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.
(WND)—Consider the following part of my often discussed greater discourse I reference as contributing factors in the death of America.
Pursuant to my opening paragraph, it’s stunning to me that so many people, including many of my peers, fail to realize the finality of the condition confronting the world, and specifically confronting America.
We’re not fighting a conventional war; therefore, conventional weaponry and strategies won’t work. Any and all attempts to reclaim loss ground are pointless, because an unconventional war cannot be won conventionally. We are in a full-blown spiritual war.
The enemies of America and global civilization as a whole understand said factoid very well. America was truly a gift from God to the world, second only to Moses, Abraham and other great leaders found in the scriptures. But, as I’ve repeatedly said: The only thing our governmental construct was unable to protect America from were evil and wicked men.
It’s one thing to not see the forest for the trees, but it’s another thing altogether to misidentify the trees.
America is being deconstructed piece by piece. Speaking metaphorically, the illusionists have the people focusing on how the rabbit got out of the hat and failing to realize that the rabbit was never in the hat.
The American public from womb to grave in ever increasing numbers are being misinformed and misled for the express purpose of destroying what God, through our Founders, gave us.
The truth has been misstated to the point that even well-meaning people unconsciously accept and advance the fraudulent representations.
The so-called intellectuals and elitists today view the four foundational constructs of America – church, family, education and military – with hostility. But, hating same is one thing, getting rid of these foundations is the goal.
Change the language and the founding documents become of no effect; e.g., the Constitution, the Articles of Confederation and the Declaration of Independence never mention nor refer to America as a democracy. That’s because America isn’t a democracy nor was it ever intended to be. (See: “Why the United States was Designed as a Republic” by David Shestokas.)
Don’t get me wrong. You’ll hear so-called conservatives and certain others correctly argue that America is a constitutional republic. But, day after day in public school classrooms and America’s equivalent to Pravda, i.e., higher education and the mainstream state media propagandists, malleable minds are brainwashed through an uninterrupted diet of references to a fictional “democracy.”
This error isn’t being committed by accident. This damnable lie is being advanced as heterodoxy for the express purpose of destroying the Constitution of the Untied States of America. It’s being advanced for the express purpose of undermining and abandoning the veritas of the Constitution.
Our son forwarded me an article about Washington becoming the fourth state, following Oregon, New Hampshire and Wisconsin, that will no longer require the bar exam to become a licensed attorney. This a travesty on its face; it’s a definitional miscarriage of language, because in order to be licensed for anything, one must pass a test of some sort on some level.
In reality, this is the next step in reducing the Constitution to no effect, without a Constitutional Convention.
People are ignoring the true rationale of the Fabianists. I’ve warned over the years that the democratic socialists advance with ophidian-like rapidness using gradualism and reformist guerrilla tactics. And their tactics are working, in large part because the foundations of America have been eroded by the pursuit of those entrusted to defend them, becoming more desirous of the riches/trappings of the godless than they are in honoring the foundations America was built upon.
I predict in the very, very near future these so-called attorneys will find themselves appointed to judgeships, ultimately leading to state supreme courts, all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS). They will be hailed as evidence that doing away with bar exams and the renunciation of all licensing was a success with these persons placed in judicial positions.
It will be done with the usual political cast posing as a symphonic retinue to fakes and charades. We will be inundated with “firsts”: the first crayon-color unlicensed judge, the first queer unlicensed judge, the first unlicensed transgender, ad nauseam. Having not taken a bar exam will be reason for ascension to judgeships, because those people will be seen as more compassionate. Their efficacy will be judged on their ability to fundamentally disregard and alter the Constitution and laws of our once great nation.
Despite what is argued by those who refuse to admit this hellish transmogrification happened to America on their watch, I blame our collapse on the compromise of the church and our failure to hold politicians accountable.
This did not happen overnight. It has been structured and set in place in plain sight.
Consider the damage that has been done by the pathetic creatures masquerading as legal professionals today. The woman who couldn’t define what a woman was during confirmation hearings, now sitting on SCOTUS openly lamented the First Amendment, referencing it as a handicap and restraint to her idea of jurisprudence.
