When President Reagan was in office, he had a close working relationship with then Speaker, Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill. They met regularly in the evenings at the White House, talking politics and policy over tumblers of Irish whiskey.
One evening, nearing the vote on the Reagan tax cuts, they hashed things out, amicably, over tumblers of Irish whiskey. The President said, “Mr. Speaker, I want a 30% income tax reduction spread out over three years. 10-10-10.
Speaker O’Neill responded, “Mr. President, I’ll give you 5-10-10.”
President Reagan responded, “I can accept that. But, I want ninety House Democratic votes.
The Speaker responded, “Mr. President, you shall have your ninety votes.”
Now, here we are, almost 40 years later and the Speaker won’t even talk to the President, let alone hashing out compromises and delivering the votes.
Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values. A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the renunciation of your happiness—to value the failure of your values—is an insolent negation of morality. A doctrine that gives you, as an ideal, the role of a sacrificial animal seeking slaughter on the altars of others, is giving you death as your standard. By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man—every man—is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.
But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.—Ayn Rand
With the presidential election nearing, it’s important to remind ourselves of an important fact, one that Democrats and Republicans and their supporters in the mainstream press fail to realize: Democracy is not freedom.
Democracy enables people to elect public officials. That’s all. That’s in contrast to countries that are ruled by people that are not democratically elected, such as kingdoms or militarily controlled regimes.
But the right to elect one’s government officials doesn’t guarantee a free society. Freedom is determined by the powers wielded by the government. If government’s powers are limited to their legitimate function, then people in that society will be free. And that’s true whether government officials are democratically elected or not.
In other words, theoretically an unelected regime could result in a freer country than a democratically elected one. An unelected regime, for example, could implement a free-market economic system while a democratic one could implement a welfare-state, managed-economy system. Or an unelected regime could establish a system with a small military and no CIA or NSA while an elected regime could establish a national-security state.
The only real benefit of a democratic system is that people can peacefully change public officials, especially when there is a change in overall philosophies within society. With unelected regimes, the only way to change officials is through revolution, which can be costly in terms of life, property, and money.
There is something else that is important that Democrats and Republicans and the mainstream press are oftentimes unaware of: Democracy can actually be a grave threat to liberty.
In fact, the Bill of Rights was designed specifically to protect the country from democracy. Consider, for example, the rights enumerated in the First and Second Amendments. Even if 99 percent of the American people and 99 percent of the members of Congress wish to enact a law requiring everyone to send their children to church, they lack the power to do so.
No democracy there. The rights of the one percent who oppose being forced to send their children to church are protected. The idea is that freedom means that people’s fundamental rights are not subject to majority vote.
Notice something else that is important, something that even some libertarians forget: There is a critical difference between a government that is prohibited from wielding certain powers and a government that wields such powers but is exercising them in a wise and prudent manner.
For example, the federal government doesn’t enact laws requiring people to send their children to church because it believes it unwise or imprudent to do so. It doesn’t enact such laws because it simply lacks the power to do so. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights prohibit the federal government from wielding such power. That’s what freedom requires.
Now, consider the coronavirus crisis. There are many libertarians carping and complaining that the government is not exercising its powers over healthcare in a wise and prudent manner. They are saying that the government should have done this or that and that it shouldn’t have done this or that.
But that mindset is not a freedom mindset — that is, the mindset that undergirds freedom of religion. The freedom mindset holds that government should not have the power to manage, control, or regulate healthcare at all, just as it lacks the power to manage, control, or regulate religion.
Once people delegate the power to manage, control, and regulate peaceful behavior to government, more often than not the government is going to exercise such power — and in ways that are going to displease at least some of the people. At that point, fights break out over the things the government is doing and not doing. In a genuinely free society, those kind of fights don’t occur because government lacks the power to involve itself in such areas.
If we are to achieve a free society, it is incumbent on us libertarians to lift our visions — and the visions of our fellow Americans — to a higher level — one that involves the removal of powers from the government rather than simply calling on the government to exercise illegitimate powers in a wise and prudent manner.
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.
America and her freedoms are worth defending, but both are rapidly approaching a critical tipping point. On November 3rd, Americans go to the polls to vote for our future and, subject to the election’s outcome, we must be ready to aggressively push against those who would trash this great nation should the radical Democrat Party elite take over the White House and Senate and begin to push an anti-constitutional agenda.
