RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/13/reflections-on-the-digital-revolution/

The problems and challenges posed by what is often referred to as “Big Tech” should primarily be understood as novel instantiations of age-old issues. Power, whether political, cultural, or economic, tends to concentrate over time unless that concentration is disrupted by an outside force that favors or forces dispersion.

This is readily apparent across nearly every segment of the American economy today. Every major industry and thus every labor market is dominated by what are effectively cartels: chemicals, airlines, steel, automobiles, health care, and so forth. This creates all kinds of undesirable byproducts, but nowhere is the effect more pronounced and the outcomes more anti-social than those created by Big Tech—especially the FAANG companies. These are Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google. I’d also include Twitter for our purposes because of the outsized role it plays as a platform for public discourse. It’s noteworthy that Microsoft is not included: it may be larger than Facebook, but is clearly less powerful.

That fact is critical to understanding the nature of the problem America faces. Part of the problem is bigness itself, but the more significant issue is the power that the large tech companies exert by controlling access to critical technology, infrastructure, customers, or people. The network effects that make these companies powerful also create a natural defense against competition. That’s a fantastic business proposition, but it can be bad for the country. And that’s where we find ourselves today. The power wielded by these companies undermines what Oren Cass describes as “the basic assumptions on which our market, our democracy, and our society have relied.”

The solutions to the problems created by the digital revolution are perhaps not simple, but they are less complex than they may seem once we understand the problems clearly. While the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which already prohibits anti-competitive behavior, should be applied—and updated if necessary—to Big Tech companies, that is only a partial solution. The bigger issue is that these companies abuse the essential political rights of all Americans by regulating political speech. This is where both our thinking and the law need upgrades. The scale of these companies and the essential role they play as platforms for political speech mean that they must be regulated in order to protect and promote that speech. Arguments that Facebook and Google are analogous to small, local bakeries because they are both non-state-owned companies are facile, untrue, and disingenuous. They don’t have anything like the same amount of power and they don’t play the same role in the lives of their customers or the country.

/https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/13/anatomy-of-the-woke-madness/

Wokeism has become our most popular secular religion—at least for a moment dethroning climate change. It reduces all of the past and present into puerile binaries between “whites” and “non-whites.”

Its aim is for the present generation to rewrite our history—whether by The 1619 Project and cancel culture or iconoclastic statue-toppling and Trotskyization of names and places. Wokeism becomes a child’s morality tale of noble non-white victims versus villainous white victimizers. Erasing the past and its language supposedly fuels a recalibration of the future, all in the here and now, a holy Year Zero

In the process, wokeism has done a lot of damage to America, and will do even more if left unchecked. Here are its chief characteristics.

Elites vs. Elites

First, remember that wokeism is a top-down phenomenon. It started in academia with “critical race theory” and “critical legal theory.” These are bastard offshoots of harebrained “critical theory,” which arose from a demoralized and adrift Europe after the cataclysms of two devastating European-spawned world wars.

These ‘theories” are merely adolescent delusions that norms, customs, traditions, laws, and rules are just arbitrary “constructs.” Thus they should have no authority over those whom they “oppress.” These relativist props are the tools of the white male hierarchy to gain and consolidate their “power.” So they can only be resisted by rejecting all these insidious “norms,” whether  the canons of physics and math, jurisprudence, standardized test scores, or the idea that police keep the “peace.”

Outside of the campus, the media, the entertainment industry, the corporate boardroom, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley, thousands of rank-and-file social justice warrior demonstrators are not demanding, for example, to enroll women in Special Forces combat units. Grassroots America does not insist on subsidized transgendered surgeries.

Instead, leftist Washington politicos and bureaucrats pressure the Pentagon brass, in quid pro quo fashion. The subtext is that those who promote woke policies are assured of promotion and future exemption from audit of lucrative retirement consulting for defense-related corporations.

The people⁠—that is, 51 percent of America—is not organizing for more cancel-culture censorship on Facebook, or even greater percentages of college admissions determined largely by race. Inner-city residents are not clamoring for less police patrolling. Defunding law enforcement is an elite obsession of those who do not live in insecure places.

Whether in the corporate boardroom or in Hollywood casting meetings or in the campus president’s office, race-based obsessions mostly reflect intramural wars between elites for the lucrative spoils of the one-percent’s news anchorships, roles in TV shows and commercials, diversity deanships, and admissions quotas to the Ivy League.

