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It’s Time for Patriotic Freedom Lovers to Become MEAN
The problem with liberty lovers and patriots is that we are not MEAN enough.
Our opponents are vicious; and mean. After all, they’re totalitarians. Totalitarianism is based on BRUTE FORCE. The initiation of brute force is wrong; it’s mean.
I’m not suggesting we respond by becoming totalitarians. I am suggesting we respond in a way fitting to the threat.
For starters, this means: Being willing to morally shame them. Why? Because they are shameful. Forcing people to endure experimental medical treatments is vicious. It’s insane. Forcing people to force their children to endure experimental medical treatments is, if anything, worse. Ditto for lockdowns, masks and all the other things that our state, local and federal governments now do without hesitation.
Too many of us are willing to criticize these people in private, or in our own minds, but not to their faces. And, more importantly, too many of us are too frightened to tell people in our communities and families that we believe what they’re supporting is SHAMEFUL.
Seeking conflict for its own sake is not healthy. But conflict is unavoidable. Conflict has found US — like it or not. We have lost our liberties. Even if the experimental vaccine doesn’t end up killing millions of people, it’s not the point. The point is that we have now established the principle that we must put into our bodies whatever the government tells us to put into our bodies — simply because the government says so, and mislabels it “science.”
That is not America. That is not a free country. It’s shameful beyond words. It’s shameful beyond anything that went on at the time America was first founded. Today’s tyrants in California, New York, Oregon, Washington, New Jersey, Delaware, Michigan and Minnesota make the British royal tyrants of 1776 seem like nothing. And today’s tyrants are just getting started. We know that because of 100 percent of their actions, daily. We know that because they tell us so, and they laugh and sneer as they do it.
It’s beyond masks and vaccinations. Those are not trivial things. But the principle has been established that government may do whatever it wishes, whenever it wishes to whomever it wishes. A third of our population is irredeemably lost. These are the true blue leftists who watch nothing but MSNBC and who dominate not only the deep blue states, but the whole culture. Another third of the country are genuine patriots, and they will (I still believe) reach a point of no return, and will turn on the present, rotten-to-the-core establishment in government and culture. The middle third worry me. These are the people who know the ends and means of the totalitarians are wrong, but are afraid of being shamed. These are the people who must learn how to become MEAN. And we have to support them in that quest.
This is no time for kindness to your fellow man — not if your fellow man hires government thugs to place a gun at your neck or a boot on your throat. Get it through your heads: THIS is what they’re doing. Virtually every government in human history has been authoritarian, to one degree or another; since the 20th century, we have seen the unspeakable brutality of totalitarian governments. All of the evidence tells me that today’s leftists are WORSE than anything we have yet seen in all of history.
Stop being nice. Stop worrying about what others think of you. Stop caring what people who wish to annihilate your liberty for their own neurotic (or psychotic) reasons think. What they think does not matter. What matters is that we stop them. Now.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
Is there such a thing as Racism ?
Racist. No word has such power. It can end careers, embitter families, and provoke amazing displays of cowardice. But the word means nothing anymore. It’s doubtful if it ever did.
Until recently, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) had a definition of racism most Americans would probably agree with: “Racism is the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another, that a person’s social and moral traits are predetermined by his or her inborn biological characteristics.”
Even this definition has problems. Few say that one race is inherently “superior or inferior” to another, even though races do differ in average intelligence and in broad psychological traits. A person’s success or failure often depends on intelligence, which can be measured by IQ and standardized test scores.
Who we are is not a product of voluntary choice. Our inborn characteristics shape us, and race is one of them. If “racists” are people who recognize this, then they are the ones who see reality clearly.
Race realists and white advocates aren’t “racist” when we talk about scientifically demonstrable racial differences, but defending the term is like slugging the tar baby. Sam Francis wrote:
“Racism,” therefore, is a term originating on the left, and has been so defined and loaded with meanings the left wants it to have that it cannot now be used by the supporters of white racial consciousness for any constructive purpose. Anyone who uses the term to describe himself or his own views has already allowed himself to be maneuvered onto his opponents’ ground and has already lost the debate. He may try to define the word differently, but he will need to spend most of his time explaining that he does not mean by it what everyone else means. As a term useful for communicating ideas that the serious supporters of white racial consciousness wish to communicate, the term is useless, and it was intended by those who developed it that it be useless for that purpose.
