Tolerance versus "Acceptance" -- Explaining the Decline in Support for Tolerance as a Value

 Recently, a Wall Street Journal poll confirmed what most sentient Americans already knew — that patriotism, religion, and even having a family are now much less valued than even in the recent past.  Patriotism was "very important to only 38% of today's respondents compared to 70% in 1998.  Religion was down to 39% from 62%, and the importance of raising children cratered from 59% to a demographically dangerous 30%.  One statistic, however, likely caught most folks by surprise — the significant slide in the number of Americans who thought tolerance was "very important," which slipped from 80 to 58%.

The obvious cultural attacks on patriotism, religion, and "the nuclear family" can take the lion's share of "credit" for dismal numbers in those categories, but what's the explanation for the pronounced decline in support for tolerance, a once highly touted "liberal" virtue that scored higher than any other category in 1998?  I think I know the answer.

Around the turn of the century, I was in a prep school teachers' meeting where a young economics teacher observed that "tolerance is such a negative word."  He suggested as a substitute the warm and fuzzy term "acceptance."  As usual, the logical consequences of this linguistic swap were never discussed.  After all, one can't "accept" ideas and actions that are fundamentally incompatible.  One can "tolerate" the beliefs of Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, and atheists, but one can't logically "accept" all four.  What my touchy-feely colleague really wanted, without saying or perhaps even knowing it, was for everyone to "accept" his largely secular, politically correct beliefs, which included the contemporary gay agenda.  

What then becomes of beliefs and actions that he and his like-minded colleagues reject?  Are they to be "tolerated"?  Apparently not.  By putting "acceptance" in the place of tolerance, beliefs and practices incompatible with "accepted" beliefs are set in a "not to be tolerated" category.  For the past several decades, one need only peruse Hollywood entertainment to see this formula working in practice as ridicule is heaped on patriots (often caricatured as idiots or neo-fascists), religious believers (parodied as rural morons or violent anti-abortion activists), and traditional families (where cringe-worthy Married with Children family life images compete with childless, carefree Seinfeld characters and the heroic detective Olivia Benson on Law and Order: SVU).  More recently, this implicit fictional deprecation has become explicit in real life, as "un-woke" cultural opponents are blithely labeled fascists, racists, white supremacists, homo- and trans-phobes, or, in the case of African-American conservatives like Larry Elder, "the black face of white supremacy."    

Put succinctly, the crowd that only a few decades ago passionately touted the virtue of tolerance now demands acceptance of their du jour victim groups and beliefs — ideas like the following: men can get pregnant and menstruate; separate-sex bathrooms are "heteronormative"; America is institutionally racist; children are mature enough to change their sex, and dissenting parents should be circumvented or even (currently under consideration in California) deprived of their parental rights.  

It turns out that "tolerance" was only a stopgap virtue until such time as enough power was gained to impose their utopian, totalitarian vision upon dissenters — under penalty of law and pain of ostracism.  Nowadays, Berkeley, the so-called home of the "free speech movement," alongside almost all universities, regularly harasses and prevent conservatives or non-conforming independents from speaking.  At Stanford's law school, a DIE associate dean sided with hecklers and lectured a distinguished jurist whose views didn't mirror her intolerant leftist creed.  And swimming champion Riley Gaines was recently assaulted by "trans activists" who weren't about to allow an actual female athlete to say that men who identify as women shouldn't compete in female sports. 

By ditching tolerance for "acceptance," intolerance toward what one does not accept and those who espouse such beliefs becomes acceptable — and widely practiced.  Consequently, bashing and silencing the "enemy" is legitimized, and rational discourse is made unnecessary.  Non-conforming views become "hate speech" and even "violence" that's worthy of violent suppression. 

In short, by substituting "acceptance" for "tolerance," it becomes necessary to be intolerant of persons who don't kowtow to beliefs that must be "accepted."  So much for tolerance. 

GUTFELD! OR GUTTER-FILLED!

Now that the midterms are over, can we speak honestly about the moral black hole named Greg Gutfeld—an abysmal vortex that sucks everyone around him into a perverse world of cultural depravity.  Yes, he’s more politically astute than media’s leftist Cretins, but if politics are “downstream from culture,” what kind of political environment is being created in the witches brew of Gutfeld’s pre-pubescent potty humor?  It’s certainly not a milieu that exhibits any attachment to, much less reverence toward, the great achievements of Western literature, art, civic life, and morality.

Seldom does Gutfeld manage to complete a late-night monologue that omits his obsession with scatology, and never does he focus sustained attention on the essential roles that intact families and religious faith play in creating a virtuous culture.  Assuming his humor bears some relationship to the truth, Gutfeld has no affection for children and offers scant appreciation for male-female households whose primary focus is raising their offspring to be moral adults.  Instead, when proffering remedies for our political (not cultural) rot, his default position echoes the leftist cliché about education.  Yes, he adds an important school choice proviso but is totally blind to the fact that schooling alone, even if academically sound, will have little impact on cultural degradation absent a widespread moral awakening—a revolution that spawns massive institutional changes and millions more intact families. If Gutfeld’s show ever emphasizes the role played by overwhelmingly religious families in shaping children’s lives, it’s up to conservative guests like Mercedes Schlapp who, like other true conservatives, must crave a long shower after being dunked in Gutfeld’s verbal cesspool.

Ironically, Gutfeld’s expletive-filled program airs at 8 p.m. on the West Coast, the former “family hour.”  That irony becomes thicker when Gutfeld passionately and regularly advocates for the legalization of drugs—a position that coincides with his comic persona as an aficionado of most forms of chemical intoxication and sexual deviancy.  Given his attachment to music emitted by bands with nihilist leanings (cf. Power Trip) as well as that compulsive snicker, it’s rather clear that Gutfeld assuages his obvious psychological demons by resorting to other than over-the-counter remedies.

On this issue Gutfeld has a reliable echo in the person of Kat Timpf, a self-proclaimed libertarian whose on-air superficiality doubtless has Ayn Rand spinning in her grave.  Kat’s a “no rules” gal whose “live and let die” philosophy opposes laws both against and for sexualizing young kids in school.  In real life, of course, that means allowing radicals who set the agenda for public education to continue pushing “instruction” on six-year-olds that would have been deemed child abuse twenty years ago. Timpf is even unwilling to oppose drag queen shows for young kids.  Instead, she comments with passion about her friendships with practitioners of that “profession.”  The same inane preference for dogma over reality applies whenever Timpf opines about illegal immigration.  The “real” problem, she asserts, is the welfare system, not immigration—as if there were some possibility that the former will magically disappear before the country’s schools, hospitals, and social services are overwhelmed with a hundred million foreigners possessing little education, no proficiency in English, and a clear preference for the political party that encourages illegal border crossings and provides “migrants” whatever “entitlements” are needed to ensure their ballot-box loyalty.  

