Uncommon Knowledge: Dennis Prager on Why America Is Still the Best Hope [Video]

Rep. Allen West: ‘Family Values, Not Government’ Needed for Economic Stability in Black Community

By Amanda Swysgood | June 20, 2012 | CNS News

Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), a former Army Lt. Col. (AP photo)

(CNSNews.com) – Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), a freshman conservative congressman and former Army officer, said that the “breakdown of the Black family” is one of the most important causes of the economic disparity facing the black community.

“We are here today to talk about economic freedom, as opposed to economic dependency,” West said at a Capitol Hill forum Monday addressing “Economic Empowerment in the Black Community.”

“‘Husband’ and ‘Wife’ in the black community are at 28 percent; that leads to a failure in education and that leads to a failure in urban statistics and revitalization,” West said.

A panelist at the forum, West said Black unemployment remains at almost 14 percent — almost double the rate for whites.

“This is a trend that has continued for the past 50 years, during both strong and weak economies,” he said.

A Nation of Paper, Not of Men

By Andrew C. McCarthy | June 18, 2012 | PJ Media

In continuing the dramatic shift from American constitutional democracy to rule by executive fiat that has marked his tenure, President Barack Obama now claims that the illegal aliens, to whom he purports to grant what effectively is amnesty, are “Americans … in every single way but one — on paper.” That is false. They are not Americans under the only thing that matters, the thing the Obama administration has chanted like a mantra — while riding roughshod over  – since its very first day in power: the rule of law.

The Constitution and congressional statutes are written on parchment. That is the only relevance of “paper” in this equation — as the “hard copy” of our social contract and of the laws enacted pursuant to it. Under the Constitution, Congress, not the president, is endowed with such a power: “To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization.” Congress exercises this power by passing laws. Under the Constitution, which Obama took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend, and under the laws it is his duty to execute faithfully, illegal aliens — no matter how sympathetic their plight, no matter how blameless they may be for the illegality of their status — are not citizens of the United States. They are not Americans. Period. It is not “paper” that separates them from our body politic, it is the law, of which Obama is supposed to be servant, not master — as I argued in this September 2011 essay for The New Criterion: “The Ruler of Law — On ‘Justice’ in the Age of Obama.”

Obama the Reactionary

By James Lewis | June 18, 2012 | American Thinker

In a perverse way this is the most utopian administration in American history. That’s after all what Marxism comes down to, a stubborn fantasy that the world will flip into utopian perfection as soon as all the evil capitalists are in Siberian labor camps. The Soviet Union spent seven decades trying to eradicate capitalism at home and abroad, along with religion, family values and individualism. As a natural consequence, they ended up destroying hard work and agriculture, and every five years the Kremlin kept wondering what could have gone wrong with their “scientific” policies this time around.

Today Vladimir Putin kneels down with the Patriarch of Moscow in the Kremlin Chapel, surrounded by magnificent bling going back to the Byzantine Empire.

So much for eradicating human nature.

Madison Rising: The Star Spangled Banner [Video]

Which Stage Best Describes the Current State of the Tea Party? [Handout]

View this document on Scribd

Hat Tip: Glenn Beck

Source: Turning-the-Tide.org

Dennis Prager: Americanism is the Best Hope

By Dave Gordon | June 3, 2012 | Breitbart News

Dennis Prager is a popular and respected conservative radio talk show host, broadcasting since 1982 and nationally syndicated since 1999.

In his fifth book, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph (Broadside Books) Prager maintains that the world must decide between American values and two oppositional alternatives: Islamism and European-style democratic socialism.

The reasons for America’s greatness lie in what he calls the American Trinity, imprinted on US coins: E Pluribus Unum, In God We Trust, and Liberty.

Pastor Sentenced To 2 Years In Prison For Teaching That Parents Should Spank Their Children

By Michael Snyder | May 30, 2012 | The American Dream

Do you believe that parents should be able to spank their children?  Do you ever express that opinion to others?  If so, then you could be sent to prison.  Sadly, that is exactly what happened to one pastor up in Wisconsin recently.

A minister named Philip Caminiti was sentenced to 2 years in prison for simply teaching that parents should spank their children when they misbehave.  Please note that Caminiti was not accused of spanking anyone or of physically hurting anyone.  He was put in prison simply for his speech.  He was put in prison simply for what he was teaching others to do.  Whether you agree with spanking or not, this should be incredibly sobering for all of us.  Increasingly, speech is being penalized in the United States.  Much of the time, the focus of the attacks by the forces of political correctness is on religious speech.  If this trend continues, many of you that are reading this article might be put in jail for the things that you say in the coming years.

Empowering Individuals or Bureaucrats?

By Rep. Paul Ryan | May 2012 | American Spectator

Also in Choice Symposium

• James Piereson – A Time for Choosing
• Stephen Moore & Peter Ferrara – The Road From Serfdom
• David N. Bass – The Millennial Perspective

The choice and the contrast in health care.

In March, as the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of President Obama’s partisan health care law, the American people saw an event that could mark the end of bureaucrat-controlled health care. At the same time, just across the street in the halls of Congress, they witnessed a powerful reaffirmation of the American Idea as the House of Representatives passed the Path to Prosperity—a budget for the federal government.

Black-on-black crime in the suites

By Robert L. Woodson, Sr. | May 24, 2012 | Washington Times

African-American political power didn’t protect civil rights, it robbed us blind

For decades, it was presumed that having blacks in positions of political leadership on the local, state and national levels would serve as a safeguard to preserve the victories of the civil rights movement and ensure that the people on whose behalf those battles had been fought could benefit from the new opportunities that those victories afforded. But in time, just the opposite has happened. In an era where race has begun to serve as both a shield (rebuffing legitimate criticism as evidence of racism) and a sword (attacking dissenting opinions as racist) many black officials have entered zones of comfort insulated from responsibility. In many cities, monopolies of opportunist leadership have reigned unchallenged for decades.

A case in point is that of former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who, along with his cronies, was indicted on 38 charges, in what a federal prosecutor described as a “pattern of extortion, bribery and fraud” by some of Detroit’s most prominent officials. Charges in the indictment include extortion, mail and wire fraud, obstruction of justice, malicious threats to extort money, and bribery.

Turn Out The Lights – The Largest U.S. Cities Are Becoming Cesspools Of Filth, Decay And Wretchedness

Staff Report | May 24, 2012 | The Economic Collapse Blog

Once upon a time, the largest U.S. cities were the envy of the entire world.  Sadly, that is no longer the case.  Sure, there are areas of New York City, Boston, Washington and Los Angeles that are still absolutely beautiful but for the most part our major cities are rapidly rotting and decaying.  Cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore, Memphis, New Orleans, St. Louis and Oakland were all once places where middle class American workers thrived and raised their families.  Today, all of those cities are rapidly being transformed into cesspools of filth, decay and wretchedness.  Millions of good jobs have left our major cities in recent decades and poverty has absolutely exploded.    Basically, you can turn out the lights because the party is over.  In fact, some major U.S. cities are literally turning out the lights.  In Detroit, about 40 percent of the streetlights are already broken and the city cannot afford to repair them.  So Mayor Bing has come up with a plan to cut the number of operating streetlights almost in half and leave vast sections of the city totally in the dark at night.  I wonder what that will do to the crime rate in the city.  But don’t look down on Detroit too much, because what is happening in Detroit will be happening where you live soon enough.

Is GOP Headed for Ash Heap of History?

By Patrick J. Buchanan | May 17, 2012 | WND

Pat Buchanan applies latest racial data to realities of Republican Party policies

 Among the more controversial chapters in “Suicide of a Superpower,” my book published last fall, was the one titled, “The End of White America.”

It dealt with the demographic decline of the white majority and what it portends for education, the U.S. economy, politics and national unity.

That book and chapter proved the proximate cause of my departure from MSNBC, where the network president declared that subjects such as these are inappropriate for “the national dialogue.”

Apparently, the mainstream media are reassessing that.

