RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/04/cancel_culture_and_identity_politics_are_the_road_to_a_oneparty_state.html

America is at war. This time the enemy isn’t on some distant battlefield or hiding in a barren cave thousands of miles away. Instead, the enemy is not only here, but it’s ruling over us.

That’s the powerful message of David Horowitz’s latest book, The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement is Destroying America. This isn’t just a warning, it’s the reality around us.

“Americans are more divided today than at any time since the Civil War,” Horowitz writes. “In the course of the anti-Trump wars, we have become two nations with little shared ground on the core issues that previously defined us.” And it’s the Left that brought us to this state, not just in the last five years, but going all the way back to the fundamental strategy of its divisive politics.

In The Enemy Within, Horowitz exposes the Communist roots of identity politics that have been used to turn Americans against each other and reduce them to hostile warring tribes, rather than citizens of a common nation invested in its welfare, success, and prosperity.

Identity politics is the delegitimization of America and Americans. It’s a hate campaign that justifies any extremity, and any attack on the country and her people. “It is this regressive attack on America’s fundamental principles by the Left that is the source of the irreconcilable conflicts and ugly passions that are currently tearing the nation’s fabric apart,” Horowitz writes.

Class warfare, racial warfare, gender warfare, and the countless other forms of identity politics injected into schools, workplaces, government offices, and every area of life are aimed at forcing Americans to identify radically and tribally, rather than nationally. Divide and conquer.

David Horowitz, a veteran of the radical politics of the Left, has the knowledge, the experience, and the training to expose not just what the movement he was once a part of is doing, but the ideological origins of its tactics, and how they feed it into its dreadful vision for America.

America is delegitimized through revisionist history smears, like the 1619 Project, that rewrite the powerful force for equality and freedom that is the true history of the United States into the big lie of systemic racism, while Americans are accused of various forms of oppressive privilege so that, just by existing, they oppress everyone who does not fit into the same artificial category.

In The Enemy Within, Horowitz tackles the radical and racist roots of these ideas, from Karl Marx to Derrick Bell, a supporter of Farrakhan, and how they exploded into violence and tyranny in the streets of our cities and the halls of power as Black Lives Matter mobs used lies to unleash racist violence and Democrat officials used racist myths to build a one-party state.

But it’s not just BLM.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/10/do-vaccine-resisters-risk-being-wacod/

Because of the natural mutation the clever little RNA strand undergoes, it is clear to anyone with a critical mind that the COVID-19 vaccines will go the way of the flu vaccines: An annual affair if one chooses to make it so.

Choice, alas, is quickly becoming a quaint concept in COVID-compliant America.

Vaccine Passports 

The possibility of a vaccine passport, a “certification of vaccination that reduces public-health restrictions for their carriers,” has been floated. Without finesse, it amounts to, “Your papers, bitte!”

While Fox’s Tucker Carlson did term the idea an Orwellian one—it took civil libertarian Glenn Greenwald, the odd-man-out among the authoritarian Left, to place the concept of a vaccine passport in proper perspective.

The popular TV host (and perhaps the only good thing on Fox News) had asked Greenwald if he felt a vaccine passport “would work to convince more Americans to get vaccinated.”

But judging a policy by its positive outcomes for the collective, rather than by whether it violates individual rights is utilitarianism. It is the rule among politicians and pundits. 

“It doesn’t work”: How often have you heard those words used to describe grave violations of your rights? As if using coercion to decrease “vaccine hesitancy”—is ever a good reason for coercing vaccination! As if employing coercion to decrease “vaccine hesitancy” is ever an appropriate use of state or corporate power!

The Benthamite utilitarian calculus is thus rightly associated with a collectivist, central planner’s impetus.

America’s founders, conversely, held a Blackstonian view of the law as a bulwark against government abuses. Their take has since been supplanted by the notion of the law as an implement of government, to be utilized by all-knowing rulers for the “greater good.”

To his great credit, later in the program, Carlson did advance a rights-based argument against the vaccine-passport outrage: the individual right to privacy.

It fell, however, to Greenwald to take note of the three different ways in which the passports constitute a draconian invasion: 

Number one, coercing citizens to put a substance into their body that they don’t want in their body, a pretty grave invasion of bodily autonomy, one of the most fundamental rights we have. Secondly, gathering a new database that can track people in terms of their health, that can easily be expanded as government programs often do into a whole variety of other uses, and then thirdly, . . . restricting people’s movement. Freedom of movement is one of the most fundamental rights we have. It’s actually guaranteed in the Constitution.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/what-should-be-done-to-curb-big-tech

Do your eyes gloss over when you see the words “Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act”? Mine do.

Yet the subject of Big Tech’s might — Should Facebook have the power to ban a president? Should Amazon have the power to ban the sale of a controversial book? Should Twitter have the power to permanently bar a user over a single tweet? And if not, what should the government be doing about it? — is both fascinating and incredibly important.

I don’t think there is a group left in America who is happy about the power that companies like Facebook and Twitter and Google have arrogated to themselves. According to a recent poll from Vox and Data for Progress, 59% of Democrats and 70% of Republicans think Big Tech’s economic power is a problem. It’s hard to think of another issue with that kind of bipartisan consensus.

The nature of your anger, of course, depends on where you sit. (Twitter’s decision to ban Trump in January found 87% approval from Democrats and a mere 28% of Republicans in the same poll.) But the point is that this subject touches everyone. 

So why is so much of the writing about tech so confusing? One of the reasons it confuses, I think, is that the loudest “progressive” and “conservative” arguments are the opposite of what you’d imagine.

Progressives are supposed to be against corporate power. And yet on this subject, they are the ones pushing for more of it. They are enraged that these companies don’t crack down harder on “disinformation,” arguing that the Zuckerbergs and Dorseys of the world put profit above principle when they allow groups like QAnon to run wild on their platforms. Sure, President Trump was banned, but only after he lost the election. Why didn’t it happen earlier? Private companies are not hamstrung by the First Amendment, so why do they hesitate to ban dangerous people whose online words lead to real-world violence?