If those considerations aren’t sufficiently damning, consider Timpf’s self-congratulatory insouciance over “bump and grind” high school entertainments.  After all, she observes, kids nowadays already have access to that activity and much worse online—just as she herself did in high school.  Never crossing Timpf’s mind is the thought that using her own experience as a normative rule will have the effect of producing multitudes of self-absorbed, morally clueless adults incapable of cherishing a society in which individuals care about their neighbors and exhibit gratitude for the accomplishments of folks who came before them.  Anyone who thinks those words are unduly harsh should ponder Timpf’s comment that she would only want to have a child if it were ugly, since it would then not detract attention from herself.  It’s difficult to imagine a more staggering expression of narcissism.     

I also find it hard to understand how Timpf became a writer or blogger for National Review, but it’s clear she has no affection for religion and only offers back of the hand “raised Catholic” slights that would have made William F. Buckley bolt up straight in his chair.  It’s revealing that Timpf once complained bitterly about how cold she was in the studio while wearing, as is her wont, attire suitable for a Caribbean beach.  On another occasion Timpf scoffed at the name Rand Paul (as if he were a Libertarian) and affirmed her political allegiance to the Senator’s eccentric dad, former Congressman Ron Paul.  To sum up, Timpf has to be squeezed to say anything remotely akin to a moral imperative but is quick to denounce, with passion, “losers” who object to bikini-clad baristas.  Her fantasy society consists of human monads free to engage in depravities that never impact anyone else—a society miraculously devoid of ruthless folks bent on wielding absolute power for whom an assemblage of  party-goers who only wish to be left alone pose no obstacle whatsoever.  

It isn’t particularly surprising that late 20^th century America has produced individuals of the Gutfeld-Timpf stripe, personalities who display for an audience’s amusement lives enmeshed in emotional turbulence, stimulants, and various degrees of intellectual virtuosity devoid of serious attachment to the West’s literary and moral traditions—persons who also have little contact with folks in “fly-over” country who love God, family, football, and the flag.  It is, however, depressing that FOX seems willing to subject its guests and audience to Gutfeld’s morally debilitating influence—a pox that even infects more serious news programs like The Five.  

Sam Donaldson once defended sensationalized news coverage with the rationalization that apart from its ambulance-chasing exaggerations and frivolities no one would watch.  It always occurred to me that news hidden beneath so much toxic “frosting” was hardly worth watching.  The same analysis applies to the noxious effluvia that accompany the occasional political insights on Gutfeld’s show. Bottom line:  if politics is “downstream” from the culture exhibited on that program, those politics won’t be compatible with a Constitutional system that, as John Adams observed, “was made only for a moral and religious people” and is “wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”  

"Pushing the Envelope" Toward What?

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THE MYTH OF VOTER SUPPRESSION (and the reality of voter fraud)

As Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts notes in his poignant introduction, the primary question addressed by Lucas’s book, The Myth of Voter Suppression, is this: “[W]hy does the Democratic Party oppose free, fair, and credible elections?”  The short answer the author provides is that Democrats are much better at cheating and rigging elections than Republicans are.  Tammany Hall, the Chicago Daley machine, and Missouri’s Pendergast organization provide three historical examples.  That’s not to say Republicans never engage in electoral shenanigans, of which cases Lucas provides several examples.  But it is Democrats who consistently oppose measures designed to increase election integrity--measures that even a former Democratic President, Jimmy Carter, advocated in 2005 when serving on a bi-partisan commission co-chaired by former GOP Secretary of State James Baker. 

Two major recommendations of that commission were voter IDs and restrictions on mail-in voting, the latter being a process riddled with invitations to fraud, especially when corrupt voter rolls include dead persons, duplications, and folks who’ve moved elsewhere.  Opportunities for fraud are multiplied when, as in California, ballot harvesting is permitted.  Under this execrable practice (also known as vote trafficking) almost anyone can take custody of and deliver mail-in ballots to a mail box or voting receptacle--a “chain of custody” nightmare that would have made Mayor Daley’s day in 1960.  

By contrast, the top Democrat priority in 2021, HR-1 (mendaciously labeled a “voting rights” bill) would have eliminated most state voter ID laws, expanded ballot harvesting, mandated Election Day voter registration, and required no-excuse absentee voting in all states.  Ironically, in 1977, first-term Delaware Senator Joe Biden opposed Election Day voter registration because it “could lead to a serious increase in voter fraud.”  Fortunately, this “For the People” bill didn’t survive a Senate filibuster but, as Lucas explains, Democrats continue to press for legislation that would essentially federalize elections and thus make their legitimacy as questionable as the Covid-rationalized measures that plagued the 2020 election.

Lucas also notes that the whole idea of “voter suppression” is a myth designed to smear legal measures like voter IDs.  No law actually mentions the term “voter suppression,” and the author cites numerous examples that debunk the Democratic narrative that ID laws diminish election participation.  Indeed, most electoral evidence suggests ID laws actually increase participation and buttress voter confidence in election integrity.  It is, of course, true that laws designed to increase election integrity do “suppress” fraud, which is doubtless a major reason Democrats oppose such laws that are common in Europe.  Case in point: “Today, Democrats routinely call seeking an accurate accounting of eligible voters ‘suppression.’“  Such an accounting would obviously “suppress” the votes of 25,975 dead people who were discovered on Michigan’s voter rolls, stiffs who would obviously prefer to vote by mail.

A trip down memory lane reveals that political bosses have typically made arguments akin to those now proffered by the “voter suppression” crowd.  Tammany Hall opposed cleaning up voting roles in New York City (where more votes were cast than there were available voters).  That same corrupt Big Apple machine also “worked to get prisoners released to ensure they voted and even established a ‘naturalization mill’ to instantly turn immigrants coming off boats into voters.”  Other strong-arm organizations campaigned against the secret ballot, which lessened their power to intimidate voters.  Then there was 1864, when “Democrats tried to use mail-in voting to defeat Republican President Abraham Lincoln.”  Today, the Brennan Center for Justice, along with the queen of the “voter suppression hysteria industrial complex,” Stacey Abrams, serve as the foremost Democratic voices for corrupt elections. 

