When the established government does not recognize dissidents and calls them “domestic terrorists” and limits their speech, controls the media, alters the language, denies legitimate history, trashes tradition and culture, erases national borders, blurs the role of the military, destroys the canons of education, science and medicine, and uses the powers of government to spy on its citizens- that is an insurrection. rsk
https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/02/claremont-under-fire/
What is the most important think tank in America circa 2021? I’d say that a good case could be made in support of the Claremont Institute, the California-based organization that is home to the Claremont Review of Books—perhaps our single most incisive quarterly devoted to high politics and the vocation of statesmanship—and a number of world-class scholars. Their statement of purpose says that “The mission of the Claremont Institute is to restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life.” Through the CRB and the writings of their scholars and fellows, the institute lives up to that high calling.
What is the single most disgusting and mendacious article published this year? The competition for that title is stiff, I know, but I’d like to propose Daniel Drezner’s mephitic eructation in the Washington Post abusing the Claremont Institute and some of the scholars associated with that organization. Mary McCarthy once noted that every word that Lillian Hellman wrote was a lie, including the words “and” and “the.” Hellman had nothing on Drezner, whose hysterical (I do not mean “funny”) effort at demolition is as embarrassing as it is tendentious.
The one amusing passage (inadvertently amusing, I hasten add) is the bit toward the end where Drezner invokes the late, great Samuel Huntington for support in his vendetta against Claremont. “The connection between democracy and political science has been a close and continuing one,” Huntington said in a late 1980s speech for the American Political Science Association. “Where democracy is strong, political science is strong; where democracy is weak, political science is weak.” Drezner offers this gloss: “Make no mistake, whatever it was in the past, the 2021 version of the Claremont Institute explicitly wants to weaken democracy.” That rumbling sound you hear is Huntington turning over in his grave. The author of The Clash of Civilizations and Who Are We? would not have been amused to be enlisted in this attempted character assassination.
As it happens, abusing the Claremont Institute has become a favorite pastime of our would-be masters. The occasion for Drezner’s flaccid fusillade was the American Political Science Association’s decision to ostracize Claremont from its annual conference, taking place this weekend in Seattle. In July, The Bulwark, Bill Kristol’s current squeaky megaphone, published a fevered attack called “What the Hell Happened to the Claremont Institute?” That piece is a runner-up for my prize of most deceitful article of the year.
What is it about the Claremont Institute that drives the snotty establishment to distraction? In a word, Trump. They hate Donald Trump and they hate anyone who doesn’t share their hatred. They especially hate anyone who questions the legitimacy of the deeply problematic 2020 election or raises questions about the FBI-sponsored protest at the Capitol on January 6.
https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/02/heroes-of-the-pandemic/
Many highly accomplished and credentialed medical professionals have put their careers and reputations on the line with their public opposition to the failed COVID strategies of the global biomedical complex. For this, the corporate media has done everything it can to discredit them, and suppress their alternative message.
Over 9,100 medical doctors and scientists have signed a document charging policy-makers with potential “crimes against humanity,” accusing them of preventing physicians from providing life-saving treatments for their patients and suppressing open scientific discussion.
The now-famous “Rome Declaration” wasn’t even the first time a large number of medical experts had gone on the record to reject the tenets of the church of COVID.
A year ago, more than 860,000 infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists signed a declaration expressing their “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies.”
The Great Barrington Declaration argued that “the most compassionate” way to reach herd immunity while minimizing mortality and social harm was “to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk.”
Unfortunately, because of the work they’ve done over the past year and a half advocating for early treatments, and raising red flags about the experimental vaccines, many brave doctors and scientists have had their voices muzzled and their reputations smeared by the corporate media.
Why? Because no one is allowed to question the official narrative of the global biomedical complex, which is that the vaccines are very safe, effective, and the best way to fight COVID-19.
Among the detractors of this narrative, highlighted below, are medical doctors, infectious-disease researchers, virologists, a former vice president of Pfizer, the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, and even a state surgeon general.
