Of the sons of Issachar, men who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do, their chiefs were two hundred; and all their kinsmen were at their command — 1 Chronicles 12:32
Prime Minister Thatcher: If the hon. Gentleman will just listen, he might hear something that he did not know. The average pensioner now has twice as much to hand on to his children as he did 11 years ago. They are thinking about the future. This massive rise in our living standards reflects the extraordinary transformation of the private sector.
Mr. Hughes: There is no doubt that the Prime Minister, in many ways, has achieved substantial success. There is one statistic, however, that I understand is not however challenged, and that is that, over her 11 years as Prime Minister, the gap between the richest 10 per cent. and the poorest 10 per cent, has widened substantially. At the end of her chapter of British politics, how can she say that she can justify the fact that many people in a constituency such as mine are relatively much poorer, much less well housed and much less well provided for than they were in 1979? Surely she accepts that that is not a record that she or any Prime Minister can be proud of.
Prime Minister Thatcher: Mr Speaker, ALL levels of income are better off than they were in 1979. But what the honorable member is saying is that he would rather the poor were poorer provided the rich were less rich. That’s why you will NEVER create the wealth for better social services as we have. And what a policy! Yes, he would rather have the poor poorer, provided the rich were less rich. That is the liberal policy.
Mr. Hughes: No.
Prime Minister Thatcher: Yes, it came out! He didn’t intend it to, but it did.
[Different liberal socialist Mr. Sillars]: The prime minister is aware that I detest every single one of her domestic policies and I have never hidden that fact.
Prime Minister Thatcher: And I think that the honorable gentleman knows that I have the same contempt for his socialist policies as the people of East Europe who have experienced it. I think I must have hit the right nail on the head when I pointed out the logic of those policies are they’d rather have the poor poorer. Once they start to talk about the gap, they’d rather the gap were that [indicating] - down here – not that [indicating], but that [indicating]. So long as the gap is smaller, so long as the gap is smaller, they’d rather have the poor poorer. You do not create wealth and opportunity that way. You do not create a property-owning democracy that way.
Margaret Thatcher was EVERY BIT as correct about the liberal American socialists like Obama who are running this country into its grave as she was about the liberal British socialists of her era.
“I came to office with one deliberate intent: to change Britain from a dependent to a self-reliant society — from a give-it-to-me, to a do-it-yourself nation. A get-up-and-go, instead of a sit-back-and-wait-for-it Britain.”
I was speaking of the Labour party wanting to renationalise privatised industry. Four of the industries that we have privatised are in the top 10 British businesses, but at the very bottom of the list of 1,000 British businesses lie four nationalised industries. Labour’s industries consume the wealth that others create and give nothing back.
That’s exactly what Obama has given us: the nationalized industries of his crony capitalist fascism where only HE and his bureaucrat thugs get to decide who wins and who loses, who gets to keep their money and who gets their money taxed, who succeeds and who fails.
And that sum of massive Obama failure has grown massively since I wrote that a year ago – as Fisker alone proves.
Reality simply doesn’t matter to dishonest hypocrite liberals or to their dishonest and hypocritical ideology of liberalism. There is simply no contact with the real world. The Word of God enables humans to – at least in part – be able to see the world accurately, as God sees it. Liberals hate the Word of God and the Judeo-Christian worldview which is based on the Word of God. Instead, liberals view the world through demonic secular humanist theories such as existentialism, postmodernism and yes, Marxism and its socialist cousin fascism. They are blind fools leading a blind and foolish world into the heart of darkness. And they are about to get their way.
It’s not that conservatives have no convincing arguments; it is rather that, between the facts that a) mainstream media propaganda deceitfully distorts the conservative message; and b) we are entering the last days before the Antichrist and the mark of the beast as God has decreed that it is time that the world receive the judgment for its wickedness that it deserves – which is why we have the terrible choice between a Mormon Mitt Romney who believes Jesus Christ is the spirit brother of Lucifer and an Obama who actually IS the spirit brother of Lucifer; c) which results in RINO turds like John McCain, Lindsey Grahem and Mitt Romney being the inarticulate voices of the Republican Party who can’t argue their way out of a wet paper bag on a rainy day.
Todays’ leaders have no courage, no backbone and no clue. Because they are men and women manufactured by politics rather than men and women shaped by virtue.
Now we are cursed with Barack Hussein Obama, a fool who believes the disease is the cure. And if his “cure” doesn’t work to plague America with more of his disease. And then more disease, and still more.
When God damned Europe for its wickedness in the wake of the rise of Stalin and Hitler, there WERE no intelligent voices of opposition who were allowed to rise up and confront the evil and stupidity that were swallowing up the world. In nation after nation in Europe, you had the dismal choice between an evil, terrible choice and a slightly less evil, terrible choice. And again and again the most evil and terrible choice was the one that prevailed.
We won’t see your like again, Mrs. Thatcher. But God bless you for your good work on this earth. The world desperately needs leaders like you, but they will not rise. Because the beast is coming – and fools must reign to welcome him and his coming mark.
Enjoy your rest with God in heaven, Iron Lady. You truly earned it.
Would that we had your like now instead of the God damn America that we have under this failed presidency of a man who is every bit as foolish as the fools you exposed.
Few casual liberals realize the fact that the entire economic premise underlying economic Marxism flows from a hostility toward God and toward religion.
Atheism and a spirit of hostility and hatred toward God and toward religion is at the very core of Marxism. In the words of Karl Marx:
The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.
What did Karl Marx mean by this?
Basically, Marx taught that the world is divided into the haves and the have-nots – which is everywhere being shouted around us today. And the have-nots were being oppressed by the haves. But rather than the people rising up in rage and seizing what Marx declared was theirs by force as Marx wanted them to, the people were instead happy in their religion, which according to Marx had been invented by the rich to keep the proletariat in bondage. Marx acknowledged that in his day, religion was the order of the world; but he determined – and in fact succeeded – in imposing a NEW world system. Since religion is nothing but an illusion, and materialism is all there actually is, the happiness that the people had in their Christianity was nothing more than a narcotic that kept them in bondage. The only “real” reality is economic reality. And therefore the solution presented by Marx was for the people to set aside their shackles of religion and rise up in a spirit of rage and take what was theirs by force. Only then could the people have actual, “material” happiness.
The eight commandment in the Holy Bible is “You shall not steal,” and the tenth commandment is, “You shall not covet.” Both ultimately flow from violation of the first commandment, “You shall have no other gods before Me.” Marxism – as Marx acknowledged – overthrew this system and imposed one in which the State replaced God. And where God in the Bible had commanded man NOT to covet anything that belonged to his neighbor, Marxism was in fact BASEDon coveting. “Hey, look at those damn rich people! They’ve got everything! Let’s take their stuff!” Because apart from that looking over the wall at your neighbor’s house and coveting what he had and becoming angry that he or she had things that you did not have, Marxism never gets off the ground.
God said, “Thou shalt not covet. Thou shalt not steal.” And Marxists – and frankly liberals and Democrats – declared instead, “Thou shalt covet thy neighbor’s possessions, and thou shalt seize them and redistribute them.”
The sin of Achan as described in Joshua chapter 7 (especially 7:21) follows this order: first you covet, THEN you steal. And thus economic Marxism, based on atheism and upon replacing God with the all-powerful socialist State, first ordains abolishing God, then ordains materialism and demagogues coveting, and then ultimately empowers the all-powerful government that they have erected to steal in the name of the people.
The book of Ephesians 5:5 identifies coveting with idolatry. And this idolatrous coveting is a root-sin from which all others flow. Covetousness comes from idolatry because you are taking God off the throne and replacing Him with yourself – or in the case of Marxism, with the State – in God’s place. We covet what belongs to others because we have a misplaced value system. As our desires and our pleasure are directed more and more toward more material things, we covet and begin to feel entitled to take – or allow the State to take – what others have built and worked for. And many people as a result of this system have a seething anger toward those who have more than they because their unrealistic expectations aren’t being met. God created us to find our fulfillment and our happiness in Him, but Marxism – and liberalism – says piss on that. God is an illusion, and we can take what we want from others to make ourselves happy.
“reveal this dark secret that lies at the deepest recesses of the human soul, which is our susceptibility to become slaves. It’s there. It’s ready. It can pounce at any moment and transform us into serfs.”
Rabbi Lapin points out that King Nimrod didn’t actually come out and say, “Let’s build a tower.” Rather, he said, “Let’s make bricks.” And united the people in the endeavor of making bricks. And this is important, as Lapin explains:
Bricks are really important things here. Later on in the five books of Moses, ancient Jewish wisdom highlights the fact that that an altar — an altar to God must not be built of bricks, right? It has to be built with stones.
Why? Because this tension between the bricks and stones is absolutely crucial. Bricks and stones are a biblical metaphor for the way people should be stones, and the way we are easily pulled to be bricks.
Two differences between bricks and stones.
Number one, every brick is the same as every other brick. That’s the whole point. They’re totally interchangeable. If you want to turn people to bricks, you are able to turn them into interchangeable social economic cogs that can be just plugged around society.
The second thing about bricks is they’re made by man. Stones are each unique. When we have a tradition in Western civilization that man is created the image of God, what it really means is that just as God is unique, so is every single human being is unique, just like a stone.
Don’t allow other people to turn you into bricks, retain the personality of a person for which you are created.
It’s a difference between “yes, I can,” and “yes, we can.” [...]
And one way it really works is that in every epoch, there is always going to be somebody who tries to seize power. What these 11 verses — these nine verses in Chapter 11 tell us is here are the things you have to watch out for. Here are the things that a potential tyrant is going to do in order to seduce you.
