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Old 11-14-2018, 21:49   #1
tonyz
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The Present American Revolution - VDH

A cultural civil war, a revolution, growing pains...whatever you call it...Houston, we have a problem here.

VDH conducts class as usual - complete article at link.

The Present American Revolution
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
National Review
November 13, 2018 11:34 AM

Destroying the Constitution and seeking state-mandated equality of result

The revolution of 1776 sought to turn a colony of Great Britain into a new independent republic based on constitutionally protected freedom. It succeeded with the creation of the United States.

The failed revolution of 1861, by a slave-owning South declaring its independence from the Union, sought to bifurcate the country, More than 600,000 dead later, slavery was abolished, a Confederacy was in in ruins, and the South was forced back into the United States largely on the conditions and terms of the victorious North.

The 1960s saw efforts to create a new progressive nation by swarming democratic and republican institutions. The sheer force of a left-wing cultural revolution would supposedly transform a nation, in everything from jeans, long hair, and pot to rock music and sexual “liberation.” It was eventually diffused by popular weariness with the extremism and violence of the radical revolutionaries, and the establishment’s agreements to end the Vietnam War, give 18-year-olds the right to vote, phase out the draft, expand civil rights to include reparatory action, legalize abortion, radicalize the university, and vastly increase the administrative state to wage a war on poverty, a war on pollution, and a war on inequality.

Our present revolution is more multifaceted. It is a war on the very Constitution of the United States that has not yet brought the Left its Holy Grail: a state-mandated equality of result overseen by an omnipotent and omniscient elite. The problem for today’s leftists is that they are not fighting Bourbon France, a reactionary Europe of 1848, or Czarist Russia, but an affluent, culturally uninhibited, and wildly free United States, where never in the history of civilization has a people attained such affluence and leisure.

Poverty is not existential as it once was, given high technology and government redistribution. The grievance is not that America is destitute (indeed, obesity not famine is our national epidemic). The poorer do not lack access to material goods (everything from iPhones to high-priced sneakers is in the reach of about everyone).

Instead, the complaint is that some have far more than others, and the government, despite its $21 trillion in debt, seems unable to guaranteed universal parity, especially when the people seem unexcited about joining “taking a knee” protests or “swarming the homes” of counter-revolutionaries. In other words, millions of Americans will never join Antifa, Black Lives Matter, or Occupy Wall Street on the barricades; nor will they worry that in Texas 59 percent of white women voted for Latino Ted Cruz while 95 percent of black women voted for white male Robert O’Rourke. They apparently prefer instead to live private lives on their own terms.

Taking a drive in a Hyundai today is far more comfortable, reliable, and safe than touring in a 1970 Rolls Royce. An inner-city youth with an iPhone has more computing power and global access in his palm than did an estate owner in 1990 with a row of mainframe computers in his basement. So revolution is not so easy anymore and requires changing the very idea of the state, the law, and the ancient institutions that uphold them.

Immigration

Sovereign and secure borders do not lead to the sort of demographic upheaval that fuels progressive agendas. Measured, legal, meritocratic, and diverse immigration does not result in a vast impoverished shadow population in need of self-appointed advocacy; it enhances individual assimilation, integration, intermarriage, and Americanization.

If in the past nullification of federal laws led to the states’-rights crises involving southern states in 1828–32, 1860, or 1962, today there is apparently little worry about ignoring federal immigration statutes. We simply have allowed more than 500 municipalities, counties, and states to declare full enforcement of federal immigration law null and avoid within their jurisdictions — period.

Immigrants 1,000 miles away, intent on crashing the southern border and residing in the U.S. illegally, sue the federal government to force acceptance of their anticipated illegal entry. Again, the revolutionary idea is that progressive messaging cannot win 51 percent approval without changing the demography — and changing the demography is impossible without constitutional nullification.

Elections and Courts

Voting does not always result in the result that progressives desire. Unfortunately for the Left, more than half the country still believes America is unquietly good, blessed with a wonderful inheritance by its brave and ingenious ancestors, a beacon of freedom and security in a scary world, and constantly improving. Even a progressive media, university, Hollywood, and a progressive plutocracy, Antifa, and street theater cannot yet change that fact.

