Category: Culture

Will Somebody Please Hate My Enemies For Me?

Mr French is being sarcastic as he’s one of the big Never-Trumpers

“So my problem with David French’s claim that Christians shouldn’t vote for Trump is that if you take it seriously, Christians shouldn’t vote for anyone because no president in my lifetime was Christ-like enough to meet French’s standard. (No, not even Jimmy Carter, whose public piety is merely cover for a poisonous personality). Now if you want to argue for monastic exclusion from politics, that’s fine (though to my mind stupid). But if you want to argue for it only when Trump is president, then I question your sincerity, and French’s rather pharasaical tone doesn’t help.

But despite his argument, I think even a serious pro-life Christian might conclude that, given a choice between an un-Christ-like politician who is loudly and vigorously in favor of abortion (i.e. any Democrat these days), and an un-Christ-like politician who is without doubt the most pro-life president we’ve ever had, it’s okay to support the latter. French attempts to engage this argument but to my mind he is not successful. I doubt many will find the piece all that persuasive but I think that French’s main intended audience was David French, whose faith in neverTrumpism may need bolstering at this point. And I’m not sure it’s impossible to love your enemies while still trying to kick their ass.

On a broader note, so long as we’re talking about sin, I’ll note that pride and envy seem to play a major role in the NeverTrump movement in general: Pride in (self-proclaimed) moral superiority, and envy of Trump’s accomplishments, which make him by any reasonable measure the most conservative president of my lifetime. I’d suggest some self-reflection on this point'”–Dr Glenn Reynolds

Hate has no place in pro-life America. None. And embracing or defending hate—even hatred of the movement’s most vigorous opponents—for the sake of life contradicts the spirit of the movement and stands to do more harm than good to the political cause that so many Christians value the most.

American Evangelicals represent one of the most powerful religious movements in the world. They exercise veto power over the political success of any presidential candidate from one of America’s two great parties. Yet they don’t wield that power to veto the selection of a man who completely rejects—and even scorns—many of their core moral values.

I fully recognize what I’m saying. I fully recognize that refusing to hire a hater and refusing to hire a liar carries costs. If we see politics through worldly eyes, it makes no sense at all. Why would you adopt moral standards that put you at a disadvantage in an existential political struggle? If we don’t stand by Trump we will lose, and losing is unacceptable.

Why the Left Really Wants to Kill America

The century-long attempt to kill capitalism in America gained a dramatic head of steam in the 1960s with the rapid ascendency of progressivism, a Marxist movement that would quietly seize control of the Democratic Party over the last half-century.

Which was something different. For most of America’s 244-year history, the dominant political parties that evolved had a common goal constantly working to improve the country they both loved.  In the 1860s, a Republican president went to war to end slavery.  A century later, a Democratic president launched another well-intentioned war, a war on poverty.  Democrats and Republicans alike largely saw their country as a force for good, both at home and abroad.  Beginning in the 1960s, that widely- shared view began to show cracks as the progressive movement began tightening its grip on the modern Democratic Party.  Democrat icons of the 1960s — Adlai Stevenson, Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Sam Nunn, Hubert Humphrey and JFK, to name a few — were genuine patriots who loved their country, a sentiment that was shared by a large majority of that era’s rank and file Democrats.  Such is no longer the case. Here are four ways Democrats are looking to end the idea of America altogether:

Killing America by replacing patriotism with socialism

In October 2018, The New York Times reported that 69% of progressive Democrats  are ashamed of being American.  Increasingly influenced by the progressive wing of their party, Democrats as a whole have moved sharply away from that love of country, and veered toward socialism that sounded like communism: In February 2019, Public Opinion Strategies found that an astounding 77% of Democrats who plan to vote in 2020 self-identify as socialists.  Aided and abetted by the complicit mainstream media, the modern Democratic Party has been remarkably successful at driving down patriotism: Gallup found that less than a third of Democrats are extremely proud of their country.  That’s less than a third, and trending sharply downward.