Fortunately, the ADL has changed the definition of racism, so we never have to worry about it again.
The new definition is “the marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.”
This is bewildering. It means the Chinese could exterminate blacks in their country and not be racist, if they are privileging Asians but not whites. Blacks who set out to murder the first white they find can’t be racist. Only whites (or, presumably, non-whites who fight for white supremacy) can be racist.
If racial differences in achievement are caused by “institutional racism,” whites can be racist without even trying. This is “racism without racists,” at least under the old definition of “racist.” The new definition fits better with the conventional wisdom that all whites are racist. Racism practically defines “whiteness.”
But what’s a “socially constructed racial hierarchy”? We still need a way to tell “people of color” from “white people.” There must be a physical difference — something not socially constructed — or we can’t victim from oppressor.
Some people find this confusing. Whoopi Goldberg does. She recently said on The View that the Holocaust was not about race, but “man’s inhumanity to man.” “This is white people doing it to white people,” she said, “so y’all going to fight amongst yourselves.” In later comments on Stephen Colbert’s talk show, Miss Goldberg said that “as a black person,” she thought of “race as something I can see.”
Jews, to her, are white, but apparently she got it wrong. Actor Michael Rapaport complained, “It was only about race. It was about kill the Jews, exterminate the Jews. ‘They’re not white, they’re Jewish.’ ” ABC suspended Miss Goldberg from her show for two weeks, despite her groveling. Would she have got the same treatment if she had just said she thinks Jews are white – without mentioning the Holocaust?
Many blacks lump Jews in with whites, especially because Jews historically ran shops in black neighborhoods. Blacks also commit crimes against Jews in places such as New York City. Do they attack Jews because they think they are white or because they are Jews? Because they’re both?
It’s all so confusing.
On Vacation
Dear Loyal Folowers:
I am on vacation in Florida from the frosty North. For the next week, my posts may be spotty. I apologize for this respite in my eagerly anticipated posts.
Best… The Artful Dilettante
Living Under the Irrationality of Dictatorship in America
The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie.”
— Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
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REPORT: CNN in talks to pay Chris Cuomo some $9 million in Hush Money to protect Zucker, Network
We have all known scum. Scum always turn on each other, in the end. Leftists are dishonest brutes; they are simply high profile scum.
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If Whoopi Goldberg quits The View, I will collapse in despair.
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So Biden accidentally kills an ISIS terrorist. Now we’re supposed to forgive election fraud, censorship, medical tyranny, runaway inflation, ugly divisiveness, and losing Afghanistan?
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Empowering and supporting your government to act like criminals is, morally, no better than being a criminal yourself.
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IF the Democrats are crushed in the 2022 and 2024 elections, will they stand down, relinquish power and reform?
My answer: NO. However, I don’t believe they consider failure in those elections an option. They will utilize subjective voting, mail-ballots, illegal alien voting and much else only a criminal or sociopath could think up in order to ensure victory of some kind. But if their tactics fail — no, they will not stand down.
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Omicron numbers down. Tyrants in a panic. “How can we scare and control people?” Evil is SO predictable.
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Wherever you pass gun control, crime stays the same, or escalates. Why? “Because not every state has gun control. We must make it national! Until every part of the country has gun control, it can’t work!”
A majority get the COVID vaccine, yet we have even MORE flu and cold viruses than before. Why? “Because not everyone got the vaccine. Until we get 100 percent compliance, the vaccine won’t work!”
See a pattern here? EVERYONE must sign on for things that don’t work. That way, you don’t have to talk about it anymore.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
The Drip…Drip…Drip of Tyranny
The thing about tyranny? It’s the drip-drip-drip mentality.
They get you bit by bit. That’s how an annoying, overreaching government suddenly becomes a totalitarian dictatorship. Seemingly overnight.
For example: In my current home state of Delaware, the mask mandate was reinstated last month. No real reason was given. People assumed it was Omicron. But the numbers for Omicron are way, way down. Still no mention of getting rid of it. Most likely, the mask mandate will remain for the summer season, when people crowd into a beach resort and officials can’t be accused of letting a virus spread. What if there is no virus? “Well, there COULD be!” And it’s an election year (not that Delaware’s elections aren’t already rigged.)