For, in rare unanimity, the New York Times, the Washington Post and USA Today all led yesterday with the same story.

“Whites Account for Under Half of Births in U.S.,” blared the Times headline. “Minority Babies Majority in U.S.,” echoed the Post. “Minorities Are Now a Majority of Births,” proclaimed USA Today.

Barack Obama’s 15 Minutes of Fame

By Greg Lewis | May 22, 2012 | American Thinker

“In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes.” -Andy Warhol

In 1970, George Winne, Jr., achieved his Warholian 15 minutes of fame by setting himself on fire on the campus of the University of California, San Diego, to protest the war in Vietnam.  These days you can achieve the same notoriety if you’ve done nothing more than bronze yourself to a deep pre-cancerous glow like tanning addict Patricia Krentcil.

Or, you can take things several steps further by doing your best to destroy the U.S. economy, fraternize with the Islamic enemy, and cripple the American energy industry. Add in advancing the cause of bringing our country under the rule of a big-government, crony-capitalist elite by dividing America into warring minority demographic groups in the most blatant manner imaginable, and you’ve got Barack Obama’s claim to his 15 minutes of fame.

You Cannot Miss What You’ve Never Had: The Vanishing Feeling of Freedom

By Daren Jonescu | May 19, 2012 | American Thinker

 The primary reason why it is so difficult to defend political liberty today is because freedom is a rational construct, and thus cannot be understood by the irrational.  Children, or adults whose moral reasoning skills are stalled at childish levels, are unable to experience it — they literally don’t know what they are missing.

This is why authoritarians of all stripes are hell-bent on producing and maintaining a society of childish citizens: dependent, trusting of the hand that feeds, obedient, pleasure-centered — perhaps capable of proficiency in well-defined tasks, but frightened, above all else, of being left to “fend for themselves.”

Progressing Toward Moral Darkness

By Gary Horne | May 19, 2012 | American Thinker

 A fashionable name for the left these days is “progressive.”  The use of this word hints that the progressive has already passed the rest of us and is moving on to some place where the normal rules of reality don’t apply.  Is it the Garden of Eden?  Atlantis?  Oz?

What will life be like in this destination?  Will the moral standards be compatible with the society we want?  How do progressive values compare with the traditional American ethical standards from the founding of the United States and from the major religions?

From the Founding:

The moral underpinnings of the United States of America were beautifully and concisely expressed in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Can we rely on the progressives to protect those unalienable rights derived from our nature as human beings?  Will they uphold the standards in the Declaration of Independence: Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness?

“Bad Big Daddy”

By William R. Mann | May 12, 2012 | Canada Free Press

“The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero

God Bless Joan Swirsky for her recent Canada Free Press article, “Bad Mommy.” It is wonderful compendium about how America missed or ignored the signals of a growing Marxist menace in America.

Radical Feminism was but one prong on a fork of efforts, coordinated generations long ago of subterfuge with which to overlay our Republic with Communism. Just as Ulysses men were nearly overcome by the effects of eating the Lotus on their way back for their victory over Troy, so Americans must reject the multicultural, Progressive vision of this faux Collectivist Utopia. Behold Ulysses’ task:

“I was driven thence by foul winds for a space of 9 days upon the sea, but on the tenth day we reached the land of the Lotus-eaters, who live on a food that comes from a kind of flower. Here we landed to take in fresh water, and our crews got their mid-day meal on the shore near the ships. When they had eaten and drunk I sent two of my company to see what manner of men the people of the place might be, and they had a third man under them. They started at once, and went about among the Lotus-Eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus-eaters without thinking further of their return; nevertheless, though they wept bitterly I forced them back to the ships and made them fast under the benches. Then I told the rest to go on board at once, lest any of them should taste of the lotus and leave off wanting to get home, so they took their places and smote the grey sea with their oars.” – The Odyssey by Homer

It was obvious to the American and International Reds early-on that America would never be won over to Communism by threat, intimidation, or war. Like “Mack the Knife,” Liberalism has erringly flashed its collectivist “pearly whites” at us once too often. The hard working folks of America are waking up. But back in the Depression only the wary, cautious traditionalists and conservatives saw the warnings, or manned the political barricades. In their day, Conservatism was slandered continuously for 50 years until the election of Ronald Reagan, himself a convert from the lies of the New Deal. Conservatism has only recently become a popular choice.

Read and understand what happened to the earlier alarm-bell ringers:

• Franklin Roosevelt’s sycophants derided anyone who questioned the New Deal Statism. The New Deal was a rush to political gibberish. FDR, himself, could not even understand the Keynesian economic nonsense. But the Progressive Left [aka Marxists Socialists] forced it into mainstream political-economic thought by constantly calling into question “the failure of Free Enterprise” and supply & demand economics, and by blaming Herbert Hoover. In Foreign Policy, anyone who dared question the Fellow Traveler dalliances and sympathies of FDR’s favorite envoys, Harry Hopkins or Averill Harriman,  were branded themselves as unpatriotic “crackpots” [a favorite derisive term of the Left then and now. In psychology that is called Projection].
• Liberals were apoplectic over Ronald Reagan’s cooperation with Congress [as President of the Screen Actors Guild] to investigate Hollywood film-making. Oh … how terrible, that the average American’s Patriotism is so “jingoistic and fascistic” as to deny a multiplicity of visions in film for American Society! “Blacklisting” people who want to subvert and destroy America as founded is now a bad thing and this term is still constantly used by the Left against the Right [again … Projection]
• Then-Congressman Richard Nixon and his House Committee staff were vilified for decades by the Liberal and Progressive Left for going after, and convicting, the State Department darling [and Soviet Agent] Alger Hiss for perjury. Even after Hiss’ treason was confirmed through old KGB files after the fall of the USSR, the Left still denied that Hiss was a Communist. But the Left “got” their old enemies, Richard Nixon and Roy Cohn, in the end. It took them thirty more years, but the Left “destroyed” their old foes.
• Similarly, the Press and the Establishment distorted, maligned and chewed up the likes of Whitaker Chambers, Senator Joe McCarthy and anyone else who dared to question infiltration of Cabinets and Agencies by “active and sleeper” Communist Agents in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. This time around, defending traditional American values was called Red-Baiting. Does this mean that what the Left does is “Patriot Baiting?” Joe McCarthy, by alerting the American Public to the intrusion of anti-Democratic ideas, methods and goals by Communist Agents, Dupes and Useful Idiots in Film, Society, the Media, and Public Service, was widely applauded by the public at first, until the Leftist Press decided enough was enough. Joe McCarthy “had to go.” So, the Progressive Machine turned its fury on McCarthy and drove him out of Public Service and into oblivion. Historical revelation since then has shown that McCarthy was largely correct in his assertions. Government was thoroughly infiltrated by Soviet agents as captured or acquired old Soviet Documents showed.
• American Academia is a bastion of admirers of Comrades Lenin and Stalin. They teach that Communism has a Right wing and a Left Wing [guess which one is bad Communism]. Further they say Communism and Socialism fails only because it has not yet been used to transform a fully developed, bourgeois Capitalist Society like the United States. Their propagation of Communist methodology and theory, posing as collegiate higher education, has stripped education of its rigors. It has instead substituted slavish regurgitation of emotional utopian Socialist dogma. The hard, true academic work of reading, research, recall, assembly, evaluation, proposition and coherent expression of ideas is all but non-existent. Instead, they foist a flawed social science methodology called “Scientific Communism” [though Leftists would substitute the term “Progressivism”] which chooses desired outcomes and then forces data and evaluation to fit the thesis.
• Fast forward to what is happening today to Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has dared to investigate the gaps and possible forgeries in Mr. Obama’s personal identity and public records. Obama’s Attorney General, the tainted Eric Holder [i.e., Ruby Ridge, Waco, Elian Gonzales, Black Panther Intimidation, Operation Gun-Runner connections] has charged Arpaio with profiling Hispanics as Illegal Aliens. What a convenient distraction and a lesson to all who would challenge monolithic Obamism. Now think about how weird such a charge is in Arizona, when the Feds will not secure the Border. This is now is the typical patter. Here is the Internationalist response by this Administration to securing our Borders and our National Security Interests: Persecute the Citizen, traditional American institutions, and American religions that threaten the Obama “Fundamental Transformation of America!”

