FREE, PRESS

Without an active, frequently reinforced grasp of American history, current and recent events appear to be unique, and justification for implanting new policies for the guidance and “transformation” of the United States.  This is a dangerous circumstance, readily corrected by wise, educated and honest media.  Sadly, we no longer are served by wise, educated and honest journalists, or by equally qualified managers and owners of “the press.”  If we were, political bull-crap would be challenged without fail by members of the 4th estate who recognize lies about government and about history, on the spot!

Instead we see complete capitulation to partisan politics and, worse, ownership of the largest media conglomerates by multi-billionaires whose own partisanship distorts their news as much as their editorials, and whose financial power is used extra-constitutionally to direct public policy against legal activities they don’t approve of.  This is no longer capitalism in a constitutional republic, it is fascism outside of and regardless of, elected representation, on which our society depends.

Financial institutions and even specific retailers have joined in to set “public” policy with regards to guns, for glaring example.  Banks, although tightly “regulated” and subject to hundreds of laws and rules, have begun to deny legal services to businesses they disapprove of: firearm manufacturers, gun ranges, ammunition manufacturers, firearm retailers, large and small.  They are responding by either changing their businesses or offerings, if retailers, or moving or, for smaller retailers, giving up their small business.  Those on the left (exclusively) cheer this as “woke” capitalism.  To Hell with democracy, or even with representation, when something is “evil,” “the people” must act.  It is all too simple.

Some of the neo-fascists believe that guns are “racist” because so many blacks are killed by “gun violence,” occasionally when a white person is wielding the weapon.  The more than 90% of black shootings performed by black weapon wielders do not count.  Some wise and educated journalist could immediately question their view on many grounds, not least of which the fact that many gun laws on the books today were part of “Jim Crow” laws aimed at keeping blacks from owning guns.

The 35 Million black babies vacuumed from their mothers’ wombs do not constitute a racist action: that statistic is living proof (odd phrase, that) that blacks are enjoying their full array of “civil rights.”  No one whose Constitutional protections guarantee his or her RIGHT to question such dubious views, seems available to actually raise the question.

Lately – mostly since the democrat-socialists regained a majority in the House of “Representatives” – there are put forth daily radical ideas for subverting democracy, if not ignoring it altogether.  The greatest of these is nearly 3 years old, now: the subversion of Donald Trump and others who helped him gain the presidency.  Once the Electoral votes were tallied in his favor the heavy machinery of a virtual coup d’etat was rolled into place.  Democracy be damned.

This has yielded the hottest complaint against the constitution: it’s time to replace the Electoral College with “the popular vote.”  A number of states have accepted simple subversion of the U. S. Constitution by resolving to unseat their own Electors who are committed to a candidate who did not win the imaginary “popular vote.”  And it is imaginary since the presidential election is not a “national” election: it is 50 state elections held on the same day.  Choosing Electors who are empowered to cast votes for President is a function of EACH STATE’S VOTERS.  How callous can elected officials be to declare in advance that they – not their voters – will determine if their votes will actually count on election day.  That’s an odd mind-set for people who won election in the United States of America.  Let’s hope cases are making their way to the Supreme Court to put this unconstitutional plan out of our misery.

Interestingly, however, not a single “journalist” questions these weird declarations and resolutions.  No one has been smart enough to point out to reckless and/or ignorant state election officials that theirs are state elections, not national ones.  The United States does not hold a national election at any level.

Another proof of the idiocy of these efforts can be found in the execution of congressional elections that are held on the same day as the election of Electors in each state.  States run their own elections for federal representatives, for example, according to the congressional districts into which the states have divided themselves.  Each district’s voters make their choices and the winner takes the seat.  Using the precise “logic” of the Electoral subverting states, if the number of one party’s voters in one group of districts – or even a single district – were greater than all of the votes cast for a different party’s candidate in the other districts, every winner in the lower-count districts would have to relinquish his or her seat to the candidate of the opposing party.  Only that undemocratic shift would fulfill the “principle” of the statewide “popular” vote.  “Hey,” the winners’ supporters might justifiably say, “we voted for the guy who won IN OUR DISTRICT.  We don’t care how many votes the gal in the other district received.  This is our district and OUR VOTES COUNT!”

Is there not a single champion of a free press intelligent enough to point out the obvious fallacy of the “national” popular vote?  Were they all so poorly educated and left to graduate with only the merest ability to think for themselves, that none can question partisan stupidity?  How is it that district results are less sacred – or more sacred – than states’ results?  Don’t the votes that elected the winning slate of Electors count, also?  When did any state, or any district, for that matter, gain authority to discard legitimate votes?

The essential nature of a free and skeptical press is enshrined in the first Amendment.  The founders could not conceive of a craven, dishonest and partisan press as the single source of information for a majority of voters; nor could they imagine the alternative sources being simultaneously converted to corporate censors in favor of a single party.