Even as the authoritarian Biden Administration has ratcheted up pressure on unvaccinated Americans to get the jab or lose all of their rights, these bold medical professionals have fought back, arguing that the experimental injections fail a risk-benefit assessment for most people, and are arguably a violation of the Nuremberg Code.
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/terry-mcauliffe-faith-experts/
Terry McAuliffe, Virginia’s former governor and Democratic power broker, is seeking to return to his old job in 2021. Polls show him narrowly ahead of his Republican opponent, Glenn Youngkin, by a one- to four-point margin.
That is by no means a safe distance for McAuliffe in a state that is widely understood to reflect national sentiment. Virginia’s 2021 gubernatorial race, one year ahead of the congressional midterms, will be the first major contest held in the blazing light of Biden’s constitutional bonfire.
Many Americans believe that the government is absconding with their rights and liberties, and high on the list of stolen articles is their right to have some say in the education of their children. School boards in almost every state have been visited by throngs of citizens outraged over the imposition of curricula infused with the 1619 Project, critical race theory, the diversity-equity-inclusion agenda and other approaches that characterize the country as systemically racist. Many of those parents are also unhappy over their schools’ embrace of transgenderism and aggressive mask mandates.
Virginia has been no exception. Fairfax and Loudoun county school districts are frontline battlegrounds in the fight over curricula. Videos of parent rebellions and the heavy-handed responses of school boards have racked up millions of hits. Fairfax and Loudoun are adjacent in the metropolitan DC area. They are part of must-win Northern Virginia if McAuliffe is to prevail over Youngkin.
All of which makes McAuliffe’s remarks during a gubernatorial debate in Fairfax County on Tuesday a wonder to behold. He declared, ‘I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach’. He gave this answer in response to a question about how state and local school districts should respond to parental concerns about transgender policy.
McAuliffe swaddled his anti-parent declaration in soothing assurances: ‘Locals [meaning school boards] have an input on such an important issue.’ ‘I want every child in Virginia to get a quality education.’ ‘No matter the color of your skin or who you love, I believe you should get a great quality education.’
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/inequality__the_engine_of_prosperity_.html
“The proponents of economic equality fail to recognize the immutable fact — freedom enables people to use their ingenuity to generate wealth, whereas coerced economic equality suppresses the very freedom required to innovate and begets poverty.”
Throughout the history of civilization, people have been dreaming of a perfect world — full employment, full satisfaction of material and intellectual needs, and equal distribution of wealth — only to discover, to their disappointment, that this utopian system does not exist on this side of the grave.
Nevertheless, the illusory ideas of economic equality transcend time and appeal to people of all colors and races. If the supporters of economic equality, including Marxist graduates of American universities, absorb human history, they may realize that the only historical datum that points to economic equality goes back to the era of primitive communism. Ten thousand years ago, before farming, people were forced to obtain food collectively. Everything that was produced was immediately consumed. This primitive society produced no surplus and created no wealth. Under such arrangement, the private property was limited to personal articles of clothing, hunting tools, etc. resulting in total economic equality — in absolute poverty. Ironically, this is the only way economic equality can be achieved — economic equality and wealth are mutually exclusive.
As people invented agriculture and property ownership, put fences around their properties, produced surplus, engaged in commerce and subsequently built up wealth — inequality was born. The predominant pursuit of wealth creation is the purpose of any society, whether it is slavery, feudalism or capitalism.
Inspired by human’s inherent desire for well-being and passion to extricate himself from misery, wealth creation became the locomotive of economic growth. Capitalism stands out as the greatest wealth generator and distributor that has created more wealth during the last 250 years than all preceding civilizations combined in 7,000 years.
The source of this enormous wealth is the man’s God-given ability to think and innovate. This intellectual ability is a property of the individual and has not been dispersed equally. Hence, it wouldn’t be reasonable to expect equal results from unequal abilities.
https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/30/trying-to-prevent-illegal-conduct-from-deciding-an-election-is-not-endorsing-a-coup/
The media-generated controversy over the legal memo I wrote in January (a preliminary, incomplete draft of which was recently made public) outlining the possible scenarios for the certification of the electoral vote is another instance of the press whipping up a frenzy around a false narrative and thereby further undermining its own legitimacy.
The carefully curated snip, lifted from a preliminary draft, showed only one scenario out of the many that had been floated, including in a prominent and lengthy article published by the far-left Atlantic Monthly on September 23. The most puzzling result of this “gotcha” is that in my memo I do not even recommend the alternative which they claim I do. But being out for blood, this doesn’t matter. America’s intellectual elites are bloodhounds who, having lost a taste for sniffing out the truth, now devour anything contrary to their ideology.
Each of the scenarios I presented was grounded in constitutional text and supported by scholarly writings or prior judicial precedent. They were presented to serve as the basis of a full discussion of all the options available to our elected leaders, premised on the assumption of proven electoral fraud or illegality.
Ironically, the scenario I actually recommended to Vice President Mike Pence was that he accede to requests from numerous state legislators, including the president pro tempore of the Pennsylvania state senate, to delay the proceedings long enough for the legislatures in the contested states to assess the impact of acknowledged illegality in the conduct of the election.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/9_30_2021_23_54.html
The classical liberal tradition that inspired America’s founding is rooted in a deeper Enlightenment tradition that rose in principled opposition to religious conflict in Reformation Europe. This earlier Enlightenment fostered a secular political culture that disavowed the enforcement of religious uniformity as an object of political endeavor. Under the guidance of the Enlighteners, the fanatics were disempowered and the West abandoned theocracy as a governing ideal. Western societies grew to accommodate religious variety without sacrificing social harmony. We are heirs to this tradition, and we would do well to reflect upon it, especially since human nature itself would seem to make the ascendancy of political fanaticism a permanent threat.
One might like to assume that people are basically reasonable and that episodes of brutal domination are historical aberrations, but such practices as the burning of heretics and the slaughter en masse of errant co-religionists did not simply end on their own — people didn’t just come to their senses one day. Political sanity is not as self-recommending as one might like to assume; arguments for toleration had to be made, and they had to gain general acceptance, supplying new norms. These norms had to be codified into laws and these laws safeguarded by institutions designed to uphold them.
The philosopher Baruch Spinoza was among the earliest authors of these new norms, norms that would eventually inform the American founding. These norms have held for centuries. Not so long ago the consensus supporting them was so solid there was little need to consciously invoke them; they are now buckling under the relentless attacks of a morally bigoted, hateful, authoritarian Left.
It is perhaps a fundamental truth of the human experience that the mere prospect of exercising political power motivates the very worst kinds of people to seek it. These vulgar climbers often masquerade as paragons of virtue. Indeed, the empowerment of “virtue” (however defined) is perhaps the most common founding myth of tyranny.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17826/prowler-preaching-neighborliness
Raisi has not managed to impose some discipline on the few hundred mullahs and brigadier-generals who form the core of the ramshackle regime. Thus the mullah from back of the beyond and the brigadier-general who has never seen a battle except on television, continue to make foreign policy comments mostly to threaten the very neighbors that the Dr. Ayatollah hopes to seduce.
Tehran’s disregard for Iraqi sovereignty came in other forms as well. The official media threatened Baghdad and Erbil with “consequences” unless those who had organized a private seminar on normalization with Israel were “dealt with”. The fact that the seminar in question was in conformity with Iraq’s constitution and law, guaranteeing freedom of opinion and expression, was conveniently ignored.
However, the biggest show of “good neighborliness” promised by Raisi came inside the (former Soviet) Republic of Azerbaijan and along its borders with Iran and Armenia.
What Tehran media described as “a multi-faceted task force” consisting of helicopter gunships, tanks, armored vehicles and elite Special Units under the personal command of IRGC’s Chief of Land Forces Gen. Pakpur was assembled on full alert within sight of Azerbaijani troops and their Russian “advisers”.
In his first statements on foreign policy, Islamic Republic’s new President Dr. Ayatollah Ebrahim Raisi made two claims: First that he would be the ultimate arbiter of Tehran’s foreign relations and, second, that his top priority is to “establish close ties with neighbors and promote peace and stability in West Asia.
(The ruling mullahs now use the term West Asia, which was circulated by the Soviet Union, instead of the Middle East, which they regard as a term coined by “Infidel powers.”)
