In an article on children, philosopher Stephen Hicks makes an interesting case against homework for school-aged kids. “Everyone says that they want children to grow up able to live independent lives and pursue their chosen careers passionately. But that aspiration does not fit with a traditional practice of education that teaches children to follow instructions – above all – without asking ‘why’.

“What kind of education will prepare students for order-following and self-stultifying jobs? Simple: One which requires rigidly defined school projects assigned by “authorities”. When kids do the schoolwork primarily because they have been told to do so, homework then becomes nothing more than an additional imposition. Kids learn that life is about doing tasks, whether they like it or not, and following orders. No wonder independent and critical thinking is slowly disappearing from so many young people.

“In the ‘traditional’ system, most children will learn to accept and go along grudgingly, and to that extent give up their potential for a life fully lived. Only a few will fight to preserve their potential for self-actualization by rebelling — often obnoxiously because of their youth — against their teachers, parents, and other perceived representatives of the system.” [http://www.thesavvystreet.com/the-case-against-homework/]

Interesting. We seem to have created a generation of children whose aspirations and expectations are immensely high, but whose initiative and follow-through are incredibly low. More young people are living at home with their parents than at any time since the 1930s. Yes, some of this is economic, but it goes deeper than that.

I hear stories in my office every day from people about their kids. When I started training as a family therapist in the late ‘80s, I never heard of kids living at home with their parents; lacking direction and purpose – unless there was some kind of medical illness or, even more frequently, a drug or alcohol addiction.

Today, it’s different. I routinely hear stories of people whose kids are home well into their 20s and even their 30s. They’re not ill, and they don’t abuse drugs or alcohol. Many of them completed college. They’re not particularly irresponsible, but they do seem frightened and insecure while — oddly enough — entitled to a level of comfort that nobody can attain as easily as they seem to assume.

Even when grown kids are moved out and working, it’s typical for me to hear complaints from the older generation that we didn’t hear in the past. “My son [or daughter] has such grand expectations. He can’t understand why he’s not making a million dollars so quickly.” It seems that young expectations have of have never been higher, while initiative has never been weaker.

So here’s a theory: Schools for recent and current generations do it the old way, but with a new twist. The old way was to create passivity and ultimately resentment, with a command-and-control school system (see the Hicks quote above).  But more recently, added to that uninspiring approach has been an emphasis on badly defined “self-esteem”. The prevailing definition of self-esteem has been (and still is) to make someone “feel good” about themselves. But when you use a subjective standard to define self-esteem, you convey unrealistic – and unattainable – ideas like, “You can be anything you want to be,” or “You’re entitled to be happy.” But today’s “good little citizen” education doesn’t provide the tools to actually do that.

The good news is that many young people challenge this Pollyanna phoniness when they reach young adulthood. But sadly, others come to believe it. They expect huge levels of wealth and achievement, but they lack the follow-through required to make it happen. They want ends without means; results without effort. To some extent all people (of any generation) are subject to this problem, but in the present generation this appears to have reached epidemic proportions.

Hicks brilliantly sums it up when he says: “So we should listen carefully and read between the lines, so to speak, when our children start saying self-assertive things like; ‘You’re not the boss of me!’ To that we should reply, ‘Damned straight, kid. You are the boss of yourself, and our job as adults is to help you become better at it.’” Exactly.

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As this critical 2024 presidential election draws closer, the panicked left finds themselves without a candidate even remotely capable of defeating Donald Trump – an inexorable, MAGA juggernaut that the Democrat Party cannot seem to stop no matter how many trumped-up (pun intended) lawsuits and investigations they throw in his path to a second Presidency.

Democrats are saddled with an incumbent so obviously decrepit in body and mind that his supporters can no longer successfully gaslight even themselves into believing he’s a keen-witted dynamo. Their vice-presidential fallback option is a hopelessly incompetent and unpopular Woman of Color™ whose only skill is “failing up.” Long-rumored candidate California Governor Gavin Newsom craves the presidency like a vampire craves blood but is a white man, so he’s out. The Party’s not-so-secret weapon whom many felt sure was going to be the nominee, popular former First Lady Michelle Obama, reiterated this week that she is adamant about wanting nothing to do with political office. So the Democrats’ only hope as an election strategy (apart from widespread voter fraud, of course) is to demonize their opponents – those unwoke, white Deplorables of flyover country – as an existential threat to America and to the idea of democracy itself.

Of course, by “democracy” the left means “permanent Democrat hegemony,” and by “America,” the left means an impotent, borderless, former-superpower-turned-satellite of the European Union and other supranational entities like the World Economic Forum. That is their globalist, totalitarian vision to which Trump is an immovable obstacle.

