The Landslide Victory We’ll be Glad to Have

Posted on October 28, 2020 by theartfuldilettante

An election prediction: Something has broken over the nation in the past couple weeks. And that’s a good thing.

Official White House Photo/Andrea Hanks

President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump greet trick-or-treaters during the 2020 White House Halloween event Sunday, Oct. 25, 2020, at the South Portico of the White House.

Seems only yesterday, there were widespread fears we were headed for election night and post-election chaos. That it’d be the 2000 post-election pandemonium times 50. That tension was at such a fever pitch, we could pretty much guarantee violence in the streets.

In a bitterly contested, confused election, the social media giants would suppress any information favoring Trump as “disinformation,” and boost any news that demonstrated a Biden win. America wouldn’t know who was elected for weeks, maybe months. Maybe the House of Representatives was going to have to settle the issue. Certainly, battles from many states would land on the Supreme Court’s doorstep.

It would take the military to get Trump out of the White House. “Civil war” was on many lips.

Either that, or Joe Biden was going to coast to victory. As promised, his Antifa-BLM army would behave (for a few months). Those who opposed the socialist/totalitarian plans laid out by the radicals and former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich would just have to suck it up, and prepare for the re-education camps and religious persecution.

Right now, Nate Silver’s 538 puts Biden’s chances at about 86%. Most polls still show Biden winning. GOP pollster Frank Luntz says if Trump wins, the polling industry is finished.

What do I know? I know that no matter what happens, God is in control. What do I sense? Things are going to be much better than we imagined. And by “we,” I mean all loyal Americans, Democrat or Republican.

With one week to go until Election Day, I now believe Donald Trump will be re-elected with such a resounding victory, there will be no serious disputing. Only the radicals and nutjobs will take to the street, and even those who have disdain for Trump will accept defeat.

And our attention will turn to having a warm holiday with those we love.

The Little Signs

Oh, I could point to little signs. Like Trump building a lead in Florida. Or even The New York Times reporting that Trump is polling about 10 points better in Philadelphia than he did in 2016, which would all but guarantee him a win in Pennsylvania. Or his stunning rise among Blacks and Latinos.

I could point to more Trump supporters showing up at Biden rallies than Biden supporters, or wild Trump car rallies in places where having a GOP sticker on your car used to guarantee your car getting keyed. I could point to the enthusiasm gap, which is massive.

Or Kamala Harris blowing her big audition, voters understanding she is the real candidate in this election, and going, “No, thank you!” Or the common sense observation that few people will stand in line for hours just to vote against Trump.

America is a Chuck Berry riff, not Russian literature.

I could point to the fact that Donald Trump is actually out there working to earn votes while Biden is, well, barely trying.

Or that Biden thinks he’s running for Senate and running against George Bush … or George Lopez … or George Jetson. George someone.

I could point to that, but no, I am talking about a sense. A feeling in my bones that a spirit of division and rancor is being broken. That something’s changed in recent weeks. Almost overnight.

I started feeling it when Trump beat COVID, and was bounding out with renewed energy and hope, expressing thanks to “The Boss” … aka God … for help. He took to dancing at the end of his rallies. The spirit of death and defeat and worry from COVID seems to have weakened.

The spirit of rebellion, while still existing in the form of the media, social media giants, and Democratic leaders, seems to have dissipated. I mean, even after the death of RGB, and the nomination and confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, doesn’t it seem the anger merchants are just going through the motions?

America is a Sunny Country

I sense America is tired of fighting. Tired of lockdowns. Tired of being enslaved to a virus. Really tired of manipulation. Tired of hypocrisy. Tired of re-fighting 2016 every day.

And tired of not being able to sing at church. We want to sing or watch a choir sing … or watch our kids get married with a large circle of friends and family on hand.

The call to hope is being heard. The positivity of things like Trump boat and car parades, is more infectious than COVID. Who doesn’t want to step out of the Biden circles and party?Please Support The Stream: Equipping Christians to Think Clearly About the Political, Economic and Moral Issues of Our Day.

It’s like, “The heck with your ‘Dark Winter,’ talk. Yeah, there may still be pain in the night, but joy comes in the morning.”

America is a sunrise nation. Not a sunset nation. We’re sunny country, not a solemn country. We know the “sun will come out tomorrow.” We “keep on the sunny side of life.” Things seem stormy? No problem. We’ve got “sunshine on a cloudy day.”

America is a Chuck Berry riff, not Russian literature.

Hope Built Into Our DNA

The American breed has hope built into our DNA. Nobody comes here without heart and hope and chutzbah to take on the unknown. Take on adversity. Those huddled masses yearning to breathe free may have been tired, they may have been poor. But they were rich with courage and optimism, and they’ve passed it down to us.

That is why I think in one week, America will choose to step up rather than hunker down. Choose to join the parade, rather sit and sulk. Choose dancing to “YMCA” to bowing before COVID-19.

I believe Donald Trump will win with a broad coalition, including Blacks and Latinos in record numbers for a Republican. He will win the popular vote by millions. In the electoral college, he will win even where he’s not expected to.

And here’s the strangest part of my prediction. To their shock, some Democrats will feel less bad about it than they expected. They know Biden is not up for the job. That the corruption stories are likely true, and Kamala is a train wreck. They couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Trump. But there’s relief, after all the chaos of 2020, not to have to deal with the certain uncertainty of a Biden presidency.

And, it is no small thing that with a 2020 win, the 2016 election will finally be over.

Friends, I have a hope something new will rise.

A Beautiful Christmas

I believe we are in for a surprise after the election. In fact, we may see something beautiful. A joyful, deeper Christmas season.

After 2020, the glitz and tinsel of Christmas will pale next to the profound feeling for home and hearth, faith and family. Do you care what you get Mom, or are you just grateful you get to be with her?

Starting with two days before the election, we will discover the United States had a phenomenal, historic 30% or more growth during the third quarter, marking an amazing rebound from the COVID shutdown. The return to prosperity, there for the taking. We took the hit, Jack … or should I say “Xi,” … and we’ve bounced back.

Within weeks of the election we will have a bipartisan COVID relief package. Its hold-up was purely political. Perhaps Pelosi will even be in the room with Trump when he signs it,not that I expect them to smooch under any White House mistletoe.

We will suddenly see the COVID scare stories diminish dramatically. The 24/7 hysteria was purely political. More schools and blue state businesses will open.

We will see more of the gracious side of President Trump. More of that guy in our featured image. He already seems to be smiling more.

If the Saudis and Israelis Can Come to Terms…

We will see more peace on earth! An official with Israel’s Mossad said the other day Saudi Arabia and Israel will make peace shortly after the election. A Saudi-Israeli peace agreement will be monumental achievement, a glorious day for the nations of the earth.

