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Since the Democrats’ shellacking at the polls on November 5, the party has been undergoing a fractious discussion about what went wrong. A whole roster of the usual suspects has been mooted, including neglect of the working class. But that accurate assessment still doesn’t get that the problem is leftism per se, not bad candidates, polling, tactics, or whatever, no more than New Coke failed for those reasons. It was just a bad product.
Take Vermont Socialist, er, Independent Bernie Sanders’s scolding of his party: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. . . . And they’re right.”
We know what Sanders means: “changing” to a full socialist planned economy managed by the state, rather than the over-regulated hybrid we now have. But those features of our dirigiste economy have created conditions, dysfunctions, and moral hazards––the tax, spend, print, borrow, hyper-regulate, and redistribute money that during the Biden-Harris administration unleashed inflation and wage stagnation that drove voters, including traditional Democrat constituencies, to vote for Trump.
Nor is the problem that “real” socialism has “never been tried.” History is littered with attempts to create a successful socialist or communist economy, and every one we know of has failed––not because it wasn’t properly managed or had a bad “messaging strategy,” but because unlike free-market capitalism, it has been predicated on unreal assumptions about human nature and motivation, as well as ignoring the power of freedom and choice.
Instead, “They believed,” as Lee Edwards of the Heritage Foundation writes, “with John Maynard Keynes, that ‘the state is wise and the market is stupid.’” Edwards refutes Keynes with this historical datum from a New York Times article: “Singapore, an Asian city-state of only 2 million people, exported 20 percent more machinery to the West in 1987 than all of Eastern Europe.”
Whatever the motives that have inflicted these assaults on our economy, socialism has serially failed for more than a century. Whether from sincere if flawed convictions, or selfish greed for pelf and power–– in the end, socialism is a form of slow-motion suicide. No nation––let alone one with living standards as high as ours––can survive such insults to our productivity, innovation, and economic growth, especially when these policies are accompanied by the redistribution of money to the unproductive. Character is eroded and virtues lost when people grow accustomed to getting something for nothing, for they soon come to see such feckless largess as an unalienable right to which they are permanently entitled.
Twenty-five centuries has given us copious evidence that civilizations can be destroyed by this malign dynamic. In the 18th century, Edward Gibbon chronicled dangers as it unfolded in ancient Athens: “In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all – security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.”
Such policies and ideas of today’s progressive left aren’t just suicidal. They are so extreme and preposterous that they are surreal, so incredible that they are beyond even the “big lie” made famous by Adolf Hitler, one so huge that “It would never come into [people’s] heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”
Obvious examples include the economically destructive “green energy” policies based on a shaky hypothesis that ignores how much we don’t know factually about how global climate has functioned over billions of years. For now, it lies beyond what mathematician John Allen Paulos calls the “complexity horizon,” “that limit or edge beyond which social laws, events, and regularities are so complex as to be unfathomable, seemingly random.” Yet despite our incomplete understanding, we have embarked on a wildly expensive project to eliminate––without a proven, economical and reliable available substitute––the abundant, cheap fossil fuel energy that has created nearly every dimension of our rich modern world.
Or consider transgenderism, the anti-scientific idea that biological sex is due not to DNA or God, but to some private intuition or fever dream selected from a whole made-up suite of alternatives called “gender.” And from that nonsense has come an obsession with pronouns that callow or neurotic children think should reflect their subjective feelings rather than the rules of the English language. More heinous than that imposition of society from a tiny minority, medical doctors perform irreversible, mutilating surgeries to create a creepy simulacrum of a man or woman.
Finally, as the New Year’s Day terrorist murders in New Orleans––by a jihadist displaying the flag of ISIS––remind us, the worst example of surreal and suicidal leftist “activism” has arisen from the willful blindness that our cognitive elites have indulged towards Islam since the Iranian Islamic Revolution turbocharged the revival of jihad against the West.
One of the most shameless and morally moronic examples of that blindness has been the support for Hamas’s genocidal atrocities against Israel by university students, professors, and administrators. These disgusting displays of support for vicious murderers, antisemitic chants like “Death to Jews,” and acts of violence targeting Jews students––all have been committed with impunity, and are acts of appeasement that have encouraged jihadists that the West is a decaying civilization. What else would you call a people whose young, affluent, free, privileged cognitive elites celebrate a faith diametrically opposed to every tenet that these “woke” poseurs profess?
The Middle Eastern Muslims who have sworn genocidal jihad against Israel, the U.S., and the secularized Western democracies, certainly see an opportunity for undermining the “Great Satan,” as Iran calls the U.S., by exploiting these protestors. Recently, “very grateful Uncle Als—al Qaeda and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,” as the Wall Street Journal put it, have reached out to these Fifth Columnists.