The left despise, with the heat of a thousand Texas suns, the working class patriots they smear as white supremacists, who refuse to give up on Trump and America. The most blatant current example of their visceral contempt for Trump supporters is a new book with the on-the-nose title White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy. It was written by a pair of white Progressive hatchet men, University of Maryland political science professor Tom Schaller and journalist Paul Waldman (I point out their whiteness because they themselves, like the Democrats generally, see everything through the distorted lens of skin color).

Schaller and Waldman waste no time in the book identifying “rural” and “urban” as the defining major divide in this country, and painting a picture of paranoid, bitter, enraged, Trump-deluded, working class country music fans as existential Enemies of the State. White Rural Rage reeks in every paragraph (yes, I’ve read it) of demagoguery, projection, and a stunning lack of self-awareness.

I won’t bother to sum up the book’s argument because Schaller and Waldman did that ably themselves when they appeared on the propaganda outlet MSNBC to promote White Rural Rage. They leapt immediately into smearing white working class Americans outside the oh-so-sophisticated blue cities as the dregs of our society. In response to a question from Trump-hating Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski, whose face is set in a permanent sneer, Schaller was ready with his talking points explaining why rural whites are “a threat to democracy”:

First, they are the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geo-demographic group in the country.

Second, they are the most conspiracist group: QAnon supporters and subscribers, election denialism, COVID denialism, scientific skepticism, Obama birtherism.

Third, anti-democratic sentiments: they don’t believe in an independent press, free speech. They’re the most likely to say the president should be able to act unilaterally without any checks from Congress, or the courts or the bureaucracy. They’re also also the most strongly white nationalist and white Christian nationalist.

And fourth, they are the most likely to excuse or justify violence as acceptable alternative to peaceful public discourse.

The elitist arrogance and projection are breathtaking. Only left-wing ideologues could live in a country ravaged over the last few years by Black Lives Matter rioting, by a dizzying descent into rampant lawlessness and chaos spurred on by Democrat pro-crime policies and prosecutors, by a Biden administration-driven border invasion threatening to overwhelm to turn our cities into Third World hellholes, by widespread campus Jew-hatred fueled by radical academics and taking over the streets, by racial division inflamed by race-hustling elites – and claim that it is white rural voters who are the most violent, racist, anti-democratic threat to America. Would Schaller and Waldman, or anyone on the left, write a book titled Black Urban Rage: The Threat to American Democracy?

White rural voters aren’t anti-immigrant; they’re simply opposed to the madness of an administration that has thrown open our border and abandoned immigration law entirely. They’re not anti-gay; they’re just sick of having gender ideology shoved down their throats and being slammed as bigots for not celebrating every anti-family perversion the left insists we embrace. They’re not anti-democratic; it’s not white rural voters who created cancel culture or who turned the entire mainstream media into a propaganda arm of the Democrat Party. And as any conservative speaker on a college campus will tell you, it’s not white rural voters who refuse to engage in peaceful public discourse.

As for COVID denial, we all know now that the vaccine skeptics and mask-resisters who were demonized and ostracized as hateful, anti-science monsters were right from the beginning, and that the pandemic was engineered by globalist greed-mongers for power and profit – just as 2020 “election deniers” were right that Democrats engaged in massive cheating to put their candidate over the top. (Schaller and Waldman have nothing to say, by the way, about the Democrat “election deniers” such as Hillary Clinton who come out in full force when a Republican wins.)

Schaller and Waldman claim that white rural voters have been manipulated into their purported rage by a “right-wing noise machine” and by Republican lawmakers who are really to blame for the legitimate complaints they have against a system that Schaller and Waldman admit has failed them. And it is fair to say that far too many Republican politicians either don’t have the best interests of American patriots at heart or lack the fortitude and character to push back against the leftist agenda.

But the current state of our disunion is not the result of an insidious, anti-democratic, right-wing propaganda machine radicalizing poor whites, but of the left-wing radicalization of the Democrat Party and the left’s full-bore agenda to “fundamentally transform” America as we know it into a permanent, one-party totalitarian state.

The left’s demonization of the working-class, white Americans who have the gall to resist the Progressive agenda at every turn is ugly, destructive, and pushing this country toward open civil war. And they will blame that civil war on the demographic they have been intentionally — and dangerously — provoking.

Mark Tapson, Front Page Magazine

It took just three days.

After drag performer RuPaul announced the creation of a “no censorship” Allstora bookstore, censorship was back with a vengeance after many on the left learned that free speech meant that opposing views might be sold at the site.  While the sentiment was appealing, it became intolerable when activists noted that a “no censorship” store would mean that they could not censor others.

In the rollout, RuPaul stood in a blue suit before a flag to defy the censors and embrace access to works of different authors and viewpoints. For many of us, it was an exciting moment. The anti-free speech movement on the left has grown exponentially. Now, this iconic figure from the left was taking a bold stand for free speech.