In their present incarnation, barely qualified judges, attorneys general and district attorneys are haters of modernity and political hacks, and we’re to believe removing the bar exam will fix the whole thing.
Everyone is calling Trump’s bond appeal an “incredible win.” It’s not an incredible win. An incredible win would consist of an appeals decision that said:
“This is ridiculous. Trump was not guilty of anything. This is a made up figure, for a nonexistent crime based on a Marxist opinion that he made too much money, even though everyone associated with the real estate deals made a profit. No fraud was proven, nor was fraud the point of the case.
These kinds of damages have never been applied to anyone before, and never will be again — not if New York state does not intend to blow itself economically off the face of the earth. There will be ZERO bail, because there are no damages to atone for, not by Donald Trump.
The state of New York should pay all legal bills. The Attorney General of New York should be removed from office, immediately disbarred and criminally charged for her actions, along with all her henchpersons.
$400 million bond, $100 million in bond, $1 in bond — it’s all viciously wrong in principle, and should never, ever happen to anyone again. “
THAT is what an incredible victory would look like.
Everyone is calling Trump’s bond appeal an “incredible win.” It’s not an incredible win. An incredible win would consist of an appeals decision that said:
“This is ridiculous. Trump was not guilty of anything. This is a made up figure, for a nonexistent crime based on a Marxist opinion that he made too much money, even though everyone associated with the real estate deals made a profit. No fraud was proven, nor was fraud the point of the case.
These kinds of damages have never been applied to anyone before, and never will be again — not if New York state does not intend to blow itself economically off the face of the earth. There will be ZERO bail, because there are no damages to atone for, not by Donald Trump.
The state of New York should pay all legal bills. The Attorney General of New York should be removed from office, immediately disbarred and criminally charged for her actions, along with all her henchpersons.
$400 million bond, $100 million in bond, $1 in bond — it’s all viciously wrong in principle, and should never, ever happen to anyone again. “
THAT is what an incredible victory looks like.
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“I have found that if you love life, life will love you back.” (Arthur Rubinstein)
So true.
One of the worst mistakes people make is to approach life passively. “Life hasn’t shown me much. So what’s the point of taking risks or expending energy?” So they do the bare minimum, and wonder why they’re not happy. Or they opt to live off others (family, the government) and then wonder why they don’t feel self-confidence, self-respect or self-esteem.
The mental health and psychiatric industry (paired with the government-subsidized pharmaceutical industry) call it “depression.” What they mean by this is: People who are unhappy, to any degree or for any reason. What they also mean is: Only a PASSIVE response will help. Sit back and take your medication. What, it’s not helping? Don’t question the doctors who represent the pharmaceutical industry, who in turn represent our fascist government. And you’ll only get 5 minutes every four months with your psychiatrist anyway. Medicare or Medicaid will still reimburse him or her. So just shut the hell up.
I’m basing this on decades of having worked in the psychiatric industry, by the way. It’s not pretty.
And then there’s the snake oil, aside from the drugs. They tell you that “if only you listen to me, or read this book, your depression will evaporate.” Again, that’s passive.
Passivity does not work. If you’re a human being, you need an active attitude. If you’re depressed, you’re not suffering from the lack of a passive attitude; you’re suffering from the lack of an ACTIVE attitude. If you’re unwilling to adopt or practice an adaptive attitude, that’s your prerogative. There are plenty of people willing to pay your way, or pump you up with drugs that barely have an impact, if we’re (even for five seconds) honest about it.
But don’t say, “I’m a victim of depression” or “I suffer from depression” and then complain that passivity is doing nothing to resolve it. If you don’t have energy or motivation — then you do everything in your power to find it. Because if you don’t, you’re as good as dead — at least, psychologically speaking.
And when you seek help, you don’t ask: “Can you please give me energy and motivation?” Nobody can ever give you that, as much as they will lie to the contrary. You have to find a purpose for your life. If anyone helps you, they’re helping you help yourself. They don’t carry you, and live your life for you. They inspire you, assuming they’re inspirational. That’s the only kind of help there is.