Read the full article here.

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Is Obama’s Narcissism a National Security Concern?

By Dr. Timothy C. Daughtry | May 12, 2012 | Breitbart

Dr. Timothy Daughtry is a former clinical psychologist and co-author of a new book,Waking The Sleeping Giant: How Mainstream Americans Can Beat Liberals At Their Own Game. He advises candidates at the local, state, and federal level on understanding and countering leftist tactics. Dr. Daughtry is the Chairman and CEO of Concord Bridge Consulting.

The media flurry over Obama’s most recent position on gay marriage almost obscured a statement that could have significant implications for America’s security.

As reported by Elliott Abrams at the Weekly Standard, Obama has returned to his 1996 position of supporting gay marriage after opposing it during his senatorial and presidential campaigns. Calculated flip-flopping by a politician is not new, of course, but Abrams rightly zeroes in on a phrase in Obama’s announcement that reveals far more about his character than his change of positions on a controversial issue. As part of his reasoning for coming out, once again, in favor of gay marriage, Obama described his concern for gay “soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf…”

Fighting on his behalf? Our troops put themselves in harm’s way for Barack Obama? Presenting his “evolving” position as concern for our troops was a stretch to begin with, a weak attempt to wrap the flag around a position that will not play well in the thirty-one states that have affirmed traditional marriage. But to say that our military fights on his behalf — instead of on the behalf of the nation — reawakens concerns about the deep and abiding narcissism observed from the early days of Obama’s rapid rise to power.

The narcissistic personality is defined by characteristics such as an inflated sense of one’s importance, unrealistic fantasies of power and success, the need for constant approval and acceptance, and difficulty handling criticism from others. Narcissism is different from healthy self-esteem; people who simply have strong self-esteem can realistically evaluate their shortcomings as well as their strengths. Such people are not likely to describe their impact upon the world in messianic terms, as Obama did during the 2008 campaign when he prophesied that his election would be remembered by future generations as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

Under normal circumstances, extreme narcissism creates difficulties in personal relationships and at work because of the narcissist’s intense and unrealistic demands for approval and acceptance. When the narcissist works out of the Oval Office, however, the implications become ominous.

Read the full article here.

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Could George W. Bush Be the Last Republican President?

By Myra Adams | May 4, 2012 | PJ Media

Is it possible that George W. Bush could be the last Republican president ever, or at least for the foreseeable future?

Am I crazy to even formulate that question?

Maybe not and here are 10 reasons why.

1. Rapidly changing demographic trends that favor the Democrat Party.

2. An education system controlled by liberals that churns out young liberals.

3. A population with an ever increasing dependence on government in the form of entitlements and subsidies.

4. A mainstream media that is overwhelmingly comprised of journalists who subtly and not so subtly spin the news in support of Democrats and liberal causes.

5. The influence of Hollywood, which makes it cool to be a liberal Democrat.

6. The growing power concentrated in local, state, and federal government worker unions, whose members actively campaign against Republicans on the taxpayer dime.  (See WI Governor Walker’s upcoming recall election for an active example of this.)

7. A culture where non-traditional social and sexual behavior has become mainstream.

8. A hatred for Republicans in general and a tendency to blame the party for “the mess we’ve inherited.”

9. A Republican Party that is growing increasingly white, old, southern, and male, while alienating majorities of younger voters, Hispanics, African Americans, gays, teachers, young professionals, atheists, unmarried women, and even suburban married women.

10. The internet and the growing social media phenomenon that strongly tilts in favor of Democrats.

Together, all of the above reasons are reflected in the latest Obama vs. Romney Real Clear Politics Electoral College map.

Currently with 270 electoral votes needed to win, the states that are either likely or lean Obama total 253, while Romney’s likely or lean states total 170.

What is even more significant is the list of toss-up states.

Below is a list with their electoral votes and a hyperlink to the latest Obama vs. Romney polling averages in each state.

Arizona (11)

Colorado (9)

Florida (29)

Iowa (6)

Missouri (10)

New Hampshire (4)

North Carolina (15)

Ohio (18)

Virginia (13)

Together these 9 states total 115 electoral votes, of which Romney must win 100 if he is to reach 270.

Consult your nearest statistician for the odds of that happening.

Upon examining this lopsided electoral matchup, one could conclude that Romney is not the strongest candidate the Republicans could nominate to go up against Obama.

Sure, you could say that, but you would be wrong.

Read the full article here.

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So What Do You Think “Fundamental Transformation” Will Do? Just Ask Winston Churchill!

“A  love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril.”  ~Sir Winston Churchill

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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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Suicide of a Superpower: Pat Buchanan on the Death of Western Civilization [Video]

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The Secularization of Martin Luther King, Jr.

By Ken Blackwell | April 26, 2012 | Breitbart

 This month at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington, the faithful met to worship the Almighty and discuss the latest battles for religious liberty in an increasingly secular culture.

When the Knights of Columbus’ Supreme Knight Carl Anderson spoke, he made a startling observation about the new Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. monument which has not been widely reported and is quite unique among monuments throughout our nation’s capital. Even though Dr. King was a Baptist minister and his history-altering speeches about civil liberties are saturated with references to natural rights and profound theological constructs, all 14 quotes carefully etched into his stone monument completely eschew references to God!

Mr. Anderson mocked those in authority who were given the difficult task of carefully combing through Rev. King’s archives trying to find a few secular quotations.

In Dr. King’s famous letter from the Birmingham jail, which is full of religious references, he relied on the Catholic natural law tradition by citing Saint Augustine of Hippo, who said in On Free Choice of the Will that “an unjust law is no law at all.” King went on to proclaim he and his peaceful supporters were “in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”

Read he full article here.

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America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution

By Angelo M. Codevilla | July 2010 – August 2010 Issue | American Spectator

The only serious opposition to this arrogant Ruling Party is coming not from feckless Republicans but from what might be called the Country Party — and its vision is revolutionary. Our special Summer Issue cover story.

As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors’ “toxic assets” was the only alternative to the U.S. economy’s “systemic collapse.” In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets’ nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.

When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term “political class” came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public’s understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the “ruling class.” And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.

Although after the election of 2008 most Republican office holders argued against the Troubled Asset Relief Program, against the subsequent bailouts of the auto industry, against the several “stimulus” bills and further summary expansions of government power to benefit clients of government at the expense of ordinary citizens, the American people had every reason to believe that many Republican politicians were doing so simply by the logic of partisan opposition. After all, Republicans had been happy enough to approve of similar things under Republican administrations. Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degree, not kind. Moreover, 2009-10 establishment Republicans sought only to modify the government’s agenda while showing eagerness to join the Democrats in new grand schemes, if only they were allowed to. Sen. Orrin Hatch continued dreaming of being Ted Kennedy, while Lindsey Graham set aside what is true or false about “global warming” for the sake of getting on the right side of history. No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class’s continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place. The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it.

Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and “bureaucrat” was a dirty word for all. So was “social engineering.” Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday’s upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.

Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century’s Northerners and Southerners — nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, “prayed to the same God.” By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God “who created and doth sustain us,” our ruling class prays to itself as “saviors of the planet” and improvers of humanity. Our classes’ clash is over “whose country” America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark’s Gospel: “if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”

The Political Divide

Important as they are, our political divisions are the iceberg’s tip. When pollsters ask the American people whether they are likely to vote Republican or Democrat in the next presidential election, Republicans win growing pluralities. But whenever pollsters add the preferences “undecided,” “none of the above,” or “tea party,” these win handily, the Democrats come in second, and the Republicans trail far behind. That is because while most of the voters who call themselves Democrats say that Democratic officials represent them well, only a fourth of the voters who identify themselves as Republicans tell pollsters that Republican officeholders represent them well. Hence officeholders, Democrats and Republicans, gladden the hearts of some one-third of the electorate — most Democratic voters, plus a few Republicans. This means that Democratic politicians are the ruling class’s prime legitimate representatives and that because Republican politicians are supported by only a fourth of their voters while the rest vote for them reluctantly, most are aspirants for a junior role in the ruling class. In short, the ruling class has a party, the Democrats. But some two-thirds of Americans — a few Democratic voters, most Republican voters, and all independents — lack a vehicle in electoral politics.