And an opportunity to help heal the divided nation.

Can you imagine a signing ceremony in Washington before Christmas? I encourage President Trump to invite former President Jimmy Carter as his special guest to take part, honoring him for his role in the historic Egypt-Israel Camp David Accords. Share the spotlight with him. Re-enact the historic photo of Carter with Anwar Sadat and Menachim Begin, hands clasped. I could see Trump, as a reconciliatory gesture, also inviting former President Bill Clinton, who brokered the Israel-Jordan peace agreement.

What’s more, I see more people over the holidays reaching out to friends they’d defriended on Facebook, or family members reuniting who’d broken relations over politics.

If the Saudis and Israelis can do it …

First the Demo, Then the Rebuild

It may sound strange to think of Donald Trump as someone who could bring people together, but consider this: His previous job involved him taking over rundown, beaten up properties. Tearing them down to their foundations and frame, then building up something new and beautiful and exquisite in its place.

Tearing buildings to their foundations and basics is messy, dirty, noisy business. That was Trump’s first term.

Building up something beautiful and harmonious, and full and new and bright? That’s Trump’s second term.

Al Perrotta is the Managing Editor of The Stream and co-author, with @JZmirak, of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration. You can follow him at @StreamingAl. And if you aren’t already, please follow The Stream at @Streamdotorg.

Don’t Believe the Polls, Trump Will Win, and Win Big

Posted on October 28, 2020 by theartfuldilettante

We predict that President Trump is going to win the 2020 presidential election — and win big.

While the majority of the polls suggest that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is leading, or at best that it’s close, those polls suffer from at least three problems.

First, the tone of the questions. There is significant evidence from behavioral psychology that suggests that the way a question is framed predetermines the range of potential answers. In fact, Gallup has found that respondents can answer very differently to questions with the same topic even in the same survey based on the language that’s used. And the use of metaphors can even dwarf the importance of preexisting differences between Republicans and Democrats.

One of the reasons respondents do that is because of a tendency to give socially desirable answers, which was the case especially during the 2016 election. Most people don’t like confrontation, so the easiest, albeit not necessarily the best, solution is to avoid it. Right now, saying that you’re voting for Trump/Pence is often not the socially desirable answer. In fact, a recent poll by the Cato Institute suggests that nearly two-thirds of Americans say that the political climate is sufficiently harsh that they don’t want to give their genuine opinion about politics.

Second, the sample of respondents. Who responds depends on many factors, including the medium (e.g., landline versus cellphone), the location, the sample size and demographic factors. Moreover, the pool of respondents is not necessarily the same as the pool of likely voters. Even though election polls all contain a margin of error, that margin of error is unreliable if the underlying sample does not reflect the population. Researchers have also identified self-screening as the major contributing factor to the polling failures during the 2016 election cycle.

For example, distrust of pollsters also leads to lower response rates for Trump supporters. Rasmussen finds that 17 percent of likely U.S. voters who “strongly approve” of the job Trump is doing say they are less likely to let others know how they intend to vote in the upcoming election. By comparison, only 8 percent of those who “strongly disapprove” of the president’s performance say the same.

While proper sampling methodology matters more than the size, having a representative sample with enough people still helps considerably. Robert Cahaly of the Trafalgar Group notes how their work to create minimum samples sizes of 1,000 voters, added to their work to doggedly pursue the “quiet Trump voter,” led to Trafalgar being one of the most successful battleground polling firms in the country in 2016. Cahaly explains that “we don’t do a state with less than a thousand. You see these polls, 400, 500, 600 people for a state. I don’t buy that. Your margin of error is far too high.”

Third, the content of the current news cycle. What’s going on in a particular moment in time can influence voter attitudes, particularly in swing states. For example, the recent revelation of Hunter Biden’s hidden emails on his laptop, coupled with the link to his father, has come at an opportune time for the president. Moreover, if the economic recovery continues, the good news may continue putting wind in Trump’s sails.

Admittedly, no poll is perfect. That’s why RealClearPolitics takes a step forward by “averaging out” these errors across polls. But “averaging out” only works when errors are made in both directions. Here, many polls make errors primarily in one direction, so the average will still reflect some of the biases that exist.

Gallup conducted a recent survey finding that 56 percent of respondents report that they are better off than they were four years ago, which is striking given that we are in the midst of a pandemic with a recovering labor market and deepening political polarization.null

We delved a little deeper into the data from Gallup, coupled with voter registration data, for eight swing states. We find that states with a higher proportion of people who report that they are thriving have a lower polling average for Biden and a higher one for Trump. What’s even more telling is that there’s a big gap between the percentage of people who say they’re thriving and the percentage who say they’re voting for Biden. For example, that gap is 5.3 percentage points in Pennsylvania.

Moreover, if we look at voter registration in Pennsylvania, we see a similar pattern. There were 803,427 more registered Democrats than Republicans as of May, but that gap has narrowed to 700,853 as of October. In fact, Republicans have netted seven times as many registered Republican voters than Democrats since 2016. Similar trends are taking place in North Carolina and Florida.

We don’t pretend to have all the answers, but we do have some of the right questions. How are people actually feeling? Surveys are great when respondents know what they’re answering and when the sample is representative, but surveys can be misleading otherwise.

Jonathan Jakubowski is author of the newly-released book, “Bellwether Blues: A Conservative Awakening of the Millennial Soul.” He is also director of a startup business focused on sustainable packaging and is the executive chairman of the Wood County (Ohio) Republican Party. Follow him on Twitter at @jonjakubowski. Christos A. Makridis is a research professor with Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business, a senior adviser at Gallup and a nonresident fellow at Baylor University. Follow him at @camakridis.

The Great Ideological Lie of Diversity

Posted on October 28, 2020 by theartfuldilettante

If you are a Canadian faculty member, there is a reasonable chance that you recently received an email or letter from Statistics Canada. The Survey of Postsecondary Faculty and Researchers was designed to assess what has come to be known as “diversity” among the groups targeted, in consequence of a commitment made by the three Canadian research granting councils, under guidance from the federal Liberal government, to increase “diversity” among those receiving funding. It has long been the case that research funding was dependent, as much as possible, on two factors, both intensely meritocratic: the research record of the applicant and the quality of the proposed research. That appears about to change.