President Donald Trump may not be a perfect candidate but his almost four-year policy record is quite impressive. President Trump appointed more than 190 mostly strict constitutional constructionists to our federal courts; pushed back at communist Chinese tyrants on a host of critical issues; installed pragmatic immigration policies and built more than 200 miles of wall on our southern border that protects American citizens; and gave us a great economy even after considering the COVID-19 shutdown.
By comparison the Democrat Party’s presidential candidate, former vice president Joe Biden, is a pawn of the left who appears to have failing mental health given his frequent gaffes, quite apart from his refusal to answer critical questions such as to whether he will pack our Supreme Court, creating a superlegislative body that would destroy our constitutional checks and balances. Further, Biden’s mixed messages on other policy issues are alarming: he is coy about whether he would undermine our prosperous energy policies by ending fracking; wreck the economy by reversing the Trump tax cuts thus burdening the middle class; promote anti-family policies on homosexuality and abortion; open wide our borders to floods of illegals; embrace socialized medicine which would ruin the world’s best health care system; and perhaps most disconcerting, he refuses to condemn the likes of Marxist-inspired Black Lives Matter and ANTIFA, albeit while failing to condemn the left’s calls to defund the police.
For these reasons I consider the coming election the most important of my lifetime – a true moral tipping point for America. The Democrat Party establishment and their anti-American sponsors like George Soros, an assortment of other leftist billionaires and Hollywood luminaries would flush our form of government and impose a tyranny on our country not that different from the circumstances that ignited our founding revolution.
Our Founders fought the tyranny of the British crown in the 18th century to win American independence. Those early patriots outlined their many grievances in our Declaration of Independence which gave justification for resisting the British tyrant who used the heel of his boot — that nation’s military — to keep the American colonists in check. Fortunately the ranks of English redcoats weren’t enough to contain freedom-seeking patriots, because our forefathers vigorously resisted, at first through appealing peacefully to the crown for justice and then by mounting armed opposition to win our future. https://lockerdome.com/lad/9371484590420070?pubid=ld-8832-1542&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanthinker.com&rid=www.americanthinker.com&width=692
I’m not in favor of armed rebellion should the Democrats retake the White House and Senate. However, as in the 18th century, some things are worth fighting for. Our Founders embraced the Bill of Rights to our Constitution, which guaranteed citizen liberties such as free speech, religious liberty, and protection from government overreach as well as the right to bear arms. Today those liberties are under serious assault by the left and I hope there never comes a time when today’s patriots, those who believe in our founding liberties, must choose between surrendering our rights and the demands of a host of modern tyrants.
Today’s leftists must fail, as did the 18th-century British tyranny because patriots then and now must confront freedom’s tipping point or else today’s left will destroy our heritage of liberty. Conditions could deteriorate as they did for millions of souls over past centuries who lived under the oppressive thumb of Soviet Russia and others today that live under the harsh rule communist tyrants in Beijing and the iron fist of socialists in Venezuela or Islamic fascists in Iran.
God-fearing Americans today must not be naïve about what is at stake in the coming election. You don’t have to like President Trump to vote against the Democrats’ radical agenda. Leftists are fueling the so-called Democratic Party’s campaign to transform America, and the threat is dangerously real, a true existential ultimatum to our form of government, especially our freedoms.
Under the banner of the Marxist-inspired leftist Democrats, Joe Biden and his phalanx of radical donors and elitist progressives intend to transform this country by packing our courts with leftist ideologues, radicalize every defining American institution (family, education, religion, and economy), trample our freedom of faith and speech and make America a godless society ruled by progressive elites who enshrine big government as the nation’s god, shutter our churches, and confiscate our arms.
Such tyranny if it comes to pass must be opposed with all our might. We need to stand up, much as our founders Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams who disputed British tyranny with words and then with muskets. Those forefathers knew America was a special place where liberty, free speech, and faith must prosper and godless elitists and tyrants must fail. Resisting the oppressor was worth all that our Founders willingly surrendered for the hope of freedom.
True patriots today know that anti-American Marxists are the puppet masters behind the Democrat Party establishment that seeks to transform this nation in the name of “progress.” Their agenda is straight out of the pit of hell. They threaten our security as seen on America’s streets this summer. They intend to forever change our form of government. They are ideologically against our God, our liberty, and individualism, and believe they know better than those who gave us a government of checks and balances that has for more than 200 years preserved the best form of self-rule the world has ever known.