Lucas provides scores of examples of fraud that actually affected the outcome of elections, thus disproving the Democrat-Media mantra that fraud in American elections, and especially the 2020 election, is almost non-existent.  While Lucas doesn’t assert the 2020 POTUS election was stolen from President Trump, the examples he provides (including an eye-opening analysis by Professor John Lott of mail-in voting in adjacent, typically homogenous precincts) make it clear that that election was far from “the most secure” in American history.  I should note that Lucas’ book is not and does not claim to be a thorough analysis of possible fraud in that election, but in my view the information he does provide indicates that its outcome could easily have been affected by the widespread use of mail-in ballots whose signatures weren’t carefully scrutinized and whose contents were frequently submitted for tabulation via vote harvesting.   

Given this evidence plus a whole chapter listing organizations that provide an endless supply of money and energy for the Democrat HR-1 election fraud agenda, I question the brief assertion made in Lucas’s first chapter that neither voter fraud or voter suppression currently pose an existential threat to the republic.  The $400,000,000 supposedly non-partisan “Zuckerbucks” that went overwhelmingly to Democrat precincts is only one of many 2020 illegalities that makes this “existential” observation less than reassuring.  Indeed, the conclusion I drew from reading Lucas’s scrupulously researched analysis of election laws and practices is that voter fraud (not voter suppression) is an existential threat to the republic right now. 

The original “Godfather” movie is famous for the line, “Leave the gun; take the cannoli.” In this case I’d say, “Read the book but leave out the not-currently-an- existential-threat assessment.”

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle    

GUTFELD! NIETZSCHE and NIHILISM!

One of the Left’s favorite philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche, correctly predicted that the “death of God” would lead to a nihilist upheaval (e.g. The Gay (fröhliche) Science, #343). Put succinctly, if what was passionately believed for centuries to be the basis of truth is now considered false (i.e. the “death of God”) people will start to believe that nothing is ultimately true.  

The American version of Nietzsche’s prediction has become increasingly clear as faith diminishes and truth is transmogrified into political correctness and whatever sexual lunacy Leftists impose via their near monopoly over the means of education and communication. Given this state of affairs, one might ponder the outlook of individuals who come of age in this era, imbibe liberally its relativistic assumptions, but can’t stomach the political absurdities. Such are the social genetics, I think, that explain personalities of the Greg Gutfeld, Kat Timpf stripe--neither of whom should be called, or want to be called, “conservatives.”

While Gutfeld exults in exposing Leftist irrationality and even on rare occasions manages to compose monologues that omit his obsession with scatology, the host of late-night’s raunchy response to The View seldom, if ever, focuses diagnostic attention on intact families and never on religious faith.  Assuming Gutfeld’s humor bears some relationship to the truth, he has little affection for children and scant appreciation for male-female households whose primary focus is raising kids to be moral adults.  Instead, when offering cultural remedies, Gutfeld typically echoes the leftist cliché about education. To be fair, he adds an important “school choice” proviso that, while valid, continues to ignore the fact that schooling alone will have little impact on cultural degradation absent a revolution in curricula that presupposes massive institutional changes. And those changes won’t happen without a huge moral awakening that spawns millions more intact families. On one program it was up to Gutfeld’s conservative guest Mercedes Schlapp to note the essential role families play in shaping children’s lives.   

Ironically, the expletive-filled Gutfeld! program airs at 8 p.m. on the West Coast, the former “family hour.” That irony becomes thicker whenever Gutfeld passionately and regularly advocates the legalization of drugs--a position that coincides with his comic persona as an aficionado of most forms of chemical intoxication and sexual deviancy. Unfortunately such references may no longer be over the heads of South Park tweeners who tune in looking for some early-evening SNL humor. Given his oft-declared attachment to music emitted by bands with nihilist inclinations as well as his compulsive snicker, it’s not a stretch to think Gutfeld might actually assuage his psychological demons by resorting to other than over-the-counter remedies.

On this issue Gutfeld has a reliable echo in the person of Kat Timpf, a self-proclaimed libertarian whose on-air superficiality doubtless has Ayn Rand spinning in her grave. Kat’s a “no rules” gal whose “live and let die” philosophy opposes laws both against and for sexualizing young kids in school. In real life, of course, that position means allowing radicals who set the agenda for public education to continue pushing “instruction” to six-year-olds that would have been deemed child abuse twenty years ago. On one program Timpf was even unwilling to oppose (or favor) drag queen shows for kids.  Instead, she commented with unusual passion about her friendships with practitioners of that “profession.” The same inane preference for dogma over reality applies whenever Timpf opines about immigration (actually “illegal” immigration).  The “real” problem, she asserts (again with blind libertarian arrogance) is the welfare system, not immigration—as if there were some possibility that America's welfare system would magically disappear before the country’s schools, hospitals, and social services were overwhelmed with five-hundred million foreigners possessing little education or proficiency in English.

I find it hard to understand how Timpf became a writer (or blogger) for National Review, but it’s clear she has no affection for religion and only offers back of the hand “raised Catholic” slights that would have made William F. Buckley bolt up straight in his chair. It’s also revealing that Timpf once complained bitterly about how cold she was in the studio while wearing, as is her wont, attire suitable for a Caribbean beach. On another occasion Timpf scoffed at the name Rand Paul (as if “he” were a Libertarian) and affirmed her political allegiance to the Senator’s eccentric dad, former Congressman Ron Paul. To sum up, Timpf has to be squeezed to say anything remotely akin to a moral imperative but gets passionate about drag queens, drug legalization, criticism of the Beatles, and her desire to be left alone by others--a “hands off” preference that includes taxes and existence of the Federal Reserve.  

It isn’t particularly surprising that late 20^th century America produced individuals of the Gutfeld/Timpf stripe, personalities who put on display for an audience’s amusement lives enmeshed in emotional turbulence, stimulants, and various degrees of intellectual virtuosity that appear devoid of serious attachment to the Western intellectual, religious, and artistic traditions—individuals who clearly have little contact with line-dancing folks in “fly-over” country who love God, family, football, and the flag.  

