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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.

Ayn Rand: A Legacy of Reason and Freedom

Ayn Rand left a legacy in defense of reason and freedom that serves as a guidepost for the American spirit–especially pertinent today when America and what it stands for are under assault.

A version of this article was first published in 2005. Capitalism Magazine is republishing it again because its message still remains relevant today.

Born over 100 years ago in Holy Mother Russia and educated under the Soviets, Ayn Rand became the quintessential American writer and philosopher, upholding the supreme value of the individual’s life on earth. She herself led a “rags to riches” life, wrote best-selling novels that championed individualism, and developed a philosophy of reason that validates the American spirit of achievement and independence.

The story of Ayn Rand’s life is, in the words of the Oscar-nominated documentary Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life: “a life more compelling than fiction.” Born February 2, 1905, she wrote her first fiction at age 8, when she also showed signs of being an intellectual crusader, vowing to refute a newspaper article claiming that school was the sole source of a child’s ideals. A year later she decided to become a writer: inspired by the hero of a children’s story, who embodied “intelligence directed to a practical purpose,” she had a “blinding picture” of people–not as they are but as they could be.

In high school and college, she discovered two figures whom she never ceased to admire: Victor Hugo, for “the grandeur, the heroic scale, the plot inventiveness” of his stories, and Aristotle, as “the arch-realist and the advocate of the validity of man’s mind.”

Escaping the tyranny and poverty of the U.S.S.R., she came to America in 1926, officially for a brief visit with relatives. A chance meeting with her favorite American director, Cecil B. DeMille, resulted in jobs as a movie extra and then a junior screenwriter. After periods of near-starvation, she sold her first play to Broadway and her first novel, We the Living, set in the Soviet tyranny she had escaped. With her first best-seller, The Fountainhead in 1943, she presented her ideal man, individualist architect Howard Roark. But it was, she said, “only an overture” to her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged in 1957, a mystery story about the role of the mind in man’s existence. With Atlas Shrugged her career as a fiction writer ended, but her career as a philosopher had just begun.

Her philosophy–Objectivism–upholds objective reality (as opposed to supernaturalism), reason as man’s only means of knowledge (as opposed to faith or skepticism), free will (as opposed to determinism–by biology or environment), and an ethics of rational self-interest (as opposed to the sacrifice of oneself to others or others to self). The only moral political system, she maintained, is laissez-faire capitalism (as opposed to the collectivism of socialism, fascism, or the welfare state), because it recognizes the inalienable right of an individual to act on the judgment of his own mind. Your life, she held, belongs to you and not to your country, God or your neighbors.

Ayn Rand understood that to defend the individual she must penetrate to the root: his need to use reason to survive. “I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism,” she wrote in 1971, “but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.” This radical view put her at odds with conservatives, whom she vilified for their attempts to base capitalism on faith and altruism. Advocating a government to protect the individual’s right to his property, she was not a liberal (or an anarchist). Advocating the indispensability of philosophy, she was not a libertarian.

Despite being outside the cultural mainstream, her novels became best-sellers and her books sell more today than ever before–half a million copies per year. There is a reason that Atlas Shrugged placed second in a Library of Congress survey about most influential books. There is a reason that her works are considered life-altering by so many readers. She had an exalted view of man and created inspiring fictional heroes.

A sui generis philosopher, who looked at the world anew, Ayn Rand has long puzzled the intellectual establishment. Academia has usually met her views with antagonism or avoidance, unable to fathom that she was an individualist but not a subjectivist, an absolutist but not a dogmatist. And they have thus ignored her original solutions to such seemingly intractable problems as how to ground values in facts. But even in academia, her ideas are finding more acceptance, e.g., university fellowships and a subgroup within the American Philosophical Association to study Objectivism.

Ayn Rand left a legacy in defense of reason and freedom that serves as a guidepost for the American spirit–especially pertinent today when America and what it stands for are under assault.

Michael Berliner, Capitalism Magazine

The Public School Monopoly Is Immoral

But when the polarization of American politics creates a divide where public school teachers have an overwhelming financial interest in one side of the debate, there is a third and decisive argument for school choice: namely, that public schools are increasingly inclined to slant what is taught with institutionally self-serving propaganda. So much so that school systems can no longer guarantee parents that their children are being educated in ways consistent with their family’s values and beliefs.

The enthusiasm of public school teachers and especially their unions for the liberal-progressive side of today’s ideological rift is not hard to understand. It was just over a half-century ago when President Lyndon B. Johnson proposed a new function for American public schools, insisting they should become the primary means for breaking the cycle of poverty and bettering poor children’s lives. “Education is the only valid passport from poverty,” he said, later signing what was to become the cornerstone of his War on Poverty, the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), into law.

The good news for educators was a lot more money. In 31 states, according to Katharine B. Stevens, visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, per-student spending more than doubled in inflation-adjusted dollars between 1972 and 2017, tripling in 14 others and the District of Columbia. Since President Johnson’s time, K-12 education has, in fact, become states’ single largest general-fund expenditure, with the nation’s total budget for elementary and secondary education now exceeding $700 billion annually.

The bad news about all this spending was that it was accompanied by an expectation for results, which has become a growing source of embarrassment for both teachers and administrators. With the exception of a relatively few affluent suburban school districts—which tens of thousands of American families have literally bankrupted themselves to buy into over the years—U.S. public schools have continued to rank at or near the bottom of academic comparisons with other countries. Indeed, results from the 2019 bi-annual National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) of U.S. fourth and eighth graders show that low-performing students have made none of the gains Johnson originally promised.

