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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.

Surgeon General is Hazardous to Your Health

Biden’s Surgeon General is commanding Big Tech media companies to censor Joe Rogan, a highly popular podcaster who challenges some of the government and the Party’s COVID narrative.

For generations, brave people have literally shed blood so that America’s First Amendment rights could be preserved. Now we have this pitiful morally and intellectually challenged TWIT standing ready to silence a popular and accurate Internet broadcaster for daring to make the government doom profiteers look stupid and deceptive–WHICH THEY ARE. If Rogan is silenced by Communist Democrat intimidation, then it will be America’s most shameful hour.

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“Stay home. Save lives.”

That would be a solid U.S. foreign policy.

–Mike Maharrey @mmaharrey10th

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Picking or rejecting a nominee for the Supreme Court based on race alone is RACIST. The specifics do not matter. IT’S RACIST.

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Ian Roden @ianrodenppc:

People often ask me why I hate government so much.

Only government could use your own money to sign a deal with a company to manufacture a drug, grant the manufacturer immunity from liability if anything goes wrong with the drug, and then punish you for not taking the drug.

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Forget “politics.” Your neighbors and fellow citizens COERCING you to live, think, speak and make personal or medical decisions according to THEIR wants and demands is unacceptable, nonnegotiable and unsustainable. Period.

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NOT getting COVID now matters more than:

Not dying of a heart attack
Not getting cancer
Maintaining serenity and sanity
Making a living
Education of children

The central purpose of life now is: NOT GETTING a virus with a 99.99 percent survival rate.

It’s all that matters. It has become THE central purpose for millions of people glued to their media.

If this isn’t madness, there is no such thing as madness.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

The Cold War Racket Never Ended for the US

There is something important to recognize about the Cold War: It was not ended by the U.S. government. Instead, it was ended by the Soviet Union. If it had been up to the U.S. national-security establishment, the Cold War would have gone on forever because it is the best racket in U.S. history, one that continually expanded the tax-funded largess, power, and influence of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA.

In a sense, the U.S. national-security establishment considered the Soviet Union’s unilateral decision to end the Cold War a betrayal. The Soviets weren’t supposed to do that. The supposed international communist conspiracy to conquer the United States that was supposedly based in Moscow was serving as a fantastic boogeyman that was used to frighten the American people into supporting the continuation of the Cold War racket. 

There is something else to recognize about the Cold War: For the U.S. government, it really never ended. They weren’t about to let the Reds dictate the end of their racket. They were bound and determined to figure out some way to keep the racket going.

That’s what keeping NATO around was all about, along with the gradual absorption of former Warsaw Pact countries (without the express approval of Congress), which enabled NATO forces to get closer and closer to Russia’s borders. 

Stalingrad 1942

Thus, why in the world would the Soviet Union want to start another war, especially knowing that it would be fighting the United States, its World War II partner and ally, whose officials had nuclear weapons and were more than willing to use them against populated cities? 

What about the continued Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe? It wasn’t justifiable but it certainly was understandable. The Soviets had just been invaded by the Nazi army, which had come very close to conquering the Soviet Union. Once they pushed the German army back and then defeated it, the last thing the Soviets were going to do was give up their Eastern European buffer against future German invasions. Moreover, we mustn’t forget something important: At the Yalta Conference, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt agreed that the Soviets could have Eastern Europe. 

When the Soviets unilaterally dismantled their empire and exited Eastern Europe in 1989, the United States had an excellent opportunity to do its part to restore a peaceful and harmonious world. It should have dismantled NATO immediately. NATO’s ostensible mission of protecting Western Europe from the Soviet Union was over. If NATO had been abolished, there wouldn’t be a crisis in Ukraine today. It’s because the Pentagon and the CIA kept NATO in existence and, even worse, began absorbing former Warsaw Pact countries that there is a crisis in Ukraine today. 

Just as the U.S. officials go ballistic at the thought of Russia installing missiles in Cuba, Russian officials go ballistic over the thought of NATO installing missiles in Ukraine, which is on Russia’s border. U.S. interventionists claim that Russia is being paranoid. They say that the U.S. government is a peace-loving nation that would never attack Russia. 