Killing America by making citizenship meaningless

Why has the modern Democratic Party worked so diligently to erode patriotism? Because love of country is a major impediment to convincing voters to support what they really want, which is yielding their nation’s sovereignty to an international governing body, ultimately the United Nations. With patriotism marginalized, a society’s populace can more easily be led to no longer see themselves as citizens of their country, but as “citizens of the world.”  (In his July 2008 speech in Berlin, progressive presidential candidate Barack Obama told an adoring crowd of 200,000 cheering Europeans, “I come to you as a Citizen of the World.”)

In Europe, the long-standing national identity of every progressive-run nation is already being intentionally erased, and it stands as a sort of bellwether of things to come over here.

Government-encouraged mass migration is its instrument, and the same thing is being attempted in America by the modern Democratic Party. This particular phenomenon is particularly associated with billionaire globalist George Soros.  The Hungarian-born “stateless statesman” is the most prolific financier of the progressive push for a world without borders.

In his anti-capitalist best-seller, The Crisis of Global Capitalism, Soros sets out the progressive strategy.  Complaining bitterly about “the sway of sovereign nations,” Soros has advocated for, and since spent immense sums each year fostering “open society alliances” among sovereign nations.  The goal of these alliances is to indoctrinate citizens of western nations to accept the high-mindedness of doing away with national identities in favor of a collectivist world identity.  With national identities erased, people no longer see themselves as patriotic citizens of their countries, but as united citizens of an enlightened global society.  People who oppose the unfettered influx of migrants and refugees are shouted down as racists and xenophobes.  Once open-border alliances have been solidified, the last obstacle is cleared for a borderless world governed by the UN.  For global governance to become a reality, the sovereignty of every western nation, including America, must be eliminated, Soros believes.

When the election of Donald Trump dealt a calamitous setback to the near-term realization of fundamentally transforming America, Soros penned an angry rant comparing Trump to Hitler, and calling him a racist and a xenophobe.  Known as “the puppet master” because of the enormous influence he exerts on Democratic Party hierarchy, Soros’s foremost target in taking down sovereign western democracies is the crown jewel of them all: the United States of America.  In working toward the culmination of that takedown, the billionaire globalist mastermind has powerful allies at the highest levels of the modern Democratic Party.

Killing America through identity politics

To overthrow a capitalist society, The Communist Manifesto calls for fomenting a titanic struggle by pitting an alleged victim class against an alleged oppressor class.  In the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks rose to power by pitting the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.

Over the last half-century, the Democratic Party has taken the concept of Marxist/Leninist dialectical struggle to new heights through its use of identity politics. The term refers to politically subdividing the electorate into multiple factions (voting blocks), whose members are told they are singled out for persecution by a bigoted and unjust society.  To wit: People of color are persecuted by racists & white supremacists, women by sexists & misogynists, refugees & illegal immigrants by nativists & xenophobes, Muslims by Islamophobes, gays & lesbians by homophobes & religious bigots, the 99% by the 1%, and so on.  The goal of identity politics is to turn a majority of the American electorate against their country.

The self-serving narrative of identity politics is that caring, inclusive and tolerant Democrats will righteously defend the members (voters) of each identity group from the constant onslaught of outrages inflicted on them by an oppressive society.  Identity politics is used as a political bludgeon to deceive Americans into believing their country is an incurably unjust place where things can be set straight only by killing off its existing economic and governing systems.

That is the observed pattern and it’s important. It tells us why the 2020 elections will determine whether our free market Republic survives, or falls from within to single-party socialist rule.

 

Paul mentioned this in a comment on a previous post.
It bears serious reading.

Why Liberals Can’t Listen

When Cathy Newman’s absurdly hilarious interview with Jordan Peterson exploded across the internet, it wasn’t just because it was so funny. To a lot of conservatives, myself included, it sounded way too familiar. What we’ve known for a long time, Cathy Newman made blindingly obvious: Liberals really don’t listen. Maybe liberals can’t listen.

