Mark Steyn: The End of Europe – America Alone (Parts 1-5) [Video]

Book Description:

In this, his first major book, Mark Steyn–probably the most widely read, and wittiest, columnist in the English-speaking world–takes on the great poison of the twenty-first century: the anti-Americanism that fuels both Old Europe and radical Islam. America, Steyn argues, will have to stand alone. The world will be divided between America and the rest; and for our sake America had better win.

From the Inside Flap:

Its the end of the world as we know it
Someday soon, you might wake up to the call to prayer from a muezzin. Europeans already are.

And liberals will still tell you that “diversity is our strength”—while Talibanic enforcers cruise Greenwich Village burning books and barber shops, the Supreme Court decides sharia law doesnt violate the “separation of church and state,” and the Hollywood Left decides to give up on gay rights in favor of the much safer charms of polygamy.

If you think this cant happen, you havent been paying attention, as the hilarious, provocative, and brilliant Mark Steyn—the most popular conservative columnist in the English-speaking world—shows to devastating effect in this, his first and eagerly awaited new book on American and global politics.

The future, as Steyn shows, belongs to the fecund and the confident. And the Islamists are both, while the West—wedded to a multiculturalism that undercuts its own confidence, a welfare state that nudges it toward sloth and self-indulgence, and a childlessness that consigns it to oblivion—is looking ever more like the ruins of a civilization.

Europe, laments Steyn, is almost certainly a goner. The future, if the West has one, belongs to America alone—with maybe its cousins in brave Australia. But America can survive, prosper, and defend its freedom only if it continues to believe in itself, in the sturdier virtues of self-reliance (not government), in the centrality of family, and in the conviction that our country really is the worlds last best hope.

Steyn argues that, contra the liberal cultural relativists, America should proclaim the obvious: we do have a better government, religion, and culture than our enemies, and we should spread Americas influence around the world—for our own sake as well as theirs.

Mark Steyns America Alone is laugh-out-loud funny—but it will also change the way you look at the world. It is sure to be the most talked-about book of the year.

Digging Up Dirt on the President’s Enemies List

By Kimberley A. Strassel | May 10, 2012 | Wall Street Journal

First a Romney supporter was named on an Obama campaign website. That was followed by the slimy trolling into a citizen’s private life.

Here’s what happens when the president of the United States publicly targets a private citizen for the crime of supporting his opponent.

Frank VanderSloot is the CEO of Melaleuca Inc. The 63-year-old has run that wellness-products company for 26 years out of tiny Idaho Falls, Idaho. Last August, Mr. VanderSloot gave $1 million to Restore Our Future, the Super PAC that supports Mitt Romney.

Three weeks ago, an Obama campaign website, “Keeping GOP Honest,” took the extraordinary step of publicly naming and assailing eight private citizens backing Mr. Romney. Titled “Behind the curtain: a brief history of Romney’s donors,” the post accused the eight of being “wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records.” Mr. VanderSloot was one of the eight, smeared particularly as being “litigious, combative and a bitter foe of the gay rights movement.”

About a week after that post, a man named Michael Wolf contacted the Bonneville County Courthouse in Idaho Falls in search of court records regarding Mr. VanderSloot. Specifically, Mr. Wolf wanted all the documents dealing with Mr. VanderSloot’s divorces, as well as a case involving a dispute with a former Melaleuca employee.

Mr. Wolf sent a fax to the clerk’s office—which I have obtained—listing four cases he was after. He would later send a second fax, asking for three further court cases dealing with either Melaleuca or Mr. VanderSloot. Mr. Wolf listed only his name and a private cellphone number.

Some digging revealed that Mr. Wolf was, until a few months ago, a law clerk on the Democratic side of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He’s found new work. The ID written out at the top of his faxes identified them as coming from “Glenn Simpson.” That’s the name of a former Wall Street Journal reporter who in 2009 founded a D.C. company that performs private investigative work.

The website for that company, Fusion GPS, describes itself as providing “strategic intelligence,” with expertise in areas like “politics.” That’s a polite way of saying “opposition research.”

When I called Fusion’s main number and asked to speak to Michael Wolf, a man said Mr. Wolf wasn’t in the office that day but he’d be in this coming Monday. When I reached Mr. Wolf on his private cell, he confirmed he had until recently worked at the Senate.