As a result, class considerations have vanished. They are replaced by absurd racial reductionism. For example, CNN mediocrity Don Lemon, by virtue of his race-mongering, can pose as a multimillionaire victim. The anonymous white deplorables at Walmart, caricatured as smelly in the Lisa Page-Peter Strozk text trove, are his proverbial anonymous oppressors.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/06/an_explanation_of_tactics_to_fundamentally_transform_america.html

In 1984, former KGB officer Yuri Bezmenov, who defected to the West in the 1970s, alerted Americans to the methods the Soviet secret service was using to subvert our political system.  The aim of the agency, he said, was gradual “ideological subversion” or “psychological warfare.”

Using ample video footage of the late Bezmenov, Brainwashed America — the latest documentary from filmmaker, radio host, and author Brannon Howse — exposes how dangerously far this process of undermining American culture has advanced.  Howse’s conclusions are based on thirty years of study of the history, utilization, and advancement of brainwashing in America.  He defines brainwashing as “a method that manipulates and modifies a person’s emotions, attitudes, and beliefs” and indoctrination as a subtle, pedagogic process “to induce someone to give up basic political, social, and religious beliefs and attitudes, and to accept contrasting regimented ideas.”

In the mid-1980s, the former spy had delineated the phases of the Soviet operation in America: demoralization, destabilization, chaos, and normalization (when communism takes hold).  This came to be called Bezmenov’s “Soviet subversion model.”  As early as 1984, he had claimed that the process of demoralization — turning youths against traditional American values — was complete and that destabilization was well under way to subvert the economy, foreign relations, and defense.  He had warned that Americans may believe it’s peacetime, but they are really “in a state of undeclared war against the basic principles and the foundations of this system.”

Howse’s documentary contemporizes Bezmenov’s warning.  It sets out the twelve-step process of brainwashing aimed at effecting a Marxist revolution in America and illustrates it using events from the coronavirus pandemic.  The twelve steps are: 1) removing principled leadership; 2) encouraging the questioning of values, convictions, and the American worldview; 3) presenting a revisionist history that portrays the free market system as oppressive; 4) propagating moral relativity to cloud the distinction between right and wrong; 5) extolling consensus and collectivism while declaring individualism dangerous; 6) focusing on emotions over facts, reason, and context; 7) fostering anxiety, confusion, social turbulence; 8) concealing the ultimate agenda; 9) using trusted individuals and institutions to enhance credibility; 10) using informants to zero in on those who don’t comply; 11) rewarding compliance and punishing dissent; and 12) winning public trust by manufacturing chaos to lay the groundwork for a benevolent-seeming rescue.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/why-flag-day-disturbs-obama-and-dems-jack-cashill/

Named after journalist Michael Kinsley who introduced the concept, a “Kinsley gaffe” occurs when a speaker “accidentally reveals something truthful about what is going on in his or her head.” Last week, the New York Times Editorial Board Member Mara Gay made the season’s most notable Kinsley gaffe in her account on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” of a harrowing trip to New York City’s eastern suburbs on Long Island.

“I was on Long Island this weekend visiting a really dear friend, and I was really disturbed,” said Gay live on MSNBC, where she is a contributor. “I saw, you know, dozens and dozens of pickup trucks with explicatives [sic] against Joe Biden on the back of them, Trump flags, and in some cases just dozens of American flags, which is also just disturbing because essentially the message was clear: This is my country. This is not your country. I own this.”

After Gay had finished recounting how she found “just disturbing” the sight of “dozens of American flags,” co-host Mika Brzezinski chimed in, “Totally agree.”

The Babylon Bee responded with a story headlined, “New York Times Relocates Offices To Beijing So Reporters Won’t Have To See So Many ‘Disturbing’ American Flags,” but for people who fret about flags as Gay and Brzezinski do, the very anticipation of Flag Day, June 14, is no laughing matter.

Perhaps the most prominent of such thinkers—and the most anxious—is Barack Obama. As candidate and later as president, Obama had to pretend to care about the flag. It wasn’t easy. In his most recent memoir, A Promised Land, he spends an unseemly amount of time on an incident that most Americans had forgotten about but that apparently left the former president emotionally scarred—his failure to wear an American flag pin.