All of this is connected to our growing sociopolitical crisis. More and more people don’t believe they should have to be active. They do the bare minimum, and — increasingly — are handed material prosperity to them by their parents or family (and in poorer sectors, the government — especially if you’re an illegal immigrant). But none of it works. It leads only to more depression, angst, anger and resentment. You can’t have a society filled with millions of people — tens of millions of new people dependent on the government, waiting for the next expensive government handout — and not expect a horrendous sociopolitical crisis. It’s frankly amazing that we haven’t seen worse. It’s a tribute to how much America started out with, that we don’t have an even worse crisis on our hands. But we will: Unless real people start to challenge all the faulty thinking that got us into this mess.
There is absolutely no other solution.
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People talk about the importance of humility. For example, reformed alcoholics or drug addicts will say, “Until I learned humility, I could not become sober.” They’re certainly on to something profound and important here, but is it really humility that saved them?
A website focused on addiction and recovery defines humility this way: “Humility can mean different things to different people, but in basic terms it refers to modesty and respectfulness … . Being humble means that an individual is able to accept [his or her] own limitations and weaknesses. It also means [having] a realistic understanding of [one’s] own strengths.”
Modesty and respect towards whom? And why? Should we show the same respect toward everyone? Or should we first show respect to ourselves, and then to those who have earned our respect, love and trust? The essence of self-esteem is self-respect. Ask any recovering addict. Regardless of what he says about modesty, he will tell you that stopping substance abuse goes hand in hand with greater self-respect. Without that, nothing else works. You hear about the corrosion of values and consideration in people who abuse drugs. They lie, steal and even kill for the sake of their addiction. Do such behaviors come from a sense of too much self-interest or too much self-respect or too much love of life and self? Of course not. Just ask any former addict.
Accepting ones limitations and weaknesses doesn’t sound like modesty to me. It simply sounds like an acceptance of reality. But be careful here. Your limitations and weaknesses refer to facts you cannot change, i.e., you can’t read people’s minds; you can’t foretell the future; you can’t flap your arms and fly; you cannot control or change other people. It’s not humility, but simply realistic to accept these hard facts. They’re not really flaws or limitations; they’re just facts – metaphysically given truths nobody can change. In fact, it is difficulties with reality itself that leads so many to substance abuse in the first place.
A lot of reformed addicts, especially those who participate in Twelve Steps programs, talk about humility in the face of God. “God” is a totally faith-driven concept, but authentic self-esteem, while often influenced by significant others, is rooted in confidence in one’s own mind – not just the mind’s capacity to feel, but to rationally and objectively think and know. Again, ask any reformed addict, and she will likely tell you that she’s much more confident in her own reasoning abilities now, than when she was stoned or drunk every day.
Arrogance is the opposite of humility, many say. But what is arrogance? It’s certainly arrogant, but also naïve and foolish, to think more of yourself than you really are. It’s arrogant to think you can change the oil in your car if you don’t even know how to open the hood. It’s arrogant and stupid to lie to yourself; to declare war on facts or reality. But the risk of arrogance does not rule out the possibility of confidence.
We all should be confident in our capacity to think and reason. Thought and reason do not guarantee success. But they offer the always present possibility that we can figure something out. If we can’t figure it out, we can find intelligent people to ask, while using our own brains to critically evaluate their answers.
We’re in the driver’s seat of our own lives and our own minds. Nobody can do our thinking for us. That doesn’t mean we have to pretend we know everything. But we’re capable of thinking, concluding and judging, and don’t have to let anyone else do these things for us. Even when we delegate tasks to specialized people – car mechanics, tax accountants and the like – we still exercise judgment about what to ask, and whom to trust.
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You only need to be informed about facts, and objective truth. The insane ravings of lunatics in 99 percent of the media and government are neither facts nor truth. Stick to what’s true, and what’s necessary for survival. Focus on what you know, not on what morons and sociopaths babble about. Ditch most of the media, and ignore the government and the culture as much as you can. It’s all in the process of falling apart completely, and in many ways the world will be better off without them.
In the likely troubled times ahead, you will need your inner strengths and your virtues; Rachel Maddow, the View, the DNC, and Don Lemon–trust me–are not going to matter. The people you’re allowing to compromise your sanity are parasitical, and have no virtue, no strength, and no redeeming qualities whatsoever. They really don’t matter. Once you better understand this, you’ll be both sane, and free.