Number one, he is going to have a tower. Now, a tower means reaching for the skies — appealing to everything that is great in human nature.
Now, look, any leader, whether you’re taking care of your family, whether you’re running a business, whether you’re a military leader — you know, military recruiters don’t say: Hey, come join us. The food is horrible. You’re likely to get killed and you’re going to be a horribly hot — they don’t do that. Step forward and play a role to defend your country, be all you could be. You appeal to the highest in human nature.
That’s what tyrants learn to do as well.
And we don’t need God. We don’t need stones. We don’t need anything that God created because you are great, people are great. All of this is going to be built with bricks and we’re going to make you all interchangeable. That’s why tyrants will do exactly that.
Conservative thought emphasizes that individuality of the Bible as told by the God who created us in His image. We’re not interchangeable bricks unified by an all-powerful State, we’re individual stones. But Barack Obama is firmly rooted in man as bricks. He says of small business owners, the most individualistic people of all, “You didn’t build that. Government did.” But back in this ancient time, just as they were when Karl Marx emerged onto the scene, people had been worshiping God and content in their religion. But then this King Nimrod came along. The Bible described him as a “hunter of men.” Why? Lapin explained:
Why on earth would this one man, Nimrod, be identified as a hunter? Because he hunted, not animals, he hunted people. Not to kill them, he hunted people to seduce them into becoming his subjects and to allow him to become their master.
Karl Marx and Barack Obama haven’t presented anything new, as Rabbi Lapin explains:
The new idea is — and is presented as the Babel blueprint. This is not long forgotten story. This is actually something which is as relevant today as it will be tomorrow, as it was when Robespierre was conducting the French Revolution. The principle is always the same.
The two competing ways of organizing human society: One is the Abraham vision of individual independence, individual accountability, God-centric — versus the idea of centralized control.
So, Abraham gives the vision of individual independence, which always has to include economic impendence. That’s absolutely crucial. And sure enough, Abraham, first man in the Bible described as a wealthy man, a blessing, a good thing. Not a curse — a good thing.
And what is it that binds all of these interchangeable bricks that Marxism and liberalism want us to become? Mortar. And what is mortar? Lapin again:
Yes now, in Hebrew, mortar is very related — same word really as the word materialism. And you can actually even hear the similarity transfer into the English language. Mortar — M, T, R are the key consonants. Material — matter — same word essentially.
And it’s very important because the lesson from ancient Jewish wisdom here is that you can bond people and unify people with a sense of common spiritual purpose, but if you’re going to eliminate the spiritual — if you’re going to take God entirely out of the picture — then you can unify people through materialism.
Get people in debt, use your credit cards, folks. Buy stuff. Acquire stuff. And then you can rent storage facilities to keep the stuff you bought that you don’t need.
But that way, we’re all in this together and we can all talk about the great commercials we saw during the football game. And we’re all in this great materialistic splurge because it will unite people.
Materialism that flows from the denial of God:
And what any tyrant knows is that you cannot enslave a people that believe in the Boss. You just can’t. And so, therefore, any tyranny will always begin to develop a hostility to traditional biblical faith, a hostility to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, a hostility to biblical commitment of any kind at all.
You always find that, whether it’s Cuba or the Soviet Union or anywhere else, secularism becomes the religion of the day. In fact, I gave it a name — secular fundamentalism, I think, is the religion of the day.
Now, it usually doesn’t begin with religious belief and God-centric thought and then get replaced by atheism. There is, rather, very often a process by which religion is eroded away until it can be overthrown altogether and replaced. And so atheistic Marxism was itself officially repackaged into a pseudo-Christian heresy called “liberation theology” that Barack Obama bought from his pastor for 23 years. I described this movement and its relationship to communism in my very first article:
But even allowing that Obama somehow never heard – and even more amazingly, never heard of – anything offensive ever coming from the mouth of his pastor, anyone even remotely familiar with Jeremiah Wright, Jr. and the Trinity United Church of Christ knows full well that both the pastor and the church are leading proponents of an extremely radical ideology known as “black liberation theology.” In short, liberation theology is a giant nut of Marxism covered with a candy coating of Jesus. Liberation theology is a reading of Christianity through Marxist eyes, and very pointedly NOT vice versa. Rather than forgiving its enemies, its adherents all over the world have routinely claimed that oppressors should be overthrown by violent means.
Liberation theology was developed in the early 1970s to pave the way for the communist Sandinistas to infiltrate – and subsequently dominate – Nicaraguan society. The Sandinistas understood full well that they had no hope of installing a Marxist regime in a country that was well over 90% Roman Catholic unless they could successfully subsume Catholicism into their cause of Marxism. And the wedding of Marxism with Christianity was brought about in a clear effort of the former to crush the latter.
Marxism – atheistic though it is – has frequently been characterized as a Christian heresy, in which a glorious new age utopia (a Marxist perversion of heaven) is to be ushered in by a transformation of human nature in a grand historical dialectic. In traditional Christianity, the ennobling of human nature takes place because of the creation of man in the image of God and because of the divine Christ’s Incarnation; in Marxism, the State assumes God’s place. Marxism offers rival theories of sin (private property) and salvation (collective ownership), a church that dispenses grace (the State), and a litany of saints (the proletariat and their Marxist leadership) and sinners (the bourgeoise and their capitalists enablers). In actual historical practice, in every single case, Marxism in a single century has led to more human slaughter and more degradation than all the religions of the world combined led to throughout all of human history.
Thus we see that it is not too much of a stretch for Christian heretics to embrace Marxism as a creed, since, as G.K. Chesterton pointed out, heresy is often truth gone mad. Liberation theology is the subsumption of one tiny truth (that God cares about the poor) wrapped by so much error that it resulted in a form of insanity that saw “Christians” embrace what clearly amounted to terrorism against governments and the very poor and innocent that they claimed to champion.
That last sentence about “terrorism against governments and the very poor and innocent that they claim to champion” is simply true: Marxism has been responsible for the murder of 100 million of its various regimes’ own people in less than a single century. It has crushed the human spirit more than any other system in the history of the world. It offered fantastic promises to create a Utopia for the poor and then ended up taking everything from the poor before ultimately destroying and murdering them.
Marxism was NEVER about the poor; Marxism was ALWAYSabout the State.
Liberalism as a movement has LONG realized what hard-core Marxism understood through “liberation theology” in the 1970s. Namely, that you could “Christianize” socialism by taking that little kernel of truth – that God cares for the poor – and then exploiting that to build a gigantic totalitarian nanny state that is itself a massive lie out of that tiny kernel of truth.
Don’t tell me that liberalism isn’t a close relative of Marxism that is only waiting to be given enough power to become exactly LIKE Marxism. Karl Marx provided a key statement about economic Marxism when he said:
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
What we have here is the grounds for a State to seize wealth from those who produce and redistribute it to those who do not.
And I defy any liberal to explain how ideological liberalism repudiates and denounces this central premise of Marxism.
I have more to say about liberalism and how it has perverted the essence of Jesus and Christianity, and will do so in an article I have yet to write titled, “Why Do Depraved Democrats Deceitfully Distort Jesus To Demagogue Republicans???”
Ever hear about the Milgram Experiment? It was a rather famous – or infamous – 1962 experiment that measured the willingness of ordinary Americans to brutalize or even torture another human being under the auspices of a white-coated authority. Milgram found that 62 percent of Americans would pull a switch that delivered what they believed was progressively high doses of electricity that ultimately reached what would have been a fatal dose of 450 volts.
Milgram said by way of conclusion to what he had learned through his experiment that, “If a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town.” [But allow me to point out at the very outset that Milgram's initial experiment actually measured garden varietyConnecticut liberals and the subsequent verifications of his experiment mainly measured liberals located in liberal university towns].
That thought frankly ought to scare the crap out of you as you survey your neighbors and your friends and consider what kind of hell they would willingly support in the event of a political change. You ought to realize you could very quickly end up being the next “Jew” in the next Nazi Germany. And if you claim that the fundamental decency of the American people would preclude that from happening, the title of “fool” belongs to you.
I was watching a program about a repeat of that experiment that ended up showing that ordinary Americans are as willing to follow a white-coated authority figure’s instructions to brutalize as they EVER were. You can skim through this to familiarize yourself with the experiment and the findings:
Would You Have Been A Nazi? A new test of Milgram’s obedience experiment asks if it can still happen here.
Ronald Bailey | January 6, 2009
Don’t answer too hastily, but have you ever wondered what you would have done if you grew up in Nazi Germany? Of course, we all hope that we would have had the moral strength to stand against that monstrous regime, but can we be so sure? After all, times were tough and both important politicians and leading intellectuals supported Nazi theories and policies. And then there were the ordinary Germans, friendly neighbors like Karl and Lötte down the street. They had joined the Party and were sending little Wolfgang and Gretchen to healthful Party-sponsored summer camps. Being a Nazi was normal for many Germans. Would things have been any different for you or me if we had been unfortunate enough to grow up at that time and in that place?
The most horrific feature of Nazi and Communist regimes, of course, was their industrial-scale savagery. The Nazis managed to murder six million Jews and 22 millionother Europeans. The Soviet Communists exterminated 62 millionand the Chinese Communists killed 35 million. While these murders were ordered by vicious dictators, they were actually carried out by ordinary people like Karl and Lötte. Which brings us to the famous obedience studies conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram.