To give public educators their due, there did seem to be a sincere (if somewhat bizarre) effort to improve K-12 curricula early on. Back in the late 1960s and early ’70s, teachers experimented with a technique called “discovery learning,” which had children try to teach themselves. They later tried “open classrooms,” which literally removed the walls that had traditionally separated students from teachers and different age groups from each other.

the more obvious it became that real academic improvement meant opening K-12 education to outside competition—from charter schools, independent schools, private tutoring, home schools, and most recently online academies—the more teachers unions began to discover a cause even more important than higher reading and math scores: engineering social justice. It began perhaps innocently enough with a greater emphasis on bilingual instruction, softer disciplinary techniques, and multicultural awareness programs. But with time it became clear just how effectively a never-ending succession of progressive palliatives for racism and sexism—minimizing testing and grading, ending the grading of homework, making grade level advancement automatic, eliminating selective-admission public schools, and recognizing multiple valedictorians—could shield both teachers and administrators from any academic accountability.

As Williams College political science professor Darel E. Paul has suggested, antiracism and related woke policies even allowed failing professionals to pose as heroes, defying the “tyranny” of traditional academic standards to champion more equitable schooling outcomes. Progressivism not only gave public educators the appearance of shouldering “noble tasks,” but conveniently justified their ever-growing salaries and benefits to accomplish those tasks.

(In the wake of President Trump’s January 6 D.C. rally speech, one suburban Connecticut superintendent was apparently so taken with his progressive mission as to publicly attack every local parent who had ever re-tweeted a Trump remark, shouted “lock her up,” agreed that Biden was not up to the job, or countered BLM with “all lives matter.” Each one of them, he posted to his Facebook page, was “a co-conspirator who has sided with domestic terrorism.”)

Unfortunately, few human institutions are capable of simultaneously upholding two competing worldviews. The result is that what began as a progressive set of policies related to how children are educated has increasingly changed what children are taught. In other words, the progressive outlook once associated with adjuncts to learning—school assembly programs, extracurricular activities, teacher development seminars, and the kinds of grading policies already mentioned—has more and more become embedded in the subject matter itself.

And not just in the most obvious places, such as history and the social sciences, but in math and English as well. In Seattle, for example, the public schools have adopted an “anti-western” or “re-humanized” mathematics curriculum, which advances failing students on the grounds that they should not have to learn a subject intrinsically unfair to people of color.

When it comes to English, Wall Street Journal columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon has chronicled growing efforts around the country to ban everything from Homer to Shakespeare to F. Scott Fitzgerald. With what is left, she says, “The subtle complexities of literature are being reduced to the crude clanking of ‘intersectional’ power struggles.”

In January of last year, even the New York Times expressed concern at how widely different editions of the same public-school textbook could vary, depending on how liberal the state. “Classroom materials are not only shaded by politics,” wrote national correspondent Dana Goldstein, “but are also helping to shape a generation of future voters.”

Because public education is technically a state responsibility, some might argue for letting school boards deal with the growing problem of a progressively biased curriculum. But the fact that most people serving on local school boards typically do so because they have at least one child in the system means, as a practical matter, that educators have far more leverage over boards of education than boards have over teachers and administrators. Even those parents willing to challenge subject matter are usually no match for administrators “with advanced degrees [who] flash their credentials and have glib answers for every question,” laments Dr. Armand Fusco, a retired public school superintendent who has written extensively on the need for school board reform.

Indeed, the existence of easily manipulated school boards, combined with support from a vocal minority of left-leaning voters, has led to the creation of course content so clearly at odds with the larger community’s values as to be almost unbelievable. In the red state of Ohio, for example, the Department of Education started off the 2020 academic year by providing local social studies teachers with a resource it called its “Anti-Racist Allyship Starter Pack”—links to 200 op-eds, essays, and blog posts on such academically relevant topics as “In Defense of Looting,” “Capitalism is the Real Robbery,” and “The Case for Delegitimizing the Police.”

If by some miracle local boards did assert greater control over what is taught in their schools, they would still be in the morally dubious position of imposing a single perspective on a population more politically and culturally divided now than it has been since the Civil War. Having a greater say over the curriculum might be good news for those households comprising the majority view in each community, but what about the minority—left or right—who will continue being taxed to support a political and cultural agenda they abhor?

Are those families which remain at odds with the prevailing ideology to be dismissed as simply “out of luck?” As Michael McShane, director of national research for EdChoice, has observed, today’s public school district may still be a local organization, but the disagreements are now too deep for it ever to be a pluralistic one.

The traditional argument for giving public schools an exclusive call on government funding has been the desirability of instructing all of America’s children in the larger community’s shared civic values. But the strategic decision of professional educators to ideologically camouflage their academic shortcomings—combined with an unprecedented cultural divide—effectively means that in our time, fewer and fewer values are held in common.

For decades, the National Education Association (NEA) and other teachers unions fought school choice on the grounds that taxpayers’ dollars would inevitably end up funding religious schools; and public money, they said, should never support an ideology not universally shared. Ironically, that is an excellent argument for why today’s public schools should no longer keep their monopoly on government funding: every American parent has the right to protect his or her child from being propagandized by an alien ideology.

Dr. Lewis Andrews was executive director of the Yankee Institute for Public Policy at Trinity College from 1999 to 2009. He is author of the new book Living Spiritually in the Material World (Fidelis Books).

Proof That the US November Election Was Stolen Exists in Abundance

The official narrative that there was no election theft is likely the largest lie ever perpetrated on the world. The lie is so vast and so fragile that everyone who disagrees with the official narrative is suppressed, deplatformed, kicked off social media, ostracized, and fired from their job in order to protect the lie from examination and exposure. In Michigan the state attorney general is attempting to debar attorneys who represented cases of electoral theft. Massive effort was made—including an orchestrated “storming of the Capitol”—to insure that the evidence would not be presented and that the majority of the population would never encounter the evidence. The presstitutes from the first instance declared continuously with one voice “there was no vote fraud,” “baseless claims of vote fraud,” and the old standby “conspiracy theory.”