Al Qaeda’s leadership announced, “As we support the assassination and beheading of Zionist unbelievers, so also we value and appreciate the movement of Western protesters and occupiers from among the students of Western universities, who by their occupying and protests have expressed their rejection of the ongoing genocide in proud Gaza.” Muslim students were reminded that jihad is a “legal and divine obligation.” A Columbia “protest leader” affirmed that “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” and advised his colleagues “be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.”
At least not yet. And we might wonder how bougie American day-tripping protestors reacted to the casual reference to “beheadings,” and what sense they made of the term “unbelievers.” Another jihadist message to the protestors, from Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, raised similar questions: “Dear university students in the United States of America, this message is an expression of our empathy and solidarity with you. As the page of history is turning, you are standing on the right side of it. . . . You have now formed a branch of the Resistance Front.”
But what “empathy” could a cleric from an apocalyptic strain of traditional Islam have with secularized American students? And how effective for addressing lefty college students––steeped as they are in the juvenile romance of revolution––to be called a “branch of the Resistance”? Or is he really addressing the many Muslim foreign students participating in the protests? In any case, Khamenei’s direct exhortation to American students clarifies his purpose: “The Quran’s lesson for human relations is: ‘Do not oppress and do not be oppressed,’” he writes. “My advice to you is to become familiar with the Quran.”
The canny injunction about not being an oppressor is surreal, given that the Islamic Iranian Republic has been brutally oppressing its own people, including religious minorities like the Baha’is, for over 46 years, and has strictly adhered to the Koran concerning the treatment of infidels, and the oppressive precepts of sharia law regarding apostasy, blasphemy, heresy, the subjection of women, and homosexuality. But the most significant part of his message is his advice to American young elites “to become familiar with the Koran.”
This exhortation, moreover, is also the traditional “Dawa,” the summons to infidels to convert to Islam, issued before a jihadist battle in order to make it a legitimate holy war fighting to conquer the world. As the Iranian Islamic Republic’s founder the Ayatollah Khomeini preached, “We shall export our revolution to the whole world. Until the cry ‘There is no god but Allah’ resounds over the world, there will be jihad.”
The enthusiastic support both for genocidal terrorists murdering in order to cleanse Israel of “infidels,” and for the proxies who serve a radical jihadist regime that represents everything these posturing students claim to believe, is surreally ignorant. But it is also suicidal, given that for nearly half a century the U.S. has been infidel enemy No. 1 for Khomeinist Muslims, and that Iran is aligned with our geopolitical rivals Russia and China.
The Dems’ suicidal surrealism has been endangering our country and institutions for decades. Let’s hope that the new administration discredits and discards it, and restores our country to reality.
The Dems suicidal and whacko ideas, especially socialism – which
ultimately segue into tyranny – inevitably gravitate to suicidal and
whacko, albeit brutal, Islam. The two forces remind one of a couple
irresistibly attracted to each other but whose ultimate union will only
end in disaster.
Islam is totalitarian and the economies of Muslim countries are dismal.
As in socialism, they are – to varying degrees – centrally planned by
government with economically poor results. Saudi Arabia has improved
as has Turkey and Indonesia but life remains hard for their people, except
for their elites. Other Muslim countries fare even worse.
The fantasies of the Left about utopia on Earth coexisting with the
Religion of Peace are not harmed in any way by the actual reality of life
in terror prone, poor Muslim nations. Especially among the young nitwits
marching for the Palestinian cause. And, as Dr. Thornton points out, the
Left has a willful blindness towards the dangers to non-Muslims from
Islam – making Islam the ignored bully in the coupling of Democrat
progressives with that barbaric religion.
And the brave protesters are protecting themselves from a flu WHICH DOES’N’T KILL LITTLE TINY BIRDS by wearing masks that don’t stop infection.
FPM is probably the best source of information on the Koran.
How’s this for absurd. For the past several months two aged baby boomers have stood on the corner of a busy intersection of town during the peak evening commute, in all kinds of weather, to hold up their hand made posters that shriek “Stop the Genocide” and “Free Palestine.” During recent frigid temperatures they have donned their kefirs.
The little darlings will be all for the Palyswinians “River to the sea” B.S. and the jihadists until a coordinated attack occurs that wrecks their Leftist campus comfort zone. Then they will be expecting/demanding the cops to protect them…..you know the cops that the students wanted to defund last year.
Sorry les petite etudiants. No one’s coming. Least of all those armed Americans you want to disarm.
So eff off. You are on your own. You sowed the wind. You will reap the whirlwind.
I recently saw a news report showing stats that the LGBTQ-WTF crowd have begun purchasing firearms, ostensibly for defense against being rounded up and put into concentration camps by the MAGA people and/or Trump’s executive orders.
So, the left’s war against Trump backfired on their was against guns. Ain’t that a hoot!
Sorry, that was should have been war, Dang that auto correct.
Where are the Knights Templar when you need them?
We are here. We never went away. Waiting for the right timing.