These miscreants behind the veil of the Democrat Party are evil progressives, power-crazed and self-deluded. They are the most dangerous types of radicals who promise to redistribute America’s wealth to their liking and will use the strong arm of government to realize their will — a true Marxist strategy.
Americans who love this country must take stock. We are at another 1776. We can either naively embrace a Marxist agenda under the progressive guise of social justice or we can resist first through our votes, our peaceful protests, and then, as a last resort, like our Founders exercise our right to protect ourselves from an over reaching federal government.
God save America and grant wisdom to our present-day Patrick Henrys, Thomas Jeffersons and John Adams, where-ever they may be!
Robert Maginnis is a retired U.S. Army officer and the author of seven books, the most recent is Collision Course: The Fight to Reclaim Our Moral Compass Before It Is Too Late.
Mary Bucholtz is professor and chairperson of the Linguistics Department at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She declared all white Americans, including herself, to be racists. Indeed, she claims America is suffering a pandemic of white supremacy.
Let’s see now, if white Americans are white supremacist racists, why did they let their white country fill up with people of color and reduce the white percentage of the population from close to 100% to 60% and falling?
Would white racists vote in an immigration law that essentially keeps white people out and fills the country up with black people?
Would white supremacists impose affirmative action against white people in order to elevate blacks?
Would white supremacist racists elect a black president?
Apparently, these questions are too profound for the faculty and administration of the University of California.
How about all the damage caused by the China virus and Islamic terror?
“As a nation, we can only truly thrive when every one of us has the opportunity to thrive. Our painful history of slavery has evolved into structural racism and bias built into and permeating throughout our democratic and economic institutions.”
That was California Gov. Gavin Newsom in a September 30 signing statement for Assembly Bill 3121 which “establishes a nine-member task force to inform Californians about slavery and explore ways the state might provide reparations.” For all its faults, California was never part of the Confederacy, and Californians might wonder about a stronger case for reparations from damages caused by the China virus.
Evidence points to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, recipient of funds from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, which banned “gain of function” research in 2014 because of danger that a manipulated virus might be released into the population. The NIH revived the dangerous research in 2017 but kept it secret. The Wuhan Institute was an ideal place to hide gain of function, and Anthony Fauci backed the lab with more than $7 million. Dr. Fauci has been evasive about what, exactly, went on at Wuhan but there can be no dispute about the aftermath.
The China virus claimed more than 200,000 deaths in the United States alone and touched three leaders of G7 nations: President Trump, British prime minister Boris Johnson, and Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, whose wife Sophie tested positive for the coronavirus in March. The economic damages are undeniable: millions unemployed, businesses going bankrupt, mounting debt, and all the social wreckage now on display.
President Trump is on record that this was all “China’s fault,” and China is going to pay “a big price” for what they’ve done to the United States and the world. One U.S. state is already taking measures. In April, Missouri attorney general Eric Schmitt filed a lawsuit charging that Chinese Communist officials are “responsible for the enormous death, suffering, and economic losses they inflicted on the world, including Missourians.” For Sen. Dianne Feinstein, California Democrat, the Missouri lawsuit was the problem.
“We launch a series of unknown events that could be very, very dangerous,” said Feinstein in a July 30, Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. “I think this is a huge mistake.” And Feinstein had only praise for China, “as a country that has pulled tens of millions of people out of poverty in a short period of time” and as “a country growing into a respectable nation among other nations. And I deeply believe that. I’ve been to China a number of times. I’ve studied the issues.”
Indeed, as Feinstein told James Areddy of the Wall Street Journal during a 2006 visit to Shanghai, the San Francisco Democrat had been coming to the Communist nation for 31 years. Feinstein compared Tiananmen Square to Kent State, and as Rosemarie Ho reported in The Nation, Democrats in general and Feinstein in particular ignored the Communist crackdown against Hong Kong.
As the San Francisco Chronicle noted, the Chinese spy on Feinstein’s staff for 20 years even attended Chinese Consulate functions for the senator, who has her own version of Hunter Biden. As Ben Weingarten reported in the Federalist in 2018, Feinstein’s husband Richard Blum has “profited handsomely from the greatly expanded China trade she supported.”
None of this has touched off an investigation, which confirms that FBI favors for Democrats go far beyond Hillary Clinton. A party that functions as a cheerleader for China will not seek any reparations from China, or any other entity that has inflicted vast damage on the United States.
On September 11, 2001, Islamic terrorists claimed nearly 3,000 American lives and caused billions in damages. If that not a case for reparations, it is hard to know what one would look like. Democrats made no case, and the president formerly known as Barry Soetoro shipped billions in cash to Iran, the major sponsor of terrorism in the world.