Sooner or later, well or badly, that majority’s demand for representation will be filled. Whereas in 1968 Governor George Wallace’s taunt “there ain’t a dime’s worth of difference” between the Republican and Democratic parties resonated with only 13.5 percent of the American people, in 1992 Ross Perot became a serious contender for the presidency (at one point he was favored by 39 percent of Americans vs. 31 percent for G.H.W. Bush and 25 percent for Clinton) simply by speaking ill of the ruling class. Today, few speak well of the ruling class. Not only has it burgeoned in size and pretense, but it also has undertaken wars it has not won, presided over a declining economy and mushrooming debt, made life more expensive, raised taxes, and talked down to the American people. Americans’ conviction that the ruling class is as hostile as it is incompetent has solidified. The polls tell us that only about a fifth of Americans trust the government to do the right thing. The rest expect that it will do more harm than good and are no longer afraid to say so.

While Europeans are accustomed to being ruled by presumed betters whom they distrust, the American people’s realization of being ruled like Europeans shocked this country into well nigh revolutionary attitudes. But only the realization was new. The ruling class had sunk deep roots in America over decades before 2008. Machiavelli compares serious political diseases to the Aetolian fevers — easy to treat early on while they are difficult to discern, but virtually untreatable by the time they become obvious.

Far from speculating how the political confrontation might develop between America’s regime class — relatively few people supported by no more than one-third of Americans — and a country class comprising two-thirds of the country, our task here is to understand the divisions that underlie that confrontation’s unpredictable future. More on politics below.

The Ruling Class

Who are these rulers, and by what right do they rule? How did America change from a place where people could expect to live without bowing to privileged classes to one in which, at best, they might have the chance to climb into them? What sets our ruling class apart from the rest of us?

The most widespread answers — by such as the Times‘s Thomas Friedman and David Brooks — are schlock sociology. Supposedly, modern society became so complex and productive, the technical skills to run it so rare, that it called forth a new class of highly educated officials and cooperators in an ever less private sector. Similarly fanciful is Edward Goldberg’s notion that America is now ruled by a “newocracy”: a “new aristocracy who are the true beneficiaries of globalization — including the multinational manager, the technologist and the aspirational members of the meritocracy.” In fact, our ruling class grew and set itself apart from the rest of us by its connection with ever bigger government, and above all by a certain attitude.

Other explanations are counterintuitive. Wealth? The heads of the class do live in our big cities’ priciest enclaves and suburbs, from Montgomery County, Maryland, to Palo Alto, California, to Boston’s Beacon Hill as well as in opulent university towns from Princeton to Boulder. But they are no wealthier than many Texas oilmen or California farmers, or than neighbors with whom they do not associate — just as the social science and humanities class that rules universities seldom associates with physicians and physicists. Rather, regardless of where they live, their social-intellectual circle includes people in the lucrative “nonprofit” and “philanthropic” sectors and public policy. What really distinguishes these privileged people demographically is that, whether in government power directly or as officers in companies, their careers and fortunes depend on government. They vote Democrat more consistently than those who live on any of America’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Streets. These socioeconomic opposites draw their money and orientation from the same sources as the millions of teachers, consultants, and government employees in the middle ranks who aspire to be the former and identify morally with what they suppose to be the latter’s grievances.

Professional prominence or position will not secure a place in the class any more than mere money. In fact, it is possible to be an official of a major corporation or a member of the U.S. Supreme Court (just ask Justice Clarence Thomas), or even president (Ronald Reagan), and not be taken seriously by the ruling class. Like a fraternity, this class requires above all comity — being in with the right people, giving the required signs that one is on the right side, and joining in despising the Outs. Once an official or professional shows that he shares the manners, the tastes, the interests of the class, gives lip service to its ideals and shibboleths, and is willing to accommodate the interests of its senior members, he can move profitably among our establishment’s parts.

If, for example, you are Laurence Tribe in 1984, Harvard professor of law, leftist pillar of the establishment, you can “write” your magnum opus by using the products of your student assistant, Ron Klain. A decade later, after Klain admits to having written some parts of the book, and the other parts are found to be verbatim or paraphrases of a book published in 1974, you can claim (perhaps correctly) that your plagiarism was “inadvertent,” and you can count on the Law School’s dean, Elena Kagan, to appoint a committee including former and future Harvard president Derek Bok that issues a secret report that “closes” the incident. Incidentally, Kagan ends up a justice of the Supreme Court. Not one of these people did their jobs: the professor did not write the book himself, the assistant plagiarized instead of researching, the dean and the committee did not hold the professor accountable, and all ended up rewarded. By contrast, for example, learned papers and distinguished careers in climatology at MIT (Richard Lindzen) or UVA (S. Fred Singer) are not enough for their questions about “global warming” to be taken seriously. For our ruling class, identity always trumps.

Much less does membership in the ruling class depend on high academic achievement. To see something closer to an academic meritocracy consider France, where elected officials have little power, a vast bureaucracy explicitly controls details from how babies are raised to how to make cheese, and people get into and advance in that bureaucracy strictly by competitive exams. Hence for good or ill, France’s ruling class are bright people — certifiably. Not ours. But didn’t ours go to Harvard and Princeton and Stanford? Didn’t most of them get good grades? Yes. But while getting into the Ecole Nationale d’Administration or the Ecole Polytechnique or the dozens of other entry points to France’s ruling class requires outperforming others in blindly graded exams, and graduating from such places requires passing exams that many fail, getting into America’s “top schools” is less a matter of passing exams than of showing up with acceptable grades and an attractive social profile. American secondary schools are generous with their As. Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges. And it is an open secret that “the best” colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages. No, our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in. The most successful neither write books and papers that stand up to criticism nor release their academic records. Thus does our ruling class stunt itself through negative selection. But the more it has dumbed itself down, the more it has defined itself by the presumption of intellectual superiority.

The Faith

Its attitude is key to understanding our bipartisan ruling class. Its first tenet is that “we” are the best and brightest while the rest of Americans are retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional unless properly constrained. How did this replace the Founding generation’s paradigm that “all men are created equal”?

The notion of human equality was always a hard sell, because experience teaches us that we are so unequal in so many ways, and because making one’s self superior is so tempting that Lincoln called it “the old serpent, you work I’ll eat.” But human equality made sense to our Founding generation because they believed that all men are made in the image and likeness of God, because they were yearning for equal treatment under British law, or because they had read John Locke.

It did not take long for their paradigm to be challenged by interest and by “science.” By the 1820s, as J. C. Calhoun was reading in the best London journals that different breeds of animals and plants produce inferior or superior results, slave owners were citing the Negroes’ deficiencies to argue that they should remain slaves indefinitely. Lots of others were reading Ludwig Feuerbach’s rendition of Hegelian philosophy, according to which biblical injunctions reflect the fantasies of alienated human beings or, in the young Karl Marx’s formulation, that ethical thought is “superstructural” to material reality. By 1853, when Sen. John Pettit of Ohio called “all men are created equal” “a self-evident lie,” much of America’s educated class had already absorbed the “scientific” notion (which Darwin only popularized) that man is the product of chance mutation and natural selection of the fittest. Accordingly, by nature, superior men subdue inferior ones as they subdue lower beings or try to improve them as they please. Hence while it pleased the abolitionists to believe in freeing Negroes and improving them, it also pleased them to believe that Southerners had to be punished and reconstructed by force. As the 19th century ended, the educated class’s religious fervor turned to social reform: they were sure that because man is a mere part of evolutionary nature, man could be improved, and that they, the most highly evolved of all, were the improvers.

