The ‘Far Right’ Is Surging In Europe Because The Left’s Version Of ‘Democracy’ Has Failed

From The Federalist.com (June 13, 2024):

Due to mounting dissatisfaction with the political establishment throughout the European Union, right-wing parties have made significant gains in the recent European Parliament elections. Perhaps most surprisingly, this surge in seats won was fueled not only by traditional older conservatives but also by younger voters who have sought to rekindle the spirit of nationalism within their homelands.

Before the European Parliament elections, 32 percent of French 18-to-25-year-olds said they’d vote for the “far right” National Rally party, closely reflecting the eventual election outcome. Led by Marine Le Pen, “the National Rally party is on course to win 31.5 percent of the vote—more than twice the 14.7 percent projected for [French President Emmanuel] Macron’s liberal Renaissance party.”

Meanwhile, Germany’s AfD party secured better-than-expected results, coming in second in Germany’s EU parliamentary election, winning nearly 16 percent of the vote. Notably, AfD gained significant ground among younger voters, surging 12 percentage points to 17 percent among 16-24-year-olds.

This political earthquake felt in France and Germany is not an isolated incident within these two countries. Feelings of Euroscepticism and discontent over immigration are rising all across Europe.

While a “centrist” (meaning leftist) pro-EU majority remains in firm control of the European Parliament, members of the Western ruling class are quickly realizing that the backlash against the globalist agenda, put into motion shortly after World War II, is escaping leftist containment and steadily growing.

This should surprise no one. We saw the first strong signs of this immune response to globalism in 2016 when Britain voted to leave the European Union. Yet ruling class members on both the left and right within the United Kingdom did not heed the message their voters sent as immigration surged.

One of the major promises of Brexit was to regain control of England’s borders, yet the number of legal arrivals has nearly doubled since Brexit. This surge has fueled a significant rise in anti-immigration protests by individuals desperate to preserve their culture and heritage. As a consequence, the Conservative Party in the U.K., which has been the primary governing party since 2010, is now set for historic losses ahead of the July 4 national elections due in part to its failure to control its borders.

Of course, according to leftist media, the rise of so-called “far-right” populism, manifesting itself through legitimate electoral wins, is positioned as a threat to democracy. But this is a rhetorical sleight of hand.

Democracy is not in danger. It’s their “democracy” that’s threatened as the right is beginning to flex its political muscles — finally acting as legitimate opposition to the status quo dominated by an establishment left and right that look and behave in a very similar fashion.

When liberals use the word “democracy,” they don’t mean the will of the voters. Rather, the word democracy is used as a substitute for leftist hegemony, or as Curtis Yarvin explained, “When they say democracy, they mean oligarchy.”

“Traditional” conservatives and “centrist” leftists both share the same immigration policy. That’s part of why the left is terrified of legitimate right-wing opposition as opposed to the traditional “opposition in-name-only” conservatism they are accustomed to defeating. In a recent New York Times analysis titled “Just How Dangerous Is Europe’s Rising Far Right?” author Roger Cohen alluded to the failure of leftist political containment strategies,

“Across Europe, the far right is becoming the right, absent any compelling message from traditional conservative parties. If ‘far’ suggests outlier, it has become a misnomer. Not only have the parties of an anti-immigrant right surged, they have seen the barriers that once kept them out crumble as they are absorbed into the arc of Western democracies.”

Much to the dismay of liberal elites, authoritarian “barriers” in the form of “hate speech” legislation, social stigmatization, corporate media exclusion, and outright censorship are proving ineffective because the reality of deteriorating social and economic conditions, due in part to mass migration across the West, is too great to ignore. After decades of prioritizing the well-being of immigrants over that of native-born citizens, the reinvigoration of traditional forms of nationalism through legitimate right-wing opposition was not only necessary but inevitable.

The surging popularity of the “far right” in Europe is shaking democracy to its core, as it should, exposing how unresponsive “democracy” has become to the needs of the people Western governments were meant to serve. [source]

Good. The Left likes to scare the public by using the term 'far right.' When in reality, the public gets tired of failed crazy socialist policies and wants sane policies back again.

Study: 44 Percent of Dems OK With Violence to Stop Trump

From Newsmax.com (Sept. 27):

A quarter of American adults — including 44% of self-identified Democrats — say they support the use of force to prevent President Donald Trump from being president, according to a new survey's findings described by University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape.

Pape is also warning that the 2026 midterm elections could produce a level of political violence not seen in the U.S. in decades — and, under a worst-case scenario, could become "the most violent election in American history."

"We haven't seen this level of violence, political violence, since the 1960s," Pape said in a recent interview.

Pape is director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, or CPOST, which has been tracking Americans' attitudes toward political violence since 2021.

CPOST conducts nationally representative surveys with NORC (National Opinion Research Center) at the University of Chicago.

Pape said his concern about November is heightened because several pressures are converging at once: deep partisan hostility, rapid demographic and social change, economic anxiety, and an electorate in which significant minorities tell pollsters that political force can be justified.

In his interview last week with podcaster Chris Williamson, Pape said his latest University of Chicago survey found that 25% of American adults supported using force to prevent Trump from being president, equivalent to about 65 million adults.

Among self-identified Democrats, Pape said the figure was 44%.

"This is a stunning number," he said. "This is not just another turn of the data."

Pape said broad support for political violence increases the likelihood of violence.

He said his team has tried to determine what respondents mean by "force" through focus groups and survey experiments.

Pape said that among respondents endorsing force against Trump, 55% associated it with lethal violence such as assassination, while others envisioned riot-style violence.

He said his surveys also found support for coercive force on the other side.

Pape said 16% of Americans supported Trump using the military to suppress Democrat protesters in his latest polling.

For Pape, however, Election Day itself is not necessarily the most dangerous moment. His greatest concern is the period beginning when votes are counted and extending through the seating of the winners in January.

"That's the real danger zone," he said.

The critical question, he said, is whether losing candidates and their supporters accept defeat or conclude the election was stolen.

Pape also points to additional economic stress.

Behind all of this is Pape's broader theory of "violent populism." He argues that social media amplifies political anger but does not create its underlying causes. [read more]

That percentage is way too high. ☹️ Should be closer to zero. Then again they and their collaborators in the artificial news say the President is Hitler. So, there is that.

Beware the AI bosses ‘please regulate us’ bait-and-switch

From NY Post.com (Sept. 14):

Top AI companies are blatantly seeking special privileges under cover of warning against the AI-pocalypse.

That’s the best explanation for the sudden flurry of doom-mongering from CEOs like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

These moguls say their industry needs to tap the brakes on the tech’s rapid progress, but will (rightly) warn that still the United States still needs to beat China in the AI-development race — leaving “the only choice” to be a de-facto cartelization, with the feds setting up guardrails and offering their companies protections against disastrous mistakes.

That is: What they really want is to protect themselves from liability by shifting responsibility to the government.

Think of the Section 230 shield for social media, blogs and online platforms from libelous content posted by users, except this would protect Anthropic etc. if their AIs go rogue, causing billions or trillions of dollars in damage.

Or how “too big to fail” protected the megabanks that bumbled their way into the 2007-08 global financial crisis.

Getting off the hook for harms their tech causes would put the AI giants in great positions for their coming IPOs.

The cynical combo of doom-mongering and pleas for federal oversight feels like “a Trojan horse,” Vice President JD Vance fumed Monday — quite rightly.

As a plus for progressives, this scheme is sure to produce a vast new pack of lefty billionaires.

Yes, AI firms and their backers have been funneling millions to political candidates of both parties.

Yet Amodei, most obviously, has long worked closely with Democrats: As The Post’s Miranda Devine reports, Anthropic’s “bipartisan” National Security and Public Sector Advisory Council is riddled with ex-Biden and -Obama intel officials.

A former national-security adviser to Sen. Chuck Schumer is also on the panel.

Oh, and Altman’s OpenAI just hired the senator’s daughter, Jessica Schumer, for a top policy job.

Many of this crew are devotees of the feel-good lefty movement Effective Altruism — whose Tarbell Center for AI Journalism actually pays the salaries of journalists embedded with mainstream news outlets like Time, Bloomberg, The Guardian and NBC News.

Former President Barack Obama recently joined the campaign, warning of AI’s dangers and urging Dems to make AI regulation the heart of their political agenda — pushing for the cartel that Altman and Amodei want in the name of reining them in.

Don’t fall for the hysteria: If these companies want guardrails to avoid AI tragedies, they can adopt them all by themselves.

Indeed, nothing will motivate them toward caution more than knowing they’ll be held liable; offer protections, and you remove their incentive to keep their products safe.

So let them slow down, if that’s what they think wise.

Having the American public to protect them from responsibility for getting it wrong is just foolish. [source]

I think it is a bait-and-switch or even a Trojan Horse as VP Vance has suggested. It might be also a way for Big AI to limit AI start-ups to compete against them. After all, any gov't regulation will hurt the start-ups more than the bigger corporations. If Big AI is really worried about AI getting out-of-control, they should be ones to correct the potential issue or put guard rails in not Congress who has no idea how LLMs work.

More on the AI Panic:

• You Know The AI Panic Is An Op Because Top Dems All Have The Same Talking Points
• OpenAI and Anthropic CEOs push for AI cooperation at UN after Trump rebuffs ‘globalist scheme’ to control it
  
• Trump: US, China to Leave 'Super Intelligence' as Is
  
• AI Tech Elites BEG the Government to do THIS?! [video]

7 Ways DSA Plans To Turn America Into A Third-World Communist Country

From The Federalist.com (July 17):

The group that dictates the tenor of the Democrat Party has radical plans for America, which include getting rid of the presidency and the Supreme Court. The Democratic Socialists of America is a far-left organization that appeals to the struggle of the working class while pushing far-left candidates. The organization has recently unveiled a new platform that would destroy the American system and radically remake it.

DSA candidates are currently surging in America, winning major elections across the country. Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier — both DSA members — won their Democrat primaries in New York City, making them almost certain to win seats in Congress. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is also a DSA member, and he has pushed far-left policies since taking office in January.

Abolish the Presidency and Supreme Court

According to the DSA’s platform, “we need a new political system.” This new political system involves remaking the American government and electoral system.

“Abolish the Electoral College. Replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress,” the platform states. This change would help these socialists secure their objective of “creating a real democracy.”

This is part of an effort to give more power to Congress, thereby creating a more “democratic” system. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., showed her disdain for America’s system of government when she introduced articles of impeachment against Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

Accusing Thomas and Alito of failing to disclose their financial information and declining to recuse themselves from cases they purportedly had a personal interest in, Ocasio-Cortez called on Congress to impeach them from the court. Her justification was that “Congress has a legal, moral, and democratic obligation to impeach,” according to a press release.

Replace the Constitution

In its introduction to the platform, the DSA quietly slipped in one of its most radical proposals: creating a new United States Constitution.

“We are workers fighting to transform society: to win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic,” the platform’s introduction states. This is not the first time the DSA has attacked the Constitution, either. An earlier statement published on the DSA website reads: “The Constitution establishes a political order explicitly designed to enshrine rule by elites.”

In a recent attempt to recruit members, a DSA caucus called the Marxist Unity Group attacked the Constitution because “it was made by rich landowners who owned slaves, and it was designed to protect their power, not give ordinary people a real vote. Back then, the Founding Fathers were kind of like the billionaires of today.” [read more]

DSA stands for Destructive Socialists of America. ☹️ Just steps to concentrating and growing power. When they say they want to abolish the Senate, they are just wanting a parliamentary system of gov’t like Israel and the European countries have.

Along the same lines:

• The Problem With DSA Democrats Isn’t Socialism, It’s Third-Worldism
• Democratic socialism could cost the US a staggering $200 trillion, report reveals: ‘Closer to Soviet-style communism’
• There Is No Such Thing As A Moderate Democrat Anymore
  
• America Flirts with Democratic Socialism

Horowitz: The one public health emergency the left won't declare

From The Blaze.com (Sept. 19, 2023):

We were told in 2020 that our life, liberty, and property — up to and including our right to breathe freely — were subservient to the government’s capricious invocation of public health needs. As such, under the guise of stopping a virus, state governments were able to mask children for two years, shut down businesses and churches, and even place travel bans on Americans from other states.

Now officials want to use these emergency powers for global warming and, as we saw in New Mexico last week, for gun control. But one instance in which they will not invoke emergency power, even though it would be an appropriate use of federal and state power, is to shut down the flow of millions of illegal aliens crashing our borders and filling our cities.

If a state could shut down cross-state travel for public health, how is it that the federal government and even the states have not closed their borders to people who aren’t entitled to be here? One cannot deny the public health threat of millions of illegal aliens camping out on our major cities’ streets, not to mention the crime, flow of drugs, and strain on our hospitals, schools, and social welfare system.

Here’s the state of play at the border, a reality that has permeated practically every major city.

At present, the Department of Homeland Security is catching roughly 7,000 illegal aliens a day, an annualized rate of about 2.5 million people. Tying down border agents with “catch-and-release” babysitting duties has led to roughly one “gotaway” for every three apprehensions. That is an annualized rate of about 850,000 people, including untold numbers of criminals, gang members, and even international terrorists.

The DHS reports that 160 foreign individuals on terror watch lists have been apprehended in the first 10 months of this fiscal year. These people pay a lot of money to the cartels to cross surreptitiously, so you have to believe a substantially greater number enter the country undetected. And those are only the known terrorists on a watch list.

Are states completely helpless in dealing with the problem? It’s quite evident that the federal government is facilitating the invasion and, as such, will never stop it. That leaves resolving the crisis to the red states. The time has come for states to come together and repatriate illegal aliens with their own resources, such as the state highway patrol and National Guardsmen.

Now comes the inevitable question from those who believe we’re helpless in the face of government betrayal: Isn’t deportation a federal function? [read more]

This is not an emergency to the Left. It's exactly want they want. Good think President Trump won the 2024 election or this emergency would have continued.

How to Win 2026 Part 1: The Strategy for a Historic Republican Midterm Victory.

From Gingrich 360.net (Aug. 23):

Two realities shape American politics today.

The first is the reality we see every day in the news. It is shaped by the latest polls, the Washington and New York political class, and whatever controversy dominates the news cycle.

The second reality is deeper. It is shaped by what Americans actually believe, how they are changing, and where the country is moving over time.

Understanding the difference between these two realities is essential to understanding how Republicans can win a historic victory in 2026.

I learned this lesson firsthand in 2016. Two weeks before the election, I had a memorable exchange with Megyn Kelly about what I described as two different realities. Virtually the entire political establishment believed Hillary Clinton would win. The public polling seemed to reinforce that view. But beneath the conventional wisdom, signs suggested something very different was happening.

Early voting numbers in Florida and Pennsylvania and turnout patterns in Iowa suggested the race was not unfolding the way the political establishment thought it was. President Donald Trump ultimately carried all three states.

The lesson is not that Republicans should ignore polls or assume we are going to win. The lesson is that we must learn to distinguish between the frothy waves on the surface and the much larger political current moving underneath them.

Today, that current presents Republicans with an enormous opportunity. But recognizing an opportunity is not the same thing as winning an election.

First Win the Argument

Margaret Thatcher famously said, “First you win the argument, then you win the vote.”

That should be the Republican strategy for 2026.

Republicans will not win a historic victory by reacting to every controversy, chasing every news cycle, or turning the election into a referendum on whether Americans are satisfied with everything happening today.

We have to make this election a choice about the future. History tells us this can work.

I saw it in my first congressional victory in 1978. I saw it in George H.W. Bush’s remarkable comeback against Michael Dukakis in 1988. I saw it when we built the first Republican House majority in 40 years in 1994. And we saw it again when Donald Trump transformed a presidential campaign into the Make America Great Again movement.

Victory came from identifying a clear contrast, making a factual argument, and repeating it with discipline until the American people understood the choice. Republicans should approach 2026 with exactly the same determination. [read more]

Good advice.  Hopefully, the GOP reads Gingrich's article and takes his advice to heart. Actually, good advice for any GOP election.

All his “How to Win 2026” streaming episodes.

My truth, your truth, or the truth? How wokeness undermines the concept of truth itself

From Breakpoint.org (Jan. 19, 2024):

In an interview with The Harvard Crimson, the disgraced plagiarist and ex-president of Harvard University, Claudine Gay, used some interesting language about “truth” — language that should make any Christian’s eyebrows pop up.

She said, “What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged …Substantively, I failed to convey what is my truth.”

But the use of the phrase “my truth” isn’t only found among the progressive left these days. In one of the Republican presidential primary debates, Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and United Nations ambassador, outlined her (rather weak) position on abortion and claimed to be pro-life. Later, when facing criticism for not being pro-life enough at a candidates forum in Iowa, she said “What you heard me say at the debate was very much my truth.”

This raises a serious question: Since when did truth become something that needs to be modified with a personal possessive pronoun?

Christian apologist Frank Turek, perhaps having witnessed these strange personal modifications to the concept of truth, recently asked on X (formerly Twitter), “What do you say to people when they talk about ‘their truth?’”

Ryan Helfenbein, Executive Director of the Standing for Freedom Center, gave an excellent answer:

“There is no ‘your’ truth or ‘my’ truth. There is only ever one universal and absolute truth. The language of postmodernity and indeed Wokism, is a total affront and assault on truth.

Jesus said, ‘I AM the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’ John 14:6. Appreciate this question from @DrFrankTurek.”

There is no “your” truth or “my” truth. There is only ever one universal and absolute truth. The language of postmodernity and indeed Wokism, is a total affront and assault on truth.

Jesus said, “I AM the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through… https://t.co/kCNfgAluj9

— Ryan Helfenbein (@RHelfenbein) January 3, 2024

Ryan is right. There is only “one universal and absolute truth.” And there is only one being in the universe who has a right to make a personal claim on that truth — the Triune Creator God.

But in today’s increasingly secular world, the concept of truth has become blurred. The rise of postmodernism and its offspring, wokeness, have contributed significantly to this confusion. As Christians, it is essential to understand the implications of these ideologies and how they impact our understanding of truth. Let’s explore the concept of this sort of subjective truth from a Christian worldview and examine how wokeness undermines the very idea of objective truth.

The Christian understanding of truth

The Bible, as the foundation of the Christian faith, provides a clear understanding of truth. In John 14:6, as Ryan referenced, Jesus declares, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” This statement reveals that Jesus is the embodiment of truth and that truth is not a concept or an abstract idea but a fixed reality determined by God and miraculously embodied in Jesus Christ through the incarnation.

Moreover, the Bible teaches that truth is not relative but absolute. In John 8:32, Jesus says,

“And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

This statement teaches us in no uncertain terms that there is a single, objective truth that can be known and that this truth has the power to liberate us from the chaos and confusion of the world — and, more importantly, from our sin and rebellion against the God of truth. [read more]

Wokeness like Marxism (which wokeness is a variation actually) is a mental virus which needs to be eliminated.

Why Young Americans Are Not Taught About Evil

From Real Clear Politics.com (August 29, 2023):

Most of our schools teach almost nothing of importance, and nothing is more important than the study of good and evil. In the United States today, nearly all schools, from elementary through graduate, concentrate on teaching about racism, sexism, preferred pronouns, homophobia, transphobia, LGBTQIA+, climate change, diversity, equity, inclusiveness and white guilt. In other words, most of our educational institutions, including the most prestigious, do not educate.

Here are a few proofs.

It is almost certain that the great majority of American high school and college students (with the obvious exceptions of Christian students) could not name the Four Gospels (presuming they even know what they are); five of the Ten Commandments (presuming they know what those are); or the names of two Shakespeare plays. Most American students know little about the American Revolution, let alone about the French or Russian Revolutions. The same holds true for the Constitution and every other American founding document. It is doubtful that, other than Washington and Jefferson having owned slaves, American students know anything about these men or could name two other Founders.

When it comes to evil, the ignorance is enormous, often almost total. For example, according to Pew, about half of Americans ages 18-39 cannot identify Auschwitz or any other Nazi death camp. And there is every reason to assume that much fewer than half could identify the Gulag Archipelago (20 million-plus murdered); the Ukrainian forced famine (5 to 6 million murdered in a little over a year); Mao's Great Leap Forward (about 60 million murdered); or Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge (about one in every four Cambodians murdered).

As noted, almost no one outside of Russia has ever heard of the Russian Civil War, let alone knows anything about it. One reason is that the winners, the communists, had no desire that people know about it. Yet, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, about 10 million people, the great majority noncombatants, were killed.

Why don't students know about evil?

The first reason is that nearly all the genocides of the 20th century were committed by communists, and the Left, which runs virtually all educational institutions, has always had a soft spot for communism. If people were to recognize that communism has been the greatest source of evil in the modern age in terms of numbers murdered, number of lives destroyed, liberty stolen, and the sheer amount of human suffering inflicted (greater by those metrics than those of the Nazis before they were forcibly stopped), the Left would lose much of its appeal.

Another reason is the foolish notion that people are basically good. This has been a left-wing belief since the French Enlightenment leader Jean-Jacques Rousseau came up with the idea. As he wrote in his book, "On Philosophy, Morality, and Religion," "Man is a naturally good being, loving justice and order; there is no natural perversity in the human heart... All the vices imputed to the human heart are not natural to it."

This nonsense had been foreign to the Western mind. Its view of humanity was rooted in the Bible, and neither Bible-based religion -- Judaism or Christianity -- affirmed the goodness of the human heart. As Genesis states, "The will of man's heart is evil from his youth," and the rest of the Bible repeatedly warns us against following our hearts.

However, as the West began to abandon the Bible, including belief in the God of the Bible, Westerners began to believe in man. As Marx put it, "Man is God." People had no choice. For if there is no God to believe in, one must believe in man -- or one has literally nothing to believe in. Therefore, belief in man's inherent goodness became both psychologically and philosophically necessary.

A third reason follows from the second. With the exception of the mass murder of the Armenians (which was committed by Muslim Turks), the genocides and the other horrors of the 20th century were committed by secular regimes. Given the centrality of secularism to leftism, this fact has been kept from young people. Likewise, the fact that all these genocides were committed by big governments is not taught to young people because big government is also central to left-wing ideology. In other words, a true depiction of the evils of the 20th century would mean the end of the two pillars of left-wing ideology: secularism and big government.

If you want to make a more moral world, you must begin with the study of evil. But, for the reasons enumerated here, the Left is not -- and cannot be -- interested in fighting real evil. So, the Left fights made-up evils: American systemic racism, transphobia, capitalism, carbon emissions, sexism and former President Donald Trump, to name a few.

This is why young people know almost nothing about evil. The Left doesn't want them to know about it. Because knowledge of evil inevitably leads directly to rejection of the Left. [source]

Great points. Dennis Prager's last comment sums his essay up quite nicely: "This is why young people know almost nothing about evil. The Left doesn't want them to know about it. Because knowledge of evil inevitably leads directly to rejection of the Left."

Why Progressives Love Government “Experts”

From FEE.org (June 9, 2022):

In twenty-first-century America, ordinary people are at the mercy of well-paid, unelected government experts who wield vast power. That is, we live in the age of the technocrats: people who claim to have special wisdom that entitles them to control, manipulate, and manage society’s institutions using the coercive power of the state.

We’re told these people are “nonpolitical” and will use their impressive scientific knowledge to plan the economy, public health, public safety, or whatever goal the regime has decided the technocrats will be tasked with bringing about.

These people include central bankers, Supreme Court justices, “public health” bureaucrats, and Pentagon generals. The narrative is that these people are not there to represent the public or bow to political pressure. They’re just there to do “the right thing” as dictated by economic theory, biological sciences, legal theory, or the study of military tactics.

We’re also told that in order to allow these people to act as the purely well-meaning apolitical geniuses they are, we must give them their independence and not question their methods or conclusions.

We were exposed to this routine yet again last week as President Joe Biden announced he will “respect the Fed’s independence” and allow the central bankers to set monetary policy without any bothersome interference from the representatives of the taxpayers who pay all the bills and who primarily pay the price when central bankers make things worse. (Biden, of course, didn’t mention that central bankers have been spectacularly wrong about the inflation threat in recent years, with inflation rates hitting forty-year highs, economic growth going negative, and consumer credit piling up as families struggle to cope with the cost of living.)

Conveniently, Biden’s deferral to the Fed allows him to blame it later when economic conditions get even worse. Nonetheless, his placing the economy in the hands of alleged experts will no doubt appear laudable to many. This is because the public has long been taught by public schools and media outlets that government experts should have the leeway to exercise vast power in the name of “fixing” whatever problems society faces.

The Expert Class as a Tool for State Building

The success of this idea represents a great victory for progressive ideology. Progressives have long been committed to creating a special expert class as a means of building state power. In the United States, for example, the cult of expertise really began to take hold in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it led directly to support for more government intervention in the private sector. As Maureen Flanagan notes in “Progressives and Progressivism in an Era of Reform,”

“Social science expertise gave political Progressives a theoretical foundation for cautious proposals to create a more activist state…. Professional social scientists composed a tight circle of men who created a space between academia and government from which to advocate for reform. They addressed each other, trained their students to follow their ideas, and rarely spoke to the larger public.”

These men founded new organizations—such as the American Economics Association—to promote this new class of experts and their plans for a more centrally planned society. Ultimately, the nature of the expert class was revolutionary. The new social scientists thought they knew better than the patricians, religious leaders, local representatives, and market actors who had long shaped local institutions. Instead,

Progressives were modernizers with a structural-instrumentalist agenda. They rejected reliance on older values and cultural norms to order society and sought to create a modern reordered society with political and economic institutions run by men qualified to apply fiscal expertise, businesslike efficiency, and modern scientific expertise to solve problems and save democracy. The emerging academic disciplines in the social sciences of economics, political economy and political science, and pragmatic education supplied the theoretical bases for this middle-class expert Progressivism.

The Progressive impulse for expertise-based rule was perhaps exemplified by the Progressive transportation planner Emory Johnson, who advocated for a strong federal executive branch that would be resistant to political pressure while relying on the supposedly “scientific” judgments of government planners and other bureaucrats. Johnson

explicitly took up the question of the role of expertise in the American state…. he maintained that success relied upon what he termed “executive functions.” He sought to empower the federal government’s executive branch as experts’ natural home.1

In the Progressive view, business leaders and machine politicians lacked a rational and broad view of the needs of society. In contrast, the government experts would approach society’s problems as scientists. Johnson felt this model already somewhat existed in the Department of War, where Johnson imagined the secretary of war was “quite free from political pressure and [relied] on the counsel of the engineers.” Johnson imagined that these science-minded bureaucrats could bring a “really economic and scientific application” of policy. [read more]

Trump drops election integrity bombshells, urges passage of SAVE America Act

From Just the News.com (July 16):

On Thursday at the White House, President Donald Trump addressed the nation and presented new evidence detailing multiple security breaches in elections he said were concealed by a self-proclaimed "shadow government" and the Biden administration.

"Another official inside the FBI wrote that she was running 'a shadow government' to keep intelligence about China's election meddling from becoming known," he said, during a primetime address from the White House.

The Chinese hacked while the Democrats denied

According to Trump and subsequent documents to be released Thursday, in the spring and summer of 2020, the intelligence community (IC) began detecting the Chinese illegal acquisition of voter databases. At the time, the number of voter files was in the tens of millions.

The documents reportedly reveal that there was a concerted and conscientious effort by the IC not to tell the president (Trump at the time), Congress, or the American people.

Because nothing was done by former President Joe Biden's administration to stop the Chinese activities, the number of voter files hacked went from 10 to 20 million in 2020 to roughly 220 million by 2023.

China targets Trump to damage the election

Furthermore, evidence shows that China was activating certain interference methods to specifically target Trump, as the IC was telling Trump and the American people the opposite.

The IC report, declassified and released by former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines, concluded that China did not interfere, as it “considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election.”

Since the spring and summer of 2020, on at least five occasions, intelligence reports have revealed that U.S. election voting machines could be hacked by a foreign power because of specific vulnerabilities.

In the summer and fall of 2020, the IC watched a foreign adversary, Venezuela, move from theoretically hacking the machines to creating a practical plan that would accomplish it. The plan was apparently so good that a post-election hand-audit would not have been able to detect that the ballots had been changed.

The same vulnerabilities used to hack the machines and change ballots were recently tested by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which determined that those vulnerabilities still existed, according to that July report.

Roughly 278,000 non-citizens were found on voter rolls

To further investigate, DHS purchased 30 voter registration databases, which are available for purchase commercially, that Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the Department of Justice Harmeet Dhillon was unable to compel states to hand over.

DHS was unable to purchase those files from California, New York, New Jersey and a handful of other states. Through their investigation, they found that in mid-sized states, roughly 278,000 non-citizens are currently on voter roles. The non-citizens were identified through foreign social security numbers or foreign drivers' licenses.

Democrats fabricated ballots in Michigan to make quotas in 2020 elections

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has also interviewed numerous subjects who were canvassers hired by GBI Strategies. The Democratic National Committee is one of the largest funders of GBI Strategies, a Democrat-aligned voter registration and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) organization.

During the 2020 election, GBI reportedly received payments nearing $5 million from campaigns and committees. These canvassers, who were illegally paid per ballot, were allegedly instructed that if at the end of the day they had not met their quota of ballots signed and received, to sign ballots themselves.

According to the documents to be released, the Biden DOJ blocked the FBI from indicting anyone in these matters for four years following the 2020 election. Reportedly, the FBI and the Michigan State Police never investigated beyond Michigan and slow-walked any further probes.

Amanda Head is White House Correspondent for Just The News. You can follow her here. [source]

Of course, the Chi-Coms wanted Biden to win. Just like Putin wanted Hillary Clinton to win too. Both candidates are easy to manipulate. One other thing, Senate pass the SAVE America Act already.

Other articles on the speech:

• Trump’s Declassified Docs Detail Massive Michigan Voter Registration Fraud
• Thousands of non-citizens registered to vote in NJ due to software error, governor says
• Analysis: The Many Times Noncitizens Popped Up On Voter Rolls
• If the government was a company, it would’ve faced lawsuits for data breach of millions of voters
• Trump’s Speech Sends Beijing, And China-Watchers, Into A Frenzy
• After Birthplace Citizenship Ruling, China Won’t Need Hackers To Meddle In US Elections
• Intel Agency Assessed China Planned To ‘Encourage’ Violent BLM Riots To Hurt Trump In 2020

EXCLUSIVE: George Soros Gave $250K to British Group Working To Censor Conservative News Sites and ‘Kill Musk’s Twitter’

From Free Beacon.com (Nov. 17, 2025):

The left-wing philanthropy funded by George Soros, Open Society Foundations (OSF), bankrolls a British nonprofit that works to censor conservative news websites and social media companies, including through a plot to "kill" Elon Musk’s X by pressuring advertisers and investors to boycott the company.

OSF gave $250,000 last year to the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) for "general support," according to the Soros charity’s grant database. The CCDH, under the guise of stopping "the spread of online hate and disinformation," has pressured social media companies’ investors and advertisers to censor supposed "disinformation" or other content it deems to be offensive.

The organization, founded by former Labour Party operative Imran Ahmed in 2018, has also pressured tech companies to pull advertisements from the conservative websites the Federalist and the Daily Wire over allegedly racist content.

The grant, which has not been reported, could resurrect a longstanding battle that Musk has waged with both the CCDH and Soros. Musk has accused Soros of "crimes against humanity" and funding groups involved in violent protests across the country this year. And he has called the CCDH a "criminal organization" and said he was "going after" the group’s donors over its efforts to harm X’s finances.

Last year, the CCDH quietly organized a campaign to "kill Musk’s Twitter" by pressuring advertisers to cut ties with the company, according to memos published by Racket News. The CCDH, which the watchdog group Capital Research Center calls a "UK-based censorship advocacy group," met with 16 congressional offices to discuss Musk’s lawsuit against the organization, and held "policy engagement" meetings with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.). The nonprofit also lobbied American policymakers toward the creation of an "independent digital regulator," according to Racket News.

While the CCDH has criticized most social media companies for failing to curtail extremism, the organization has been particularly hostile toward X since Musk purchased the site, formerly known as Twitter, in October 2022. Musk, who pledged to end censorship on the platform after purchasing the site, sued the CCDH in July 2023 over a report from the group that claimed hate speech had spiked on X since Musk’s takeover.

The revelation of the Soros grant helps answer longstanding questions about the CCDH’s funding. In 2023, Rep. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) subpoenaed the CCDH for a list of its donors as part of an investigation of the firm’s alleged collusion to censor social media platforms.

The CCDH does not voluntarily disclose its donors. But some organizations have revealed contributions to the nonprofit. The Skoll Fund, the private philanthropy of former eBay president Jeff Skoll, gave $415,000 to the CCDH in 2023, according to tax filings. The Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a donor-advised fund that manages charitable contributions on behalf of anonymous donors, contributed $403,175 to the CCDH in 2023. The CCDH received $2.1 million in revenue in 2023, the year of its most recent tax filing.

The grant revelation comes as the Trump administration sets its sights on the Soros operation and the CCDH. President Donald Trump called over the summer for Soros and his son Alex, the chairman of OSF, to be investigated for allegedly funding violent riots across the country. The Soroses have denied the allegation. [read more]

The Spooky Dude drama continues...

More Soros stories:

• Soros-Funded PAC Aims to Turn Texas Blue
• Report: Soros Family Pours $103 Million Into Midterms

Indictment: Leftist Mega-Nonprofit SPLC Paid For Wood And Gas For KKK To Burn Crosses

From The Federalist.com (June 3):

This will be quick, and it’s a detail we’ve already mentioned, but the most extraordinary allegation in the superseding indictment filed Tuesday by federal prosecutors against the Southern Poverty Law Center demands a screenshot so you can see it with your own eyes. In the indictment, people labeled with the letter F and a number are members of extremist organizations who were allegedly funded by the SPLC, so F-31 and F-32 are alleged members of the Ku Klux Klan:

Image CreditScreenshot

The government is alleging that the SPLC, which presents itself as America’s foremost anti-hate organization, quite literally funded Klan robes, and also paid for lumber and gas so the Klan could make crosses and burn them.

The SPLC has due process rights, and is entitled to the presumption of innocence. But if prosecutors can support these allegations in court with convincing evidence, we’ll need to strap ourselves in for the ride on the narrative rollercoaster.

The SPLC has been generously supported by leftist grandees like George Soros and George Clooney. If the new indictment is correct, they were paying for Klan robes and cross-burnings. [source]

Did they also pay for Nazi flags and uniforms too?  This saga just keeps getting worse and worse.

An article and video on SPLC:

• Dems Defend Giving SPLC Police Power To Target Conservatives
• Klan Hoods and WORSE Paid for by LEFTIST Group?! [video]

The Remaking of America

From AM Greatness.com (Aug. 7, 2023):

We are in the midst of one of the most radical revolutions in American history. It is as far-reaching and dangerous as the turbulent years of the 1850s and 1860s or the 1930s. Every aspect of American life and culture is under assault, including the very processes by which we govern ourselves, and the manner in which we live.

The Revolution began under the Obama administration that sought to divide Americans into oppressed and oppressors, and then substitute race for class victimization. It was empowered by the bicoastal wealth accrued from globalization, and honed during the COVID lockdown, quarantine-fed economic downturn, and the George Floyd riots and their aftermath. The Revolution was boosted by fanatic opposition to the presidency of Donald Trump. And the result is an America that is unrecognizable from what it was a mere decade ago.

Here are 10 upheavals that the Left has successfully wrought.

Free expression. In large swatches of American society—particularly the corporation, the media, the government, the public schools, and the university—it is suddenly dangerous to speak freely. At a DEI workshop, politely object that “whiteness” does not account for all the challenges of “marginalized peoples,” and you will become either ostracized, reprimanded, or perhaps fired.

Suggest to a class that man-made climate change and the state remedies for it, are still under debate—and your career and livelihood are endangered. In 2020, state that Covid lockdowns would do more eventual damage than the virus—and your career was through. Express doubt that there are more than two biological sexes, and if an athlete or high school principal you will be shunned or rendered professionally inert.

The government, in league with social media, censors the news. “Liberal” universities often first require McCarthy-era type “diversity” statements for one to be hired. Commissars review syllabi to spot incorrect or improper speech or insufficient DEI zeal.

The Left now seeks to modify the First Amendment, and its empowerment of “hate speech,” defined as most anything impeding the progressive project. The state and the universities properly issue word lists of approved vocabularies.

The old ACLU or Sen. Church Committee would now probably be deemed rightwing. The methodologies of Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover are the preferred models, once they were rebooted to the right cause.

The Weaponization of Justice. Administrations and their efforts to stock the justice department with supporters come and go. But in the last decade the Left has viewed the Department of Justice as a political extension of the party—whose unchecked power must properly be directed to hurt enemies and help friends. No wonder Eric Holder described himself as Obama’s “wingman” and became the first Attorney General to be held in contempt for ignoring a congressional subpoena.

Never in U.S. history have the Department of Justice and sympathetic state and local prosecutors indicted a leading opposition candidate and likely nominee of one of the two major parties, and at the beginning of a presidential campaign. Donald Trump is currently charged with nearly 100 felonies by at least two prosecutors. He likely eventually will be hit with more than- 500 indictments, from four prosecutors, every one of the latter with a long record of either leftwing associations or Democratic service.

The mass murderer Charles Manson faced less legal exposure. No one believes Trump would have been indicted on such counts—most of them involving allegations from years past—were he not running for President.

One count that Donald Trump is not charged with is bribery, or taking money while in office, a crime cited as impeachable in the Constitution and germane to the accusations that Joe Biden and his family raked in millions from foreign governments due to the improper use of his prior Vice Presidency. For what reason did Joe Biden lie that he never discussed his son’s business? Why did Hunter complain to his daughter that Joe demanded half of his own grifting income? Why would a Vice President serially call disreputable American grifters and foreign corrupt oligarchs? Can Joe’s lifestyle ever be reconciled with his reported income?

Given such asymmetry in the application of the laws, conservative or even apolitical Americans are apprehensive that any political prominence will draw the attention of government in effort to either indict or bankrupt them with legal expenses.

The last four FBI Directors have either admitted they lied under oath, or preposterously under oath claimed ignorance or amnesia about events directly under their control. Or they simply stonewalled subpoenas and testimonies about alleged FBI crimes.

The former CIA Director admitted to lying twice under oath. The FBI hired social media corporations to suppress election-cycle news deemed unhelpful to the Left. The agency, along with Democratic operatives, helped hatch the election-cycle conspiracy of the 2015-2016 Russian-Collusion hoax, and the 2020 Russian disinformation laptop hoax. The FBI played a central role in many of the 2024 indictments. In other words, the FBI along with the DOJ, has sought to warp three presidential elections in a row.

On the prompt of a Joe Biden campaign official (and now Secretary of State) and a former interim CIA director, 50 former intelligence officials lied to the electorate that an authentic but incriminating Biden computer was a likely Russian plant—a fact known to be lie but not disclosed as such by the FBI. [read more]

This is the blueprint how the Left is radically transforming America. Another great article by VDH.

A Reminder About the Moral Difference Between the Christian and Muslim Worlds at This Time

From Townhall.com (Aug. 16, 2022):

About 30 years after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued his fatwa calling for Muslims to murder Salman Rushdie, the Indian author was finally attacked and nearly killed.

Stabbed 10 times by a young Muslim living in America, Rushdie is in a hospital, where his prognosis as of this writing is partial paralysis and the loss of an eye.

What was Rushdie's "crime"? He "insulted" Islam.

Tens of millions of Muslims believe that if a person insults Islam, Muhammad or the Quran, he should be killed. Any Muslim who does kill a person deemed to have insulted Islam goes straight to heaven when he or she dies.

The most famous case of Muslims murdering people charged with insulting Islam occurred in 2015, when two French Muslims entered the Paris editorial offices of the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, and murdered 12 people and wounded 11 others. Charlie Hebdo had printed cartoon images of Muhammad, which most Muslims consider forbidden even to non-Muslims.

That same week, Muslims also entered a kosher supermarket in Paris and murdered four Jews. For many Muslims, Jews don't have to do anything to insult Islam; their mere existence is an insult to Islam.

It is instructive to compare Christian reactions to insults to Christianity with Muslim reactions to what they perceive as insults to Islam.

If Christians reacted to insults to Christianity the way Muslims react to insults to Islam, there would be daily murders in America and elsewhere. Christianity is constantly insulted in America and elsewhere in the West, and Christians are regularly murdered by Muslims in the Middle East and Africa.

Perhaps the famous example of the former is the "artwork" by Andres Serrano titled "Piss Christ," which features a crucifix in a jar of urine.

Imagine how many people radical Muslims would kill if a Quran or an image of Muhammad submerged in a jar of urine were displayed in museums around America. It would never happen because museums would never put their staff or their visitors in that kind of danger. Museum staff and visitors to museums that featured this work would be killed.

Why doesn't that argue for the moral superiority of most Christians relative to most Muslims at this time in history? After all, some scholars argue that Muslims and Muslim civilization were morally superior to Christians and Christian civilization at various times during the Middle Ages. Whether or not that is accurate, no one charges the scholars who make that argument with an anti-Christian phobia or with harboring anti-Christian bigotry. Yet, anyone who would argue that contemporary Christian civilization is on a more elevated level than Muslim civilization -- while of course acknowledging that this does not apply to all Muslims or to all Christians -- would be attacked as an "Islamophobe," lose his reputation and quite possibly lose his job and career.

This inability to judge the West -- which was created by Christians and has, with all its many flaws, been rooted in Judeo-Christian morality -- as morally more elevated than the Muslim world goes to the heart of the crisis facing the West: the Left's desire to destroy it. Western elites in academia, media, politics and the business world -- in short, everywhere -- are moral fools.

They claim to be unable to make moral distinctions between the two civilizations -- because of Western slavery and treatment of native populations, for example. Yet, they either do not know or simply ignore Muslims' far worse history of slavery and wiping out native populations. And they know but choose to ignore the fact that the worldwide antislavery movement began in the West and was founded by Christians. It did not begin in the Muslim world, which had no such widespread movement.

The Left has the same morally bankrupt view regarding Israel and its Muslim enemies. On the Left, Israel, with its robust freedoms that extend to its large Muslim minority, is not morally superior to its unfree, terror-honoring Muslim neighbors (e.g., Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Hamas).

It is true that it was only one Muslim who stabbed Salman Rushdie. But it is millions of Muslims who believe anyone who "insults" Islam should die. It was also one Muslim who murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh for "insulting" Islam's take on women. And it was a lot more than one Muslim member of the Islamic State who slit the throats and beheaded countless infidels -- that is, non-Muslims.

Author Taslima Nasrin fled her native Bangladesh, fearing for her life, after a court said she had hurt Muslims' religious feelings with her novel "Lajja" ("Shame"). Unlike virtually every Western author and leader, her reaction to the attack on Rushdie noted that the would-be murderer was Muslim: "I just learned that Salman Rushdie was attacked in New York. I am really shocked… If he is attacked, anyone who is critical of Islam can be attacked."

Exactly. [source]

Glenn Beck: Here's What's Wrong with Conservatism Today

From Glenn Beck.com (Nov. 4, 2025):

What does it mean to be a conservative in 2025? Glenn offers guidance on what conservatives need to do to ensure the conservative movement doesn't fade into oblivion. We have to get back to PRINCIPLES, not policies.

To be a conservative in 2025 means to STAND

• for Stewardship, protecting the wisdom of our Founders;
• for Truth, defending objective reality in an age of illusion;
• for Accountability, living within our means as individuals and as a nation;
• for Neighborhood, rebuilding family, faith, and local community;
• and for Duty, carrying freedom forward to the next generation.

A conservative doesn't cling to the past -- he stands guard over the principles that make the future possible.

Below is a rush transcript that may contain errors

You know, I'm so tired of being against everything. Saying what we're not.

It's time that we start saying what we are. And it's hard, because we're changing. It's different to be a conservative, today, than it was, you know, years ago.

And part of that is just coming from hard knocks. School of hard knocks. We've learned a lot of lessons on things we thought we were for. No, no, no.

But conservatives. To be a conservative, it shouldn't be about policies. It's really about principles. And that's why we've lost our way. Because we've lost our principles. And it's easy. Because the world got easy. And now the world is changing so rapidly. The boundaries between truth and illusion are blurred second by second. Machines now think. Currencies falter. Families fractured. And nations, all over the world, have forgotten who they are.

So what does it mean to be a conservative now, in 2025, '26. For a lot of people, it means opposing the left. That's -- that's a reaction. That's not renewal.

That's a reaction. It can't mean also worshiping the past, as if the past were perfect. The founders never asked for that.

They asked that we would preserve the principles and perfect their practice. They knew it was imperfect. To make a more perfect nation.

Is what we're supposed to be doing.

2025, '26 being a conservative has to mean stewardship.

The stewardship of a nation, of a civilization.

Of a moral inheritance. That is too precious to abandon.

What does it mean to conserve? To conserve something doesn't mean to stand still. It means to stand guard. It means to defend what the Founders designed. The separation of powers. The rule of law.

The belief that our rights come not from kings or from Congress, but from the creator himself. This is a system that was not built for ease. It was built for endurance, and it will endure if we only teach it again!

The problem is, we only teach it like it's a museum piece. You know, it's not a museum piece. It's not an old dusty document. It's a living covenant between the dead, the living and the unborn.

So this chapter of conservatism. Must confront reality. Economic reality.

Global reality.

And moral reality.

It's not enough just to be against something. Or chant tax cuts or free markets.

We have to ask -- we have to start with simple questions like freedom, yes. But freedom for what?

Freedom for economic sovereignty. Your right to produce and to innovate. To build without asking Beijing's permission. That's a moral issue now.

Another moral issue: Debt! It's generational theft. We're spending money from generations we won't even meet.

And dependence. Another moral issue. It's a national weakness.

People cannot stand up for themselves. They can't make it themselves. And we're encouraging them to sit down, shut up, and don't think.

And the conservative who can't connect with fiscal prudence, and connect fiscal prudence to moral duty, you're not a conservative at all.

Being a conservative today, means you have to rebuild an economy that serves liberty, not one that serves -- survives by debt, and then there's the soul of the nation.

We are living through a time period. An age of dislocation. Where our families are fractured.

Our faith is almost gone.

Meaning is evaporating so fast. Nobody knows what meaning of life is. That's why everybody is killing themselves. They have no meaning in life. And why they don't have any meaning, is truth itself is mocked and blurred and replaced by nothing, but lies and noise.

If you want to be a conservative, then you have to be to become the moral compass that reminds a lost people, liberty cannot survive without virtue.

That freedom untethered from moral order is nothing, but chaos!

And that no app, no algorithm, no ideology is ever going to fill the void, where meaning used to live!

To be a conservative, moving forward, we cannot just be about policies.

We have to defend the sacred, the unseen, the moral architecture, that gives people an identity. So how do you do that? Well, we have to rebuild competence. We have to restore institutions that actually work. Just in the last hour, this monologue on what we're facing now, because we can't open the government.

Why can't we open the government?

Because government is broken. Why does nobody care? Because education is broken.

We have to reclaim education, not as propaganda, but as the formation of the mind and the soul. Conservatives have to champion innovation.

Not to imitate Silicon Valley's chaos, but to harness technology in defense of human dignity. Don't be afraid of AI.

Know what it is. Know it's a tool. It's a tool to strengthen people. As long as you always remember it's a tool. Otherwise, you will lose your humanity to it!

That's a conservative principle. To be a conservative, we have to restore local strength. Our families are the basic building blocks, our schools, our churches, and our charities. Not some big, distant NGO that was started by the Tides Foundation, but actual local charities, where you see people working. A web of voluntary institutions that held us together at one point. Because when Washington fails, and it will, it already has, the neighborhood has to stand.

Charlie Kirk was doing one thing that people on our side were not doing. Speaking to the young.

But not in nostalgia.

Not in -- you know, Reagan, Reagan, Reagan.

In purpose. They don't remember. They don't remember who Dick Cheney was.

I was listening to Fox news this morning, talking about Dick Cheney. And there was somebody there that I know was not even born when Dick Cheney. When the World Trade Center came down.

They weren't even born. They were telling me about Dick Cheney.

And I was like, come on. Come on. Come on.

If you don't remember who Dick Cheney was, how are you going to remember 9/11. How will you remember who Reagan was.

That just says, that's an old man's creed. No, it's not.

It's the ultimate timeless rebellion against tyranny in all of its forms. Yes, and even the tyranny of despair, which is eating people alive!

We need to redefine ourselves. Because we have changed, and that's a good thing. The creed for a generation, that will decide the fate of the republic, is what we need to ¬nd.

A conservative in 2025, '26.

Is somebody who protects the enduring principles of American liberty and self-government.

While actively stewarding the institutions. The culture. The economy of this nation!

For those who are alive and yet to be unborn.

We have to be a group of people that we're not anchored in the past. Or in rage! But in reason. And morality. Realism. And hope for the future.

We're the stewards! We're the ones that have to relight the torch, not just hold it. We didn't build this Torch. We didn't make this Torch. We're the keepers of the flame, but we are honor-bound to pass that forward, and conservatives are viewed as people who just live in the past. We're not here to merely conserve the past, but to renew it. To sort it. What worked, what didn't work. We're the ones to say to the world, there's still such a thing as truth. There's still such a thing as virtue. You can deny it all you want.

But the pain will only get worse. There's still such a thing as America!

And if now is not the time to renew America. When is that time?

If you're not the person. If we're not the generation to actively stand and redefine and defend, then who is that person?

We are supposed to preserve what works.

That -- you know, I was writing something this morning.

I was making notes on this. A constitutionalist is for restraint. A progressive, if you will, for lack of a better term, is for more power.

Progressives want the government to have more power.

Conservatives are for more restraint.

But the -- for the American eagle to fly, we must have both wings.

And one can't be stronger than the other.

We as a conservative, are supposed to look and say, no. Don't look at that. The past teaches us this, this, and this. So don't do that.

We can't do that. But there are these things that we were doing in the past,that we have to jettison. And maybe the other side has a good idea on what should replace that. But we're the ones who are supposed to say, no, but remember the framework.

They're -- they can dream all they want. They can come up with all these utopias and everything else, and we can go, "That's a great idea."

But how do we make it work with this framework? Because that's our job. The point of this is, it takes both. It takes both.

We have to have the customs and the moral order. And the practices that have stood the test of time, in trial.

We -we're in an amazing, amazing time. Amazing time.

We live at a time now, where anything -- literally anything is possible!

I don't want to be against stuff. I want to be for the future. I want to be for a rich, dynamic future. One where we are part of changing the world for the better!

Where more people are lifted out of poverty, more people are given the freedom to choose, whatever it is that they want to choose, as their own government and everything.

I don't want to force it down anybody's throat.

We -- I am so excited to be a shining city on the hill again.

We have that opportunity, right in front of us!

But not in we get bogged down in hatred, in division.

Not if we get bogged down into being against something.

We must be for something!

I know what I'm for. Do you? [watch the video]

Great principles now and in the future.

Democrats Falsely Claim Trump Assassination Attempts Were Staged To Cover Up Their Own Domestic Terrorism

From The Federalist.com (May 13):

Three weeks ago a gunman armed with multiple firearms burst through security lines at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to try and assassinate President Donald Trump and members of his cabinet. But according to 34 percent of Democrats, that assassination attempt was staged.

In fact, that assassination attempt was only the latest staged attempt — if you ask some Democrats.

A NewsGuard/YouGov poll found 30 percent of Americans “believe that at least one of the three attempts on President Donald Trump’s life over the last two years was staged.” When broken down by party affiliation, 34 percent of Democrats said the WHCA dinner was staged. Forty-two percent of Democrats say the Butler assassination attempt — in which Trump was visibly hit and bleeding and in which Corey Comperatore was murdered — was staged. Twenty-six percent of Democrats say the attempted assassination that took place just weeks after Butler, in which Ryan Routh tried to assassinate the president on his golf course, was also staged. Thirteen percent of Republicans said the White House Correspondents’ Dinner assassination attempt was staged, while 7 percent said both the Butler and Routh attempts were staged.

The poll surveyed 1,000 Americans between April 28 and May 4.

The assassination-denial conspiracy theories aren’t limited to everyday Democrats, however; leftist pundits are also on board. Former MSNBC host Joy Reid said that “odd things … keep happening around Trump” before referencing a “fake assassination” of Viktor Orbán that the Russians purportedly staged. “So, all of this thrown in together, you’re like, when something seems too perfect, people, they don’t — they don’t believe in it. And Donald Trump now again gets victimized by an alleged would-be assassin in front of the perfect witnesses — the press.”

The View co-host Ana Navarro suggested Trump staged the attempt because he “lies.”

“It’s odd to me that in a place that is teeming with Secret Service … this could happen,” Navarro said. “But also I think people jump to that conclusion that it is staged because Trump lies … so people do not trust and do not believe anything Trump says. His lips are moving, the likelihood is, he is lying.”

TDS-infected author Don Winslow claimed the entire weekend around the dinner was “coordinated.”

So after badgering the public day in and day out with rhetoric designed to justify and even incite the most egregious political violence possible, Democrats now want to pretend the violence that predictably follows as a result of that rhetoric is “staged.” Democrats and their allies in the propaganda press have spent years depicting Trump and his supporters as existential threats to democracy, “fascists,” “dictators,” Nazis, and enemies of the state. Now they don’t want to accept responsibility for the consequences of their rhetoric.

But it’s hard not to see the connection.

The propaganda press has run an assassination prep campaign that, as The Federalist co-founder and CEO Sean Davis explained, is fueled by language “meant to justify and even incite the most extreme measures, up to and including unconscionable violence.”

To give just a few examples, The Atlantic’s Marc Novicoff published a piece this past January entitled “How to Tell If Your President Is a Dictator.” The piece claims Trump’s second term is “literally dictatorial.” A 2023 Washington Post op-ed by Robert Kagan said, “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.” Kagan also said a second Trump administration would be akin to Hitler’s regime.

Democrat politicians are eagerly peddling the same assassination-prep rhetoric. Ilhan Omar called Trump “the leader of the Pedophile Protection Party” and added that “at least in Somalia they execute pedophiles not elect them.”

Just months ago, Democrats in Virginia elected Jay Jones to serve as attorney general despite text messages from 2022 showing Jones wishing to kill his Republican colleague and former state House Speaker Todd Gilbert. “Gilbert gets two bullets to the head,” Jay said in one message. “Yes, I’ve told you this before. Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy,” he wrote in another, adding that Gilbert’s children are “little fascists.”

Graham Platner, the Democrat who had the Nazi tattoo and is running for Senate, suggested in 2018 that voters can’t “expect to fight fascism without a good semi-automatic rifle.” Elliot Forhan, a Democrat running for attorney general in Ohio, posted a video this past January explaining how he would “kill Donald Trump” if elected to serve as attorney general. Forhan said he would kill the president “with the requirements of due process, resulting in a sentence, duly executed, of capital punishment.”

As Eddie Scarry highlighted in these pages, the owner of a Wisconsin brewery who is now running for governor as a Democrat offered free beer when “either a brother or sister in the Resistance” gets their “marksmanship” right and Trump is successfully killed. Notably, the brewery also suggested Trump may have “faked another assassination to get a positive news cycle.”

When Democrats and corporate media leftists repeatedly tell Americans that Trump is Hitler and Republicans are fascists, they present violence to that end as justified, even acceptable — and their assassination prep has gained clear traction. In fact, Routh called Trump a “dictator” in a handwritten letter, and he asserted in a self-published book that Trump “perpetrated” the Jan. 6 unrest. The alleged shooter at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Cole Tomas Allen, reportedly left a manifesto falsely accusing Trump of being a “pedophile, rapist, and traitor.” He allegedly wrote, “And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” adding that he was not obligated to “yield [elected officials and judges] anything so unlawfully ordered.”

The rhetoric allegedly espoused by the WHCA dinner suspect is the same rhetoric shared by members of the Democrat Party and the corporate media. In fact the normalization and acceptance of political violence by the left has become so obvious even Politifact wrote that “Democrats and liberals are becoming more open to political violence.”

PolitiFact also noted that “younger Americans today are more open to political violence than members of other age groups” and that “the strongest Democratic rate of justifying violence was to remove Trump from office. More than 27% of Democrats said violence was justified for that purpose.” PolitiFact was citing polling by the Chicago Project on Security and Threats and NORC.

A Marquette Poll taken days after Charlie Kirk was assassinated by a leftist showed 15 percent of Democrats believed that it is “justified for Americans today to resort to violence in order to achieve political goals.” Twenty-five percent of respondents who identify as “very liberal” agreed with the statement. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found 7 percent of Democrats agreed with the statement that it is justifiable “for someone in my political party to commit violence to achieve a political goal,” according to PolitiFact.