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Each of the following quotes are from Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.”
The spirit and the content of this novel are the polar opposite of everything in our culture, our corporate world, our schools, our art and our government today.
If you sense that absolutely everything today is wrong, both in principle and practice — implicitly and explicitly — then you’d do well to take a look at Ayn Rand’s magnificent and timeless novel, “The Fountainhead.”
“Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. man had no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons,and to make weapons – a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and we have comes from a single attribute of man -the function of his reasoning mind.”
“Listen to what is being preached today. Look at everyone around us. You’ve wondered why they suffer, why they seek happiness and never find it. If any man stopped and asked himself whether he’s ever held a truly personal desire, he’d find the answer. He’d see that all his wishes, his efforts, his dreams, his ambitions are motivated by other men. He’s not really struggling even for material wealth, but for the second-hander’s delusion – prestige. A stamp of approval, not his own. He can find no joy in the struggle and no joy when he has succeeded. He can’t say about a single thing: ‘This is what I wanted because I wanted it, not because it made my neighbors gape at me’. Then he wonders why he’s unhappy.”
“It’s easy to run to others. It’s so hard to stand on one’s own record. You can fake virtue for an audience. You can’t fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge. They run from it. They spend their lives running. It’s easier to donate a few thousand to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement. It’s simple to seek substitutes for competence–such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence.”
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Men and boys are struggling mentally, physically, academically, economically, and spiritually because of the absence of fathers, the failures of our education system and policies, and changes in both the job market and our culture. Playing a key role behind the scenes is expressive individualism, a radical autonomy that replaces the embodied relational person, connected to family and human nature, with the isolated psychological self who constructs his or her own morality. Solutions to the boy crisis must encourage relationships rather than personal license. They must repair the ties between inalienable rights and their accompanying duties, between happiness and virtue, and better situate the individual within the broader social matrices that truly shape him: God, family, and country.
AUTHOR
Brenda Hafera is the Assistant Director and Senior Policy Analyst at The Heritage Foundation’s Simon Center for American Studies. She previously served as the Director of International and Continuing Education at The Fund for American Studies and the Assistant Director of the Matthew J. Ryan Center for the Study of Free Institutions and the Public Good at Villanova University.
Brenda holds a bachelor of arts in Political Science, a bachelor of science in Finance, and a master’s in Political Science from Villanova University. She was a Publius Fellow at the Claremont Institute and a James Madison Fellow at Hillsdale College. Her articles have appeared in publications such as Modern Age, The Federalist, Law and Liberty, The National Interest, RealClear Public Affairs, and The Hill.
It’s no secret that many Democrat voters have “daddy” issues. They grew up in homes without strong, loving fathers and desperately seek from government what they never found in their youths: a protective authority figure and lifelong role model.
When Democrats with “daddy” issues find their way into power, they force their own psychological deficiencies upon the broader populace. Why? Because they try to play “father” to their constituents but have no idea how a good father is supposed to behave. They scream and shout because they confuse insults and tantrums with masculinity. They reimagine the ideal male leader as someone who would enjoy wearing make-up and behaving like a teenage girl. They demand that male “allies” relinquish any say over the healthy delivery of their unborn children. Instead of taking personal responsibility for missteps in life, they blame their problems on the nebulous “patriarchy” — or rather, the failed fathers of the past!
After punishing all the good men as stand-ins for all the weak men who never properly parented them, Democrats are left with the wimpiest, least wise leftovers of the sorry lot. Then some angry, man-hating leftist with zero self-awareness uploads a video onto social media demanding to know where all the good men have gone. Well, you chased them away, you trans-obsessed, insult-spewing, sniveling punk!
Greg Gutfeld made this point on a recent episode of The Five when discussing the exodus of black and Hispanic voters from the Democrat party: “They’ve alienated men in order to please miserable activists, and men are like, ‘Hey, we know when we are not wanted. We will see ourselves out. We know what a woman is, right? We know what is best for our kids. We know what it takes to protect our cities and our families, and we are tired of apologizing for laughing at funny jokes and having natural testosterone.’”