Thus began the Progressive Era. When Woodrow Wilson in 1914 was asked “can’t you let anything alone?” he answered with, “I let everything alone that you can show me is not itself moving in the wrong direction, but I am not going to let those things alone that I see are going down-hill.” Wilson spoke for the thousands of well-off Americans who patronized the spas at places like Chautauqua and Lake Mohonk. By such upper-middle-class waters, progressives who imagined themselves the world’s examples and the world’s reformers dreamt big dreams of establishing order, justice, and peace at home and abroad. Neither were they shy about their desire for power. Wilson was the first American statesman to argue that the Founders had done badly by depriving the U.S. government of the power to reshape American society. Nor was Wilson the last to invade a foreign country (Mexico) to “teach [them] to elect good men.”

World War I and the chaos at home and abroad that followed it discredited the Progressives in the American people’s eyes. Their international schemes had brought blood and promised more. Their domestic management had not improved Americans’ lives, but given them a taste of arbitrary government, including Prohibition. The Progressives, for their part, found it fulfilling to attribute the failure of their schemes to the American people’s backwardness, to something deeply wrong with America. The American people had failed them because democracy in its American form perpetuated the worst in humanity. Thus Progressives began to look down on the masses, to look on themselves as the vanguard, and to look abroad for examples to emulate.

The cultural divide between the “educated class” and the rest of the country opened in the interwar years. Some Progressives joined the “vanguard of the proletariat,” the Communist Party. Many more were deeply sympathetic to Soviet Russia, as they were to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Not just the Nation, but also the New York Timesand National Geographic found much to be imitated in these regimes because they promised energetically to transcend their peoples’ ways and to build “the new man.” Above all, our educated class was bitter about America. In 1925 the American Civil Liberties Union sponsored a legal challenge to a Tennessee law that required teaching the biblical account of creation. The ensuing trial, radio broadcast nationally, as well as the subsequent hit movie Inherit the Wind, were the occasion for what one might have called the Chautauqua class to drive home the point that Americans who believed in the Bible were willful ignoramuses. As World War II approached, some American Progressives supported the Soviet Union (and its ally, Nazi Germany) and others Great Britain and France. But Progressives agreed on one thing: the approaching war should be blamed on the majority of Americans, because they had refused to lead the League of Nations. Darryl Zanuck produced the critically acclaimed movie [Woodrow] Wilson featuring Cedric Hardwicke as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who allegedly brought on the war by appealing to American narrow-mindedness against Wilson’s benevolent genius.

Franklin Roosevelt brought the Chautauqua class into his administration and began the process that turned them into rulers. FDR described America’s problems in technocratic terms. America’s problems would be fixed by a “brain trust” (picked by him). His New Deal’s solutions — the alphabet-soup “independent” agencies that have run America ever since — turned many Progressives into powerful bureaucrats and then into lobbyists. As the saying goes, they came to Washington to do good, and stayed to do well.

As their number and sense of importance grew, so did their distaste for common Americans. Believing itself “scientific,” this Progressive class sought to explain its differences from its neighbors in “scientific” terms. The most elaborate of these attempts was Theodor Adorno’s widely acclaimed The Authoritarian Personality (1948). It invented a set of criteria by which to define personality traits, ranked these traits and their intensity in any given person on what it called the “F scale” (F for fascist), interviewed hundreds of Americans, and concluded that most who were not liberal Democrats were latent fascists. This way of thinking about non-Progressives filtered down to college curricula. In 1963-64 for example, I was assigned Herbert McCloskey’s Conservatism and Personality (1958) at Rutgers’s Eagleton Institute of Politics as a paradigm of methodological correctness. The author had defined conservatism in terms of answers to certain questions, had defined a number of personality disorders in terms of other questions, and run a survey that proved “scientifically” that conservatives were maladjusted ne’er-do-well ignoramuses. (My class project, titled “Liberalism and Personality,” following the same methodology, proved just as scientifically that liberals suffered from the very same social diseases, and even more amusing ones.)

The point is this: though not one in a thousand of today’s bipartisan ruling class ever heard of Adorno or McCloskey, much less can explain the Feuerbachian-Marxist notion that human judgments are “epiphenomenal” products of spiritual or material alienation, the notion that the common people’s words are, like grunts, mere signs of pain, pleasure, and frustration, is now axiomatic among our ruling class. They absorbed it osmotically, second — or thirdhand, from their education and from companions. Truly, after Barack Obama described his opponents’ clinging to “God and guns” as a characteristic of inferior Americans, he justified himself by pointing out he had said “whateverybody knows is true.” Confident “knowledge” that “some of us, the ones who matter,” have grasped truths that the common herd cannot, truths that direct us, truths the grasping of which entitles us to discount what the ruled say and to presume what they mean, made our Progressives into a class long before they took power.

The Agenda: Power

Our ruling class’s agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof. Like left-wing parties always and everywhere, it is a “machine,” that is, based on providing tangible rewards to its members. Such parties often provide rank-and-file activists with modest livelihoods and enhance mightily the upper levels’ wealth. Because this is so, whatever else such parties might accomplish, they must feed the machine by transferring money or jobs or privileges — civic as well as economic — to the party’s clients, directly or indirectly. This, incidentally, is close to Aristotle’s view of democracy. Hence our ruling class’s standard approach to any and all matters, its solution to any and all problems, is to increase the power of the government — meaning of those who run it, meaning themselves, to profit those who pay with political support for privileged jobs, contracts, etc. Hence more power for the ruling class has been our ruling class’s solution not just for economic downturns and social ills but also for hurricanes and tornadoes, global cooling and global warming. A priori, one might wonder whether enriching and empowering individuals of a certain kind can make Americans kinder and gentler, much less control the weather. But there can be no doubt that such power and money makes Americans ever more dependent on those who wield it. Let us now look at what this means in our time.

Dependence Economics

By taxing and parceling out more than a third of what Americans produce, through regulations that reach deep into American life, our ruling class is making itself the arbiter of wealth and poverty. While the economic value of anything depends on sellers and buyers agreeing on that value as civil equals in the absence of force, modern government is about nothing if not tampering with civil equality. By endowing some in society with power to force others to sell cheaper than they would, and forcing others yet to buy at higher prices — even to buy in the first place — modern government makes valuable some things that are not, and devalues others that are. Thus if you are not among the favored guests at the table where officials make detailed lists of who is to receive what at whose expense, you are on the menu. Eventually, pretending forcibly that valueless things have value dilutes the currency’s value for all.

Laws and regulations nowadays are longer than ever because length is needed to specify how people will be treated unequally. For example, the health care bill of 2010 takes more than 2,700 pages to make sure not just that some states will be treated differently from others because their senators offered key political support, but more importantly to codify bargains between the government and various parts of the health care industry, state governments, and large employers about who would receive what benefits (e.g., public employee unions and auto workers) and who would pass what indirect taxes onto the general public. The financial regulation bill of 2010, far from setting univocal rules for the entire financial industry in few words, spends some 3,000 pages (at this writing) tilting the field exquisitely toward some and away from others. Even more significantly, these and other products of Democratic and Republican administrations and Congresses empower countless boards and commissions arbitrarily to protect some persons and companies, while ruining others. Thus in 2008 the Republican administration first bailed out Bear Stearns, then let Lehman Brothers sink in the ensuing panic, but then rescued Goldman Sachs by infusing cash into its principal debtor, AIG. Then, its Democratic successor used similarly naked discretionary power (and money appropriated for another purpose) to give major stakes in the auto industry to labor unions that support it. Nowadays, the members of our ruling class admit that they do not read the laws. They don’t have to. Because modern laws are primarily grants of discretion, all anybody has to know about them is whom they empower.