Obviously, if there was no fraud, there would have been no danger in examining “baseless claims.” Their baselessness could simply have been demonstrated. If the claims of electoral fraud are baseless, there was no need to split the country and to cause half of the voting population to distrust the public institutions that are supposed to uphold election integrity.

Even without hard evidence of a stolen election, it is obvious that Trump did not lose to Biden who inspired no enthusiasm and whose campaign events had to be halted due to non-attendance. How did Trump lose the election when on December 29, after two months of his heightened demonization following the November 2020 election, he won the annual Gallup survey as America’s most admired person, ending Obama’s 12-year run. According to the official vote count, Trump received 11 million more votes in 2020 than the number he won in 2016 and three times the black support. In 2020 Trump received 8 million more votes than Obama received in 2012 and Hillary received in 2016. It is not possible that this extraordinary performance is a losing one. And this is his official vote count, not his suppressed actual vote.

No sane person believes that such an uninspiring candidate as Biden garnered 81.2 million votes—15.3 million more popular votes than Obama in 2012 and Hillary in 2016. The Obama-Hillary popular vote of 65 to 66 million is the limit of the Democrat vote. Even Trump’s losing official vote count of 74 million is larger than any winning president in American history other than the fraudulent 2020 Biden vote count.

In other words, no voting machine or other material evidence is needed to see that the 2020 election was stolen.

Nevertheless, there is massive evidence. Giuliani collected a lot of it, and it was presented to members of state legislatures in swing states. I watched presentations of the evidence by highly skilled analysts and sworn witnesses. In previous postings on this website there are links to the presentations. As so much information has been deplatformed, the links might no longer work. But “MyPillow” CEO Mike Lindell has collected some of the experts who investigated the electoral fraud and has put together a two-hour video that provides some of the massive evidence, certainly enough to liberate you from the media indoctrination “there is no evidence.”

Mike Lindell’s presentation is here: https://michaeljlindell.com

I recommend that you watch the entire video. It will leave you wondering how such startling information could go unreported and be discarded in Orwell’s Memory Hole. If you won’t find the time for the entire video, then go to Dr. Shiva’s presentation at about the 49 minute spot and to the presentation that begins about 1:08 by Matt DePerno, the lead attorney in the open Antrim County, Michigan, court case where Trump’s large vote was reported as Biden’s and Biden’s small vote was reported as Trump’s. Then go to former Michigan state senator Partick Colbeck at 1:02, Melissa Carone at 1:04, and Russell Ramsland at about 23 minutes into the video.

I admire the partriotism and courage of Mike Lindell. By insisting on the truth, he is bringing all sorts of calumny upon himself, and many retailers are punishing him by dropping his company’s products. I am concerned that the corrupt American Establishment will bankrupt him with endless lawsuits and false criminal indictments. In the United States law is no longer a shield of the people. It is a weapon to be wielded against people as it was in Stalinist Russia.

Although I recommend the video, I think Mr. Lindell gets too involved in the presentations, interrupts the experts’ presentations with questions and points of his own and is too didactic. I also think that Mr. Lindell’s belief is optimistic that the evidence will get a hearing and serve to reunite the country. It is OK with me if Mr. Lindell is correct. Indeed, I hope he is. But the fact is that the election was stolen for a reason, and the Establishment is strong enough to protect the theft from the evidence and the truth.

As for the video itself, there seems to be two sets of contradictory evidence. One set deals with computer algorithms and software in voting machines (not only Dominion’s) that can weight the vote count, for example, counting a vote for one candidate more than one and the other candidate’s vote less than one. The machines can also be programmed to produce a large percentage of ballots that have to be adjudicated, that is assigned to a candidate by the discretion of election officials. Testimony is provided in the video showing how both of these ways were used against Trump.

The other set of evidence has to do with foreign intervention in the election. A couple of experts establish beyond all doubt that despite assurances by Dominion and the media that the machines can’t be connected to the Internet, they most certainly can and were. We are even shown the Dominion manual instructions on how to connect the machines to the Internet.

Once it is established that the machines can be connected to the Internet, foreign intervention becomes possible. The final part of the video presents what appears to be evidence of foreign intervention in the voting. According to the evidence presented, equipment in many countries was used to alter the actual votes, with over 60% of the foreign intrusions coming from China.

So we are left with a question: Who stole the election? The Democrats in the swing states using voting machines and mail-in ballots or China using the Internet to alter the vote count?

If China has its hooks into the Biden family, as the material on Hunter Biden’s laptop indicates, the Chinese government would have a strong interest in having a blackmailable president in the White House. But why was voting machine manipulation necessary if the vote count can be altered via the Internet?

Is the answer that both China and the Democrats were simultaneously stealing the election for Biden independently of one another or in cahoots? Or does foreign intrusion mean the use of foreign location or false foreign computer addresses to hide a local operation?

According to the foreign intrusion evidence, there was intrusion into the voting from other countries as well—Italy, Iran, Iraq, for example.

If our election was actually stolen for Biden by foreign intrusion, why are Democrat election officials, the US media, and Dominion defending foreigners who defeated American democracy?

What I make of the evidence of foreign intrusion is that American conservatives and patriots much prefer to blame foreigners than to point a finger at their own country. It is easier for patriots to say “the foreigners did it” than to say “Americans did it.” Moreover, the theft seems worse and becomes a national security issue if foreigners are to blame.

This comes through strongly in the video’s final words from a retired high-ranking US Air Force general who interprets the stolen election as the work of global socialists/communists who are subverting the United States. This was also the theme of Sidney Powell, which I thought derailed to some extent the Giuliani investigation.