I’m seeing it again in a book I’m reading on the history of America’s culture wars. Conservatives’ opposition to new views on morality in the 1910s and 20s was “driven by fear,” the author says. Never mind that when the Pope Pius XI weighed in on the question, his answer was balanced, focused both on the real good that comes for all from true morality, and what dangers may follow upon straying from it. No, it was all “driven by fear.”

Liberals don’t see both sides. In fact, it’s almost as if they can’t. Or maybe we should drop “almost” from that sentence. For there’s some fascinating — and disturbing — research that says conservatives have the ability to understand liberals, but liberals literally can’t understand conservatives.

It has a lot to do with seeing moral issues from multiple points of view. The Pope could do it; can liberals?

I’m sure they think they can. Suppose you went out and struck up a conversation with a liberal friend of yours, or a teacher or a co-worker. Suppose you asked them, “Who’s better at seeing moral issues from more than one point of view: liberals or conservatives?” What would you bet they’d claim they could do it better? I’d put a lot of money down on that one.

Five Moral Foundations

But then along comes New York University psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He and his research team set out on a global project seeking to understand human morality. They found that wherever you go, you’ll find five basic “moral foundations”: Caring, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity. He explains all this brilliantly in a TED talk, if you can overlook some lingering bias. (In his book The Righteous Mind he includes a sixth, Liberty.)

But there’s more. Haidt found a glaring difference between people on the left and people on the right. Conservatives, by and large, tend to live with all five of these moral dimensions in balance. Liberals don’t. They’re strong on Care and Fairness, but they’re weak on Loyalty, Authority and Purity.

And that’s a problem. Jonathan Haidt, who viewed himself as a liberal before doing this study, extended his research to look at what societies need in order to maintain stability and security. And he realized it isn’t just the left’s favorite pair. It takes all five moral categories. He paid attention: he’s a moderate now.

Conservatives could do it. Liberals couldn’t.

The Really Interesting Difference Between Liberals and Conservatives

But hang on — we’re just now getting to the interesting part. Haidt asked liberals and conservatives to put themselves in one another’s shoes; to imagine how the other side would answer a list of ethical questions. Conservatives could do it. Liberals couldn’t. People on the right had the ability to understand people on the left; even to empathize with them to a degree. People on the left couldn’t do the same in return.

The reason, Haidt says, is because liberals’ moral scope is unbalanced. They’re so focused on Care and Fairness, they can’t imagine anyone thinking other values being important. Therefore, he says in this excerpt from his book The Righteous Mind, “If you don’t see that Reagan is pursuing positive values of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity, you almost have to conclude that Republicans see no positive value in Care and Fairness.”

And if we don’t value Care and Fairness — liberals’ most important values, by far — then we must be Really Awful People.

Misunderstanding Conservatism

Think I’m overstating it? Go back to the link and re-read the rest of the excerpt. Read the New York theater critic who wrote, “Republicans don’t believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the planet. … I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm).”

It isn’t just that liberals don’t want to understand us. Many of them simply can’t. Not without considerable effort and coaching, at any rate; but which of them puts in that effort? Why would anyone want to empathize with Really Awful People? “Many readers,” writes Haidt, “ stayed locked inside their Care-based moral matrices and refused to believe that conservatism was an alternative moral vision.” He continues, “One reader … thought it was ‘sad’ that Republican narcissism would prevent them from understanding my perspective on their ‘illness.’”

We could go on all day explaining our positive reasons for the positions we take; all they’ll hear is us playing cover-up games. We must be driven by fear. Or power, or hate. Anything but decency. “What you’re really saying is…”

They can’t even imagine anything better of us. Why? According to Haidt, they don’t have a place in their minds to process Loyalty, Authority or Purity. For a large proportion of the liberal world, those values don’t even belong in the “ethics” category — even though human societies can’t survive without them.

So What Do We Do?

Need I say it? There’s no magic formula to fix this. It’s going to take time, and patience, and even love on our part, along with constant clear explanation of who we are and what we believe. It’s going to take real relationships, in other words.

Even that, though, may be difficult, since both conservatives and liberals have gotten ourselves fenced off in different towns and cities, or different parts of town, and certainly on different parts of the internet. It’s going to take real relational outreach on our part, in other words.