The fact of this occurrence motivated me to try my hand at writing a critique of the concept of diversity, which is a very slippery term. What it truly means is “let’s aim for fewer white men in positions of authority,” which would be a fine idea if race and sex were reasonable criteria by which to judge applicants, and if it wasn’t motivated by a broad set of “progressive” beliefs, which include the idea that we live in an oppressive patriarchy and that men who work now should be required to step back so that a litany of hypothetical, indefinable and prejudicial historical wrongs might be righted (this even though those who do the righting weren’t those who committed the prejudicial crimes, so to speak, and those who benefit not those who were the victims). There was even a recent article in Nature, a magazine that was once, with Science, one of the two unquestionably most influential scientific journals, suggesting that male scientist should voluntarily delay their career advancement so that their underprivileged colleagues (underprivileged despite their status as university professors) could catch up and justice properly served.

“Diversity” is a word that, on the face of it, masquerades as something positive—because it is positive, in some of its manifestations. It’s obviously not helpful to set up an organization where everyone thinks alike, or solely in the approved manner. It is necessary, for example, for healthy organizations to ally the conservative tendency to preserve with the more liberal tendency to transform. But that begs the question: where is diversity to be found? Among the ideologues who were pushing the “progressive” doctrine that it’s part of, most frequently including “inclusivity, equity and intersectionality,” it is to be found in a set of immutable characteristics that typify different groups, including race, sex, gender (because that is distinguished by those same ideologues from sex) and sexual proclivity, above all.

There are real problems with this agenda, however. The first is that it’s dangerous, in exactly the manner it is hypothetically designed to fight. The argument made by those who are truly prejudiced has always been that the differences between groups are so large that discrimination, isolation, segregation and even open conflict–including war and genocide–are necessary, for the safety of whatever group they are part of and are hypothetically protecting. Why is it any less risky for the argument to be made in the reverse manner? The claim that group-based differences are so important that they must take substantive priority during hiring and promotion merely risks validating the opposite claim.

There’s a second problem, too—and it’s particularly interesting, because it has been made by the same ideologically-oriented groups on the left that are pushing the diversity agenda: considering race, say and gender when making diversity decisions is not sufficient. Diversity that focuses on females is insufficient, because black, Asian or Hispanic women, for example, face more egregious prejudice than white women. This brings us to the last word of the progressive set—“intersectionality.” For the ideologues of intersectionality, true diversity cannot be limited to the features we have already considered—race and the like—because many people are alienated or, in the jargon, “marginalized,” from the broader culture by more than one oppressed minority feature. In consequence, the “intersection” between the groups must be considered for any real justice to make its appearance as a consequence of policy.

This is an extremely problematic theory, practically speaking (and this is the second problem, in addition to the danger just outlined), in that there appear to be no limits, practically or philosophically, to the number of group memberships that have to be taken into account for true diversity to establish itself (and I mean this non-ironically). It doesn’t take much thought—just a little arithmetic—to determine the nature of the problem: There are just too many potential intersectional categories. Let’s break it down.

There’s race and sex, for starters—and plenty of attention is paid to both—and, following that, gender, which seems to come in something approximating second place in terms of import. But how many races, sexes and genders is it required to consider? Assume, for the sake of argument (and this is what the modern science suggests) that there are five major human subpopulations: African, European/Middle Eastern, East Asian, inhabitants of Oceania, and denizens of the New World. Let’s assume two sexes and three genders—although many of those concerned with diversity, etc., would insist that there are a much larger number of the latter. So that’s 5X2X3 =30.

Then we might as well add to that disabilities, which are extraordinarily common (particularly when you consider that many people who are not actively ill in some major manner, physical or mental, are faced with the exceptional stress that comes with caring for a family member who is).I don’t know how to calculate the appropriate number here, although but according to the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics, 20% of undergraduates[1] reported a disability in 2015-2016. These include “those who reported that they had one or more of the following conditions: blindness or visual impairment that cannot be corrected by wearing glasses; hearing impairment (e.g., deaf or hard of hearing); orthopedic or mobility impairment; speech or language impairment; learning, mental, emotional, or psychiatric condition (e.g., serious learning disability, depression, ADD, or ADHD); or other health impairment or problem.”[2] So, if we assume that two divisions (presence/ absence) are necessary to cover each disability (counting each listed in the last phrase separately), we’re now require nine additional multiples of 2 (two for blindness, two for hearing impairment, etc.) for our equation:

So that’s 30 X 2 X 2 X 2 X 2 X 2 X 2 X 2 X 2=15360.

I can’t see why class/economic origin shouldn’t be taken into account as well. According to the U.S. Census Bureau estimates, 12% of Americans live below the poverty line. So, we need at least an additional two categories to account for economic disparity, and that’s a very coarse grained measure. And that brings us to 30720 categories of “diverse” individuals (15360X2). If we are truly serious about diversity, and are willing to attribute it to group identity, and are going to apply its dictates to hiring, placement and promotion for every position, then we have a minimum of ~thirty thousand different categories to consider—and there are many other categories of exclusion that are arguably of equal import (such that it is difficult to determine why it was that race, sex and gender occupy so much attention).

There’s height, strength and attractiveness, which all arguably provide an unequal starting place in the race for success. There’s intelligence, native language and education. There’s age, marital status and—of critical importance—presence or absence of dependent children. That’s nine more categories. Assuming we once again use two divisions for each additional category (short/tall, strong/weak, etc.), the total of “diverse” individuals now exceeds fifteen million.

30720 X 2 X 2 X 2 X 2 X 2 X 2 X 2 X 2=15728640

We’d only need to add one more binary category (obese/non-obese (?)) to exceed the entire 18 million person workforce of Canada. And why not? Who’s to say, given that elimination of discrimination is hypothetically the goal, that one more important than another? I say this in all seriousness: Isn’t that just another form of discrimination?

And there are great problems even with the categories that seem, on the surface, relatively simple—let’s say, race. The geneticists, as I mention, consider five (and even those don’t overlap perfectly with the categories that are used politically: Hispanic, for example—a favorite unique to the US—is more of a linguistic category, although those described that are often of mixed European and New World origin). But why is it reasonable to stop at five? Let’s take the case of “black,” for example. First, we could note that blacks who immigrate to the US do better, in general, than blacks who are born American. This is true for education[3] (black immigrants are more likely than Americans, in general, to have a college degree) as well as income ($43,800, somewhat lower than immigrants to the US in general ($48,000, a figure inflated by the outsized economic attainments of Asians: $70,600) but substantially higher than U.S. born blacks ($33,500). (Americans overall average $52,000).

Do we therefore differentiate blacks on the basis of their place of birth, and add another category to the diversity pool? And we could also make a very strong scientific case for even further differentiation. Are we truly to be satisfied with the claim that all blacks are the same, even independently of birthplace? For example, there is much more genetic diversity among Africans—the putative home of humanity—than among all other non-African populations.[4] [5]This is in large part because the apparently small number of migrations out of Africa to the rest of the world produced a variability bottleneck: a relatively small number of people moved, and so a relatively small amount of genetic diversity existed. By what logic, therefore, is it reasonably to cluster all these people together, call them “black,” and assume that organizational diversity justice has been served, say, by their increased rates of hiring, promotion and placement?