Our Republic is hanging by a thread, my friends.

GHETTO, LIVING

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.”  – Ronald Reagan.


    Into his simple statement, Ronald Reagan distilled the greatest threat and the greatest strength of America: the ideas of it.  We could forget them.  We could become so enamored of the false idols of socialism that we finally fail completely to pass along the meaning and significance of America.  The Prudent observer already recognizes that a large fraction of U. S. citizens are far down that path.

What makes this possible?  Obviously, education is worth examining; so is immigration; so, too, is ghetto-ization.  Let’s look at the last.  Ghettos form somewhat naturally, primarily for ethnic reasons, which is to say, cultural reasons.  They form economically, as well, but where the only shared “norm” is poverty… or substantial wealth.

Religious ghettos are well recorded and well-storied in history.  Most were either harmless or threatening to a power-structure.  Some were left in peace, most eventually destroyed for their “other-ness,” and the implied threat that represented.

Most ghettos engender resentment, or cohere because of it.  Shared resentment is a political tinderbox, to which outside intrusion, however legitimate, can provide the explosive spark.  In and of itself, ghetto-ization is deconstructive of the greater society, corrosive and segregationist.  There is no good reason to encourage the growth or even the existence of ghettos – of any sort, at least not in a democratic, free-enterprise republic.

In its perpetual confusion, religious sectarianism both creates and attempts to integrate, ghettos.  Part of Judeo-Christian teaching is to “…come apart and be a separate and chosen people.”  It is not dissimilar to many other faiths.  The direction seeks purity of body, mind and soul.  When the rest of the “world” is deemed impure and immoral, “sickly” in a sense, quarantine appears wise, and temporarily it is.  Enlightened sects both separate themselves and purposely integrate themselves, hoping to attract some – if not all – of the impure and immoral to adopt their ways of belief and of life.

Mere enlightenment can easily evolve into messianism, causing religious groups to send missionaries out to dissimilar, and therefore, “heathen” lands who are living in sin for no other reason than ignorance of the one, true path.

But ghettos, religious, ethnic, economic, tend to inhibit understanding – understanding which is essential to cultural/social survival based on shared mores and standards, habits and language.  Those “inside” tend to mostly talk to one another, share distrusts of outsiders with one another, hear only opinions from one another and, eventually, for some, reinforce one another’s hatreds for outsiders.

Hatred is unhealthy, especially so for relatively “open” societies, where there is freedom of movement, speech and expression… and where there are politicians.  Hatred spawns a rotten sort of political power… a sort that is happy to ply ghetto hatreds with pandering postulates, even to the point of social revolution.  That is, every form of “establishment” power is besmirched and derogated until the cravings of those seeking votes are but a shade away from the hatreds of the marginalized.

It would seem unwise to spur the creations of more ghettos, and unwise to feed the ones that exist such that they need not integrate and come to better understandings.

In effect, the United States has permitted, encouraged and protected the formation of new ghettos, both through civil tolerance of the rights of homeless people to remain drugged while living animally on appropriated public lands, and by importing enclaves of aliens whose cultures and belief structures are not only unlike our own, but antithetical to our own.  The great “melting pot” of quickly assimilating immigrants is a quaint notion.  Immigrants today come, in part, to show Americans how inferior our mores are to their “superior” ones, from which they have fled to our shores.  This is unhealthy.

At the same time our social welfare industry strengthens and feeds the original, “black” ghettos, feeding their politically powerful support to those in government who feed the welfare industry.  More recent ghettos based on Central and South American attitudes and language(s) actually compete for the support from the welfare industry that was largely delivered to blacks 50 years ago.  The United States literally fights to grow those ghettos in contravention of our own laws.  This is doubly unhealthy since it cements a disregard for law amongst our fastest growing minorities, many of whom reside here illegally.  Very unhealthy.

Very few within the ghettos described share understandings of our Constitution or of our common law and standards.  For these growing sub-cultures, there is no need to forget our heritage: they come or are born without it and there is no requirement to adopt it in order to enjoy our land and protections, legally and honestly or not.

For the rest of us, upon whom the survival of the ideas of America rests, many of our youth are ignorant of, have forgotten or have been instructed away from those ideas.  One generation is all it will take to lose everything.

ULTIMATE and PERPETUAL

America’s accelerating trend toward denial of reality – and of codified law – is and should be worrisome.  Unfortunately, large segments of the polity see no reason to worry because the gulf of unreality has yielded political power, or comfort, and promises more.  Confronted with claims of actual, or imminent, damage linked to the rush toward unreality, those who find the unreality comforting are compelled toward hatred of the claimants, even to the point of attacking them.  One should wonder whether the trend alluded to is comprised of innocent reaction to “reactionary” opposition to “progress,” or is it the fruit of evil, aggressively transformative attack.  Why would the latter be so?

The prime question, of course, is who benefits from the disunity of the United States and following that, the discrediting and dissembling of the ideas of America?  The unimaginative can readily suggest that “the RUSSIANS” or “the CHINESE,” or “IRANIANS,”  would want to destroy us, but those peoples actually like us well enough, and respect and love us enough to come to the United States for a better life.  There are relatively small subsets of both Russia and China that definitely DO work toward our failure, but not because of their, or our, nationalities.  The forces who would revel in our spiritual  destruction are, themselves, spiritually motivated, unrecognizably in some instances, even in their own mirrors.

America is a spiritual invention.  Prudence would cause us to not call it a religious invention, given the many ways religions have so distorted the inherent purity of spirituality.  The waves of peoples who sacrificed to come to the “New World” to begin America, did so with strong spiritual underpinnings… essentially Judeo-Christian.  Were they perfect?  Clearly not, as we look back and judge them from today’s sensitivities, but at their times they were doing their level best as they strove to make a better civilization than the corrupted ones they left behind.  And religious freedom was – and is – crucial to the new form of self-government that evolved from their sacrifices, and repeatedly since.

We should wonder why Judeo-Christianity is the prime target of attack in the U. S. over the past 60 to 70 years.  As the basis of our laws and social order – conscience, if you will – its destruction is the most rapid way to destroy “America” and all of its quaint ideas of individual sovereignty and responsibility, private property, charity and sacrifice.  Who would want to do that?

If we concentrate on the enemies of America – or of our Constitution – as competitors for oil, or food, or land or military power… or competitors for limited budget resources who disagree on how to make life “better” for all of us, we will miss the point, tragically and historically.  Our misdirected concerns expose our failure to comprehend American exceptionalism.  It exposes, as well, the danger of relinquishing public education – and much of our administrative ‘state,’ and even parts of our law-enforcement and judiciary – to people who agree with our enemies.

“America” does not, and cannot, run or survive on its own.  President Reagan observed that we are only, ever, one generation away from losing it altogether.  This powerful country?  With this military?  With our wealth?  All these McDonalds?  One generation?  Surely not. 

Let’s open our eyes.

America can survive only so long as its citizens believe in it… simple.  We have to believe in our Constitution, in our founding, in personal liberty as well as personal responsibility, and in what we term, “Judeo-Christian” tradition.  Unfortunately, as more and more people are attracted to dis-belief in God, they are encouraged to disbelieve in the United States.  No one outside of the United States is going to carry the burden of believing in the ideas that sustain it for us.  It is our test of citizenship and no one’s else.

“We the People of the United States, (they were people with quite similar moral compasses, if not religious upbringings) in Order to form a more perfect Union, (consider the capitalized words to this point: We, People, United, States, Order, Union) establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, (sic) promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain (wonderful choice, there) and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”  These words cannot be improved upon.

The intent of Americans, then, was incontrovertibly NOT to create a more powerful central government… or to create a new monarchy… certainly not to establish a theocracy or an aristocracy of inherited baronies and dukedoms.  It wasn’t even to create a more powerful military.  Americans wanted to live and let-live; develop their nation and prosper without wars.  Wars have always vexed the “New Jerusalem,” some completely from outside, some as would tear us asunder, but all that was desired for the first 8 generations or so was a “return to normalcy” after each conflict was over.

For a like period “we” had no interest in dominating other peoples or re-shaping their societies and governments for them.  But almost from the start, and more specifically following the second Civil War (“The” Civil War), forces – or A force – has arrayed itself against the ideas  of America, against the dream of e pluribus unum.  Why?  Who would care how we live or govern ourselves?  And even if “they” didn’t like how we chose to do things in our own country, what would prompt “them” to infiltrate us and attempt to tear us apart?  Something, apparently.

Is it not apparent that “they” are not simply envious churls?  Looked at from a position of Prudence, the impetus to destroy the first nation founded on anti-tyranny seems spiritual, not material.  Indeed, the two competing philosophies, or faiths, dare we say, if one is represented by the ideas of America, would be essentially Judeo-Christianity and socialism-communism.  Which, from a broad perspective, still begs the question: why bother to destroy America?  Socialism has proceeded on its destructive path quite well despite the presence of the United States.

In a way we are engaged in the ultimate, and perpetual, struggle between darkness and light, good and evil.  Our enemy can survive only by weakening the strong, sapping our strength.  It behooves us to acknowledge that we have the seeds of “goodness” and the strength of Light, and that it is high time we reinforced and nurtured those things, and defended them against all enemies, foreign and domestic, rooting out the latter. 

What might that defense entail?