And even then nothing is guaranteed. Considering how many people ignored Jesus right up until the end of His life — and how eager some of them were to end His life — we need to be realistic with our expectations.

Yet some responded to Him then, and some will respond still today. I’m not giving up. And in the meantime, I for one find this insight from Haidt to be very interesting — and helpful.

Let the word go forth:

This is the most conservative of all the Democratic presidential candidates, note well.

So, as the man says, let’s be clear: if you think it might be a bad idea for biological males to compete against your daughter in the high school women’s sports league, or that biological males do not belong in your daughter’s or wife’s locker room, or even if you dissent from gender ideology at all, as the left-wing feminist J.K. Rowling did publicly late last year — then you are on the same side as Bull Connor and the Ku Klux Klan, and will deserve the hatred you receive.

This is how left-wing identity politics works today. The Age of Entitlement, Christopher Caldwell’s dark, provocative new book illuminates how the concept of “civil rights” has been weaponized to demolish constitutional principles. If you’ve heard anything about the book, it’s probably something along the lines of this Jonathan Rauch review in the NYT. Excerpts:

In Caldwell’s telling, the Civil Rights Act, which banned many forms of discrimination, was a swindle. Billed as a one-time correction that would end segregation and consign race consciousness to the past, it actually started an endless and escalating campaign of race-conscious social engineering. Imperialistically, civil rights expanded to include “people of color” and immigrants and gays and, in short, anyone who was not native-born, white and straight — all in service of “the task that civil rights laws were meant to carry out — the top-down management of various ethnic, regional and social groups.”

With civil rights as their bulldozer, in Caldwell’s view, progressive movements ran amok. They “could now, through the authority of civil rights law, override every barrier that democracy might seek to erect against them”; the law and rhetoric of civil rights “gave them an iron grip on the levers of state power.”

Perhaps the author should have come up for oxygen when he found himself suggesting that the Southern segregationists were right all along. Reading this overwrought and strangely airless book, one would never imagine a different way of viewing things, one that rejects Caldwell’s ultimatum to “choose between these two orders.” In that view — my own — America has seen multiple refoundings, among them the Jackson era’s populism, the Civil War era’s abolition of slavery, the Progressive era’s governmental reforms and the New Deal era’s economic and welfare interventions. All of them, like the civil rights revolution, sparked tense and sometimes violent clashes between competing views of the Constitution and basic rights, but in my version of history, those tensions proved not only survivable but fruitful, and working through them has been an engine of dynamism and renewal, not destruction and oppression. I worry about the illiberal excesses of identity politics and political correctness, but I think excesses is what they are, and I think they, too, can be worked through. Being a homosexual American now miraculously married to my husband for almost a decade, I can’t help feeling astonished by a history of America since 1964 that finds space for only one paragraph briefly acknowledging the civil rights movement’s social and moral achievements — before hastening back to “But the costs of civil rights were high.”

Perhaps most depressingly, Caldwell’s account, even if one accepts its cramped view of the Constitution and its one-eyed moral bookkeeping, leads nowhere. It proffers no constructive alternative, no plausible policy or path. The author knows perfectly well that there will be no “repeal of the civil rights laws.” He foresees only endless, grinding, negative-sum cultural and political warfare between two intractably opposed “constitutions.” His vision is a dead end. Unfortunately, it also seems to be where American conservatism is going.

Rauch is not wrong in his description of the most controversial part of Caldwell’s book. Caldwell really does see the Civil Rights regime as where things went badly wrong. But Rauch, in my view, doesn’t take on Caldwell’s actual argument, but only asserts that these conflicts “can be worked through.” Boy, is that ever whistling past the graveyard. However, I have to admit that I never would have read a book that claimed the Civil Rights movement went wrong had it not been written by someone I respect as much as I do Christopher Caldwell. I read the book last week, and I’m glad I did, though I doubt I will read a more unsettling book all year………..