In 1961, Milgram did research involving ordinary residents of New Haven, Connecticut, who participated in an experiment that ostensibly aimed at determining the effect of punishment on learning. Along with the experimenter, the situation involved two subjects, one a “teacher” and the other a “learner.” The learner was a confederate of the experimenters, so the teacher was the only actual participant. In the experiment, the learner was supposed to memorize a list of word associations. The learner was strapped down to a chair with an electrode attached to his wrist. To encourage learning, the teacher was to pull switches that would supposedly increase electric shocks from 15-volts up to 450-volts in 15 volt increments. Before the experiment began, both the teacher and the learner were given 45-volt shocks. In addition, the switchers were labeled with warnings such as Slight Shock, Moderate Shock, and so forth, all the way up to Danger: Severe Shock. The final two switches were marked XXX.
As the experiment proceeded, the learner (experimental confederate) would keep making wrong answers. The teacher (experimental subject) would then be instructed by the expermenter to progressively pull the switch for ever higher levels of shock. The learner would begin to make noises expressing pain at 75-volts increasing in loudness until 150-volts, at which point he would urgently demand to be released, complaining of heart palpitations. His complaints would grow louder until 300-volts were reached. At 330-volts the learner fell silent. If the teacher showed signs of wanting to discontinue, the experimenter offered a series of prompts:
“Please continue”
“The experiment requires that you continue”
“It is absoulutely essential that you continue”
“You have no other choice, youmust go on”
The appalling results of these obedience experiments was that 65 percent of participants eventually pulled all of the switches, ultimately reaching the 450-volt level. But perhaps modern Americans would be less susceptible to the demands of authority. After all, the intervening years have seen the rise of the civil rights, peace, and gay rights movements, right? Not necessarily. Last month, Santa Clara University psychologist Jerry Burger reported the results of replicating Milgram’s experiment. He excluded people who had heard of the original experiments and found that the average rate of obedience remained the same at around 65 percent. In addition, there was no difference between men and women.
In 1965, Milgram wrote, “With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Men who are in everyday life responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the experimenter’s definition of the situation, into performing harsh acts.” In 1979, Milgram’s judgement was more severe: “If a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town.”
But can it really happen here? It’s a giant step from a Yale psychology lab to Auschwitz and the Gulag. What Milgram showed was that ordinary people are deferential to authority figures in laboratory settings. The exact nature of the authority wielded by experimenters is controversial, but it seems based on both perceived legitimacy and expertise. It doesn’t take too much imagination to think that even more people would have gone all the way to 450-volts if the experimenter had the power to punish disobedience. Leaders of governments, militaries, religions, corporations, universities, and gangs all arguably exercise these types of authority. Hierarchy is a universal feature of human societies.
As obedience experiments show, Americans are not really any better at resisting the claims of authority than other people, yet there was no Gulag and no Auschwitz here. True, there was the immense moral evil of slavery, the destruction of Native Americans,Woodrow Wilson’s imprisonment of thousands of dissidents, Franklin Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese Americans, and more recently, the Abu Ghraib cruelties. Leaders at all levels can persuade some Americans to participate in immoral activities. However, the arc of American history has been toward correcting old evils and the commissioning of fewer atrocities over time. Why? Because our institutions of freedom have maintained and expanded the norms that limit the powers wielded by authorities.
For example, a free press is able to criticize practices like slavery and racial discrimination and help establish new norms. If Bill and Joanne down the street send their kids Joe and Kathy to an ethnically mixed school, in other words, it must be OK. In addition, American governmental powers are fragmented and in competition with one another. As another Milgram experiment showed, if two experimenters disagreed about continuing the experiment, the majority of participants sided with the one who argued for stopping it. In other words, when people could refer to an authority figure who agreed with their moral views, they were much more likely to act on them. Similarly, dividing up governmental power increases the chances that some authorities will act ethically and thus inspire people to act on the dictates of their consciences.
Milgram didn’t really explore why it was that Germans created death camps while Americans did not. The answer is liberty. In 1974, Milgram more generously noted, “It is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.” Americans have not escaped the natural human tendency to defer to authority. Instead, we have had the good fortune to find ourselves in the situation where our social institutions have traditionally limited what authorities can get away with. The institutions of liberty are what enable people to act on what Lincoln called, “the better angels of our nature.”
Well, this is what occurred to me as I watched the program: this shocking experiment could easily be rephrased as a measurement of one’s commitment to liberalism.
Why would I say that?
Which political ideology WANTSa state possessing limitless power (see here and here for examples)? Which ideology is only too über-willing to commit itself to every new pseudo-scientific trend that appears under the sun? Which ideology is constantly trying to expand the role and power of government to have the ability to shape and control peoples’ lives? Which ideology has the frightening tendency to worship its leaders in what I argue is a shockingly similar to the adoration that the German people accorded to their Führer?
Let me begin with my last question first: let’s consider the Obama worship that I argue conservatives would NEVER have applied to George W. Bush.
You show me government school teachers indoctrinating precious American schoolchildren (including REPUBLICAN PARENTS’ children) like this:
And of course this liberal propaganda-in-public-school crap goes on ALL the time, as government and union teachers exploit their positions as opportunities to try to indoctrinate, as we again recently saw. Leftwing political meddling in the guise of “education” goes on all the time because the essence of the left is fascist propaganda.
“You are the instruments that God is gonna use to bring about universal change, and that is why Barack has captured the youth. And he has involved young people in a political process that they didn’t care anything about. That’s a sign. When the Messiah speaks, the youth will hear, and the Messiah is absolutely speaking.”
I’d like to see rightwing conservative media figures appearing on rightwing news sources such as Fox News or the Wall Street Journal the way Newsweek editor Evan Thomas appeared on MSNBC to say something like this about George Dubya Bush:
“I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God.”
You show me the mainstream media smiling happily while George Bush claimed, “There are no red states or blue states, just BUSH states.” You show me that.
There is a worship of Barack Obama from the left – even after the years of abject failure – that we never saw coming from the right for George W. Bush. Not only would the mainstream media – which is overwhelmingly dominated by liberalism which dives into ideological propaganda – never allow this, but conservatives themselves are simply not the kind of people who would so blatantly succumb to messiah-worship from its political leaders no matter how much we might respect a Ronald Reagan or a Margaret Thatcher. It’s just not in our DNA.
It sure is in the DNA of the left.
I also asked, “Which ideology is only too über-willing to commit itself to every new pseudo-scientific trend that appears under the sun?” I think of global warming that got morphed into the even more nebulous category of “climate change” and the answer is again blatantly obvious: it is the essence of the left to take the marching orders coming from the white coats while we conservatives are shaking our heads in skepticism and dismay at all the liberal “sheeple.”
“My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout the world.” – Dave Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!
“Mankind is the most dangerous, destructive, selfish and unethical animal on the earth.”
- Michael Fox, vice-president of The Humane Society
“Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs.”
- John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal
“Humans on the Earthbehave in some ways like a pathogenic micro-organism, or like the cells of a tumor.”
- Sir James Lovelock, Healing Gaia
“The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man.”
- Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point
“A reasonable estimate for an industrialized world society at the present North American material standard of living would be 1 billion. At the more frugal European standard of living, 2 to 3 billion would be possible.”
- United Nations, Global Biodiversity Assessment
“A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.”
- Prof Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb
“A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”
- Ted Turner, founder of CNN and major UN donor [and major DEMOCRAT PARTY DONOR]
Hitler wanted to exterminate Jews and other “racial inferiors.” But for the liberals in global warming establishment of today, NEARLY THE ENTIRE HUMAN RACE IS THE NEW “JEW” TO BE VIEWED AS A DANGER TO BE EXTERMINATED.
Please don’t think for a nanosecond that these people wouldn’t gladly up your voltage when they electroshock you to death. AND THEY ARE LIBERALS, LIBERALS, LIBERALS!!!
You can look at my articles and see the mindset of the left: how DARE you be against global warming! The guys in the white coats tell me to believe it and if they tell me to turn that knob and deliver a fatal dose of electricity then the only reasonable thing to do is turn that damn knob and push that damn button!!!
Just a few days ago we larned that the arctic sea ice is the thickest it has been in more than a decade:
Heavy ice could delay start of Shell Alaska’s Arctic drilling
May 28, 2012 The heaviest polar ice in more than a decade could postpone the start of offshore oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean until the beginning of August, a delay of up to two weeks, Shell Alaska officials said.
Unveiling a newly refurbished ice-class rig that is poised to begin drilling two exploratory wells this summer in the Beaufort Sea, Shell executives said Friday that the unusually robust sea ice would further narrow what already is a tight window for operations. The company’s $4-billion program is designed to measure the extent of what could be the United States’ most important new inventory of oil and gas. [...]
“We’re seeing multiyear ice that they’ve not seen in such large quantities in over a decade, and it could impact our ability to start the well,” Slaiby said. Of particular concern, he said, is the region of the Chukchi Sea around the company’s Berger Prospect – potentially the crown jewel of the company’s offshore oil inventory – which in normal years would be accessible by mid-July. This year, it may be unreachable until late July or early August. [...]
Compare that to the dire warnings just five years ago from the left that there would be NOarctic ice by now:
An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer—a sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point.
One scientist even speculated that summer sea ice could be gone in five years. [...]
“The Arctic is screaming,” said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the government’s snow and ice data center in Boulder, Colorado. [...]
That’s an Associated Press screech that was re-screeched by National Geographic.
On the one hand you have actual facts and reality and legitimate science and on the other hand you have the Associated Press, National Geographic and “senior government scientists” PUTTING THEIR EARS TO THE ICE AND CLAIMING TO HEAR IT SCREAMING.