By making economic rules dependent on discretion, our bipartisan ruling class teaches that prosperity is to be bought with the coin of political support. Thus in the 1990s and 2000s, as Democrats and Republicans forced banks to make loans for houses to people and at rates they would not otherwise have considered, builders and investors had every reason to make as much money as they could from the ensuing inflation of housing prices. When the bubble burst, only those connected with the ruling class at the bottom and at the top were bailed out. Similarly, by taxing the use of carbon fuels and subsidizing “alternative energy,” our ruling class created arguably the world’s biggest opportunity for making money out of things that few if any would buy absent its intervention. The ethanol industry and its ensuing diversions of wealth exist exclusively because of subsidies. The prospect of legislation that would put a price on carbon emissions and allot certain amounts to certain companies set off a feeding frenzy among large companies to show support for a “green agenda,” because such allotments would be worth tens of billions of dollars. That is why companies hired some 2,500 lobbyists in 2009 to deepen their involvement in “climate change.” At the very least, such involvement profits them by making them into privileged collectors of carbon taxes. Any “green jobs” thus created are by definition creatures of subsidies — that is, of privilege. What effect creating such privileges may have on “global warming” is debatable. But it surely increases the number of people dependent on the ruling class, and teaches Americans that satisfying that class is a surer way of making a living than producing goods and services that people want to buy.

Beyond patronage, picking economic winners and losers redirects the American people’s energies to tasks that the political class deems more worthy than what Americans choose for themselves. John Kenneth Galbraith’s characterization of America as “private wealth amidst public squalor” (The Affluent Society, 1958) has ever encapsulated our best and brightest’s complaint: left to themselves, Americans use land inefficiently in suburbs and exurbs, making it necessary to use energy to transport them to jobs and shopping. Americans drive big cars, eat lots of meat as well as other unhealthy things, and go to the doctor whenever they feel like it. Americans think it justice to spend the money they earn to satisfy their private desires even though the ruling class knows that justice lies in improving the community and the planet. The ruling class knows that Americans must learn to live more densely and close to work, that they must drive smaller cars and change their lives to use less energy, that their dietary habits must improve, that they must accept limits in how much medical care they get, that they must divert more of their money to support people, cultural enterprises, and plans for the planet that the ruling class deems worthier. So, ever-greater taxes and intrusive regulations are the main wrenches by which the American people can be improved (and, yes, by which the ruling class feeds and grows).

The 2010 medical law is a template for the ruling class’s economic modus operandi: the government taxes citizens to pay for medical care and requires citizens to purchase health insurance. The money thus taken and directed is money that the citizens themselves might have used to pay for medical care. In exchange for the money, the government promises to provide care through its “system.” But then all the boards, commissions, guidelines, procedures, and “best practices” that constitute “the system” become the arbiters of what any citizen ends up getting. The citizen might end up dissatisfied with what “the system” offers. But when he gave up his money, he gave up the power to choose, and became dependent on all the boards and commissions that his money also pays for and that raise the cost of care. Similarly, in 2008 the House Ways and Means Committee began considering a plan to force citizens who own Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) to transfer those funds into government-run “guaranteed retirement accounts.” If the government may force citizens to buy health insurance, by what logic can it not force them to trade private ownership and control of retirement money for a guarantee as sound as the government itself? Is it not clear that the government knows more about managing retirement income than individuals?

Who Depends on Whom?

In Congressional Government (1885) Woodrow Wilson left no doubt: the U.S. Constitution prevents the government from meeting the country’s needs by enumerating rights that the government may not infringe. (“Congress shall make no law…” says the First Amendment, typically.) Our electoral system, based on single member districts, empowers individual voters at the expense of “responsible parties.” Hence the ruling class’s perpetual agenda has been to diminish the role of the citizenry’s elected representatives, enhancing that of party leaders as well as of groups willing to partner in the government’s plans, and to craft a “living” Constitution in which restrictions on government give way to “positive rights” — meaning charters of government power.

Consider representation. Following Wilson, American Progressives have always wanted to turn the U.S. Congress from the role defined by James Madison’s Federalist #10, “refine and enlarge the public’s view,” to something like the British Parliament, which ratifies government actions. Although Britain’s electoral system — like ours, single members elected in historic districts by plurality vote — had made members of Parliament responsive to their constituents in ancient times, by Wilson’s time the growing importance of parties made MPs beholden to party leaders. Hence whoever controls the majority party controls both Parliament and the government.

In America, the process by which party has become (almost) as important began with the Supreme Court’s 1962 decision in Baker v. Carr which, by setting the single standard “one man, one vote” for congressional districts, ended up legalizing the practice of “gerrymandering,” concentrating the opposition party’s voters into as few districts as possible while placing one’s own voters into as many as possible likely to yield victories. Republican and Democratic state legislatures have gerrymandered for a half century. That is why today’s Congress consists more and more of persons who represent their respective party establishments — not nearly as much as in Britain, but heading in that direction. Once districts are gerrymandered “safe” for one party or another, the voters therein count less because party leaders can count more on elected legislators to toe the party line.

To the extent party leaders do not have to worry about voters, they can choose privileged interlocutors, representing those in society whom they find most amenable. In America ever more since the 1930s — elsewhere in the world this practice is ubiquitous and long-standing — government has designated certain individuals, companies, and organizations within each of society’s sectors as (junior) partners in elaborating laws and administrative rules for those sectors. The government empowers the persons it has chosen over those not chosen, deems them the sector’s true representatives, and rewards them. They become part of the ruling class.

Read the full article here.

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Law Professor: Zimmerman Prosecutor Unethical and Politically Motivated [Video]

Legal Expert Dershowitz Tells Beck: Zimmerman Charges ‘Unethical’ and ‘About Politics’

By Tiffany Gabbay | April 24, 2012 | The Blaze

During Tuesday morning’s radio broadcast, renown legal professor Alan Dershowitz joined Glenn Beck and his co-hosts to discuss the legal intricacies of second degree murder charges, particularly as they relate to George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin case. The veteran law expert asserted unequivocally that the evidence in the case does not support the charge of second degree murder and that it is “unethical” behavior, “not incompetence,” on the part of the prosecution to have pursed such a charge. 

Dershowitz explained that in order to substantiate second degree murder, pure malice and “extreme disregard” for human life must be evident and that nothing present in the affidavit submitted met those elements. He added that the prosecution would have had to show Zimmerman made a conscious decision “to kill the young man because he hated him.. or didn’t value his life.”

The legal professor also explained that, given the pictures of Zimmerman’s bloodied head and the facts of the case known thus far, a second degree murder charge is nearly impossible to prosecute. With this in mind, Dershowitz concluded that the prosecution must have purposely withheld evidence for political purposes in order to pursue a second degree murder charge.

“The blood is a smoking gun,” he stated emphatically.

According to Dershowitz, in Florida, a second degree murder charge is the same as first degree murder except for the fact that it does not carry the death penalty. This is not the kind of case where second degree murder “is charged by ethical and rational prosecutors based on the evidence.“ He added that withholding evidence is unlawful and reminded that ”this is not a poker game.”

Read the full article here.

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Guess Who Rejects America’s Founding Ideas?

By Alan Keyes | April 20, 2012 | WND

Exclusive: Alan Keyes charges GOP with pushing despotism over gov’t constraints

During the GOP primary season, people vying to be the Republican nominee for this or that office in most parts of the county will routinely give pro-forma respect to the republican ideas of America’s founders and posture as champions of the Constitution framed in light of those ideas. Especially when attacking their Democratic opponents, most will pose as champions of liberty, free enterprise and limited government. Such posturing makes sense as a matter of purely selfish political calculation since the overwhelming majority of the GOP’s voter base consists of pro-American patriots (as evidenced by the conservative tone of the GOP platform).

Yet despite the rhetoric they cynically deploy to manipulate their party’s pro-American constituency, these days most GOP politicians are pressured into acting on an understanding of politics that fundamentally rejects the republican concepts of the founders. As I have elsewhere discussed, America’s founders acted on the assumption that justice is the end or aim of human society and government.