An election stolen by foreign intrusion is inconsistent with the video evidence of Democrat election officials counting the same ballots over and over, pulling out from under tables boxes of ballots that had never been folded or mailed and running them through the machines. It is inconsistent with the hundreds of sworn affidavits of those who witnessed fraud with mail-in ballots. How did China bring all this about? How did China know the graveyards that were voted, the out-of-state people who voted in swing states, the illegal aliens who voted, and so on? Did China also program the voting machines to weight the vote count in Biden’s favor?

If China stole the vote and Democrats did not, why are the Democrats so determined to protect themselves by preventing any examination of the evidence? Why, for example, is the Michigan attorney general trying to debar attorneys who bring election challenges against Michigan election officials, including an attorney who has an open court case in Michigan? Who owns Bill Barr and the Department of Justice? China or the US Establishment?

The Democrats invented the accusation of foreign intervention in the 2016 election. Russia’s alleged intervention was the basis for three years of the Russiagate hoax. It doesn’t seen productive to rival or negate such powerful evidence as presented by Dr. Shiva and the other investigators with a Chinagate story.

Either Democrats used the voting machines to steal the election or China used the Internet to steal the election. The problem with Mr. Lindell’s video is that the video creates this contradiction and does not resolve it.

Or so it seems to me.

Paul Craig Roberts

The Absurd, Cruel Dishonesty of Preaching “Unity”

By “unity”, the occupying forces do not mean authentic togetherness. By “unity” they mean the absence of dissension and opposition. They have achieved the absence of meaningful opposition by rigging elections and imposing censorship on social media. But they will never eradicate dissension. If dissension has nowhere else to go, it will reside in the hearts, minds and souls of individual people–75 million, at last count. It will bubble and fester. No matter how grim things look, that will remain a fact. And it WILL come back to bite them. In Soviet Russia, it took decades. In Maoist China and Nazi Germany, it took a decade. In America of the 21st Century, it could take much less time. But when you suppress the individual rights and dignity of millions, you will, in some way or time, pay for it. That’s not a threat, nor even a promise. It’s just the way it is.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Ayn Rand on God

They claim that they perceive a mode of being superior to your existence on this earth. The mystics of spirit call it “another dimension,” which consists of denying dimensions. The mystics of muscle call it “the future,” which consists of denying the present. To exist is to possess identity. What identity are they able to give to their superior realm? They keep telling you what it is not, but never tell you what it is. All their identifications consist of negating: God is that which no human mind can know, they say—and proceed to demand that you consider it knowledge—God is non-man, heaven is non-earth, soul is non-body, virtue is non-profit, A is non-A, perception is non-sensory, knowledge is non-reason. Their definitions are not acts of defining, but of wiping out.

Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics.

For instance, God is infinite. Nothing can be infinite, according to the Law of Identity. Everything is what it is, and nothing else. It is limited in its qualities and in its quantity: it is this much, and no more. “Infinite” as applied to quantity does not mean “very large”: it means “larger than any specific quantity.” That means: no specific quantity—i.e., a quantity without identity. This is prohibited by the Law of Identity.

Is God the creator of the universe? There can be no creation of something out of nothing. There is no nothing.

Is God omnipotent? Can he do anything? Entities can act only in accordance with their natures; nothing can make them violate their natures . . .

“God” as traditionally defined is a systematic contradiction of every valid metaphysical principle. The point is wider than just the Judeo-Christian concept of God. No argument will get you from this world to a supernatural world. No reason will lead you to a world contradicting this one. No method of inference will enable you to leap from existence to a “super-existence.”

Study Finds School Choice Improves Students’ Happiness

At a time countless students face obstacles that could permanently stunt their learning growth, school choice provides one obvious solution to help mitigate a ‘lost generation.’

At a time countless students face obstacles that could permanently stunt their learning growth, school choice provides one obvious solution to help mitigate a ‘lost generation.’

Impact on Suicide Rates

The study, released in December and conducted by a Cato Institute scholar and Western Carolina University economist, used two different methods to examine the impact of school choice on mental health. First, the researchers used examined variations in teenage (i.e., 15-19) suicide rates based on states’ different charter school laws. Charter schools—which receive taxpayer funding but whose charters free them from many of the bureaucratic obstacles of traditional public schools—represent a common form of school choice, with 3.3 million students enrolled at 7,500 schools in 44 different states.

The analysis yielded “robust” results: “We consistently find declines in suicides following the adoption of charter schools,” equivalent to a 10 percent decrease in the suicide rate for 15-19 year olds. The researchers found some reduction in suicides among students attending private schools after receiving opportunity scholarships (also known as vouchers). However, the results in the scholarship group did not rise to the level of statistical significance—possibly because scholarship programs are less developed than charter programs, with more recent origins and fewer student participants.

The researchers also examined how school attendance impacts the self-reported mental health of former students in adulthood, using a decades-long study of students aged 12-18 in 1997. Students who attended private school in 1997 were between 1.9-2.9 percentage points less likely to have a mental health condition in their late 20s and early 30s, based on a survey conducted in 2013.

Why School Choice Improves Mental Health

In putting the first-of-its-kind study in context, the researchers offered some possible explanations for why school choice can improve mental health. For starters, private schools and charter academies often put more emphasis on character, thereby discouraging bullying behaviors. The authors also noted that, for students bullied in traditional public schools due to their love of a specific subject—say, performing arts or science—moving to a private school focused on that subject would place them among like-minded students, alleviating a source of stress.

The authors also note the most obvious explanation for why school choice could improve student mental health: Parents and families get to pick the school that works best for their children—placing them in the best environment to succeed. Private schools in particular also face competitive pressures, because parents who do not feel their child is receiving an education worth their tuition dollars will enroll their children elsewhere.

All told, these beneficial effects on student mental health more than offset any added stress from a more intense academic environment, or the beneficial effects of higher spending by public schools (most of which has gone towards administrative staff rather than teaching). As the analysts conclude: “School choice improves mental health….As public attention focuses on the mental health of adolescents in the United States, the results imply that increased school choice advances the public goal of improving mental health outcomes.”

Put Children First

The results of this study provide yet another data point for policymakers to bolster the case for expanding school choice. On the state level, lawmakers should work to expand opportunity scholarship programs in their 2021 legislative sessions. In Washington DC, Joe Biden should rethink his newfound hostility towards charter schools, and instead come up with a platform that puts students’ needs—and not those of government bureaucrats or teachers’ unions—first.

Events over the past 12 months have put into stark relief the stakes of the education debate in this country. America’s youth need a better future than the current COVID-defined present—and the failed status quo of the past. School choice can help them, and us, get there.

Christopher Jacobs, The Federalist

China’s Maoist Cultural Revolution A Lot Like America of 2020-21

Democrats are evil; but they’re also smart. They patiently took over American culture for several generations, starting with college campuses, then public schools and eventually mass media, entertainment, sports, corporations and, of course, state and local governments (especially all the major cities). The leftist radicalism on college campuses of the 1960s morphed into the political correctness of the 1990s and, eventually, the Obama-Biden takeover and consolidation of dictatorship culminating in the events of 2020-21.

We now know that even President Donald Trump was no match for an ENTIRE CULTURE overtaken by the statist, irrationally anti-individualistic and thoroughly anti-capitalist, anti-liberty and anti-individualist point-of-view. Cultural elites are a minority, and not even all Democrat-voters are rabid, Communist leftists. But their party is, and it was a movement and establishment that takes into account what many conservatives never considered: That culture disproportionately influences a society. The elites of a culture, including a corporate culture, are more powerful than even 75 million Americans who think and feel otherwise — if not for all time, certainly in the short-run.

Today’s Communist China is rooted in a Maoist “Cultural Revolution” that sounds awfully familiar when you consider the present state of America today.

If you still think “it can’t happen here”, then stop to consider … that it’s already happening. Look at what Mao Zedong imposed on a compliant China back in the 1960s and 1970s.

“The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was a decade-long period of political and social chaos caused by Mao Zedong’s bid to use the Chinese masses to reassert his control over the Communist party.

Its bewildering complexity and almost unfathomable brutality was such that to this day historians struggle to make sense of everything that occurred during the period.

However, Mao’s decision to launch the “revolution” in May 1966 is now widely interpreted as an attempt to destroy his enemies by unleashing the people on the party and urging them to purify its ranks.

When the mass mobilisation kicked off party newspapers depicted it as an epochal struggle that would inject new life into the socialist cause. “Like the red sun rising in the east, the unprecedented Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is illuminating the land with its brilliant rays,” one editorial read.

In fact, the Cultural Revolution crippled the economy, ruined millions of lives and thrust China into 10 years of turmoil, bloodshed, hunger and stagnation.

Gangs of students and Red Guards attacked people wearing “bourgeois clothes” on the street, “imperialist” signs were torn down and intellectuals and party officials were murdered or driven to suicide.

After violence had run its bloody course, the country’s rulers conceded it had been a catastrophe that had brought nothing but “grave disorder, damage and retrogression”.

Party officials, teachers and intellectuals also found themselves in the cross-hairs: they were publicly humiliated, beaten and in some cases murdered or driven to suicide after vicious “struggle sessions”. Blood flowed as Mao ordered security forces not to interfere in the Red Guards’ work. Nearly 1,800 people lost their lives in Beijing in August and September 1966 alone. [Source: The Guardian]

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Democrats and Racism

Mea culpa. There is structural and systemic racism in the United States. The inconvenient truth is that it is perpetrated, propagated, and perpetuated by the Left. Birthed in the cesspool of radical Left university departments, demagogic terms like white privilege, whiteness, or white fragility are part of a poisonous and dangerous ideology that is meant to divide rather than unite. Critical race theory and racial equality can be summed up in a single statement: if you are white, you are racist and if you are a person of color, you are oppressed.

The combination of white guilt plus black victimhood is especially toxic. Our self-anointed “Uniter-in-Chief” Joe Biden has jumped on the race hustler bandwagon under the guise of diversity training with his recent decision to rescind an executive order from former President Trump that would have put restrictions on advancing racial equality by limiting diversity training for federal government employees and its contractors. In other words, more identity politics. Unfortunately, this isn’t an anomaly for Democrats. This isn’t a blip on the Democratic arc of history bending towards justice. Judging people by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character has a rich history in the Democratic Party.

Democrats have been solely responsible for defending slavery, starting the Civil War, opposing reconstruction, lynching blacks, founding the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow laws and segregation, poll taxes and literacy tests. The Party voted against the 13th amendment (end slavery), 14th amendment (black citizenship), and 15th amendment (black right to vote), filibustered the 1960 Civil Rights Act (elimination of poll taxes), and tried to filibuster the 1964 Civil Rights Act for 60 days, the longest filibuster in Senate history.

The Civil War wasn’t North v. South, as highlighted in the Lincoln-Douglas debates in the northern state of Illinois. It was a Democrat v. Republican battle. The infamous Dred Scott decision (blacks were property) in 1857 was a Supreme Court vote of 7 Democrat justices for, and 2 Republican justices against. By 1900, more than 20 black Republicans had served in Congress. Democrats did not elect a single black congressman until 1935. And every black senator until 1979 was a Republican. When federal troops withdrew from the South after reconstruction ended, Democrats’ white supremacy laws re-emerged with a vengeance enforced by the paramilitary arm of the Democratic Party, the KKK, which was used to suppress blacks from voting Republican.

Democrats are also the party of abortion. Planned Parenthood, founded by eugenics racist Margaret Sanger was created to eliminate the “undesirables” and that continues today where there are more abortions in NYC of black babies than are born.