If Gutfeld/Timpf were the only alternative to Leftist tyranny, I’d take it. But the important point here is that a shallow, agnostic, “libertarian” alternative is incapable of successfully opposing Leftist tyranny. One can’t defeat morally deranged ideologues with “live and let die” lifestyles put forward without commitment to a widely shared, deeply felt moral vision. I can imagine Leftists licking their chops while facing a regiment of drug-friendly “libertines” whose most passionate ideals extend no further than the desire to have a good time and a wish to be left alone.    

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle    

WOKE, INC.: Drawing Back the Curtain on Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

 

WOKE, INC. -- Drawing Back the Curtain on Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam

The Harvard educated founder and CEO of a successful Pharma start-up, Roivant, found himself on the wrong side of a Woke uprising in his own company and decided that resignation, reflection, and a careful, multi-pronged literary response was the better part of valor.  Vivek Ramaswamy’s book, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam, is evidence that he made the right decision.  

Seldom does a book provide as many insights as Woke, Inc., starting with the threat to democracy posed by stakeholder capitalism, a seemingly altruistic corporate posture that expands business goals to include external priorities like “equity” and the environment.  In reality this expanded list destroys the beneficent limits set by stockholder capitalism, which bind these institutions to strictly financial objectives.  The gigantic financial power and technical reach attained by corporate behemoths like Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and Google now bestow up these businesses an enormous ability to shape America’s  political and moral decisions -- powers that were never part of the liability concession given to corporate stockholders.  This monumental anti-democratic clout was clearly demonstrated during the 2020 Presidential election when the aforementioned tech giants conspired to deny voters crucial information about Hunter and Joe Biden by silencing a blockbuster New York Post story.  Ramaswamy argues that limiting a corporation’s purpose to its original financial purpose would help transfer democratic power back to individual voters and away from a handful of multi-billionaires whose egos reach beyond unimaginable wealth to near absolute social power.

Another segment of Ramaswamy’s analysis exposes the shell game played by Woke corporations whose BLM and other Woke declamations deflect attention from their own morally vacuous pursuit of profits.  Nike, for example, embraced Colin Kaepernick’s NFL protest against a supposedly racist nation while aggressively marketing expensive sneakers manufactured by children in Southeast Asian sweatshops to young black Americans.  Meanwhile various corporations funded BLM’s racist portrait of America while kowtowing to a Chinese dictator who commits unspeakable atrocities against the nation’s Uighur population.  This Woke grandstanding not only diverts attention from a Faustian access-to-Chinese-markets bargain, it also provides China’s Communist leaders a race card to play against the United States, thus suggesting a false moral equivalence between the two nations.  Even worse, as the author demonstrates, these corporations (e.g. Disney and the NBA) allow the Chinese to tailor to their totalitarian taste corporate messages that are sent worldwide -- no defense of Hong Kong democracy, no reference to an independent Tibet or Taiwan, and no Tech stamp of approval on the lab origin of the Wuhan Virus.  

A third major focus of Woke, Inc. is the assertion that “Wokism” (based on actual Supreme Court opinions) has the same status as a religion.  The significance of this assertion, if actually put into practice, is that a secular corporation could not legally fire an employee for opposing dogmatic Woke beliefs (e.g. trans-women are the same as biological women) any more than a business manager with traditional religious beliefs can now fire an employee of an essentially secular corporation for not adhering to his own particular spiritual tenets.  This novel idea is argued with the kind of attention to detail one would expect of a diligent attorney -- or of an author who actually possesses a legal degree from Yale.

Some of the other topics covered in Ramaswamy’s analysis of corporate culture include the author’s take on Congress’s 230 liability exemptions given to tech companies.  These organizations, acting with a special government privilege not given to publishers, should thus be held to the same First Amendment standards that apply to the federal government.  A jaw-dropping factoid related amid the author’s analysis of outsized corporate censorship power was the convenient coincidence of extended COVID lockdowns and a trillion dollars in extra market capitalization that big-tech companies enjoyed as a consequence.  Ramaswamy also stresses the destructiveness of valuing group identity over individual uniqueness -- of judging diversity based solely on race and sex categories rather than on diversity of thought and experience.  Another theme emphasized throughout the book is the common practice of doing, or pretending to do, charitable works in order to bolster a resume or burnish a corporation’s image.  The author relates a personal Goldman-Sachs “tree planting” excursion to Harlem that ended with these words and no trees planted, “Let’s take some pictures and get out of here!”  

Ramaswamy’s concluding universal public service proposal for bringing Americans together (a program aimed at summertime teens) seemed surprisingly naïve given the author’s perceptive analysis of corporate, personal, and governmental duplicity.  A couple of ill-considered jabs at Mike Lindell and at President Trump’s presumed failure to adequately address the COVID  pandemic were brief enough to put aside for the wealth of corporate, legal, social, and even psychological insights provided by WOKE Inc.

SPEECHLESS: CONTROLLING WORDS, CONTROLLING MINDS by Michael Knowles

Why has the United States been transmogrified in little more than half a century from a Christian nation that joyously displayed Christmas trees and crèches in public spaces, celebrated familial virtues, embraced the importance of temperance, and (both culturally and legally) censored pornographic productions, into a secular nation that bans prayers at public school graduation ceremonies, allows men who “identify” as women to invade female sport competitions and dressing rooms, celebrates the “freedom” to indulge in almost any debauchery short of the ever diminishing prohibition against pederasty, highlights paternal dysfunction, frowns on a woman’s desire to raise a family and even celebrates her penumbral Constitutional “right” to snuff out the life in her womb?  Add to this litany a cohort of semantic alterations that obliterate the biological distinction between men and women and label as “hate speech” or “violence” utterances that differ from the ever-shifting demands of political correctness.  Top off these changes with the silencing of a sitting President by a handful of tech oligarchs who effectively control speech in America’s and the world’s “public square.”

These are a few of the transformations in American society that Michael Knowles analyzes in his recent work Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, transformations broadly attributed to “political correctness,” a tactic with roots in Marxism whose ultimate goal is the destruction of our traditional culture -- a culture whose self-confidence and virtues made radical revolutions impossible.  In short, undermine the family, destroy moral probity, discard rational thought, debauch the population, vilify religion, denigrate patriotism, and you have a demoralized population ripe for indoctrination and authoritarian rule.