THE PARTY FOR SOCIALISM AND LIBERATION (PSL) and A.N.S.W.E.R. are the main organizers of the Pro-terrorist groups with their own signs at these protests to prove it.
Here in Albuquerque, the head of PSL i s Joel Marcos Gallegos, on FB “Marxist-Leninist.” The National PSL also organizes and pays for protest leaders to organize mostly at Universities where many of these groups had encampments last spring. Here at UNM, also an encampment with a middle-aged woman from Jewish Voice for Peace who admitted to me, after me acting I supported them, said, “Hamas didn’t do enough!” At other protests, many admit, again me in an act, that they support Hamas and some signs had Intifada. A mob then took over the Student Union but the State Police and UNM PD removed them at 2am. Sixteen arrests, all cases dismissed with their attorney, Ahmad Assed, the President of the Islamic Center NM and who organized a protest IN SUPPORT OF HAMAS over ten years ago which is a first in my observations of protests since ’86. My calls to local media asking for them to interview Assed to see if he still supports Hamas, a terrorist group. Has he sent any type of aid, directly or indirectly, to a TERRORIST GROUP? I find it hard to believe that not one Muslim, or protester, has been arrested for aiding a Terrorist group!!! Is the FBI too afraid to open that can of worms or is it that they side with these DOMESTIC TERRORISTS?
hamas is not a terrorist group they are freedom fighters
True freedom fighters do not rape, torture and embark on massacres without warning.
source? they treat the hostage well while israel commit genocide
you implying israel massacres with warning
They are human garbage with enabling idiots carrying water for them.
Hopefully, Trump will miserably destroy those brute beasts. (The reign of Sleepy is over.)
no you are ignorant
Thus spake another mindless programmed entity with no identifiable intelligence but with coding limitations demonstrates “most human” conversational behaviour.
huh what are you talking about?
Freedom from who? Israel hadn’t been in the Gaza S-hole in at least the last 10 years when they handed it over to the Palyswinians.
Freedom fighters? Yeah, it takes real courage to gun down a bunch of unarmed kids. You effing pussy.
israel is one killing innocents and Leila Farsakh, associate professor of political science at University of Massachusetts Boston, has said that after 1977, “the military government in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (WBGS) expropriated and enclosed Palestinian land and allowed the transfer of Israeli settlers to the occupied territories.” She notes that settlers continued to be governed by Israeli laws, and that a different system of military law was enacted “to regulate the civilian, economic and legal affairs of Palestinian inhabitants”. She says, “[m]any view these Israeli policies of territorial integration and societal separation as apartheid, even if they were never given such a name.”[67]
In a lot of Politically Correct Homes there is a sign in the window that says: “Science is real.”
The last time I checked, biology was a science.
I guess these people think they get to decide which science is real and which science is not real.
huh what are you talking about?
this is completely false
He called Israel an “apartheid Zionist regime” that is committing “genocide” in Gaza.
https://thehill.com/policy/international/4694384-irans-supreme-leader-applauds-us-campus-protests-against-israel/
free palestine and the guy who wrote this is a ignorant
So how long do we have to put up with your ignorant propaganda? And why aren’t you over in Gaza fighting the IDF, pussy-man.
I guess it’s so much safer protesting on a U.S. college campus surrounded by beta males and angry white girls, where you can be fashionable in your little Keffiya.
Oh yeah. Try complete sentences next time, douchebag boy.
Why aren’t you over in gaza fighting hamas then? huh? lol what argument is this and didn’t even debunk me you ignorant
Khameini’s statement that the Qu’ran guarantees freedom from oppression to those who do not oppress others is completely true provided that you happen to be a male Muslim, because the Qu’ran does not regard ill-treatment of anyone who is not a male Muslim as oppression.
As women are routinely arrested and/or beaten for not wearing their potato sacks or hijabs (or not deemed worn correctly) proves your point.
Jug-eared Barry smuggly admonished us that women have a right to wear hijabs & burkas, as a response to hoax reports of “MAGA scumbags” tearing them off the heads of muslim women.
What those women really want (except for leftist muslim women) is the right to take that garbage off & not get beaten to death.
no you ignorant you are a infidel
no this is false
islam have woman rights it a peaceful reilgion
“The Progressive believes in precisely two things: his own magnificence and the constructive power of brute force. In combination, they lead him naturally from the role of pestiferous busybody to brutal dictator. Where the productive man dreams of the things he might create if only left alone by his fellows, the Progressive dreams of the world he could create if only the lives and property of his fellows were at his disposal. The roots of his pathology lie in that oldest and most destructive of all human vices, the desire for the power to rule over other men.”. – N. Halkides
Just like back in the 1960’s!! When there was any Republican type victory, the lefties would sit on their couches and conjure things like closets full of guns to be used against the certain attack of the conservatives, things like that. Their imagination knows no bounds.
the west is not serious about fighting terrorism . thats why they are prohibiting israel from winning . they will be serious if they empty their countries of muslims .