And let’s return to the beginning. As far as I am concerned, unless you accept it as a dogmatic given (and this would be if you were an advocate of the “equity” doctrine, which means that all outcomes for all groups in all professions must be identical, and which therefor runs into the same arithmetical problem that diversity encounters, as described previously) university hiring and granting practices are remarkably meritocratic. In the university departments I have worked within (McGill, Harvard and the University of Toronto) it was obvious to everyone that within the limits of human error, which are of course manifold, people were promoted when they deserved it and obtained research grant money for the same reasons. In both cases, the more productive people had a pronounced edge, which is exactly how it should be if scientific research is important enough to garner investment, be it from private or public funding sources. The three granting agencies are as meritocratic as our somewhat (and inevitably) flawed measures of research productivity can make them, and the universities themselves bend over backwards and tie themselves in knots (both clichés are necessary) to right past wrongs—to the point where, according to the well-respected social scientists Wendy Williams and Stephen Ceci in their demonstrated a 2:1 hiring advantage for female candidates for open science, technology, engineering and mathematical positions.

In consequence, I would like to suggest that the proper way to determine who gets what slice of which pie in a given organization is the manner in which employers are legally bound to hire: first, they must conduct an analysis of the job to determine and list its requirements; then, with certain exceptions they are required to hire, place or promote the person who is most qualified to undertake that job, regardless of attributes that are not relevant to the task. These include, in my opinion, the differences in race, sex, gender, and their combinations (as well as the other intrinsic differences we discussed) that are pushed so assiduously, self-righteously and thoughtlessly by the progressives who think they can replace comparatively well-functioning meritocracies, aimed at the solution of serious problems by the most qualified people with candidates chosen on the basis of attributes that would clearly be viewed as prejudicial if they were used as grounds for rejection, failure to promote, and firing.

A final observation. The fact of the endless multiplication of categories of victimization, let’s say—or at least difference—was actually solved long ago by the Western emphasis on the individual. We essentially assumed that each person was characterized by so many differences than every other person (the ultimate in “intersectionality”) that it was better to concentrate solely on meritocratic selection, where the only difference that was to be considered was the suitability of the person for the specific and well-designed tasks that constituted a given job. That works—not perfectly, but less imperfectly than anything else that has been contemplated or worse, implemented. We toy with it at our peril.

Jordan B. Peterson

Biden is Running a Protection Racket

Posted on October 28, 2020 by theartfuldilettante

October 28, 2020

By Sidney Powell

Joe Biden’s big pitch is his promise to restore calm. It’s a con. It’s Antifa and Black Lives Matter — both on his side — that are stirring everything up. He’s trying to run a protection racket: vote Democrat, or the chaos continues.

Biden talks of calm, but it is not Trump-supporters storming restaurants and other public places across the country to demand obeisance to their agenda. Instead, from Washington to Kentucky to Florida, it is the “Black Lives Matter” movement — which Biden has made a centerpiece of his campaign — that has smashed up restaurants, threatened their owners, and demanded that diners raise the black power fist. As one headline put it, “aggressive mob of white BLM protesters threaten and film white diners at DC restaurants and DEMAND they raise their fist and show solidarity with them…or else.”

Biden speaks of tolerance, but it isn’t MAGA people marching into our schools, newsrooms, and even corporate boardrooms to demand absolute allegiance; it’s Biden-supporting leftists. As President Trump warned in his Independence Day address at Mt. Rushmore, if you do not “perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished.”

Biden professes not to treat the other party as the enemy, but he demonizes his opponents whenever he opens his mouth. Just this week, he called Trump-supporters “chumps.” And his supporters call themselves “the resistance” — a term ordinarily used to describe armed insurgency against an occupying military power.

Biden speaks of mutual respect, but he demonstrates contempt, animosity, and rage at Trump-supporters. Let’s face it: no one in America is afraid of going out in public while wearing a Biden hat.

Biden accuses the president of sowing chaos, but small businesses across the country haven’t boarded up their windows in advance of MAGA rallies.

Biden decries deepening divisions but defends government-wide indoctrination sessions that preach tribalism and racism rather than unity and colorblindness. In the first debate, with the assistance of moderator Chris Wallace, Biden dismissed the spread of “Critical Race Theory” as “racial sensitivity training.”

Critical Race Theory is an explicitly Marxist academic concept that casts all white people as oppressors. It maintains that white Americans must stop valuing “white” things like “individualism” and “objectivity” and give up their “comfort,” “relationships with some other white people,” and even their “physical safety” to atone for their “complicity in the system of white supremacy.”

A recent Wall Street Journal column called it “a deeply ideological agenda that includes reducing people to a racial essence, segregating them, and judging them by their group identity rather than individual character, behavior and merit.” Joe Biden just calls that “sensitivity.”

There’s nothing new about the bad faith behind the Democratic appeal to “civility.” What it really means is: no dissent from its views. Just submit.

It started even before President Trump’s inauguration. When Vice President–Elect Mike Pence and his wife went to see Hamilton on Broadway two weeks after his election victory, the cast berated him from the stage, haranguing the New York City audience to boo him. A Democrat restaurateur in Virginia kicked White House press secretary Sarah Sanders out. Crowds yelled “shame” at Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen as she tried to eat dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Washington.

Democrat elected officials cheered the thuggishness on from the very beginning. Rep. Maxine Waters, in a typical display of civility, said that if you see Trump Cabinet members “in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd … [a]nd you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

If Joe Biden is really all about a return to civility, why is his national campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond, a top-ranking Democrat who defended Waters’s shocking call for public harassment, disturbance of the peace, bullying, and shaming?

The truth is, Biden has gone all in on division and hatred from the moment he launched his campaign with complete lies about the president’s remarks on the violence in Charlottesville in 2017 — remarks that included the words “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”

As it turns out, the president’s prediction at that juncture — that if you pulled down Robert E. Lee’s statues, they would come for Washington and Jefferson next — proved entirely correct. The violence that day in Charlottesville would eventually pale in comparison to the violence accompanying leftists’ attempts to take over our cities and pull down our monuments — while Biden and Democrat mayors and public officials joined in marches or watched their cities burn.

The fraudulent Biden campaign has no policies, no proposals, no plans to do anything but divide America to facilitate the return of Biden and the Democrats to power to enrich their friends and themselves at the expense of “we the people.” Unified patriots are their greatest fear.

Don’t be fooled by Biden’s sanctimonious rhetoric. He is not the Fire Department. He is the arsonist lobbing Molotov cocktails.

