"For several centuries, at least since John Stuart Mill, the Left has defined itself by its commitment to freedom of speech. This was practically the sine qua non for calling oneself a liberal. Yet some time around 2019-20, in the historical blink of an eye, free speech was simply . . . dismissed. It became obligatory on the Left to support systematic control of our public discourse by a handful of massive tech companies, in cooperation with the government."
"The time, it is to be hoped, is gone by, when any defence would be necessary of the “liberty of the press” as one of the securities against corrupt or tyrannical government. No argument, we may suppose, can now be needed, against permitting a legislature or an executive, not identified in interest with the people, to prescribe opinions to them, and determine what doctrines or what arguments they shall be allowed to hear."
The Left wishes to abolish the Western past, which it regards as evil. This past is evil because Western societies until recently attributed unequal identities to different groups of people, and they supposedly still oppress the virtuous of the Earth, who are non-Westerners or victims of the West. This may not offer a serious example of moral reasoning, but it also does not betoken relativism or the wishy-washiness that Kendall associated with his political opponents. The Left is venting moral fury on what it perceives as an unjust situation and against those who are held responsible for real or imagined inequality. This outrage together with its war against civilization renders the Left, certainly in its present form, utterly destructive.
#AmericanMind #Leftist #Moderates #CivilLiberties #TheNewNormal
Neo-Marxists are Communizing your children.
To make sense of the current war on the family—and make no mistake, there is one—we must travel back to early 20th-century revolutionary Russia and then pass by Hungary on our way home. Because, odd as it may seem, recent snapshots from across our nation are all related. The Department of Justice targets parents for challenging the school’s racialist curriculum. Police officers arrest a dad after he exposes that his daughter was raped in her school’s bathroom by a boy in a skirt. A politician declares, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” These scenarios reveal the perverted logic and revolutionary aims of a new Bolshevik Revolution.
Supported by the imperial German government at war with his country, the young Vladimir Lenin applied the principles of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto to his homeland. Guided by a utopian fantasy wherein peasants turn plowshares into factory timecards, Lenin envisioned a society free of social classes and economic inequality, united under an almighty state. To achieve his goal, Lenin coalesced all power under the Soviet Communist Party. All other Russian social institutions, such as church and family, were brought to heel.
What resulted was a dissolution of the very notion of privacy. The Party policed every aspect of life, down to one’s thoughts. It was not enough for the so-called “enemies of the state” to confess fake crimes; they were obliged to feign belief in them. After all, the state alone determined what was good, true, beautiful, and most of all, real.
So began a series of violent persecutions on an enormous scale, from the Red Terror to the Great Purge and beyond. Russia’s regime under Lenin and his successor Stalin was bloody and violent, but, even worse, it was psychologically crushing. The state police reserved exceedingly sadist interrogation methods for those who refused to betray a neighbor or bring accusations against a family member. Often enough, the police would release the accused and then send his loved one to a prison camp instead.
President Biden’s Covid workplace mandate revives an ancient debate.
Recent political developments have brought clarity regarding the goals of the regime. Biden, in his continuing dedication to “keep us safe,” has directed the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to enforce a rule mandating vaccinations by January 4 on employees of business with more than 100 workers, or else those businesses will face exorbitant fines.
Unsurprisingly, major wokeist corporations have cheered Biden’s attempt to seize authoritarian powers. Ford enthusiastically embraced Biden’s directive and wants its 32,000 employees to get vaxxed by December 8.Expect more of this whether the mandate is reversed in the courts or not. Corporate America largely has the same priorities as the regime.
Before the Donald Trump-inspired challenges of the 2020 presidential election, Democrats and liberals alleged fraud and formally contested the results of the 2000, 2004, and 2016 Republican-won presidential elections. Those earlier challenges spurred the creation of a network of election litigators on the left — what J. Christian Adams, a conservative ex-Justice Department attorney pitted against them, calls a “linear build-out” of “some 30 groups” responsible for a lot of sudden changes in election law last year amid the pandemic.
For the closely fought 2020 presidential election, 29 largely Democrat-controlled states and the District of Columbia loosened voting laws, most expanding access to mail voting, according to the liberal Brennan Center for Justice. In response, after former President Trump’s efforts to contest his narrow loss, 19 largely conservative states tightened their voting laws, the Brennan Center reports. The latest changes have provoked a wave of litigation, overwhelmingly from the left.
Now Harvard Law School, in seeming recognition of the power of this “lawfare” strategy, is gearing up for a future where elections are regularly decided not at the ballot box – but in the courts. Two programs at Harvard Law show close ties between the school, the Democratic Party, and liberal activist groups with an interest in fighting elections through the judicial system.
An unholy alliance of planners, financiers, and leftists wants everyone to live in mass social housing developments.
From the ancient world to modern times, the class of small property owners have constituted the sine qua non of democratic self-government. But today this class is under attack by what Aristotle described as an oligarchia, an unelected power elite that controls the political economy for its own purposes. In contrast, the rise of small holders were critical to the re-emergence and growth of democracy first in the Netherlands, followed by North America, Australia, and much of Europe.
Today the current class of small holders face a threat from two powerful hegemonies, tech and financial interests, and increasingly intrusive bureaucracies. Both favor policies that would force higher population densities, which would likely raise housing costs and lead to lifetime renting for middle income households who would otherwise own their own homes. These forces—one long associated with the right, and the other the left—share a common agenda, though for different reasons.