“It may accurately be said that the people most responsible for the American founding were obsessed with justice. They saw it as the overriding purpose of political life, to which the freeways of passion would ultimately be forced to submit. But if, by deliberation, people recognize and submit to its requirements, their freedom of choice becomes the basis for government, rather than forced submission. The extent and degree of their self-determination with respect to the requirements of justice establishes the extent of individual freedom in their society. In this respect, the more good individuals are willing to do of their own volition, the less the force of government will be called upon to do for them. Conversely, the less justice they reflect in their individual choices, the more the force of government will be called upon to dictate and impose upon their actions. Freedom depends on individual responsibility. ”

As stated in the Declaration of Independence, the republican ideas of America’s founders start from the premise that human beings are creatures of God, naturally governed by laws that reflect the will of their Creator. They are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, which are the routines of natural conscience (i.e., knowledge inherent in the way they are made; the special information by which the activities that correspond to their particular way of being are revealed; the program or choreography of the movements by which God intends to dance His way through their existence) by which reason promulgates those laws to all humanity. As they are translated into action, the routines of natural conscience constitute the exercise of natural liberty in which each and every human being peacefully does and/or enjoys all that the Creator’s law for their nature makes it necessary and appropriate for them to do or to enjoy.

Read the full article here.

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Do You Know Why Earth Day is April 22?

By Kevin DeAnna | April 19, 2012 | WND

Clue: It didn’t start as celebration of butterflies, recycling and solar energy

School children, businesses, clergy, politicians and even the United States military soon will honor the birthday of Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union.

Of course, they will call it Earth Day.

Brian Sussman points out in his explosive new book, “Eco-Tyranny: How the Left’s Green Agenda will Dismantle America,” that the first nationwide Earth Day was held April 22, 1970, the 100th anniversary of the birth of the communist Bolshevik leader.

The “nationwide teach in” was spearheaded by Democratic Sen. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin and college professor Paul Ehrlich.

Ehrlich had just written the “Population Bomb” in 1968, which famously – and falsely – predicted, “In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

Building on the idea, Ehrlich went on to advocate “brutal and heartless decisions” to solve the “problem” of overpopulation.

Comparing humanity to a cancer, he stated, “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. … We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.”

Ehrlich went on to add, “We must have population control at home, hopefully through changes in our value system, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.”

Inspired by the book, Nelson met with Ehrlich and came up with the idea of the “nationwide teach in” with the purpose of tapping the “environmental concerns of the general public and infuse the student anti-war energy into the environmental cause.”

Nelson selected campus anti-war and left-wing activist Denis Hayes to coordinate efforts for the first “Earth Day.” Hayes later would brag to the New York Times how he fled overseas because “he had to get away from America” and refused to print bumper stickers for the event because “they go on automobiles.”

Organized by radical student activists, built on the model of left-wing “teach-ins” at American universities, and created with the objective of furthering progressive activism, Sussman notes that the movement for Earth Day took to heart Lenin’s adage, “Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevik forever.”

However, Sussman exposes in “Eco-Tyranny” that the Bolshevik influence goes beyond tactics. After implementing his tyrannical rule over Russia in the October Revolution, Lenin issued a Decree on Land within his first year as Communist Party chairman. The decree declared that all forests, waters and minerals were property of the state.

Lenin also issued the decree “On Hunting Seasons and the Right to Possess Hunting Weapons,” which banned hunting moose and wild goats and ended open seasons for a variety of other animals.

Another resolution adopted by the Soviet government titled “On the Protection of Nature, Gardens, and Parks” established zapovedniki, or human-free nature preserves.

Despite the poverty of the people under Soviet rule, Lenin decided that it better served the national interest to place the rich natural resources of the area beyond human reach.

Sussman summarizes, “During Lenin’s reign, Russia initiated the most audacious nature conservancy program in the twentieth century. Starting with a vision created by Marx 50 years prior, Lenin had successfully implemented version one of the green agenda. His accomplishments would eventually … [be] celebrated the world over each April.”

Today, Earth Day is the most widely celebrated secular holiday in the world, with almost every major American institution paying it some sort of recognition in spite of its extreme origins. Despite the mainstreaming of Lenin’s anniversary celebration, left-wing activists honor the true history of the holiday by attacking property rights and human economic activity.

Read full article here.

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Forgerygate: Ignoring Arpaio’s Report is a Scandal in Itself

By Jeffrey T. Kuhner | March 15, 2012 | Washington Times

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio announces preliminary findings of his investigation into the authenticity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate during a March 1 news conference in Phoenix, Ariz.

Is President Obama’s birth certificate a forgery? Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz., believes it is. He recently held a press conference in Phoenix to discuss the findings of a new 10-page report. Mr. Arpaio’s investigators have come to a stunning conclusion: The long-form birth certificate Mr. Obama released last year is a “computer-generated forgery.”

With the exception of The Washington Times, however, no major U.S. media outlet reported this bombshell story. The liberal press corps is desperately trying to suppress any discussion of Forgerygate — potentially one of the biggest scandals in American history. The media class is betraying its fundamental mission to pursue the truth.

“Based on all of the evidence presented and investigated, I cannot in good faith report to you that these documents are authentic,” Sheriff Arpaio said. “My investigators believe that the long-form birth certificate was manufactured electronically and that it did not originate in paper format as claimed by the White House.”

The Washington Times story, written by Stephen Dinan, points out that Mr. Arpaio has called for Congress to investigate the matter. Think about this: A high-profile sheriff orders a team of former law enforcement officials to examine whether the president is truly a natural born citizen and that he has the constitutional and legal right to occupy the White House. Their official report is that Mr. Obama’s documents are shoddy and he likely engaged in deliberate fraud. And yet, most of the American press corps doesn’t believe this is an important news story? The liberal media has become rotten to the core.

Ironically, the foreign press reported widely on the story. For example, Pravda — that’s right, the former official organ of the Soviet Communist Party — did an extensive analysis of Mr. Arpaio’s findings. The article by Dianna Cotter asks the obvious question: What are U.S. journalists afraid of?

The answer is that the issue strikes at the heart of Mr. Obama’s administration: If his presidency is illegal, then all of his accomplishments — the stimulus, Obamacare, the contraceptive mandate, the government takeover of the auto sector and appointments to the Supreme Court — are illegitimate as well. The scandal would trigger a constitutional crisis.

Following Mr. Obama’s surprise news conference last year, when he unveiled the long-form certificate, the media insisted that the controversy was settled once and for all. The “birthers” supposedly had been silenced. Mr. Arpaio’s report, however, changes that. The issue has been resuscitated — except in the eyes of the mainstream media.

A prominent sheriff says he has damning evidence that Mr. Obama probably lied to the public. The international media believes it’s a big deal; many Americans agree. They want to get to the bottom of it. Yet, the liberal hacks at the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC can do nothing more than yawn.

Read the full article here.

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The Best of Fred Hutchison: Postmodern Barbarians

By Fred Hutchison | April 19, 2012 | RenewAmerica

Originally published June 17, 2004

In this essay, I discuss some psychological similarities between Postmodernism and barbarism. Both seem to inflict some of the same kinds of torments upon the mind. I shall contrast these miseries with the joys of a high culture.

Modernism and primitivism

By an irony of history, men of the French Enlightenment began the cult of “progress” at the same time they began to idealize the “noble savage.” This curious paradox occurred in the middle of the eighteenth century. Interestingly, the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau provided a stimulus for both seemingly contradictory things.

The fascination with primitivism has continued through the modern and postmodern eras. Modernism was disconnected from the great ideals of the classical civilization of Europe — which I like to call Baroque Civilization. In spite of this detachment from the old ideals, Modernism profited greatly from the western cultural heritage. It constantly drew from this heritage in spite of its irrational ideological insistence that the past was “darkened,” the present day is “enlightened,” and the future will be glorious.

There was a Romantic reaction against Modernism in which Classical and Medieval revivals in the arts and architecture occurred. Some critics have pronounced these Victorian styles to be “decadent.” (This kind of decadence is not to be confused with the fin-de-siecle decadent art which was pornographic.) Pitirim Sorokin said that Victorian classicism was “overripe.”

Some sensitive artists and scholars revolted against this overripe decadence and reached towards primitivism. Gauguin, a French post-impressionist painter, traveled to Tahiti to celebrate primitivism in his art and in his experience. Picasso’s transition from Neoclassicism to abstract expressionism began as he obsessively stared at an African mask. Margaret Mead traveled to Samoa seeking a rationale for a liberation from the Victorian “sexual repression” which Freud warned about. She sought an example of sexual liberation in primitive Samoa. Her game of pseudo-science has long since been exposed and discredited. But the myths she created are still in circulation among postmodern liberals. The myths are going strong in the cult of Multiculturalism and in the delusions of the sexual revolution.

In our popular culture, the longing for primitivism and barbarism can still be heard in the primitive beat of much of hard rock music, in cartoonish movies such as 1982’s Conan the Barbarian, and in the clownish exhibitionism of public wrestling.

The fallacies of barbarian fantasies

Kenneth Clark made short work of the Romantic nostalgia for barbarism. “People tell me that they prefer barbarism to civilization. I doubt if they have given it a long enough trial….they are bored with civilization; but all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater. Quite apart from discomforts and privations, there was no escape from it. Very restricted company, no books, no light after dark, no hope. On one side the sea battering away, on the other infinite expanses of bog and forest. A most melancholy existence!” (Civilization, by Kenneth Clarke)

Clarke pointed out that the Anglo-Saxon poets had no illusions about barbarism.

“A wise man may grasp how ghastly it shall be/ When all this world’s wealth stands waste/ Even as now, in many places over the earth,/ Walls stand wind beaten,/ heavy with hoar frost; ruined-habitations…/The maker of men has so marred this dwelling/ That human laughter is not heard about it/ and idle stand these old giant works.”

“These fragments have I shorn up against my ruin.” (T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land) Eliot’s gloom sounds a little like barbarian melancholy. He was an intelligent modern looking over the brink at Postmodernism. The existential despair which was shortly to follow Eliot’s time would be even more forlorn in its message. The liberal Postmodernism of our day is one further stage of retreat from hope.

Postmodern counter-culture

Postmodernism is not decadent. It is counter-cultural. Decadence (from the root word decay) is a debasement of aging cultural forms. A counter-cultural revolt is a rejection, not an inferior imitation of the forms’ cultural heritage. Postmodernism involves an utter renunciation of the Western cultural heritage. As a result, Postmoderns not only cherish cultural primitivism, as did their decadent Modernist forbears; they suffer from some of the pathologies which the barbarians used to suffer — boredom, fragmentation, hopelessness, and melancholy.

I would also add claustrophobia. Postmoderns do not suffer the claustrophobia of living at close quarters in a mud hut. I think they suffer from a mental claustrophobia of thinking within the closed system of cultural determinism. It is as though their minds are trapped in an endlessly repeating loop of a computer program. As their thinking has become compressed, they have become prone to narrow ideologies, ideological myths, the terrors of ideological bogeymen, and cartoonish interpretations of the world. The Postmodern renunciation of reason has turned their minds into a shadowy underground cavern in which all the exits are blocked. Such may be the fate of those who turn away from reason and from high culture.

Barbarism is filled with myths and taboos. The politically-correct speech codes of Postmodernism are also full of taboos. A barbarian will kill you if you violate a taboo. A Postmodernist will demonize you if you violate a taboo, will try to block you from speaking, and will prevent you from getting tenure if he can.

Read the full article here.

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Why Liberals Foster a Black ‘Thug Culture’

By Erik Rush | April 18, 2012 | WND

Exclusive: Erik Rush describes how the left props up quintessential race stereotypes

With the furor over the shooting death of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman on Feb. 26, it quickly became clear that a preponderance of black Americans were buying into the narrative proffered by the establishment press, radical activists and far-left politicos. Generally, they believed that the shooting was an act of murder, that Zimmerman was a white racist and that law enforcement was prepared to evade its responsibility in investigating the incident because the victim was black.

It is not my intention to expound further upon this phenomenon, although the dynamics are quite significant. Instead, I’d like to shed light on why so many blacks readily react to racially charged incidents in the way they do and how this is used to further fortify the left’s political influence over black Americans.

Blacks have allowed themselves to be defined by the press, activists, politicians and the entertainment media, who have set themselves up as the final arbiters of racial orthodoxy in America. That definition is one that had its genesis in nothing less than the quintessential stereotype of good-old-time bigots. This stereotype portrays blacks as shiftless, ignorant, nefarious, manifestly incapable of holding on to money and wholly preoccupied with sex. You know why they always got sex on the brain? ‘Cause they have pubic hair on their heads, ha-ha-ha!

This, if one examines the so-called culture that is so vociferously defended by many blacks, is most definitively encapsulated in “thug culture,” which has been legitimized in media and which received a shot in the arm in the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin shooting. Indeed, blacks – particularly young blacks – were even more so encouraged to embrace and flaunt the thug image, if for no other reason than to protest the shooting.

Thug culture in particular holds to belligerence, misogyny and rebellion against any accepted norms and authority – all of these are embraced. If you’re black and you own a business, or wear a suit and hold a job in corporate America, you’re a sellout; yet black multimillionaire entertainers are able to talk the country and capitalism down, and not one among them even recognizes the hypocrisy therein. As with most liberal-socialist logic, the inconsistency of this view knows no bounds, and heaven help the individual who condemns the thug lifestyle as morally ambivalent. Such assertions are (according to the arbiters of racial orthodoxy) tantamount to denying black people their culture, and as such, are racist.

Read the full article here.

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The Meme War We Must Win

By streiff | April 18, 2012 | RedState

If you think Ann Romney and Seamus the Dog aren’t important you don’t belong in electoral politics.

In the past week the presidential campaign has been hit by two events that many have termed silly. First there was the Hilary Rosen comment denigrating Ann Romney’s decision to stay at home and actually raise her children rather than elect to have a stranger do that. Second was the softer Seamus-on-the-roof story rolled out by the Obama campaign yesterday.

Many, especially our own “smart set”, have criticized the attention these events have attracted as somehow taking away from the high minded policy discussion that is supposedly taking place.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Since Mitt Romney has become the presumptive GOP nominee we’ve seen two broad lines of attack opened against him. The first is “Mitt is an out of touch rich guy.” The second is “Mitt is a Mormon and Mormons are very, very strange.”

The closest they have come to making a policy attack on Romney is criticizing him as a conservative. How this is supposed to hurt him is anyone’s guess as the major knock on Romney during the primary was that he wasn’t conservative.

Both the stories on Ann Romney and Seamus the dog are designed to build a meme portraying Romney as a plutocrat, some sort of latter day (nyuk nyuk) J. P. Morgan. For instance, the recent Paul Begala article in The Daily Beast refers to Romney as Thurston Howell III:

And I mean elite. In Mitt Romney the Republicans have the apotheosis of wealth worship. Romney has amassed a fortune so vast he is expanding his $12 million beachfront mansion and installing an elevator … for his cars. For his cars, people. If you’re insanely rich, you might have an elevator in your mansion. But a lift for your Lexus? Keep in mind he’s running for office, for Pete’s sake. What’s he going to do if he wins? Use orphans as human golf tees?

[…] So far Romney has had a case of Marie Antoinette Syndrome. Every time he tries to connect with a middle- class voter he makes the Grey Poupon guy look like Joe Lunchbucket. He brags about his friends who own NASCAR teams and NFL franchises. He casually makes $10,000 bets. He says the $374,000 he made in speaking fees isn’t a lot of money. When a kid gives him an origami duck made out of a $1 bill, all he has in his pocket to replace it are hundreds.

Romney apologists will say I’m taking this out of context. Baloney—or rather, Wagyu filet mignon. The context is that Romney truly is out of touch [my emphasis] , and middle-class voters may conclude that he is not on their side.

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 […]