Because the Democrat party is filled with fake men and phony fathers, it continues to shove real men and fathers away. Then, when Democrat voters find that their trusted “authority figures” have squishy backbones, too, their “daddy” issues spiral out of control. They need more laws, more mask mandates, more punishments; they become desperate for some governmental “daddy” to tell them what they can and cannot do.
This hits at a major distinction separating Democrats from the liberty-loving conservatives whom leftists naturally resent. Liberty-lovers do not confuse the government for their own parents. Government is, at best, a nuisance and, at worst, a thuggish bully. It does not exist to keep you safe at night, to put food on the kitchen table, to teach you right from wrong, or to furnish you with love. Government is a bureaucratic machine that specializes in using the threat of force and the application of actual violence to coerce strangers into doing exactly what the State wishes them to do.
Depending on the government to behave like a loving parent is like depending on one of James Cameron’s cybernetic Terminators for a soothing hug. Both have the kind of uncaring programming that makes most embraces fatal. Still, for Democrats with “daddy” issues, those bureaucratic Terminators are the closest things to family that they’ve got. They’d gladly put their trust in a brutal and dogmatic State that occasionally pats them on the head and promises to take care of them. It’s psychological abuse disguised as “caring government.”
This fraudulent parent-child construct produces nothing but servile citizenry. In a healthy family, parents nurture their children until they become competent, self-sufficient adults. Good parents supervise what their children learn, keep them from harm, and guide them along their journey to adulthood. The love and respect between a parent and child never go away, but the relationship is not meant to produce lifelong juveniles stuck in a permanent state of dependency. Children grow to become capable adults; those adults have children of their own; and the cycle promotes a strong, healthy society.
When governments act as false parents, however, they are not interested in transforming juveniles into adults. They do not seek to create competent citizens who are capable of taking care of themselves. They do not want to produce a population strong enough to think for itself. Because a citizen’s self-sufficiency eliminates his dependency on government, bureaucrats must infantilize grown adults for the rest of their lives. The State is not equipped to be a parent, but it is an ideal machine for mass-producing slaves.
I suspect that part of President Trump’s popular appeal comes from his refusal to treat adults as if they were still children.
Parents sometimes have to “pretend” around their young children. To keep them safe from the terrors of an often dark world, they “bend the truth” here and there. When a family seeks shelter during a tornado, or a parent is laid off from work, or a relative is diagnosed with a scary illness, parents will look into their children’s eyes and say, “Everything will be all right.” That’s what good parents do when the best that they can do for their children is to soothe their worries with fearless love and steady support.
Adults, on the other hand, should be able to speak bluntly to each other without concern that an unvarnished truth will “trigger” another adult to melt into a trembling, catatonic puddle of tears. Trump told NATO countries that they should pay their full financial commitments to the alliance if they really fear for their own security, and the fainting class screeched, “How dare he tell the truth so publicly?” Trump (allegedly!) pinpointed Haiti and other unstable nations as “S-hole countries,” and celebrities came out of their mansions to pretend Haiti is just as luxurious as Hollywood. Trump told Americans there is a dangerous invasion of foreign nationals crossing our open borders, and the corporate news propagandists denounced his accurate assessment as intolerably “racist.”
Time and again, the pundit class has insisted on treating American adults as if they were children too young to understand harsh realities. President Trump is the first national leader in most Americans’ lives to show them respect by plainly speaking the truth.
A lot of people did not quite understand how long their government had been treating them like toddlers until Donald Trump’s frank speech jolted them awake. He questioned the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, excoriated globalism’s destruction of America’s middle class, and refused to search for the constantly shifting line denoting what is “politically correct” to say out loud. He called out “journalists” for spreading fake news, criticized monetary policies that have transferred Americans’ wealth to foreign adversaries, and rebuked “allies” that facilitate illegal immigration into the United States.
When threatened by foreign regimes, he threatened them back in direct and unequivocal terms. When speaking of rising crime in the United States, he did not worry about the criminals’ feelings. When his enemies used the Intelligence Community, Department of Justice, and politically partisan judges to threaten his freedom, he never hesitated to call out the abuse and corruption taking place. At first, a lot of Americans thought, “He can’t say that!” Over time, however, a lot of those same Americans wondered, “Why shouldn’t he be able to say that?”