Really? I wonder if the Iraqi people and the Afghan people would agree about that peace-loving bit. But there is something else to consider: It’s not just the U.S. that is in NATO. So is Germany — the nation that invaded the Soviet Union in World War II and wreaked massive death and destruction there. Why would it surprise anyone that Russia might be reticent about having German troops and missiles on Russia’s borders?

Germany seems to get this, which would explain its refusal to send weaponry to Ukraine. Other NATO members are chiding Germany for being “weak” in the face of Russian “aggression.” In actuality, Germany is showing that it understands Russia’s position.

Yesterday, I wrote about how President Kennedy would do his best to step into the shoes of an adversary in order to try to understand why his opponent was taking certain actions. In that way, JFK was able to fashion a solution to a crisis that would take into consideration his opponent’s concerns. That’s how Kennedy was able to resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis without going to nuclear war with the Soviets, much to the anger and even rage of his enemies within the Pentagon and the CIA.

Too bad President Biden is unable to do that. What Biden should do is declare an end to the Cold War and abolish NATO immediately. Unlike Kennedy, however, Biden is deferring to the power of the Pentagon and the CIA and, in the process, letting them continue their dangerous and destructive Cold War racket.

Jacob Hornberger

Is Biden Right ? Does the Left Own the Future ?

Before he appeared at his first solo news conference of 2022, President Joe Biden knew he had a communications problem he had to deal with.

Namely, how to get off the defensive.

How to avoid spending his time with the White House press corps defending his decisions and explaining his actions as allegations of failure, one after another, were tossed up at him?

Biden entered knowing what issues would be paramount and what questions would be raised:

Why had he been unable to control a coronavirus pandemic now killing 2,000 Americans a day? Why was he unable to contain an inflation eating up the wages, salaries and savings of American families at a yearly rate of 7%? Why was he unable to secure a southern border that 150,000 illegal immigrants were crossing every month?

To get off the defensive and onto offense, Biden brought his own questions for his GOP inquisitors and conservative critics:

“What are Republicans for? What are they for? Name me one thing they’re for,” Biden demanded to know.

Turning the tables, Biden charged his Republican critics with having no policy goals, other than the willful obstruction of his goals.

“The fundamental question is: What’s Mitch (McConnell) for? … What’s he for on immigration? What’s he for? What’s he proposing to make anything better? … What’s he for on these things? What are they for?”

Biden was making the case that while the Democratic Party has an agenda of declared goals, providing benefits to millions, the GOP is the party of “No.”

Why not fight our battles on this terrain for a change? Biden was demanding. And, behind his exasperation, he has a point.

Democrats do have an agenda. They do have things they want to accomplish. And the party of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is basically an opposition party whose goal is to prevent them from succeeding.

There is another reason Biden would like to force Republicans to identify their goals. Naming them would reveal the divisions inside the GOP on priorities and open Republicans up to the kind of attacks the GOP is mounting against Biden’s agenda.

In short, behind Biden’s demand that the GOP identify its goals was an attempt to shift the debate onto terrain more familiar and favorable for the Democratic Party.

For the truth is that Democrats are the party of government, and Republicans are the party of the private sector. These are their historic roles. Biden is seeking to re-elevate that critical difference.

Democrats, for example, are almost unanimous in their support of federally funded universal pre-K, child care, the child tax credit, student loan forgiveness and federal standards for voting in federal elections.

Historically, Democrats led the fight for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, civil rights, voting rights, welfare and most of the rest of a federal monolith that now consumes perhaps a fourth of our GDP.

Republicans have been the party that resisted the expansion of government over our lifetimes, and its role has often been to conduct an orderly retreat to a new defense perimeter after the most recent defeat.

The most celebrated Republican of the last century was Ronald Reagan, who famously declared that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

Republicans have emphasized, as a major role of government, providing the security that citizens cannot provide for themselves.

Security against crime and violence, security against an invasion of the country, security against hostile foreign powers.

Biden’s problem is that while millions might agree on aspects of his Build Back Better plan, the present primary concerns of the electorate are those government duties that his party is visibly failing to perform: controlling the pandemic, stopping the shootings and killings of cops, halting the invasion across our southern border, preventing the loss of incomes and savings to inflation.

Yet, despite the imperiled position of Biden’s party today, it has relative strengths and long-term trends in its favor.