President Trump pushed back on terrorism, taking out Iranian master terrorist Soleimani and ISIS boss al-Baghdadi. Democrats were critical of these actions, and their diversionary push for slavery reparations has no merit. Neither does Gov. Newsom’s charge of “structural racism,” which as David Azerrad explains, lacks proof on the historical, legislative, and even the subconscious level.
Meanwhile, old-money Democrats are grooming Gov. Newsom for a presidential run in 2024. Should he succeed, the nation would never get reparations for terrorism or the China virus. On the other hand, the entire nation would soon look like California, whose rapid decline reminds Bill Maher of “Italy in the 70s or something.” As President Trump says, we’ll have to see what happens.
The nation can only thrive, Gov. Newsom contends, “when every one of us has the opportunity to thrive.” As it happens, the most powerful figure in recent California history is the African American Willie Brown. The thriving assembly speaker set up his girlfriend Kamala Harris in lucrative sinecures and backed her career all the way to candidacy for what she has called a “Harris administration.”
Lloyd Billingsley, Front Page Magazine
Comment: Does this mean reparations for all the ancestors of Union soldiers who fought and died to free the slaves ? A/D
Property rights are one of our three basic natural rights–i.e. life, liberty, and property. They are universal and transcendent. Ours by birthright, not permission.
Moreover, property rights are inherent, inborn, congenital. When it comes to property rights, humans are hard-wired for property rights. Witness, what are one of the first words babies express after mama and dada ? It’s not ours, and it’s not theirs, and it’s not yours. It’s MINE.
Even animals are hard-wired as such. Try taking a bone from your family hound. Big mistake.
Socialists would be well advised not to waste their time trying to change human nature. It is an exercise in futility.
Last June Cambridge University college Gonville and Caius announced that it was taking down a window commemorating Sir Ronald Fisher, the creator of modern statistics. shorturl.at/fuJPS
The window allegedly “gave offense” because Fisher also headed up Cambridge University’s eugenics research program, which has, through accusation and Third Reich genetic experiments, come to be associated with racism. The removed window says nothing about eugenics and depicts a mathematical model that Fisher devised. Nevertheless, newspaper headlines, such as The Guardian’s, described the window as commemorating an eugenicist, not the greatest statistics genius of all time. shorturl.at/acdeO
The Guardian was unable to point out that it was a Cambridge University research program, not Fisher’s. The Guardian also failed to wonder how ignorant BLM thugs had ever heard of R.A. Fisher. Have you ever heard of him? Most likely one of Cambridge’s quota hires had decided to have fun with the white university’s cowardice.
The college administration, of course, fell all over itself to erase the memory of its illustrious member in order to please Black Lives Matter. The college administration said it “is now aware of the views and actions of RA Fisher in a way that was not fully appreciated in 1989” (apparently when the window was installed as one of a series celebrating the college’s famous members) and was taking further steps to stamp out racism at the college.
This is the same university where in the same week a quota hire, Priyamvada Gopal, tweeted “Abolish whiteness,” “White lives don’t matter.” Not only did this not give offense, Cambridge University rushed to her defense and promoted her to the rare position of full professor. shorturl.at/nvQ05
Cambridge is generally ranked as the second most prestigious university in the world, after Oxford. The erasure of a famous statistician and scientist while promoting an anti-white racist lecturer of postcolonial literature tells us all we need to know about the utter collapse of white confidence in the leading white universities of the world.
Statues of white people are everywhere disappearing. Initially it was “racist” Confederate war memorials, but “systemic racism” and “critical race theory” define all white people as racists.
Now the University of Wisconsin is removing the Statue of Abraham Lincoln.
The practice of universities and colleges disavowing their most illustrious members in order to pander to the ignorant thugs of Black Lives Matter But White Lives Don’t has spread to the California Institute of Technology, one of America’s top scientific research and educational institutions. One might have thought that a research and educational education focused on science and engineering, and unencumbered with Black Studies, Feminist studies, Queer studies, Transgender studies, postcolonial literature and the other “studies” in which fact plays no part, would be immune to pandering to anti-white racism. But, sadly, this is not the case. Caltech is about to remove the name of its venerated former president Robert A. Millikan from buildings and programs. You guessed it, Millikan’s offense is that he also dabbled in the “racist” eugenics movement of a century ago. shorturl.at/ptBH0
How did eugenics become “racist”? It certainly wasn’t thought of as racist at the time. It was a liberal movement incorporating the liberal confidence of an ever-improving humanity. Eugenics aimed at reducing human suffering by breeding out disease, disabilities and other undesirable characteristics from the human population and increasing the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable.