Why must we censor our own speech and pretend that untrue things are true simply to avoid the possibility of feeling uncomfortable? Are we not all adults? Are we not capable of speaking to one another candidly?
One of the most important things President Trump has done for our country is to stop pretending that things are fine when they clearly are not. Pretending is for young children. Facing hard truths head-on is for adults. Childish Americans must grow up because the government can never be their “daddy.”
When Democrats with “daddy” issues find their way into power, they force their own psychological deficiencies upon the broader populace. Why? Because they try to play “father” to their constituents but have no idea how a good father is supposed to behave. They scream and shout because they confuse insults and tantrums with masculinity. They reimagine the ideal male leader as someone who would enjoy wearing make-up and behaving like a teenage girl. They demand that male “allies” relinquish any say over the healthy delivery of their unborn children. Instead of taking personal responsibility for missteps in life, they blame their problems on the nebulous “patriarchy” — or rather, the failed fathers of the past!
After punishing all the good men as stand-ins for all the weak men who never properly parented them, Democrats are left with the wimpiest, least wise leftovers of the sorry lot. Then some angry, man-hating leftist with zero self-awareness uploads a video onto social media demanding to know where all the good men have gone. Well, you chased them away, you trans-obsessed, insult-spewing, sniveling punk!
Greg Gutfeld made this point on a recent episode of The Five when discussing the exodus of black and Hispanic voters from the Democrat party: “They’ve alienated men in order to please miserable activists, and men are like, ‘Hey, we know when we are not wanted. We will see ourselves out. We know what a woman is, right? We know what is best for our kids. We know what it takes to protect our cities and our families, and we are tired of apologizing for laughing at funny jokes and having natural testosterone.’”
Because the Democrat party is filled with fake men and phony fathers, it continues to shove real men and fathers away. Then, when Democrat voters find that their trusted “authority figures” have squishy backbones, too, their “daddy” issues spiral out of control. They need more laws, more mask mandates, more punishments; they become desperate for some governmental “daddy” to tell them what they can and cannot do.
This hits at a major distinction separating Democrats from the liberty-loving conservatives whom leftists naturally resent. Liberty-lovers do not confuse the government for their own parents. Government is, at best, a nuisance and, at worst, a thuggish bully. It does not exist to keep you safe at night, to put food on the kitchen table, to teach you right from wrong, or to furnish you with love. Government is a bureaucratic machine that specializes in using the threat of force and the application of actual violence to coerce strangers into doing exactly what the State wishes them to do.
Depending on the government to behave like a loving parent is like depending on one of James Cameron’s cybernetic Terminators for a soothing hug. Both have the kind of uncaring programming that makes most embraces fatal. Still, for Democrats with “daddy” issues, those bureaucratic Terminators are the closest things to family that they’ve got. They’d gladly put their trust in a brutal and dogmatic State that occasionally pats them on the head and promises to take care of them. It’s psychological abuse disguised as “caring government.”
This fraudulent parent-child construct produces nothing but servile citizenry. In a healthy family, parents nurture their children until they become competent, self-sufficient adults. Good parents supervise what their children learn, keep them from harm, and guide them along their journey to adulthood. The love and respect between a parent and child never go away, but the relationship is not meant to produce lifelong juveniles stuck in a permanent state of dependency. Children grow to become capable adults; those adults have children of their own; and the cycle promotes a strong, healthy society.
When governments act as false parents, however, they are not interested in transforming juveniles into adults. They do not seek to create competent citizens who are capable of taking care of themselves. They do not want to produce a population strong enough to think for itself. Because a citizen’s self-sufficiency eliminates his dependency on government, bureaucrats must infantilize grown adults for the rest of their lives. The State is not equipped to be a parent, but it is an ideal machine for mass-producing slaves.
I suspect that part of President Trump’s popular appeal comes from his refusal to treat adults as if they were still children.
Parents sometimes have to “pretend” around their young children. To keep them safe from the terrors of an often dark world, they “bend the truth” here and there. When a family seeks shelter during a tornado, or a parent is laid off from work, or a relative is diagnosed with a scary illness, parents will look into their children’s eyes and say, “Everything will be all right.” That’s what good parents do when the best that they can do for their children is to soothe their worries with fearless love and steady support.