Democrat Woodrow Wilson re-segregated many federal agencies and screened the racist film Birth of a Nation at the White House. Democrat FDR refused to invite four-time gold medalist Jessie Owen (a staunch Republican) to the White House (only invited white athletes) and interned 120,000 Japanese Americans. Eisenhower re-integrated the military and forced the integration of schools in Little Rock against the wishes of Democrat governor Orval Faubus. The racist Democrat LBJ started the welfare state and said “I’ll have those n#@!rs voting Democrat for the next 200 years,” highlighting the fact that Democrats care about black votes but not blacks. The welfare state has decimated the black family with 77 percent of children growing up fatherless. JFK first mentioned Affirmative Action in 1961 but it was Nixon who passed it in 1971.

Democrat race hustlers Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton foment black victimhood. The party promotes racial identity politics because of the abject failure of its policies which continues to hurt black people and shows its continued contempt for blacks. Opposition to school choice keeps blacks in failing schools. Politically correct policing has left blacks as victims to violent crimes. In 2019, 9 unarmed blacks (the number is 19 for white people) were killed by police while more than 2,000 blacks were murdered by other blacks in 2018 and Democrats have had monopoly control of ALL the cities we hear and see about black plight: Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit..

If Democrats really wanted to help blacks, they would treat abortion as a tragedy, support school choice, work to end the failed welfare state, drop the idea of defunding police, promote advancement based on merit and character not the amount of melanin in your skin, end open borders which flood the market with cheap labor and steal jobs from black Americans, end their support of minimum wage laws which lead to higher black unemployment, and end their social justice mantra which is equality by group not the individual, anathema to America’s founding principles. I know, wishful thinking. So, whenever you hear Democrats calling Republicans racists, just know there is a simple psychological term for this: projection.

Rigging the Election for China and Profit

Emerald Robinson tweets:

@EmeraldRobinson

The corporate media: “People who say there was a shadow campaign to rig the 2020 election are conspiracy theorists!”
Time Magazine: “Read our story on the shadow campaign to rig the 2020 election!”

She’s referring to the most astonishing story of the week, Molly Ball’s article in Time: ”The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that saved the 2020 election,” a sordid tale of how Big Tech, BLM, organized labor and big business, particularly the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, colluded to defeat Donald J. Trump’s reelection.

The participants justified their behavior as “saving democracy.” Was this a “modified limited hangout” in the old Watergate sense? An effort to undo the public perception that the election was illegally stolen with an alternative that there was an unsavory but legitimate perception management by powerful people and institutions to defeat the man who had captured the angst of the middle class and worked to improve their lives? Or were members of the cabal playing neener neener on the voters they bested to further dispirit them and keep them from tipping over the chessboard they set up to wipe out the pawns? All these theories have merit, but I think these powerful people — or most of them — have been coopted by China and Biden is the perfect puppet to carry the sellout to China and to defeat Trump’s moves to strengthen America and improve the lot of working Americans and their communities.

The Cabal

You must read the Time article to get the full flavor of the brazen admissions of what was done. Here’s a brief summary of the most significant of them, devoid of the leftist spackle of the author. Business, the AFL-CIO, and Black Lives Matter worked together to change voting systems and laws, to get hundreds of millions of dollars to make voting less secure and worked with social media to keep the Biden message upfront, the Trump message buried and the country terrified of widespread violence if the president won re-election. (4.6 percent of people who voted for Biden said in a poll that they would not have done so, had the information about Hunter Biden’s corruption not been scotched by the media.)

The participants see themselves as the protectors of democracy and want their story told, the author explains. Initial moves were coordinated by Mike Podhorzer, senior adviser to Richard Trumka, president of the AFl-CIO. He saw in the COVID-19 reaction an opportunity to bypass normal, more secure election procedures, and working with Planned Parenthood, Indivisible, and Move On, “progressive data geeks and strategists, representatives of donors and foundations, state-level grassroots organizers, Working Families Party, racial-justice activists and others, to manipulate the election procedures. In time, they persuaded Congress to steer COVID relief funds for election administration, a feat aided by the Leadership Conference of Civil and Human Rights. When the $400 million grant proved insufficient for their means, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative dropped into their hands another $300 million, which the National Vote at Home Institute used to advise secretaries of state on the new, insecure voting procedures. (Chan is the wife of Mark Zuckerberg — Facebook’s chairman, CEO and controlling shareholder).

Having altered the rules, the next step was taken by the Voter Participation Center, which sent out ballot applications to 15 million people “in key states” and urged people not to “wait until election day.” ”In the end, nearly half the electorate cast ballots by mail in 2020, practically a revolution in how people vote.”

But rigging election procedures was only a part of the cabal’s work. They also worked at pressuring media platforms to remove content or accounts which in their view “spread disinformation.” Among those pressured to silence opposition views were Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

Huge efforts were undertaken to persuade voters that the final results would not be known on election night until 70% of the public was made to believe that Biden won, including media election analysts.

All this was insufficient to swing the election to the most unqualified candidates — Biden and Harris. And yet that was insufficient to their ends. Following on the absurd media coverage of George Floyd’s death from a drug overdose and poor health while in police custody, Black Lives Matter was ginned up and the word was out that there would be even more riots if “Trump interferes with the election” (that is, if he won). A coalition tagged “Protect the Results” included “Women’s March, Sierra Club, Color of Change and Democratic Socialists of America.” This while the legacy media was calling the riots “mostly peaceful,” people watched their communities being burnt down and shops looted, and mayors of cities like New York, Portland, and Seattle took no steps to punish those involved.

A week before the election, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whose Chief Executive Thomas Donohue resigned days after the Time article was published, approached Podhorzer. They were concerned about threats of riots if Trump were elected, and joined with Trumka, the heads of the National Association for Evangelicals and the North African American Clergy to “trust in our system,” in effect pre-judging any challenge to the rigged election.