To put the “racist” brand on eugenics is itself racist, because it implies that the person calling eugenics “racist” believes that blacks have no desirable characteristics that would improve the human race. How could anyone deny black contributions to popular music and athletics, for example. Black athletes dominate basketball, and the current world champion racing driver is Lewis Hamilton who yesterday (October 11, 2020) in the German Grand Prix tied Michael Schumacher’s record for the most Formula One race wins. In a society such as ours that judges worth by money Hamilton’s annual salary of $54 million puts him in the top ranks of successful people. (Hamilton is half white, half black, but finds it advantageous to identify as black. Obviously, Hamilton does not believe in “white privilege.”)
Just as the British and Americans experimented with eugenics, so did the Germans during the Third Reich, and this is where eugenics’ bad name comes from. Anything associated in any way with National Socialist Germany is beyond the pale, and, of course, the Third Reich has come to represent—along with the Confederate States of America, America’s Founding Fathers, the US Constitution, and European colonialism—racism.
The odd thing about eugenics is that it is the old form that is discredited as “racist,” not the new form which has the same goal. In the original eugenics, selective breeding was the only way to engineer the genetic composition of an individual. Watson and Crick’s discovery of the DNA Double Helix opened up human genetic engineering via direct intervention in genes themselves. Instead of selectively mating people with desirable traits, modern eugenics achieves the result by altering genes. By avoiding procreation, the “racist” aspect somehow disappears.
What it boils down to is that the original eugenics is deemed racist because it lacked the technology of a later discovery. But the goals of both are the same: to reduce human suffering by replacing undesirable characteristics with desirable ones.
One would think that there would be sufficient intelligence at Cambridge University and Caltech to comprehend that if the old eugenics is racist so is the new, and if the new eugenics is not racist, neither is the old. But apparently not.
Do Cambridge and Caltech and Black Lives Matter—the latter being the group that seems to have the most voice on the issue—really want to eliminate the ability of genetic engineering to repair faulty genes associated with illnesses and disabilities? Do Cambridge and Caltech understand that if Fisher and Millikan are racists, so are Watson and Crick as their discovery made eugenics more powerful?
That such simple and obvious questions have not occurred to the high IQs at Cambridge and Caltech illustrates that the ability of white people to think has been shattered by the long assault on white confidence that has culminated in the inability of white people to respect and defend their culture’s accomplishments, or in the case of Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, New York, and elsewhere, an inability to defend their own businesses from looting and burning.
We are witnessing the surrender of Western Civilization to barbarians.
This week, Democrats struggled to explain why Judge Amy Coney Barrett should not be confirmed to serve on the Supreme Court. They trotted out hackneyed arguments, suggesting that some political norm had been broken by a Republican president nominating a judge to be confirmed as a justice by a Republican Senate in an election year. There have been 19 times where a seat became vacant in an election year and both the presidency and Senate were controlled by the same party, resulting in 17 judicial confirmations. They suggested that Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dying wish to leave her seat open until a Democrat takes power represented a sort of binding legal commitment.
And they fumed.
They fumed that Barrett refuses to pledge fealty to their political priorities. They fumed that Barrett has stated that the role of the judiciary is not to achieve moral ends but to enforce the law. They fumed that Barrett had the temerity to state that “courts are not designed to solve every problem or right every wrong in our public life,” that “the policy decisions and value judgments of government must be made by the political branches” and that she has done her utmost to “reach the result required by the law,” whatever her preferences might be.
That’s because, in the view of the political left, the court ought to be merely another weapon in its political arsenal. Conservatives see the judiciary as Alexander Hamilton characterized it in “Federalist No. 78”: as the “least dangerous” branch, capable of “neither force nor will, but merely judgment,” an institution whose legitimacy rests on its unwillingness to “exercise WILL instead of JUDGMENT.” Liberals see the court as a super-legislature, designed to act as moral arbiters on behalf of progressive values. That’s why former President Barack Obama stated that judges ought to be selected for the quality of “empathy, of understanding and identifying with people’s hopes and struggles, as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes.”