When I asked what his interest was in Mr. VanderSloot’s divorce records, he hesitated, then said he didn’t want to talk about that. When I asked what his relationship was with Fusion, he hesitated again and said he had “no comment.” “It’s a legal thing,” he added.

Fusion dodged my calls, so I couldn’t ask who was paying it to troll through Mr. VanderSloot’s divorce records. Mr. Simpson finally sent an email stating: “Frank VanderSloot is a figure of interest in the debate over civil rights for gay Americans. As his own record on gay issues amply demonstrates, he is a legitimate subject of public records research into his lengthy history of legal disputes.”

Read the full article here.

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How Liberals Successfully Silence Dissent

By Phil Elmore | May 3, 2012 | WND

Exclusive: Phil Elmore challenges conservatives to start fighting for keeps

Liberals adore the idea of silencing dissent. To this end, and because they believe they hold the moral high ground when contending with heartless, selfish, benighted conservatives, liberals will use a combination of intimidation, threats and dishonesty to destroy or remove any and all critics.

The Obama administration has tried several times to exploit this tendency among its more ardent followers. There was the White House email hotline, flag@whitehouse.gov; there was the running joke that was “AttackWatch” and its Twitter account; more recently, Obama’s flacks have been pushing the Orwellian “Truth Team.” Liberals are also abusing Twitter’s spam-reporting system to trigger automatic blocking of conservative Twitter accounts.

The goal, in every case, is to respond to the outrage that is political dissent in Obama’s America. The means is to threaten, to shout down and to shut up. Dare to express an opinion counter to Dear Leader’s Democratic Party line? Obama demands his violent and foul-smelling Occupy Wall Street rabble “get in your face” and yell at you until you stop talking. This is the “Coming Obama Thugocracy” Michael Barone predicted almost four years ago.

There was a time when liberals told us that criticizing judges for their extra-constitutional interpretations of the law was tantamount to agitating for those judges’ assassination. Today, those same liberals attack the United States Supreme Court if they suspect there exists even the possibility some of Obama’s unconstitutional legislation may be found so. When Democrats did not hold the White House, no less a lib luminary than Hillary Clinton famously screeched that we are Americans, and we have the right to disagree with any administration. Today, if you disagree with Obama, Democrat thugs are supposed to “get in your face” and explain to you the error of your ways.

There is no room for debate; there is no opportunity for discussion; there is no way even to argue, no matter how passionately. No, if you are a conservative, you are supposed to close your mouth-hole, and if you don’t like it, Obama voters can find some union thugs, some club-wielding racists, or some mob of whining communists to beat you until you can’t speak.

Conservatives and libertarians are in part to blame for this wretched state of affairs. We don’t fight well. We don’t stand up for ourselves, nor protect our own. We harrumph and we cluck and we shake our heads, refusing to challenge the logically flawed premises the libs foist on us. We agree with liberal useful idiots that Rush Limbaugh should not call a slut a slut, that what Mitt Romney does with his money is a greater outrage than what Barack Hussein Obama does with your money. We let the enemy frame the “debate.” We let our opposition set the terms. We never simply stand up and say, “I reject your flawed premise … and if you don’t get ‘out of my face,’ I will drop you where you stand.”

Read the full article here.

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Dems Kill Crackdown on Teacher-Student Sex

By Bob Unruhe | April 17, 2012 | WND

‘Another reason for conscientious parents to flee government school system’

Majority Democrats on a California state legislative committee have decided to kill a plan that would have cracked down on intimate relationships between school teachers and their students, prompting a pro-family organization to warn that it is just another reason for parents to pull their children from the government education industry.

Assembly Bill 1861 would have made it a felony if any teacher or employee of a public or private school “engages in a sexual relationship or inappropriate communications with a pupil.”

Those communications were defined as anything that is “sexual, lewd or lascivious in nature.”

“This is yet another reason for conscientious parents to flee the dysfunctional, immoral, and imploding government school system for church schools and home schools, which are much safer physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually,” said Randy Thomasson, president of SaveCalifornia.com.