When the original mask mandate was lifted back in spring of 2021, even people who supported it said, “Well, that’s that. It won’t be back. And I’d be really angry, if the mask mandate ever came back.” For the first few days when the mask mandate inexplicably returned in January 2022, a lot of people were angry. And then the anger soon converted into, “Well, hopefully by the spring or summer they’ll lift it again.” Please master. Show me some mercy. Whatever you say, master. Does anybody know when or if the mandate will be lifted again? Do the tyrants in the state capital even know? Not likely. They’re just going from whim to whim; because that’s what politics and tyranny are. They are not smart people, and they are not good people. They are simply power-driven people.
Similarly, a bill has been quietly introduced in the Delaware state legislature to make the presentation of a fake vax passport a felony. But Delaware does not have a vax passport. Nobody in the state has one. So why introduce a bill making a vax passport a felony? The legislator introducing it is a crony of Biden and the state’s unrelentingly partisan governor. There has to be a reason for introducing a bill managing a vax passport not in effect. “Well,” people say. “I don’t think they’ll go THAT far.” If they DO go that far, a lot of people will be really angry. And then they’ll get used to it, saying that maybe it won’t be permanent. Drip, drip, drip.
If a totalitarian, “show your papers, wear a mask forever” government had been presented all at once, you would have experienced outrage from probably two-thirds of the population, even in a deep blue state like Delaware. But when you present it drip by drip by drip, you hypnotize people, in a sense, to tolerating what just a year or two before would have been unthinkable and intolerable.
It’s nothing new. Dictators have done this for centuries. Dictators began in earnest in the 20th Century. Mao was brilliant at in China, instituting a Cultural Revolution to override any political opposition — precisely what’s happening in America right now. America heroically fought off those dictatorships in World War II and the Cold War only to succumb themselves, starting in earnest in 2020 and continuing undisturbed at the present time. Sure, some states are worse than others. But the governors and legislators running the deep blue states are fully in charge of the federal government, at present. Sooner or later, the federal government WILL launch attacks on the red states for not conforming to the only real Party in charge, and it will be up to those states either to fight — or submit. And, as our experience with President Trump taught us, the Deep State bureaucracy is firmly entrenched with the same people who run the deep blue states. And those entrenched fascists/Communists will be there in the unlikely event that a Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis wins the presidency in 2024 AND the Deep State allows it to happen. My guess is they will NEVER allow 2016 to happen again, especially after their huge success in 2020.
Increasingly, I see no way out of this other than secession or breaking up of some kind. The Bill of Rights is no longer in operation in the federal Imperial City. Frankly, it wasn’t in operation even when Donald Trump seemed to be in charge. We can try the Convention of States, and a principled stand would probably be practical and important. But let’s face it. We’re dealing with the worst dictators (at the very least) since the time of Hitler and Stalin and Mao. These people are ruthless, dishonest, and literally care nothing about anyone or anything other than their own power. They are also ideologically rigid, on top of it. They are the worst of all possible worlds — Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Castro’s Cuba, Mussolini’s Italy and the fall of the Roman Empire all rolled up into one unspeakably nasty, stinking hybrid of horror. Most don’t yet grasp just how evil they are.
They are immovable, in the worst sense of that term. We are already in a civil war. It’s just not obvious to most, at the moment; but before long, unless 100 percent of us roll over 100 percent, it’s going to be pretty obvious.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
Destroy the Public-School Systems
A local Fox affiliate reports that last year in Baltimore’s largest high school, 77 percent of students graduated reading at an elementary-school level, and many of them at a kindergarten level. Only twelve students at the school were at grade level — that’s under 2 percent. And it was a whistleblower who came forward with this information:
A Baltimore City teacher comes forward with devastating information, showing 77 percent of students tested at one high school, are reading at an elementary school level
The teacher works at Patterson High School, one of the largest high schools in Baltimore with a 61 percent graduation rate and a nearly $12 million budget. We agreed not to identify this source who fears retribution for giving Project Baltimore the results of iReady assessments.
“Our children deserve better. They really do,” the Patterson High School teacher told Project Baltimore. “As a whole, the system has failed them.”