Sidney Powell, a former federal prosecutor and veteran of 500 federal appeals, is the author of LICENSED TO LIE: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice. She is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.https://939968f25c91f3b935716b04b8de8208.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

Biden speaks of mutual respect, but he demonstrates contempt, animosity, and rage at Trump-supporters. Let’s face it: no one in America is afraid of going out in public while wearing a Biden hat. https://lockerdome.com/lad/9371484590420070?pubid=ld-8832-1542&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanthinker.com&rid=www.americanthinker.com&width=692

Biden accuses the president of sowing chaos, but small businesses across the country haven’t boarded up their windows in advance of MAGA rallies.

There’s nothing new about the bad faith behind the Democratic appeal to “civility.” What it really means is: no dissent from its views. Just submit.

Don’t be fooled by Biden’s sanctimonious rhetoric. He is not the Fire Department. He is the arsonist lobbing Molotov cocktails.

The Dreadful Inescapability of Conscience

Posted on October 28, 2020 by theartfuldilettante

We hold ourselves personally responsible for the decisions that we have made, or failed to have made, and the actions we have undertaken, or failed to have undertaken, as if we had a choice in the matter—and no matter how sophisticated the rationalizations we might generate to account for our failures, we find it very difficult for our consciences to be quelled by explanations that remove from us our sense of moral culpability and responsibility.

In the light of day, we might be narcissistically certain of the correctness of our actions or inactions. In the dark of the night, however, when sleep will not come, or suddenly vanishes, we find ourselves confronted by doubt and uncertainty and shame and guilt and fear and apprehension, and we torture ourselves: did we do the right thing? And it is very difficult to account for this self-accusation, as it does not seem so much something we choose (as if we would choose to experience involuntary guilt and shame and doubt) as something that is an inevitable consequence of a poor decision—particularly if we knew when we made the decision that we were taking the easy way out.

Jordan B. Peterson

Three Reasons the Left Keeps Winning

Posted on October 28, 2020 by theartfuldilettante

Even if Trump somehow manages to win in November, the Left (i.e., “progressives” and social democrats) can rest easy knowing that the Left’s influence over the country’s institutions and ideological views have only increased in recent years.

Naturally, the Left has portrayed itself as somehow victimized, declaring itself to be “the resistance” and making numerous predictions of doom in which the opponents of the Left would gain untrammeled control over the population. In this view, the nation is always just a few days away from enduring a mixture of social darwinism and theocracy as imposed by libertarians and conservatives, respectively.

After four years with the Trump administration in power, of course, the nation isn’t even heading in this direction. Government control over healthcare isn’t going away. Most states have only expanded Medicaid. Gun control laws have become more stringent, not less. Government spending has risen to unprecedented levels and almost no political candidate at the federal level would seriously argue in favor of any substantial cuts. Anti-Christian rhetoric has become more fashionable than ever, so that now any Christian who actually practices his or her religion—i.e., Amy Coney Barrett—is portrayed in the media as a religious zealot. Even minor deviations from the demanded orthodoxy—such as actor Chris Pratt’s lack of enthusiasm for Joe Biden—earns hate campaigns from the guardians of acceptable public opinion.

These trends have only accelerated in recent years. The Left has consolidated and increased its control over academia, the media, social media firms, Hollywood, the recording industry, and corporate America. In other words, outside some legislative and legal institutions—and a shrinking handful of religious institutions—the Left’s control of the nation’s educational, cultural, artistic, and media institutions is very safe indeed.

If the electoral success enjoyed by Donald Trump and his supporters has offered any meaningful opposition to this, it lies only in the fact that the Trump party has in some ways slowed these trends. But by no measure has the trend leftward been stopped or reversed.

But why has the Left been so successful in this?

The reasons for this are many, but there are three reasons that stand out: the Left recognizes the importance of education in forming Americans’ ideology. The Left takes a long-term view. The Left accepts partial victories, and then proceeds from there.

One: The Left Understands the Importance of Ideas and Ideologies

The Left long ago mastered the art of intellectual activism. What is intellectual activism? Legal scholar David Yamada offers a helpful definition: “intellectual activism involves conducting and publishing original research and analysis and then applying that work to the tasks of reforming and improving the law, legal systems, and the legal profession.”

Yamada is referring to intellectual activism within the field of law. But, of course, it can be applied to any number of fields. Within economics, intellectual activists conduct research, provide analysis, and then apply that work to reforming political and economic institutions. Historian often do similar work within their own fields.

In recent decades, the Left’s dominance of intellectual activism has grown to the point of dominating most fields. Leftwing (i.e., anti-capitalist) historians, sociologists, anthropologists, legal scholars, and economists routinely publish studies illustrating their views. But the activism doesn’t stop there. Journalists, pundits, and artists then cite these studies, rehash them, popularize them, and repackage them for public consumption.

These views are then passed on to the next generation of scholars, imbibed by school-teachers-in-training, and parroted by elected officials. These views filter down to the voting public, the TV viewer at home, and school children in the classroom.

Certainly, there are other intellectual activists offering differing views. There are still courageous scholars who attempt to do the work of fighting the Left’s dominance through research that dissents from the usual zeitgeist.

If these intrepid scholars did not exist, the Left’s success would be even more complete. Dissenting views would be even more marginalized, and even more in the minority. As Lew Rockwell noted:

A new BBC poll [reported November 2009] finds that only 11 percent of people questioned around the world — and 29,000 people were asked their opinions — think that free-market capitalism is a good thing. The rest believe in more government regulation.
As to those who would despair at this poll, consider that it might have been much worse were it not for the efforts of a relative handful of intellectuals who have fought against socialist theory for more than a century. It might have been 99% in support of socialist tyranny. So there is no sense in saying that these intellectual efforts are wasted.

And yet, there are many on the Right who want to completely abandon the field to the Left. For those of us involved in the work of intellectual activism, we’ve heard something like this many times: “We don’t have time to read books or spread ideas! We need to win elections now! All this stuff about spreading ideas and changing ideology will never work!”

Of course, what these people might as well be saying is “stop using the methods that the Left has employed so successfully for decades! Sure, after 12 years of public schooling, four years of university education, and a lifetime of watching TV news and Hollywood movies, most people are fully steeped in the Left’s ideology. But I have a newfangled plan that will magically undo all those years of ideological conditioning just in time for the next election!”

Needless to say, this isn’t exactly a recipe for success.

The Left wins because leftists understand that if the goal is to “win elections now!” one must first lay the groundwork that makes the public open to one’s ideological agenda. Sometimes this work takes decades. Without doing this necessary and time-consuming work before hand, however, long-term failure is assured.