With ten million titles, readers could buy most any book, including writers like Riley Gaines who have challenged transgender theories.

Various sites like National Review have covered the rise and rapid fall of the free speech initiative.

The rollout was promising. Like many of us, the founders objected to book bans across the country. Such bans have been implemented by both the left and the right.

Allstora was founded on the pledge that “We’re a marketplace for all books and all stories, with a focus on elevating marginalized voices.” Co-founder Eric Cervini and drag performer Adam Powell, welcomed visitors to the website with a pop-up message that warned “you may find books you disagree with.”

The site declared “censorship of any book, perspective, or story is incompatible with the survival of democracy.” After all, “banning books is never the answer.”

The pledge was heralded in the media. Many viewed it as a jab at conservatives to show that there is nothing to fear in access to opposing views.

Then someone thought about what free speech means.

Liberal critics raised the alarm that the bookstore would be selling “homophobic,” “transphobic,” and “anti-woke” works. Drag performer “Lady Bunny” noted that the store would be selling works by figures like Mike Huckabee, Chaya Raichik, and Matt Walsh.

Lady Bunny asked “Why not just stop selling what many on the left consider to be hate speech?”

That is all that it took. Allstora first implemented a flagging system for offensive books and then just got rid of the no censorship pledge. While some sites state that Allstora only moved to add disclaimers, it appears that the no censorship pledge is gone and various authors are missing. I searched for books by writers like Gaines and Matt Walsh and found nothing.

The obvious response to Lady Bunny is that she is the answer to her question. In the name of combatting hate speech, she is embracing the very tool used by the most hateful movements in history from book burning to black listing of opposing views. Censorship becomes insatiable as the list of offensive topics or views grows from transgender politics to climate change to abortion. Every advocacy group finds opposing its own views to be dangerous and harmful.

It is analogous to what Gandhi said about vengeance:  “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” The same is true about censorship. Eventually it leaves the whole world ignorant.

Jonathan Turley

“Success will bring unity to our country,” a victorious Trump told supporters on Super Tuesday. This presupposes that his opposition wants success. Success means liberty, freedom, the Bill of Rights, honest democratic elections, freedom of speech and association, meritocracy, real capitalism, a rising standard of living for all, rational immigration with borders, and self-responsibility. Trump’s opposition, in both parties, want NONE of these things. So if by success Trump means freedom and prosperity, he’s not going to unite good people with bad people. The bad guys, and the fools who support DemComs and RINOs, don’t want success. They have the media, the schools and much of the corporate world behind them. This is why Trump’s battle continues to be so ferocious.

The only way to drain the swamp is cut off their money supply (massively reducing the size and scope of the government), arrest and try for treason the top offenders: Starting with Biden, his Cabinet and Obama. If that’s what we’re talking about, I am all in.

Follow Dr. Hurd on Facebook. Search under “Michael Hurd” (Charleston SC). Get up-to-the-minute postings, recommended articles and links, and engage in back-and-forth discussion with Dr. Hurd on topics of interest. Also follow Dr. Hurd on Twitter at @MichaelJHurd1, drmichaelhurd on Instagram, Michael Hurd Ph.D. on LinkedIn, @DrHurd on TruthSocial

Here’s something to consider about a potential Trump victory in November.

Thus far, the Democrats have done nearly all the things they threatened that Trump would do — but never did. They have suppressed free speech through compliant social media companies. They have locked down the country multiple times, because of the flu. They have forced medical experimentation on people, something they opposed when Trump was in office, but gleefully did themselves until stopped by some courts. They have arrested political enemies, including Trump himself, and made every possible effort to get his name removed from the ballot. These are ALL things they SAID Trump would do, but never did; and they did all of them, without any glimmer of shame or defensiveness.

It stands to reason that if Democrats have done ALL these things they insisted Trump would do while in office — and never did — then they will respond to his election in 2024 (if it happens) the same way they claim he responded to Biden. They talk endlessly about “January 6.” They say that Trump started an insurrection to hold onto power. Some insurrection! Trump peacefully and willingly walked away from office, knowing full well there was serious, objective evidence of questionable election practices, especially in Georgia and Arizona. The Biden regime couldn’t find the peaceful protesters at the Capitol guilty of anything other than a few misdemeanors (often with manufactured evidence). They almost treated these misdemeanor offenses as capital crimes of treason, but that’s all they could come up with. They tortured many of their detainees — American citizens — with long, unconstitutional prison stays bereft of due process for the first time in all of American history!

It stands to reason that should Trump actually win in November (against all odds of election cancellation, fraud, and the rest), then the Democrats will do precisely what they claimed Trump did back in January 2021, but never did.