America’s white majority, home to the base of the GOP, is a diminishing majority, on average older than the core constituencies of the Democratic Party — the young, the migrants and people of color.

Second, the Democratic mega-states in presidential elections — California, New York, Illinois — seem solidly blue, while Republican mega-states like Texas and Florida seem less solidly red.

Third, America’s major media centered in New York and Washington, D.C., is liberal and Democratic, as are our cultural institutions — museums, Hollywood, higher education, the entertainment industry.

Fourth, the trend for democracies is toward transferring more and more power to central governments, not less. Under President Calvin Coolidge, the U.S. government share of GDP was 3%.

As for the culture wars, traditionalism has been in retreat since the 1950s.

Biden appears to be a failing president who believes in the inevitable victory of the ideology toward which he himself has been moving over his half-century career since arriving in Washington as a 30-year-old centrist Democrat.

Unfortunately, he may not be wrong.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.”

Dope Francis and a World Gone Insane

Pope Francis, pleading with his fellow Communist pal, Joe Biden, says: “Please, no more war.”

Sorry, idiot. This is what you get for supporting Green fascism, medical totalitarians, corrupt Chinese Communists, Bidenistas and radical, militant Islam. What did you expect? Peace?

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Forcing people to wear masks, get vaccines, hand over their bank account passwords and their money, to give up their guns and to silence their opinions are all acts of violence.

People who support “Democrats” actually are voting for violence against innocent, peaceful citizens.

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January 6:
Manufactured attack

COVID:
Manufactured pandemic

We live in a world of B.S.

The MEDIA is the culprit.

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Kamala Harris will go to Supreme Court. Pete Buttigieg will become VP.

Rumor — or nightmare?

When will we wake up from the nightmare?

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“The idea of imposing universal peace on the world by force is a barbarian fantasy.”
– Garet Garrett

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Republicans: Don’t let Biden appoint anyone to Supreme Court.

They are lawless, violenct and Communist.

Paralysis hurts them and can only help what’s left of freedom.

The Politics of Commencement Exercises

In 2018, the Young America’s Foundation (YAF) issued its 25th annual commencement-speaker survey which revealed that the nation’s top 100 universities – as rated by U.S. News & World Report – had invited many liberal or leftist ideologues, newsmakers, authors, and entrenched Washington insiders to speak at their graduation ceremonies that year; by contrast, few conservative speakers had been invited. This imbalance represented the continuation of a pattern that already had been well established for many years. Announcing the results of its study, YAF wrote:

The 25th Annual Commencement Speakers Survey from Young America’s Foundation shows the leftist slant at America’s colleges pervades the final lessons given to graduating students as they turn their tassels and collect their diplomas. The small number of conservative speakers (just four this year) is again eclipsed by a number of prominent liberals (45) who were invited by the nation’s top colleges and universities to impart one last skewed lesson.

YAF’s Commencement Speakers Survey scrutinizes the commencement addresses given at the top 100 national universities as ranked by U.S. News and World Report. With 45 liberal speakers imparting progressive ideas and just 4 conservatives addressing graduates, the contrast in this year’s survey is stunning.

Vice President Mike Pence is the most notable and only national conservative figure speaking at any of America’s top colleges. Ambassador Ron Dermer, NBA commentator Ernie Johnson, and Tulsa Mayor G. T. Bynum are the other three conservatives delivering commencement addresses in 2017.

The Left’s childish reaction to Vice President Mike Pence’s commencement address at Notre Dame proves the pervasion of liberal intolerance. Even when conservatives are given the rare opportunity to address students, leftists won’t even consider an alternative viewpoint. In a tragic irony, the infantile leftists who walked out at Notre Dame proved the exact point he made about the “all-too-common practices” of the Left being “destructive of learning and the pursuit of knowledge …  wholly outside the American tradition.”

The class of 2017 will hear from [former] Vice President Joe Biden and Senators Cory Booker, Bob Casey, Tammy Duckworth, and Elizabeth Warren who continually spout flawed, debunked, and failed ideas.

Other outspoken liberals including Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Billie Jean King, Ken Burns, Michael Bloomberg, and Sheryl Sandberg will be speaking at some of America’s top-rated schools.

Leftist figures from Hollywood also made the rounds, including Michael J. Fox, S. Epatha Merkerson, Steve Levitan, Nick Offerman, Helen Mirren, Pharrell Williams, and Will Ferrell.

