Category Archives: culture

“A Battle for the Soul of this Nation”

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That’s what Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Hamlet’s poor relation Joe Biden, said we’re in as he opened his campaign.

We are in the battle for the soul of this nation[.] If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter….

Indeed, we are in a battle for our nation’s soul. It’s a battle between one party that actively tries to improve the situations of our nation’s citizens—whether we agree with those policies or not—and a party that has no aim for our people’s benefit, but is focused solely on anti-Trumpism.

It’s a battle between a party on the one hand that wants to get Government out of our way, to unleash our individuality and individual entrepreneurial spirit, to restore to us our individual responsibilities and freedoms, and a Party on the other hand that wants to take things away from us: our money in the form of higher taxes; our weapons, under the guise of carefully undefined “common sense”…restrictions; our freedom of speech under the cynically offered guise of suppressing “hate” speech or “terrorism fomenting;” our freedom of religion under the just as cynically offered guise of “protecting” others from discrimination (but not the ones asserting their religious tenets); our morality by growing Government to arrogate that morality to it, thereby destroying it in both places; our individualism by mandating what all of us collectively must do because Party says it benefits some of us—even where it plainly does not—and on and on.

It’s a battle between a party that wants to shrink government and Party, which wants to grow a Government run by Party members who Know Better than the rest of us.

It’s a battle between a party that wants government to work for all of us and Party, which has open contempt for millions of us and insists that us ignoramuses must simply be quiet and obey.

What will be altered—an outcome devoutly to be wished—is what this nation has become under the last 80 years of pressures and outright rule of the Democratic Party and of late the Progressive-Democratic Party: a rapidly growing regulatory state with weakened national security, and a nation damaged domestically by Party’s explosively growing national debt, its racist and sexist affirmative action programs, its gilded welfare cage, and lately its revived segregationist policy of identity politics.

There have been excursions from that trend, to be sure, but they have been only occasional and brief: one party’s successful effort to defeat the Soviet Union via its rapid defense buildup and its current, nascent restart toward rebuilding our nation’s defense establishment, together with the beginnings of a rollback of Party’s imposed regulations governing what Party would permit or require each of us to do.

This is a battle we cannot afford to lose.

Banning Violence and Extremism from Social Media

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That’s what France and New Zealand want to do and want others to join them in doing, all in response to the terrorist murders in New Zealand.  The two intend to host a conference involving G-7 members’ IT chiefs and a separate “technology summit” aimed at getting commitments

to end the use of social media to organize and promote terrorism and extremist violence.

But whose definition of violence? Whose definition of extremism? We’re already seeing, in our nation, the Progressive-Democratic Party and their violence-oriented arms, Antifa and BLM, and their university management team associates, defining conservative speech as triggering, dangerous to mental health, violent.

This is a very slippery slope, onto which the first step may well be fatal.

Censorship

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The Wall Street Journal opined the other day on the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Flyers banning Kate Smith and her rendition of God Bless America from the opening of their home games.  The WSJ takes the position that this is overwrought concern for perfection in today’s persons, demanding even perfection of their past.  Smith was, as we all are, and the WSJ notes, a person of her time. The WSJ went on:

Smith’s fate suggests the dominant impulse of our era is in fact to censor—and that those rifling through the histories of people long dead for evidence to destroy their reputations are progressive Puritans, seeking to suppress or cover up anything they object to.

I’m not so sanguine.  The Yankees and Flyers aren’t censoring Kate Smith for her early last century-era songs that very few of us knew about, or remembered—and some of which were satirical, not straight up. No, they’re showing their Liberal bona fides by censoring a song that glorifies America.

Citizen’s Arrests

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New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) has no understanding of duty or of law.  It seems that an armed group of citizen militia caught 200 illegal aliens in the act of illegally entering our nation near Sunland Park, NM, and they detained those illegal aliens until US Border Patrol agents—which those citizens called—could arrive and take charge.

In her response to this, Grisham said,

It should go without saying that regular citizens have no authority to arrest or detain anyone[.]

On the contrary, it should go without saying that regular citizens have both the authority and the duty to arrest and detain until the arrival of formally constituted authority—police or Border Patrol agents, for instance—persons committing crimes in the presence of those citizens.  It also should go without saying that that authority and that duty derive from the plain duties of citizenship.

It’s both instructive and illustrative that this Progressive-Democrat does not understand the obligations of citizenship.

An Outcome of Open Borders

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Two members of MS-13, having been deported, have been arrested trying to illegally reenter our nation.  These thugs were traveling separately and were caught in widely separated locations.

The fact that they were caught might be an argument that we don’t need walls at key areas of our border.  However, such an argument elides the fact that many others get through without being caught because we don’t have those walls, which would both seal off the particular areas and would funnel penetration attempts to other areas more limited and more easily patrolled.

The continued flow of these thugs and of drugs is an outcome—intended or not—of the open border policy of the Progressive-Democrats.  Progressive-Democrats just don’t see thugs and drugs as much of a problem.

Progressive-Democrats do insist that they want secure borders, and that this can be achieved by technology.  However, they carefully do not say how technology will stop anything, since all technology is capable of doing on its own is watching—a necessary component of security, but very far, indeed, from sufficient.

These same Progressive-Democrats know that full well, which contradicts their pretense of not wanting open borders.