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Ruth King

U.S. Schools Get Bad Marx A book written in 1958 explains our current cultural upheaval. By Larry Sand

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/04/u-s-schools-get-bad-marx/

My father was a liberal Democrat. He worshiped FDR and didn’t care much for the GOP. His parents were staunch Republicans, and the political discussions I remember from the 1950s were always entertaining—if not a bit confusing—to this eight-year-old. Importantly, while my dad was a liberal, he was a virulent anti-Communist, and saw them as just as evil as the Nazis he went to war to eradicate.

The reasons my father hated the Communists are neatly spelled out in The Naked Communist, a book written in 1958 by political theorist W. Cleon Skousen, who eerily predicted our current state of affairs. In a section titled “Current Communist Goals,” he elucidates the plan in 45 steps, explaining that “many loyal Americans are working for these same objectives because they are not aware that these objectives are designed to destroy us.”

Skousen is especially insightful on the cultural and educational strife we are now experiencing. For example, in Step 20, he writes, “Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policy-making positions.”

While there certainly is a conservative media, is there any doubt that the predominant mainstream media runs far-left? A good example of press manipulation was the ongoing reference to the George Floyd riots—in reality, mass violence and 164 structure fires from arson in a four-day period in 2020—as “protests.” Another was the complete suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, which may very well have altered the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

Step 24: “Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them ‘censorship’ and a violation of free speech and free press.” In a similar vein, Step 25 reads, “Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.”

Compared to what we have now in films, TV, and music, Playboy and the ravings of Lenny Bruce in the 1950s seem Church-worthy.

In Step 30, Skousen foresaw the current mania to deny the greatness of George Washington and other iconic Americans who don’t toe the utopian party line.“Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the ‘common man.’”

How Old Bad Ideas Become Wonderful We in America are regressing—now returning to the distant neanderthal past, now embracing the worst of what the 19th and 20th century had to offer.  By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/04/how-old-bad-ideas-become-wonderful/

There is no end of history. Instead, civilization is a constant fight to embrace what has worked for the common good through the ages—and to reject what in the past has failed abysmally. 

Bad and bankrupt ideas, protocols, and ideologies—like McCarthyism, communism, various cults, or fascism—resurface not because of their intrinsic or lasting value or record of success, but because civilizations become less vigilant and allow human vanities, ignorance, arrogance, and evil to reassert themselves. 

Joe McCarthy Is Back

Our Tail Gunner Joe (of semi-truck driving expertise and brilliant legal training fame) in a single week smeared roughly half the country as un-American “semi-fascists.” Then in one of the creepiest speeches and background sets in American political history, Joe Biden railed that “Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans are a threat to the very soul of this country.” Franklin Roosevelt declared war on Japan in careful, sober, and exacting presidential tones; Joe Biden all but declared war against half his own people like a raving lunatic.

All that was missing from the rant was Biden waving to the crowd a purported list of names of prominent MAGA threats to our collective soul and screaming, “I have here in my hand a list of 205 members of the MAGA Party!”

Yet Biden never quite told us what was subversive about the “MAGA Scare” or wanting to “Make America Great Again.” It was merely a sort of conservative version of George McGovern’s call to “Come home, America.” Both slogans, like Obama’s “hope and change” banality, suggest things were either better before the present or will be better afterwards. 

Unable to acknowledge this, a more-than-usual angry, snarling, and nearly incoherent Biden screamed his McCarthyesque attack amid an eerie red-and-black lit background, punctuated by two U.S. Marines on guard in the shadows of the red glow. (Gen. Mark Milley was uncharacteristically silent about the use of military props for executive political agendas). The resulting lurid visual effect was a cross between an outtake from “Triumph of the Will” and a bad version of “Phantom of the Opera.” 

Biden barked out all sorts of fantasy enemies of the state, as he lumped 75 million people together as a collective existential threat to the soul of America. Left unsaid but understood is what Biden and the “good” other half are supposed to do with such an existential danger posed by millions of their fellow Americans. 

Biden’s Speech Had It All Backward Biden’s Democrats seek a one-party state. Trump’s followers want freedom from government power. By Lance Morrow

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-speech-had-it-all-backward-fascist-democratic-party-trump-ideology-america-jan-6-democracy-11662161065?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

EXCERPT:

The Democrats have the “fascist” business wrong.

If there are fascists in America these days, they are apt to be found among the tribes of the left. They are Mr. Biden and his people (including the lion’s share of the media), whose opinions have, since Jan. 6, 2021, hardened into absolute faith that any party or political belief system except their own is illegitimate—impermissible, inhuman, monstrous and (a nice touch) a threat to democracy. The evolution of their overprivileged emotions—their sentimentality gone fanatic—has led them, in 2022, to embrace Mussolini’s formula: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Or against the party. (People forget, if they ever knew it, that both Hitler and Mussolini began as socialists). The state and the Democratic Party must speak and act as one, suppressing all dissent. America must conform to the orthodoxy—to the Chinese finger-traps of diversity-or-else and open borders—and rejoice in mandatory drag shows and all such theater of “gender.” Meantime, their man in the White House invokes emergency powers to forgive student debt and their thinkers wonder whether the Constitution and the separation of powers are all they’re cracked up to be.

Mr. Trump and his followers, believe it or not, are essentially antifascists: They want the state to stand aside, to impose the least possible interference and allow market forces and entrepreneurial energies to work. Freedom isn’t fascism. Mr. Biden and his vast tribe are essentially enemies of freedom, although most of them haven’t thought the matter through. Freedom, the essential American value, isn’t on their minds. They desire maximum—that is, total—state or party control of all aspects of American life, including what people say and think. Seventy-four years after George Orwell wrote “1984,” such control (by way of surveillance cameras, social-media companies and the Internal Revenue Service, now to be shockingly augmented by 87,000 new employees) is entirely feasible. The left yearns for power and authoritarian order. It is Faust’s bargain; freedom is forfeit.

Who Are You Calling a Fascist, Mr. President? First time in American history a president openly attacks opposing party’s constituents. David Harsanyi

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/09/who-are-you-calling-fascist-mr-president-david-harsanyi/

The other day, President Joe Biden accused voters of the opposition party of turning to “semi-fascism.” This is probably the first time in American history a president has openly attacked the opposing party’s constituents in this way.

Then again, Biden, who once alleged that the chaste Mitt Romney was harboring a desire to bring back chattel slavery, is prone to stupid hyperbole. And it’s true that most people who throw around the word “fascist” fail to do so with much precision. These days, the word “democracy,” like “fascism,” has lost all meaning. According to Democrats, asking someone to show ID before voting is an attack on “democracy,” but so is the Supreme Court’s handing back power to voters on the abortion issue. When you have no limiting principles of governance, anything that inhibits your exertion of power is seen as anti-“democracy.” If students have loans to be paid, “forgive” them. If you can’t pass a bill, the executive branch should do it by fiat. If the court stops it, pack it. Power is only to be limited when the opposition holds it.

A microcosm of this confused thinking can be found in the recent spate of hysterical media pieces about alleged Republican “book banning.” The use of “ban” by the media is more than a category error; it’s an effort to paint parents who use the very same exact democratic powers the left has relied on for decades as book burners. Public school curricula and book selection are political questions decided by school and library boards. Neither have a duty to carry every single volume on racial identitarianism or sexually explicit material simply demanded by some busybody at the American Library Association.

Why Are We Surprised by Biden’s Speech? The epitome of the Democrat Party’s totalitarian instincts. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/09/why-are-we-surprised-bidens-speech-bruce-thornton/

Last week’s speech by Joe Biden was the epitome of the Democrat Party’s totalitarian instincts. Even the banana-republic staging–– two Marines flanking the president, the lurid blood-red lighting, and a photo of Biden orating with raised fists––evoked the theatrics beloved by dictators. The burden of the speech was the dangerous “semi-fascism” of Donald Trump and his millions of MAGA supporters, which similarly recalled the “enemies of the state” like Jews, “deviationists,” and kulaks that typify autocratic regimes, as do the numerous “big lies” lacing Biden’s rant.

All this has been noted and deservedly criticized by commentators, some of them even on CNN. But the implications that the Dems and Biden have violated some venerable norms of “our democracy” were puzzling. For nearly 60 years the Democrats have been relentlessly moving farther to the Left and adopting its vicious “any means necessary” tactics for acquiring and keeping power. All it needed to reach a wider audience were decades of an educational system corrupted by leftist ideology.

But even before the chaos and degradation of politics in the Sixties got this malignant ball rolling, starting in the late 19th century Marxism had gained a foothold in our culture and politics. Progressivism was the political philosophy that was the vehicle of Marxist assumptions that both ideologies share.

Like Marxism, progressivism favors centralized power, technocratic control, the perfectibility of people, and the pretensions of “science” as the means for undermining the Constitution’s limited, balanced, and divided powers. This constitutional structure is necessitated by a human nature driven by zero-sum “passions and interests” that need power in order to be realized. And both ideologies scorned the Founders’ principles of federalism, unalienable human rights, individual freedom, traditional wisdom, common sense, and civil society.

It Took Less Than a Day for Joe Biden to Retract His Attacks on MAGA Republicans Matt Vespa

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2022/09/04/it-took-less-than-a-day-for-joe-biden-to-retract-his-attacks-on-maga-republicans-n2612635

Joe Biden, who everyone thought would play the role of Mr. Unity, set off a bomb Thursday and later went on vacation. That incendiary device was the fascistic speech he delivered on the grounds of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Biden decided to waste precious time not talking about inflation, drug cartels, border security, the rising fentanyl crisis, rising crime, or inflation—but MAGA Republicans and their supposed threat to the country.

The irony is as thick as concrete. The speech was supposed to be a smackdown of the alleged “semi-fascist” elements in America but made Biden look like Franco. The Democrats are obsessed with Nazi references when attacking politicians and viewpoints they don’t like. This speech is the closest anyone has ever come to embodying those heinous principles, Joe Biden, of all people, was the one to send it when it came to channeling their inner Hitler.

The remarks were a trainwreck. He smeared tens of millions of Americans who voted for Donald Trump as enemies of the republic and then called for unity. Questioning election results, protected by the First Amendment, is now a domestic terrorist activity. Does Joe know his press secretary is an election denier? 

The Bullies of Woke A new book exposes their assault on mental health. Mark Tapson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/09/bullies-woke-mark-tapson/

Totalitarian Cancel Culture, the bullying trans lobby, and the race-mongering indoctrination of Critical Race Theorists, among other leftist assaults on society, have turned daily life into everyday battlefields for normal Americans who stand in the way of Progressive social engineering.

To address this ubiquitous, corrosive phenomenon, Canadian author Diane Bederman has written Bullies of Woke and Their Assault on Mental Health just published by New English Review Press. Ms. Bederman is also the author of Back to the Ethic: Reclaiming Western Values, The Serpent and the Red Thread: The Definitive Biography of Evil, and The #IslamophobiaIndustry: The Insidious Infiltration of Islam into the West, all of which I have either reviewed or interviewed her about (see links) for FrontPage Mag.

Bullies of Woke documents the serious damage that bellicose leftist activists are wreaking upon the mental health of our children, who are subjected in schools and in the culture at large to unrelenting pressure to conform to, if not actually celebrate, woke ideology. In many cases our children are literally being bullied to death – committing suicide because they are unable to handle the aggressive bullying from the fanatical proponents of Progressive-driven movements such as Critical Race Theory, transgenderism, and Cancel Culture. Bullies of Woke is simultaneously a guidebook to the modern woke movement and a call to action for the silent majority to push back and restore common sense and bedrock Judeo-Christian values in our homes, our schools, and our nations in the West.

I asked Ms. Bederman some questions about her new book.

Mark Tapson:           Diane, your book covers a lot of ground and many questions come to mind, but let me just begin by asking what inspired you to view the left’s ideological assaults of Cancel Culture, Critical Race Theory, and the like through the lens of its impact on the West’s mental health?

Diane Bederman:   Mark, as much as I would like to take credit for this idea, a friend and I were talking about our world today, and we went from discussing the bullying by Progressives to mental illness. I had previously written about bullying and mental illness on my blog. And so it began.

Who’s really threatening American democracy? Joe Biden has helped usher in a terrifying new era of ‘respectable’ authoritarianism. Tom Slater

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/09/03/whos-really-threatening-american-democracy/

There were many striking things about that weird Joe Biden speech the other night. First and foremost, it was a spectacular failure of optics, something the political class from which Biden hails is supposedly so brilliant at. For some reason, Biden and his team decided he should address the American people in front of an Independence Hall in Philadelphia – birthplace of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution – illuminated in blood-red lighting: a peculiarly Nuremberg-esque aesthetic given his subject – as we’ll come on to – was the supposedly proto-fascistic threat posed by Trumpist right-wingers. But the speech was also a spectacular display of brassneck – a tirade against authoritarianism that only underlined the ‘respectable’ authoritarianism that Biden himself has helped usher in.

Building on his recent shameful comments about the supposed ‘semi-fascism’ of former president Trump and his supporters, Biden cast the modern Republican Party in his speech as a threat to America itself. ‘Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic’, he thundered. ‘Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans’, he kindly conceded. ‘But there is no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country.’ Given 74million people voted for Trump in 2020 – the second-highest number of Americans to ever vote for a presidential candidate, just behind Biden in that same election – one wonders who does or does not count as a MAGA Republican. Still, the effect was to make Hillary Clinton’s infamous ‘basket of deplorables’ comment look cute by comparison. Biden essentially cast vast swathes of the American public as domestic terrorists.

He reeled off a laundry list of the usual scare stories about Trumpism, ditching what might be legitimate criticisms of Trump and his more crazed supporters in favour of painting an image of a lurid fascistic hellscape. ‘[H]istory tells us that blind loyalty to a single leader and a willingness to engage in political violence is fatal to democracy’, Biden said, in a not-so-subtle nod to the 1930s. ‘January 6’, the storming of the US Capitol in January 2021, came up a lot. But while the Capitol riot was an unhinged and anti-democratic display, fed by Trump’s conspiratorial nonsense about the election being ‘stolen’ from him, it was not an ‘insurrection’, as Biden put it in his speech on Thursday night. It was a strangely carnivalesque riot that got seriously out of hand. Most of the Trumpists just wandered around the Capitol aimlessly, posing for self-incriminating selfies.

Of course, this hasn’t stopped ‘January 6’ being turned into a new 9/11 – a comparison vice-president Kamala Harris has explicitly made – and the justification for a new wave of authoritarianism. Which is where the cheek of Biden’s speech comes in. Since he came to power he has made tackling ‘domestic terrorism’ a priority. In June 2021, his administration published the first-ever national strategy for tackling domestic terrorism, pledging new resources to fight this ill-defined threat. When you hear officials and FBI agents speak about domestic terrorism, it seems to encompass both racist mass murderers and a much broader, vaguer category of ‘those who ascribe to extremist anti-government and anti-authority ideologies’. Nevertheless, it seems to be the latter – with ‘January 6’ in mind – that particularly preoccupies the administration. Indeed, it is striking that this Democratic-led clampdown on extremism was sparked not by, say, the racist Charleston church shooting at the tailend of the Obama years, but by a big, dumb riot at which the only person shot was a Trump supporter.

A heartbroken grad watches the woke descent of the US Naval Academy By Drew J. Reiner

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/09/a_heartbroken_grad_watches_the_woke_descent_of_the_us_naval_academy.html

As reported by TheBlaze, it is apparent that those in charge of the U.S. military are on a mission to destroy what is left of a once unmatched war-fighting capability that was earned by blood and sweat.   As a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (USNA), I may be qualified to analyze recent events that had the commandant of midshipmen publish the “Diversity Education Program” as an USNA standing order on how to “foster a culture of inclusion across the Yard.”  

It is inconceivable that instead of promoting unity, strength, and courage among other noble attributes of military leaders, the U.S. Navy and specifically USNA are advancing that midshipmen are to be assigned as agents of this diversity nonsense and that these young, impressionable students

• serve as a walking safe space for peers and

• facilitate discussion among company-mates to ease the tensions surrounding diversity topics.

These are actual bullet points from material used to train midshipmen in executing this destructive diversity directive on the Yard.  What is a “walking safe space”?  Can a person be a “space”?  If I were a midshipman, I would run from such an assignment, with demerits accrued if necessary.  

Will the person or persons who wrote that vile speech please step forward? By Patricia McCarthy

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/09/will_the_person_or_persons_who_wrote_that_vile_speech_please_step_forward.html

While pathetic old Joe Biden delivered his “soul of the nation” speech on Thursday with the fury and rage of a demented man, everyone knows he did not write the words he spewed with such venom.  So, who did write it?  And exactly who thought staging the event like Hitler’s Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl was a good idea and that parroting Hitler’s gestures would win over supporters?   

The Nazi-like staging could only be lost on the very young.  Are the writer (or writers) and stage designers so contemptuous of America, as Obama surely was, that they thought presenting Biden as some third world dictator would be well-received?  From Independence Hall where our Founders signed the Declaration of Independence?   

Surely, they must be proud of their work.  One might expect them to admit authorship and enjoy bragging rights.  But no, no one has claimed credit for what will come to be known as the most infamous speech ever delivered by an American President.  Whoever they were, they need to be identified and fired for they are enemies of America.  

Oh, we all get that the goal was to drive Trump supporters into the streets to wreak violence in the style of Antifa and Black Lives Matter, those thugs who are allowed to destroy entire cities without being charged with any crimes.  That was abundantly clear.  

The left badly wants an excuse to accuse Republicans of the kinds of violence those left-supported groups commit on a regular basis.  But conservatives simply do not behave that way.  On the whole, Trump supporters are more evolved than the street goons the leftists cheer.   Biden claimed that Trump’s supporters are violent but given Kamala’s support for the rioters of the summer of 2020, it is the left that incites violence and participates in it, and then bails out the perpetrators.