On election night eve, analysts for the media having been conditioned to expect a late surge, ignored calling it for Trump despite his heavy lead, and Podhorzer then concentrated on winning the certification, pressuring election boards, GOP-controlled legislatures, state canvassing boards, and Congress.

If you believe, as Time’s author and the participants do, that all these shenanigans were to protect democracy, you’ll have to explain to me why Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit is wrong when she observes how shaky the new administration is:

Look, guys, any honest person who knew math knows. I know the left and the right who hates Trump loves to lie to themselves that “everyone hates Trump.”
1- This is not true.
2- Most people weren’t crazy about Trump but liked the way he governed.
3-The election wasn’t only dirty, it was submerged in fraud.
4-People who haven’t stolen elections don’t fight having fraud looked into.
5- People who haven’t stolen elections don’t turn DC into occupied territory.
6- People who haven’t stolen elections don’t try so hard to gaslight the country.
7- People who haven’t stolen elections don’t try to turn opposing them into a crime.
8- People who haven’t stolen elections don’t try to destroy the country they just took over.
9- More importantly, people who haven’t stolen the election don’t tell us how they STOLE THE ELECTION.
There is that “consent of the governed.” The left doesn’t think they need it anymore. They think they have it all sewn up.

China Was the Real Winner of the Election

In my view, the big winner of this “fortified election” gambit is China. Like Lee Smith, I see that a few at the top were coopted by China and profits to be made in dealing with China even on its terms, and used their powers to undermine, weaken and ultimately destroy democracy. Drawing an historical parallel with Sparta and Athens, he reminds us how the pro-Sparta oligarchy worked to undermine the rights of Athenian citizens. The “meritocracy” has decided their bread is best buttered in a globalized world. They see China as “big, productive and efficient” and American workers being displaced as people deserving of punishment, “reactionary racists” all. (Ignoring, of course, the extreme racism of the Chinese government now torturing and eliminating the Uyghar minority, among others.)

President Trump upended that, ending foreign wars and illegal immigration while returning jobs to Americans was the core of his appeal, and nothing could be more threatening to the oligarchy. This explains Big Tech and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s role. How to explain Labor’s? In my own view, I think it obvious that AFL-CIO head Rich Trumka has determined that the industrial unions are not worth fighting for — hence no complaints about closing down coal mines (and in Kamala Harris’s words training the miners to reclaim “land mines”) or shutting down the Keystone Pipeline and putting thousands of union workers out of work while impoverishing their communities. He sees the big gain for labor in a vastly increased public sector and rigging the rules to unionize more workers .

It’s not just labor and big business coopted, the think tanks and universities are also in the Chinese camp, says Smith:

Think tanks and research institutions like the Atlantic Council, the Center for American Progress, the EastWest Institute, the Carter Center, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and others gorged themselves on Chinese money. The world-famous Brookings Institution had no scruples about publishing a report funded by Chinese telecom company Huawei that praised Huawei technology.
The billions that China gave to major American research universities, like $58 million to Stanford, alarmed U.S. law enforcement, which warned of Chinese counterintelligence efforts to steal sensitive research. But the schools and their name faculty were in fact in the business of selling that research, much of it paid for directly by the U.S. government — which is why Harvard and Yale among other big-name schools appear to have systematically underreported the large amounts that China had gifted them.
Indeed, many of academia’s pay-for-play deals with the CCP were not particularly subtle. In June 2020, a Harvard professor who received a research grant of $15 million in taxpayer money was indicted for lying about his $50,000 per month work on behalf of a CCP institution to “recruit, and cultivate high-level scientific talent in furtherance of China’s scientific development, economic prosperity and national security.”

The China Virus was a boon to them, leading to absurd lockdowns that weakened our economy, kept kids from schools, let Democrats like Cuomo boost casualties and increase panic all to defeat the president, and from the very start of China’s move, the media has played a willing handmaiden in our destruction.

California senator Dianne Feinstein and Silicon Valley as well cemented the Chinese techno-autocracy which played so significant a role in the cabal against Trump. Curious about why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce joined the anti-reelection cabal? Smith explains it. The Chamber no longer represents the interests of main street businesses, it was vehemently opposed to his tariffs on Chinese imports and his efforts to move the supply chains back home: More profits for big domestic business in keeping the cheaper China supply chains open.

The consequences of the oligarchy’s embrace of China is evident, Smith observes in the U.S. Security and Defense analyses fluffing up their reports to bury evidence of China’s aggression at our expense.

Perhaps the most interesting part of Smith’s account is the report that Wuhan was initially astir in fall of 2019 because of a revolt against air pollution and a quarantine was imposed to keep the revolt from spreading. Having found a quarantine a useful means to stopping a rebellion, they used it again in December of 2019 utilizing as a public health measure — ostensibly stopping the spread of the virus — but, in fact, designed to stop news of the government’s blunder in allowing the release of the virus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Lockdowns here made the U.S. oligarchs like Bezos much richer while impoverishing Trump’s base. “In imposing unconstitutional regulations by fiat, city and state authorities normalized autocracy.”

He has much more to say and substantial evidence for his point of view, and I strongly urge you to read it all.

I have no simple solution to return us to democracy, though I think Roger L. Simon is correct when he argues that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ lead should be followed by all Republican state legislatures.

  • Mandatory opt-outs from big tech’s content filters, a solution to tech censorship first proposed by Breitbart News.
  • A private right of action for Floridian citizens against tech companies that violate this condition.
  • Fines of $100,000 per day levied on tech companies that suspend candidates for elected office in Florida from their platforms.
  • Daily fines for any tech company “that uses their content and user-related algorithms to suppress or prioritize the access of any content related to a political candidate or cause on the ballot.”
  • Greater transparency requirements.
  • Disclosure requirements enforced by Florida’s election authorities for tech companies that favor one candidate over another.
  • Power for the Florida attorney general to bring cases against tech companies that violate these conditions under the state’s Unfair and Deceptive Practices Act.

