Good analysis and right on!

What citizens can do to resist the ruling class’s redefinitions of moral and cultural norms.

The ruling class also refers to abortionists as providers of medical services for “reproductive rights,” and indicts as “extremists” those who illustrate what the abortionists do with photos of what surely look like children, with arms, legs, and heads chopped or burned. Yet each of these little ones’ DNA shows him or her to be a son or a daughter of a particular mother and father. Lincoln argued that no one has the right to exclude any other person from the human race. Why is it right so to dispose of millions of little sons and daughters? By what right does anyone dishonor as “extremists” those who show the victims for the human beings they are?

Our ruling politicians, media figures, and so on don’t even try to show that life results from meaningless evolution or that anthropogenic global warming exists  (tomorrow it will be something else). By answering questions about how they know such things, through appeals by appealing to Authority, they reveal their scientific illiteracy. Thus do they demand that you declare your faith in them as “Science R-Us,” or be pilloried as anti-science.

RELATED: Religious Liberty and the Left’s Endgame

But science is reason, not pretense. Only the power of government can translate scientific illiteracy into scientific pretense. What President Dwight Eisenhower warned against in his 1961 farewell address has become our reality: “domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money.” Government money is the means by which ruling-class power has become the scientific pretense by which we are instructed what to eat, how to shower, what medical care is proper and what is not, and what to think about right and wrong.

If anyone deserves labels such as “divisive” and “destructive,” is it not this ruling class?

The principle of equality is the bedrock of the rule of law. Creating “protected classes” of citizens shattered that bedrock. No vote by our elected representatives ever did that. Hubert Humphrey, the principal sponsor of the 1964 Civil Rights bill, staked his hard-earned reputation for honesty on the proposition that the bill’s anti-discrimination provisions could never result in preferential treatment for Negroes, because this would contradict the bill’s central intent. Nevertheless, as courts enhanced executive powers to enforce anti-discrimination, they effectively codified discrimination on behalf of “protected classes,” defined first by race, and later by sex, age, disability, origin, religion. Ruling-class insiders use these officious codes to prey upon their opponents. Justice Kennedy’s and President Obama’s assurances that their creation of a right to homosexual marriage, and concomitant creation of a new “protected class,” should not reduce the rights of any other Americans rest on reputations poles apart from that of honest Hubert.

RELATED: The Burdens of Thought Policing

Why should not all “classes” be equally protected? Does the rule of law even admit of “classes”? Does not the 14th Amendment promise “the equal protection of the laws” to all alike? But when presidents and supreme courts tell us that “equal” can mean “unequal” as willfully as that “is” can mean “is not,” when what is written counts less than what the powerful want, what can “law” mean? What obligation has anyone to obey such pretend-law?

If anyone deserves labels such as “divisive” and “destructive,” is it not this ruling class?

*      *      *

Demands from on high to join in mouthing lies call forth a visceral reaction: “Who the [expletive deleted] do they think they are to impose this warp of reality on us?”

Typically, however, people who live under unaccountable power follow fashion publicly and keep to family and friends such opinions as can get them in trouble. Crouching protectively, they secede from the regime individually. Thus lacking confidence in the future, they hollow out the country. America used to be an exception. No more. The official opposition in the Obama era — the Republican party’s leadership — now leads ordinary citizens in self-censorship, further convincing us that our dissent is lonely and futile. But to approve of officious lies, thereby tacitly normalizing unaccountable power, is to become worthy of it. As the great Solzhenitsyn reminds us, the sine qua non of liberty is refusal to live by lies.

We need neither submit nor secede.

As the great Solzhenitsyn reminds us, the sine qua non of liberty is refusal to live by lies.