As Knowles’ subtitle suggests, a major component of the Left’s revisionist project is through the control and manipulation of language -- making it almost impossible to think and speak outside the radicals’ own linguistic box.  The semantic apotheosis of what once seemed modest feminist-inspired changes (e.g. substituting “chairperson” or “chair” for “chairman”) is the contemporary demand (on pain of being labeled a “transphobic bigot”) that everyone must call a “man” a “woman” if “she” identifies as a woman.  Other neologisms that set the terms of engagement for contemporary conversations include the word “fetus” (since Roe v. Wade, 1973) and the self-annihilating phrase “reproductive rights”-- terms used to mask the once morally repugnant act of stopping reproduction by killing babies in the womb. 

This linguistic project is part and parcel of the “long march through the institutions” that “cultural Marxists” like Rudi Dutschke and Antonio Gramsci (who employed the phrase “cultural hegemony”) deemed necessary to destroy the “false consciousness” Americans imbibed from traditional culture.  To give one salient example, if the values extant in the 1950s permeated society, most women would likely embrace the idea of being married and a mom -- a decision that feminists like Simon de Beauvoir equated with being in prison.  “No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. . . .  Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.”  Given the enthusiastic “breaking the glass ceiling” rhetoric that emanates incessantly from leftist media and the largely implicit denigration of women who choose the option of becoming a mother and homemaker, de Beauvoir’s vision of “freedom” for women now lacks only the element of legal compulsion.  More broadly, the traditional idea that freedom itself involves self-control and mastery of the passions has long been discarded for the notion that liberty  means the ability to act freely on one’s desires or, in popular lingo, the freedom “to be myself.”  

Of course to control language, one must occupy the “commanding heights of the culture” -- which include academia, journalism, entertainment, and major corporations (especially big-tech).  All these institutions (as well as most big cities in the U.S.) are now firmly under leftist control, which makes the charge that America is “structurally racist” all the more absurd.  Fortunately for PC radicals, logical consistency isn’t necessary for the success of a project whose consistent aim is, in Marx’s words, “ruthless criticism of all that exists.”

Explaining Marxist goals and their linguistic tactics, however, is only one side of Knowles’ argument. The most provocative and insightful component of his book concerns a critique of conservatives who play into the hands of their opponents by failing to see the importance of these linguistic battles or by countering them with abstract paeans to “free speech” and “free markets.”  As noted earlier, by defining the linguistic terms of debate, Marxists are able to create “heads I win, tails you lose” scenarios that revolve around putative “rights” of “marginalized” populations who “feel excluded” or “oppressed” by something that was once part of traditional culture (e.g. statues of Jefferson, the national anthem, the American flag, laws against abortion, vagrancy, and public lewdness).  Knowles observes that “free speech” and “anti-censorship” arguments essentially create a moral vacuum that are inevitably filled by the passionate Left.  He further notes that no society, including America, ever tolerated all manner of speech or failed to censor actions and ideas it deemed inimical to its welfare. 

The critical question concerns not “censorship” itself but the things a society censors.  Nowadays the “n-word” is number one on the list, with the exception that individuals possessing sufficient melanin (and leftist leanings) can employ the actual word with impunity.  Public displays of Christian religious items (crosses, crèches, Ten Commandments) are now deemed “exclusive” if not illegal.  A Michael Knowles talk may be heckled into oblivion and the speaker attacked, but black racists can address a crowd without interruption, be given academic tenure, and secure lucrative book deals.  The term “illegal alien” is verboten; “undocumented migrant” is ok; but best of all, I might add, one refers to “an economic or political refugee and future American citizen.”  Most notoriously, President Trump, as well as his supporters, can be denounced as “deplorables” or “insurrectionists” and silenced by the big-tech communication arm of the Left.  In short, we’ve exchanged the standards for acceptable speech and practice that guided a largely religious society for standards set by Leftists intent on destroying the country we once loved.

So how should conservatives oppose Leftists?  Not with encomiums to “free speech” that essentially abandon the substantive principles upon which our democratic republic was founded.  As John Adams observed, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.  It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”  Consequently, conservatives must assert those basic principles that guided our nation and its moral progress since its founding -- principles and standards adumbrated in Knowles’ final chapter but reserved for and deserving a book of their own.  In brief, “Any substantive conservative vision must begin with an acknowledgment of moral conscience, which is a judgment of reason whereby we recognize the moral quality of concrete acts. This acknowledgement requires the further recognition that good, evil, virtue, and vice are not mere sentiments or superstitions but eternal realities.”  Conservatives must not cede to Leftists the linguistic playing field and tiptoe around the absurdity of saying that men can have babies or menstruate.  With William F. Buckley they must reject the “hoax” of “academic freedom” (God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom”) and realize that “Skepticism has utility only when it leads to conviction.”

Knowles becomes in my view needlessly pedantic when he chides conservatives for noting that Antifa (meaning “anti-fascist) actually employs fascist tactics.  The author frequently insists that Antifa is a Marxist organization and should be so categorized.  (I myself would wager that most of these black-garbed gang members are philosophically clueless nihilists and prospective sociopaths.)  But that picayune quibble pales in comparison with the larger message that Knowles provides about the origins, linguistic tactics, and cultural victories of the Left.  More importantly, Knowles explains how successful opposition to the Left must embrace positive standards and principles rooted in both moral conscience and rational judgment -- not abstract praise of “free speech” and thoughtless denunciations of “censorship.”  

LIVE NOT BY LIES by Rod Dreher (American Thinker Book Review)

"Live not by lies" was the challenge issued by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, upon his departure from the Soviet Union, to individuals still condemned to live behind the Iron Curtain — especially to those who were well aware of the suffocating mendacity that permeated communist societies.  Rod Dreher's book gives the same advice to Americans today, especially to Christians who are expected to mouth obvious lies or face social ostracism and economic devastation — punishments administered occasionally by leftist judges and government officials but most frequently by tech giants, woke corporations, and P.C. media sycophants.  

Dreher was inspired to write his book by heroic dissidents who refused to bend the knee to communist tyrants and saw a similar tyranny becoming ensconced in the United States.  These moral giants are astonished that the primary beacon of freedom during their years of oppression has become a society where speech and actions disapproved by secular elites are regularly squelched and punished.  Religious freedom, for example, is being reduced to the freedom to gather in congregations where (at least for now) marriage is affirmed by a priest, rabbi, or minister, a freedom that doesn't extend beyond meeting walls to how a baker runs his business.

