Category Archives: Progressivism

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Daily Broadside | It’s My First Post of 2023 …

… and yesterday was New Year’s Day (Observed) at my office, so I had another day off. I hope your Christmas and New Year’s celebrations were wonderful and meaningful and full of warmth and pleasant memories …

… because it might be a new year but it’s the same-old same-old in the world of politics and culture and faith. Just because everything is “merry and bright” doesn’t mean we begin with a completely clean slate once the calendar turns a new page. Well, unless you’re in Christ, then “his compassions never fail. They are new every morning” (Lamentations 3:22-23) and, by extension, every year.

We’ll have to learn how to live in a country that is not just fraying at the edges, but is tearing down the middle. The FBI is still the Gestapo we learned about over the last six years; the Democrats are still the political mafia they exposed themselves to be; the GOP is not the opposition party but part of the swamp (with a few notable exceptions); our economy is being destroyed by the Church of Perpetual Climate Fear as war is waged on our abundance of natural gas and oil resources for some fantasy of “carbon-neutral” energy (go back to nuclear energy!); the border is still porous and getting worse because we live under a lawless regime whose sole purpose is to destroy the United States as founded; the judiciary has become a court of rubber stamps that enable progressive lawlessness; our elections are no longer free or fair, but hopelessly suspect; the DOJ and Brandon himself have demonized patriotic Americans and keeps hundreds of them locked up in violation of their due process rights; and normal Americans should be gathering by the millions to protest and agitate against all of it but such behavior is only allowed on the Left and prosecuted against the Right.

My political awakening came a couple of decades ago and I’ve invested more time in speaking out against the lawlessness than I ever have over the last three years. I sometimes see myself as a guy running up and down the brow of a rocky island jutting up out of the sea, waving a red flag, setting off flares, and yelling at an approaching luxury cruise ship, trying to get the attention of anyone on board, warning them that they’re about to run aground and sink the boat. Unfortunately, even though I’ve gotten the attention of a few people on the promenade deck, the captain and crew don’t seem to notice or care.

It’s dawning on me that there is no solution that will immediately fix the dire circumstances we find ourselves in. What I didn’t want to grant, but what has become most apparent, is that our freedoms and homogenous cultural assumptions can no longer be taken for granted. Speech is being curtailed by political and technological ideologues; deeply evil people lie and conspire to get the political outcomes they want. The spirit of our Founders once held us together as a nation, along with deeply religious communities of faith. Those have now been relegated to specialized institutions like the Heritage Foundation or Hillsdale College or to the church or the synagogue or the mosque. You’re certainly not going to find them in the halls of congress or our schools, which regularly and naturally reinforced our national values.

The Lord foils the plans of the nations;
    he thwarts the purposes of the peoples.
But the plans of the Lord stand firm forever,
    the purposes of his heart through all generations.

Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord,
    the people he chose for his inheritance.
From heaven the Lord looks down
    and sees all mankind;
from his dwelling place he watches
    all who live on earth—
he who forms the hearts of all,
    who considers everything they do.

Psalm 33:10-15

Nothing escapes the Lord’s notice. He’s aware of all that is taking place in our country’s capitol, in each of the legislatures in each state, of every person in a position of authority. He’s aware of the lies, the cheating, the oppression, the hatred, the incitement conflict among the people, of the favoritism and the graft and the greed.

His purpose among the nations will prevail because his plans “stand firm forever.” How I wish that we would be known as a “nation whose God is the Lord.” But those in power disingenuously say they fear a “theocracy,” even though a return to the Judeo-Christian principles that this nation was founded on would be the right thing.

They reject them at the cost of their own destruction. They are blind fools and, one day, they will shrink in horror and shame as the full weight of their foolishness bores down on them.

In the meantime, Christians should be doing three things: actively opposing the evil being done in this nation, preparing for persecution, and winning as many to Christ as they can, while they can.

