Politicizing The Military Has Consequences (Ideas Have Consequences)

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INTRO

What lies below are three excerpts from articles I wish to highlight. There is much more below, but after reding The Washington Times article and the Monbattery post, this addition to my website was birthed.

I will end with Moonbat discussing the kid from the Air Force who lit himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy as a night-cap discussing our current military condition in regard to DEI, CRT, and WOKE ideology.

Also below is a 12-page excerpt of Richard Weaver’s book, IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES… a large chunk of his introduction. (INTERNET ARCHIVE has the entire 1948 edition for free.) The below is — I think — a good explainer for the phenomenon we are seeing, and if this culture continues, we will see more of.

HERITAGE FOUNDATION

Since the beginning of the Biden administration how the #WOKE/DEI agenda has been implemented in the military. Heritage Foundation notes this in a 2023 article:

The U.S. Armed Forces have one mission: to protect our nation from foreign enemies. Our troops are as committed to that mission as ever before. But according to a bracing new report, our warriors’ ability to do their job is being undermined by civilian leaders more interested in woke indoctrination and partisan politics than warfighting readiness.

“The Report of the National Independent Panel on Military Service and Readiness” is an urgent warning about creeping politicization at the Pentagon and its corrosive impact on America’s national defense. As the report details, the Biden administration’s whole-of-government embrace of woke politics is becoming a dangerous distraction for servicemen and women who signed up to protect and defend, not virtue-signal. 

The top-line statistics compiled in the report are jarring.

Last year, the Army missed its recruiting goal by 25 percent. They expect this year to be even worse. The Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps began the new fiscal year in October 50 percent below their normal recruiting numbers. Public confidence in the military is falling precipitously, and even military families—from which most recruits come—are less likely to recommend military life.

What explains the decline? According to a November poll, the most common explanations included “military leadership becoming overly politicized” and “so-called ‘woke’ practices undermining military effectiveness.” Another survey found that 65 percent of active-duty servicemen and women are concerned about politicization, including the woke training programs and equity-minded reduced physical fitness standards.

Troop retention rates are falling, too, and for the same reasons. As the report notes, “the perception that non-warfighting missions are distracting senior military leadership may alienate experienced, skilled and knowledgeable warfighters, incentivizing their early departure[.]” ….

For those that need some further confirmation… this is not good. And while there are two more articles to follow, here is a very long quote from an introduction to a book I read in the late 90’s — itself written in 1948, that goes a long way to explain the rotting roots of our current fruit.

  • “Ideas have consequences, and totally erroneous ideas are likely to have destructive consequences.” — Steve Allen

Like I said, this is not a short/pithy post:

RICHARD WEAVER

INTERNET ARCHIVE has the entire 1948 edition for free. – PDF of below:

INTRODUCTION

This is another book about the dissolution of the West. I attempt two things not commonly found in the growing literature of this subject. First, I present an account of that decline based not on analogy but on deduction. It is here the assumption that the world is intelligible and that man is free and that those consequences we are now expiating are the product not of biological or other necessity but of unintelligent choice. Second, I go so far as to propound, if not a whole solution, at least the beginning of one, in the belief that man should not follow a scientific analysis with a plea of moral impotence.

In considering the world to which these matters are addressed, I have been chiefly impressed by the difficulty of getting certain initial facts admitted. This difficulty is due in part to the widely prevailing Whig theory of history, with its belief that the most advanced point in time represents the point of highest development, aided no doubt by theories of evolution which suggest to the uncritical a kind of necessary passage from simple to complex. Yet the real trouble is found to lie deeper than this. It is the appalling problem, when one comes to actual cases, of getting men to distinguish between better and worse. Are people today provided with a sufficiently rational scale of values to attach these predicates with intelligence? There is ground for declaring that modern man has become a moral idiot. So few are those who care to examine their lives, or to accept the rebuke which comes of admitting that our present state may be a fallen state, that one questions whether people now understand what is meant by the superiority of an ideal. One might expect abstract reasoning to be lost upon them; but what is he to think when attestations of the most concrete kind are set before them, and they are still powerless to mark a difference or to draw a lesson? For four centuries every man has been not only his own priest but his own professor of ethics, and the consequence is an anarchy which threatens even that minimum consensus of value necessary to the political state.

Surely we are justified in saying of our time: If you seek the monument to our folly, look about you. In our own day we have seen cities obliterated and ancient faiths stricken. We may well ask, in the words of Matthew, whether we are not faced with “great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world.” We have for many years moved with a brash confidence that man had achieved a position of independence which rendered the ancient restraints needless. Now, in the first half of the twentieth century, at the height of modern progress, we behold unprecedented outbreaks of hatred and violence; we have seen whole nations desolated by war and turned into penal camps by their conquerors; we find half of mankind looking upon the other half as criminal. Everywhere occur symptoms of mass psychosis. Most portentous of all, there appear diverging bases of value, so that our single planetary globe is mocked by worlds of different understanding. These signs of disintegration arouse fear, and fear leads to desperate unilateral efforts toward survival, which only forward the process.

Like Macbeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the existence of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence.

One may be accused here of oversimplifying the historical process, but I take the view that the conscious policies of men and governments are not mere rationalizations of what has been brought about by unaccountable forces. They are rather deductions from our most basic ideas of human destiny, and they have a great, though not unobstructed, power to determine our course.

For this reason I turn to William of Occam as the best representative of a change which came over man’s conception of reality at this historic juncture. It was William of Occam who propounded the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existence. His triumph tended to leave universal terms mere names serving our convenience. The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man; and the answer to the question is decisive for one’s view of the nature and destiny of humankind. The practical result of nominalist philosophy is to banish the reality which is perceived by the intellect and to posit as reality that which is perceived by the senses. With this change in the affirmation of what is real, the whole orientation of culture takes a turn, and we are on the road to modern empiricism.

It is easy to be blind to the significance of a change because it is remote in time and abstract in character. Those who have not discovered that world view is the most important thing about a man, as about the men composing a culture, should consider the train of circumstances which have with perfect logic proceeded from this. The denial of universals carries with it the denial of everything transcending experience. The denial of everything transcending experience means inevitably—though ways are found to hedge on this—the denial of truth. With the denial of objective truth there is no escape from the relativism of “man the measure of all things.” The witches spoke with the habitual equivocation of oracles when they told man that by this easy choice he might realize himself more fully, for they were actually initiating a course which cuts one off from reality. Thus began the “abomination of desolation” appearing today as a feeling of alienation from all fixed truth.

Because a change of belief so profound eventually influences every concept, there emerged before long a new doctrine of nature. Whereas nature had formerly been regarded as imitating a transcendent model and as constituting an imperfect reality, it was henceforth looked upon as containing the principles of its own constitution and behavior. Such revision has had two important consequences for philosophical inquiry. First, it encouraged a careful study of nature, which has come to be known as science, on the supposition that by her acts she revealed her essence. Second, and by the same operation, it did away with the doctrine of forms imperfectly realized. Aristotle had recognized an element of unintelligibility in the world, but the view of nature as a rational mechanism expelled this element. The expulsion of the element of unintelligibility in nature was followed by the abandonment of the doctrine of original sin. If physical nature is the totality and if man is of nature, it is impossible to think of him as suffering from constitutional evil; his defections must now be attributed to his simple ignorance or to some kind of social deprivation. One comes thus by clear deduction to the corollary of the natural goodness of man.

And the end is not yet. If nature is a self-operating mechanism and man is a rational animal adequate to his needs, it is next in order to elevate rationalism to the rank of a philosophy. Since man proposed now not to go beyond the world, it was proper that he should regard as his highest intellectual vocation methods of interpreting data supplied by the senses. There followed the transition to Hobbes and Locke and the eighteenth-century rationalists, who taught that man needed only to reason correctly upon evidence from nature. The question of what the world was made for now becomes meaningless because the asking of it presupposes something prior to nature in the order of existents. Thus it is not the mysterious fact of the world’s existence which interests the new man but explanations of how the world works. This is the rational basis for modern science, whose systemization of phenomena is, as Bacon declared in the New Atlantis, a means to dominion.

At this stage religion begins to assume an ambiguous dignity, and the question of whether it can endure at all in a world of rationalism and science has to be faced. One solution was deism, which makes God the outcome of a rational reading of nature. But this religion, like all those which deny antecedent truth, was powerless to bind; it merely left each man to make what he could of the world open to the senses. There followed references to “nature and nature’s God,” and the anomaly of a “humanized” religion.

Materialism loomed next on the horizon, for it was implicit in what had already been framed. Thus it soon became imperative to explain man by his environment, which was the work of Darwin and others in the nineteenth century (it is further significant of the pervasive character of these changes that several other students were arriving at similar explanations when Darwin published in 1859). If man came into this century trailing clouds of transcendental glory, he was now accounted for in a way that would satisfy the positivists.

With the human being thus firmly ensconced in nature, it at once became necessary to question the fundamental character of his motivation. Biological necessity, issuing in the survival of the fittest, was offered as the causa causans, after the important question of human origin had been decided in favor of scientific materialism.

After it has been granted that man is molded entirely by environmental pressures, one is obligated to extend the same theory of causality to his institutions. The social philosophers of the nineteenth century found in Darwin powerful support for their thesis that human beings act always out of economic incentives, and it was they who completed the abolishment of freedom of the will. The great pageant of history thus became reducible to the economic endeavors of individuals and classes; and elaborate prognoses were constructed on the theory of economic conflict and resolution. Man created in the divine image, the protagonist of a great drama in which his soul was at stake, was replaced by man the wealth-seeking and-consuming animal.

Finally came psychological behaviorism, which denied not only freedom of the will but even such elementary means of direction as instinct. Because the scandalous nature of this theory is quickly apparent, it failed to win converts in such numbers as the others; yet it is only a logical extension of them and should in fairness be embraced by the upholders of material causation. Essentially, it is a reduction to absurdity of the line of reasoning which began when man bade a cheerful goodbye to the concept of transcendence.

There is no term proper to describe the condition in which he is now left unless it be “abysmality.” He is in the deep and dark abysm, and he has nothing with which to raise himself. His life is practice without theory. As problems crowd upon him, he deepens confusion by meeting them with ad hoc policies. Secretly he hungers for truth but consoles himself with the thought that life should be experimental. He sees his institutions crumbling and rationalizes with talk of emancipation. Wars have to be fought, seemingly with increased frequency; therefore he revives the old ideals—ideals which his present assumptions actually render meaningless—and, by the machinery of state, forces them again to do service. He struggles with the paradox that total immersion in matter unfits him to deal with the problems of matter.