Americans tell pollsters that we distrust our bipartisan ruling class. Accusations of racism, sexism, ignorance, etc. have not convinced us. People who pay attention to public affairs are not ignorant about how these accusations contrast with reality. The several pro-life organizations have spread the elements of embryology and moral logic to the ever-expanding millions of Americans who care about the sanctity of human life. Similarly, the Family Research Council and the National Organization for Marriage have bolstered the common sense that the words “marriage” and “family” derive their meaning from heterosexual monogamy, and that American society is founded on that. The Club for Growth has become the standard reference by which millions of voters judge the economic probity of policies and candidates. When the public thinks about the right to self-defense, it looks to the National Rifle Association or Gun Owners of America. And so it goes.

RELATED: Cultural Conservatives Have Barely Begun to Fight

The practical problem in America has been that when the ruling class trains its united wrath against persons in any one sector — e.g., supporters of marriage as the dictionary and the law have defined it, or those who support economic probity or the right to keep and bear arms — the general public quietly stands by. No longer accustomed to speaking together, Americans hang separately. For the members of the public to transcend their isolation enough to threaten the ruling class’s hold on the commanding heights of American society would require a nationwide movement with which disparate individuals could identify, and which could encourage them to join together and speak up.

Typically, such movements are associated with presidential campaigns. Today’s campaigns, however, consist of focus-group-tested sound bites. Listening to them diminishes us all. To transcend this, to reclaim the American people’s freedom from arbitrary power over minds and souls as well as bodies, to expose the false premises on which the ruling class’s pretenses rest, a candidate would have to imitate Abraham Lincoln. His debates with Stephen Douglas — no notes, much less teleprompters — dealt with complex matters before audiences few of whom had gone beyond elementary school, and enabled them seriously to discuss the choices they faced. Said Lincoln: “Let the people know the facts, and the Country will be saved.”

In our time, if a candidate were to challenge his opponents to bare-knuckle, Lincoln–Douglas sessions, his example might lead fellow citizens to reject the combination of poisonous sloganeering and of dominance, submissiveness, and corruption that now passes for politics. Retaking control of our lives requires us to reason with one another and to decide for ourselves what is good and bad, better and worse, true and false. This is how it was when we were free.

— Angelo M. Codevilla is professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University. He is the author of 14 books, including To Make and Keep Peace (2014) and The Ruling Class (2010). 

Re post from The Daily Sheeple July 6th, 2015

By Joshua Krause When it comes to people the government fears the most, those who live in rural areas must be somewhere near the top of the list. Not that there’s anything wrong with this particular group of people. It’s just that they’re a demographic that the government often struggles to contend with. They usually have the resources to take care of themselves, and often by necessity, which makes it difficult to corral this population. When you have no choice but to take care of yourself because government services are too far away, they don’t have any good excuses for telling you what to do. They know that if they tried to micromanage your life, they would utterly fail (at least more than they do already). Now, contrast that with urban dwellers. The population density of cities makes it easier for them to control that population. One cop in the countryside may be miles away from the nearest person, but a cop in the city has rapid access to thousands of people. They’re never very far away. Simply put, the cost of exerting control over a population is much less in a city than it is in the countryside. So it should go without saying that if the government could move those people out of the countryside and into the cities, they could rest easy knowing that everyone is firmly planted under their watchful eye, and away from their rural blindspot. Unfortunately, that may very well be what they have in store for those who live outside of the city. They’ve also been planning this for a very long time. An author for the thedailyherb.com recently stumbled upon a very interesting article written in 1998, for a local newspaper in Montana. It was written in part, to expose a plan made by the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, to try and relocate rural populations into the cities.

In the article, Libby County Commissioner, Rita Windom, informs us that she and other commissioners were approached by Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks (FWP) state land manager, Darlene Edge, with a proposal to cooperate in driving rural residents out of the Montana countryside into cities. When commissioners responded with horror, Windom says Edge replied. “Can’t you see we are doing you a favor by forcing people to move from rural areas into the urban areas. That way you can close roads…Why don’t you work with us and move these people out of the rural areas and into the urban areas so cities can shoulder more of the responsibilities and the county can save money?” This exchange took place in a meeting regarding a document called The Wildlife Program Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), of which only 300 were published. According to Windom, there was very little public input because the few public meetings held were so poorly advertised.

As you can see, the when dealing with lower ranking government officials, they like to conceal these plans under the guise of saving money. However, when they try to sell it to the people, it’s always about environmentalism. The Author makes a pretty good case that these measures were connected to Agenda 21; the UN plan to depopulate the rural areas of America, and move those people to the cities. However, they don’t call it Agenda 21 anymore. That term has been thoroughly demonized by so called “conspiracy theorists” and caries a lot of baggage. No, the government’s plan to relocate rural residents will be conducted under another name.

Policies leading to rural cleansing are found in the document, Agenda 21: the Earth Summit Strategy to Save Our Planet, but another important source is associated with one of the other documents introduced at Rio.  That was the Convention on Biological Diversity.  It has been shown that the Wildlands Project is the central mechanism by which the Convention on Biological Diversity is to be implemented.  The Wildlands Project calls for humans to be removed from one-half of the American land mass, and to create uninhabited corridors for wildlife to move freely from Alaska to Yellowstone Park, or farther south.  It was written by radical environmentalists working in United Nations nongovernmental organizations with the full knowledge and aid of U.S. federal agencies such as U.S. Forest Service, BLM, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, EPA and others. It appears that the Wildlands Project is now being implemented, under another name, in Idaho and the West through the Western Governors Association’s Wildlife Corridors Initiative (WCI). 

But in truth, it will probably be implemented under many names. The author only speaks for Montana and Idaho, but the scope of this agenda includes the entire United States. Different regions will likely have different labels for it. So if you live in a rural area, pay attention to some of policies that are being carried out by local government agencies. You should be especially suspicious of anything that is done in the name of environmentalism. They’re not all bad of course, but sometimes, preserving the environment and saving money is just a cover for pushing folks off their land. Added by Centinel2012 This is a real program being implemented now in North East Ohio (Cleveland/Akron) I have been to the planning sessions and the goal is to complete this by 2040.  The program is being run from  Cleveland and is called Vibrant 2040. This program is funded by the US federal government.

By Prof. Paul Eidelberg

However one classifies his book “American Sniper,” Chris Kyle refers to the Muslim insurgents in Iraq as the “bad guys.” He does not insert inverted commas around the word “bad,” the practice of American academics tainted by moral relativism.

Kyle, a 100% red, white, and blue American and a Navy SEAL, knew without a college degree, that the insurgents in Iraq consisted of bad guys, not because they were Muslims, but because they used Muslim children as decoys. Since this barbaric behavior is condoned by Islam, it would be reasonable to conclude that Islam, whatever its positive qualities, harbors intrinsic and enormous evil, a judgment reached by former Muslims such as Syrian-born psychiatrist Dr. Wafa Sultan, now living in America.

However, such moral judgment is taboo not only among morally neutral American college professors, but also among college-educated officials of the American State Department, such as John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, appointees of President Barack Obama. In fact, John Bolton, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, has written in his book Surrender Is Not an Option, that “moral equivalency” permeates the State Department.

This pernicious doctrine obviously precludes moral condemnation of regimes, such as Iran, and terrorist organizations, such as the Palestinian Authority, which have used young children to explode mine fields or as human bombs – and in the name of Allah.

The officials of the American State Department, the most highly university-educated department in American government, conduct foreign policy under the aura of moral and cultural relativism. It’s hard to see how America can survive with such people at the helm. Indeed, why would any sensible soldier want to risk life and limb in the service of a country led by such people?

By the way, it was reported on November 16, 2007, that the number of U.S. Army deserters was up 80% since the Iraq War started in 2003. To be sure, there were several causes – such as an inept American President – but it would be a mistake to disregard the moral and cultural relativism that flourishes in academia, and which today saps the fighting spirit of Americans despite the war Islam declared against America on 9/11.

Indeed, although American Sniper will not go down as great literature, it reveals some of the patriotic and humane qualities of American soldiers, qualities which are being undermined by academic moral relativism.