Admittedly, the totalitarianism Americans face is not the "hard" Soviet variety of which socialist-sympathizing Millennials are overwhelmingly ignorant.  Those regimes committed horrific crimes against political prisoners.  To cite one example given by Dreher, a row of twenty or thirty priests were shot in the face, one after the other, as each affirmed his faith in God.  America's "soft" totalitarianism, by contrast, flourishes thanks to an unholy alliance of tech, media, academic, corporate, and political powers that are eager to punish anyone brash enough to express un-woke opinions above a furtive whisper.  Under this soft totalitarianism, Americans are now compelled "to engage in doublethink every day.  Men have periods.  The woman standing in front of you is to be called 'he.'  Diversity and inclusion mean excluding those who object to ideological uniformity.  Equity means treating persons unequally, regardless of their skills and achievements, to achieve an ideologically correct result."  I might add to that short summary the lie that America is a racist country, that law enforcement and our judicial system are institutionally racist, and that America was founded in 1619 upon the bedrock principle of white racism.

The ascendancy of this soft totalitarianism has been in the making for well over a half-century and gained substantial momentum in the sixties and seventies with the rise of what Philip Rieff called a "therapeutic culture" within which "the great sin is to stand in the way of the freedom of others to find happiness as they wish."  Dreher further notes that this culture "goes hand in hand with the sexual revolution, which, along with ethnic and gender identity politics, replaced the failed economic class struggle as the utopian focus of the post-1960s radical left."  These "cultural revolutionaries," the author adds somewhat surprisingly, "found an ally in advanced capitalism, which teaches that nothing should exist outside of the market mechanism and its sorting of value according to human desires."  My less pretentious translation of that sentence would be the following: Madison Avenue has promoted for decades the notion that nothing is more important than comfort, leisure time, and feelings of pleasure so shallow that "happiness" seems to represent an exalted ethical principle.

Clearly, this "live and let live" philosophy (if it ever was sincere) has been superseded by a doctrine of ruthless cultural and political conformity, since the happiness of "oppressed groups" requires a world in which using the "wrong" pronoun for another's "gender identity" is considered the equivalent of a violent assault.  Moreover, in today's cultural calculus, unequal group outcomes are taken as prima facie evidence of racism, sexism, or a plethora of hateful "phobias."  Supercharging this morass of mendacity is the rise of "surveillance capitalism," where privacy has been ceded to woke corporate entities in exchange for convenience, thus providing these leftist groups an unprecedented level of information about the lives of consumers.  That same information is then used to shape the future actions and beliefs of those individuals according to the economic, cultural, and political whims of tech giants.

What is sadly lacking in modern American society, Dreher observes, is allegiance to a set of principles (especially Christian principles) that transcend the ubiquitous desire to be happy.  He relates the story of a Hungarian woman who, after thirty years of Western consumerism, is now inundated with the same secular advice from associates that has become common in American culture.  They urge her to divorce her husband, put her child in daycare, and get a job that will make her happy.  The woman, however, doesn't want to dismiss her maternal duties or end her marriage.  Rather, "she worries that her friends don't grasp that suffering is a normal part of life — even part of a good life, in that suffering teaches us how to be patient, kind, and loving."  The lady doesn't want to "escape her problems," but rather "wants them to help her live through them."

One of the things that impressed Dreher in his conversations with the numerous anti-communist heroes was the soul-satisfying lives they achieved via faith, family, and moral integrity even in the midst of suffering.  On the other hand, he despairs of a society where individuals have become increasingly isolated and reduced to Brave New World addicts hooked on feelings of well-being provided by the Conditioners in charge.  Thus, his question directed to Christians is whether they are truly disciples of Christ (i.e., followers) or merely admirers — whether they are willing to suffer for their faith or whether their primary allegiance is to the gospel of wealth, comfort, and success ("Moralistic Therapeutic Deism") that's proclaimed in numerous churches.    

Dreher's dissident models did not seek martyrdom, but they were unwilling to propagate and live out official lies.  "Let their rule hold not through me!"  By drawing strength from their families, meeting in small groups, and secretly printing and distributing forbidden literature, they were strengthened to avoid the fate of an inward-only dissenter who "eventually becomes the character he [constantly] plays."  A motto employed by some of these intimate groups (one that Dreher also adopts throughout his book) is the triple-injunction to "See, Judge, Act."

Unfortunately, a grave failure on Dreher's part to "See" and "Judge" correctly is contained in his repetition of an endlessly repeated leftist lie about "the US federal government's [i.e. the Trump administration's] failure to respond effectively to the Covid-19 pandemic."  Later, Dreher says, "Politics are so divided by rigid ideologies that it is difficult for the US federal government to get anything done" — a naïve late-September observation I trust the author wouldn't repeat following the torrent of perverse executive actions the Biden administration has issued in just five months!

 Fortunately, such errors in judgment are few in this work that provides poignant examples of moral (e.g., Vaclav Havel) and spiritual courage in the face of overwhelming state brutality and that identifies numerous fissures in American society (broken families, loss of historical memory, corrupt centers of power) that have prepared the ground for the utopianism that serves as the deceptive lure for a freedom-denying totalitarian culture.  Accordingly, Dreher challenges Americans to see the clear signs of totalitarianism in their midst and to act positively to oppose its spread.  In particular, he calls on Christians to resist living by lies by embracing true discipleship, a commitment that requires a willingness to suffer for one's faith. 

HOWARD ZINN’S AMERICAN HOLOCAUST

If folks wonder why youngsters today are less patriotic and more inclined toward socialism, they need look no further than the most popular “history” textbook in the United States, Howard Zinn’s  A People’s History of the United States -- a one-sided work written from the perspective of a Communist activist that contains a plethora of distortions and outright lies.  In 2012, the director of the American Textbook Council noted that Zinn’s text had sold two million copies and was the “best-selling survey of American history.”  By 2018, it was estimated that the book had sold more than 2.6 million copies.  

Mary Grabar’s new book, Debunking Howard Zinn, does us the service of exposing  the mendacious,  non-scholarly character of this work that was praised to the hilt by Zinn’s former Cambridge neighbor,  Matt Damon.  In Good Will Hunting the film’s protagonist exclaims, “It will knock your socks off!”  making an even greater rock star of Zinn and solidifying for impressionable teens the bona fides of a propaganda tome composed in a scant year.  Even a sympathetic leftist historian, Michael Kammen, called the book “simpleminded” and a “scissors-and-paste-pot job.”  The well-known liberal scholar Arthur Schlesinger was even more critical, labeling Zinn “a polemicist, not a historian.”  Grabar herself notes that after his graduate school book on Fiorello La Guardia, Zinn produced not a single piece of historical scholarship until decades later he slapped together his People’s History -- a work that relies overwhelmingly on secondary sources and for which “there is no evidence that Zinn ever actually made extensive notes,” as he claimed, in preparation for its writing.