This is why leftists have spent so much time writing books, teaching classes, getting graduate degrees, becoming journalists, and editing newspapers. They know that ideas matter, and that the long term goals of any ideological movement depend on spreading ideas through scholarship, media, and art.

In other words, the Left has long understood that ”politics is downstream from culture.” If we want to change political institutions, we must first change cultural, educational, and intellectual institutions first. Once the public’s ideas have been changed, then political change will follow.

Two: The Left Takes a Long-term View

It seems if there’s anything conservative and libertarians like to do, it’s to declare defeat at the earliest opportunity.

We see it in the language employed by conservatives and libertarians all the time. Every time the state seizes some new socialism-inspired powers, conservatives and libertarians frequently response by saying “oh, we’ll never get those freedoms back. The government will never give up those powers!” To quote Yoda when Luke Skywalker declared he’d never get his spaceship out of the swamp: “So certain are you.”

After all, “never” is a very long time. Consider the following two statements:

“The Soviet Union will never give up its rule over Russia and all the other republics of the USSR.”
“The Roman Empire will never allow Christians to worship legally and in peace.”

Both statements, of course, were wrong when uttered in that time and place. It’s true, the timeframe for breaking Soviet rule was 70 years. It took the Christians three centuries to obtain an edict of toleration from the emperor. But it’s a good thing the freedom fighters in the old USSR and the Roman Empire didn’t have modern-day conservatives and libertarians around to assure them that their attempts at gaining more freedom were futile and impractical.

Yes, I get it. In many cases, these people who insist good things will never happen recognize things are different in the long term. But if that is the belief, why not be clear about it?

Leftists, in contrast, are often quick to emphasize their belief that it will have the long-term victory with phrases like these: “It’s just a matter of time until we win! We’re on the right side of history! When we take over we’ll machine-gun everyone we don’t like!”

Meanwhile, many conservatives and libertarians spend their time debating whether or not they should give up and retreat to a mountain compound right now, or maybe wait until after the next election.

Successful ideological groups, of course, are in it for the long haul. Any modern day political or ideological activist who gives up after ten or twenty or thirty years simply was never serious to begin with.

Three: The Left Pursues Partial Victories

And how exactly do the leftists execute their long-term strategy? They accept partial victories.

Here’s something we never hear from the left: “Well, we got the legislation we wanted. It’s time to declare victory and rest on our laurels.”

Here’s the reality: the Left pushed and pushed for Obamacare. And then, when it was passed, not more than five minutes passed before the Left began advocating for Medicare for All.

Imagine also if the Left managed to win a federal mandate for a 15-dollars-per-hour minimum wage. Does anyone seriously believe the demands would stop there? We’d never stop hearing about the need for a 17-dollars-per-hour wage. And then one at 20 dollars.

In other words, leftists are willing to take partial victories, one step at a time. What we don’t hear leftists say is “if I call for a a 15-dollars-per-hour wage, that implies I don’t think a 20-dollars-per-hour wage is needed. Therefore I will oppose any wage mandate below 20 dollars-per hour!”

Yet, a sizable and vocal contingent of conservatives a libertarians use this line all the time: “Why, if I support a ban on late-term abortion, that implies I think abortion is fine!” Or, “if I support a cut to the income tax, that implies I think income taxes are fine!”

Here’s a real world example: in 2015, Colorado pro-gun-rights activists had almost everything they needed to increase gun magazine limits to 30 rounds, almost totally undoing a 2013 Democrat-passed bill reducing gun magazine limits to 15 rounds. Clearly, this would have been a significant victory for gun freedom. But then Rocky Mountain Gun Owners stepped in to prevent the passage of the bill by threatening elected officials with primaries if the officials voted for the change. “If you let them limit mags to 30 rounds, that implies we accept limits of any kind,” the “pro-gun” activists huffed. So, they killed the bill. To this day, the magazine limit is 15 rounds instead of 30. Gee thanks, Rocky Mountain Gun Owners!

This short-sighted and half-witted strategy can be contrasted with the strategy of the abolitionists — the strategy recommended by Murray Rothbard.

Rothbard understood that it is important to always “hold aloft” the ultimate goal, which is the evisceration of state power. But as with the abolitionists, it is important to also accept even partial victories, so long as these partial victories move us closer to the goal.

The Left understands this. A great many libertarians and conservatives, on the other hand, have apparently not yet figured this out.

Ryan McMaken

LRC Blog

LRC Podcasts

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Alex Newman: False History Taught in Schools Incites Children to Hate American

Posted on October 27, 2020 by theartfuldilettante

A classroom at the MESA Charter High School in Bushwick, Brooklyn, N.Y., on Oct. 28, 2014. With the New Year upon us, a host of changes in education is set to mark the lives of the city’s students, parents, and educators alike. e America

Chinese Red Guards, high school and university students, waving copies of Chairman Mao Zedong's "Little Red Book," parade in Beijing's streets at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution on June 1966. During China's Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), under the command of Mao, Red Guards rampaged through much of the country, humiliating, torturing, and killing perceived class enemies, and pillaging cultural symbols that were deemed as not representative of the communist revolution. (Jean Vincent/AFP/Getty Images)

The history taught in public schools is “a complete and total reversal of reality” and the root cause of the civil unrest sparked by the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis that has spread across the nation, said Alex Newman, an author, and award-winning international journalist.

President Donald Trump said during the Independence Day celebration at Mount Rushmore on July 3, “Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but that were villains.”

“The violent mayhem we have seen in the streets of cities that are run by liberal Democrats, in every case, is the predictable result of years of extreme indoctrination and bias in education, journalism, and other cultural institutions,” Trump said.

“He hit the nail right smack on the head. That’s what I’ve been arguing for years,” said Newman, co-author of the book “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children.”

“Now, when i say [what’s been taught is] a complete and total reversal of reality, that’s what i mean,” he told The Epoch Times‘ “Crossroads” program. “It’s not hyperbole, that’s not exaggeration.”

He said what defines American people as Americans are principles enshrined in the country’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, and that everyone is endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights,” Newman said.https://www.youtube.com/embed/DkLTQQw9aWA?wmode=transparent&wmode=opaque

Interview with Alex Newman starts at 14:47.

However, the history taught in schools has been replaced by a historical narrative that reverses those principles, claiming that the country’s founding principles were “slavery, oppression, racism, white supremacy,” and similar things, Newman said.

An example of U.S. history reversal is a New York Times series, called the 1619 Project, created by New York Times reporter Nikole Sheri Hannah-Jones, whose opening line of an essay that won her a Pulitzer was, “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written.”

According to the 1619 Project, America was founded in 1619 when a group of 20 Africans, who were considered to be the first enslaved Africans in British America, arrived in the colony of Virginia.