I frankly don’t give a damn how many diplomas are on these fools’ walls. They have abandoned “science” in favor of a fanatic religious committment. And they will use the raw, naked power of government force and – if they get their way – exterminate human beings by the BILLIONSto force the world to bow down before their global warming gods.
Global warming has been utterly refuted and the motives and methods of its white-coated priests have been discredited time and time again. But these people – liberals – cannot even theoretically ever possibly be proven wrong to their satisfaction. And that is only because they have a worldview that is totally divorced from reality.
And this love of death and complete fanatic insanity that today’s liberalism has embraced isn’t new. We can go back to Darwinism and eugenics – and the Holocaust was nothing more than applied Darwinism – and see a history of liberalism, liberalism, liberalism.
On large families:
“The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.” (Women and the New Race, Eugenics Publ. Co., 1920, 1923)
On blacks, immigrants and indigents:
“…human weeds,’ ‘reckless breeders,’ ‘spawning… human beings who never should have been born.” Margaret Sanger, Pivot of Civilization, referring to immigrants and poor people
On sterilization & racial purification:
Sanger believed that, for the purpose of racial “purification,” couples should be rewarded who chose sterilization. Birth Control in America, The Career of Margaret Sanger, by David Kennedy, p. 117, quoting a 1923 Sanger speech.
On the right of married couples to bear children:
Couples should be required to submit applications to have a child, she wrote in her “Plan for Peace.” Birth Control Review, April 1932
On the purpose of birth control:
The purpose in promoting birth control was “to create a race of thoroughbreds,” she wrote in the Birth Control Review, Nov. 1921 (p. 2)
On the rights of the handicapped and mentally ill, and racial minorities:
“More children from the fit, less from the unfit — that is the chief aim of birth control.” Birth Control Review, May 1919, p. 12
On the extermination of blacks:
“We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population,” she said, “if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America, by Linda Gordon
Margaret Sanger had other things to say, too. About the birth control that the left wants (Sanger said it would lead to a “cleaner race”); about sterilization (“to prevent multiplication of this bad stock”); about hell on earth which she demonically believed was a Utopia.
I don’t believe I have to say a further word about how genuinely EVILthis hero of liberalism, who was not only a Nazi sympathizer but whose work was cited as justification for the Nazis’ own extermination program, truly was. Her own volume of words and her entire life’s work betray her.
I’m no musical genius, but I would put Whitney Houston in the top ten women’s voices of all time – and certainly one of the greatest voices in American music history. Barbara Streisand – another of those voices - possessed magnificent depth of feeling; but in terms of sheer power and range and the ability to send delicious chills coursing down your spine, Whitney Houston’s voice was simply unmatchable.
She was also beautiful. I remember watching the movie The Bodyguard and seeing Whitney’s face filling the movie screen and thinking over and over again what an incredibly pretty woman she was.
Fame, fortune, beauty and talent all in amazing quantities. If you wanted to know what it was like to have it all, Whitney Houston would have been the one to ask.
I also remember seeing her last year – gaunt, emaciated, sick-looking, eaten alive by drugs – and wondering how such a beautiful woman could so quickly come to resemble a gargoyle.
Now she’s dead, very likely the same way Amy Winehouse ended up dead.
And it’s so incredibly sad that somebody so successful, so talented, so beautiful would destroy herself the way she did.
The quickest path to a fast death is to be a rich drug addict.
But why did she – with all of her amazing talent and resources – take this path?
It is amazing how many of “the beautiful people” have ended this way. And there is a lesson worth pondering in that.
Imagine being able to have anything in the world that you want and being miserable.
Imagine having everything the world can offer and discovering that nothing in this world makes you happy.
I think about the poor person who buys a lottery ticket and dreams and schemes of what his or her life could be like if he or she just got lucky. Whitney Houston had long since lost hope of having any such dreams and schemes. Imagine the desolation of her soul.
To answer the poor person who says, “If I only had a thousand – or a million – more dollars, I would be happy,” my response is, “No, you wouldn’t. If you had a thousand more dollars, you’d very quickly want a thousand more, etc., etc. Nelson Rockefeller – the richest man in the world at the time – was asked how much money is enough; and his response was, “Just one more dollar.” And that’s the way degenerate human nature has rewired itself. We’re all like that. We can try to fill ourselves with money or fame or success or sex or food or drugs or any other idol you can possibly imagine. And it is never enough.
And Whitney Houston had experienced that condition until she was sick to her soul.
God hardwired us to find rest and completion only in Himself. And nothing else in this world – no matter how much of it we try to fill ourselves with – can possibly make up for the absence of God in our souls.
I remember watching a news program – I think it may have been Nightline but I can’t recall – during the war that was going on in Yugoslavia between the Serbs and the Croats. Croatians, Slovenians and Bosnians were driven out of their homes by an ancient hatred that the collapse of the USSR allowed to erupt yet again. And these people – who had been educated, successful people – were relegated to picking through the garbage of American troops to look for food or something of some value that they could sell or trade.
One of these victims of war paused in his scavenging to respond to a reporter. And I will never forget what he said:
“We are living like animals. Is this all there is to our lives? Is there nothing more?”
And see, the incredible thing about that is that Whitney Houston, or Amy Winehouse, or Heath Ledger, or Kurt Cobain, etc., etc. – with all of their fortunes – were asking themselves the very same questions.
What would it be like to have everything the world can offer and still be miserable? What would it be like to have be able to get anything you want – except hope?
If you wanted to know what it was like to have it all and discover that everything the world could ever offer was worthless, Whitney Houston would have been the one to ask.
There is one way out of this world besides the route that Whitney Houston took tragically early. Saint Paul described it thus:
“I once thought these things were valuable, but now I consider them worthless because of what Christ has done. Yes, everything else is worthless when compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage, so that I could gain Christ and become one with him. I no longer count on my own righteousness through obeying the law; rather, I become righteous through faith in Christ. For God’s way of making us right with himself depends on faith. I want to know Christ and experience the mighty power that raised him from the dead. I want to suffer with him, sharing in his death, so that one way or another I will experience the resurrection from the dead!” — Philippians 3:7-12
Mock us all you want, secular humanist world, but we have one thing that you will never have if you continue down your same path – we have Jesus. And we have the hope of resurrection life.
No matter how bad things might get for us, no matter how terrible of a mistake we may have made, we have hope. Hope of forgiveness, hope of a better tomorrow, hope that Jesus Christ will one day make everything as new.
Whitney Houston began her music career singing in a church choir. I truly hope that beautiful, fragile soul heard the gospel and believed it before her life turned into something ugly.
Christians can be wretched sinners; in fact, the first necessary condition of coming to Jesus Christ in faith and asking Him to heal you and make you whole involves acknowledging that you are a wretched sinner. Because it is from that beginning that God begins to work out His resurrection life in your soul.
And once you have tasted that eternal life, you never lose it. If you have eternal life, how can you lose it? Which means that if Whitney Houston ever tasted it, she’s in heaven with Jesus right now.
I pray that Jesus called Whitney home to Himself to spare her from more self-inflicted pain.
And I and many others on this earth mourn the loss of one so beautiful and so talented who didn’t know how to find joy in this world.
And I send up a prayer that Whitney Houston is truly resting in peace this night.
I get a few things all the time from liberals in my experience of blogging, and I’m going to get a couple of the things that annoy me the most off my chest.
Now, I’m sure that some bloggers who might come across this might think, “9k views in a week for one article? Big Deal. I get that all the time.” But as I said, this is definitely one of my top ten most viewed in such a short time period.
I obviously love it very much when an article I write takes off, because I’m writing to try to make a difference. But the problem is that somebody must have re-posted my “Who Spent More” article under a rock or something. Because a bunch of liberals suddenly started coming to visit me.
Now here’s the thing that annoys me. I’ve got a very clear premise that clearly matches my title: Democrats demonized George Bush for spending, but lo and behold Obama’s spending makes Bush’s spending look Lilliputian in just three years in office. But do liberals want to talk about Obama’s spending? Nope. That is pretty much the last thing they want to talk about when they comment to me.
What is the real important subject as far as they’re concerned? In a word, it’s that I’m “mean.”
And, you see, if I’m mean it means that facts don’t matter, so nyah, nyah, nyah. Or something to that effect.
I tried to respond to somebody the other day that if Aristotle had a scowl, he’d be just as good of a philosopher as if he wore a smile. But that didn’t seem to wash. The “You’re a mean meany so I get to disregard all of your facts” meme continued to play and play like puppies who afterward can’t control their little bladders.
If you were racing down the road at 120 mph and I had a scowl on my face when I shouted that the bridge had washed out, would it really matter whether I had that scowl and shouted? I mean, if you’re genuinely sane?
“Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more live up to their own rules than the Christian Church can live up to Christianity.”
And, to an extent, this is true. For one thing liberals don’t have any rules or code of honor that binds them; they can be as vile as they wish: Lucifer sure won’t care. And the Kingdom Jesus established is a spiritual one. And you must therefore either recognize that strife and violence is a part of this world while you strive for the better one to come, or you simply bow your head to the next dictator that comes along. But it is very difficult to fight for a very political world in the here-and-now against a side that has no rules beyond “Rules for Radicals.” It’s a genuine dilemma for Christians.
This dilemma has increasingly overtaken us during the course of the last century. It was there when the Germans used first poison gas and then total war and then the intentional bombing of civilian populations. Should we have used these vile tactics against an enemy that had no moral restraint, or should we have encouraged more and more of the same by displaying that we wouldn’t fight in such a way that the enemy knew there would be consequences for such terrible actions? By using poison gas ourselves we forced the Germans to quit using it; wouldn’t not using poison gas have amounted to an immoral sacrifice of our own troops?