So the revolution again turns to upending the constitution and the law. In Florida, local violations of state election laws seek to warp the result and elect the more progressive candidate. More fundamentally, why does a Wyoming of 600,000 souls deserve two senators, the same number as in California with its 40 million? Are not 39,400,000 California citizens deprived of their “rights” of proportional senatorial representation?

Why is there an electoral college that violates the spirt of Athenian democratic direction elections? Why is there a Second Amendment that allows “automatic” assault weapons and “nuts” with handguns?

For that matter, why is there a counterrevolutionary First Amendment that protects “hate speech” and de facto promotes right-wing racists, homophobes, nativists, xenophobes, sexists, and climate-change deniers, allowing them to propagandize and pollute the public discourse and infect campuses with right-wing rhetoric?

The courts have become revolutionary. They now routinely overturn popular referenda, presidential executive orders, and legislative statutes, mostly on the principle that better-educated, more moral and experienced judges answer to a higher, more progressive calling and know what in the long run is best for the uneducated rabble. From now on out, every Republican-nominated Supreme Court nominee will probably result in a Kavanaugh-like circus, in which protestors in the gallery, disruptive senators themselves, and mobs in the street will attempt to create so much chaos that the wearied public will cave and just wish that conservatives would not nominate such controversial constructionists.

Campuses

Today’s university is in a revolutionary spiral. The U.S. Constitution does not necessarily protect students and faculty. By that dramatic statement, I mean, free speech is all but gone. A professor who confessed opposition to affirmative action, abortion, or global warming would face ostracism and even risk physical assault and yet see his attackers all but sanctioned by a neutral or complicit administration.

Due process is nonexistent in many areas. In accusations of sexual harassment or assault, there is little left of the presumption of innocence, the right to confront and question a transparent accuser, and the appeal to be judged by a jury of one’s peers. Most of the 1960s civil-rights agenda is moribund on campus.

Racial segregation in dorms and safe spaces is unquestioned. Racial biases can result in rejected admission on the premise that there are too many of one particular race on campus — and merit-based criteria are a prejudiced construct anyway. Censorship has returned, by both banning texts and demonizing classics now deemed to need “trigger warnings.” Free assembly and expression are on life support. Speakers and guests deemed “right-wing” are shouted down, swarmed, or disinvited by a terrified Bourbon administration.

The Mob

The mob is becoming in some ways as powerful as the French rabble who cheered on the guillotine, or the adolescent crowds that spoiled affluent kids such as Bill Ayers and Jane Fonda once used as demonstration fodder. Instead, it is vast and global — and linked by instant communications on social media and the Internet, and it remains often anonymous. Post or say one wrong word, and the electronic turba comes out of the shadows, swarming to demand career-ending confessions, or offering amnesty on promises of correct reeducation. One’s entire life can be accessed in nanoseconds to root out past thought crimes and counterrevolutionary speech. Be deemed a right-wing obstructionist or activist, and everything — from one’s cell-phone number and email address to private residence and office —can become known to 7 billion.

Cont’d below
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Last edited by tonyz; 11-14-2018 at 21:52.
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Old 11-14-2018, 21:51   #2
tonyz
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Cont’d from VDH article above.

Logging on may mean using the public airspace and thus entering the domain of a traditionally regulated public utility, but the masters of the universe at Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, by the power of their trillions of dollars and loud progressive fides, are exempt from antitrust and monopoly legislation. So when the mob targets a public enemy, correct-thinking thirtysomething geeks and nerds in Menlo Park and Palo Alto gear up to shut down, censor, and recalibrate public transmitted speech and thought.