Adults, on the other hand, should be able to speak bluntly to each other without concern that an unvarnished truth will “trigger” another adult to melt into a trembling, catatonic puddle of tears. Trump told NATO countries that they should pay their full financial commitments to the alliance if they really fear for their own security, and the fainting class screeched, “How dare he tell the truth so publicly?” Trump (allegedly!) pinpointed Haiti and other unstable nations as “S-hole countries,” and celebrities came out of their mansions to pretend Haiti is just as luxurious as Hollywood. Trump told Americans there is a dangerous invasion of foreign nationals crossing our open borders, and the corporate news propagandists denounced his accurate assessment as intolerably “racist.”
Time and again, the pundit class has insisted on treating American adults as if they were children too young to understand harsh realities. President Trump is the first national leader in most Americans’ lives to show them respect by plainly speaking the truth.
A lot of people did not quite understand how long their government had been treating them like toddlers until Donald Trump’s frank speech jolted them awake. He questioned the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, excoriated globalism’s destruction of America’s middle class, and refused to search for the constantly shifting line denoting what is “politically correct” to say out loud. He called out “journalists” for spreading fake news, criticized monetary policies that have transferred Americans’ wealth to foreign adversaries, and rebuked “allies” that facilitate illegal immigration into the United States.
When threatened by foreign regimes, he threatened them back in direct and unequivocal terms. When speaking of rising crime in the United States, he did not worry about the criminals’ feelings. When his enemies used the Intelligence Community, Department of Justice, and politically partisan judges to threaten his freedom, he never hesitated to call out the abuse and corruption taking place. At first, a lot of Americans thought, “He can’t say that!” Over time, however, a lot of those same Americans wondered, “Why shouldn’t he be able to say that?”
Why must we censor our own speech and pretend that untrue things are true simply to avoid the possibility of feeling uncomfortable? Are we not all adults? Are we not capable of speaking to one another candidly?
One of the most important things President Trump has done for our country is to stop pretending that things are fine when they clearly are not. Pretending is for young children. Facing hard truths head-on is for adults. Childish Americans must grow up because the government can never be their “daddy.”
It’s no secret that many Democrat voters have “daddy” issues. They grew up in homes without strong, loving fathers and desperately seek from government what they never found in their youths: a protective authority figure and lifelong role model.
When Democrats with “daddy” issues find their way into power, they force their own psychological deficiencies upon the broader populace. Why? Because they try to play “father” to their constituents but have no idea how a good father is supposed to behave. They scream and shout because they confuse insults and tantrums with masculinity. They reimagine the ideal male leader as someone who would enjoy wearing make-up and behaving like a teenage girl. They demand that male “allies” relinquish any say over the healthy delivery of their unborn children. Instead of taking personal responsibility for missteps in life, they blame their problems on the nebulous “patriarchy” — or rather, the failed fathers of the past!
After punishing all the good men as stand-ins for all the weak men who never properly parented them, Democrats are left with the wimpiest, least wise leftovers of the sorry lot. Then some angry, man-hating leftist with zero self-awareness uploads a video onto social media demanding to know where all the good men have gone. Well, you chased them away, you trans-obsessed, insult-spewing, sniveling punk!
Greg Gutfeld made this point on a recent episode of The Five when discussing the exodus of black and Hispanic voters from the Democrat party: “They’ve alienated men in order to please miserable activists, and men are like, ‘Hey, we know when we are not wanted. We will see ourselves out. We know what a woman is, right? We know what is best for our kids. We know what it takes to protect our cities and our families, and we are tired of apologizing for laughing at funny jokes and having natural testosterone.’”
Because the Democrat party is filled with fake men and phony fathers, it continues to shove real men and fathers away. Then, when Democrat voters find that their trusted “authority figures” have squishy backbones, too, their “daddy” issues spiral out of control. They need more laws, more mask mandates, more punishments; they become desperate for some governmental “daddy” to tell them what they can and cannot do.