The teacher is a hero. It is a shame that the teacher, and not the administrators, is the one terrified about retribution. Public schools such as Patterson have a state-compelled monopoly on education that traps kids in their perpetually failing institutions. And the more funding they get, the worse they perform. Last year, the Baltimore public-school system — which functioned remotely most of the time — had a $1.4 billion budget for only 78,000 students.
From a devastating piece by Adam Andrzejewski at Forbes:
CEO Sonja Santelises ($339,028) and her chief of staff, Alison Perkins-Cohen ($198,168), collectively earned nearly $700,000 in pay, perks, pension funding, and health insurance benefits.
Santelises’ cash compensation was more than $126,000 higher than that of the U.S. Secretary of Education, a cabinet-level position.
Chief of Schools John Davis made $218,303 in base salary alone. Tina Hike Hubbard, the “Chief Communications & Community Engagement Officer” earned $194,283.
Other highly compensated employees included Jeremy Grant-Skinner, the “Chief Human Capital Officer” ($194,283); Lynette Washington, the Chief Operating Officer ($194,283); Theresa Jones, the “Chief Achievement & Accountability Officer” ($192,827); and Maryanne Cox, the Deputy Chief Financial Officer ($192,827).
In a marketplace, all these people would have lost their jobs a long time ago. It’s not the salaries that are the problem. It’s the failure of the system they oversee.
Few things have undermined minorities over the past 40 years more than inner-city public-school systems. Rich and middle-class Americans already have school choice. They can move. Neighborhoods with high-performing systems have far higher homes values, shutting poorer people out. Teachers’ unions use tax dollars, often through compelled dues, to help elect politicians who preserve the status quo — which, functionally, is the racial segregation of schools.
One of the most popular arguments against school choice is that granting parents the freedom to pick better schools would only weaken traditional ones. Well, imagine making this argument about any other area of life: “Hey, you can’t leave this supermarket because we’re going to suck even more.” No one would accept that logic. Yet they do for their kids’ education. Maybe when 77 percent of high-school graduates can’t make it through Goodnight Moon, someone will do something. We’re not that far off.
David Arsanyi
Ayn Rand: A Legacy of Liberty and Reason
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.
Dr. Berliner is the senior advisor to the Ayn Rand Archives. He was the executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute from its founding to January 2000.
Watch “How to Win in the Game of Politics | Thomas Sowell” on YouTube
Joe Rogan and Spotify
Gee, I WAS supporting Joe Rogan and Spotify’s decision to keep him. But now that I know these two [pictured] are outraged about it … well, that changes everything.
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A dishonest media does even MORE evil than state-run media. Why? Because millions believe them. Nobody believes the state-run media.
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People who do not treasure their freedom and who think tyranny is acceptable are not worth knowing.
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California Gov. Newsom has again been caught violating his own mask mandate — and then lying about it. Of course, he suffers no consequences and snickers about it. [Fox News 1-31-22]
Why do leftists keep applauding and voting for swine like Newsom? Shouldn’t his hypocrisy and insincerity anger them? It doesn’t. They will give him 10 terms. Why? Because most leftists are insincere themselves. They possess no integrity, and they inhabit hollowed out souls. They are incapable of admiring anyone, so they cannot feel betrayed or disappointed. They are just full of hatred and (at the root of it all) profound anxiety over the responsibility of freedom in a once beautiful, free country they now gleefully destroy. They’re destroying their own precious California, as they did New York City, and they do not care. They are incapable of caring because they are all about destruction for its own sake.
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On social media, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele mourned the state of American cities.
“Is there a deliberate plan to destroy the United States from within?” Bukele tweeted on Monday. “Why are the authorities and some of the media not even commenting on this things? Why are they letting their beautiful cities rot?”
Mistakes of this magnitude are NOT made innocently.
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A full 70% of Americans agree with the sentiment that “it’s time we accept that COVID is here to stay, and we just need to get on with our lives.” [NEWSMAX 1-31-22]
Fine. But what if you have no life? Or, to you, “life” means a delusional sense of control, or a sociopathic (Karenesque) need to control others? That 30 percent is still in control of society and government, for the most part. Sad, bad and sick.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
