I often get into trouble when I cut too much from a piece that should be in there. And this time it was a lengthy explanation of how Communism is treated in the film, what I think of it, and how we're living through a time now where McCarthy would think the Communists won - I've written about this subject many times here. But this piece, like the movie, was already too long to include all of that. What I hope people got from this wasn't that Oppenheimer is a communist and this movie glorifies him -- it most certainly does not --but that 1) we don't live in a country that grows people like that anymore and 2) everything has reversed itself. The Left is doing what the Right did back then because now they have all the power. What's the lesson? Humans are all the same? I don't know. I know where I would stand back then and where I stand now and that's against persecution for thought crimes.
Oppenheimer was a person with compassion and endless curiosity. Coming up in the 1930s, which was right after the Depression and heading into the New Deal era, he like so many others was concerned about equality, not equity. He helped raise money so that Black people could be allowed to swim in a pool in Pasadena. They finally relented but only one or two days a week and they would empty the pool every time. THAT was the time he was living through.
The Communists, for all of the horrors of Stalin and their indoctrination madness were also the only ones who fought for Civil Rights back before the 1960s - and helped Black men get fair trials.
But Oppenheimer, like so many others, noticed the party changed when Stalin came along -- this is what 1984 is ABOUT. It's about exactly this. So he distanced himself from those ideas and those people.
Surely this is not that hard to grasp. And if you feel so weirded out about Communist sympathizers well, you better stop quoting Orwell.
Sasha, please do not capitalize “Black.” That’s something the media started after St George of Floyd died to let us know they believe blacks deserve respect and whites don’t. As for communism, the left traded class based communism for race based Marxism and called it Critical Race Theory or Woke. It retains the Marxist belief that the world is divided between the oppressors vs the oppressed but now labels whites as the source of evil in the world, the oppressors, vs the oppressed, “people of color” in general and blacks in particular.
You say the sides have flipped and the communists who were out of power in the fifties are now in power. But those in power now are not communists. They’re Woke Marxists who despise whites and want whites to be second class as the blacks were in the fifties. You should watch the Heather MacDonald video I posted here. That is precisely what she is saying.
Vivek says as president he will issue an Executive Order banning race based affirmative action wherever it can be found. He says better schools and early education for blacks can improve their ability to compete and then they won’t need a crutch. But that’s an idea that has been tried many times and always failed. In 2007 Oprah Winfrey gave up on trying to help black inner city school kids on the south side of Chicago because, she said, they’re just not interested in learning. She then opened a girls school in South Africa. If even Oprah couldn’t motivate them to study and learn, what teacher could, especially a white teacher who would immediately be condemned as racist for even trying?
"They’re Woke Marxists who despise whites and want whites to be second class as the blacks were in the fifties."
I think it applies to men, too. It seems very clear that they want men* to be removed from power, not some positions, but all positions. That's what the Barbie movie was all about IMO. I was shocked by how blatant the message was, and how aggressively it played out.
*not beta men, like Michael Cera in the Barbie movie. They can stay, because they've got enough "feminine energy".
I once saw a video of Camille Paglia talking about these Women’s Studies classes in our universities. She said they are taught by women with serious mental problems who hate men yet then they are allowed to poison young women with their pathologies about gender. Why is this allowed? Because our ruling class wants it, that’s why. Democrats say Putin is a monster but I’m sure this type of thing would not be allowed in Russia. Camille Paglia’s video on trans is good as is the RCI article about “Queering Jesus.” You’d sure never see this in Russia either.
“This wouldn’t be the first time that religious zeal scoffed at sexual norms as obstacles to holiness – the history of free-love communes and orgiastic rites offers plenty of case studies. Early Christians believed that grace and faith freed believers from observing the strictures of Jewish law, an idea called “antinomianism.” This idea historically reappears in extreme forms to make the controversial claim that breaking the earthly bonds of sin and death requires obliterating sexual taboos.”
“Queering Jesus: How It’s Going Mainstream at Progressive Churches and Top Divinity Schools.”
Your essays are outstanding and while we might knit-pick on occasion, nearly all of us are overwhelmingly on your side and appreciative of your courage and this subscription. Has opened a lot of our hearts and minds.
While I understand the similarities between the anti-communist fervor of that time and the nihilistic, totalitarian insanity which grips our nation today. there is one very major distinction. Those opposing communism where fighting to *keep* our nation as it was and its freedoms -- at least so much as they applied to the white people who enjoyed them the most. As you say, Sasha, not a perfect world back then. But one with the best of intentions in spite of man's inherent flaws and brutal histories. Easy to play Monday Morning Quarterback some seven decades later.
Today, in sharp contrast, the "struggle" is to utterly destroy what we have accomplished over the past two and a half centuries. These barbarian maggots are the ones holding the tribunals, blacklisting wrongthinkers, censoring both science and culture, and most pernicious of all, they have completely brainwashed the last two generations of young Americans. And in the process denied them even the most basic of education and life skills which previous generations were guaranteed to have before taking on the world as adults.
My -- *our* -- only hope is that the pushback is real, powerful, and effective enough to counter this malaise.
True! Once we have lost something it will be very difficult to clawback what we once had. Kind of like when laws have been passed they very rarely are “un-done”.
Yes, and there actually were quite a few Soviet agents in Hollywood beginning in the thirties. It was Stalin’s MO to finance and enlist local utopians, ie communists all over the world.
This isn't to say people didn't have a right to think the way they did or that communism wasn't a threat. Look around. This is what they were afraid of. But the point is not about communism but about the weaponization of the fear of communism that led to persecutions of people who did not deserve it, like Oppenheimer,
"they have completely brainwashed the last two generations of young Americans"
They've certainly tried, but I see a lot of young people pushing back, even starting alternative news programs and commentary. It's just not something the MSM covers.
If they were in fact successful, we should see overwhelming support for Biden. Instead, he's barely scraping a 40% approval rating:
“We need to get rid of the Constitution,” said my friend, a well-educated, middle class, middle-aged, lifelong Democrat.
Why do we need to get rid of the Constitution? Because of the Second Amendment, which emboldens nazis and white supremacists. Because reactionary, racist Supreme Court justices like Clarence Thomas use the Fourteenth Amendment in order to abolish affirmative action. Because the First Amendment legitimates dis/mal/misinformation and is a danger to democracy. The Constitution, I have learned, is a right-wing screed.
My friend is not young or an oddball, she’s mainstream in her views and lifestyle, and is generous and kind. She’s old enough to have taken Civics in high school. I’d never refer to her as a barbarian maggot. If she holds this benighted opinion of our precious founding documents and has no context for why they matter, there must be millions more just like her.
Here’s a strange but beautiful video of a woman who loves sharks and helps them by removing fish hooks from their mouths which no doubt caused them a lot of pain. They know her and come to her for help. No denying our fallen world is a terrible place full of evil but then there are also many beautiful things that we should be grateful for so it’s not all bad. YouTube is great. I think we’re very fortunate to live in a time when it’s so easy to find so many amazing and beautiful things online. The best of times. The worst of times. That’s basically our situation in a nutshell.
“I love my sharks. This is a wild animal and she’s giving me full trust. It is something to be in awe of no matter how many times it happens. I think sharks are absolutely beautiful!”
“Woman has removed over 300 hooks from shark’s mouths.” (4 min)
That's why I put the timeline in there, to show they had a valid reason to be worried about the infiltration of Commies. It's just that we are living through something similar though the threat to them is racism which they believe is embodied in Trump and MAGA. The mechanism is the same.
"they had a valid reason to be worried about the infiltration of Commies"
The U.S. Government, under "Operation Paperclip", brought hundreds of Nazis to America after WWII who were integrated into the power structure at the highest levels. The worries about phantom "Commies" - while we embraced literal Nazis - is illustrative of the deeply entrenched fascist tendencies among the power elite (1).
It is these same forces that killed JKF and led us down the path of endless war, militarism and state surveillance. These same forces were behind 9/11 and its coverup, which destroyed many of our basic freedoms (the "Patriot Act"). (2)
It is these same fascist forces that are now masquerading as the "left" (the "progressive" Biden administration is full of neocons, just like Obama's). Their game as always is to silence all criticism of their power. They sugar coat their fascism by bloviating about "diversity, equity and inclusion" to ensnare the gullible left as they convince the young and impressionable to sterilize themselves and believe that, yes, censorship is a good thing to shut up those bad people who oppose our "progressivism". They get traction via their control of mass media, academia, big business, banking, and political power. They have plenty of useful idiots on the "left" who are just too stupid to see who is pulling their strings.
(1) 'These Wall Street millionaires literally plotted to overthrow the president'
Also implicated in the plot was Al Smith, former New York governor and 1928 Democratic presidential nominee, as well as Prescott Bush, a banker, future Connecticut senator, and father to George H. W. Bush and grandfather to George W. Bush.
(2) Hastily passed 45 days after 9/11 in the name of national security, the Patriot Act was the first of many changes to surveillance laws that made it easier for the government to spy on ordinary Americans by expanding the authority to monitor phone and email communications, collect bank and credit reporting records, and track the activity of innocent Americans on the Internet. While most Americans think it was created to catch terrorists, the Patriot Act actually turns regular citizens into suspects.
Your observations are of course spot on. However, the growing totalitarian power structure is only half of the equation. The other half being the more-or-less half of our fellow citizens (and perhaps a few non-citizens as well) who put and keep these fascists in power. The useful idiots. Not only have they bought into the cornucopia of lies and deceit, they willingly turn on their neighbor to report any suspected non-compliance or dissent. If you dare to question their belief systems or try and apply any sort of rational logic they will blow up in your face and scream at you with profane ad hominems. And, especially in numbers, will quite likely assault you.
November of 2024 will, as they say, be the most important election in our lifetimes if not in the history of this nation. If We The People choose to plunge any deeper into the totalitarian swamp there will be no turning back. Keeping in mind the past two elections, things are very precarious at best. Fateful at worst.
Just saw Oppenheimer. Outstanding performances led by Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey. We left the theater thinking “these assholes have been doing this for a long time”, ie- stomping out ideas that don’t align with the approved narrative.
The movie is a little too long but still really good. It feels like an important film for these times.
I was raised in a Democrat family in MI. My Dad owned an auto parts business south of Detroit. I remember where I was when I heard that JFK had been assassinated. I am now a Republican. The irony is that I am more committed to American values like free speech than my still Democrat siblings who have been swept into the Marxism of the Left. I find it hard to believe what my own eyes saw — the Democrats attempting to censor a Kennedy.
I’m just hoping Barbie bombs just like all the other woke movies. I saw the trailer for Barbie while waiting for Sound of Freedom to start. I must say, they couldn’t pay me enough to see that horrendous film.
The Woke left has done so much damage in so many areas that it’s hard to say which is worst but I think I’ll go with race. Heather MacDonald says that “disparate impact” is used to label standards that have a disparate impact on blacks as racist and are therefore canceled in order to be “non-racist.” Anyone who objects is immediately condemned as racist which can ruin a person’s career. She says America used to be racist but isn’t now. We also used to be a functional society that had borders, schools that educated and safe streets in our cities. We have none of those things now. Basically then, America traded being functional but racist for being a dysfunctional, disintegrating mess for being “non-racist” which actually is racist but against whites rather than blacks. That is what Heather is saying which certainly is quite true. This is just not working at all.
Lowering the Bar for Ethnic Minorities ‘Threatens Lives & is a Recipe for Civilizational Suicide.’ (8 min)
The New Culture Forum. Heather MacDonald. July 19, 2023
I love Heather. Always interesting, always worth my time.
It often seems to me that the left --and woke in particular -- suffer from incurable naïveté. Their unshakable Lockeian belief that mankind is good gets disproven daily, yet they cling to it unscientifically, no matter how much proof to the contrary!
That’s what is behind their upside down and backwards world, where criminals are valuable citizens but their victims are worthless; where the color of your skin matters so more than the content of your character. Oh, the ennui of it all.
Heather is very good but the left despises her for being sane and white and ignores her. Human nature is severely flawed and societies periodically collapse into insanity and self destruct but the difference now is that the weapons are so much more powerful. We simply can’t afford this anymore yet here we are again, heading for war and the abyss.
The juxtaposition of these two movies and stories is really painful to watch, and yet it seems clear from the media coverage that commentators are finding an equivalence between horrific atomic bombs and peacetime insecurities brought on and assuaged by plastic toys. Where we used to run for the fallout shelters, we now scurry off to “safe spaces”. Toxic masculinity is the new hydrogen bomb. I don’t watch the Oscars, but can’t wait to see which movie will capture the Academy next spring. Just imagine the speeches.
Sasha, they're movies, they're make believe. Hollywood has yet to make a movie that is historically accurate. As for McCarthy, Ike and others may have turned on him but it turns out he was right. Former Communists SAID there were Communists in the government. There have been Communists in the government going all the way back to (Not So) Honest Abe, who had Communists in his Army and in his cabinet. And the goal of Communism hasn't changed since Karl Marx and Joseph Engels wrote their manifesto in 1848 - to take over the world.
Hi Sam, I agree they are movies and that we can’t expect movies to be very historically accurate. Certainly not as accurate as I have seen you be (eg it’s well documented that Communists were prevalent in US government). With regard to “they’re movies”, true and also true that movies can reflect and significantly impact culture and society.
Movies only impact culture and society because too many lack the capability of actual thought and are easily led. Movies are and always have been entertainment and nothing else. Hollywood studios don't even attempt to make them historically accurate. A good example is t883, in which the characters are supposed to be Tennesseans on the Oregon Trail. As a matter of fact, the Oregon Trail was a major route A HALF CENTURY before 1883. Furthermore, someone from Tennessee going to Oregon wouldn't have gone to Fort Worth, Texas in 1883 to start their journey. As you know, I grew up in Tennessee - about 70 miles from the Missouri Bootheel and only a little over 100 miles from St. Louis, where the actual Oregon Trail began. The Yellowstone creator is from here in Houston and should have known better. I assume he wrote it the way he did so he could film it on his Texas property. He also has the main character having been a POW for three years after being captured after Antietam. Actually, both the Union and Confederate armies PAROLLED prisoners until 1864 when Lincoln and Grant decided to stop paroling Confederates as a means of restricting manpower. For that matter, the Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869. This kind of stuff is common in Hollywood productions whose object is to entertain. It's no effing wonder Americans today have no concept of history.
Sam, fully half today’s US students aren’t proficient at grade level math and reading. Entire US cities are tracking at over half 70% illiteracy. Teachers Union churns them out like widgets and tells them they’re geniuses. General US population will likely never have a remotely accurate understanding of history and certainly won’t in the next 80 years.
We already have a society where many believe the hate whitey history promoted in our schools by Critical Race Theory, the “1619 Project” and by books like “Between the World and Me” by the deranged racist Ta-Nehisi Coates. No society can survive this level of stupidity and flat out insanity. In what sense does America even still exist as a country? A society needs at least some degree of trust to enable cohesion to avoid social fragmentation, dysfunction and unraveling. Where’s our trust? Nonexistent and ever more intense distrust by the day.
Last year I read “Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History” by S.C. Gwynne.” Superb book about about the US Army vs the Comanches. Also talked about the endless and often genocidal wars the Comanches waged on other tribes and it was the same with the Aztecs in Mexico and the Incas in Peru. That’s why the oppressed Indian tribes in these places so hated these dominant tribes and helped the Europeans defeat them. The Woke say we need to teach children the truth about history. I totally agree. I’d love to see this book required reading in our high schools. Fat chance of that ever happening in cities like Chicago which just elected a new Woke mayor and teaches the hate whitey “1619 Project” in our high schools. This is just not working at all.
One other comment on Oppenheimer. I held a high government security clearance and to get it, I had to meet certain qualifications, one of which was no association with organizations whose goal was to undermine the United States. Oppenheimer (who headed the scientists working for the Army who actually built the bomb) had known associations with subversives, including his wife Kitty. Although he wasn't a card-carrying member of the Communist Party (neither was Rosa Parks, she just attended meetings), he was a known associate with Party members and harbored communist sympathies. In 1942 when he went to work for the Army, the Soviet Union was allied with the United States. By 1954 the USSR and USA were sworn enemies, and with good reason. Oppenheimer had become a security risk. I knew a young airman with the highest security clearance the government has who lost it because he got married and his bride turned out to have relatives behind the "Iron Curtain." Leftists and former leftists like to talk about "Red Scares" and imply that Americans were afraid of communists because of their beliefs when the US was actually opposed to communism because of what Communists (Bolsheviks) did in Russia and Ruthenia (Ukraine) then what Stalin did in the USSR where untold hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, died in purges. Marxists have a way of eliminating those who don't support them and their ideas.
A wonderful piece. You have a very unique ability and perspective.
If I may I will add that Joe McCarthy was a drunken asshole, but he was right about almost everyone he accused. There still is many communists within our 'elites'; hell, post K-12 academia have been communist generators for at least two decades.
“To Coates, history is a maze in which every path leads back to the dragon in the center, which is slavery. So blame the white racist superstructure even if a black cop working for a black county run by black politicians kills a black suspect—that would be Coates’s college acquaintance Prince Jones, who died when an undercover cop in Prince George’s County, Maryland, mistook the young man for another suspect and Jones responded by ramming his car at the officer, who shot him.
And the street gangs in Coates’s native Baltimore? Their aggression is purely a defensive posture. They’re “girding themselves against the ghosts of the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered ’round their grandfathers so that the branches of the black body might be torched, then cut away.’” By such logic, no black person can ever be considered responsible for his acts. People, in Coates’s view, are simply hapless playthings, borne this way and that by history’s winds. This is why Coates believes criminals should be released from prison en masse, violent criminals included. How catastrophic would be the effect on black neighborhoods if their most lethal alumni suddenly returned all at once? Are not “public intellectuals” supposed to reason past step one of their policy proposals?”
Coates is a national correspondent for the Atlantic who’s been given many awards. The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates is among 2015s 24 recipients of “genius” grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
The recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship get a no-strings attached award of $625,000, which is paid out in equal quarterly installments over five years.
It's always funny to me how these folks (Coates, HN Jones, Kendi, etc al) are so forthright in their condemnation of the America that exists as 'stamped from the beginning' and what not...but are at the same time so very enthralled with the Pulitzer, thevMacArthur, tenureship, and the rest. Its almost as if they REVERE those very institutions so much so that they actually believe America is a pretty decent place. Seems odd.
I often get into trouble when I cut too much from a piece that should be in there. And this time it was a lengthy explanation of how Communism is treated in the film, what I think of it, and how we're living through a time now where McCarthy would think the Communists won - I've written about this subject many times here. But this piece, like the movie, was already too long to include all of that. What I hope people got from this wasn't that Oppenheimer is a communist and this movie glorifies him -- it most certainly does not --but that 1) we don't live in a country that grows people like that anymore and 2) everything has reversed itself. The Left is doing what the Right did back then because now they have all the power. What's the lesson? Humans are all the same? I don't know. I know where I would stand back then and where I stand now and that's against persecution for thought crimes.
Oppenheimer was a person with compassion and endless curiosity. Coming up in the 1930s, which was right after the Depression and heading into the New Deal era, he like so many others was concerned about equality, not equity. He helped raise money so that Black people could be allowed to swim in a pool in Pasadena. They finally relented but only one or two days a week and they would empty the pool every time. THAT was the time he was living through.
The Communists, for all of the horrors of Stalin and their indoctrination madness were also the only ones who fought for Civil Rights back before the 1960s - and helped Black men get fair trials.
But Oppenheimer, like so many others, noticed the party changed when Stalin came along -- this is what 1984 is ABOUT. It's about exactly this. So he distanced himself from those ideas and those people.
Surely this is not that hard to grasp. And if you feel so weirded out about Communist sympathizers well, you better stop quoting Orwell.
Sasha, please do not capitalize “Black.” That’s something the media started after St George of Floyd died to let us know they believe blacks deserve respect and whites don’t. As for communism, the left traded class based communism for race based Marxism and called it Critical Race Theory or Woke. It retains the Marxist belief that the world is divided between the oppressors vs the oppressed but now labels whites as the source of evil in the world, the oppressors, vs the oppressed, “people of color” in general and blacks in particular.
You say the sides have flipped and the communists who were out of power in the fifties are now in power. But those in power now are not communists. They’re Woke Marxists who despise whites and want whites to be second class as the blacks were in the fifties. You should watch the Heather MacDonald video I posted here. That is precisely what she is saying.
Vivek says as president he will issue an Executive Order banning race based affirmative action wherever it can be found. He says better schools and early education for blacks can improve their ability to compete and then they won’t need a crutch. But that’s an idea that has been tried many times and always failed. In 2007 Oprah Winfrey gave up on trying to help black inner city school kids on the south side of Chicago because, she said, they’re just not interested in learning. She then opened a girls school in South Africa. If even Oprah couldn’t motivate them to study and learn, what teacher could, especially a white teacher who would immediately be condemned as racist for even trying?
Great comment. I would build on this:
"They’re Woke Marxists who despise whites and want whites to be second class as the blacks were in the fifties."
I think it applies to men, too. It seems very clear that they want men* to be removed from power, not some positions, but all positions. That's what the Barbie movie was all about IMO. I was shocked by how blatant the message was, and how aggressively it played out.
*not beta men, like Michael Cera in the Barbie movie. They can stay, because they've got enough "feminine energy".
I once saw a video of Camille Paglia talking about these Women’s Studies classes in our universities. She said they are taught by women with serious mental problems who hate men yet then they are allowed to poison young women with their pathologies about gender. Why is this allowed? Because our ruling class wants it, that’s why. Democrats say Putin is a monster but I’m sure this type of thing would not be allowed in Russia. Camille Paglia’s video on trans is good as is the RCI article about “Queering Jesus.” You’d sure never see this in Russia either.
“This wouldn’t be the first time that religious zeal scoffed at sexual norms as obstacles to holiness – the history of free-love communes and orgiastic rites offers plenty of case studies. Early Christians believed that grace and faith freed believers from observing the strictures of Jewish law, an idea called “antinomianism.” This idea historically reappears in extreme forms to make the controversial claim that breaking the earthly bonds of sin and death requires obliterating sexual taboos.”
“Queering Jesus: How It’s Going Mainstream at Progressive Churches and Top Divinity Schools.”
Real Clear Investigations. Jun 13, 2023
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/06/13/queering_jesus_how_its_going_mainstream_at_progressive_churches_and_top_divinity_schools_903535.html
“Camille Paglia on Transgender Mania.” (6 min)
Apr 9, 2023. From a 2016 talk.
https://youtu.be/mB3Knhmfogo
Your essays are outstanding and while we might knit-pick on occasion, nearly all of us are overwhelmingly on your side and appreciative of your courage and this subscription. Has opened a lot of our hearts and minds.
While I understand the similarities between the anti-communist fervor of that time and the nihilistic, totalitarian insanity which grips our nation today. there is one very major distinction. Those opposing communism where fighting to *keep* our nation as it was and its freedoms -- at least so much as they applied to the white people who enjoyed them the most. As you say, Sasha, not a perfect world back then. But one with the best of intentions in spite of man's inherent flaws and brutal histories. Easy to play Monday Morning Quarterback some seven decades later.
Today, in sharp contrast, the "struggle" is to utterly destroy what we have accomplished over the past two and a half centuries. These barbarian maggots are the ones holding the tribunals, blacklisting wrongthinkers, censoring both science and culture, and most pernicious of all, they have completely brainwashed the last two generations of young Americans. And in the process denied them even the most basic of education and life skills which previous generations were guaranteed to have before taking on the world as adults.
My -- *our* -- only hope is that the pushback is real, powerful, and effective enough to counter this malaise.
Today is a mirror reflection of back then, a complete reversal.
Black Mirror
True! Once we have lost something it will be very difficult to clawback what we once had. Kind of like when laws have been passed they very rarely are “un-done”.
Yes, and there actually were quite a few Soviet agents in Hollywood beginning in the thirties. It was Stalin’s MO to finance and enlist local utopians, ie communists all over the world.
This isn't to say people didn't have a right to think the way they did or that communism wasn't a threat. Look around. This is what they were afraid of. But the point is not about communism but about the weaponization of the fear of communism that led to persecutions of people who did not deserve it, like Oppenheimer,
Agree 100%. It’s helpful to see a narrative that places the individual against the mob.
"they have completely brainwashed the last two generations of young Americans"
They've certainly tried, but I see a lot of young people pushing back, even starting alternative news programs and commentary. It's just not something the MSM covers.
If they were in fact successful, we should see overwhelming support for Biden. Instead, he's barely scraping a 40% approval rating:
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/biden-approval-rating/
And the latest polling shows him losing on nearly all fronts, and in a head-to-head with Trump:
https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/HHP_July2023_KeyResults.pdf
“We need to get rid of the Constitution,” said my friend, a well-educated, middle class, middle-aged, lifelong Democrat.
Why do we need to get rid of the Constitution? Because of the Second Amendment, which emboldens nazis and white supremacists. Because reactionary, racist Supreme Court justices like Clarence Thomas use the Fourteenth Amendment in order to abolish affirmative action. Because the First Amendment legitimates dis/mal/misinformation and is a danger to democracy. The Constitution, I have learned, is a right-wing screed.
My friend is not young or an oddball, she’s mainstream in her views and lifestyle, and is generous and kind. She’s old enough to have taken Civics in high school. I’d never refer to her as a barbarian maggot. If she holds this benighted opinion of our precious founding documents and has no context for why they matter, there must be millions more just like her.
This is a problem.
Here’s a strange but beautiful video of a woman who loves sharks and helps them by removing fish hooks from their mouths which no doubt caused them a lot of pain. They know her and come to her for help. No denying our fallen world is a terrible place full of evil but then there are also many beautiful things that we should be grateful for so it’s not all bad. YouTube is great. I think we’re very fortunate to live in a time when it’s so easy to find so many amazing and beautiful things online. The best of times. The worst of times. That’s basically our situation in a nutshell.
“I love my sharks. This is a wild animal and she’s giving me full trust. It is something to be in awe of no matter how many times it happens. I think sharks are absolutely beautiful!”
“Woman has removed over 300 hooks from shark’s mouths.” (4 min)
Aug 11, 2020
https://youtu.be/G8LmxwOgBhA
That's why I put the timeline in there, to show they had a valid reason to be worried about the infiltration of Commies. It's just that we are living through something similar though the threat to them is racism which they believe is embodied in Trump and MAGA. The mechanism is the same.
"they had a valid reason to be worried about the infiltration of Commies"
The U.S. Government, under "Operation Paperclip", brought hundreds of Nazis to America after WWII who were integrated into the power structure at the highest levels. The worries about phantom "Commies" - while we embraced literal Nazis - is illustrative of the deeply entrenched fascist tendencies among the power elite (1).
It is these same forces that killed JKF and led us down the path of endless war, militarism and state surveillance. These same forces were behind 9/11 and its coverup, which destroyed many of our basic freedoms (the "Patriot Act"). (2)
It is these same fascist forces that are now masquerading as the "left" (the "progressive" Biden administration is full of neocons, just like Obama's). Their game as always is to silence all criticism of their power. They sugar coat their fascism by bloviating about "diversity, equity and inclusion" to ensnare the gullible left as they convince the young and impressionable to sterilize themselves and believe that, yes, censorship is a good thing to shut up those bad people who oppose our "progressivism". They get traction via their control of mass media, academia, big business, banking, and political power. They have plenty of useful idiots on the "left" who are just too stupid to see who is pulling their strings.
(1) 'These Wall Street millionaires literally plotted to overthrow the president'
Also implicated in the plot was Al Smith, former New York governor and 1928 Democratic presidential nominee, as well as Prescott Bush, a banker, future Connecticut senator, and father to George H. W. Bush and grandfather to George W. Bush.
https://timeline.com/business-plot-overthrow-fdr-9a59a012c32a
(2) Hastily passed 45 days after 9/11 in the name of national security, the Patriot Act was the first of many changes to surveillance laws that made it easier for the government to spy on ordinary Americans by expanding the authority to monitor phone and email communications, collect bank and credit reporting records, and track the activity of innocent Americans on the Internet. While most Americans think it was created to catch terrorists, the Patriot Act actually turns regular citizens into suspects.
https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/privacy-and-surveillance/surveillance-under-patriot-act
Bingo….. you win 🏆
Your observations are of course spot on. However, the growing totalitarian power structure is only half of the equation. The other half being the more-or-less half of our fellow citizens (and perhaps a few non-citizens as well) who put and keep these fascists in power. The useful idiots. Not only have they bought into the cornucopia of lies and deceit, they willingly turn on their neighbor to report any suspected non-compliance or dissent. If you dare to question their belief systems or try and apply any sort of rational logic they will blow up in your face and scream at you with profane ad hominems. And, especially in numbers, will quite likely assault you.
November of 2024 will, as they say, be the most important election in our lifetimes if not in the history of this nation. If We The People choose to plunge any deeper into the totalitarian swamp there will be no turning back. Keeping in mind the past two elections, things are very precarious at best. Fateful at worst.
Barbieland, here we come.
Just saw Oppenheimer. Outstanding performances led by Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey. We left the theater thinking “these assholes have been doing this for a long time”, ie- stomping out ideas that don’t align with the approved narrative.
The movie is a little too long but still really good. It feels like an important film for these times.
I wouldn't go to Barbie if they paid me.
I was raised in a Democrat family in MI. My Dad owned an auto parts business south of Detroit. I remember where I was when I heard that JFK had been assassinated. I am now a Republican. The irony is that I am more committed to American values like free speech than my still Democrat siblings who have been swept into the Marxism of the Left. I find it hard to believe what my own eyes saw — the Democrats attempting to censor a Kennedy.
R
I somehow must have miss typed “R” as I was reading the comments. Not sure. Please excuse. Wasn’t intending on posting a comment.
You can delete it by clicking on the 3 dots and delete.
I’m just hoping Barbie bombs just like all the other woke movies. I saw the trailer for Barbie while waiting for Sound of Freedom to start. I must say, they couldn’t pay me enough to see that horrendous film.
One has to wonder who they think is the audience for such a film.
Women who grew up with Barbie in the 1980s and 1990s.
After hearing this guess which movie I will see and which I will not. Thanks
The Woke left has done so much damage in so many areas that it’s hard to say which is worst but I think I’ll go with race. Heather MacDonald says that “disparate impact” is used to label standards that have a disparate impact on blacks as racist and are therefore canceled in order to be “non-racist.” Anyone who objects is immediately condemned as racist which can ruin a person’s career. She says America used to be racist but isn’t now. We also used to be a functional society that had borders, schools that educated and safe streets in our cities. We have none of those things now. Basically then, America traded being functional but racist for being a dysfunctional, disintegrating mess for being “non-racist” which actually is racist but against whites rather than blacks. That is what Heather is saying which certainly is quite true. This is just not working at all.
Lowering the Bar for Ethnic Minorities ‘Threatens Lives & is a Recipe for Civilizational Suicide.’ (8 min)
The New Culture Forum. Heather MacDonald. July 19, 2023
https://youtu.be/YYR7_YPYMwE
I love Heather. Always interesting, always worth my time.
It often seems to me that the left --and woke in particular -- suffer from incurable naïveté. Their unshakable Lockeian belief that mankind is good gets disproven daily, yet they cling to it unscientifically, no matter how much proof to the contrary!
That’s what is behind their upside down and backwards world, where criminals are valuable citizens but their victims are worthless; where the color of your skin matters so more than the content of your character. Oh, the ennui of it all.
Heather is very good but the left despises her for being sane and white and ignores her. Human nature is severely flawed and societies periodically collapse into insanity and self destruct but the difference now is that the weapons are so much more powerful. We simply can’t afford this anymore yet here we are again, heading for war and the abyss.
The juxtaposition of these two movies and stories is really painful to watch, and yet it seems clear from the media coverage that commentators are finding an equivalence between horrific atomic bombs and peacetime insecurities brought on and assuaged by plastic toys. Where we used to run for the fallout shelters, we now scurry off to “safe spaces”. Toxic masculinity is the new hydrogen bomb. I don’t watch the Oscars, but can’t wait to see which movie will capture the Academy next spring. Just imagine the speeches.
Sasha, they're movies, they're make believe. Hollywood has yet to make a movie that is historically accurate. As for McCarthy, Ike and others may have turned on him but it turns out he was right. Former Communists SAID there were Communists in the government. There have been Communists in the government going all the way back to (Not So) Honest Abe, who had Communists in his Army and in his cabinet. And the goal of Communism hasn't changed since Karl Marx and Joseph Engels wrote their manifesto in 1848 - to take over the world.
Hi Sam, I agree they are movies and that we can’t expect movies to be very historically accurate. Certainly not as accurate as I have seen you be (eg it’s well documented that Communists were prevalent in US government). With regard to “they’re movies”, true and also true that movies can reflect and significantly impact culture and society.
Movies only impact culture and society because too many lack the capability of actual thought and are easily led. Movies are and always have been entertainment and nothing else. Hollywood studios don't even attempt to make them historically accurate. A good example is t883, in which the characters are supposed to be Tennesseans on the Oregon Trail. As a matter of fact, the Oregon Trail was a major route A HALF CENTURY before 1883. Furthermore, someone from Tennessee going to Oregon wouldn't have gone to Fort Worth, Texas in 1883 to start their journey. As you know, I grew up in Tennessee - about 70 miles from the Missouri Bootheel and only a little over 100 miles from St. Louis, where the actual Oregon Trail began. The Yellowstone creator is from here in Houston and should have known better. I assume he wrote it the way he did so he could film it on his Texas property. He also has the main character having been a POW for three years after being captured after Antietam. Actually, both the Union and Confederate armies PAROLLED prisoners until 1864 when Lincoln and Grant decided to stop paroling Confederates as a means of restricting manpower. For that matter, the Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869. This kind of stuff is common in Hollywood productions whose object is to entertain. It's no effing wonder Americans today have no concept of history.
Sam, fully half today’s US students aren’t proficient at grade level math and reading. Entire US cities are tracking at over half 70% illiteracy. Teachers Union churns them out like widgets and tells them they’re geniuses. General US population will likely never have a remotely accurate understanding of history and certainly won’t in the next 80 years.
We already have a society where many believe the hate whitey history promoted in our schools by Critical Race Theory, the “1619 Project” and by books like “Between the World and Me” by the deranged racist Ta-Nehisi Coates. No society can survive this level of stupidity and flat out insanity. In what sense does America even still exist as a country? A society needs at least some degree of trust to enable cohesion to avoid social fragmentation, dysfunction and unraveling. Where’s our trust? Nonexistent and ever more intense distrust by the day.
Last year I read “Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History” by S.C. Gwynne.” Superb book about about the US Army vs the Comanches. Also talked about the endless and often genocidal wars the Comanches waged on other tribes and it was the same with the Aztecs in Mexico and the Incas in Peru. That’s why the oppressed Indian tribes in these places so hated these dominant tribes and helped the Europeans defeat them. The Woke say we need to teach children the truth about history. I totally agree. I’d love to see this book required reading in our high schools. Fat chance of that ever happening in cities like Chicago which just elected a new Woke mayor and teaches the hate whitey “1619 Project” in our high schools. This is just not working at all.
"the endless and often genocidal wars the Comanches waged on other tribes and it was the same with the Aztecs in Mexico and the Incas in Peru"
See:
'North American Indigenous Warfare and Ritual Violence'
https://www.amazon.com/American-Indigenous-Warfare-Ritual-Violence/dp/0816525323/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=1-1
'Latin American Indigenous Warfare and Ritual Violence'
https://www.amazon.com/American-Indigenous-Warfare-Ritual-Violence-ebook/dp/B08ZYCWF8P/ref=sr_1_4?refinements=p_27%3ARichard+J.+Chacon&s=books&sr=1-4&text=Richard+J.+Chacon
One other comment on Oppenheimer. I held a high government security clearance and to get it, I had to meet certain qualifications, one of which was no association with organizations whose goal was to undermine the United States. Oppenheimer (who headed the scientists working for the Army who actually built the bomb) had known associations with subversives, including his wife Kitty. Although he wasn't a card-carrying member of the Communist Party (neither was Rosa Parks, she just attended meetings), he was a known associate with Party members and harbored communist sympathies. In 1942 when he went to work for the Army, the Soviet Union was allied with the United States. By 1954 the USSR and USA were sworn enemies, and with good reason. Oppenheimer had become a security risk. I knew a young airman with the highest security clearance the government has who lost it because he got married and his bride turned out to have relatives behind the "Iron Curtain." Leftists and former leftists like to talk about "Red Scares" and imply that Americans were afraid of communists because of their beliefs when the US was actually opposed to communism because of what Communists (Bolsheviks) did in Russia and Ruthenia (Ukraine) then what Stalin did in the USSR where untold hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, died in purges. Marxists have a way of eliminating those who don't support them and their ideas.
A wonderful piece. You have a very unique ability and perspective.
If I may I will add that Joe McCarthy was a drunken asshole, but he was right about almost everyone he accused. There still is many communists within our 'elites'; hell, post K-12 academia have been communist generators for at least two decades.
I recall when Barbie came out in 59 us guys thought it was Great, because it had Boobs.
Freedom of Speech enables you to spot the idiots and make sure you are not one of them.
The Internet is called the 'Web' for a good reason; do you Surf the net, or does the net Serf you?
So who is Ta-Nehisi Coates? The excerpt below is from a 2015 Commentary article.
“The Hard Untruths of Ta-Nehisi Coates.”
A best selling polemic riven with hatred thrills the liberal elite
Commentary magazine. By Kyle Smith. Oct 2015
This excerpt below is 19 paragraphs down.
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/hard-untruths-ta-nehisi-coates/
“To Coates, history is a maze in which every path leads back to the dragon in the center, which is slavery. So blame the white racist superstructure even if a black cop working for a black county run by black politicians kills a black suspect—that would be Coates’s college acquaintance Prince Jones, who died when an undercover cop in Prince George’s County, Maryland, mistook the young man for another suspect and Jones responded by ramming his car at the officer, who shot him.
And the street gangs in Coates’s native Baltimore? Their aggression is purely a defensive posture. They’re “girding themselves against the ghosts of the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered ’round their grandfathers so that the branches of the black body might be torched, then cut away.’” By such logic, no black person can ever be considered responsible for his acts. People, in Coates’s view, are simply hapless playthings, borne this way and that by history’s winds. This is why Coates believes criminals should be released from prison en masse, violent criminals included. How catastrophic would be the effect on black neighborhoods if their most lethal alumni suddenly returned all at once? Are not “public intellectuals” supposed to reason past step one of their policy proposals?”
Coates is a national correspondent for the Atlantic who’s been given many awards. The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates is among 2015s 24 recipients of “genius” grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
The recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship get a no-strings attached award of $625,000, which is paid out in equal quarterly installments over five years.
It's always funny to me how these folks (Coates, HN Jones, Kendi, etc al) are so forthright in their condemnation of the America that exists as 'stamped from the beginning' and what not...but are at the same time so very enthralled with the Pulitzer, thevMacArthur, tenureship, and the rest. Its almost as if they REVERE those very institutions so much so that they actually believe America is a pretty decent place. Seems odd.