This hits at a major distinction separating Democrats from the liberty-loving conservatives whom leftists naturally resent. Liberty-lovers do not confuse the government for their own parents. Government is, at best, a nuisance and, at worst, a thuggish bully. It does not exist to keep you safe at night, to put food on the kitchen table, to teach you right from wrong, or to furnish you with love. Government is a bureaucratic machine that specializes in using the threat of force and the application of actual violence to coerce strangers into doing exactly what the State wishes them to do.
Depending on the government to behave like a loving parent is like depending on one of James Cameron’s cybernetic Terminators for a soothing hug. Both have the kind of uncaring programming that makes most embraces fatal. Still, for Democrats with “daddy” issues, those bureaucratic Terminators are the closest things to family that they’ve got. They’d gladly put their trust in a brutal and dogmatic State that occasionally pats them on the head and promises to take care of them. It’s psychological abuse disguised as “caring government.”
This fraudulent parent-child construct produces nothing but servile citizenry. In a healthy family, parents nurture their children until they become competent, self-sufficient adults. Good parents supervise what their children learn, keep them from harm, and guide them along their journey to adulthood. The love and respect between a parent and child never go away, but the relationship is not meant to produce lifelong juveniles stuck in a permanent state of dependency. Children grow to become capable adults; those adults have children of their own; and the cycle promotes a strong, healthy society.
When governments act as false parents, however, they are not interested in transforming juveniles into adults. They do not seek to create competent citizens who are capable of taking care of themselves. They do not want to produce a population strong enough to think for itself. Because a citizen’s self-sufficiency eliminates his dependency on government, bureaucrats must infantilize grown adults for the rest of their lives. The State is not equipped to be a parent, but it is an ideal machine for mass-producing slaves.
I suspect that part of President Trump’s popular appeal comes from his refusal to treat adults as if they were still children.
Parents sometimes have to “pretend” around their young children. To keep them safe from the terrors of an often dark world, they “bend the truth” here and there. When a family seeks shelter during a tornado, or a parent is laid off from work, or a relative is diagnosed with a scary illness, parents will look into their children’s eyes and say, “Everything will be all right.” That’s what good parents do when the best that they can do for their children is to soothe their worries with fearless love and steady support.
Adults, on the other hand, should be able to speak bluntly to each other without concern that an unvarnished truth will “trigger” another adult to melt into a trembling, catatonic puddle of tears. Trump told NATO countries that they should pay their full financial commitments to the alliance if they really fear for their own security, and the fainting class screeched, “How dare he tell the truth so publicly?” Trump (allegedly!) pinpointed Haiti and other unstable nations as “S-hole countries,” and celebrities came out of their mansions to pretend Haiti is just as luxurious as Hollywood. Trump told Americans there is a dangerous invasion of foreign nationals crossing our open borders, and the corporate news propagandists denounced his accurate assessment as intolerably “racist.”
Time and again, the pundit class has insisted on treating American adults as if they were children too young to understand harsh realities. President Trump is the first national leader in most Americans’ lives to show them respect by plainly speaking the truth.
A lot of people did not quite understand how long their government had been treating them like toddlers until Donald Trump’s frank speech jolted them awake. He questioned the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, excoriated globalism’s destruction of America’s middle class, and refused to search for the constantly shifting line denoting what is “politically correct” to say out loud. He called out “journalists” for spreading fake news, criticized monetary policies that have transferred Americans’ wealth to foreign adversaries, and rebuked “allies” that facilitate illegal immigration into the United States.
When threatened by foreign regimes, he threatened them back in direct and unequivocal terms. When speaking of rising crime in the United States, he did not worry about the criminals’ feelings. When his enemies used the Intelligence Community, Department of Justice, and politically partisan judges to threaten his freedom, he never hesitated to call out the abuse and corruption taking place. At first, a lot of Americans thought, “He can’t say that!” Over time, however, a lot of those same Americans wondered, “Why shouldn’t he be able to say that?”
Why must we censor our own speech and pretend that untrue things are true simply to avoid the possibility of feeling uncomfortable? Are we not all adults? Are we not capable of speaking to one another candidly?
One of the most important things President Trump has done for our country is to stop pretending that things are fine when they clearly are not. Pretending is for young children. Facing hard truths head-on is for adults. Childish Americans must grow up because the government can never be their “daddy.”
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 