I’ve come to realize that I can turn the other cheek to the guy I’m trying to bring into the kingdom of heaven and I can shoot the home invasion psychos who are breaking in my house to murder my family. And I believe that any morally intelligent individual can understand that difference.
I also believe that most of the reason that culture has degenerated to the shocking extent that it has (I mean Lady Gaga? Seriously?) is related to the fact that too few Christians were willing to stand up and fight – even wrestle in the mud as necessary – for their culture. It was far easier for too many to create their own little sub-culture, much as the monks did in walling themselves up in monasteries lest they have to face a nasty world.
So I’m fighting as best I know how. And I often must fight against a pseudo-righteousness from a side that calls me all kinds of terrible names and labels even as it hypocritically demands I refrain from doing the same thing they’re doing to me.
In any event, I’ve recently gotten a larger dose in a shorter period of time crap from liberals that I’ve basically been experiencing since the day I got my “very first comment” and it turned out to be from a liberal hater. I’m getting my fill of liberal avoidance and victimism and projection and other disorders.
“Victimism” in this context is when a liberal practices a particularly bizarre form of psychological jujitsu in order to make themselves the victim in an argument or debate. You see, in their warped little minds, if they can manage to make themselves the victim, they win. It doesn’t matter how strong your case is or how weak theirs is otherwise; in liberalism the victim always wins. Period. And look; they’re the victim!
So, of course, if I say something mean – (regardless of anything vile they previously said to me) – they become the victim and therefore they win the debate. Because that’s the way their world works.
You can, of course, translate this into the larger socio-economic-and-political issues: victimhood means everything to the left. It is a cherished status to be sought above everything else – especially above facts.
I would rather have someone sitting right next to me raking her fingernails over a chalkboard than be involved in such a “debate.” But as a conservative blogger I am nevertheless forced to endure it most every day.
There’s a flip side to the victimism, and that is avoidance.
Liberals do not like things called “facts” or “arguments.” They are too constraining and isn’t “liberalism” all about feeling free from such constraints?
So I write an article on the issue of abortion and as a result I get called a “KKK racist.” I get a very similar accusation of being a racist if I talk about government spending. Because, as we all know, being pro-life or anti-reckless government spending is very clearly “racist.” I mean, what liberal doesn’t know that?
Why talk about the facts when you can talk about something else instead?
So all the time I respond to liberals, carefully try to interact with and refute their arguments, and it’s like I haven’t said anything, or maybe like I’m writing in a different, incomprehensible language.
I get very bored very quickly arguing with somebody who doesn’t bother to even acknowledge anything I say. I start thinking about all the things I could be doing that would be far more productive usages of my time.
Again, that’s pretty much just par for the course of being a conservative blogger.
There’s another psychological malady that’s pretty typical of the liberals who comment on my site: a bizarre identity disorder which results in liberals being unable to simply admit what they are. All the time I get people who are very clearly committed leftists/Democrats trying to pass themselves off as “moderates” or “independents.” Because, you see, if they’re “moderate,” then they represent the giant voice of the middle. And how on earth can I debate someone who is the living embodiment of The Middle.
So I get liberals all the time who will post comment after comment – with every single ONE of those comments arguing for liberal/Democrat positions – and then they’ll tell me that they’re most certainly NOT liberals or Democrats.
Notice everything I’m linking to is recent. I don’t have to dredge stuff up from 16 months ago; I get this crap ALL THE TIME from liberals.
It’s not enough for me to say that I would never go to a liberal’s blog and try to pass myself off as a liberal in order to achieve some perverted goal; I have never even HEARD of a conservative talking about trying to pull that kind of stunt. It is a peculiar disorder that only liberals suffer.
Personally, I believe that liberals, at least at some subconscious level, intuitively understand that they are cockroaches and really ought to feel ashamed of themselves if they could only possess the virtue of shame. But that’s just a pet theory of mine.
This reminds me of another personality disorder that defines the left: projection. In psychology, you’ve got the pathologically angry person who immediately assumes that everyone around him is angry – which of course justifies his constant angry outbursts.
Well, we don’t have to stretch very hard to think about all the labels and demonization the left handed out to the Tea Party. And then the Occupy (OWS) movement came along and showed us what all the ugliness the left was falsely accusing the Tea Party of REALLY looks like:
But rather than simply walking around muttering to themselves like they ought to, liberals find a way to make their unfortunate mental condition as annoying and harmful as possible.
I just wish they wouldn’t do it so much around me. But as a conservative blogger, I am a light. And they are a bunch of moths.
I don’t write this with the intent of attacking the recently deceased, but rather to underscore a point that occurred to me as I scanned through an LA Times op-ed by liberal Meghan Daum. Her piece began:
As fans of the late Christopher Hitchens cycle through the five stages of grief, it’s interesting to see which of his opinions can still inspire the kind of anger that is unlikely to ever fade into acceptance. There are, of course, the obvious candidates: his characterization of Bill Clinton as “a rapist” or his vilification of Mother Teresa as “a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.” There is also his oh so chivalrous shout-out to the Dixie Chicks, whom he called “fat slugs” (or “slags” or “sluts” depending on your source) despite later admitting “having not the least idea of what any of them looked like.”
I actually hadn’t realized that Christopher Hitchens was such an equal-opportunity hater. I mean, I thought he just hated religious or Christian people like me.
This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just “people of faith” but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.
And I was thinking, “So it wasn’t just Christians and religion in general he dumped hate on.
I’ve cited Christopher Hitchens in a couple of articles:
And a frankly irrational anger and a determination to impose an agenda by force rather than by consent were the scope of both pieces.
In the immediately above piece, Hitchens is quoted:
“How can we ever know how many children had their psychological and physical lives irreparably maimed by the compulsory inculcation of faith? Religion … has always hoped to practice upon the unformed and undefended minds of the young… If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.”
Ah, if we could just forcibly remove the children of those Christians and those religious nutjobs and allow the state to indoctrinate them instead, you know, like the Soviet Union or North Korea, imagine what a “different world” we could have.
It occurred to me to wonder how many hateful and vicious quotes came from the mouth or pen of Christopher Hitchens’ most obvious counterpart, Billy Graham?
I found Billy Graham saying the following despicable thing about Bill Clinton:
Oops, I’m sorry. Billy didn’t actually say anything hateful about Bill Clinton. I’m sure it was only because they were both “Bills” rather than that Billy Graham isn’t hateful, though.
Oops, Billy Graham didn’t say anything hateful about ANY Democrat candidate for president, let descriptions such as “fanatic,” “boastful,” “ignoramus,” as “those who despise science and learning,” as ”morally and intellectually slothful people,” “who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured,” as ”theocratic bullies,” and as “wickedness and stupidity.”
I mean, the sheer tolerance of Christopher Hitchens as compared to Billy Graham is really something.
I mean, maybe I’ve been wrong about which side is so really intolerant.
I did find an article from an atheist entitled, “Dear Billy Graham: You’re A Hateful Bigot,” but if you click on that hoping for ammo against Rev. Billy, you won’t get very much. Billy’s most hateful quote, the pièce de résistance, was:
Only God can give us the moral and spiritual foundation we need for our lives. This is why the most important step you can take is to turn to Jesus Christ and commit your life to him. When you do, God will forgive your sins and make you his child forever. He also promises to be with you in the future. By a simple prayer of faith ask him to come into your life today.
“God’s not unjust, he doesn’t actually exist. We’ve been deceived. If God existed, he’d have made the world more just… I’ll lend you a book and you’ll see.”
Mao Tse Tung was an atheist who was rather famous for his care for the poor and the little people:
“Our God is none other than the masses of the Chinese people. If they stand up and dig together with us, why can’t these two mountains be cleared away?” [Mao Tse Tung, Little Red Book, "Self-Reliance and Arduous Struggle chapter 21"].
You gotta love the comparison between these great leaders of their respective movements. I mean, Jesus said ugly things like:
“But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also” — Matthew 5:39
“But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” — Mathew 5:44-45
“Put your sword back in its place,” Jesus said to him, “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword” — Matthew 26:52
Just naked hate from that Jesus Bigot, I know. I can only apologize for having repeated His dark and evil teachings.
“The atom bomb is nothing to be afraid of,” Mao told Nehru, “China has many people. . . . The deaths of ten or twenty million people is nothing to be afraid of.” A witness said Nehru showed shock. Later, speaking in Moscow, Mao displayed yet more generosity: he boasted that he was willing to lose 300 million people, half of China’s population.” [Annie Dillard, “The Wreck of Time” in Harper’s from January 1998].
Comedian Bill Maher drew the ire of Tim Tebow fans and Christians over the weekend after a profane tweet reveling in the Broncos’ blowout loss to the Buffalo Bills.
“Wow, Jesus just f***ed #TimTebow bad! And on Xmas Eve! Somewhere … Satan is tebowing, saying to Hitler “Hey, Buffalo’s killing them,” Maher tweeted.
Tebow, whose team suffered its second straight loss after a six-game winning streak, did not respond to Maher’s tweet.
After the disappointing 40-14 road loss, Tebow tweeted, “Tough game today but what’s most important is being able to celebrate the birth of our Savior, Jesus Christ. Merry Christmas everyone GB2.”
GB2 is a phrase Tebow has made popular that means “God Bless + Go Broncos,” according to his official website.
The tweet prompted some to call for a boycott of Maher’s HBO show “Real Time with Bill Maher.”