Grabar provides scores of examples of Zinn’s modus operandi that ignores, distorts, or simply lies about evidence to construct a Manichean portrait of good versus evil as those categories are conceived by a Marxist activist.  Zinn’s caricature of Columbus sets the stage for his presentation of American history as a series of Holocausts.  In one case Zinn quotes Columbus’ diary entries out of context to portray the explorer as a rapacious gold-seeker who wouldn’t be averse to enslaving the island’s primitive inhabitants.  To accomplish this goal Zinn ignores Columbus’ positive comments about “freedom” for the “Arawak” tribe and splices together separate entries that make the explorer appear a nascent slave trader on first viewing the island’s inhabitants.  In fact, the damning comments about the natives being “good servants” were made days later and concerned the perspective of a warring tribe intent on subjugating their more docile neighbors.  The other side of Zinn’s narrative involves the beatification and Marxification of the Americas’ native population -- a portrait at odds with any objective history of the New World which was filled with wars at least as ubiquitous and violent (including the cannibalism that Zinn omits) as those in “capitalist” Europe!   

To top off the lies about Columbus, Grabar shows that a good deal of Zinn’s “scholarship” is plagiarized from a 1976 work by fellow anti-Vietnam War activist, Hans Koning, Columbus: His Enterprise: Exploding the Myth.  Grabar shows how page after page in Zinn’s history was lifted almost verbatim from Koning’s book.  Indeed, “The first five-and-a-half pages of A People’s History of the United States are little more than slightly altered passages from Columbus: His Enterprise.”  The secondary kicker is that Koning wasn’t even an historian, much less a Columbus scholar.  In fact, Koning’s “slim volume does not cite any sources.”  Grabar also reveals additional instances of Zinn’s plagiarism -- one of which was discovered by a leftist Professor who didn’t publicize the truth lest it harm their common ideological objectives.  So much for professional standards that were applied even to a well-known historian like  PBS’s favorite scholar, Doris Kearns Goodwin, who “resigned from her post on the Pulitzer Prize review board and took a ‘leave’ from PBS NewsHour” when parts of her work were found to be plagiarized.

Chapter two of Grabar’s book reviews the life of Zinn as a dedicated Communist activist whose Marxist beliefs and activities spoke louder than any card he may or may not have carried.  Chapter three shows how Native Americans are used as props for Zinn’s ongoing Marxist cartoon, with Europeans and Americans forming the necessary oppressive class.  As for his account of the Iroquois Indians, it was again largely plagiarized from another patently biased historian, Gary Nash.  One critic said the descriptions of this well-known American tribe resembled “California countercultural rebels, defenders of women’s rights, and communist egalitarians. . . .”   In Zinn’s telling, any butchery and slavery on the side of oppressed groups (even the Aztecs) is ignored, distorted, or excused.  Thus, Zinn’s “history” conforms perfectly to Professor Fred Siegel’s observation about the “New Historians” for whom “American history became a tragedy in three acts: what we did to the Indians, what we did to the African-Americans, and what we did to everyone else.”  

Concerning the second act of that tragedy, Zinn somehow manages to blame capitalism for American slavery, though the institution has been around for all of recorded history and still exists in some very non-capitalist African states.  He also ignores the fact that only in America, where slavery was said to be the cruelest, were slaves, despite the evils of the institution, able to grow their population through natural increase, something not possible in regions where slaves died or were killed so frequently that only a constant influx of new victims maintained their numbers.

Grabar clearly demonstrates that Zinn takes the orthodox Communist line when discussing any topic: The Founding Fathers were more interested in their investments than the welfare of oppressed groups.  Lincoln was more a capitalist tool than a President committed to ending slavery -- or a friend to his adviser and later Republican political official, Frederick Douglass.  Even World War II was fought to maintain the capitalist system, as was, of course, the Vietnam War, where, according to Zinn, the My Lai massacre was “typical.”  Also in the 60s, radical and violent groups like the Black Panthers are given greater attention and more credit for (always inadequate) civil rights progress than traditional groups like the NAACP -- even though the latter organization clearly accomplished more than the former and was supported by blacks (despite Zinn’s insinuations) far more than their violent counterparts.                    

Earlier in the book and also in closing Grabar makes a telling point about the duplicity of modern historians by comparing their vigorous denunciation of David Irving’s Holocaust-minimizing work with the plenary indulgences given to Zinn’s unbalanced, unreliable, often-plagiarized volume.  Why, she asks, should Zinn’s false American Holocaust history not be judged by the same standards that make Irving’s account of Hitler’s crimes totally unacceptable.  The obvious answer is that most historians, even those who think Zinn’s book is more propaganda than history, are still sympathetic to the ideology that permeates Zinn’s distorted view of the U.S. -- a sympathy illustrated by their spirited defense of the book whenever official attempts arise to remove it from state-related classrooms. Grabar provides sufficient evidence to make the case that Zinn’s history is every bit as contemptible as Irving’s and should be viewed with equal revulsion.  That Zinn in 2004 signed a statement supporting an investigation into a possible 9/11 Bush Administration conspiracy says all one really needs to know about Zinn’s animus toward America.  That professional historians, clueless high school teachers, and even Google searches (no surprise) present  Zinn’s history as reliable is a big reason many young Americans no longer feel pride in a nation that’s been presented to them through the jaundiced eyes of a Communist who cares not a whit for professional historical standards -- or the truth. 

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle   

The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return

Only a few decades ago California twice elected Ronald Reagan governor and twice voted for the Gipper as President.  It later chose a series of Republican governors, ending with its former Senator Pete Wilson (1991-1998).  Twenty years later the state has no functioning Republican Party and all statewide offices are securely held by Democrats in the mold of San Francisco’s Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris.  What California looks like today is what Democrats want for the whole country.  That Gilded State dystopia is described in detail in the first chapter of Michael Anton’s book The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return.  That portrait features super-wealthy coastal elites eager to impose their environmental ideology and social justice agenda on a vanishing middle class as well as on Valley farmers whose irrigation waters and livelihood dry up for the sake of a supposedly endangered fish.  This Democrat lock on political power is based on an ever-growing multitude of legal and illegal immigrants whose voting power and reliance on government assistance turned a relatively red state deep blue. 