Critical legal theorists have suggested that conservatives are fibbing — that their view of the judiciary as relegated to judgment alone is merely cover for the reinforcement of their political priorities. But the data suggest otherwise. During the 2019 Supreme Court term, for example, out of some 67 decisions, the four justices appointed by Democrats voted together 51 times; Republican appointees only voted together 37 times. As Ilya Shapiro of the Cato Institute has pointed out, “it’s the (Ruth Bader) Ginsburg Four that represent a bloc geared toward progressive policy outcomes.” Republican appointees, in other words, are politically heterodox significantly more often than Democratic appointees. That’s because, on a fundamental level, they take their job — and the constitutional separation of powers — seriously.
Democrats do not. That’s why they see as the glories of the Supreme Court those moments in which the Supreme Court seized power on behalf of progressive ideals. Roe v. Wade has become holy writ on the political left, specifically because it robbed the American people of their right to vote on the issue of abortion. Democrats see nothing but glory in Supreme Court justices seizing authority to protect abortion on behalf of defining “one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” (Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 1992). They see nothing but wonder in Supreme Court justices declaring that the judiciary has been delegated enforcement of “a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning” (Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015). They see nothing but cause for celebration in the Supreme Court cramming down on the American people their own sense of our “evolving standards of decency” (Trop v. Dulles, 1958) or the importance of never-before-defined “emanations” and “penumbras” (Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965). They want the court to act as an oligarchy.
And they are angry that Barrett’s nomination has moved the court away from that progressive, oligarchic rule. That’s why they’re threatening to pack the court — because they wish to restore that oligarchy to power. And that’s just another reason why, for all the talk about Donald Trump’s threats to core American institutions, he can’t hold a candle to even mainstream Democratic willingness to trash checks and balances on behalf of power.
The Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Amy Coney Barrett provide a fitting warmup act to the presidential election that will follow in a few weeks.
The rancor pouring forth from this confirmation flows from the very deep divide in the nation — conservative versus liberal — that will decide who will be our next president and what kind of nation we will pass on to our children and grandchildren.
Against this background, my organization, Center for Urban Renewal and Education, or UrbanCURE, hosts its annual policy summit in Washington, D.C., where pastors come from all over America and convene to examine public policy and principles that will bring health and wealth to our nation’s most distressed communities.
Our guest speakers include Dr. Jerome Adams, surgeon general of the United States, and Jack Brewer, a former NFL defensive safety who is now a businessman, college professor and vocal conservative Christian.
We will also announce the launch of a new State of Black America project, a partnership between UrbanCURE and prominent conservative policy institute the Claremont Institute.
This will be a new and innovative venture where, for the first time, black American life will be systematically examined and recommendations will be made for how to end the cycle of poverty through the application of conservative principles.
The late Harry V. Jaffa, the great Claremont Institute scholar, noted that the Constitution’s purpose is stated in its preamble — to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
“What is a blessing?” asks Jaffa. It is “what is good in the eyes of God.”
Jaffa also reminds us that, in the closing paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, the signers appealed to “the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions.”
It should be clear that the moral chaos, the rote meaninglessness, that defines what those on the left today conceive to be freedom, has little to do with the vision of freedom of the Christian men and women who founded and built the nation.
It is an unfortunate fluke of history that in the 1960s, the time when the civil rights movement crystalized and black Americans achieved equal treatment politically — what should have long before been achieved morally — was a time of moral unraveling of the country.
Religion and moral principles were increasingly seen as a barrier to freedom, rather than its source.
Prayer was banished from school, abortion on demand legalized.
But the choice of man is not whether to believe. The only choice is what to believe.
As religion was pushed out of the public square, the new religion became government. Government programs were increasingly seen to be the path to salvation, rather than personal commitment to eternal truths.
In 1960, about 25% of the federal budget was payments to individuals. Today, it is 70%.
The popularization of culture that says your life is somebody else’s responsibility deeply hurt the communities that were the weakest in the 1960s: our black communities.
Politicization of our culture is striking a fatal blow, with government debt exceeding the size of our entire economy. Degradation of the sanctity of life and the sanctity of marriage has torn apart our communities — particularly our at-risk communities.
This is the discussion we will be having with our pastors convening in Washington.
The poor are not poor because the rich are rich.
Those who have achieved much in America should be viewed as examples of what can be achieved in a great, free nation.
Government’s job is to protect our lives and our property.
It is the job of every citizen — of every race and ethnicity — to live properly and responsibly so that each of us can achieve the potential given us by our Creator.