Maher, an atheist, made a 2008 documentary called “Religulous” that mocked organized religion, and he routinely jokes about religion on his show.
Christmas – and the meaning of Christianity itself – can be summed up in two names.
The first is “Immanuel,” which translates from Hebrew to “God with us.” It comes from a prophecy written approximately 700BC about the future Messiah
“Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.” — Isaiah 7:14
Of this same miraculously conceived child the same prophet writes about other things this same child would be called in addition to “Immanuel”:
“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” — Isaiah 9:6
I often marvel over the bickering of unbelief over whether the Hebrew word in Isaiah 7:14 should really be translated “virgin” given what is said about this same child in Isaiah 9:6. How ELSE would one expect this child, this son who would be born, who would be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father and Prince of Peace to be conceived other than by miraculous supernatural means? Seriously?
What does “God with us” mean?
It means that this child – rightly called “Immanuel” in Isaiah 7:14 and “Mighty God” in Isaiah 9:6, would literally be God come to be with mankind in some powerful way.
It is a beautiful reference to the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, the unique, One-and-Only Son of the Living God. Isaiah prophesied that some day in the future, God would somehow take a human nature and be born as a child, as a son. It was a prophecy of the coming birth of One who would one day call Himself “the Son of Man” (e.g. Mark 10:45).
The other name that completes the meaning of Christmas and Christianity is “Jesus.” It comes from the Hebrew name “Yeshua” (or ”Joshua”) which means, “Jehovah is Savior.”
Two things emerge from this name: the first is that God Himself would one day come to personally save and deliver mankind from the bondage and death sentence of sin; the second is that One particular bearer of that name would be Himself God on earth.
The same Book of Isaiah that we have been discussing amply attests of our Lord Jesus Christ taking upon Himself the name both of “Jehovah” and “Savior.”
Isaiah 43:11 makes it most clear:
“I, even I, am the LORD [i.e., Jehovah], and apart from Me there is no Savior.” — Isaiah 43:11
See also Isaiah 45:21 to see that this is no fluke description from the prophet who described the coming of “Immanuel” who would be “Mighty God”:
Declare what is to be, present it–let them take counsel together. Who foretold this long ago, who declared it from the distant past? Was it not I, the LORD [i.e., Jehovah]? And there is no God apart from Me, a righteous God and a Savior; there is none but Me.” — Isaiah 45:21
But as we celebrate Christmas, we celebrate the birth of the One of whom the angel proclaimed:
“Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; He is Christ the Lord.”
The mystery of Jesus, of this Savior who would be born in spite of the fact that only JEHOVAH could be called “Savior,” is given a little clarity in the first words of the Book of John as it identifies Jesus Christ as “the Word”:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being by Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being which has come into being.” — John 1:1-3
When St. John says, “In the beginning was the Word,” it is a direct reference of Genesis 1:1, which begins, “In the beginning God…”
When St. John says, “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” he is pointing out that while the Word, Jesus, is divine (i.e., is God), He is not God in the logically exclusive sense that the Father and the Spirit are not also God. Jesus is God (the Son), and Jesus was also with God (the Father and the Spirit).
When St. John tells us, “He was in the beginning with God,” we know that Jesus was NOT a created being. He could not have in any way, shape or form been created, because in fact He always existed; He was with God the Father from the very beginning.
If this wasn’t clear enough already, St. John further elaborates on the eternality of Jesus Christ when he says, “All things came into being by Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being which has come into being.” All things came into being by Jesus Christ. God the Son was the Creator Moses describes in Genesis 1:1 (“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”). Not only that, but “apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.” Which is to say that this Son of God, the Word - who would one day become Incarnate under the name of Jesus who was born of a virgin in fulfillment of Isaiah 7:14 – created every single thing which has EVER been created or come into existence. It is a logical impossibility that the One who created ALL things could Himself have been in any way created.
A short poem sums it up more simply and more concisely that I ever could:
“He came to die on a cross of wood, yet made the hill on which it stood.”
He was truly God.
But He was truly God become man.
How? Why?
God the Son added to Himself – added to His eternal divine nature - a human nature in the Incarnation. God became man. And 700 years before it happened, He revealed it to His prophet Isaiah.
One verse from the first chapter of the first Book of the Bible becomes significant in understanding this:
“So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” — Genesis 1:27
In Genesis the Son of God, the Word, created man in His divine image; in the Incarnation, that same Son of God assumed the image He had created. Which is to say that God made man in such a way that He could one day become man Himself.
In the most remarkable act of other-centered love in the history of the universe, Christ the Son of God did the following as recorded in Philippians 2:5-11:
“You must have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had. Though he was God, he did not think of equality with God as something to cling to. Instead, he gave up his divine privileges; he took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being. When he appeared in human form, he humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal’s death on a cross. Therefore, God elevated him to the place of highest honor and gave him the name above all other names, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” — Philippians 2:5-11, (NLT)
In verse 7 of that marvellous passage in the original Greek language we have the word “kenosis” occur. It means, “emptied”: “He emptied Himself.”
In becoming a man, God had to temporarily let go of attributes of deity that belonged to Him by very right of His divine nature. He entered into time, which means He had to divest Himself of His eternality while on earth so He could age and grow and die. He set aside His omniscience so He would experience living as a man, depending on faith just like any other man before or after Him. He laid aside His omnipotence, such that He could experience the helplessness and fatigue that all men feel. And so on.
Jesus was completely dependent upon His Father and upon the Spirit for all things, because He had made Himself weak in the Incarnation in order to fully experience human frailty. He had to walk by faith and live by the power of faith, just as we do.
We can imagine the One who created the Cosmos – and in whom all things literally hold together (Colossians 1:17) – emerge from Mary’s womb that first Christmas as a tiny, helpless baby, struggling just to open His eyes. He grew in wisdom and stature (Luke 2:52) because He had made Himself a man in every way that it was essential to be a man.
It makes me weep to think about what Jesus laid aside so He could come to live with mankind as a man. Think of the choice of God to do that! We all want to become great and mighty and awesome and have all the status that accompanies our greatness; Jesus radically went the other way and took a plunge from all the glorious majesty of heaven to a trough that farm animals ate out of.
And the obvious question is, why did He do this?
He did it to take the blame that rightly belonged to me, to live and then die in my place.
He did it to be my Savior, because He as God knew that I, a miserable sinner, desperately needed saving.
In the Incarnation, Jesus lived a perfect life in our place because we could never hope to live such lives. And then, as the perfect God-Man, He gave His life to take the death sentence earned by OUR sins upon Himself, so that we would not have to experience eternal death the way that all sinners apart from His grace will one day experience.
This mighty act of salvation was God-sized; no mere man could even attain his own salvation, let alone that of the entire human race. And yet just as sin entered the world through a man, only a man acting as a true representative of man could deliver us from that sin.
Enter the God-Man. Enter Jesus.
Jesus explained His mission to a Jewish Pharisee and member of the Sanhedrin named Nicodemus in the most beautiful and powerful words ever spoken:
“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him would not perish, but have eternal life.” — John 3:16
Isaiah 64:6 says,
“But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousness are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.”
Isaiah 53:6 says,
“All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” — Isaiah 53:6
On Christmas morning, a little over 2,000 years ago, in the fullness of time (Galatians 4:4), God came to save me from that from which I most needed saving: from myself; and from my sins which separated me from my Creator, my King and my God.
God is holy and righteous and perfect and sinless: He can not tolerate sin in His presence; nor can any sinner survive His presence. As a sinner, I deserved hell. And apart from the grace of God, hell is precisely where I would have gone.
Only there is a God who loved me, and gave Himself for me (see Galatians 2:2o; Ephesians 5:2; Titus 2:14) so that I could be alive in Him and share eternity with Him in His glorious presence forever and ever.
Thank you, Jesus. I bow down before You and thank You with all of my soul that You alone had the power to save. I desperately needed a Savior, and You came to save me.
I pray that you, too, bow down before Jesus your King and thank Him from the bottom of a saved, delivered soul this Christmas day.
Let’s take a moment to compare the Tea Party versus the Occupy movement.
The Tea Party movement overwhelmingly believes in God. There is a higher law, a higher morality and a better way than government or the size and power of government. And if the way of God conflicts with the way of government, we exercise our right to influence and change the government to influence the nation to become more like what God has said a nation ought to look like.
Not so the left or the Occupy movement. Government is all there is. Government power is the sum total that they are attempting to build toward. Government as God; Government as Savior; Government as moral arbiter of right and wrong.
And here’s where the Occupy movement and the left itself is fundamentally incoherent and hypocritical.
If you don’t believe in God and the moral absolutes that are possible ONLY with the existence of God, then government truly is all there is. What determines right and wrong? Government. What else even could? Nothing. Morality is relative, and the government decides or dictates what morality is and what it is not under its sphere of control.
So if you think that way, how can you then rationally or coherently change the morality of the government? Government decides right from wrong, and you’re not the government; you’re just a rabble of people pooping in the city square like a particularly filthy species of pigeon.
What is the transcendent source of objective morality that you on the left are appealing to as you seek to change the morality of the government? What objective moral law stands above the United States of America and holds it accountable? If it isn’t God and the revelation of the Word of God, then just what is it?
Nothing, for you.
Which is why you leftists are defined by hypocrisy and fundamental incoherence.
I also think of the violence and utter disruption of law and order that has accompanied the Occupy movement in every single city it has visited. We have had nearly 3,000 arrests so far. Versus ZERO for the Tea Party.