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Daily Broadside | Here’s One More America-Hating Strategy Being Used Against Us

Daily Verse | Matthew 22:30
“At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.”

Monday’s Reading: Matthew 23-25

Happy Monday! I have been having significant issues with my computer and some nuisances with my energy levels. Both conspired to throw me off my game on Thursday and Friday last week. Glad to be back at it again this week (although the computer issues remain, contributing to the energy drain, since these posts take a lot longer to complete).

One of the things I’m trying to accomplish with this blog is to identify for you not only what is going on in the moment (as it were), but also what has led up to these series of moments. When I first started paying attention to politics years ago and to the destruction of the Judeo-Christian norms in our culture, I asked anyone I thought might have an answer, “Why?! Why are they doing this?”

I hardly knew who “they” were … Democrats, liberals, mostly, was the extent of what I could see at the time. It was a long time before I recognized that so-called “liberals” had gone the way of the dodo. These were “progressives” as opposed to conservatives. But still my question remained: “Why?”

In past posts I’ve discussed the roots of cultural Marxism (series listed here) which parades itself as “progressivism,” starting with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx, which led to Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School and their eventual invasion of America in 1935, where they joined Columbia University. I’ve also examined the radical organizer Saul Alinsky (here and here) whose “Rules for Radicals” became the map for how to implement the progressive vision in practice. (Here’s an excellent primer by Sebastian Gorka that I linked to some time ago that will help you understand what’s happening today.)

The other day I came across an article that introduced me to Cloward-Piven, a strategy “first proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University [that place needs to be defunded, leveled and salted] sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and his wife Frances Fox Piven — both longtime members of the Democratic Socialists of America.”

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when “the rest of society is afraid of them,” Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system. The authors also asserted that: (a) the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the country; (b) poor people would rise in revolt; and (c) only then would “the rest of society” accept their demands.

The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inherent inadequacy of the welfare state. In this regard, Cloward-Piven’s early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. “Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s failure to “live up” to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist “rule book” with a socialist one.

You can see that most of these provocateurs are all students of the same Marxist system of thought but they’re trying to implement it using a variety of techniques.

The Cloward-Piven Strategy was an example of what are commonly called Trojan Horse initiatives — mass movements whose outward purpose seems to be providing material help to the downtrodden, but whose real objective is to draft poor people into service as revolutionary foot soldiers; to mobilize poor people en masse in an effort to overwhelm government agencies with a flood of demands beyond the capacity of those agencies to meet. Cloward and Piven calculated that the flood of demands which they were recommending would break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears into gridlock, and bring the system crashing down. Fear, turmoil, violence and economic collapse would accompany such a breakdown — providing perfect conditions for fostering radical change. That was the theory.

This was the core of the strategy: to break the system by placing too much weight on it. After they tried to sabotage the welfare system, Cloward-Piven turned their attention to mass voting, which resulted in the 1993 Motor-Voter law signed by president Clinton.

The new law eliminated many controls on voter fraud, making it easy for voters to register but difficult to determine the validity of new registrations. Under the new law, states were required to provide opportunities for voter registration to any person who showed up at a government office to renew a driver’s license or to apply for welfare or unemployment benefits. “Examiners were under orders not to ask anyone for identification or proof of citizenship,” notes Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund in his book, Stealing Elections.

Voter registration and welfare handouts are just two examples of where Cloward-Piven have been tried, but you can’t help but see the effects of their devious scheming being applied on multiple fronts today. Our immigration system is overwhelmed to the point of being virtually non-existent with millions of foreigners crossing our open border without any meaningful resistance. Our economy is being overwhelmed with borrowing as our debt reaches $31 trillion. Our energy sector is being flattened by the ban of extracting the oil under our own feet while we have to pay increasingly more to the oil cartels in the Middle East, who just voted to reduce production. Our military is being undermined by the implementation of “woke” practices, driven by the commanding officers that Barack Hussein Obama appointed during his terms in office.