A number of news personalities are slated to speak at commencement exercises this spring, including Frank Bruni (New York Times), Jake Tapper (CNN), Brooke Baldwin(CNN), Christiane Amanpour (CNN), and Stephanie Ruhe (MSNBC). Notably missing from the list of commencement speakers at America’s Top 100 universities are any personalities from the Fox News or Fox Business channels.

The bias against conservatives becomes even more clear when 2017 is compared to the first year of President Obama’s tenure. Apart from Vice President Mike Pence, no members of President Trump’s administration are speaking at top 100 schools this spring. In 2009, 11 commencement addresses were delivered at top 100 schools who fell over themselves to host members of Obama’s campaign and White House teams. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, Attorney General Eric Holder, campaign manager David Plouffe, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, CIA Director Leon Panetta, and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel joined President Obama and Vice President Biden in pushing their liberal agenda.

This slant against conservative commencement speakers is an unfortunate and alarming trend Young America’s Foundation has documented for the past 24 years….

“YAF provides the intellectual diversity that far too many leftist administrators work to suppress today,” [said Young America’s Foundation spokesman Spencer Brown]. “America’s top colleges and universities are out of touch with America’s young people, and continue to rob students of the chance to think critically. Instead, these ‘leading’ institutions feed students a never-ending stream of one-sided lessons. That’s not education, it’s indoctrination.”

Jordan Petersen, The Collapse of Academia, A Demented Creep Goes to War & Other Horrors

From my Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and GETTR posts of the last 24 hours.

Can a “commander in chief” with a 33 percent approval rating make himself popular by starting a war of no interest to Americans?

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Why does freedom for Ukraine matter so much, while freedom for Americans doesn’t matter at all?

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Even swamp thing OSHA has more respect for the Supreme Court’s ruling on vax mandate than Biden and his fellow thugs. Impeach Bidenistas, and then arrest them.

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Putin is an evil tyrant, but he’s far away. The Biden regime is full of evil tyrants, and they are at our front doors.

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Wanting to control other people’s bodies with masks and vax mandates is sick. Using police and armies to force your will on them is EVIL.

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If the world has gone mad — and it plainly has — then, to figure out the cause, you must start in academia. They have been at this for decades, since at least the 1960s. And Jordan Peterson has been up close and personal at the scene of the crime.

Two samples from this great article:

“…Wait until you get a load of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) scores . Purporting to assess corporate moral responsibility, these scores, which can dramatically affect an enterprise’s financial viability, are nothing less than the equivalent of China’s damnable social credit system, applied to the entrepreneurial and financial world. CEOs: what in the world is wrong with you? Can’t you see that the ideologues who push such appalling nonsense are driven by an agenda that is not only absolutely antithetical to your free-market enterprise, as such, but precisely targeted at the freedoms that made your success possible? Can’t you see that by going along, sheep-like (just as the professors are doing; just as the artists and writers are doing) that you are generating a veritable fifth column within your businesses? Are you really so blind, cowed and cowardly? With all your so-called privilege?”

And: “the accrediting boards for graduate clinical psychology training programs in Canada are now planning to refuse to accredit university clinical programs unless they have a “social justice” orientation. That, combined with some recent legislative changes in Canada, claiming to outlaw so-called “conversion therapy” (but really making it exceedingly risky for clinicians to do anything ever but agree always and about everything with their clients) have likely doomed the practice of clinical psychology, which always depended entirely on trust and privacy. Similar moves are afoot in other professional disciplines, such as medicine and law. And if you don’t think that psychologists, lawyers and other professionals are anything but terrified of their now woke governing professional colleges, much to everyone’s extreme detriment, you simply don’t understand how far this has all gone.”

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

The Healthcare Road to Serfdom

by Scott McPherson

COVID-19 hysteria has done more to embolden the power-mad than a massive terrorist attack. Once content to whisper among themselves about the danger of “too much freedom” (any amount, in the final analysis, being too much for them), they slither out of the shadows now to champion every new idea or policy that treats people like bees in a hive. “Mask up,” “lock down,” and “do your part,” these self-proclaimed drill sergeants bark, like propagandists for the Politburo.A government with the power to tax one person to pay for another’s healthcare needs will eventually assume the authority to make people’s healthcare decisions, even the most personal ones.
[Click to Tweet]

Nothing about this is surprising. Those who see in every crisis (real or imagined) an opportunity to expand the size and scope of government power are acting just as we might expect. Authoritarians finally have a very large number of people scared to death over a healthcare “crisis,” so it’s natural for them to push for more policies that control our personal healthcare choices. The left has finally come out for total control.