The REAL January 6 for the honest history books may be January 6, 2025. That’s when the Biden puppet regime might unleash its full forces on the good, honest citizens who want not just to make America great again, but free again.

Michael J. Hurd

“Success will bring unity to our country,” a victorious Trump told supporters on Super Tuesday. This presupposes that his opposition wants success. Success means liberty, freedom, the Bill of Rights, honest democratic elections, freedom of speech and association, meritocracy, real capitalism, a rising standard of living for all, rational immigration with borders, and self-responsibility. Trump’s opposition, in both parties, want NONE of these things. So if by success Trump means freedom and prosperity, he’s not going to unite good people with bad people. The bad guys, and the fools who support DemComs and RINOs, don’t want success. They have the media, the schools and much of the corporate world behind them. This is why Trump’s battle continues to be so ferocious.

The only way to drain the swamp is cut off their money supply (massively reducing the size and scope of the government), arrest and try for treason the top offenders: Starting with Biden, his Cabinet and Obama. If that’s what we’re talking about, I am all in.

Follow Dr. Hurd on Facebook. Search under “Michael Hurd” (Charleston SC). Get up-to-the-minute postings, recommended articles and links, and engage in back-and-forth discussion with Dr. Hurd on topics of interest. Also follow Dr. Hurd on Twitter at @MichaelJHurd1, drmichaelhurd on Instagram, Michael Hurd Ph.D. on LinkedIn, @DrHurd on TruthSocial

Ever since my time in the White House it has bothered me.

I know politics is a filthy business. As my late father always used to say: “Politics: disgusting but oh so fascinating.” True enough. But politics in the age of Trump is something else.

I was ready for personal attacks against me as Deputy Assistant to the President. Especially since I was early on given the mandate to publicly justify and explain the President’s national-security travel ban. My dismantling of the legacy media narrative that our policy was somehow “racist,” as opposed to predicated on an Obama-era threat assessment concerning which nations were incapable of guaranteeing to us that terrorists weren’t traveling to the US from their territories, was clearly the “trigger” for a smear campaign that shocked even me.

Coming after a high-ranking White House official was, of course, expected. I was clearly a proxy for the man the establishment really hated. Just look at what they did to my Boss and his family and are still doing today. But when “journalists” started to calumny my wife and my high school aged son – calling him a “traitor” in one headline smear piece – even I was shocked. Who are these people, and why do they think a man’s family can be targeted over a difference in politics??

I know I have a certain reputation in the public sphere as a rather serious person. The British press labelled me President Trump’s pit-bull, and when the hosts of The Five were asked what tattoo they would get if they ever did, my former FOX News colleague Jesse Watters picked a portrait of me, since I am “the scariest man on television.” That’s a maybe. However, I am not made of stone, and I still cannot fully internalize the levels of hatred demonstrated by the Democrat Party, the media, and the Washington Establishment. But I have a theory.

I have said for some years now that the dividing line in America is no longer a party political one. In fact, the labels of Republicans and Democrat, or even the broader taxonomy of Conservative versus Liberal, are utterly defunct. There is only one meaningful dividing line that separates one American from another, and it is predicated on love and hate.

Today our nation is split along the answer to one question: “Do you love America, or hate America?” Do you believe this is the greatest and freest nation ever created by man, a “shining city on a hill,” founded on unalienable rights derived from our being made “in the image of our Creator?” Or do you believe, as does the radicalized Democrat Party, that we are an intrinsically bigoted country riven through with neocolonial attitudes and run as a patriarchy where women and minorities are “oppressed?”

For the truth is, we are living in the most perverse of times, with an “elite” that truly hates the nation and the people over which they have power. Why else would our government open our borders, be fine with the more than 100,000 lives annually taken by fentanyl and other drugs trafficked across the border? Or the murder of innocent 22-year old nursing students by illegals released by Democrat prosecutors? How else can you justify giving billions to our sworn enemies and deliberately infecting our armed forces with the sexually perverse and abnormal? In fact: what else would an administration do differently over the last three years if its avowed goal were to destroy America? Think about it.

And then it hit me, thanks in large part to the fascinating interview I just did with the courageous California pastor Jack Hibbs. Why do they so hate President Trump, and why will they use any accusation and any tools against him, his family, and anyone who works for him? The elite hate President Trump so very much because he loves America. Is there anyone alive today who has sacrificed as much as this one man? Simply because he wants America to be “Great Again,” he is facing 700+ years in prison, has been fined half a billion dollars, and banned from doing business in the city he has brought billions of dollars to.

The good news? Hatred only gets you so far. Sooner or later the bile eats you up inside.

We will – eventually – win because our fuel is love. Love of nation, love of family, love of country, but in order to start clawing back our Republic, we need President Trump back in the White House.

Because he actually loves America.

Dr. Sébastian Gorka

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.