The “United States.” We still call ourselves that.

If liberty, freedom and individual rights no longer unite the states, then what is left to unite us?

We were never supposed to be ONLY Christian, ONLY white, ONLY black, ONLY woke, or ONLY anything. The one thing we were supposed to all be? Individuals.

We were supposed to be united in our love of freedom and liberty. That was supposed to unite every state in the union, and every individual in the country.

If you — the leftists and totalitarians of America — don’t cherish the absolutism of individual rights embodied by our Constitution, then I have no desire to be united with you. We should simply break up.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Life can only be understood backwards. But it must be lived forwards.”

— Kierkegaard

Very true. The psychiatric industry has promoted the idea for years that until or unless you “deal with your past”, you cannot move forward. But they never take the time to explain or identify what “dealing with” the past means. Sure, it means going to a therapist on a weekly basis for an undetermined amount of time. While this may be a good deal for the therapist, it’s never explained what the patient or client is to get out of it. It’s simply an article of unarticulated faith.

The past only matters in terms of its impact on who you are in the present. The solution to your problems isn’t to say, “Well, a lot of things happened to me in my past. I have to talk about them indefinitely.” The solution is closer to something like this: “A lot of things happened to me in the past. Some of those things were terrible. So how did I survive them? What strengths do I have, to get as far as I have despite this past? And what faulty thinking or behavior in the present still exists because of the past? Why is the thinking or behavior faulty, and what steps can I start taking TODAY — even small steps — to act or think in a different way?”

You don’t have to talk about the past for the sake of talking about the past. Again, this may be good for the psychiatric industry professional who’s getting paid. What you need is more of a life coach, than a therapist. The life coach can help you identify what your strengths are and how you can capitalize on those strengths in the present, and in the future.

In that respect, Kierkegaard was right.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

More details on solution-focused life coaching here.

Some are calling Biden’s brazen, illegal handling of top secret documents the biggest political scandal in American history.

Not so.

The biggest political scandal in American history is what happened in 2020 thru 2022 — the rigging of two national elections with subjective voting; a totalitarian lockdown over the flu unprecedented in human history; and the toppling of an American president for telling the truth. Anything Biden did, however monstrous, pales in comparison with the willfull, gleeful and brazenly open violation of our Bill of Rights coming out of the twisted regime for which he is merely a demented, quasicomical puppet.

Show me a scandal greater than what we have endured in America over the last 3 years. You won’t find one.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

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“Inside Every Progressive Is A Totalitarian Screaming To Get Out”—David Horowitz

A Nation of Victims is Doomed to Fail

The obsession with victimhood is destroying our future.

January 17, 2023 by Daniel Greenfield 26 Comments

America has become a nation of ‘victims’ and ‘survivors’. Everyone is getting over a ‘trauma’ or ‘processing’. They demand special privileges because of the suffering of their ancestors. They trot out studies which prove that they are somehow disadvantaged. They gorge on self-help books and deploy therapy terminology to accuse everyone else of mistreating them.

Our society has turned into a cross between a Marxist academic conference and therapy session where Marxist terminology like “systemic racism” and therapy talk like “gaslighting narcissist” form key parts of the grammar of perpetual victimhood.

Politics has been reduced to victimhood advocacy and we are worse off for it.

Victims are not good people. Postmodern influencer culture conflates ‘victim’ and ‘survivor’, but they are two very different things. Survivors are people who pick themselves up and go on. Victims give up and spend the rest of their lives doing nothing except blaming everyone else.

After the slaves were freed, some made long journeys to major cities, others built families and worked hard to provide for them. They perserved despite lynchings and racism. Over 150 years later, some of their descendants claim that nothing can be expected from them because they’re suffering from Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome even though the only place they’ve seen slavery is on television. That’s the difference between survivors and victims.

After the Holocaust, Jewish people who had seen their entire families killed in front of them remarried, had children and started their lives again. Often they didn’t even talk about what they had experienced until decades had passed. Others helped build a nation out of the desert sands. Now some of their great-grandchildren claim they’re so fragile they need safe spaces.

The same is true of all Americans. We are all the descendants of survivors. Our grandparents and great-grandparents fought in wars, persisted through economic turmoil and didn’t give up. Whatever happened to them, they didn’t see themselves as the victims. They were strong, not because they postured on social media, but because they got up whenever they were knocked down. They had their grievances and resentments, but they didn’t build their lives around them.

Survivors are motivated by love and duty. They understand that there is more to life than their own pain. They redeem their suffering by making their lives matter. That is the essence of the human ideal. It’s how nations and families are built. And it’s how our nation is coming apart.

Victims are driven by hate. Their pain is performance. It’s what makes them special and the only purpose left to them. The more they feel, the angrier they get. And they want to be angry. There are victims who have actually suffered, but the majority in our culture are ‘identity victims’ or ‘therapy victims’ whose victimhood is based on the terminology of academic Marxism or shrink sessions: who have suffered nothing except a lack of emotional fulfillment.

These creatures, who once handed out radical fliers at campus cafes and poisoned family reunions, went ‘viral’ through social media and generated legions of sympathetic followers. Their perpetual outrage at being victims drives our culture and our politics. Incapable of talking about anything other than themselves, they have ‘built their brand’ into the model for our society.