Almost everything we have seen in just the last three months — the Kavanaugh chaos, the “caravan,” the ongoing Mueller octopus, recounting election results until they are deemed “correct,” the Beto and Gillum neo-socialism craziness, the swarming of a Fox News anchor’s home, driving public officials out of restaurants, the media circus at presidential press conferences — are symptoms of revolutionary America. In this conflict, one side believes it is not only not fair but also not allowable that it lacks the necessary power to make us all equal — but equal only in the eyes of a self-anointed elite.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/...eftist-agenda/
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Old 11-15-2018, 14:44   #3
tom kelly
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The Present American Revolution:

PICK A WINNER... The Elitist or The Deplorables as named by H.Clinton..????
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Old 11-15-2018, 15:31   #4
Box
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There are no winners.

Just my two cents of course, but there are no winners in this cultural barf bag we are all stuck in.

Liberals all like to selectively talk about how "our great nation" is a melting pot - but the left (and in many cases a growing portion of the middle) dont even know what the fuck a melting pot it.
And sadly -many of us on the right are ding a poor job of teaching them how a melting pot should really work:

Put two or three or twelve types of metal in a melting pot and you get ONE well assimilated alloy...
...possibly even stronger than the collective worth of what was put into the pot in the first place.

But making steel takes hard work. It takes blood sweat and tears to forge a good final product.

The left really just wants a cheap mixing bowl and the ability to selectively add ingredients based on personal tastes.

You like arugula - sure we'll throw some of that into the bowl.
You like tomatoes - we'll toss that into the salad as well.
In fact - we will just throw a bunch of different shit into the mixing bowl and give it a good shake to see how it turns out.

no nuts though - CASHEWS, CRUSHED WALNUTS, SLIVERED ALMONDS, - mmm they may taste good in a well made salad, but since some of the folks eating from our national mixing-bowl have nut allergies and since we only get 0NE salad, so.....

NO NUTS

Oh and no ranch dressing either - the buttermilk might trigger our lactose intolerant salad eaters
and no croutons - the gluten might cause some discomfort
and since we are trying to accommodate EVERYONE in our "mixing bowl" culture, we may as well leave out the meat too. (especially considering the fact that ham isnt just meat, it is a religion-unfriendly meat)

well -here is the fucking problem with that idiotic mindset
Some assholes will immediately eat up all of the fucking tomatoes
then some other ill mannered booger eating moron will stick his (or her) hand in the bowl to dig out all of the fucking cucumbers
before you know it - there is a fistfight over the last few olives
then some dickhead will dump too much vinegar and oil on the lettuce since all of the other ingredients have been picked clean

What are we left with?
all of the "polite" people that think we should be civil are left with nothing more than a few wilted lettuce leaves covered in bargain basement salad oil.


THAT is what the fucking left wants and since most Americans are too fucking stupid and lazy to say or do anything about it - that's what A'Murika is turning into.... a big fucking mixing bowl of wilted arugula

with NO NUTS
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Old 11-15-2018, 16:14   #5
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Good old fashioned freedom...versus...the “Fatherland Card” and a “social credit score”...

Such a clear choice that should be obvious for most Americans...but why do I suspect there will be a tough path ahead?
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Old 11-15-2018, 23:16   #6
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We may have forgotten a history lesson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_D...nal_Convention

In retrospect, an argument could be made the Mayor Daley leveled the playing field, literally, sending the progressive agenda back 40 years.

Having experienced that time with a viewpoint that could best be described as working-class poor, the deaths of King, the 2 Kennedy's, and VN, appear much more combustible than today's frustrated metro-sexual safe space seeking beta male. Who when confronted with real phallic force, retreats to their hive.

It's a realization that only force subdues these progressive cowards. If the occasion arises that a confrontation of a conservative public servant was physically defended with brute force by a protective public, imoo, the confrontations would cease. Much like the public confronting terrorist on planes and trains. If we are going to die, die fighting to survive.

That said, some called for the same treatment of the left, imoo, there is no need to directly challenge opposition party representatives in a public quid pro quo. To do so, feeds directly into the strategy that they (progressive) use to a psychological advantage to neuter a response from the center and the right.

The progressive’s taut and act on self-defined shifting moral grounds, citing racism and xenophobic labeling, this is done to control the debate and negate all argument and challenges.

The only way forward is not argue the points, but to be like Trump, not care one iota what is said about you and continue to attack.
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