I think of the Nazis. When Hitler and the Nazi Party were rising to power, they openly embraced the avant-garde and homosexuality (Hitler’s SA was FILLED with homosexuality) and everything that threatened the existing culture. Why? Because the Nazis wanted to overturn that culture and impose their own.
But when the Nazis came to power, suddenly THEY were the established order. And they ruthlessly crushed anything that threatened their “order.”
That is fundamentally incoherent and hypocritical, but that is all the left EVEN THEORETICALLY has.
Put another way, “You should act or think like X because this transcendent and objective source demands it.” WHAT IS THAT SOURCE for secular humanists?
God created us in His image and ultimately will hold us each individually and as a human race to account. But what is that source for the secular humanist left but government and its ability to punish us in the here and now?
So the ultimate transcendent objective source of right and wrong is government. Oh, but we can rise above the government and change it and shape it to what WE want it to be. And then it will go back to being the ultimate transcendent source that everyone must be held accountable to.
And understand, it isn’t the Tea Party trying to change the Word of God. We’re just trying to obey Him as the Word that He has given us teaches. Meanwhile, the secular humanist left – which has as its sole transcendent power the government – has a “living breathing” Constitution that they can endlessly change through new “interpretations” to give them whatever new “morality” they want at any given time.
There is no God who determines objective right from wrong in the ideology of the left. There is nothing above man and the institutions that man erects to hold individual man morally accountable. So when the left tries to transform society – and they are CONSTANTLY agitating to radically transform society – just what is it that they are appealing to aside from their own pursuit of power? And then when they succeed in getting their way, they ruthlessly oppress anyone (abortion opponents punished like gangsters under RICO; using the courts to force the release of names of people who supported the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman, and then using intimidation and harassment to attack people who merely exercised their democratic rights) who oppose their agenda.
The Nazis came to power promising that they would represent “the people.” They just omitted that “the people” were defined as those exactly like them and that they would crush anyone who thought otherwise. They came to power by asserting all of their rights and by then refusing to follow the rules of civil society as they usurp their way to power. And then when they GET power they show even more contempt for law and order than they did during their rise to power.
Given that over 3,000 people have now been arrested in clashes with the police that have included violence; given that we’re seeing extreme nudity at these events, public sexual intercourse, drug consumption, violent crime and even rape (make that two rapes), (Update: 11/3, oops, make it three) it’s beyond insane to call this Occupy movement anything other than evil and a direct threat to the American people and the constitutional republic the people want.
Again, versus the Tea Party.
If you support rapes, violence, mass arrests, feces and urine in the street and mob rule, then you go ahead and vote Democrat.
I’ve been saying DemonCrats (that’s “Demonic Bureaucrats,” which is what “Democrat” truly stands for) despise their country. Now I’ve got über-liberal Harvard to back me up. Which is to say that this isn’t a case of Sarah Palin blasting away at Democrats and claiming Democrats don’t love their country; it’s an example of the liberal intelligentsia itself claiming that Democrats don’t love their country:
Democratic political candidates can skip this weekend’s July 4th parades. A new Harvard University study finds that July 4th parades energize only Republicans, turn kids into Republicans, and help to boost the GOP turnout of adults on Election Day.
“Fourth of July celebrations in the United States shape the nation’s political landscape by forming beliefs and increasing participation, primarily in favor of the Republican Party,” said the report from Harvard.
“The political right has been more successful in appropriating American patriotism and its symbols during the 20th century. Survey evidence also confirms that Republicans consider themselves more patriotic than Democrats. According to this interpretation, there is a political congruence between the patriotism promoted on Fourth of July and the values associated with the Republican party. Fourth of July celebrations in Republican dominated counties may thus be more politically biased events that socialize children into Republicans,” write Harvard Kennedy School Assistant Professor David Yanagizawa-Drott and Bocconi University Assistant Professor Andreas Madestam.
Their findings also suggest that Democrats gain nothing from July 4th parades, likely a shocking result for all the Democratic politicians who march in them.
“There is no evidence of an increased likelihood of identifying as a Democrat, indicating that Fourth of July shifts preferences to the right rather than increasing political polarization,” the two wrote.
The three key findings of those attending July 4th celebrations:
When done before the age of 18, it increases the likelihood of a youth identifying as a Republican by at least 2 percent.
It raises the likelihood that parade watchers will vote for a Republican candidate by 4 percent.
It boosts the likelihood a reveler will vote by about 1 percent and increases the chances they’ll make a political contribution by 3 percent.
What’s more, the impact isn’t fleeting. “Surprisingly, the estimates show that the impact on political preferences is permanent, with no evidence of the effects depreciating as individuals become older,”said the Harvard report.
Finally, the report suggests that if people are looking for a super-patriotic July 4th, though should head to Republican towns. “Republican adults celebrate Fourth of July more intensively in the first place.”
Conservatives have American Indendence Day, which we celebrate on July 4th in honor of our Declaration of Independence. Democrats hate the Declaration of Independence because it bases our separation from Great Britain on GOD and establishes the new nation that would consequently be born as a Judeo-Christian one. Liberals have Marxist May Day, i.e. DEpendence Day, instead.
It’s rather interesting, actually. I think of the analogy of the “Naksa”, or Israel’s defeat of Arab armies in the 1967 Six-Day War. It’s a day of celebration for Israelis, and a day of mourning for Palestinians. It’s a shame that Independence Day is nothing worthy of celebrating for Democrats. But when you realize that the independence and liberty the founding fathers created was independence and liberty from big government totalitarianism, and that Democrats yearn for the very thing that our founding fathers delivered us from, it starts to make perfect sense. Ben Franklin said, “Any people that would give up liberty for a little temporary safety deserves neither liberty nor safety.” And Democrats who dream of a big government nanny state say, “Amen! Where can see sign up for that?”
Liberals have always despised the Constitution, because it gets in their way of imposing their will on society. A couple of very recent examples:
Time Magazine: “We can pat ourselves on the back about the past 223 years, but we cannot let the Constitution become an obstacle to the U.S.’s moving into the future with a sensible health care system, a globalized economy, an evolving sense of civil and political rights.”
[...]
The Constitution does not protect our spirit of liberty; our spirit of liberty protects the Constitution. The Constitution serves the nation; the nation does not serve the Constitution.”
We can go back to Woodrow Wilson, “the father of the progressive movement,” and see how Democrats have always felt about the Constitution:
President Woodrow Wilson was an early progressive who actively rejected what the founding fathers said and intended. He argued that the meaning of the Constitution should be interpreted by judges, and not based on its words.
In his book, Constitutional Government in the United States, Wilson wrote: “We can say without the least disparagement or even criticism of the Supreme Court of the United States that at its hands the Constitution has received an adaptation and an elaboration which would fill its framers of the simple days of 1787 with nothing less than amazement. The explicitly granted powers of the Constitution are what they always were; but the powers drawn from it by implication have grown and multiplied beyond all expectation, and each generation of statesmen looks to the Supreme Court to supply the interpretation which will serve the needs of the day.”
Wilson and other progressives have failed to understand the consequence of rewriting the Constitution’s meaning and ignoring the intentions of the founding fathers. If this generation is not bound by yesterday’s law, then future generations will not be bound by today’s law.
If law is not a body of rules and can be arbitrarily manipulated, then the rule of man trumps the rule of law. And the founding principle that “all men are created equal” is replaced by “some men are more equal than others.” When people are governed by self-anointed rulers instead of elected representatives, they cannot be free.
When the Constitution was written, it was a radical departure from the despotic governments of its time. While Europeans were being ruled by the arbitrary edicts of kings, Americans revolted so they could become a self-governing people.
Because the founding fathers understood human nature, they structured the Constitution to permanently protect the people from the human shortcomings of their leaders. Human nature has not changed since America’s founding. So the need still exists for the protection provided by the Constitution.
And as Mark Levin points out, we can actually go back before that to see how liberals undermined America and undermined the Constitution by finding judges who would “interpret” it rather than just read it. Consider slavery, and consider the fact that the Democrat Party was the party of slavery and that the Ku Klux Klan was the terrorist arm of the Democrat Party. And what justified slavery in the face of our founding documents which clearly condemned slavery? Liberal activist judges:
Levin: Activist Supreme Courts are not new. The Dred Scott decision in 1856, imposing slavery in free territories; the Plessy decision in 1896, imposing segregation on a private railroad company; the Korematsu decision in 1944, upholding Franklin Roosevelt’s internment of American citizens, mostly Japanese Americans; and the Roe decision in 1973, imposing abortion on the entire nation; are examples of the consequences of activist Courts and justices. Far from being imbued with special insight, these decisions have had dire consequences for our governmental system and for society.
“This member of the Government was at first considered as the most harmless and helpless of all its organs. But it has proved that the power of declaring what the law is, ad libitum, by sapping and mining slyly and without alarm the foundations of the Constitution, can do what open force would not dare to attempt.”
—Thomas Jefferson to Edward Livingston, 1825. ME 16:114
“The Constitution . . . meant that its coordinate branches should be checks on each other. But the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch.”
—Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, 1804. ME 11:51
“To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions [is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men and not more so. They have with others the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps. Their maxim is boni judicis est ampliare jurisdictionem [good justice is broad jurisdiction], and their power the more dangerous as they are in office for life and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves.”
—Thomas Jefferson to William C. Jarvis, 1820. ME 15:277
Democrats don’t love America. They haven’t for a long time. For my entire life, in fact.
America is based on the idea that man can govern himself, and that man can govern himself and should govern himself, within the just parameters of the Constitution they so painstakingly crafted for us:
The form of government secured by the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, and the Constitution is unique in history and reflects the strongly held beliefs of the American Revolutionaries.