The project is “essentially fake history, as historians from across the political spectrum—and even The New York Times’ own fact-checker—publicly confirmed,” Newman wrote for the Epoch Times.

Despite this criticism, the series, which posits that America was not founded on the basis of liberty in 1776, but on the basis of slavery in 1619, has become school curriculum that is taught across America, Newman said.

According to Hannah-Jones, the notion is that racism and evil are embedded in the very DNA of America, Newman said. Since DNA cannot be changed or removed, “and so what she’s really saying—as the mullahs say in Iran—’Death to America.’ You’ve got to kill America to get rid of this horrible DNA,” Newman said.

“This could not be more wrong,” because America’s founding fathers wanted to abolish slavery as it was incompatible with the country’s founding principles based on Christian values, Newman said, adding that Thomas Jefferson fought a war against slave catchers in North Africa, and James Madison, the father of the Constitution, “loathed slavery” and expressed this view on many occasions.

Almost every civilization or culture has practiced some form of slavery at a certain point in its history, Newman said.

Rewriting American History

Mt. Rushmore, in Keystone, S.D. The presidents were selected on the basis of what each symbolized. George Washington (L) represents the struggle for independence; Thomas Jefferson (2nd L), the idea of government by the people; Theodore Roosevelt (2nd R), for the 20th-century role of the United States in world affairs; and Abraham Lincoln (R) for his ideas on equality and the permanent union of the states. (Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images)

The consequence of teaching wrong and reversed American history to children is that “our children hate America” and “they’re burning down our cities,” Newman said.

One of the most popular history books in the United States is Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” which is a key text in schools and has sold more than 3 million copies, Newman said.

Dr. Mary Grabar, a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, exposed Zinn’s distortions of American history in her book, “Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History that Turned a Generation against America.”

Zinn portrayed Christopher Columbus as a “genocidal monster” in his book, according to Newman, who added that Grabar already knew that Zinn’s book was biased when starting her project. However, Grabar wrote in her book that “even I was surprised by how blatantly and deliberately Zinn lied.”

Reading Columbus’s own diaries shows very clearly how Columbus was mischaracterized by Zinn. Columbus wanted to bring the Bible and Christianity to people, Newman said, and was inspired by his religious belief to embark on his journey.

“The truth, I believe is much more powerful than lies” and this is our big advantage, he said.

“Anybody can go look at the primary source documents, and investigate these things for themselves, and see what really happened.”

Chinese Communist Party Applauds 1619 Project

Chinese Red Guards, high school and university students, waving copies of Chairman Mao Zedong’s “Little Red Book,” parade in Beijing’s streets at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in June 1966. (Jean Vincent/AFP/Getty Images)

“The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been openly celebrating the 1619 Project,” Newman said, because through propaganda, brainwashing, lies, indoctrination, misinformation and disinformation, and psychological warfare, Americans can be convinced to hate their own country and dismantle it from the inside. Then America’s economic or military power will no longer pose a threat to the CCP.

Americans will just “burn their own country up and that’s what we’re seeing right now,” he said. “It’s incredibly dangerous.”

The CCP, which understood this principle, launched the Cultural Revolution, one of the key elements of which was wiping out China’s true history, Newman said.

“China was this incredible civilization with thousands of years of the amazing, incredible history that contributed so much to humanity,” Newman explained, so the communists “were burning books, and they were pulling down statues and setting libraries on fire and murdering people who knew real history so that they could start from a blank slate.”

Everything prior to the communist revolution was branded “evil, backward, uncivilized, barbarous, and so on,” he said. “Everything post-Communist Revolution was wonderful and glorious, and all the rest of it.”

“That is exactly the same thing they’re trying to do in America and it’s the same thing they’ve done around the world.”

Joshua Philipp contributed to this report.

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Key Libertarian Concepts

Posted on October 27, 2020 by theartfuldilettante

The key concepts of libertarianism have developed over many centuries. The first inklings of them can be found in ancient China, Greece, and Israel; they began to be developed into something resembling modern libertarian philosophy in the work of such seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century thinkers as John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine.

Individualism. Libertarians see the individual as the basic unit of social analysis. Only individuals make choices and are responsible for their actions. Libertarian thought emphasizes the dignity of each individual, which entails both rights and responsibility. The progressive extension of dignity to more people — to women, to people of different religions and different races — is one of the great libertarian triumphs of the Western world.

Individual Rights. Because individuals are moral agents, they have a right to be secure in their life, liberty, and property. These rights are not granted by government or by society; they are inherent in the nature of human beings. It is intuitively right that individuals enjoy the security of such rights; the burden of explanation should lie with those who would take rights away.

Spontaneous Order. A great degree of order in society is necessary for individuals to survive and flourish. It’s easy to assume that order must be imposed by a central authority, the way we impose order on a stamp collection or a football team. The great insight of libertarian social analysis is that order in society arises spontaneously, out of the actions of thousands or millions of individuals who coordinate their actions with those of others in order to achieve their purposes. Over human history, we have gradually opted for more freedom and yet managed to develop a complex society with intricate organization. The most important institutions in human society — language, law, money, and markets — all developed spontaneously, without central direction. Civil society — the complex network of associations and connections among people — is another example of spontaneous order; the associations within civil society are formed for a purpose, but civil society itself is not an organization and does not have a purpose of its own.

The Rule of Law. Libertarianism is not libertinism or hedonism. It is not a claim that “people can do anything they want to, and nobody else can say anything.” Rather, libertarianism proposes a society of liberty under law, in which individuals are free to pursue their own lives so long as they respect the equal rights of others. The rule of law means that individuals are governed by generally applicable and spontaneously developed legal rules, not by arbitrary commands; and that those rules should protect the freedom of individuals to pursue happiness in their own ways, not aim at any particular result or outcome.

Limited Government. To protect rights, individuals form governments. But government is a dangerous institution. Libertarians have a great antipathy to concentrated power, for as Lord Acton said, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Thus they want to divide and limit power, and that means especially to limit government, generally through a written constitution enumerating and limiting the powers that the people delegate to government. Limited government is the basic political implication of libertarianism, and libertarians point to the historical fact that it was the dispersion of power in Europe — more than other parts of the world — that led to individual liberty and sustained economic growth.

Free Markets. To survive and to flourish, individuals need to engage in economic activity. The right to property entails the right to exchange property by mutual agreement. Free markets are the economic system of free individuals, and they are necessary to create wealth. Libertarians believe that people will be both freer and more prosperous if government intervention in people’s economic choices is minimized.