His decline can be represented as a long series of abdications. He has found less and less ground for authority at the same time he thought he was setting himself up as the center of authority in the universe; indeed, there seems to exist here a dialectic process which takes away his power in proportion as he demonstrates that his independence entitles him to power.

This story is eloquently reflected in changes that have come over education. The shift from the truth of the intellect to the facts of experience followed hard upon the meeting with the witches. A little sign appears, “a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand,” in a change that came over the study of logic in the fourteenth century—the century of Occam. Logic became grammaticized, passing from a science which taught men vere loqui to one which taught recte loqui or from an ontological division by categories to a study of signification, with the inevitable focus upon historical meanings. Here begins the assault upon definition: if words no longer correspond to objective realities, it seems no great wrong to take liberties with words. From this point on, faith in language as a means of arriving at truth weakens, until our own age, filled with an acute sense of doubt, looks for a remedy in the new science of semantics.

So with the subject matter of education. The Renaissance increasingly adapted its course of study to produce a successful man of the world, though it did not leave him without philosophy and the graces, for it was still, by heritage, at least, an ideational world and was therefore near enough transcendental conceptions to perceive the dehumanizing effects of specialization. In the seventeenth century physical discovery paved the way for the incorporation of the sciences, although it was not until the nineteenth that these began to challenge the very continuance of the ancient intellectual disciplines. And in this period the change gained momentum, aided by two developments of overwhelming influence. The first was a patent increase in man’s dominion over nature which dazzled all but the most thoughtful; and the second was the growing mandate for popular education. The latter might have proved a good in itself, but it was wrecked on equalitarian democracy’s unsolvable problem of authority: none was in a position to say what the hungering multitudes were to be fed. Finally, in an abject surrender to the situation, in an abdication of the authority of knowledge, came the elective system. This was followed by a carnival of specialism, professionalism, and vocationalism, often fostered and protected by strange bureaucratic devices, so that on the honored name of university there traded a weird congeries of interests, not a few of which were anti-intellectual even in their pretensions. Institutions of learning did not check but rather contributed to the decline by losing interest in Homo sapiens to develop Homo faber.

Studies pass into habits, and it is easy to see these changes reflected in the dominant type of leader from epoch to epoch. In the seventeenth century it was, on the one side, the royalist and learned defender of the faith and, on the other, aristocratic intellectuals of the type of John Milton and the Puritan theocrats who settled New England. The next century saw the domination of the Whigs in England and the rise of encyclopedists and romanticists on the Continent, men who were not without intellectual background but who assiduously cut the mooring strings to reality as they succumbed to the delusion that man is by nature good. Frederick the Great’s rebuke to a sentimentalist, “Ach, mehn lheber Sulzer, er kennt nhcht dhese verdammte Rasse,” epitomizes the difference between the two outlooks. The next period witnessed the rise of the popular leader and demagogue, the typical foe of privilege, who broadened the franchise in England, wrought revolution on the Continent, and in the United States replaced the social order which the Founding Fathers had contemplated with demagogism and the urban political machine. The twentieth century ushered in the leader of the masses, though at this point there occurs a split whose deep significance we shall have occasion to note. The new prophets of reform divide sharply into sentimental humanitarians and an elite group of remorseless theorists who pride themselves on their freedom from sentimentality. Hating this world they never made, after its debauchery of centuries, the modern Communists— revolutionaries and logicians—move toward intellectual rigor. In their decision lies the sharpest reproach yet to the desertion of intellect by Renaissance man and his successors. Nothing is more disturbing to modern men of the West than the logical clarity with which the Communists face all problems. Who shall say that this feeling is not born of a deep apprehension that here are the first true realists in hundreds of years and that no dodging about in the excluded middle will save Western liberalism?

This story of man’s passage from religious or philosophical transcendentalism has been told many times, and, since it has usually been told as a story of progress, it is extremely difficult today to get people in any number to see contrary implications. Yet to establish the fact of decadence is the most pressing duty of our time because, until we have demonstrated that cultural decline is a historical fact—which can be established—and that modern man has about squandered his estate, we cannot combat those who have fallen prey to hysterical optimism.

Such is the task, and our most serious obstacle is that people traveling this downward path develop an insensibility which increases with their degradation. Loss is perceived most clearly at the beginning; after habit becomes implanted, one beholds the anomalous situation of apathy mounting as the moral crisis deepens. It is when the first faint warnings come that one has the best chance to save himself; and this, I suspect, explains why medieval thinkers were extremely agitated over questions which seem to us today without point or relevance. If one goes on, the monitory voices fade out, and it is not impossible for him to reach a state in which his entire moral orientation is lost. Thus in the face of the enormous brutality of our age we seem unable to make appropriate response to perversions of truth and acts of bestiality. Multiplying instances show complacency in the presence of contradiction which denies the heritage of Greece, and a callousness to suffering which denies the spirit of Christianity. Particularly since the great wars do we observe this insentience. We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without means to measure our descent.

That is why, when we reflect upon the cataclysms of the age, we are chiefly impressed with the failure of men to rise to the challenge of them. In the past, great calamities have called forth, if not great virtues, at least heroic postures; but after the awful judgments pronounced against men and nations in recent decades, we detect notes of triviality and travesty. A strange disparity has developed between the drama of these actions and the conduct of the protagonists, and we have the feeling of watching actors who do not comprehend their roles.

Hysterical optimism will prevail until the world again admits the existence of tragedy, and it cannot admit the existence of tragedy until it again distinguishes between good and evil. Hope of restoration depends upon recovery of the “ceremony of innocence,” of that clearness of vision and knowledge of form which enable us to sense what is alien or destructive, what does not comport with our moral ambition. The time to seek this is now, before we have acquired the perfect insouciance of those who prefer perdition. For, as the course goes on, the movement turns centrifugal; we rejoice in our abandon and are never so full of the sense of accomplishment as when we have struck some bulwark of our culture a deadly blow.

In view of these circumstances, it is no matter for surprise that, when we ask people even to consider the possibility of decadence, we meet incredulity and resentment. We must consider that we are in effect asking for a confession of guilt and an acceptance of sterner obligation; we are making demands in the name of the ideal or the suprapersonal, and we cannot expect a more cordial welcome than disturbers of complacency have received in any other age. On the contrary, our welcome will rather be less today, for a century and a half of bourgeois ascendancy has produced a type of mind highly unreceptive to unsettling thoughts. Added to this is the egotism of modern man, fed by many springs, which will scarcely permit the humility needed for self-criticism.

The apostles of modernism usually begin their retort with catalogues of modern achievement, not realizing that here they bear witness to their immersion in particulars. We must remind them that we cannot begin to enumerate until we have defined what is to be sought or proved. It will not suffice to point out the inventions and processes of our century unless it can be shown that they are something other than a splendid efflorescence of decay. Whoever desires to praise some modern achievement should wait until he has related it to the professed aims of our civilization as rigorously as the Schoolmen related a corollary to their doctrine of the nature of God. All demonstrations lacking this are pointless.

If it can be agreed, however, that we are to talk about ends before means, we may begin by asking some perfectly commonplace questions about the condition of modern man. Let us, first of all, inquire whether he knows more or is, on the whole, wiser than his predecessors.

This is a weighty consideration, and if the claim of the modern to know more is correct, our criticism falls to the ground, for it is hardly to be imagined that a people who have been gaining in knowledge over the centuries have chosen an evil course.

Naturally everything depends on what we mean by knowledge. I shall adhere to the classic proposition that there is no knowledge at the level of sensation, that therefore knowledge is of universals, and that whatever we know as a truth enables us to predict. The process of learning involves interpretation, and the fewer particulars we require in order to arrive at our generalization, the more apt pupils we are in the school of wisdom.

The whole tendency of modern thought, one might say its whole moral impulse, is to keep the individual busy with endless induction. Since the time of Bacon the world has been running away from, rather than toward, first principles, so that, on the verbal level, we see “fact” substituted for “truth,” and on the philosophic level, we witness attack upon abstract ideas and speculative inquiry. The unexpressed assumption of empiricism is that experience will tell us what we are experiencing. In the popular arena one can tell from certain newspaper columns and radio programs that the average man has become imbued with this notion and imagines that an industrious acquisition of particulars will render him a man of knowledge. With what pathetic trust does he recite his facts! He has been told that knowledge is power, and knowledge consists of a great many small things.

Thus the shift from speculative inquiry to investigation of experience has left modern man so swamped with multiplicities that he no longer sees his way. By this we understand Goethe’s dictum that one may be said to know much only in the sense that he knows little. If our contemporary belongs to a profession, he may be able to describe some tiny bit of the world with minute fidelity, but still he lacks understanding. There can be no truth under a program of separate sciences, and his thinking will be invalidated as soon as ab extra relationships are introduced.

The world of “modern” knowledge is like the universe of Eddington, expanding by diffusion until it approaches the point of nullity….

Wow, wow, wow. Think of the movement on the Left to say, as one example, that men can give birth and menstruate. Weaver was prophetic in his noting how bad this zeitgeist was going to get.

Okay, pivoting BACK TO our military and consequences of ideas that harm it’s readiness and the type of young people applying. What I mean when I say that is that the young officer class have typically one through university and many have accepted the CRT/WOKE/DEI junk — what Weaver would call “hysterical optimism.”

WASHINGTON TIMES

Here is the WaTi article excerpt:

Recently, Ashish Vazirani, the Pentagon‘s acting undersecretary for personnel and readiness, testified to the House Armed Services Committee that the U.S. military missed its 2023 recruiting goals by 41,000.

Jake Bequette, an Army veteran and former U.S. Senate candidate from Arkansas, responded to this report by suggesting that no one should be surprised. Why? Because of what we’re teaching in our nation’s schools.

“In our education system today, so few young people are hearing real history,” Mr. Bequette said. “They’re hearing our American heroes being represented as evil racists … who were doing all these terrible things to disadvantaged people. And that really is shaping the views of America’s youth and making them have less respect for our institutions, have less respect for our history, and therefore making them less liable to want to put their lives potentially on the line to serve in our country’s military.”

Unless you’ve been sleeping through the past three or more decades, it’s virtually impossible for you to disagree with Mr. Bequette. Consider just a handful of examples of the intellectual malfeasance being foisted on the next generation of America’s leaders at your tax-supported schools, colleges and universities.  

At the University of Minnesota, a liberal arts professor named Melanie Yazzie has received national attention for leading a “teach-in” whereby she calls for her students to “dismantle” and “decolonize” America.

“We’re all indigenous people who come from nations who are under occupation by the United States government,” Ms. Yazzie said. “It’s our responsibility as people within the United Statesto decolonize this place. … [America] is the greatest predator empire that has ever existed. We want the U.S. out of everywhere,” including “Turtle Island” — a name used by some Native American tribes to describe North America.