Wherever you look, you see destruction. None of this is arbitrary. There are people in positions of power, behind the shriveled carcass of Joey Soft Serve, who are intentionally destabilizing and destroying our nation.

Cloward-Piven is just one more strategy being applied to that end. Hopefully knowing about it helps you understand what is behind the lunacy you see.

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Daily Broadside | 6 Things You Can Do to Help Your Candidate Win (And Deny Progressives Another Victory)

Daily Verse | Jeremiah 29:13
“You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.”

Monday’s Reading: Jeremiah 30-33

Happy Monday. I hope you had a great weekend.

One of the questions I’ve gotten a few times from readers goes something like this: “OK, Dave, I get it. I see it. We’re in a crisis that most of the nation doesn’t see or is too scared to talk about. I agree with you. But what can we DO ABOUT IT?”

That’s been a tough one for me, too. A lot of the reading I do is great at analysis, but severely lacking on what we can do. I ask myself the same question and have written about it a few times before:

SIX PRACTICAL THINGS ALL OF US CAN DO TO PREPARE FOR WHAT’S COMING

THE INSIDIOUS STRATEGY OF THE CULTURAL MARXISTS DESERVES A RESPONSE

3 WAYS YOU CAN FIGHT THE SOCIAL MARXISTS WITHOUT LOSING YOUR JOB

These are a good start (and it was good to be reminded of them), but I keep my eyes and ears open to new ideas because the alternatives to doing nothing aren’t attractive to me.

Over the weekend I had a conversation with a conservative, Christian political consultant I know. I asked her the same question: What can the average person do to help turn things around? She gave me a list.

  1. Be a poll watcher. “Poll watchers, also referred to as partisan citizen observers or poll challengers, represent political parties, candidates, or groups such as ballot issue committees at polling locations. Rules for poll watchers vary state to state. The use of poll watchers is primarily aimed at guarding a party or group’s chance at a fair election.”
  2. Be an election judge. An election judge, (or judge of election or election clerk, inspector or commissioner), is the person in charge at the polling place. They are the one who is responsible to open and close the polling place, examine and verify the ballots, “verify that voters are qualified to vote and that they are voting in the right precinct, and they provide instructions for voters to help voting go smoothly. In some states, election judges may help process absentee and mail-in ballots. Each state sets its own requirements for election judges.”
  3. Put a sign in your yard. Candidates will give you a sign for free. Easy-peasy, right? Yes, you will “out” your political leanings. So what? The lefties don’t care if you know about their partisan preferences. Why should you care if they know yours? Have courage! Of course, in our hyper-partisan political environment, opposing voters have been known to steal yard signs or otherwise destroy them. There are ways, however, to counteract that behavior!
  4. Knock on doors. Also known as political canvassing or the “ground game,” knocking on doors to persuade residents to vote for a candidate or to remind the already persuaded to turn out is key for most candidates. Door to door canvassing increases voter turnout by an average of nine percent. “Political canvassing occurs when candidates, staff, or volunteers from a political campaign attempt to directly contact voters by going door to door. This door knocking is part of an extensive outreach plan that helps put a face on a political campaign. The more people a candidate, staff, or volunteer of the campaign reaches, the further the campaign’s message spreads.”
  5. Make phone calls. This, too, is known as political canvassing. “Volunteer-led phone banks have been found to increase turnout by 3.8 percentage points.” Instead of walking neighborhood blocks, knocking on 20 doors an hour, you can volunteer to contact voters by phone.
  6. Write a check. If you’d rather make your contribution low key and out of sight, you can always donate to your preferred candidate’s campaign. Any amount makes a difference—because the difference between winning and losing an election often comes down to funding.

These are things we can all do.

The mid-terms are in November. Start looking into some of these ideas right now, as there is often an application process and training that has to happen for some of the more active roles.

Think about recruiting others who are like-minded to serve with you. Sometimes it’s easier if you have someone to share the effort with.

And don’t forget to appeal to God in prayer to promote good and to destroy evil.