I strongly urge you to read Caldwell’s book, and not to assume that you understand it from reviews. Let me get one thing out of the way now: Caldwell does NOT say that segregation was right. For example, he denounces the Jim Crow South as a confederacy of “sham democracies,” and agrees that its apartheid system had to change. Yet the manner in which the state demolished segregation had dramatic unintended consequences. Caldwell’s argument is more like that of Sir Thomas More in this famous exchange from the Robert Bolt play A Man For All Seasons:

Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law?

More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And, when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – man’s laws, not God’s – and, if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.

Caldwell argues that to get at the devil of segregation, we cut down constitutional principles that are now destroying constitutional principles that few people in 1964 imagined would one day be at risk.

 Trump at the March for Life Seals Irrelevancy of Never Trumpers.

Even Reagan never did this.
Trump did it because he’s Trump.

Like Donald Trump, I attended my first March for Life this year. I didn’t march. Instead, I was there to record the faces and screams of the angry ugly left as I often do at these sorts of events.

Stunningly, the angry ugly left didn’t show up. That’s understandable because whenever the momentum is against the left, they ignore their opposition. I see this firsthand all the time when it comes to voter fraud and especially when racial discrimination is done by the traditional victims of discrimination.

What did become clear was that Never Trump Republicans looked even more ridiculous at the end of the March for Life than they did that morning.

Trump was embraced by the largest gathering of pro-life Americans and Trump embraced them. Trump at the March for Life:

Sadly, the far-left is actively working to erase our God-given rights, shut down faith-based charities, ban religious believers from the public square, and silence Americans who believe in the sanctity of life. They are coming after me because I am fighting for you and we are fighting for those who have no voice.

Never Trump Republicans can’t imagine a man like Trump attending the March for Life.

Never Trumpism is built on a foundation of sanctimony.

These sanctimonious few don’t like how Trump speaks. They don’t like his bombast. They don’t like his past. He’s not George Bush.

Get over it. He’s winning.

Liberal elites’ secret weapon is conservative family values.

“If the elite had conspired to destroy the middle class, it seems they would have:
1, desired to corrupt middle class morals
2, convince middle class women to have fewer children or have a career instead of a family
3, convince middle class women they don’t need men but can do it all
4, take the middle class’s money by both promoting the need for a college education while driving the price of said education through the roof by subsidizing the education of the poor
5, send housing costs soaring by restricting supply
6, create a situation where good paying middle class jobs get outsourced while cheap labor is imported to keep wages down
7, promote a diet that tends to make anyone who follows it fat and sickly compared to those who eat roughly what people ate a century ago.
People in 1950 might have called the above a dystopian horror fiction.
The elites in 2020 call it good public policy.”..Cyrus in New York

 

A new study by Brad Wilcox and Wendy Wang at the Institute for Family Studies lays out the real picture.

“When it comes to their own families,” the authors discovered, “California elites with kids overwhelmingly ‘live right’ in private, giving their children the benefit of growing up in a two-parent family.”

Wilcox and Wang reveal granular data showing “that some of the most elite neighborhoods in the state — including several in Hollywood and San Francisco — have virtually no single parents.”

This is a far bigger story than Hollywood’s message vs. Hollywood’s lifestyle, of course. Across the country, Americans in the upper class are much more likely to profess liberalized teachings on family and marriage while personally practicing conservative family values. Wilcox and Wang just happened to get the data for California.

Among Californians aged 18-50, the college-educated were far more likely than those with no college degree (85% to 69%) to agree that we should celebrate the diversity of family structures, including single parenthood, unmarried parents, and other alternative family structures. The college-educated were specifically far more cheerful toward single motherhood.

That’s how they feel about others. How do the elites feel about their own lives? “It’s very important for me, personally to be married before having children,” 68% of the college-educated sample agreed. That number was only 59% for those who never went to college.

So the elites are more “tolerant” than the working class ideologically, but they are much more conservative about how they plan to live.