She went on to say that “the goal is to dismantle the settler project that is the United States for the freedom and the future of all life on this planet. [We] need to lean into the fact that colonizers are scared. Lean into scaring them and making them feel uncomfortable!”

In Milwaukee, the public school system is touting “classroom resources for all ages” to support a curriculum called “Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action.” A search of this organization’s website reveals the program’s 13 guiding principles. They include “Restorative Justice,” “Globalism,” “Queer Affirming” and “Transgender Affirming” as their primary goals.

The 11th principle, “Black Villages,” states: “We disrupt the narrow Western prescribed nuclear family structure. … We support each other as extended families and villages that collectively care for one another, especially ‘our’ children.” 

Tina Descovich, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, says it best in response to this BLM agenda:

“We are in a crisis in America in public education. We have the lowest test scores since the 1980s in reading and the lowest math scores ever. Yet we have organizations like Black Lives Matter that are setting aside a whole, entire week, the first week of February, to drive their ideology, [an ideology] that [is] divisive and [seeks] to destroy our culture and our country,” she said.

Ms. Descovich goes on to suggest that nearly all of our nation’s schools are pushing this divisive material as “a cover-up for public education’s failure.” 

Do you remember in 2020, when rioters from Minneapolis to Miami were chanting, “Death to Israel, death to America, from Gaza to Minnesota, globalize the intifada”? There’s a reason that thousands of young people marched like lemmings to the drumbeat of such blatant and undisguised antisemitism, anti-Americanism and anti-colonialism. That reason is found in what the schools, colleges and universities are teaching your children.

Call me crazy, but maybe the U.S. military is falling short of its recruiting goals by the tens of thousands because of the culturally suicidal propaganda being peddled by our country’s teachers unions and educational elites. 

When you indoctrinate one generation after another that America needs to be “dismantled” and “decolonized,” why would you think those same young people would want to make the ultimate sacrifice to defend it? ……

Which brings us to the most recent example of a person filled with lies, and it’s consequences in his life.

Aaron Bushnell’s LEFTISM

Now, this person was left leaning already, but I am sure his higher ed institution pushed him even further. What do I mean? The NEW YORK POST mentions he was attending Southern New Hampshire University. Here is the skinny on that institution:

The College Republicans at Southern New Hampshire University, along with a national free speech group, want clarity on the approval process to host speakers on campus this semester.

The controversy stems from comments that events administrator Denise Morin allegedly made to Kyle Urban, the president of the student GOP group, when the group hosted Republican congressional candidate Karoline Leavitt.

[….]

Morin allegedly told Urban that the “university must substantively review and approve all proposed speakers to ensure they are ‘not so controversial that they would draw unwanted demonstrators’ to campus,” according to a letter sent by Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

The requirement is “not new and does not ban controversial speakers,” SNHU spokesperson Siobhan Lopez told The College Fix on September 16.

“[SNHU] seeks to promote and facilitate the exchange of innovative and diverse ideas, and we welcome speakers with a broad range of viewpoints and backgrounds to foster a diverse and rich educational experience for members of the University Community,” Lopez wrote. “Our policies are compliant with both state and federal laws and allow for the free flow of information and ideas while ensuring campus safety.”

[….]

“Accordingly, the President, or his/her designee(s), reserve(s) the right to modify the circumstances (including time, location, public attendance, etc.) of an event or withdraw the invitation to speak in those cases where there exists a reasonably foreseeable risk of violence or substantial disruption of the essential operations of the University associated with an event.”….

(See THE COLLEGE FIX and FIRE for more)

Since all the violent interruptions of speakers come from the left, essentially no conservative speaker would be allowed according to this policy. I noted this one of my posts many years ago in trying to define and describe Fascism:

  • ….when people like Ann Coulter or David Horowitz go on campus, Democrat and leftist students ramp up the death threats and attempted takeover of the mic and stage. When people like Cindy Sheehan or Maureen Dowd go to a university campus, they are treated like heroes and no personal security is needed….

NEW YORK POST

The NEW YORK POST continues:

Aaron liked two Ohio-based anarchist groups — Burning River Anarchist Collective and Mutual Aid Street Solidarity — on his Facebook page.

He also gave the thumbs-up to an account belonging to the Kent State University chapter of the radical pro-Hamas group Students for Justice in Palestine.

In late December, Burning River touted two books for readers, including one titled, “Nourishing Resistance,’’ on its Facebook page.

On Oct. 17, 10 days after the Palestinian terror group Hamas launched its massacre in Israel, sparking the Gaza war, the anarchist group also linked to an interview by the Black Rose Anarchist Federation titled, “Voices from the Front Line Against the Occupation: Interview with Palestinian Anarchists.’’

It interviewed Fauda, “a small group centered in the West Bank that identifies itself as a Palestinian anarchist organization, to get their perspective on the current struggle.

“We hope that this interview will be a step in creating more connections between revolutionaries in the US and the militant youth in Palestine, and more knowledge and understanding of each other,’’ Black Rose said.

The Fauda member interviewed said during the conversation, “I want to tell all our brothers around the world, not just in the United States, to never trust what the global media empire tells you.

“I want you to know something else, which is that the Palestinian Authority and President Mahmoud Abbas do not represent us, the Palestinian people, at all. We reject authority and we reject Abbas and all his ministers.”

Burning River declined comment to The Post on Monday, saying in an email that “none of us knew’’ Aaron Bushnell.

[….]

Two people who claimed to be friends of Bushnell spoke to independent journalist Talia Jane, who posted their words to X on Monday.

“He is one of the most principled comrades I’ve ever known,” said a person called Xylem, who apparently had worked with Bushnell to support San Antonio’s unhoused residents.

Another friend called Errico, who said they had met Bushnell in 2022, added, “Aaron is the kindest, gentlest, silliest little kid in the Air Force.

“He’s always trying to think about how we can actually achieve liberation for all with a smile on his face.’’

Anarcho-Left Fascism

In fact… the entire “facade” of this conflict has it’s origins in communist propaganda and antisemitism. Of course whenever you see “anarchist,” especially in Western youth, know that is is collectivism of a communist type. Dennis Prager even mused on this years ago: “This is a recovered audio from my old Vimeo from April 2nd, 2011. It is Dennis Prager discussing how what the Left thinks is anarchy is nothing close to it.”

Which leads us to the most recent example of the state of our cultural decline, quoting Weaver from above:

  • It is easy to be blind to the significance of a change because it is remote in time and abstract in character. Those who have not discovered that world view is the most important thing about a man, as about the men composing a culture, should consider the train of circumstances which have with perfect logic proceeded from this.

Drowning In Lies

  • The thief comes only to steal, slaughter, and destroy. (John 10:10a, ISV)
  • Be clear-minded and alert. Your opponent, the Devil, is prowling around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. (1 Peter 5:8, ISV)

I noted to my boys the following regarding the topic MOONBATTERY will be bringing up (Air Force Member Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation/suicide outside the Israeli embassy):

  • The one positive that I can pull out of that whole Air Force kid is that at least he hurt himself. It’s tragic. I wish someone could have been able to talk him out of it. But, hurting himself versus hurting fellow service members to make a statement… I’m going with the the former.

My oldest responded in part: “I agree… I just am mad that the propaganda got to him. He fed on lies.” Yep.

To another friend I said something similar: “I wish someone was able to intervene in some way through conversation to get a ‘break through’.” To which he responded with a point I thought was sound, and a commentary that matches Weaver’s in some fashion:

  • your empathy is admirable. However, I’m confident it would have taken a lot more than conversation to persuade that guy. I don’t mean to go full armchair psychologists, but doing something like that suggests a fair degree of sociopathy as well as narcissistic delusion. — J.N.

Weaver notes on pages 53-54 this:

Obsession, according to the canons of psychology, occurs when an innocuous idea is substituted for a painful one. The victim simply avoids recognizing the thing which will hurt. We have seen that the most painful confession for the modern egotist to make is that there is a center of responsibility. He has escaped it by taking his direction with reference to the smallest points.

In one post I explain that much of the distorted view within the black community that harms it, and often leads to violence, is narcissism. So thinking through this this morning, I would add that this kid had the propensity to harm others as part of his statement based in lies and his egoism.

ON THE SIDE OF ANGELS

CUE MAMET:

One might say that the politician, the doctor, and the dramatist make their living from human misery; the doctor in attempting to alleviate it, the politician to capitalize on it, and the dramatist, to describe it.

But perhaps that is too epigrammatic.

When I was young, there was a period in American drama in which the writers strove to free themselves of the question of character.

Protagonists of their worthy plays had made no choices, but were afflicted by a condition not of their making; and this condition, homosexuality, illness, being a woman, etc., was the center of the play. As these protagonists had made no choices, they were in a state of innocence. They had not acted, so they could not have sinned.

A play is basically an exercise in the raising, lowering, and altering of expectations (such known, collectively, as the Plot); but these plays dealt not with expectations (how could they, for the state of the protagonist was not going to change?) but with sympathy.

What these audiences were witnessing was not a drama, but a troublesome human condition displayed as an attraction. This was, formerly, known as a freak show.

The subjects of these dramas were bearing burdens not of their choosing, as do we all. But misfortune, in life, we know, deserves forbearance on the part of the unafflicted. For though the display of courage in the face of adversity is worthy of all respect, the display of that respect by the unaffected is presumptuous and patronizing.

One does not gain merit from congratulating an afflicted person for his courage. One only gains entertainment.

Further, endorsement of the courage of the affliction play’s hero was not merely impertinent, but, more basically, spurious, as applause was vouchsafed not to a worthy stoic, but to an actor portraying him.

These plays were an (unfortunate) by-product of the contemporary love-of-the-victim. For a victim, as above, is pure, and cannot have sinned; and one, by endorsing him, may perhaps gain, by magic, part of his incontrovertible status.

David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture (New York, NY: Sentinel Publishing, 2011), 134-135.

Or, as one truth loving leftist professor explains the modern day classroom narcissism of his students, “we [leftists] are on the side of angels”:

TRANSCRIPT: Having a sort of one party state in the classroom is that it leads to certain kinds of intellectual laziness. People can be gestural, and they can make gestures. Everyone in the [class]room knows we’re on the side of the angels, so the gestures don’t get criticized, but you step outside of that room, and certain gestural leftism’s will be criticized, and you really need to know how to deal with them.

MOOONBATTERY

FINALLY, here is the post via MOONBATTERY , in full!

Twisted recruitment emphasis and indoctrination in leftist ideology may be having the effect you might expect on the US military:

US Air Force member Aaron Bushnell has died from his injuries after setting himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC, an official confirmed on Monday.

Bushnell offered himself up as a human sacrifice on behalf of Hamas in the aftermath of the October 7 terror atrocities.

“I will no longer be complicit in genocide [in Gaza]. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest,” Bushnell reportedly said, before setting himself ablaze and repeatedly crying out “Free Palestine.”

He died of moonbattery, in which he had been steeped:

“Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now,” he wrote.

Let’s be thankful Bushnell was not a pilot carrying a nuclear payload. He might have decided to confront white privilege by dropping it on a US city deemed to be insufficiently diverse.

Upon taking power, moonbat apparatchik Lloyd Austin conducted an ideological purge throughout the military. Too bad its purpose was not to root out kooks like Bushnell.

Aaron Bushnell personifies the figurative self-immolation by moonbattery of Western Civilization. Its age-old nemesis Islam is delighted.

UPDATE!

THIS IS the article I knew would come, and I was waiting for. You don’t set yourself on fire in a vacuum (ideological [or literally]). You need the wind of lies in your sails to propel you to that act. As one of my boys said, “traitor thru and thru!” The beginning part is a of course they did! See my old post on Roger Waters. As well as a Cornel West post just updated:

When Aaron Bushnell, an Antifa member and Air Force Airman, set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C., Hamas supporters in this country made him into a martyr.

Cornel West praised Bushnell’s “extraordinary courage and commitment”, Roger Waters celebrated him as an “All-American Hero” and the media emphasized his military role.

In reality, Aaron Bushnell was a member of radical anarchist groups on social media, he wanted to leave the Air Force and cheered the killings of members of the U.S. military.

When three black Army soldiers were murdered in an Iranian-backed Islamic terror attack back in January, Aaron Bushnell posted it to the Antifa ACAB (All Cops are Bastards) Reddit group with a mocking “OhNoAnyway.jpg” meme.

“The cops are the domestic military and the military is the international police. They are bad for the exact same reasons,” Aaron Bushnell posted in the ensuing debate.

Bushnell believed that Islamic terrorists killing U.S. military personnel was justified, arguing that, “I work for the air force and would also have no right to complain about violent resistance against my actions.”

In a previous exchange he warned another user against joining the military and argued again that the murder of Americans was justified. “The US DoD is one of the most powerfully evil institutions to ever disgrace the face of this planet. You will have blood on your hands that you will never be able to wash off. There are many people who suffer under the imperial boot who would have every reason to wish you dead, and they would be justified. Don’t do it.”

When asked by another anarchist as to whether joining the military would provide him with the skills to conduct domestic terrorism, Bushnell appeared skeptical. “

It’s very unlikely that you get any kind of ‘proper training’ that would be useful in a revolutionary context,” he suggested. The military was “a neo-feudal institution plugged into the broader neoliberal system. It runs on nothing but coercion, toxic masculinity, and brainwashing.”

Aaron Bushnell’s comments reveal that he wanted out of the Air Force and believed it was evil.

“I joined thinking I was doing my part to make the world a better place. Then I realized we’re the baddies, and the only way to make the world a better place is to get out,”

Bushnell, who died in support of the Hamas war against Israel, not only supported the Islamic terror group, but also justified the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews.

“Israel is a white supremacist, ethnonationalist, settler-colonial apartheid state….It has no right to exist,” Bushnell argued. He claimed that all the Jews could be killed because “there are no Israeli ‘civilians’” and that Israel was “the closest thing the world has to the Nazis”. Exterminating Israelis “wouldn’t be genocidal but actually perfectly reasonable, as Israelis are settler-colonizers” and described Hamas as  an “anti-colonial resistance organization”.

“Israel’s existence can’t be justified in the first place, it’s a colony of the US and UK. It has imposed apartheid, displacement, and extermination on the Palestinian people since its inception. No aggression against the Israeli colony can be condemned by non-Palestinians.”

The murdered Israeli families in nearby towns had it coming because they were “colonizers” and “I don’t get to claim it’s a violation of my human rights if some of those people come and kick me back out of that house or throw a molotov at it or kidnap me.”

Aaron Bushnell compared Hamas to the “diverse coalition in Star Wars” and dismissed people “clutching their pearls over” the killing and rape of young Israelis at the Nova music festival because there “are no innocent civilians in seller colonialism”.

“That music festival was happening just three miles from Gaza,” Bushnell contended. “Imagine a similar event happening in the early days of the colonization of North America. Can you or I really say that Indigenous people are wrong for retaliating against colonizers who are rubbing their domination in their face?”

Aaron Bushnell believed that the destruction of America was as justified as that of Israel.

[….]

His death will be used by Islamic terrorists and Antifa to recruit more young men like him.

The Bushnell case is a wake-up call about actual extremism within the military. Someone recruited him and someone encouraged him to kill himself. National security begins with finding and exposing the Islamic terrorists and extremists inside the United States Air Force.

Free Speech Battles | California DEI Totalitarianism

Just as an aside, Leftists and Democrats are the ones pushing “institutional racism,” as the below notes. Also note, I use “totalitarianism” in the sense of “total thought.” Which is a forced “homogenization” of thought… or, state instituted/forced “total thought.”

UPDATED VIDEO

This is an interview by Lex Fridman of Greg Lukianoff of F.I.R.E. (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression). The entire interview, “Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech | Lex Fridman Podcast #397,” can be seen HERE (I grab from around the 1:10:50 mark). There are a few universities/colleges involved in legal action in California, but The Renegade Institute for Liberty at Bakersfield College is one this is made for.

DEI stands for “diversity, equity, and inclusion” — all of which sounds fine, right? But materials put out by the state of California show that in this case, DEI translates to highly contested and controversial views. The state’s definitions say that the idea of “color blindness” “perpetuates… racial inequities,” and even the idea of “merit,” is “embedded in the ideology of Whiteness” and “upholds race-based structural inequality.” FIRE has filed a lawsuit on behalf of six California community college professors to halt new, systemwide regulations forcing professors to espouse and teach these politicized conceptions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The regulations are now in effect in the State Center Community College District, and FIRE’s clients have already been forced to change their syllabi and teaching materials, lest they face repercussions. (More info on the lawsuit @FIRE)

Here is an article from THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE that is worth reading in it’s entirety. It is titled: “First Amendment lawsuits challenge state’s DEI rules for community colleges” If you encounter a paywall, grab the URL from the link and put it into this “hopper: REMOVE PAYWALL.

California’s new community college rules sound simple enough: As of this year, all instructors must teach in a way that is culturally inclusive and must prove during employee evaluations that they respect and acknowledge students and colleagues of diverse backgrounds.

But what if an instructor holds so-called color-blind [more on this idea after article excerpt] views and prefers to ignore people’s race, ethnicity, gender or other physical and cultural characteristics as a personal philosophy? Or if an instructor disagrees entirely with the “anti-racism” and “diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility lens” that state’s college officials now require?

Seven instructors from four community colleges in the Central Valley are now testing that cultural collision on constitutional grounds, saying their views could get them fired under the new rules. With the backing of national advocacy groups, the instructors are suing state and local college officials in federal court to have the regulations tossed.

The suits echo another federal lawsuit, filed in May against the University of California, in which a psychology professor hoping to work at UC Santa Cruz ran up against a UC requirement that applicants submit a statement supporting “diversity, equity and inclusion.” The applicant likened it to a “modern-day loyalty oath” of the kind discredited in the 1950s, when those who wouldn’t sign might be labeled communist subversives.

[….]

Another group, the Institute for Free Speech, filed a similar lawsuit on July 6 on behalf of Daymon Johnson, a history instructor at Bakersfield College in Kern County.

“Almost everything Professor Johnson teaches violates the new DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility) requirements — not just by failing to advance the DEIA and anti-racist ideologies, but also by criticizing them,” the suit says, noting that compliance with the new rules would violate the instructor’s conscience and force him to surrender his academic freedom.

SEE MORE AT THE INSTITUTE FOR FREE SPEECH’S BLOG:

RPT is asking people to donate HERE.

In his U.S. History class this fall, for example, Johnson plans to have students read two books claiming to debunk the historian Howard Zinn’s work, which reveals less flattering versions of the American story, and the well-known 1619 Project, which digs deeply into the foundations of slavery.

His lawsuit contains a long list of things that the instructor “does not wish” to do. These include referring to transgender students by their preferred pronouns, acknowledging that social identities are diverse, and demonstrating “DEI and anti-racism practices” because he “rejects and even finds (them) abhorrent.”

Johnson is also a leader of the Renegade Institute for Liberty, a Bakersfield College group that opposes “political and ideological tyranny.” Its acronym is RIFL.

The suit claims that Johnson is already in the crosshairs of the college administration for his views and quotes a Kern college district trustee saying, in reference to employees holding anti-DEIA views: “They’re in that 5% that we have to continue to cull. Got them in my livestock operation and that’s why we put a rope on some of them and take them to the slaughterhouse.”

The Kern trustees did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

The suit says that Bakersfield College already fired another instructor, who was Johnson’s predecessor at RIFL, and calls him “the first cullee.”

According to the suit, the person who oversaw the firing was the Kern district’s former chancellor, Sonya Christian, who has just become the chancellor of the California community colleges. With 116 schools and more than 2 million students enrolling each year, it’s the nation’s largest higher education system.  

On Friday afternoon, state Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office filed a response to Johnson’s suit on behalf of Christian, arguing that the instructor has not only failed to show that he’s been harmed by the rules, but because of that, he also lacks standing to complain about them. 

The response defends the diversity regulations and says the rules “do not restrict the free speech of any employee,” nor do they infringe on anyone’s academic freedom, “including Johnson’s.”

The system’s Board of Governors has the right to establish policies that “reflect its ideals and principles regarding diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility,” the state argues. 

A spokesperson for Christian said the college system has not yet responded in court to the more recent lawsuit and would not comment on it.  

The new regulations require all 73 college districts to develop policies for evaluating employee performance and tenure eligibility in light of their “DEIA competencies.”

The rules follow a series of other DEIA guidance and messages from the chancellor’s office in recent years, and say that to ensure academic success, “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) and anti-racism remain at the heart of our work.”

The college system also posts a glossary of DEIA terms, which defines color blindness as a “racial ideology” that ignores “a large part of one’s identity and lived experience” and therefore “perpetuates existing racial inequities.”….

COLOR BLIND

Dennis Prager discusses a call about a gentleman disagreeing with his statement that he doesn’t see color, and others shouldn’t as well. After the discussion of the previous call, I include the call as well as the lead up to it.

MORE!