Half a century (at least) of government interfering in healthcare was all prologue. Individual choice has been steadily eroded by socialist and regulatory healthcare programs like Medicare, Medicaid, licensing laws, price controls, prescription drug coverage, and innumerable mandates imposed on health-insurance providers. Obamacare claimed the power to fine people just for choosing to not have any health insurance at all. One state, Vermont, created a universal healthcare system for its residents (that crashed and burned, naturally). All of this came about because government was going to “fix” healthcare. Now it’s going to fix you.

According to a recent Heartland Institute/Rasmussen poll, an alarmingly high percentage of the population and a majority of Democrats are prepared to jetison the final remnants of personal healthcare freedom in the name of “public health.” Fifty-eight percent of Americans said they oppose a federal vaccine mandate, but over half of those on the political left (55 percent) think it’s a great idea. Additionally, 59 percent of Democrats want the unvaccinated to be “confined to their homes at all times, except for emergencies, if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine.” The decision of individuals and families to get or refuse vaccines has long been held sacrosanct, even on the left. Today, they want you placed under house arrest.

This Stalinist mindset is oozing out to infect other freedoms as well. Almost half of Democrats (48 percent) “think federal and state government should be able to fine or imprison individuals who publicly question the efficacy of the existing COVID-19 vaccines on social media, television, radio, or in online or digital publications,” 45 percent want the “unvaxxed” forced into “designated facilities,” and 47 percent want them subjected to a “government tracking program.” The poll didn’t ask if malcontents should be forced to wear a gold star or tattooed for easier identification, but 29 percent of Democrats do think parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids should have them taken away.

This is crazy on steroids. And don’t think it ends here. A large amount of COVID-related “stimulus” funding has gone to schools to support draconian masking policies, push vaccines, enforce “social distancing” requirements, and generally scare the younger generation right into shackles. Totalitarians have long known that the best way to create compliant citizens is to catch them young. A very disturbing video from Canada, which has slid completely into leftist tyranny, shows pupils, asked about the unvaccinated, reveling in the idea of calling the police and using the government to “cut everything from them little by little until they submit and get vaccinated,” while the adoring studio audience goes wild with applause. One commentor dubbed these students, appropriately, the Hitlerjugand. A poll released by Maru Public Opinion revealed that over a quarter (27 percent) of Canadians would like to see people jailed for refusing the jab.

When CNN interviewed Dr. Peter Hotez, director of the Center for Vaccine Development, on December 28, he accused two U.S. senators – Rand Paul (R-KY) and Ron Johnson (R-WI) – of “anti-science aggression” (whatever that means) for merely questioning the efficacy of the COVID vaccine. He literally called them “killers.” Meanwhile, Democrats are cheerleaders for actual aggression through policies that will inevitably lead to clashes between citizens and government agents. Fines and imprisonment for people who “publicly question the efficacy of the existing COVID-19 vaccines on social media, television, radio, or in online or digital publications” don’t just violate people’s right to speak freely; they will be imposed by a (fully funded) policing agency backed by the full force of government. An editorial in the Salt Lake Tribune (January 15) called for a “mass vaccination campaign” in Utah that would forbid the unvaccinated from going “well, anywhere” – to be enforced by the state’s National Guard. Armed soldiers on the streets of America, keeping people locked in their homes. What could possibly go wrong!

All this insanity has its roots in government command and control. A government with the power to tax one person to pay for another’s healthcare needs will eventually assume the authority to make people’s healthcare decisions, even the most personal ones. Repealing mask and vax mandates is important, but we should understand that such a “return to normal” is far from ideal. It still leaves government in control of our most basic healthcare choices, through myriad programs and no shortage of other mandates. Repeal all the laws that give bureaucrats power in the healthcare arena, and when the next “crisis” erupts, Americans will have a principled foundation on which to stand and demand that government keep its snout out of healthcare altogether.