“Why are Democrat legislators supporting child sex abuse? Why don’t they care about children’s immature hearts and minds being immorally manipulated and sexually seduced by public school teachers,” he continued. “It is certifiably evil that this bill to protect schoolchildren’s bodies was defeated by this Democrat-controlled committee.”

It died in the Assembly Public Safety Committee, and according to the Sacramento Bee, critics worried that it would duplicate laws already on the books against sex between adults and children, and also could be used to prosecute those who text messages and exchange emails concerning various pieces of literature, such as the “Great Gatsby.”

The vote was 3-0, with one Democrat not voting and the two Republicans on the committee absent.

See the “big list” of female teachers who have preyed on students.

The proposal had been prompted by the recent case in which a student, 18-year-old Jordan Powers, moved with a teacher, 41-year-old James Hooker. The two claimed Powers was of age, 18, before their relationship became romantic.

However, reports in the last few days indicate the couple may have split.

Kristin Olsen, a Republican member of the Assembly, from Modesto, introduced the proposal, noting in comments about the legislation that it took aim at the “growing problem where teachers, administrators, or other school employees have been engaging in sexual acts, relations or inappropriate communications like lewd text messages or sexting with their students.”

The Mercury News, reported Olsen accused her fellow lawmakers of abandoning the children.

“The committee today stood up for predators and union bosses instead of students,” she told the newspaper.

The chairman of the committee, Tom Ammiano, however, told the Bee that the state needs to protect free speech “even when we don’t like it.”

Thomasson openly questioned the use of the term “free speech” for communications that could include “sexting” messages and the like.

His organization promotes the Rescue Your Child website, which encourages parents to seek out church schools or homeschooling options for their children.

Read the full article here.

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Why There is a Culture War: Gramsci and Tocqueville in America

By John Fonte | December 1, 2000 | Orthodoxy Today

John Fonte examines the philosophical antecedents of the culture war to show why the culture war takes the shape that is has. He reveals why a constant vigilance towards the permanent things that breathe life into the culture is necessary. The essay runs about fifteen printed pages but the time spent reading it will prove worthwhile.

As intellectual historians have often had occasion to observe, there are times in a nation’s history when certain ideas are just “in the air.” Admittedly, this point seems to fizzle when applied to our particular historical moment. On the surface of American politics, as many have had cause to mention, it appears that the main trends predicted over a decade ago in Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” have come to pass — that ideological (if not partisan) strife has been muted; that there is a general consensus about the most important questions of the day (capitalism, not socialism; democracy, not authoritarianism); and that the contemporary controversies that do exist, while occasionally momentous, are essentially mundane, concerned with practical problem-solving (whether it is better to count ballots by hand or by machine) rather than with great principles.

And yet, I would argue, all that is true only on the surface. For simultaneously in the United States of the past few decades, recurring philosophical concepts have not only remained “in the air,” but have proved influential, at times decisive, in cultural and legal and moral arguments about the most important questions facing the nation. Indeed: Prosaic appearances to the contrary, beneath the surface of American politics an intense ideological struggle is being waged between two competing worldviews. I will call these “Gramscian” and “Tocquevillian” after the intellectuals who authored the warring ideas — the twentieth-century Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci, and, of course, the nineteenth-century French intellectual Alexis de Tocqueville. The stakes in the battle between the intellectual heirs of these two men are no less than what kind of country the United States will be in decades to come.

Refining class warfare

We’ll begin with an overview of the thought of Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), a Marxist intellectual and politician. Despite his enormous influence on today’s politics, he remains far less well-known to most Americans than does Tocqueville.

Gramsci’s main legacy arises through his departures from orthodox Marxism. Like Marx, he argued that all societies in human history have been divided into two basic groups: the privileged and the marginalized, the oppressor and the oppressed, the dominant and the subordinate. Gramsci expanded Marx’s ranks of the “oppressed” into categories that still endure. As he wrote in his famous Prison Notebooks, “The marginalized groups of history include not only the economically oppressed, but also women, racial minorities and many ‘criminals.'” What Marx and his orthodox followers described as “the people,” Gramsci describes as an “ensemble” of subordinate groups and classes in every society that has ever existed until now. This collection of oppressed and marginalized groups — “the people” — lack unity and, often, even consciousness of their own oppression. To reverse the correlation of power from the privileged to the “marginalized,” then, was Gramsci’s declared goal.