  • LINK to a Facebook video: Dennis Reacts: “I See No Color” Is Racist?” (FACEBOOK)

The Issue Is Values, Not Systemic Racism

Do you let your race, gender, or orientation define you? If you are on the left, everything is perceived through the lens of identity politics. Systemic racism is not the real issue plaguing America—it is our opposing values system. Dennis Prager offers some refreshing insight into how to heal our broken nation.

Should We Be Colorblind?

Nothing reveals the moral confusion of our time more than those who label the term “colorblind” racist. Who would want to see themselves in terms of their skin color? And what does a person’s skin color really say about who they are — their likes, dislikes, values, and so on?

Prager Notes The Left’s Proclivity Towards Racism

A girl is legally kidnapped in Santa Clarita by state authorities. The Left’s dogged emphasis on race, class, gender is destroying families, keeping them in poverty, and utterly failing our country’s motto, “out of many, one.” The Left has dumped out the melting pot and keeps us as divided as ever. This story is maddening!

Here is the what the main battle is over: “A battle over custody of a little girl who is 1/64th Choctaw has been in and out of the courts for three years now, and returns on Friday with a new appeal hearing” (ABC-7).

  • “Is it one drop of blood that triggers all these extraordinary rights?” — Justice Roberts

Keep in mind the racial science of NAZI Germany were concerned with a 1/16th racial mix… here we see the racial sciences of the Choctaw Nation and the State of California concerned over a 1/64th portion of heritage. Sick! Racist! Leftism!

  • In 1911, Arkansas passed Act 320 (House Bill 79), also known as the “one-drop rule.” This law had two goals: it made interracial “cohabitation” a felony, and it defined as “Negro” anyone “who has…any negro blood whatever,” thus relegating to second-class citizenship anyone accused of having any African ancestry. Although the law had features unique to Arkansas, it largely reflected nationwide trends. (source)


ONE DROP RULE


More from the LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS Opinion Page:

Five hundred years ago, the Incas sacrificed children.

They removed children as young as six from their families, transported them with great ceremony to a mountain location, and left them to die of exposure.

Did they have the moral right to do it?

Some people think so. “To their credit,” wrote Kim MacQuarrie, an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker, anthropologist and author, “the Incas did their best to ensure the survival of their people and empire by paying close attention to nature and doing their best to use every means at their disposal, including human sacrifice, to gain control over it.”

There’s something seriously wrong with any kind of reasoning that places human sacrifice in the category of “doing their best.”

SEE MY: “Mayan, Incan and Aztec “Terrorism

And there is something seriously wrong with what happened in Santa Clarita this week to a 6-year-old girl named Lexi and the foster family that has cared for her since she was 2.

Rusty and Summer Page tried for years to adopt Lexi but were blocked from doing so. The reason? The little girl has a tiny bit of Choctaw ancestry — just 1.5 percent — and under federal law the Choctaw Nation can decide her fate. The tribal authorities decided that Lexi will live in Utah with distant relatives. They issued this statement:

“The Choctaw Nation desires the best for this Choctaw child. The tribe’s values of faith, family and culture are what makes our tribal identity so important to us. Therefore we will continue to work to maintain these values and work toward the long-term best interest of this child.”

This is not human sacrifice, but it is closely related. It is collectivism, the opposite of individual rights.

Collectivism holds that an individual’s life belongs not to the individual, but to the group in which the individual is a member. Where other children would have the right to have a parent or guardian make decisions for them, Lexi’s future has been decided by group leaders seeking to preserve “tribal identity.”

On Monday, in a most disturbing scene, the 6-year-old was pulled weeping and frightened from the arms of her foster father on the driveway of the only stable home she has ever known.

Lexi is not the only child to be victimized by the enforcement of a federal law that, ironically, was intended to prevent children from being removed from their families.

In Arizona, a foster family’s adoption of a baby girl, who was placed with them at birth, is being blocked by the Gila River Indian Community, and the Navajo Nation is standing in the way of foster parents seeking to adopt a 5-year-old boy who has lived with them for four years.

The Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank based in Phoenix, has filed a lawsuit on behalf of these children and “others similarly situated” over this “separate and unequal treatment.”

The lawsuit argues that children of Native American ancestry are being unfairly denied their civil rights: “Alone among American children, their adoption and foster care placements are determined not in accord with their best interests but by their ethnicity, as a result of a well-intentioned but profoundly flawed and unconstitutional federal law, the Indian Child Welfare Act.”

The Indian Child Welfare Act was passed in 1978 in reaction to another government program, the Indian Adoption Project, which began in 1958 and continued until 1967.

The Indian Adoption Project was the result of an agreement between the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Child Welfare League of America. It encouraged the removal of Indian children from their families on reservations so they could be adopted and “assimilate” into “mainstream society.” By the 1970s, between 25 and 35 percent of all Indian children nationwide had been removed from their homes, and 90 percent had been adopted by white families.

Outrage over the Indian Adoption Project led to the Indian Child Welfare Act. It requires social workers to make an extra effort to avoid removing Indian children from troubled homes, a greater effort than they would make for non-Indian children. When foster care or adoption becomes necessary, the law requires an active effort to place the child with an Indian family.

The Goldwater Institute says these requirements are discriminatory and harmful, making it harder to protect Indian children from abuse and neglect, and forcing longer waits for permanent homes.

The foster care system has many challenges and many heartbreaking stories. We don’t need laws that cause more pain. The Indian Child Welfare Act should go. Give the kids a break.

Susan Shelley is a San Fernando Valley author, a former television associate producer and twice a Republican candidate for the California Assembly.

The parents of a six-year-old girl taken from her family due to her Native American heritage speak out in a statement after officials from the Los Angeles County Department of Child and Family Services took their daughter, Lexi, away. Read more at SCV-NEWS.

George Will gets it right over at WA-PO:

Opinion | The Brutal Racial Politics Of The Indian Child Welfare Act

Lexi lived four of her first six years with a non-Native American California foster family, but because she is 1/64th Choctaw, tribal officials got her taken from the Californians and sent to live in Utah with a distant relative. On Friday, the Supreme Court will consider whether to hear a challenge to the law that made this possible — the Indian Child Welfare Act, which endangers many young Native Americans. It also is a repudiation of the nation’s premise that rights are inherent in individuals, not groups.

In 1978, before “Native Americans” became the preferred designation for Indians, but when racial “identity” was beginning to become the toxic political concept it now is, Congress enhanced tribal rights. This violated, among other principles, those of federalism: Congress thereby reduced the right of states to enforce laws on child welfare. And it plunged government deeper into making distinctions solely on the basis of biological descent.

The ICWA, an early bow toward multiculturalism, buttressed tribal identities by strengthening tribal rights. For example, tribes can partially nullify states’ powers to intervene against tribal parents’ abuse endangering children. And the ICWA conferred rights on tribes, rights adjudicated in tribal courts, including the right to require Native American children be adopted by Native Americans.

Equal protection of the laws? Not under ICWA.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has asked, “Is it one drop of blood that triggers all these extraordinary rights?” Indeed, the primitive concept of racial “blood,” recast as DNA, triggers tribal rights and extinguishes a state’s right to protect many children’s rights. Sometimes with dire consequences.

In 2015, this column acquainted readers with Declan Stewart and Laurynn Whiteshield. Declan was 5 in 2007 when he was beaten to death by his mother’s live-in boyfriend. Oklahoma had removed him from his mother’s custody after he suffered a fractured skull and severe bruising between his testicles and rectum. But when the Cherokee Nation objected to his removal, Oklahoma, knowing that the ICWA favors tribal rights, relented. Beaten again, he died a month after returning to his mother.

From the age of 9 months until almost 3, Laurynn was in a North Dakota minister’s foster care. When the minister tried to adopt her, the Spirit Lake Sioux tribe invoked the ICWA, and Laurynn was sent to a reservation and the custody of her grandfather. Less than six weeks later she was dead, having been thrown down an embankment by the grandfather’s wife, who had a record of child abuse.

The ICWA requires that “Indian children” be placed with “Indian” foster families. Because the ICWA allows a child to be yanked from a non-Indian foster home — and from possible adoption — it discourages non-Native American adults from providing care, including early infant attachment, which is a foundation of healthy child development.

Born with fetal alcohol syndrome, Antonio Renova was 3 days old when he was taken from his biological parents, members of the Crow tribe, and put in foster care. Five years later, the biological parents, both on probation following felony convictions (the mother’s included child endangerment), obtained custody of Antonio through a Crow tribal court. He suffered beatings by his parents, who have been charged in his death.

Antonio was a casualty of the ICWA’s form of identity politics — the allocation of legal status and group entitlements based on biology. The ICWA has insinuated into law a “separate but equal” test regarding Native American children in jeopardy. It demotes “the best interests of the child” from the top priority; it makes a child’s relationship with a tribe supremely important.

The nation has abundant reasons to regret its mistreatment of Native Americans, and the ICWA was perhaps motivated by an impulse to show respect for Indigenous cultures. But the cost, in broken bodies and broken constitutional principles, has been exorbitant.

Today, the nation is reverting — in the name of “social justice” and “equity” understood as improved social outcomes for government-favored groups — to a retrograde emphasis on racial identities. So, the ICWA’s sacrifice of individual rights to group entitlements probably has a diminished power to shock. Come Friday, however, the Supreme Court should be shocked into hearing the arguments against the federal government usurpation, through the ICWA, of the states’ responsibility for protecting children in jeopardy, regardless of their biological ancestry.

I Love America Too Much to Stay Silent (Prager U)

Nestride Yumga experienced real corruption and civil rights abuses in Africa. Then she came to America, the land of opportunity, education, and freedom. So when Black Lives Matter protests declared America guilty of systemic racism and injustice, she knew she had to defend her adoptive country.

“Black Lives Matter is a joke. You are the racists,” said Nestride Yumga, an American citizen originally from Africa. “Go to Chicago. They don’t have schools, and they die every day. They don’t matter [to you] because you can’t get attention from that,” she told protesters. (BREITBART)

NPR BIAS: Armstrong & Getty (Bonus Material Added)

(A&G end at the 2:20 mark, and the bonus material runs to the 8:36 mark where A&G pick back up) (The thumbnail is of Aaron Danielson [left], the murdered Trump supporter) Armstrong and Getty discuss a recent NPR news story that was quite biased (no surprise there). I added some bonus video detailing the Leftist proclivity towards violence.

Point of No Return? Thomas Sowell

Here is the intro via PJ-MEDIA:

Thomas Sowell appeared with Mark Levin on the July 12 episode of Life, Liberty, and Levin to talk about his new book and to share his opinion on the push to fight “systemic racism” in America. Sowell told Levin that he fears America is approaching a point of no return, and that too many Americans have caved in to those attacking the country as systemically racist. Of the term systemic racism, Sowell said, “It really has no meaning that can be specified and tested in the way that one tests hypotheses.”