Why Journalists and Politicians are Frightened by Armed Defense

Armed citizens stopped a mass murderer at the West Freeway Church of Christ. When we plain folk in fly-over country heard that the attacker was stopped quickly, most of us thought, “Praise God.” In contrast, Joe Biden said it was irrational to allow anyone to be armed at any religious institution. Some journalists said they were terrified that ordinary citizens could be armed at church.

Why is the emotional response from politicians and journalists so different from ours? We know something that they don’t know. Those of us who live in fly-over country know Armed America, and the elites don’t.

We know real gun owners-  We know real people people who own guns, rather than the two-dimensional cardboard-cutout characters portrayed by Hollywood and the media. With over a hundred million gun owners in the US, they are easy to find. Legally licensed gun owners are our friends, our co-workers, our associates, and our neighbors.

I have a news flash for Vice President Joe and the journalists. Ordinary people are armed. Millions of us carry a legally concealed personal firearm in public. Unless you live in one of the elite bubbles in the US, then you are standing shoulder to shoulder with Armed America.

We’ve seen their good judgement. We’ve met Armed America and we’ve seen their restraint. We’re not surprised to learn that individuals who are licensed to carry a firearm in public are among the most law abiding groups that sociologists can find. That makes us different from Joe Biden and Co. Most elites don’t have a friend who drives a pickup truck, much less a friend who is a licensed concealed carrier.

We know and trust our neighbors- We have a positive opinion of our neighbors, our community and our town. We formed this judgement through experience. We’ve seen our fellow citizens solve challenging problems. We’ve seen their character under challenging circumstances, like fires, earthquakes, hurricanes and floods. We’ve seen a broad segment of society rise to the occasion and do their best for themselves and for those around them.

We’re comfortable with our neighbors. The media elites are only comfortable with other elites. Select law enforcement officers can be armed, according to the elites. Select bodyguards can be armed, according to the elites. You and I, average voters, not so much.

We actually believe in “diversity:” Our circle of friends includes people of all ages, backgrounds, and races. If you want to see elitism, look at the makeup of the MSM and at our elite colleges. If you doubt me, try to find a conservative-Christian-Republican male in the Sociology Department at your local college.

Also, consider the “diversity” of the editors at the Huffington post.

Only young college-educated women need apply

We’ve seen bad people do bad things- We’ve seen what criminals do. We’ve seen their effect on our family, our neighbors, and our communities. In our world, violence doesn’t happen in slow motion at 35 frames a second on a 60 inch screen; it happens in the parking lot at the corner store after dark. Our connection to reality is stronger than a TV crime-drama where the bad guy is brought to justice in 42 minutes.

Ordinary citizens like us defend ourselves thousands of times a day. We are not the easy victims the criminals expected. The bad guy meets Armed America and runs the other way. In that way, Armed America is making me and my family safer every day,  just like the defenders did at the Church of Christ in Texas.

Armed America frightens the elites. Maybe the elites like Joe Biden had better stay home and have their food delivered by Amazon so they feel safe. Don’t tell them the Amazon driver might be carrying. That might upset Joe and the mainstream journalists.

We’ll keep that truth to ourselves.

Muhammad Makes List of Top 10 Baby Names in the U.S. For First Time

That’s demographics, part of which is a high birthrate for moslems, another part being the number of ‘refugees’ imported by charities run by purportedly well meaning, but crap-for-brains idiots

Sophia still reigns as queen, but Jackson has lost his crown as king.

The parenting website BabyCenter released its annual list of 100 most popular baby names for girls and boys in the United States, and for the 10th year in a row, Sophia is at the top. Liam knocked Jackson out of the No. 1 spot that he had held onto for six years straight.

The online parenting and pregnancy destination compiled the names of babies born to some 600,000 registered U.S. users in 2019 and combined those that sound the same but have different spellings (such as Sophia and Sofia) to create a true measure of popularity. The Social Security Administration also generates a list, pulling from the names of all babies born in the U.S., but the agency treats each unique spelling as a separate name.

Almost all of last year’s top-10 darlings are still favorites this year, with a few exceptions. Revealing a rise in Arabic names, Muhammad and Aaliyah made the top 10 for the first time, replacing Mason and Layla.