Power, in Gramsci’s observation, is exercised by privileged groups or classes in two ways: through domination, force, or coercion; and through something called “hegemony,” which means the ideological supremacy of a system of values that supports the class or group interests of the predominant classes or groups. Subordinate groups, he argued, are influenced to internalize the value systems and world views of the privileged groups and, thus, to consent to their own marginalization.

Far from being content with a mere uprising, therefore, Gramsci believed that it was necessary first to delegitimize the dominant belief systems of the predominant groups and to create a “counter-hegemony” (i.e., a new system of values for the subordinate groups) before the marginalized could be empowered. Moreover, because hegemonic values permeate all spheres of civil society — schools, churches, the media, voluntary associations — civil society itself, he argued, is the great battleground in the struggle for hegemony, the “war of position.” From this point, too, followed a corollary for which Gramsci should be known (and which is echoed in the feminist slogan) — that all life is “political.” Thus, private life, the work place, religion, philosophy, art, and literature, and civil society, in general, are contested battlegrounds in the struggle to achieve societal transformation.

It is perhaps here that one sees Gramsci’s most important reexamination of Marx’s thought. Classical Marxists implied that a revolutionary consciousness would simply develop from the objective (and oppressive) material conditions of working class life. Gramsci disagreed, noting that “there have always been exploiters and exploited” — but very few revolutions per se. In his analysis, this was because subordinate groups usually lack the “clear theoretical consciousness” necessary to convert the “structure of repression into one of rebellion and social reconstruction.” Revolutionary “consciousness” is crucial. Unfortunately, the subordinate groups possess “false consciousness,” that is to say, they accept the conventional assumptions and values of the dominant groups, as “legitimate.” But real change, he continued to believe, can only come about through the transformation of consciousness.

Just as Gramsci’s analysis of consciousness is more nuanced than Marx’s, so too is his understanding of the role of intellectuals in that process. Marx had argued that for revolutionary social transformation to be successful, the world views of the predominant groups must first be unmasked as instruments of domination. In classical Marxism, this crucial task of demystifying and delegitimizing the ideological hegemony of the dominant groups is performed by intellectuals. Gramsci, more subtly, distinguishes between two types of intellectuals: “traditional” and “organic.” What subordinate groups need, Gramsci maintains, are their own “organic intellectuals.” However, the defection of “traditional” intellectuals from the dominant groups to the subordinate groups, he held, is also important, because traditional intellectuals who have “changed sides” are well positioned within established institutions.

The metaphysics, or lack thereof, behind this Gramscian worldview are familiar enough. Gramsci describes his position as “absolute historicism,” meaning that morals, values, truths, standards and human nature itself are products of different historical epochs. There are no absolute moral standards that are universally true for all human beings outside of a particular historical context; rather, morality is “socially constructed.”

Historically, Antonio Gramsci’s thought shares features with other writers who are classified as “Hegelian Marxists” — the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs, the German thinker Karl Korsch, and members of the “Frankfurt School” (e.g., Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse), a group of theorists associated with the Institute for Social Research founded in Frankfurt, Germany in the 1920s, some of whom attempted to synthesize the thinking of Marx and Freud. All emphasized that the decisive struggle to overthrow the bourgeois regime (that is, middle-class liberal democracy) would be fought out at the level of consciousness. That is, the old order had to be rejected by its citizens intellectually and morally before any real transfer of power to the subordinate groups could be achieved.

Read the full article here.

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The Ryan Test: Demagoguery Versus Ideas

August 12, 2012 By John Malcolm Leave a Comment

By Jonathan S. Tobin | August 11, 2012 | Commentary Magazine As John wrote earlier today, liberals are convinced that Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan to be his running mate offers them a golden opportunity to savage the Republicans about the Wisconsin congressman’s budget plans. Predictably, the New York Times delivered one of the first such salvos in its editorial posted […]

Smoking Obama’s Crack and Yearning for the Mud

August 12, 2012 By John Malcolm Leave a Comment

By Vanderleun | August 10, 2012 | American Digest [From 2008. Only the names have been changed because the target has changed.] This downward flight of intellectuals has been going on ever since the Romantic movement began its counter-revolution a couple hundred years ago. No matter how much they flap their lips it’s a fall, not […]