Right off the bat, Levin asked Sowell about the rioting that has gone on nightly in America since the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police. “I’m regarded as pessimistic,” Sowell said, “but I was never pessimistic enough to believe that things would degenerate to the point where they are now, where adult human beings are talking about getting rid of the police what is frightening is how many people in responsible positions are caving in to every demand that is made, repeating any kind of nonsense that you’re supposed to repeat. I do believe that we may well reach a point of no return. I hope, of course, that will never happen.”

Of the term “systemic racism,” Sowell told Levin it reminds him of Joseph Goebbels. “It does remind me of the propaganda tactics of Joseph Goebbels in the age of the Nazis,” he said. “He was supposed to have said, people will believe any lie if it’s repeated long enough and loud enough. And that’s what we’re getting. It’s one of many words that even the people who use it don’t have any idea what they’re saying. Their premise is served by having other people cave in.”…….

“Burn Down This System” Chair of BLM for N.Y. (Larry Elder)

The chair of Black Lives Matter for Greater New York said recently on Fox News, “If the country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system.” He said he could be speaking figuratively or literally, saying “it’s a matter of interpretation.” To help assess these statements, Larry Elder takes a look at some of the demands from the group.

The N.E.A. and B.L.M. Promotes Anti-Americanism/Racism

FLASHBACK with “the Hammer”

These two article should be read in union with this post regarding education: “Educayshun (Updated w/White Privilege)

Two Must Read Articles, the first by THE WASHINGTON TIMES:

(Hat-tip to BAKERSFIELD COLLEGE LIBERTY INSTITUTE)

The National Education Association (NEA) is aggressively promoting an anti-American, polarizing agenda that is the root of the current racial divisions and rioting. They do this using clever messaging and The New York Times’ much-ballyhooed “1619 Project,” which intentionally perverts American history. 

Times writers weave a twisted tale in which the evil of slavery so pervades the American experiment that literally nothing about our history isn’t motivated by some racist need to preserve the intentional subjugation, exploitation, marginalization and persecution of enslaved Africans.      

Don’t get me wrong; America’s history is undeniably stained by the dark evil of slavery.

But to rewrite American history as if slavery is the defining and motivating factor behind nearly every aspect of our national story is ludicrous. It’s also dangerous and unethical to reframe history this way; especially considering America confronted the immorality of slavery head-on and defeated it.

The 1619 Project claims slave-owning colonists and hateful bigots hell-bent on institutionalizing racism set the tenor for our nation in 1619. It deceptively obliterates our true inspiration — Christian pilgrims who escaped religious persecution in 1620, launching the freest, most God-honoring “love your neighbor” nation in world history.

“1619” is chock-full of revisionist history promoting racial division and white blame, claiming our founding ideals were a lie purposefully told so whites could enslave blacks to get rich from an evil capitalist system. All this slander promoted by activists posing as journalists, educators and scholars is presented 155 years after hundreds of thousands of Americans (most of them white) gave their lives in the Civil War precisely to put an end to slavery.

It’s no wonder so many historians called out the NYT, but it’s revealing that the NEA did not.

Instead, the NEA coordinated directly with The New York Times, the Pulitzer Center, Southern Poverty Law Center and Black Lives Matter to put 1619 into the hands of educators and activists. Their goal? To assert a false but preferred narrative to advance a political agenda.

To legitimize their tales, the author of 1619 won the Pulitzer Prize, and the NEA praised 1619, saying it “informs and challenges us to reframe U.S. history and better understand the hold of institutional racism on our communities.” The NEA also launched “Black Lives Matter Week of Action” in America’s schools to train our K-12 children, college students and educators in their narrative.

Again, don’t get me wrong. Black lives do matter! Indeed, every human life is sacred. But the organization named Black Lives Matter is not what it claims to be. Like the unions, it’s a Trojan horse of anti-American, anti-family beliefs masquerading as defenders of good. 

Now Americans are terrorized by rioters who believe these anti-American narratives, while the NEA quietly launches 1619 and its historical distortions into the history curricula of schools nationwide — virtually unchallenged. 

America’s students are taught that the American Revolution was fought not to secure freedom from a tyrannical British Empire, but singularly to protect the institution of slavery. 

This ignorance of reality and true history is a major weapon in their arsenal, and they’re pushing a raft of new pseudo-realities onto our culture, too. 

No longer is gender defined by science or our Creator; it’s “fluid.” 

No longer are environmental claims based on strict adherence to the scientific method; weak theories and hysterical “consensus” rule. 

No longer are families seen as the center of a strong society, nor are children expected to obey or respect authority; “willful defiance” reigns while adults cower under the rule of child tyrants. 

No longer is history determined by fact; instead, it’s reframed to support a constant assault on our Judeo-Christian culture. 

That’s why union activists work behind the scenes ensuring this rubbish from The New York Times passes as approved history curriculum; against the will of good teachers. While The Times stirs up conflict, Black Lives Matter protests attract rioters inciting recurring fear and distraction, and the Pulitzer Center legitimizes 1619, the unions and their coalition stealthily indoctrinate our children and flip our nation’s history on its head. ….

(READ THE REST)

The next article should be paired with this recent post as well: BLM Is Anti-Christian (BONUS: Carol Swain | Larry Elder)

In a video from 2015, Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors confesses to being a “trained organizer” and a “trained Marxist,” validating claims the global group might be a radical left-wing organization designed to pander to modern multicultural permutations of Marxist ideology.

Cullors is one of the Black Lives Matter movement’s co-founders, a queer activist, and has advocated for the abolition of prisons.

In the shortened 2015 clip taken from an interview for The Real News Network, Cullors says, “I think of a lot of things: The first thing I think of is that we actually do have an ideology frame.”

 
She continues, “Myself and Alicia, in particular, are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. We are super versed on ideological theories, and I think what we really try to do is build a movement that can be utilized by many, many black folk.”

The second comes from THE FEDERALIST:

Remember that Black Lives Matter BlackLivesMatter Pays Homage to Marxist Cop Killer at Every Event It Holds. Here is the Federalist article:

….One recent derivative of this assertion is, “You can’t be Christian unless you affirm that black lives matter.” On the surface, it seems obvious that to properly represent a position that states all men are created in the image of God you would, indeed, need to affirmatively declare black lives matter.

Our Christian faith requires we believe in the intrinsic value of all life. Love for our fellow man is the motivation for promoting life-affirming culture. If our black brothers and sisters feel they’ve been disenfranchised, addressing this carefully is paramount to getting to the truth and healing wounds. Loving and supporting black people’s goal of equity in opportunity is vital for those who hope to see a universal acceptance of the sanctity of all life. As hashtag advocacy goes, #BlackLivesMatter seems self-evident and as nonpartisan as declaring #MeToo if you’re a sexual assault survivor.

But while BLM the organization declares their movement a “natural phenomenon” and its organization decentralized, the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter was intentionally marketed to a specific cause. As such, we must be cautious to clarify that affirming “black lives matter” is different than supporting Black Lives Matter, the 501 (c)(3), its chapters, and its partners.

Christians should limit our use of popular hashtags — primarily #BlackLivesMatter and #HandsUpDontShoot — to share messages regarding equality. Hashtag advocacy leads back to the organizations that create the hashtags. In this case, it means directing friends and family to an overt effort to fundamentally remake the world with socialist ideas—ideas that often directly contradict the message of the gospel.

The Origin of Black Lives Matter

Black Lives Matter began as a social media hashtag intended to bring attention to the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, who was shot by George Zimmerman. The words were a desperate cry for justice. As arguments regarding white supremacy and gun control policy dominated the airwaves, black women were burying their sons. In a country that believed it had finally broken the race barrier, electing our first black president just a few years before, this contradiction was unacceptable.

In her famous 2013 “Love Letter to Black People,” Black Lives Matter founder and community organizer Alicia Garza wrote: “I continue to be surprised at how little black lives matter.” Her friend and fellow organizer, Patrisse Kahn Cullors, created the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. Another organizer friend, Opal Tometi, saw the marketing potential, purchased the domain name, and created a social media presence. The three formed the official Black Lives Matter Network after the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

Since July 2013, Black Lives Matter has grown to 40 chapters worldwide, with 16 located in America. Famous faces and influencers like John Legend, Chrissy Teigen, and Beyoncé Knowles openly support and promote BLM. As a movement, it is here to stay. Yet despite its seeming newness, Black Lives Matter is just part of a movement that has been in existence for decades under different names.

BLM Founders Openly Support Socialism

While it’s considered lazy scholarship to declare those who have left politics “socialist,” all three founders of the Black Lives Matter movement have openly shared their desires to end capitalism. In their online articles, videos, and interviews, all three allude to concepts that originate in socialism, communism, or Marxism.

Garza started her organizing career working in abortion advocacy before moving on to groups like NDWASOUL, and POWER—which merged with CJJC in 2014, and RTTC—all of which focus on worker and housing activism via anti-capitalist activism.

Cullors works in jail and policing activism as the founder of Dignity and Power Now. Her philosophy rests on the concept of prison abolition and reparations in financial compensation and land redistribution. She promotes BDS—the leftist, antisemitic boycott, divest, and sanction movement—both as a signatory to public statements supporting Palestinians and in articles she’s written. She speaks eloquently about “peoples-led socialist movements” in South America and once was “mentored” by Eric Mann, a former agitator of the Weather Underground domestic terrorism organization.

Opal Tometi focuses almost exclusively on immigration activism. She has spoken at Left Forum events, shared a stage with Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro, and helped oversee “fair” elections in Venezuela in 2015.

Virtually all of the spaces Black Lives Matter and its founders inhabit are associated with leftist or openly socialist worker’s movements. All three women have spoken at Left Forum, a think tank for socialists, which engages high-profile communists, socialists, and Marxists as keynote speakers. Speakers include luminaries such as Marxist Silvia Federici and Frances Fox Piven.

Black Lives Matter has sponsored town hall meetings with leftist extremists even the leftist agitation group Southern Poverty Law Center finds objectionable. They’ve written touching eulogies for mass murderers who brutally suppressed Christianity.

They’ve recreated narratives to characterize a law enforcement officer as inherently aggressive and deceptive, even when forensics have shown their position to be inaccurate. While I agree that criminal justice reforms are needed, BLM’s misleading coverage forced the police officer involved in the Brown shooting to go into hiding due to death threats. Although we’re six years removed from 2014, he remains in hiding…..

(READ IT ALL)

BLM Is Anti-Christian (BONUS: Carol Swain | Larry Elder)

(This is PART ONE, PART 1.6 and PART 2 are in those links)

This is from Church Militant, and while they focus on anti-Catholicism, one should mind that many of the cultural Marxist positions are in fact just anti-Judeo-Christian… I will follow their excellent video with some Carol Swain.

Here is a 2019 C-PAC interview of Carol Swain and her thoughts on Cultural Marxism.

Identity politics has done little to resolve the grievances of minorities in the United States. Rather a group of individuals is pushing socialist policy to manipulate people for political power. Carol Swain, a political scientist, author, and political commentator, explains the cultural Marxist roots of identity politics, and the harm it has caused black Americans, in a recent interview with The Epoch Times, noting “this socialism that’s on display now, it’s been underground for a long time.”

In taking classes at seminary, one of my professors was Ray D. Arnold… he was one of the 1,000 missionaries that General MacArthur called to go to Japan at the conclusion of WWII. One blog notes this about the endeavor:

  • Perhaps General MacArthur didn’t succeed in bringing Christianity to Japan in the institutional sense.  But he did bring mercy, forgiveness and respect for human dignity–the heart of Christianity–and these the Japanese graciously accepted.

All that to say, taking his classes he used material that was older, and this excerpt expands Dr. Swain’s mention of the churches being impacted by cultural Marxism (social-justice):

As Dr. Carl F. H. Henry pointed out: “The Chicago evangelicals, while seeking to overcome the polarization of concern in terms of personal evangelism or social ethics, also transcended the neo­Protestant nullification of the Great Commission.” “The Chicago Declaration did not leap from a vision of social utopia to legislation specifics, but concentrated first on biblical priorities for social change.” “The Chicago evangelicals did not ignore transcendent aspects of God’s Kingdom, nor did they turn the recognition of these elements into a rationalization of a theology of revolutionary violence or of pacifistic neutrality in the face of blatant militarist aggression.” (Cf. Dr. Carl F. H. Henry, “Evangelical Social Concern” Christianity Today, March 1, 1974.) The evangelical social concern is transcendental not merely horizontal.

We must make it clear that the true revolutionaries are different from the frauds who “deal only with surface phenomena. They seek to remove a deep-seated tumor from society by applying a plaster to the surface. The world’s deepest need today is not something that merely dulls the pain, but something that goes deep in order to change the basic unity of society, man himself. Only when men individually have experienced a change and reorientation, can society be redirected in the way it should go. This we cannot accomplish by either violence or legislation” (cf. Reid: op. cit.). Social actions, without a vertical and transcendental relation with God only create horizontal anxieties and perplexities!

Furthermore, the social activists are in fact ignorant of the social issues, they are not experts in the social sciences. They simply demand an immediate change or destruction of the social structures, but provide no blueprint of the new society whatsoever! They can be likened to the fool, as a Chinese story tells, who tried to help the plant grow faster by pulling it higher. Of course such “action” only caused the plant to wither and die. This is exactly what the social radicals are doing now! And the W.C.C. is supporting such a tragic course!

We must challenge them [secular social activists] to discern the difference between the true repentance and “social repentance.” The Bible says: “For the godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation and brings no regret; but worldly grief produces death” (II Cor. 7:10). This was the bitter experiences of many former Russian Marxists, who, after their conversion to Christ came to understand that they had only a sort of “social repentance”—a sense of guilt before the peasant and the proletariat, but not before God. They admitted that “A Russian (Marxist) intellectual as an individual is often a mild and loving creature, but his creed (Marxism) constrains him to hate” (cf. Nicolas Zernov: The Russian Religious Renaissance). “As it is written, there is none righteous, no, not one…. For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:10,23). A complete change of a society must come from man himself, for basically man is at enmity with God. All humanistic social, economic and political systems are but “cut flowers,” as Dr. Trueblood put it, even the best are only dim reflections of the Glory of the Kingdom of God. As Benjamin Franklin in his famous address to the Constitutional Convention, said, “Without His concurring aid, we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel.” Without reconciliation with God, there is no reconciliation with man. Social action is not evangelism; political liberation is not salvation. While we shall by all means have deep concern on social issues; nevertheless, social activism shall never be a substitution for the Gospel.

Lit-sen Chang, The True Gospel vs. Social Activism, (booklet. Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co: 1976), 9.

Dr. Arnold’s classes ended up being my favorite… his background in the missions and apologetics of responding to Eastern thought were very impactful. CONTINUING… more from Dr. Swain:

Did you know that the Democratic Party defended slavery, started the Civil War, founded the KKK, and fought against every major civil rights act in U.S. history? Watch as Carol Swain, professor of political science at Vanderbilt University, shares the inconvenient history of the Democratic Party.

She also talks about the “PARTY SWITCHING MYTH” I have much more on that in my post here: Did The Party’s Switch?And so, we see this is the same all throughout the Left’s history:

  • “…virtually every significant racist in American political history was a Democrat.” ~ Bruce Bartlett, Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), ix;
  • “…not every Democrat was a KKK’er, but every KKK’er was a Democrat.” ~ Ann Coulter, Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama (New York, NY: Sentinel [Penguin], 2012), 19.

The south used to vote Democrat. Now it votes Republican. Why the switch? Was it, as some people say, because the GOP decided to appeal to racist whites? Carol Swain, Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University, explains.

It was not until the Republican Revolution of 1994 that for the first time in modern American History the Republicans held a majority of Southern congressional seats, a full three decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As the South became less racist, it became more Republican (NATIONAL REVIEW).

We should round out the above with this longer presentation by Larry Elder:

As part of CCA III: The Sixties, Larry Elder, host of The Larry Elder Show, gives a lecture at Hillsdale College on the development of the Civil Rights Movement.

Cancel Culture Cancels America (Seattle Lost Real Estate)

As we’ve been reminded over these past 14 days, the culture is where the battle for our future will be won or lost.

HERE IS TUCKER’S TAKE ON SEATTLE

List Of Socialists And Communists In Congress

The below is a clip from a larger post of mine titled, “Radical Groups Support the Democrats (Even the KKK),” however, I end the post with an updated list of Democrat Congressional radicals. Enjoy.

RADICAL SOCIALISTS/MARXISTS

I want to build on an idea via the following short post over at GAY PATRIOT (as well as MOONBATTERY):

The Communist Party of the USA has announced that it will throw its support to the Democrat Party in future elections.

One of the leading Democrat candidates for president is an open socialist; and another is a not-quite-closeted-socialist.

The Democrat Mayor of New York City spent his college breaks helping the Communist Regime in Nicaragua, and honeymooned in Communist Cuba.

Let’s just stop pretending the Democrat Party isn’t what it denies being.

I was challenged with how many actual members there are of Communist Party members. Great question!

So I pointed out the numbers do not matter, the ideology does.

From the early ruminations of the Woodrow Wilson types, to the New Left (see here also) of the 60’s radicals, to a President who had close affiliations to Marxist thinkers and the radical left. ALSO, Obama went to a church that taught radicalliberation theology” which seeks to interpret the Christian call for justice in a way that is in harmony with this Marxist dictum.

It is this ideology rather than numbers that causes Moonbat to note: “The days of anticommunist Democrats like JFK and Scoop Jackson are a fading memory now.” While I believe the Democrats have had a very sordid history, in the least they use to fight foreign threats/ideology, well. Now they cannot bring themselves to call the Taliban a terrorist organization.

All this aside, let us take a look at the numbers of a few radical left parties. First up, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). They have about 10,000 persons in their membership. While this seems small, let’s look at their influence on members in Congress, shall we (note, these stats are somewhat dated [111th Congress], but the importance of their impact still stands):

Q: How many of the DSA members sit on the Judiciary Committee?

A: Eleven:

  • John Conyers [Chairman of the Judiciary Committee], Tammy Baldwin, Jerrold Nadler, Luis Gutierrez, Melvin Watt, Maxine Waters, Hank Johnson, Steve Cohen, Barbara Lee, Robert Wexler, Linda Sanchez [there are 23 Democrats on the Judiciary Committee of which eleven, almost half, are now members of the DSA].

Q: Who are these members of Congress?

Answer:

Co-Chairs:  Raúl M. Grijalva (AZ-07);  Lynn Woolsey (CA-06)

Vice Chairs:  Diane Watson (CA-33);  Sheila Jackson-Lee (TX-18);  Mazie Hirono (HI-02);  Dennis Kucinich (OH-10)

Senate Members

  • Bernie Sanders (VT);

House Members:

  • Neil Abercrombie (HI-01);  Tammy Baldwin (WI-02); Xavier Becerra (CA-31); Madeleine Bordallo (GU-AL); Robert Brady (PA-01); Corrine Brown (FL-03); Michael Capuano (MA-08); André Carson (IN-07); Donna Christensen (VI-AL); Yvette Clarke (NY-11); William “Lacy” Clay (MO-01); Emanuel Cleaver (MO-05); Steve Cohen (TN-09); John Conyers (MI-14); Elijah Cummings (MD-07); Danny Davis (IL-07); Peter DeFazio (OR-04); Rosa DeLauro (CT-03); Rep. Donna F. Edwards (MD-04); Keith Ellison (MN-05); Sam Farr (CA-17); Chaka Fattah (PA-02); Bob Filner (CA-51); Barney Frank (MA-04); Marcia L. Fudge (OH-11); Alan Grayson (FL-08); Luis Gutierrez (IL-04); John Hall (NY-19); Phil Hare (IL-17); Maurice Hinchey (NY-22); Michael Honda (CA-15); Jesse Jackson, Jr. (IL-02); Eddie Bernice Johnson (TX-30); Hank Johnson (GA-04); Marcy Kaptur (OH-09); Carolyn Kilpatrick (MI-13); Barbara Lee (CA-09); John Lewis (GA-05); David Loebsack (IA-02); Ben R. Lujan (NM-3); Carolyn Maloney (NY-14); Ed Markey (MA-07); Jim McDermott (WA-07); James McGovern (MA-03); George Miller (CA-07); Gwen Moore (WI-04); Jerrold Nadler (NY-08); Eleanor Holmes-Norton (DC-AL); John Olver (MA-01); Ed Pastor (AZ-04); Donald Payne (NJ-10); Chellie Pingree (ME-01); Charles Rangel (NY-15); Laura Richardson (CA-37); Lucille Roybal-Allard (CA-34); Bobby Rush (IL-01); Linda Sánchez (CA-47); Jan Schakowsky (IL-09); José Serrano (NY-16); Louise Slaughter (NY-28); Pete Stark (CA-13); Bennie Thompson (MS-02); John Tierney (MA-06); Nydia Velazquez (NY-12); Maxine Waters (CA-35); Mel Watt (NC-12); Henry Waxman (CA-30); Peter Welch (VT-AL); Robert Wexler (FL-19)

Source: Congressional Progressive Caucus

So… while the DSA has only 10,000 members, officially, the impact and membership is wider than that.

