Obama’s Sinister “Religion”—Racist Marxism Under a Faux Biblical Veneer

By Kelly OConnell | June 10, 2012 | Canada Free Press

As we ready ourselves for the inevitable onslaught against Romney’s religion, we need to educate ourselves on Obama’s own beliefs, which are the most unusual of any candidate. Even taking Barack at his word, that he is a “Christian”, his beliefs are highly atypical of biblical Christianity. Barack, as an acolyte of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s ideology, is really a follower of James Cone’s own racist and Marxist Black Liberation Theology. This is the subject of today’s essay.

I. Jeremiah Wright’s Church & Rev James Cone’s “Christianity”

Barack Obama attended Jeremiah Wright’s Chicago Trinity United church for more than two decades. Given the length of time, we must assume that Barack shared the core beliefs of that congregation. But what were Wright’s core beliefs? These are just a subset of Reverend James Cone’s Black Liberation Theology. This connection is explained by Charles C. Johnson of the American Spectator:

Has the Communist Manifesto replaced the Constitution?

By George Hawley | June 9, 2012 | Young Americans for Liberty

When the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union imploded two years later, Americans sighed a breath of relief. Seemingly overnight, our debilitating fear that a horde of T-72’s would blitz through the Fulda Gap evaporated; the world realized a nuclear holocaust would not be the Cold War’s coup de grace. What’s more, the Cold War’s conclusion freed millions of souls from Soviet oppression. We were right to be relieved. American conservatives, who were eager to take credit for USSR’s demise, were feeling particularly triumphant at that time. We had finally reached the “end of history,” and “democratic capitalism” reigned supreme. It remains to be seen, however, whether post-Cold War conservative chest thumping was truly justified.

Although all freedom lovers should celebrate the downfall of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the peaceful death of the Soviet Empire did not necessarily indicate the demise of Marxism as a force in the world. In fact, a strong case can be made that the United States is more Marxist now than ever before. It is true that a socialist revolution did not occur, as Marx predicted, via an apocalyptic struggle between workers and the bourgeoisie, but a socialist revolution of sorts nonetheless occurred. To those who believe Marxism has been relegated to “the dustbin of history,” I can only point to the words of Marx himself. The world we inhabit is not so different from the one Marx envisioned.

Waking the Sleeping Giant: Book Offers Solutions to Put Liberals on Defense in Politics and Culture

By Tony Lee | May 24, 2012 | Breitbart News

The late Andrew Breitbart knew that in order to defeat the left,  Americans had to first take back the cultural institutions used by the left to advance liberalism.

In their new book, Waking The Sleeping Giant: How Mainstream Americans Can Beat Liberals At Their Own Game, authors Timothy Daughtry and Gary Casselman offer everyday “mainstream” Americans a valuable and important playbook for taking back the broader culture.

The Psychology of the liberal Mind: How Mainstream Americans Can Beat Liberals at Their Own Game [Video]

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Understanding the Culture War: Gramscians, Tocquevillians and Others

By Steven Yates | January 6, 2001 | Lew Rockwell

We start the new century and the new millennium with a problem of major proportions: the seemingly unstoppable march of political correctness through American institutions and life. A recent article in the journal Policy Review, published by the Heritage Foundation, is worth reading for its insights into how we have ended up in this predicament – and also for why we seem unable to figure a way out of it. The article is by John Fonte, of the Hudson Institute, and is entitled “Why There Is a Culture War.” If this article is any indication, Fonte’s forthcoming book Building a Healthy Culture, of which the article is an excerpt, is likely also worth reading as a barometer of where we stand.

Fonte contrasts “two competing worldviews” that are currently struggling for dominance in America. It would be fair to say that the two really are at war: Fonte somewhat euphemistically calls the contest an “intense ideological struggle.” One he calls “Gramscian”; the other, “Tocquevillian,” after the intellectuals he credits with having authored the respective warring ideologies: the Italian neo-Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, author of Prison Notebooks and other works, and the French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, author of the influential Democracy in America.

It becomes clear that one cannot understand either the meteoric rise or apparent immunity of political correctness to attack without understanding Gramsci. Rarely would I recommend actually studying a Marxist social philosopher, but this guy merits our attention. Gramsci (1891-1937) agreed with Karl Marx that every society could be divided into “oppressor” and “oppressed” classes (e.g., Marx’s own “bourgeois” and “proletariat”), but for the first time, expanded the latter into an ensemble of subordinate, marginalized groups instead of a single, homogeneous group. Whereas Marx had spoken only of the proletariat, Gramsci spoke not just of propertyless workers but also of “woman, racial minorities and many ‘criminals.’” Fonte documents how Gramsci distinguished two ways the dominant group exercises control, whereas Marx had only written of one. First, there is direct domination through coercion or force – political might in service of the economic interests of the bourgeoisie. Second, there is what Gramsci calls hegemony, which means the pervasive and mostly tacit use of a system of values that supports and reinforces the interests of the dominant groups. The repressed groups may not even know they are repressed, in Gramsci’s view, because they have internalized the system of values that justifies their repression. They have internalized a “false consciousness” and become unwitting participants in their own domination.

Is this sounding familiar yet? Think of the radical feminist philosophy professors and law professors who speak of romantic candlelight dinners – a staple of ordinary American life – as a form of prostitution. They justify this seemingly outrageous claim on the grounds that American women exist in “false consciousness,” the hegemonic product of male-dominated (and capitalistic) values. The sense of abhorrence felt by “ordinary” women at radical feminist claims is nothing more than this “false consciousness” asserting itself. Gramsci went on to argue that before there could be any “revolution” in Marx’s sense it would be necessary to build up a “counter-hegemony,” or system of values favoring the repressed groups that would undermine or delegitimize the hegemony-created consciousness. And because hegemonic values permeate the whole of society and are embodied in the warp and woof of daily life, daily life becomes part of the ideological battleground. All the institutions we take for granted – schools, churches, the media, businesses, as well as art, literature, philosophy, and so on – become places where the “counter-hegemonic” values can be seeded and allowed to take root. They become domains to be infiltrated, and brought into the service of the movement. As the radical feminists put it, “the personal is the political.” It is interesting how the latter have lifted this idea from a white male European philosopher mostly without credit. The point, however, is to create a new kind of “consciousness” free of the values that allow the dominant group(s) to repress the subordinate groups. Only this will throw off the shackles of “hegemony” and lead to true revolution.

Gramsci saw an important role in the transformation of society for those he called “organic” intellectuals (as opposed to “traditional” intellectuals). “Organic” intellectuals were to be intellectuals belonging to the repressed groups and making an effort to undermine the “hegemony” with the assistance of any “traditional” intellectuals they could persuade to defect from the dominant point of view. They will flourish as the roots of counter-hegemony grow. In other words, Gramsci was recommending recruiting radicalized women, members of minority groups, and others into the fold – affirmative action before that term was coined. Changing the minds of “traditional” intellectuals was particularly valuable, as they were already well positioned within the dominant educational institutions. The “long march through the institutions” – a phrase we also owe to Gramsci – began.

Antonio Gramsci’s name is not exactly a household word. Many people concerned about political correctness have no doubt never heard of him. To describe him as important, however, is probably the understatement of the new year. He sketched, in works such as Prison Notebooks, the basic outline of the agenda that would begin to be implemented in American colleges and universities, and then carried to the rest of society, in the final quarter of the 20^th century. The efforts accelerating in the 1990s, no doubt helped along by having one of their own (perhaps it was two of their own) in the White House. Clearly, we find echoes of Gramsci’s notion of an “organic” intellectual in today’s calls for more and more “diversity” in all areas of society: universities, the workplace, etc. The mass conversion of “traditional” intellectuals to the Gramscian struggle helps explain why this diversity is a diversity of faces and not ideas. “Traditional” intellectuals have power, especially in education. The gatekeepers control who is admitted to the academic club, and the “traditional” intellectuals control the gatekeepers. Today, an outspoken conservative might as well not even apply for an academic appointment in a public university. But feminists of all stripes and colors (and sexual preferences and fetishes) are more than welcome!

Gramsci, we ought also to note, described himself as an “absolute historicist,” whose views derive from the philosopher Hegel. All systems of value, all moral codes, etc., are entirely the products of the historical epoch and culture which gave rise to them. There is no such thing as an “absolute” or an “objective” morality. There are only systems of value that represent either the (mainly economic) interests of those in power or of those not in power; and one of the jobs of “organic” intellectuals is to develop systems of value that will undermine the former. Capturing control over language, especially the language of morality, has a major role to play in this because of the doors it opens to psychological control over the masses. Most people will reject ideas and institutions if they become convinced of their basic immorality; most people, too, lack the kind of training that will equip them to untangle the thicket of logical fallacies that might be involved. This all helps pave the way for the Gramscian transformation of society.

Clearly, political correctness in all its manifestations, from academic schools of radical feminism, “critical race theory,” gay and lesbian “queer theory,” etc., to the preoccupation with “diversity” as an end in itself, is the direct descendent of Gramsci, and the chief arm of enforcement of the ongoing Gramscian transformation of American society. Consider efforts to transform our understanding of the law. Fonte observes: “Critical legal studies posits that the law grows out of unequal relations of power and therefore serves the interests of and legitimizes the rule of dominant groups.” The academic movement known as “deconstruction,” however one defines it, is a systematic effort to destroy the legitimacy of the values of “dominant groups”: straight white Christian males of (non-Marxist) European descent. The values to be destroyed: truth as the goal of inquiry, transcendent morality as the guide to human conduct, freedom and independence as political ideals, hiring and contracting based on merit. All are rationalizing myths of the dominant consciousness, in the Gramscian scheme of things.

The transformation is now very much underway, as Gramscian footsoldiers have captured not just the major institutions in the English-speaking world (Ivy League universities) but also huge tax-exempt foundations (Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and so on) that have been bankrolling Gramscian projects for decades. Fonte cites author after author to document the millions that have flowed to academic feminist endeavors, diversity-engineering projects in universities and sensitivity-training re-education programs in corporations. The plain truth is, we can no longer trust large corporations. Fortune 500 companies have become as reliable footsoldiers in the creation of a politically correct America as universities. Even Bill Gates of Microsoft has gotten on the official bandwagon, with his creation of minority-only scholarships last year. With the money now behind it, small wonder political correctness has become so difficult to oppose!

Read the full article here.

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 […]