Add to this overview crushing home prices, the highest state income tax rate, crumbling infrastructure, traffic nightmares, deteriorating schools, a burgeoning homeless population, and a protected class of illegal aliens with more freedom to violate the law than conservatives have to express opinions about males who identify as the opposite sex and share bathroom facilities with biological females.  This incomplete portrait reveals what’s in store for the rest of the country if current trends continue, trends made possible by the addition of, at a minimum, fifty-nine million immigrants since Ted Kennedy’s 1965 “reform” bill whose every promise to the American people was, as Anton notes, a complete lie.  Anton also observes (in chapter 5, “Immigration”) that fifty-nine million doesn’t include the offspring of those prolific immigrants or the twenty million plus illegal immigrants now in the country.  All totaled, these numbers represent an unprecedented inflow of foreigners  whose presence in the country has lowered working class wages, increased home prices, drained  public coffers, taxed public services, crowded cities, “fundamentally transformed” California, and is quickly transmogrifying Colorado and even Virginia.

Most AT readers are familiar with the execrable state of affairs in California (well summarized by Victor Davis Hanson) but most will find something new to consider when Anton focuses attention on the ultimate objectives of America’s super-wealthy ruling class (chapters 3 and 4), a group consisting of tech, finance, business, and agriculture oligarchs who provide the money that creates and motivates political puppets eager to create their own fiefdoms via influence-peddling and revolving government-business doors.  (Why has Congress, including the GOP, been loath to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden’s corruption?  Answer:  “because they all do the same thing -- or hope to once they leave office.”)  Anton’s analysis of these super-rich and somewhat hereditary puppeteers focuses more on economics than sheer ideology, and on political power as the means to secure their positions of wealth and status.

 Anton asserts that the primary goal of these elites is “to transform the United States into a deracinated economic-administrative zone with one size-fits-all ‘rules’ whose surface impartiality masks an unbending bias toward capital over wages, management over labor, words over actions, ideas over things, the new over the old, cosmopolitanism over the familiar, foreigners over the native-born. ”  Put more simply, ruling elites pursue a globalist free market that redounds to the benefit of high finance and big business (especially technology) at the expense of American workers, American culture, and the American Constitution.  A “high-low” coalition of the super wealthy plus folks dependent on government is the nationwide ruling class playbook as it was in California.    

Anton doesn’t discount the role of ideology among the ruling class but views it more as a means than an end in itself -- a vehicle employed to pacify true believers (the “Wokerati”) and to secure the power that guarantees their fabulous wealth will continue indefinitely.  Indeed, these elites must employ a juggling act that balances grievance-based identity politics with the need to pay off their various constituencies.  Killing the golden goose of globalist capitalism would surely produce a break-up of their coalition that includes many “Freeloaders” as well as aggrieved minorities unwilling to give up I-phones and hefty government assistance programs just to vilify “the (white, male, heterosexual, Christian) man.”  The vindictive “Avenger” group in this coalition, led by academics like Ta-Nehisi Coates, seeks nothing short of, in the words of one critic, “a program of infinite penance for whites.” Meanwhile a soulmate of Coates, Noel Ignatiev, goes even further by giving his Harvard Magazine article this title: “Abolish the White Race.” While the largely white ruling class elites are content to use this racist hatred for political objectives that now include reparations, they hardly want to see their mega-fortunes turned into dust.  

Whether a global capitalist system can succeed in buying off these competing constituencies given a democratic-in-name-only America is unlikely, thus Anton’s prolonged discussion in chapters 6 and 7 of future possibilities which extend from Blue and Red Caesars to outright war to various secession scenarios.  Anton would have been wise, in my view, to sharply curtail these speculations since the author himself notes Yogi Berra’s prognosticative warning:  “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”  What is perfectly clear, however, is how that globalist system has harmed American workers and how our ruling elites have all but destroyed the country’s traditional political institutions thanks to the ubiquitous rule of activist judges (“kritarchy”) who regularly nullify democratic decisions like the 60 to 40 percent  California vote in 1994 to deny illegal aliens non-emergency government assistance.

With respect to culture, I give Anton major kudos for discussing how the ruling class has pacified and distracted  Americans via mindless and morally vacuous entertainments, drugs, and especially “porn” -- all products that have dulled the cognitive abilities and moral fiber of Americans thanks to their incessant propagation via television, film, music, and the Internet!   Needless to say, the ruling class’s media “Megaphones” eagerly push these tawdry products to keep themselves modestly rich and American consumers “demoralized” -- indifferent to the hollowing out of their country’s working class and Constitution. 

In this hollowed out America justice is anything but Constitutionally equal.  One example among  several  Anton provides is the FBI’s pre-dawn, SWAT-squad raid of the elderly Roger Stone’s house that was filmed “coincidentally” by CNN -- all in response to a non-violent “process crime.”  Compare this wildly disproportionate use of force with the failure to even prosecute a ruling class functionary, Andrew McCabe, who lied to Congress about a coup designed to undermine a legally elected President.  Thanks to a complicit media dedicated to the proposition that most Americans are racist dimwits, this blatant injustice is hidden from the wider public.

Anton’s final chapter provides a political platform that calls for President Trump’s re-election and disavows any Republican Party not committed to protecting American workers, America’s traditional culture, and the American Constitution.  The GOP of the two Bushes and many “conservative” think tanks that push globalist “free trade” policies and give tacit support for open borders and unchecked  immigration must either follow Trump’s pro-American lead or die. 

While Anton would have done well to make his points in two-thirds the space, he nevertheless scores numerous bullseyes that make his tendency to “over-explain” forgivable.  Among these telling hits is the author’s quotation of an English author, Anthony Daniels, who observed that political correctness is “communist propaganda writ small.”  The purpose of both is to humiliate people by forcing them to repeat obvious lies and thereby “lose once and for all their sense of probity.”  An example I would offer is the now-PC claim that men can have babies and menstruate.  Daniels says, “To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself.”  He adds, “A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.”  Control is an essential component of the ruling class’s agenda, and one that’s surely at stake in next month’s election. 

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle