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“Our children and grandchildren may yet curse the day we began hyping race and ethnicity. There are countries where that has led to slaughters in the streets, but you cannot name a country where it has led to greater harmony.” – Thomas Sowell
“People who call differences “inequities” and achievements “privilege” leave social havoc in their wake, while feeling noble about siding with the less fortunate. It would never occur to them that they have any responsibility for the harm done to both blacks and Asian Americans.” – Thomas Sowell
Biden’s America: In just a few short months, President Biden and his Administration has caused a mass crisis on our southern border, continue to lock down our country, fenced in our Capitol, and spent TRILLIONS of more borrowed/printed dollars to fund political friends and allies. Eventually, taxpayers and working Americans will pay dearly. Just consider…
In Biden’s America illegal immigrants get government paid hotel rooms while homeless veterans and mentally ill Americans sleep under bridges.
In Biden’s America illegal immigrant children are caged at the border while encouraged to come to America.
In Biden’s America legal law biding citizens are forced to wear masks, restricted from seeing their families, and are arrested for taking their children to playgrounds while illegal immigrants are set free into the U.S. with no testing, no finger printing, no immunizations, and no background checks?
In Biden’s America House Democrats are set to STEAL a congressional seat by a partisan vote of their members against state certified election and Pelosi’s Democrats will blindly follow along.
In Biden’s America biological men are allowed to play in girls & women’s sports AND use their restrooms and locker rooms.
In Biden’s America bipartisanship means NOT working with House or Senate Republicans but rather claiming “polling” reflects some (many uninformed) Republicans support one portion of a policy initiative, therefore that’s enough bipartisanship to jam through partisan legislation.
The American voter was duped by a candidate who ran by hiding in his basement and allowing his BIG money supporters to stir up enough fear and frustration in this country to vote for change. But this is NOT the change that was promised or expected.
I think the mid-term elections will be devastating for the far-left progressive Democrats who currently control the Democratic party. Their policies are far outside the mainstream of what America believes in and voters will be able to express their opinions at the polls.
Balance Budget Amendment: With Congress and the White House in the hands of progressive liberals, now more than ever we have to complete the effort to call for an Article 5 Constitutional Convention to pass a Balance Budget Amendment.
Join the effort at with the BBA Task Force which explains: The U.S. national debt ($24.6 trillion) is now 7 times federal revenue ($3.6 trillion), a serious imbalance that will cost us over $600 billion (16.5% of federal revenue) in 2020. We’ve already seen a $1 trillion spike in the 2020 deficit in just the last month as the Corona-virus stimulus starts to add up. It is hard to calculate where we will be at the end of the year, but the one thing we can say for certain is that it will be on for the record books.
The root cause of the problem was best explained by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee when it concluded, “the many statutory constraints enacted over the years to control spending failed because no Congress can bind a succeeding Congress by simple statute.” Therefore, only a balanced budget amendment (BBA) will do. Given Congress’ 75-year failure to propose a BBA, the states must do so by calling an Article V convention.
Join this fight to get a Balance Budget Amendment and it will be much less important as to what political party controls Congress.
–Saul Anuzis
Click Here for Past Commentary from Saul
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60 Plus Weekly Video Rewind
Saul’s News Rewind Video for March 26, 2021
In this week’s video rewind- Joe Biden is caught in a lie about an illegal migrant surge, Texas Democrat blows the whistle on horrible border conditions at a government facility, and Mitch McConnell sounds OFF on Democrats trying to legalize voter fraud!
Links to the articles discussed in the video:
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/mar/22/leaked-photos-show-crowded-conditions-no-social-di/
No, Trump Didn’t Create The Border Crisis. Democrats Did
Whether you agree with Trump’s immigration policies or not, Joe Biden and his team own this current border crisis — no one else.
President Joe Biden has essentially told the American people the buck does not stop at the Oval Office — at least not on the border crisis. Having dismantled many of the immigration policies the Trump administration used to regain control of our southern border, Biden administration officials now insist the current mess is somehow all Trump’s fault.
Unfortunately, the facts are not on their side. In truth, the Trump administration reformed a broken immigration system — one that had encouraged illegal migration, incentivized the most vulnerable to attempt an often deadly journey, and forced the Department of Homeland Security to release those they caught (in some cases criminals) into American communities.
Under President Trump, we applied long-standing immigration law, working with officials in Mexico and Central America to ensure those who were truly in fear of their governments applied for asylum closer to home. Furthermore, we assured those with lawful claims of asylum were allowed to enter. Meanwhile, those who did not have lawful claims gave up even trying.
As a result of these policies, we inherited a flood of fraudulent asylum claims and a massive backlog of cases. Unfortunately, this meant deserving individuals were waiting years to have their claims adjudicated. To meet this need, we hired roughly 500 new asylum officers to address the backlog, leading DHS and the U.S. Department of Justice to grant asylum to more individuals in Trump’s first three years in office than in the highest four years of Obama’s entire eight-year tenure.
Senate Republicans Line Up to Oppose House-Passed Amnesty Bills
A number of Senate Republicans are lining up to oppose two pieces of immigration legislation, both passed by House Democrats and a handful of House Republicans, that would provide amnesty to millions of illegal aliens living in the United States.
Last week, the Democrat-controlled House — with support from 30 House Republicans — passed H.R. 1603, known as the “Farm Workforce Modernization Act of 2021,” and H.R. 6, known as “American Dream and Promise Act of 2021.” The so-called “Farmworker Amnesty” and “Dream Act Amnesty” bills, though, are meeting firm GOP opposition in the Senate, possibly dooming their chances of making it through the upper chamber and becoming law.
Over the past several days, Breitbart News reached out to the offices of all 50 Senate Republicans to ask if the senators support consideration of these House-passed amnesty plans and found serious and growing opposition to them. To kill a bill in the Senate, with the filibuster intact as it currently is, Republicans need 41 of their 50 members to oppose the legislation. While at this time there are not 41 Republicans expressing public opposition to either plan, the growing opposition among Senate Republicans building quickly after the House passed the bills does not bode well for either plan’s chances. That does not mean either idea generally speaking is dead on arrival in the Senate, either, as Senators could draft a different plan than the House-passed plan–but the momentum for sweeping immigration changes is quickly hitting the brick wall of the filibuster in the Senate, dimming leftist hopes publicly touted by Senate Majority Whip Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) just this weekend that there might be enough support to move on either bill.
While the Farmworker Amnesty would give green cards to about 2.1 million illegal aliens working on U.S. farms, theDream Act Amnesty would put potentially 4.4 million young illegal aliens on track for American citizenship.
Democratic delusion and the conspiracies that fuel it
The Democrats don’t plan to run on their record in the 2022 midterm elections. They plan to go to the voters and argue that Republicans are too crazy and too outside the mainstream to be allowed to return to power in Congress.
Whether that will be enough will depend in part on the health of the U.S. economy. If the Biden-Pelosi-Schumer spending binge and planned tax increases don’t hamper the post-COVID recovery, that might be enough. However, if the economy tanks and the Republicans pull together a realistic program for bringing growth and jobs back and getting spending under control, a GOP-led majority in both chambers is not only possible but likely.
Before you snicker, remember the Republicans came within a hair of winning back control of the House in November 2020 even as Donald Trump was losing. GOP congressional candidates ran ahead of Trump in about 180 of more than 210 winning races, and Republican House candidates won more contested races than Democrats did. A change in control isn’t out of the question by any means, which is why the progressive campaign machine has to do all it can to discredit its opposition in the minds of the electorate.
Enter QAnon, the internet-based wellspring of conspiracies ranging from the sublime to the outrageous—and all of them ridiculous. Unfortunately for the GOP, a few folks who’ve lately been their voters (not to mention a newly elected member of Congress or two) have been caught on social media spreading the conspiracists’ tales.
Up until it filled a narrative need, QAnon was a little more than a curiosity among the relatively few people who were aware of it. The intrigues it promulgated did produce a few notable and even tragic events but, in the main, it drew the attention of the fringe. That is, until its usefulness in painting a picture of the GOP as controlled by radical insurrectionists became clear. After that, the legacy media became the biggest outlet for its tall tales under the guise of reporting.
Up to a point, the strategy of elevating QAnon been a success in that it left GOP leaders in the difficult position of defending their own while repudiating the insanity. It’s a tight rope to walk. What the Democrats must do now is determine whether they can sustain these attacks over two years, and whether they’re insulated enough to avoid serious blowback.
Here’s why Biden is making big mistakes on crime, welfare and immigration
How to explain President Biden’s ideological transformation over the years? Perhaps it’s the same as the explanation of why the chameleon’s complexion changes when he moves from desert to forest: adaptation to local terrain.
About the Biden transformation there can be no question. The senator who opposed government financing of abortions for 30-some years now supports it — and up through the ninth month of pregnancy.
The Senate Judiciary Committee chairman who sponsored and bragged about the tough provisions of the 1994 crime bill now echoes almost the entire Black Lives Matter mantra.
The politician who supported the welfare reform bill that House Speaker Newt Gingrich kept pressing until President Bill Clinton, facing re-election, decided to sign it in 1996 has now concocted “COVID relief” legislation that includes multithousand-dollar payments to single mothers with no work requirements.
Biden’s Gun Control Proposals Make Little Sense As a Response to the Mass Shooting in Boulder
President Joe Biden has revived his call for a new federal “assault weapon” ban and expanded background checks following yesterday’s mass shooting at a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, which killed 10 people. “We can ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines,” Biden tweeted today. “We can close loopholes in our gun background check system. This is not a partisan issue—it’s an American issue that will save lives. Congress needs to act.” As usual, those proposals make little sense as a response to a crime that supposedly illustrates the need for them.
According to the arrest affidavit, the suspect in the Boulder attack was armed with an AR-15-style “rifle” and a “semiautomatic handgun.” The affidavit says he bought a Ruger AR-556 pistol, which has a 10.5-inch barrel and a “stabilizing brace,” six days before the shooting. While it’s not clear whether that was the “rifle” described by police and witnesses, either the Ruger pistol or an AR-15-style rifle would have been covered by the latest federal “assault weapon” bill and by a local ban that a Colorado judge blocked earlier this month.
But the “military-style” features targeted by such measures have little or nothing to do with a gun’s deadliness in the hands of a mass shooter. And since Colorado already requires background checks for all gun purchases, it is hard to see how imposing that rule nationally, as Biden wants to do, could have stymied this shooter. That’s assuming he had a disqualifying criminal or psychiatric record, and at this point it looks like he did not.
Soros Gave $16,568,483 to Group Behind Project Push to Kill Senate Filibuster
A leftist “dark money” group tied to liberal billionaire globalist George Soros has led the push to have Senate Democrats eliminate the filibuster, according to a new report.
The Washington Free Beacon reported that the radical group Fix Our Senate “is steering a coalition of 60 progressive groups to pressure moderate Democrats to eliminate the filibuster, which requires a 60-vote supermajority to advance legislation.”
Fix Our Senate has existed as a “project” of the leftist “Sixteen Thirty Fund, a nonprofit incubator managed by the D.C.-based consulting firm Arabella Advisors.” Soros’s Open Society Policy Center (OSPC) gave the Sixteen Thirty Fund $16,568,483 between 2016 and 2019 alone. “As a subsidiary of the Sixteen Thirty Fund, Fix Our Senate does not have to register as a standalone nonprofit with the IRS. This allows the group to operate largely in secret,” The Beacon noted. Fix Our Senate “does not have to disclose its donors or file tax forms that would shed light on its financial activity, board members, or contractors,” according to The Beacon.
The Beacon broke down the scheme by Fix Our Senate to dramatically overhaul the Senate’s legislative process. The campaign has used racism as its pivot point:
If Joe Biden really has dementia, can he be removed?
Is something neurologically wrong with Donald Trump?’ Yes, was Professor James Hamblin MD’s answer after the headline trumpeted in the Atlantic in January 2018. Yet in the election year that followed it was Biden who was being hidden in the cellar while Donald Trump embarked on an exhausting series of campaign rallies, giving largely unscripted bravura performances to his fanatical followers. Meanwhile on the rare occasion when his handlers let him out, Biden stumbled. On one occasion he forgot which state he was in. Shockingly, America’s Democrat-dominated media stayed silent about Biden’s failing health throughout the presidential campaign.
Though even Democratic commentators have noted the decline in 78-year-old Biden’s mental faculties since the election, curiously Hamblin, a staff writer on the Atlantic and a professor of public health at Yale, seems to have gone silent on the subject of presidential health. But nobody should be surprised by Biden’s decline. Cognitive impairment is normal in the elderly.
No decent (or sane) person wants Biden to be senile. But facts must be faced. In the past few weeks President Biden has had some startlingly incoherent moments; on International Women’s Day, having announced female military promotions, Biden forgot the name of his defense secretary or even the place where he worked (the Pentagon). Afterwards when he left the dais, he looked lost. On another occasion when reading from another autocue script he referred to Vice President Kamala Harris as ‘President Harris’; an avalanche of mirthful online memes followed. Then he outdid his online caricature by falling down three times while climbing the stairs to Air Force One. Overall, the current picture of his health is one whose severity goes way beyond Biden’s gaffe-prone history.
In spite of the White House’s assertions of Biden’s good health, both Republicans and Democrats have publicly commented on his apparent mental and physical frailty. As early as last Easter Bernie Sanders’s supporters were promoting the hashtag #WhereIsJoe and questioning his mental state.
Will America Join Rome and Germany as a Fallen Republic?
The United States is not a democracy. It is a republic.
The Pledge of Allegiance, learned by every American child, includes the very words “to the Republic.” The Founding Fathers knew the most efficient government, after breaking with the British Empire was not to be a direct democracy, but a republic. The word is of Latin origin, res publica or “the public affair.” It gives the impression that the public, and not the aristocracy, the royalty, or the elites, have a say in politics, most commonly through representation.
The problem is – republics are notoriously fickle. When asked, after the Constitutional Convention of 1787 if the United States was a monarchy or a republic, Benjamin Franklin quipped, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” Franklin was, among other things, a historian with full knowledge of other, long-dead historical republics.
Some republics last centuries without crashing; others last merely years, but all, eventually, fall. The United States is nearing the end of its second century, the oldest uninterrupted country with a Constitution in the world, surpassing numerous ancient and medieval states that have long since collapsed.
Biden Will Prove Reagan Right About Big-Government Incompetence
Respected Washington Post journalist and CNN host Fareed Zakaria has thrown down the gauntlet by betting that President Joe Biden “can show us that Reagan was wrong” when the Gipper said that “government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem.”
The headline in the Washington Post was “Biden is showing government can work,” and this assertion was supported by a commitment from a Biden White House official that “For people like us who believe in government, task number one is to make government work.”
As President Ronald Reagan’s first civil service director at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, I will take the bet. While Zakaria recognizes the difficulty for Biden, the problem is that no one can make this colossal bureaucratic morass work. President Biden is further complicating matters with trillions of dollars worth of additional, impossible-to-fulfill promises, more policy complexity, more bureaus, more red tape, and more power for obstructionist government unions, which even Franklin Roosevelt knew were incompatible with effective government.
President Reagan even said that one of the reasons why he cut 100,000 domestic bureaucratic positions and reduced spending was to make government better able to concentrate on fewer issues to make the rest more efficient. Complexity has increased dramatically since his days, indeed so much so that the progressive Brookings Institution admitted in 2014 that the present numerous levels and complexity of national government make it impossible to do things right.
Working-Class Reds
In the course of a few weeks early in the Biden administration, Republicans have been making a rapid shift in their agenda, message, and perhaps philosophy.
Senator Mitt Romney (R., Utah) proposed an ambitious plan to send checks from the federal government to parents. With Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.), he sponsored legislation to raise the minimum wage, now $7.25 an hour, to $10, and at the same time to require companies to verify that their employees are legally eligible to work in the United States. Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) came out for a $15 minimum wage for employees of large companies and for a wage subsidy to boost take-home pay for low-income workers throughout the economy. Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) endorsed a unionization drive at Amazon in Alabama because its “leadership has decided to wage culture war against working-class values.”
These four come from different segments of the Republican Party, are in different stages of their careers, and ended up taking different attitudes toward Donald Trump’s presidency. All of them are breaking with what had been conservative orthodoxy — and not getting much blowback for it. In the past, Republicans have courted working-class voters by playing down portions of their economic agenda, such as entitlement reform, or by making cultural appeals. These new initiatives combine economics and culture to attempt a positive pitch.
At the same time, Republicans have been declaring a new self-understanding. On Election Night, Hawley tweeted, “We are a working class party now.” A few days later, Rubio was only a little more cautious: “The future of the party is based on a multiethnic, multiracial working-class coalition.” Representative Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) has joined the chorus. The GOP, he said, “is no longer the ‘wine and cheese’ party. It’s the beer and blue jeans party.”
Just what it means to be a working-class party, though — on that there is less clarity and less agreement. Most Republicans haven’t endorsed any legislation to raise the minimum wage or to create a wage subsidy or a child allowance. Rubio criticized Romney’s plan for sending “welfare assistance” to low-income parents.
Republicans fight back
Republicans are finally wising up and using the left’s own tactics against them. Just as the left used countless lawsuits to stymie President Trump’s executive orders, red states are doing the same to counter President Biden’s flurry of radical, destructive EO’s.
Wednesday, 21 state Attorneys General, led by Texas and Montana, filed a federal lawsuit accusing Biden of overstepping his authority by canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline project.
The lawsuit argues that by unilaterally canceling the project and voiding agreed-upon interstate and international contracts, Biden usurped the power to regulate international and interstate commerce that the Constitution reserves solely to Congress. He also violated the rules set by Congress for what actions the President may take regarding the Pipeline. In addition, by doing this under the auspices of his global climate initiatives, he is illegally altering US domestic policy with the intention of conducting foreign policy.
They also point out, just incidentally, that there isn’t even a real environmental justification to canceling the Pipeline beyond virtue-signaling to the environmentalist lobby. As I wrote here before, the oil still has to get to the refineries somehow, and if it’s not flowing through a carbon-neutral pipeline, it will have to be transported by diesel trains with the pollution equivalent of adding over 400,000 new cars to the highways.
75% Support Voter ID Laws
As the U.S. Senate considers legislation that would revamp America’s election laws, voters still overwhelmingly support laws requiring that voters show identification before casting a ballot.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 75% of Likely U.S. Voters believe voters should be required to show photo identification such as a driver’s license before being allowed to vote. Only 21% are opposed to such a requirement. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
Thirty-six states have enacted some form of voter ID law, but those laws would be nullified if the Senate approves H.R. 1, which passed the House on a party-line vote. Critics say H.R. 1 “would force states to allow anyone to vote who simply signs a form saying that they are who they claim they are.”
WMP PUBLISHES END-OF-CYCLE REPORT
New research published by the Wesleyan Media Project co-directors in The Forum: A Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics (gated) provides a post-mortem on the fast and furious political advertising in the 2020 cycle. Our analysis of the volume and spending on political advertising—both on television and online—suggests a few initial conclusions. First, ad volumes in 2020 were off the charts.
Second, Democrats’ dominance of advertising on television was clear, with pro-Biden ads outnumbering pro-Trump ads two to one or even three to one in most media markets in battleground states. Democratic ad advantages were evident in U.S. Senate and U.S. House races as well. Third, it was a big year for digital, with digital ad spending’s share up considerably from 2016 and 2018. Fourth, ads in 2020 were slightly less negative than in previous years. Finally, interest group ads accounted for 1 in every 4 ads aired in federal races.
1. Ad Volumes Were Very High
Presidential ad airings on broadcast television in the 2019-2020 cycle numbered 2.35 million, more than double the 1.03 million ad airings in 2015-2016 (Figure 1, Panel A). In the 2011-2012 election cycle, there were 1.43 million ad airings. Of course, looking at the whole election cycle includes the massive ad spending by Michael Bloomberg, and to a lesser extent, Tom Steyer, in the Democratic nomination race. If one only looks at ads since September 1 in each year (shown in Panel B on the right of Figure 1), then ad airings in 2020 (804,000) are more than double airings in 2016 (386,000) and are considerably greater than airings in 2012 (634,000).
Protect the innovation that brought us COVID vaccines
The breakneck pace of COVID-19 vaccine development will go down in history books as one of the great triumphs of modern medicine.
Just over a year ago, few had even heard of the novel coronavirus. Now, COVID-19 vaccines are being administered to millions of people every day. These vaccines have marked a turning point in the pandemic response — particularly for high-risk populations, like seniors.
And yet, these are precisely the kind of medical breakthroughs — albeit accelerated — that the U.S. pharmaceutical industry routinely delivers to patients.
If there was ever a doubt, the pandemic has made clear that protecting the innovation ecosystem is critical to combat large-scale health crises and save the lives of the most vulnerable among us.
Not long ago, it was unthinkable that two safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines would be authorized for emergency use in the United States by December 2020. As many were quick to point out, previous vaccines had taken years — sometimes over a decade — to come to fruition. Before COVID-19, the fastest vaccine ever developed took four years to reach patients.
Poll: Clarence Thomas Is GOP’s Most Popular Supreme Court Justice
According to an Economist and YouGov poll, Justice Clarence Thomas is the Republican Party’s most popular justice on the Supreme Court of the United States.
The survey asked whether there was a favorable or unfavorable opinion of the justices and found Thomas had a favorability of 59 percent within the Party, along with Justice Amy Coney Barrett with 55 percent and Justice Brett Kavanaugh with 53 percent favorability.
The top three best-known justices had very public controversial confirmation hearings, which could be one of the main factors in their overall public recognition. The three justices were also were in the top five justices the public had an option on. Sixty-seven percent had an opinion on Thomas, 66 percent had an opinion on Kavanaugh, and 64 percent had an opinion on Barrett, according to the survey.
The U.K.’s Response to Russian and Chinese Nuclear Aggression
Last Tuesday, the United Kingdom rolled out its long-anticipated National Security Integrated Review. The section regarding the enhancement of the U.K.’s nuclear forces is refreshingly straightforward and contains much of the same logic that should underpin forthcoming U.S. decisions on the modernization of our own strategic deterrent. The U.K. declares that “A minimum, credible, independent nuclear deterrent, assigned to the defence of NATO, remains essential in order to guarantee our security and that of our allies.” The U.K. also explicitly and wisely rejects the concept of a “no-first-use” policy and succinctly outlines why. Taken together, this has been the U.K. policy for decades, and it is good to see that the Prime Minister and Her Majesty’s government see no reason to change the policy.
But the U.K. clearly recognizes that something has changed: the environment and nature of the threats facing our NATO ally and ourselves. Currently, Moscow has an arsenal of 68 nuclear-tipped missile defense interceptors designed to ensure the Putin regime’s survival in the event of conflict. This system, decades-old, is designed to intercept ballistic missiles launched from either land or sea. The Russians are upgrading the system under project A-235 Nudol, which will reportedly employ a new, conventional version of the missile with a longer range and even higher accuracy.
Nor are Russian missile defense upgrades confined only to the Moscow region. The introduction of the S-500 is intended to provide Moscow with additional capability (beyond that of the S-300 and S-400 systems Russia already has) to engage intermediate and shorter-range threats with ballistic, cruise, or hypersonic trajectories. Estimated to come online in 2025, the S-500 can reportedly engage multiple targets simultaneously, at altitudes of up to 25 miles into the stratosphere. The proliferation of adversary missile defense systems isn’t just limited to the Russian Federation, however. When it comes to military modernization, the Dragon tends to copy the Bear. The Chinese are purchasing Russian S-300, and S-400 systems and likely will seek to buy the S-500 as well while investing billions of dollars of their own into missile defense programs.
What was Vladimir Lenin’s remedy for his unfolding socialist catastrophe early in 1921? Free markets
A century ago, the Mother Ship of Socialism—the Soviet Union—was teetering on the precipice. The Poles had just vanquished the hopes of dictator Vladimir Lenin to sweep across Europe. Under the bludgeon of Marxist central planning, the economy had collapsed to a fraction of its pre-war dimensions. The country was seething in discontent. Insurrection seemed imminent. Indeed, the month of March 1921 had begun with hungry Soviet soldiers and sailors mounting the Kronstadt Rebellion against the Bolshevik regime.
What was Lenin’s remedy for his unfolding socialist catastrophe? It wasn’t more socialism, at least for the moment. That would be like chasing a glass of tainted water with a gallon of Clorox. Desperate to reverse the consequences of socialism, Lenin turned to their only known antidote—capitalism.
Sunday marked the 100th anniversary of the start of Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP). In a stunning about-face on March 21, 1921, the NEP began undoing the previous four years. Expropriation of businesses and the nationalization of industries stopped. Lenin proclaimed a partial restoration of, in his own words, “a free market and capitalism.” Even state-owned firms would seek to operate on a “profit” basis. Individuals could own small enterprises again. Market prices would be permitted in place of state directives.
A little bit of freedom goes a long way. In this instance, it turned the economy around and saved the infant Bolshevik tyranny. But it did not last long. Three years later, Lenin would be dead. Before the end of the decade, Stalin obliterated the NEP with a massive collectivist campaign to re-socialize the economy. Of the NEP, former US national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in his 1989 book, The Grand Failure, “For many Russians, even more than sixty years later, these were the best years of the era ushered in by the revolution of 1917.”
The Long March Through the Corporations
That all cultural institutions in America have been taken over by the Left is beyond question. The media, the academy, Hollywood—all are now in its clutches. Conservatives still cling to talk radio, just as tightly as they do to their guns and bibles, as President Obama so dismissively put it, but that is about the only redoubt of the “sense-making” institutions they still have.
This was no accident. Those who have studied the genesis of this annexation know that it was a deliberate “long march through the institutions.” That campaign was conceived in the late 1960s by the violent German activist Rudi Dutschke, a disciple of the non-violent but much more dangerous Frankfurt School academic Herbert Marcuse, who approved of Dutschke’s plan.
Today, this strategy manifests in the demand that institutions be “woke.” The term, borrowed from African-American slang for being awake, has come to mean not just any type of liberalism, but one denoted by an obsequious obsession with social issues, denunciations of “whiteness,” the insistence that the freest and most prosperous society today is hopelessly racist and in need of deep change, and the intolerant resolve to censor any deviation from any of these concepts through cancel culture. Other American institutions are teetering on the verge of a woke takeover.
The Churches—as in the institutionalized Abrahamic faiths—have long been bastions of conservatism by their very nature, but they are now in danger of seeing their commitment to true justice and the care for the poor and the stranger hijacked in the name of Social Justice, a concept that undermines religion. Social Justice abandons forgiveness and concentrates on punishment—especially, but not only, through forced redistribution of resources according to membership in categories of the supposedly oppressed and marginalized. Forgetting past sins, which the Bible repeatedly tells us is what God routinely does, is verboten.
Professional sports, too, have turned into pageants for ritualistic woke denunciations of the country and its history, the white race, etc. Despite being one of the most integrated areas of American life, the NBA, the NFL, and now MLB constantly remind viewers in need of escapism that our country is uniquely, structurally, institutionally, and systemically racist, sexist, and homophobic.