America went from a nation of courage, allegiance and responsibility where people made commitments to something larger than themselves, used their pain to build better things, to a society of wallowers competing over who has the biggest pain and the least responsibility.

The difference between survivors and victims is that survivors have a larger purpose, while victims have made victimhood into their purpose. And they want it to be our purpose.

Politics has become a dysfunctional therapy session, an intersectional debate over whose pain is superior, and who is just faking it, as if nations are defined by individual pain rather than cultures of aspiration. New victimhood causes proliferate every day while the old ones fight it out. Whose pain is superior, feminists or transgender men? Trauma is our national resource now and there’s only so much of it to go around. Those who have the most are at the top.

Victimhood grants a moral superiority that liberates the victim from moral responsibility.

If you’re an official victim, you can rampage around cities, looting, beating and burning, with few legal and certainly no moral consequences. Beyond economics, replacing ‘equality’ with ‘equity’ takes us from an equality of moral obligations to an equity of moral outcomes. And race riots, canceling people, and rigging college admissions are just ways of achieving ‘moral equity’.

Behavior that is objectively wrong, violence, hate, harassment and terrorism, becomes right if the perpetrators are victims who claim to be striving for a society of moral equity. But the truth about victims is that they never want to stop being what they are. If they did, they would become survivors. Victimhood is convenient and comforting. Victims never have to learn to do better. They spend all of their time telling others to do better so that xer’s feelings aren’t hurt again.

Victimhood views failure as a conspiracy, rather than a choice, and nations and societies that embrace victimhood quickly turn into failed states. America used to get things done. Now we no longer win wars or can even stock supermarkets. There are a thousand points of failure and they begin with a culture that is hostile to achievement and supportive of victimhood.

Our educational system promotes those who refuse to learn, government subsidizes professional victimhood and corporations overlook those who work in favor of those who don’t, but are more likely to sue or throw a public tantrum. Trillions are spent with no return and nothing gets done because the real product is the virtue signaling of victimhood.

Victimhood is an excuse for failure and so we’ve become an unserious society. Victims are incapable of thinking about anything except themselves and our culture has become stuck in the same narcissistic loop of personalities. Everyone wants to be a celebrity, to feel special, and to play the victim when the social media collective fails to give them the due that they deserve.

The loudest voices are those who complain rather than inspire, who give up rather than get ahead, who explain that the game is rigged so everyone should join them in staying home.

Victims make a fetish of their pain. They are ‘in touch with their emotions’ because they inhabit them all the time. They are so busy selfishly feeling their feelings that they can’t be bothered to care about the impact on anyone else. Just as eskimos have many words for ‘snow’, victims have many ways to describe their pain. Their unhappiness is ‘trauma’, talking to people is ‘unpaid emotional labor’ and they spend all their time ‘processing’ or feeling their feelings.. Watching Netflix is ‘self-care’ to recover from all the ‘trauma’ of all their ‘unpaid emotional labor’.

Even their most ordinary activities are part of the fantastic drama that is their existence. Every breath they take is a labored ‘resistance’ to a vast systemic conspiracy out to destroy them.

And while such woke performative antics are more common among social media millennials than in everyday life, the underlying conviction that our emotions matter more than our responsibilities, that anger exempts us from morality, and truth takes a backseat to ‘my truth’ has spread throughout our culture with disastrous results on our functioning and our future.

A society is inspired by its leading figures and its culture is shaped by its stories. Victimhood has become our story. It pervades our classrooms, our fiction, our new myths and our discourse. It has left us in a state of arrested development because we have become incapable of moving forward. Instead of building new things, we rehash past history, purge ‘problematic’ figures and assign blame for the failures of the present to the dead history of the past.

Victimhood is obsessed with the past. Unlike survivors, victims never want to move forward. They want to remain tethered to the moments that defined them. America was always a nation that looked forward, that imagined the impossible and then realized it. Now, like many backward societies, it has become stuck in the past, rewriting its history to make its founding more evil, churning out excuses for today’s failures in the endless root causes for infinite victimhood.

No wonder most Americans, for the first time in history, no longer believe in a better future.

America was a nation of survivors. It can only endure as a nation that looks to the future. A nation of victims is doomed to fail. It fails because that is the only way its victims can succeed.

Imagine if we had tried to defeat our enemies in WW II by holding elections run by Nazis, with results reported by a media who only published Nazi propaganda.

Imagine winning the Cold War if pro-Soviet Communists controlled nearly every American school board, every American television or movie production house, nearly every American media outlet and every branch of our vast, massively expanding federal government.

Today’s government and culture consists of people just as bad. They have no limits, other than seeing how much they can get away with. So far, and especially since 2020, they have gotten away with absolutely everything. On every single issue from lockdowns, to forced participation in government medical vaccine research, to FBI raids and arrests for political reasons alone, to legalized looting in city streets, to arbitrary executive edicts on everything under the sun, to mail-in ballots favoring one party only, to outlawing fossil fuels in 8 years, to outlawing gas stoves immediately, we are up against tyrants who oppose the side of liberty in EACH AND EVERY instance, and who are winning EACH AND EVERY battle in their relentless war against freedom.

So few of us act like we care.

They are not going to stop and this will not get better on its own. Think about what you’re giving up. Freedom is the moral and intellectual air we breathe. When all freedom is finally gone, we will all perish spiritually, if not physically. If you love life, yourself and your children, you should love your freedom too.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason