U. S. A. A Nation in Crisis -- Pray For Reconciliation, Peace & Healing

 

Leftist Rioters, Like their Marxist Muses, Are Literal Revolutionaries

7/31/2020 - David Limbaugh Townhall.com

How do we make sense of the nonstop craziness going on in our society? Is there a common denominator, or is it all happening randomly?

Well, it's unlikely that multiple sectors of society just happen to be imploding at the same time without some causal forces behind them. And you don't have to be a garden-variety conspiracy theorist to realize that some kind of intelligent design is at work here.

I personally think we're in the throes of spiritual warfare. But instead of expanding on that, I'll just address the human agency that might be facilitating this chaos, because human beings are advancing it regardless of whether unseen forces are ultimately behind it.

I know of no one who disputes that George Floyd's murder was outrageous and inexcusable. I know of no one who disputed it after seeing the horrible video of the event. President Donald Trump himself condemned it within hours.

I also know of no one who objects to peaceful protests about this horrid incident and others like it. All fair-minded people abhor such misconduct toward anyone. But it is not fair to condemn all cops for the actions of a statistically small minority. And it is lunacy to dismantle law and order because of them.

I would hope, however, that we would have the more widespread condemnation of the rioters, looters, and anarchists who, have leveraged racial tension to justify violence in American cities. There is no justification for these violent riots and the explosion of murders and other violence beyond the protest venues.

The rioters, by their own admission, are implacable. They have no demands that can be met, short of overthrowing our entire societal framework and constitutional system. They're not rioting over slavery, which was ended years ago. They're not demanding equal opportunity under the law or the advancement of civil rights laws, which were enacted decades ago.

They don't seek dialogue. How can you reason with young white leftists who abuse and assault cops, and call African American cops racist? How do you reason with spoiled, self-indulgent, and sanctimonious malcontents? Think about it: While rioting over alleged white privilege and white racism against blacks, they lecture, malign, and bully blacks. It is tragically surreal.

How can you satisfy those who claim that people are guilty of racism by virtue of their race, irrespective of any individual acts of racism? Those accused are given no chance to make their case; there is nothing they can do to acquit themselves because they are convicted as a matter of who they are, not what they've done. It's no surprise that these rioters are either outright Marxists or those Vladimir Lenin called "useful idiots" -- those who unwittingly advance the cause of Marxism. They think and act like Marxists.

Marx divided people into different groups and condemned one group and everyone in it for oppressing another group and everyone in it. Just like Marx, today's rioters define the terms so as to condemn the accused class irredeemably. For Marx, it was systemic class oppression; for today's rioters and their puppet masters, it's systemic racism and economic disparities. Marx's view of the historical class struggle permitted no dissent, just as today's rioters brook no dissent from their dogmatic view of systemic racism. Like today's rioters, Marx's solution was the wholesale upheaval of the existing economic and societal system.

Today's leftists, predictably, share Marx's totalitarian mindset. We see it in their revolutionary unrest, their political advocacy, and the values they disseminate in the culture, academia, and Hollywood. It's their way or the highway. Their views are absolutely mandated. Dissenters are shunned and canceled, and their freedoms denied. And these leftists don't even recognize their own incoherence.

Leftist rioters are not the only ones who think this way. A leftist oligarchy suppresses conservative speech throughout its social media platforms. What is worse than their censorship is what it reveals about their mindset. They see nothing wrong with what they're doing. They believe that those who disagree with them are so vile they are not entitled to freedom of speech, and that their views are so objectionable they must be censored -- in the name of tolerance and free speech, no less. Leftists always insist they are censoring not opinion but falsehoods, as part of their alarming propensity to reframe opposing opinions as objectively false. The First Amendment was written to prevent the very despotism these Orwellian menaces employ.

For such leftists, the end justifies the means. When we read "1984" in high school, we never imagined this type of thing would happen in America. When it happened in Nazi Germany (among tons of other terrible things), the Soviet Union, communist China, and other places, we used to sigh in relief, grateful for how different we were.

But we aren't that different anymore. Leftists here regularly justify their totalitarian views and increasingly heinous acts by vilifying groups and classes of people. While implementing their revolutionary horror, they engage in the exact kind of behavior for which they condemn the classes they demonize.

It's obvious that the rioters don't seek racial justice or harmony. They aim to overturn the American system -- just listen to them. We must get about the business of healing, but we'll make no progress as long as those whose goal is unrest, upheaval, and disharmony are in the driver's seat.

Pray for discernment, that Americans will awaken to the disruptive motives of those burning our cities. And pray for reconciliation, peace, and healing.

Arrogance of Success Ensures Lethal Consequences

 

Our Summer of Cultural Suicide

7/30/2020 - Victor Davis Hanson Townhall.com

Cultural suicide used to be a popular diagnosis of why things suddenly just quit.

Historians such as Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee cited social cannibalism to explain why once-successful states, institutions, and cultures simply died off.

Their common explanation was that the arrogance of success ensures lethal consequences. Once elites became pampered and arrogant, they feel exempt from their ancestors' respect for moral and spiritual laws like thrift, moderation, and transcendence.

Take professional sports. Over the last century, professional football, basketball and baseball were racially integrated and adopted a uniform code of patriotic observance. The three leagues offered fans a pleasant respite from daily barroom politics. As a result, by the 21st century, the NFL, NBA and MLB had become global multibillion-dollar enterprises.

Then hubris ensued.

The owners, coaches and players weren't always racially diverse. But that inconvenient truth did not stop the leagues from hectoring their fans about social activism — even as they no longer honored common patriotic rituals.

All three leagues have suffered terribly during the viral lockdown, as American life mysteriously went on without them. And they have almost ensured that they won't fully recover when the quarantine ends. Many of their often-pampered multimillionaire players refuse to honor the national anthem. In the NFL they now will broadcast their politics on their helmets. They will virtue-signal their moral superiority to increasingly turned-off fans, as if to ensure that their sources of support flee.

Lots of American universities became virtual global brands in the 21st century. Sky-high tuition, rich foreign students, guaranteed student loans, and Club Med-like facilities convinced administrators and faculty that higher education was sacrosanct. The universities preached that every successful American had to have a bachelor's degree, as if the higher-education monopoly deserved guaranteed customers.

But soon, $1.6 trillion in aggregate student-loan debt, lightweight and trendy curricula, ideological hectoring, administrative bloat, reduced teaching loads, poor placement of graduates, and the suspension of the Bill of Rights on campus began turning off both students and the public.

If students can Zoom or Skype their classes from home this fall, why pay $70,000 a year for the campus "experience"?

Supposedly woke and informed rioters this summer incoherently toppled or damaged the statues of everyone from Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant to Frederick Douglass and Miguel de Cervantes. So the public might begin to wonder how the nation's multitrillion-dollar investment in higher education actually served the country.

Soon, popular fury will beget more dangerous questions for American universities. Maybe the country should subsidize the training of more essential electricians, plumbers, contractors, and masons instead of unemployable environmental and ethnic studies majors.

If a university president wanted to devise a plan for how to destroy his university, he could not have come up with a better one than what has happened on campus in recent decades.

Hollywood should have been ecstatic over 21st-century globalization, which should have made filmmakers and stars even richer and more popular, with a potential audience of more than seven billion. But quarantine has shut down most theaters.

Amazon, Netflix and Facebook, along with cable TV, have sent theater revenues diving for years. Silicon Valley can create filmmakers who have no need to get near Southern California.

In response, Hollywood counts on bringing comic books to the big screen, or on making poor remakes of old classics. When directors try to make a serious new movie, the result is often the monotony and boredom of thinly veiled woke propaganda.

Viewers can take only so many heroic green crusaders, diverse superhumans, and beautiful feminists — and only so many villainous cardboard-cutout Russian oligarchs, toothless and twangy Southern Neanderthals, and corporate yes-men.

The hypocrisy gets worse when the Chinese government often adjudicates movie content as the price of entering a Chinese market with more than a billion potential customers.

But viewers do seek out theaters for more lectures from beautiful multimillionaires on their racist, sexist, homophobic country.

Professional sports, universities, and the motion picture industry all know that what they are doing is bad for business. But they still believe they are rich and powerful, and thus invulnerable. They also are ignorant of history and cannot be persuaded that they are destroying themselves.

At this late date, all that matters is that the country itself learns from these suicidal examples and heals itself. If the U.S. is not to become an extinct Easter Island, it must rediscover a respect for its past, honor for the dead who gave us so much, the desire to invest rather than spend, and a need for some sense of transcendence.

If we do not believe that what we do today has consequences for our children after we are gone, there are ancient existential forces in the world that will intervene.

And it won't be nice.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of "The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern" You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.

Democrat Platform a Recipe For Disaster

Closed Schools and Open Borders are a Dangerous Combination

7/28/2020 - Rep. David Brat Townhall.com

The Democrats want to close our schools and open our borders.

American families all over the country have already dealt with months of uncertainty as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and the temporary economic downturn caused by state and local stay-at-home orders. Now, millions of working parents are facing a new worry — being left out of the “V-shaped” economic recovery that’s beginning to take place because they have no way to care for their children unless schools fully reopen in the fall.

Most schools have adopted a “partial” approach to reopening, in which students only attend in person two or three days per week, with the other days reserved for virtual “learning.” This creates a difficult situation for two-parent households, and an all-but-impossible one for single parents. It also creates a highly disjointed and inconsistent learning environment — and a potentially dangerous one for children who endure abuse or neglect at home.

An entire generation of America’s children are being deprived of formal education — not only in the skills that they will need to lead successful lives, but also in this country’s common values and ideals. It would be one thing if this were a temporary sacrifice that we had to make in order to save lives, but the data indicate otherwise. Even in countries that have reopened schools most aggressively, there has been no observable increase in COVID-19 infections as a result.

It’s enough to make one wonder whether the Democrat governors who are among the most eager to keep schools from fully reopening have something other than public health in mind — especially in light of their Party’s ongoing support for illegal immigration.

Even as they fret about letting Americans leave their houses due to COVID-19, the Democrats retain their fascination with a radical open-borders agenda that threatens to further erode the shared set of beliefs and principles that have always been a central feature of American society. Around 40 million Americans have been dislocated from the workforce, and Americans overwhelmingly want to prioritize their return to work before the cheap labor billionaire class goes to work on another amnesty.

Border security is not a matter of “xenophobia,” as Joe Biden notoriously claimed in response to President Trump’s life-saving travel restrictions on China early in the pandemic. Rather, it’s a central component to ensuring public safety, upholding the rule of law, and maintaining an orderly society.

The Democrats not only want to tear down the wall and replace it with a welcome mat, they actually want to actively incentivize foreigners to enter the country illegally by offering them access to welfare benefits such as “free” taxpayer-funded healthcare— all without having to bother with the hassle of passing comprehensive immigration reform in Congress.

This is antithetical to core American values such as personal responsibility and respect for the law of the land, and it can only serve to undermine the legitimacy of our governing institutions. After all, if we can simply ignore the immigration laws that Congress has passed, then what’s stopping us from ignoring any other federal law?

The combination of closed schools and open borders that today’s Democrats favor is a toxic brew that would prove fatal to our Republic. We can’t afford to take even the tiniest sip.

David Alan Brat is the dean of the Liberty University School of Business. He served as the U.S. Representative for Virginia's 7th congressional district from 2014 to 2019.

Multiculturalism = Total Destruction of National Sovereignty

 

We Have the Right to Cultural Preservation

7/27/2020 - Jeff Davidson Townhall.com

As a by-product of the worldwide virus, the flow of migrants between nations, for now, has slowed to a trickle. Still, the presumption that anyone who seeks to control immigration, and to maintain the key facets of their culture, is automatically racist or xenophobic is beyond absurd. In 2015, Europe received one million migrants on top of a massive influx that had already arrived.

The 500 million population of Europe can, perhaps, absorb such waves but many communities are unduly impacted. One long-standing community in Germany, totaling 102 people, braced for 750 asylum seekers.

This bureaucratic blunder represented nothing less than the desecration of that town's mini-culture. As the New York Times reported, “The influx is testing the limits of tolerance and hospitality.” In essence, those who don’t have the background, language, or customs of the long-standing villagers, or even any empathy for them, de facto were granted the capability to overrun the town.

‘Progressive’ Cultural Destruction

What terms are there for such cultural destruction? Who said that wanting to keep things relatively the same is an evil human characteristic? Do the Japanese not wish to maintain their culture? Or Thais, Finns, or Ethiopians?

Going back three generations, Turkish immigrants invited to Germany as workers have not assimilated, and if anything, have grown more apart from the surrounding host culture. Did Germany seek this? In massive enclaves both in North America and throughout Europe, particularly Denmark, Sweden, England, and France, little assimilation is occurring. Many immigrants make meager or no effort to learn the host language. Many do not adhere to the quintessential values of the existing culture.

In the United States, was it reasonable to go from 9.1 million Hispanics in 1970, to 35.3 million in 2000, to 61.0 million today (of which 15.7 million are illegal)? Suppose they’re all good people and productive citizens who make a solid contribution to society: Their sheer numbers contort society and we never had the chance to vote on the issue.

With refugees flooding Maine, did the state's citizens choose to have a mini-culture of Somalis? In limited numbers, such immigrants certainly can add character and flavor to communities. In overwhelming numbers, they swamp the culture, often in undesirable ways, leading to cramped schools, higher crime, and bursting budgets.

Assimilation, Fast and Slow

One could make the argument as Arthur C. Clarke did in Childhood's End, a science fiction book no less, that in the future all countries would be hosts to all types of immigrant populations because assimilation around the earth was inevitable. When such assimilation occurs over 200 to 300 hundred years, existing norms and structures can endure. When it happens within a matter of weeks or months, and even years, it has proven to be too fast, depending on the numbers.

In California, where Hispanics now outnumber Caucasians, income and education levels have not risen in 50 years. As “politically incorrect” as it is to say, Hispanics do not populate the high honor roll or even honor rolls of integrated high schools. They are not in AP classes, and they do not go on to top colleges on par with their Caucasian classmates.

It would be nice if Hispanic academic ascension was on par with that of other students, but Los Angeles Times research on three generations of Hispanic students shows this is not taking place and tremendous disparity still exists. One can offer a variety of assertions about socioeconomic status and so on, but after 50 years, the results speak for themselves. While California was not flooded overnight, the larger culture has nevertheless been irrevocably altered.

Off-the-mark Bromides

What society does not have the right to protect its culture, and to bar those who would not assimilate or respect the laws? The zeal with which some people support unbounded, uncontrolled immigration prompts others to think that they are insane.

The immigration zealots issue off-the-mark bromides about “melting pots” and “nation of immigrants,” but they do not understand the short as well as long-term ramifications of flooding societies with people from different cultures who, in many cases, will never assimilate. This is cultural suicide and the phenomenon confounds those to the right of center.

Some people, left and right, regard unfettered immigration as pure madness. As a U.S. citizen, if you do not have any say in preserving your local culture, as well as American culture in general, what is the point of being a citizen?