At the close of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on September 18, 1787, a Mrs. Powell anxiously awaited the results, and as Benjamin Franklin emerged from the long task now finished, asked him directly: “Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” “A republic if you can keep it” responded Franklin.
The term republic had a significant meaning for both of them and all early Americans. It meant a lot more than just representative government and was a form of government in stark contrast to pure democracy where the majority dictated laws and rights. And getting rid of the English monarchy was what the Revolution was all about, so a monarchy was out of the question.
The American Republic required strict limitation of government power. Those powers permitted would be precisely defined and delegated by the people, with all public officials being bound by their oath of office to uphold the Constitution. The democratic process would be limited to the election of our leaders and not used for granting special privileges to any group or individual nor for defining rights.
But Democrats have always despised our founding fathers and the republic they gave us. Thomas Jefferson said:
“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”
“I think that we can say that the Constitution reflected the enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day and that the framers had that same blind spot. I don’t think the two views are contradictory to say that it was a remarkable political document that paved the way for where we are now and to say that it also reflected the fundamental flaw of this country that continues to this day.”
And when you read our founding fathers, and understand their arguments and their worldview, you can readily understand why Obama has to characterize the founding fathers and the Constitution they wrote as “blind.”
Because Thomas Jefferson also said things like:
“A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have.”
And:
“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”
And:
“The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”
And:
“If people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.”
And:
“To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”
And:
“The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government”
But these notions are fundamentally incompatible with the vision of “America” Democrats have for this country. Which is why the founding fathers must be destroyed; their integrity demolished; their wisdom undermined.
Don’t tell me you love America, Democrats. You hate it. You’ve hated it for a long time. That’s why you embrace the following vision of this founding father:
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
The problem is that yours isn’t a founding father of America, but rather the founding father of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. That quote that Democrats all affirm came from Karl Marx (see Obama’s paraphrase: “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”) And if you are a Democrat who doesn’t affirm that statement, than explain to me as a Democrat why this central defining statement of communism – which flies in the face of what America’s founding fathers said - is in fact demonic and evil. And then explain to me how that statement has no part with the Democrat Party. Please.
You can come out as anything you want at college: a sexual “explorer” who pulls long sexual trains for frat boys (or for sorority sisters, for that matter); a militant homosexual activist; a private-property-destroying anarchist; a jihadist who shouts down Jewish speakers. And, of course, in the case of William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, an unashamed terrorist whose only regret is not planting even more bombs.
Just don’t you dare come out as a Republican, a conservative, a pro-lifer or a Christian, or else these “tolerant” “intellectuals” will bare their vampire fangs and leap at your throat like animals rather than the elitists they so arrogantly presume themselves to be.
To the extent that there is anything whatsoever that is funny about professors like Ellen Lewin, it is that academics such as herself actually pride themselves for their “tolerance,” on the one hand, while simultaneously priding themselves for rabidly attacking anyone who even remotely disagrees with their views.
A University of Iowa professor felt the need to reply to a blast email by the College Republicans on Monday morning. Ellen Lewin, a professor of Anthropology and Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies in the Department of Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies, sent a vulgar response to a College Republican email about the group’s, “Conservative Coming Out Week.”
The College Republican email, which was sent to the entire University of Iowa Community, had been approved by a number of university officials before being sent out.
Lewin responded to email by writing, “#*@% [F-Word] YOU, REPUBLICANS” from her official university email account.
Natalie Ginty, a University of Iowa Student and Chairwoman of the Iowa Federation of College Republicans, demanded an apology from Lewin’s supervisors. “We understand that as a faculty member she has the right to express her political opinion, but by leaving her credentials at the bottom of the email she was representing the University of Iowa, not herself alone,” Ginty wrote to James Enloe, the head of the Department of Anthropology.
“Vile responses like Ellen’s need to end. Demonizing the other party through name-calling only further entrenches feelings of disdain for the other side. I am sure you understand that nothing is ever accomplished by aimless screams of attack,” Ginty concluded.
In an email to the College Republicans, Professor Lewin wrote, “This is a time when political passions are inflamed, and when I received your unsolicited email, I had just finished reading some newspaper accounts of fresh outrages committed by Republicans in government. I admit the language was inappropriate, and apologize for any affront to anyone’s delicate sensibilities. I would really appreciate your not sending blanket emails to everyone on campus, especially in these difficult times.”
Lewin sent that email at 10:51 a.m.
Lewin’s response is as inappropriate than her choice of language in her first email. At the bottom of the original mass email, a University of Iowa disclaimer reads, “Distribution of this message was approved by the VP for Student Services. Neither your name nor e-mail address was released to the sender. The policy and guidelines for the UI Mass Mail service, including information on how to filter messages, are available at: http://cs.its.uiowa.edu/email/massmail.” The College Republicans didn’t even know who all would be receiving the message.
At 11:06 a.m. on Tuesday, Professor Lewin sent another email saying:
I should note that several things in the original message were extremely offensive, nearly rising to the level of obscenity. Despite the Republicans’ general disdain for LGBT rights you called your upcoming event “conservative coming out day,” appropriating the language of the LGBT right movement. Your reference to the Wisconsin protests suggested that they were frivolous attempts to avoid work. And the “Animal Rights BBQ” is extremely insensitive to those who consider animal rights an important cause. Then, in the email that Ms. Ginty sent complaining about my language, she referred to me as Ellen, not Professor Lewin, which is the correct way for a student to address a faculty member, or indeed, for anyone to refer to an adult with whom they are not acquainted. I do apologize for my intemperate language, but the message you all sent out was extremely disturbing and offensive.
It’s strange that Professor Lewin is upset with a student for calling her by her first name AFTER she told them to “$%@& [F Word] OFF.” Quite honestly, Lewin’s continued attacks make it seem like more serious punishment of the professor is called for rather just than the public apology that the College Republicans are demanding.
Professor Tim Hagel, the faculty advisor for the University of Iowa College Republicans, also interjected on behalf of the group.
The issue isn’t whether you found something in the message sent by the College Republicans to have been offensive, but how you chose to express yourself. Although some would disagree with the reasons in the message immediately below, there would have been a more appropriate way for you to have expressed yourself. Your initial apology, though qualified, was at least a step in the right direction. The “additional note” only served to retract the apology and was an apparent attempt to justify your initial response.
It’s not my place at this point to debate the merits of whether the CR message was offense, but let me remind you that they have First Amendment rights as much as you do and that their message was approved for mass distribution by the VP for Student Services, as was indicated at the bottom of the original message.
Let me also note that I found your complaint about Ms. Ginty’s use of your first name to be rather ironic. As much as I agree with you that it would have been better for her to have shown the respect for your position by referring to you as “Professor,” respect is a two way street and you clearly did not show respect for the College Republicans in your initial response.
-TH
Tim Hagle
Associate Professor
UICR Faculty Advisor
Update :University of Iowa President Sally Mason has responded to the incident by sending out a blast email. Mason’s response was “spurred” by TheIowaRepublican.com’s story about the incident.
Dear Members of the University Community:
The University of Iowa encourages freedom of expression, opposing viewpoints, and civil debate about those opposing viewpoints. This is clearly articulated in our core values of Diversity and Respect. Because diversity, broadly defined, advances its mission of teaching, research, and service, the University is dedicated to an inclusive community in which people of different cultural, national, individual, and academic backgrounds encounter one another in a spirit of cooperation, openness, and shared appreciation.
The University also strongly encourages student engagement in such discussions and supports students acting on their viewpoints. Student organizations are sometimes formed along political lines and act on their political beliefs. Even if we personally disagree with those viewpoints, we must be respectful of those viewpoints in every way. Intolerant and disrespectful discord is not acceptable behavior.
Sally Mason
President
Below is the original email that includes Lewin’s response.
Today, in universities across the country, we are seeing honored faculty fired for no better reason than that they disagree with one or another tenet of “political correctness.”Lawrence Summers was essentially fired from his position as president of Harvard University for raising the possibility that many factors apart from discrimination or bias could explain why there were more men than women in high-end science and engineering positions. Guillermo Gonzalez, as assistant professor at Iowa State, was denied tenure and fired for having written articles arguing that a purposive cause is the best explanation for certain features of our cosmic habitat. David Eaton said, “As alumni at ISU, we are appalled that the current Iowa State administration would stoop to expelling a brilliant young scientist and gifted instructor from the classroom, not for teaching about intelligent design or even mentioning it in his classroom, but for simply committing the thought crime of advocating it [in a research paper] as science.” The documentary film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed presents scientist after scientist who were fired merely for advocating the possibility of an intelligent cause to the universe. Ben Stein calls attention to the terrifying process of such a stifling of academic and scientific freedom. Fascists and Marxists had no qualms persecuting and stifling unwanted thought among their intellectuals; Western universities should have great qualms over such persecution, but increasingly do not
Will Professor Lewis be fired for harboring unacceptable views the way more so-called “conservative” faculty like Lawrence Summers and Guillermo Gonzalez? If intellectual hypocrisy wasn’t the quintessential defining essence of modern universities, she certainly would be.
As it is, if you want to see true intolerance today, if you want to see true Marxism, if you want to see the most vile views defended and the most decent ones viciously attacked, just go to your nearest liberal arts university.
This is a state university. The tax dollars of Reopublicans and other conservatives go to fund both this university and the salary and benefits of this professor whe turns around and denounces their ability to even have a voice. How dare these damn liberals demand that we pay for their despicable attitudes?
