ally.
Iran repeatedly threatens to wipe Israel off the face of the map. We know they mean it, because Iran sponsors most of the world’s terrorism, most of which is waged against Israel.
The U.S. regime says Israel is an ally, and that the U.S. is committed to the safety and preservation of Israel. When Israel is attacked with the worst atrocities against Jews since Hitler’s Nazi Germany, the U.S. tells Israel not to DARE think about fighting back — other than in theory, but never in practice. The vice president of the U.S. regime even hints at American military force against Israel if Israel refuses to stop bombing Palestinian terrorists, the ones committing the atrocities against Jews the U.S. regime claims it’s committed to stopping.
Saying someone’s your friend, refusing to let that friend defend itself, and then arming its enemies. And then asking: “What’s wrong? You’re my friend!” I guess this is what’s meant by “gaslighting.”
“Oh, Israel is our friend. Israel can and must defend itself. We will assist it every step of the way. Only Israel cannot fight back — only when we say so. And we’re going to keep sending billions to Iran. We’ll glibly predict that Iran will attack Israel, and that Israel cannot do much about it. We will do our part by telling Iran, ‘Now, Iran, don’t you attack Israel.’ So what’s the problem? Of course we’re pro-Israel.”
This is YOUR government, America. YOUR government is treating Israel like this. If it treats Israel like this, just think what it will do to its own citizens. Just look at what it’s already doing. The entire Democratic Congress and dozens of Republicans (including the “conservative” House Speaker) just voted to let the government spy on its citizens without a warrant. I guess that’s what they mean by “Uniparty.”
I consider the Biden regime and all in the Uniparty connected to it to be lawless, amoral, unconstitutional and illegitimate. But they’re doing it all in YOUR name, America. By refusing to fight back or even speak out, you’re sanctioning your own destruction, as well as the destruction of your children and grandchildren.
How much are you going to take? How much can Israel be expected to take? Or is there absolutely no limit to the self-sacrificial abuse good people will take at the hands of the real, greatest evil in the world which — today — resides in Washington DC?
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O.J. Simpson: He got away with murder. Before it was cool.
The Biden regime official spokesperson offered sympathy for O.J. Simpson and his family, with no mention of his victims. No surprise. Sociopaths and criminals who get away with their crimes stick together.
What else is there to say? The O.J. Simpson trial was the early warning signal of what happens when you put ideological narratives and state religion above truth and facts.
The rest of the culture, including 100 percent of our government, shows us the rest today.
We got what we asked for; or what we’ve chosen to permit. It’s as simple as that.
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In AD 2000 Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton published “The Tyranny of Good Intentions” about How Prosecutors and Law Enforcement Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice .
“What are we to do if those chasing devils decide to chase after us.” Sir Thomas More
The Tyranny of Good Intentions, Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton renew their valiant campaign to reclaim that which is rightly ours–liberty protected by the rule of law. They show how crusading legislators and unfair prosecutors are remaking American law into a weapon wielded by the government and how the erosion of the legal principles we hold dear–such as habeas corpus and the prohibition against self-incrimination–is destroying the presumption of innocence. A new introduction and new chapters cover recent marquee cases and make this provocative book essential reading for anyone who cringes at the thought of unbridled state power and sees our civil liberties slowly slipping away in the name of the War on Drugs, the War on Crime, and the War on Terror.
BORIS HORVAT/Getty Images
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 