Almost half the states are fully under Republican control, several others have Republican legislatures, and they have the power to do this. I think it is a better means to preserve democracy than allowing the U.S.-China oligarchy to turn us in an autocracy. Punch back twice as hard, as Instapundit urges. Next, I think set strict limits on gubernatorial emergency powers, and by all means strengthen and tighten election procedures, and dump the cabal’s new rules that maximize the ability to rig the vote.

Clarice Feldman, American Thinker

The State is Destroying Life and Liberty by Destroying Information and Speech

“The state, I call it, where all are poison-drinkers, the good and the bad: the state, where all lose themselves, the good and the bad: the state, where the slow suicide of all — is called “life.” Just see these superfluous ones! They steal the works of the inventors and the treasures of the wise. Culture, they call their theft — and everything becometh sickness and trouble unto them! Just see these superfluous ones! Sick are they always; they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper. They devour one another, and cannot even digest themselves.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”

State censorship has been evident over all time, but what is happening today, especially considering the ease of access and the voluminous amount of information available, is far beyond the scope of understanding for most in this country. The Internet is a wonder, but it is a very sharp double-edged sword. The real power among us understands this concept intimately, while the ‘public’ has little awareness of the potential for the controllers to eliminate history and speech by using the very tool that should allow for an expansion of learning and intellect. The Internet can store and make available all the works of man, both past and present, and all this information is seemingly accessible to anyone with little effort, but is that really the cases.

The risk that is missed by most, is that as easy as it is to access information today, that information can be manipulated, hidden, or eliminated just as easily, and that process could be controlled by a central ‘authority’ through any of its fascist partnerships. If much of the underlying information of recorded history; books, journals, letters, and all historical and political records and writings, can be captured, controlled, or even destroyed by nefarious efforts, then that would leave available only what is stored digitally. This would be an abomination, because it would also allow for the loss of much hard knowledge of the past and present by those controlling the Internet and communication systems. For this horror to occur, all books would not have to be destroyed, but if much of the important information were restricted from view by whatever means, or made very difficult to access, then people would know only what the state wanted them to know.

We live in a digitized age where physical classic and modern works, documents, books, and papers are very seldom sought. I find this very troubling, because the general population, especially the young, have been raised and trained in an era of television, cell phones and computers, and many have never read any physical material about history, culture, nature, science, art, or any other of a multitude of subjects. In other words, they are fully dependent on the mainstream media, technology, and the Internet for all the information they get, good or bad. It takes little imagination to realize that this could lead to a planned censorship over generations so as to mold minds in a way suitable to the state. If all information is thought to be available from limited sources that can be manipulated, censored, or fully controlled, what will be available in the future is what those that gain or hold power want to be available. In reality, the future is already here.
PropagandaBernays, EdwardBest Price: $36.00Buy New $15.23(as of 01:49 EDT – Details)

Censorship today is everywhere, and is affecting many areas of thought. To paraphrase Ray Bradbury, there are so many ways to burn books without ever starting a fire. Figuratively speaking, all the books have not been burned to date, but many are becoming more and more difficult to find or access, whether hard copies or online. But since most in this country now use only the Internet for so many things, this is going mostly unnoticed. We are living in a period of extreme tyranny, but it is more than that. It is a planned takeover of humanity as a whole, with the stated goal of creating a “Great Reset” that is based upon a technocratic world governing system controlled by oligarchs through smart grid technology.

Obviously, the Internet will be with us, and that can be a great thing, but we can never allow for the few to create and control the entirety of the technological systems. In other words, there needs to be multiple private opposing systems so that one “Internet of things” cannot be susceptible to any oligarchic control. If the ruling class and the state apparatus gain control of information, there will be no information, only propaganda.

Considering the situation today, censorship is far worse than I have experienced in my lifetime, and is worsening every day. It is getting almost impossible to find any alternative material or information that is either contrary to the state narrative, or in any way outside the thought police’s system of control. Any website or content that discusses real issues and truth concerning government, this fake virus pandemic, 5G technology, vaccines, election fraud, riots, and any other of a thousand issues not approved by the state, are disappeared or taken down. This is a daily occurrence, and searching for this content is becoming impossible due to the algorithmic manipulation by the big technology giants. These are not legitimate private companies, as most were funded by government and are partnered (in bed with) government, CIA, corrupt corporations and foundations, the pharmaceutical industry, and the mainstream media, among many other corrupt and criminal entities.

Censorship is absolutely rampant today. Web sites and alternative news platforms are being closed. YouTube and most all social sites with few exceptions are censoring everything possible, search engines are making almost any legitimate research impossible by hiding truthful or critical content, alternative journalism is being attacked and taken down, and many have been demonetized. The CIA controlled mainstream media are playing quarterback for the state, the global ‘elites,’ the corrupt ‘health’ organizations, the Fascist Biden administration, and are aggressively pushing every globalist agenda down the throats of gullible Americans.

We are experiencing a time when information should be the most abundant in the history of mankind, but it is being censored and eliminated to the point of closing the door to any information that is not approved by the controlling class and their political accomplices. This is unbelievably dangerous, because when the people allow speech to be manipulated or restricted in any way, truth is effectively erased, and all that is left is state propaganda. With speech censored and effectively disappeared, only the state narrative will be reported. In this environment, the masses will normally accept the lies as truth and the truth as lies. This can only lead to a slave society.

A country deprived of information and speech will cease to be free. A country without knowledge of its history will cease to be a country.

“When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”

Gary D. Barnett, LewRockwell.com