Now, let us look at the Communist Party USA. Keep in mind they have voted for quite some time a straight Democratic ticket… only now have they officially announced the policy to continue on this path:

So how many members does the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) have? Two-thousand. Again, the numbers do not matter, it is that the very root of communism and “democratic” socialists ~ their ideology (the CPUSA as well as the DSA) ~ are anathema to our founding ideals and documents.

You may think this is the end of my rant. However… you would be wrong. Because there is another radical group that has historically been Democratic and still to this day vote predominately for Democrats. You must be wondering who?

I will tell you.

UPDATED INFO — via TREVOR LONDON:

Here’s my list of 50 of the most obvious socialists in the House, with links to my website Keywiki for the backup evidence. Apologies to the many I’ve omitted. Please email me at trevor.newzeal @gmail.com if you’d like to be included in future lists.

  • Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) Has worked closely with the Communist Party USA since at least 1993. A self-described “Alinskyite.” Traveled to Cuba in 2015.
  • Ami Bera  (D-CA) Has used Communist Party USA campaign volunteers in 2010, 2014 and 2016. Also close to Democratic Socialists of America.
  • Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) Very close to several key Communist Party USA allies in San Francisco in the 1970s and ’80s. Also some involvement with Democratic Socialists of America.
  • Barbara Lee (D-CA) Lee has been close to the Communist Party USA for decades. In the 1990s she was a leading member of the Communist Party spin-off Committees of Correspondence. Has been to Cuba more than 20 times.
  • Ro Khanna (D-CA) Very close to Democratic Socialists of America.
  • Salud Carbajal (D-CA) Long history with Democratic Socialists of America members.
  • Judy Chu (D-CA) Was heavily involved with the now-defunct pro-Beijing Communist Workers Party in the 1970s and ’80s. Still works closely with former members today. China’s best friend in the US Congress.
  • Raul Ruiz (D-CA) Worked closely with Workers World Party members in Massachusetts in the late 1990s.
  • Karen Bass (D-CA) Was actively involved with the Marxist-Leninist group Line of March in the 1980s. Still works closely with former members. Mentored by a leading Communist Party USA member. Also close to Democratic Socialists of America and some Freedom Road Socialist Organization members. Has been to Cuba at least 4 times.
  • Maxine Waters (D-CA) Long history with the Communist Party USA. Also ties to some Communist Workers Party and Workers World Party fronts. Has employed staff members from Democratic Socialists of America and League of Revolutionary Struggle.
  • Joe Courtney (D-CT) Has worked closely with several Communist Party USA leaders.
  • Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) Has worked extremely closely with the Communist Party USA for many years. Traveled to Cuba in 2014.
  • Jim Himes (D-CT) His 1988 thesis “The Sandinista Defense Committees and the Transformation of Political Culture in Nicaragua” was a sympathetic portrayal of Marxist government’s civilian spy network. Has worked closely with one Communist Party USA front group.
  • Kathy Castor (D-FL) Has worked closely with Cuba and pro-Castro organizations to open US trade with the communist island.
  • John Lewis (D-GA) Worked closely with the Communist Party USA and Socialist Party USA in the 1960s. In recent years has worked with Democratic Socialists of America members.
  • Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) Has worked with Democratic Socialists of America members through her political career. Ties to some Filipino-American “former communists.” Worked with Communist Party USA affiliated former Congressman Dennis Kucinich to defend Soviet-Russian puppet Syrian leader Bashar-al-Assad.
  • Bobby Rush (D-IL) Former leader of the Maoist-leaning Black Panther Party. Has worked closely with Communist Party USA and Democratic Socialists of America. Has traveled to Cuba twice.
  • Jesus “Chuy” Garcia (D-IL) Has worked closely with the Communist Party USA for nearly 40 years.
  • Danny Davis (D-IL) Was a member of Democratic Socialists of America in the mid 2000s. Has worked closely with the Communist Party USA since the 1980s. Also close to Committees of Correspondence in the 1990s.
  • Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) Was a member of Democratic Socialists of America in the 1980s and has continued to work closely with the organization. Has also worked closely with some Communist Party USA members.
  • Dave Loebsack (D-IA) has worked closely with Socialist Party USA and 
    Democratic Socialists of America members for many years.
  • John Yarmuth (D-KY) has worked with Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism members. Traveled to Cuba in 2011.
  • Jamie Raskin (D-MD) has worked closely with Democratic Socialists of America for many years.
  • Jim McGovern (D-MA) has supported Latin American socialist and revolutionary groups for 20 years. Has traveled to Cuba at least three times.
  • Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) Has been endorsed by Democratic Socialists of America. Worked with Freedom Road Socialist Organization front groups and with the pro-Beijing Chinese Progressive Association in Boston.
  • Andy Levin (D-MI) Close to Democratic Socialists of America for at least a decade.
  • Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) Democratic Socialists of America member.
  • Betty McCollum (D-MN) Close ties to communist Laos. Has worked with Democratic Socialists of America members. Traveled to Cuba in 2014.
  • Ilhan Omar (D-MN) Supported by Democratic Socialists of America- controlled groups Our Revolution and National Nurses United. Reportedly a self-described “Democratic Socialist.”
  • Bennie Thompson (D-MS) Was close to the Communist Party USA for many years. Also supported one Communist Workers Party organization. Traveled to Cuba in 2000 and worked with Fidel Castro to train leftist American medical students in Cuba.
  • William Lacy Clay (D-MO) Has worked with Communist Party USA fronts for many years.
  • Greg Meeks (D-NY) Has traveled to Cuba at least 3 times. Was a strong supporter of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.
  • Grace Meng (D-NY) Very close to the pro-Beijing Asian Americans for Equality. Was also active in a radical Korean-American organization.
  • Nydia Velasquez (D-NY) Close ties to Democratic Socialists of America. Welcomed Fidel Castro to Harlem in 1995.
  • Yvette Clarke (D-NY) Addressed a Workers World Party rally in 2005. A close ally of a prominent Democratic Socialists of America member. Traveled to Cuba in 2007.
  • Jerry Nadler (D-NY) Was a member of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee in the 1970s and was involved with Democratic Socialists of America in the ’80s and ’90s.
  • Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) A member of Democratic Socialists of America.
  • Jose Serrano (D-NY) Close ties to the Communist Party USA and Democratic Socialists of America. Was a strong supporter of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.
  • G.K. Butterfield (D-NC) Some connection to Workers World Party and Freedom Road Socialist Organization. Also close to the “former” communist led Moral Mondays movement.
  • Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) Ties to Democratic Socialists of America. Traveled to Cuba in 2002.
  • Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) Ties to Democratic Socialists of America.
  • Steve Cohen (D-TN) Close ties to Memphis Socialist Party USA members. Traveled to Cuba in 2011.
  • Sylvia Garcia (D-TX) Elected to the Texas State House with Communist Party USA support. Works closely with a major communist-influenced organization.
  • Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) Long relationship with the Communist Party USA. Traveled to Cuba at least twice.
  • Marc Veasey (D-TX) Very close relationship with the Communist Party USA.
  • Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) Has been involved with Democratic Socialists of America since the 1980s.
  • Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) Has been involved with Freedom Road Socialist Organization-connected groups for many years.
  • Mark Pocan (D-WI) Close to some Democratic Socialists of America activists. Long-time active supporter of Colombian revolutionary movements.
  • Gwen Moore (D-WI) Has been mentored by leading Democratic Socialists of America and Communist Party USA members.
  • Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) Former Young Peoples Socialist League member. Long connection to Democratic Socialists of America.

THE EPOCH TIMES has a great article noting the infiltration of Communists into the Democrat Party:

The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) is infiltrating the Democratic Party across the country. Communists, some openly, some secretly, are working in Democratic campaigns, holding Democratic Party leadership positions, and even running for public office on the Democratic Party ballot line. The communists also are pushing their policies inside the Democratic Party, to the point that it’s almost impossible to distinguish between the CPUSA and Democratic Party programs. Many comrades also work closely with influential congressmembers or U.S. senators.

The CPUSA supports China, Cuba, Venezuela, and the Russian Communist Party—all enemies of the United States. The CPUSA still advocates for the “overthrow of the capitalist class” in this country, yet the Democrats do absolutely zilch to keep the communists out of their party.

CPUSA infiltration of the Democratic Party is widespread—it effects every region where the communists have a significant presence.

Support and Infiltration

In the San Diego area, two CPUSA members, Carl Wood and Emiliana Sparaco, ran this month for the California Democratic Party Central Committee, from Assembly Districts 76 and 80, respectively.

Wood, a lifelong communist, intended to push for the “Healthy California Act that provides improved Medicare for All, a Living Wage of at least $15/hour, the Green New Deal for a healthy environment with good new jobs in a peace economy, and legislation to promote strong Unions.” In 1999, California’s then-Democratic Gov. Gray Davis appointed Wood to a six-year term on the California Public Utilities Commission, where he “played a significant role in protecting California from the consequences of its disastrous deregulation experiment.”

Sparaco, a former leader of the Young Communist League, traveled to Sochi, Russia, in October 2017, as part of a U.S. communist delegation to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution—keynoted by Vladimir Putin himself. In 2018, Sparaco was a leading activist in Flip the 49th, which helped Democrat Mike Levin win California’s 49thCongressional District.

In Northern California, Sacramento area Democratic Congressman Ami Bera, who serves on the House Foreign Relations Committee, has won several super-close elections with communist help. For example, in 2014, CPUSA members Juan Lopez, Cassie Lopez, Michelle Kern, Nell Ranta, and Mik Diddams canvassed and phone-banked out of Bera’s campaign headquarters.

Further up the left coast in rural Washington state, communists Tim and Joyce Wheeler and Tim’s sister Marion “Honeybee” Wheeler Burns have been active in the Clallam County Democrats for decades. They campaigned for Barack Obama, U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, and local Congressman Derek Kilmer. Tim traveled to international communist gatherings for many years as editor of the CPUSA’s People’s World. His father, Don Wheeler, betrayed American secrets to Moscow during World War II while working for U.S. intelligence.

Over in Minnesota, local CPUSA leaders the late Doris and Erwin Marquitwere very active inside the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (Minnesota’s Democratic Party affiliate). The couple helped raise funds for congressional aspirant Keith Ellison in their home three times. In 2006, they used their political influence to help get Ellison elected to Congress.

Another Minnesota communist, Mark Froemke, is very active in the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. Froemke has enjoyed good relations with former Minnesota Sen. Al Franken and former Gov. Mark Dayton…..

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