The Virtue of Production. Much of the impetus for libertarianism in the seventeenth century was a reaction against monarchs and aristocrats who lived off the productive labor of other people. Libertarians defended the right of people to keep the fruits of their labor. This effort developed into a respect for the dignity of work and production and especially for the growing middle class, who were looked down upon by aristocrats. Libertarians developed a pre‐Marxist class analysis that divided society into two basic classes: those who produced wealth and those who took it by force from others. Thomas Paine, for instance, wrote, “There are two distinct classes of men in the nation, those who pay taxes, and those who receive and live upon the taxes.” Similarly, Jefferson wrote in 1824, “We have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.” Modern libertarians defend the right of productive people to keep what they earn, against a new class of politicians and bureaucrats who would seize their earnings to transfer them to political clients and cronies.

Natural Harmony of Interests. Libertarians believe that there is a natural harmony of interests among peaceful, productive people in a just society. One person’s individual plans — which may involve getting a job, starting a business, buying a house, and so on — may conflict with the plans of others, so the market makes many of us change our plans. But we all prosper from the operation of the free market, and there are no necessary conflicts between farmers and merchants, manufacturers and importers. Only when government begins to hand out rewards on the basis of political pressure do we find ourselves involved in group conflict, pushed to organize and contend with other groups for a piece of political power.

Peace. Libertarians have always battled the age‐old scourge of war. They understood that war brought death and destruction on a grand scale, disrupted family and economic life, and put more power in the hands of the ruling class — which might explain why the rulers did not always share the popular sentiment for peace. Free men and women, of course, have often had to defend their own societies against foreign threats; but throughout history, war has usually been the common enemy of peaceful, productive people on all sides of the conflict.

It may be appropriate to acknowledge at this point the reader’s likely suspicion that libertarianism seems to be just the standard framework of modern thought — individualism, private property, capitalism, equality under the law. Indeed, after centuries of intellectual, political, and sometimes violent struggle, these core libertarian principles have become the basic structure of modern political thought and of modern government, at least in the West and increasingly in other parts of the world.

However, three additional points need to be made: first, libertarianism is not just these broad liberal principles. Libertarianism applies these principles fully and consistently, far more so than most modern thinkers and certainly more so than any modern government. Second, while our society remains generally based on equal rights and capitalism, every day new exceptions to those principles are carved out in Washington and in Albany, Sacramento, and Austin (not to mention London, Bonn, Tokyo, and elsewhere). Each new government directive takes a little bit of our freedom, and we should think carefully before giving up any liberty. Third, liberal society is resilient; it can withstand many burdens and continue to flourish; but it is not infinitely resilient.

Those who claim to believe in liberal principles but advocate more and more confiscation of the wealth created by productive people, more and more restrictions on voluntary interaction, more and more exceptions to property rights and the rule of law, more and more transfer of power from society to state, are unwittingly engaged in the ultimately deadly undermining of civilization.

DAVID BOAZ

David Boaz is executive vice president of the Cato Institute and author of The Libertarian Mind, from which this is excerpted.

When Democrats Panic, Things Get Ugly

Posted on October 27, 2020 by theartfuldilettante

“Democrats, fearful of a repeat of President Donald Trump’s upset victory in 2016, are reportedly losing sleep over their candidate, Joe Biden, potentially seeing his lead in the polls evaporate and ultimately losing the election.
On Friday, the Los Angeles Times noted that Democrats are nervous about Biden falling behind in the final stretch of the presidential race when it matters most.” [Breitbart]

Normally, I would say “good”. But we already know what leftists do when they panic: place us under house arrest; set cities on fire; defund the police; and use social media to censor us. So brace yourself, regardless of the election outcome. The Democratic Party is both morally and mentally unhinged. If they win, they will enslave us under Communism and fascism; if they lose, they will enslave us under anarchy.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Black Voters No Longer Drinking Media Kool-Aid

Posted on October 27, 2020 by theartfuldilettante

My film and book of the same name, The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud that Divided America, are continuing have an impact on all Americans. They are especially helping to awaken black Americans about the race hoaxes the Democrats and their media allies have been playing on them. As I spelled out in my speech last year at the National Press Club, they use these hoaxes to control black thinking and ultimately black voting.

When the COVID crisis began, quickly followed by the George Floyd incident and riots, I put the Trayvon Hoax film on YouTube for free. It has since garnered more than 225,000 views and thousands of comments. The comments from black youths are both sad and revealing. They talk openly about the massive anxiety they were made to experience over the fear of being shot down in the streets by armed white men.

Here is an email I received this week that I believe is worth sharing. It comes from a young black woman named Lori who lives in Florida (I have made only three minor style edits). Having read scores of other such comments, I would not be surprised if black Americans vote for Trump in no small part as a backlash against the media and Democrat race hoaxes they have had to endure.

Dear Director Gilbert:

As a lifelong resident in the State of Florida, the Trayvon Martin case gripped the state of Florida and the nation. At that time, the public trusted the news media and, with that said, we believed the narrative pushed by Attorney Benjamin Crump. I have begun to connect the dots with Attorney Crump’s false narratives due to numerous cases where he race-baits–Michael Brown, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Jacob Blake. His narrative is accepted as fact by the mainstream news media and never challenged or questioned. Your documentary is on-spot with indisputable forensic facts.https://lockerdome.com/lad/9371484590420070?pubid=ld-8832-1542&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanthinker.com&rid=www.americanthinker.com&width=582

Many black people drank the Kool-aid about Trayvon Martin. Trusting the news media, as a black person, I assumed their reporting was accurate, but with the most recent Breonna Taylor case I’m now ‘woke’ about the manipulation from the news and how Attorney Ben Crump uses the news to push false narratives to strong arm cities into large monetary settlements.

I have shared the link for your documentary on social media and with my family. Thanks for exposing the truth. Not all black people are still drinking Mr. Crump’s Kool-aid about Trayvon Martin. He leaves a path of riots he incited that causes destruction, property damage to small businesses and bodily injuries. He has ruined lives of the falsely accused in the name of ‘justice’ for his self-gain.

My suspicious antenna went up about Mr. Crump when he suddenly bounced from Minneapolis to Louisville, KY. There are millions of attorneys so why is it he seems to be on the scene every time white police officers shoot or injure a black suspect (in most cases who was violently resisting arrest).

This November 3 will tell the tale as to how far black Americans have come in rejecting media narratives and race hoaxes that have been deployed against them for so long. According to Lori, the scam is up!

Hollywood film director Joel Gilbert (@JoelSGilbert) is president of Highway 61 Entertainment. Among his many films are political documentaries including The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud that Divided America, Trump: The Art of the Insult, There’s No Place Like Utopia, Dreams from My Real Father, Atomic Jihad, and Farewell Israel: Bush, Iran and the Revolt of Islam.

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