The assassination attempts — which were not “staged” — did not happen in a vacuum. Democrats and the propaganda press have spent years excusing, justifying, and even legitimizing political violence. Then when that violence becomes reality, they insist it was staged. And it’s not because they genuinely believe it was “staged,” but because acknowledging the reality of the attacks would force Democrats and the press to acknowledge that they are partially responsible for creating the conditions that have led to such violence.

So instead, leftists will gaslight the public — the bullets were fake, the blood was fake, and Comperatore actually agreed to be murdered — all while spewing the same assassination-prep language that led to the assassination attempts they deny. [source]

Either that or the Dems are just insane.

Why the State Won’t Tolerate Independence for Christianity

From Zachary Yost on Mises.org (Mar. 11, 2021):

On February 25, the House of Representatives passed the Equality Act, a bill that is touted as a step forward for civil rights in the United States. If enacted, the bill would add sexual orientation and gender identity to the federally protected classes that cannot be discriminated against and would expand where such protections are applied. While expanding such protections is not necessarily widely opposed (Mormon Republican Chris Stewart has introduced the Fairness for All Act as an alternative bill), the act explicitly says that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 cannot be invoked, and this has generated tremendous concern that both private businesses and religious institutions will be forced to toe the current cultural line regarding sexual and gender ideology, or else face discrimination suits and be sued into oblivion.

Organizations such as the Heritage Foundation and Christianity Today have argued against the bill on the basis of its effects on religious institutions, private schools, the legal rights of parents, and women’s athletics. While a discussion of such effects is important, the conversation has largely been missing the broader context of where this legislation and the numerous other proposals like it emerge from.

In his important essay “The Balance of Power in Society” sociologist Frank Tannenbaum argues that “society is possessed by a series of irreducible institutions, perennial through time, that in effect both describe man and define the basic role he plays.” These perennial institutions are the state, the church, the family, and the market. These institutions have eternally striven against each other to gain dominance and become what sociologist Robert Nisbet would call the primary reference group for its members, meaning the primary way in which they understand themselves and shape their beliefs and actions. At various times we can see one group coming to dominate the others, such as when the “trustee” form of family dominated social life in clan-based societies, or when the Roman Catholic Church exhibited tremendous power over the political affairs of Europe. Currently, we live in an epoch where the state has come to dominate social life to an extent never previously seen in human history.

It is useful to analyze the Equality Act from this perspective to truly understand its full implications. State hostility towards religion and the religious institutions through which religion is exercised is not driven solely, or in some cases even primarily, by the current secular zeitgeist. Rather, religion and religious institutions represent a major obstacle to the exercise of state control and the centralization of social power. In the Western context, orthodox Christianity especially poses a threat to this agenda due to its adherents’ membership in a kingdom “not of this world.” It is difficult for the immanent state to compete to be the primary reference for people who, by virtue of their religion, are members of a transcendent order.

However, it cannot be denied that the state has been very successful in undermining and sapping the power of religious institutions through two different means. The first is by expropriating those mundane areas of social responsibility and function that have traditionally been the purview of the church, such as charity and education. While churches are still involved in such things, the state has supplanted them as the primary social institution that provides them.

As Nisbet argues in his book The Quest for Community, a social group cannot survive for long if its chief functional purpose is lost, and unless new institutional functions are adapted, the group’s “psychological influence will be minimal.” No doubt the state has succeeded in centralizing so much power due to its success in poaching the historical functions of the church and family.

I noted above that in the Western context the emphasis of orthodox Christianity on transcendental concerns has proven to be a stumbling block to the state when it comes to becoming citizens’ primary reference group. However, the state has also attempted to muscle into that territory as well. Earlier I classified the state and the church as being two different institutions with separate functions. While this is often true, especially in the West due to the Augustinian formulation of the City of God and the Earthly City, in various times in history the functions have been unified.

In his work The Political Religions, political theorist Eric Voegelin explored this idea and traced its earliest sophisticated formulation back to Amenhotep IV/Akhenaton, a fourteenth-century BC pharaoh who temporarily upended Egyptian civilization by abolishing the old deities and introducing the monotheistic worship of the sun god Aton. By abolishing the old gods (references to traditional deities were eradicated and Amenhotep changed his name so that it no longer referenced the old god Amon), the newly named Akhenaton also abolished the old priesthood as well. What was new and innovative about Aton was that he was not just a limited god of Egypt, but in fact the god of the universe, who speaks and acts through his son, the Pharaoh. By obliterating the old gods such as Osiris, Voegelin argued that Akhenaton abolished those aspects of the Egyptian religion that were of the utmost importance to individuals, such as judgment and life after death, and replaced them only with a collective political religion of empire. This inability to fulfill the spiritual needs of the people, combined with the reaction of the defrocked priestly caste, led to backlash and restoration of the old order after the death of Akhenaton, when it was his turn to be obliterated from history.

Voegelin traces this idea of political religion through the ages and argues that Christianity, through the work of Augustine, seriously upended “the cosmos of the divinely analogous state” by subordinating the political-temporal sphere to the spiritual one. For hundreds of years this understanding dominated medieval Europe, but with the advent of the Enlightenment began to crack apart under a succession of philosophers, most notably Thomas Hobbes with his conception of the Leviathan state. However, Voegelin notes that over time, as the world has secularized, the political religions have closed themselves off to claims of being the conduit for God’s action on earth and instead have come to embody immanent forces such as “the order of history” or “the order of blood.” Metaphysics and religion have been banished in favor of a vocabulary of “science” that is “inner-worldly” and therefore closed off to what Voegelin would call the ground of being through which humans experience transcendent reality.

In the United States, our political religion takes the form of progressivism, which itself is the product of Protestant clergy who abandoned orthodoxy in the nineteenth century in favor of an immanent ideology in which the US would serve as the instrument to build God’s kingdom on earth. In his essay “The Progressive Era and the Family,” Murray Rothbard traces this movement to the rise of what he terms “evangelical pietism” and the way in which it altered traditional doctrine to require that man work for his own salvation by working for the salvation of the rest of the world through its immanent reformation.

The song “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was one product of this way of thinking and, in the words of one Voegelin scholar, its author “transforms Christ’s redemptive mission—which is not of this world—into the world immanent social activism of the Anti‑Slavery movement.” Rather than waiting for Christ to return, when he shall establish a new heaven and a new earth, the progressive creed held that it is the job of every true Christian to redeem the fallen world and to build God’s kingdom on earth right now. The Civil War was understood as one such redemptive episode (complete with a martyr in the form of Abe Lincoln), as was the First World War. In his book The War for Righteousness, historian Richard M. Gamble documents the way in which Progressive Protestant clergy led the charge to bring the US into the war with hopes of redeeming the world. Like Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson was perceived as a tragic martyr for the cause and was viewed with clearly religious veneration.

While the American political religion began by attempting to build the kingdom of God on earth, it has, in Voegelin’s term, ended up as an “inner-worldly” religion that does not even attempt to maintain a connection to the transcendent order of reality, and instead justifies itself as being the conduit through which the inexorable march of “progress” flows forth. Democracy and equality, not the return of Christ, are the new end of history.

The end result is that the state seeks to not only supplant religious institutions by usurping their mundane functions but by usurping their spiritual functions as well. Like the priests of Akhenaton’s day, American religious institutions, especially orthodox Christian ones, are both a competing pole of social power and the manifestation of a rival religion that must be subdued if the “State-God,” in the words of J.R.R. Tolkien, is to prevail.

In this context, with legislation like the Equality Act the state is not only seeking to further erode the social power of religious institutions by making religious education or adoption more difficult, but it is also advancing a rival religious doctrine at the same time by foisting progressive sexual and gender ideology on society.

It is likely that the Equality Act will not manage to pass the Senate in its current form, but the reality of the situation is that as long as the progressive political religion remains a potent force in American life, independent repositories of social power such as the family and the church will continually be under sustained attack. We can only hope that one day progressivism will meet the same fate that Aton did after the passing of Akhenaton, but until then, those who do not adhere to the cult of the “State-God” can only resist its impositions as best we can. [source]

The Left doesn’t want independence for Christianity (or Judaism for that matter) but independence for Islam is fine. But appeasing the Islamists only gets you slavery or death. They don’t want to assimilate with any country that is not Islamic.