Tag Archives: culturalmarxism

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Daily Broadside | The Democrat Serpent Needs a Heel to the Head this November

Daily Verse | Nehemiah 13:24
Half of their children spoke the language of Ashdod or the language of one of the other peoples, and did not know how to speak the language of Judah. I rebuked them and called curses down on them. I beat some of the men and pulled out their hair.

Thursday’s Reading: Esther 1-2

Happy Thursday, my friends.

I’ve consistently said that the Democrat party should be outlawed (examples here, here, here) and have noted many times that the Democrats need to be kicked to the curb completely this November. What I’d like to see is a tsunami of voting that destroys the Democrats’ hold on power, a defeat so devastating that it will take them years to regain what they lost, if ever they could.

I’m not the only one who feels that way about a political party that is trying to destroy this country by any means necessary; so does Deroy Murdoch.

The vital mission of everyone on the Republican-Right in the upcoming elections should be to demolish the Democrat Party and relegate it to the Smithsonian along with the relics of the Whig and Know Nothing parties.

This is no time for Republicans to squeak by at the polls. By heaping devastating defeats upon the Democrat Party, the GOP justifiably must treat this leftist force as a clear and present danger to the Republic. Everything the Democrat Party touches goes to hell. One would be hard-pressed to find a formerly GOP constituency where a Democrat win has made life better.

The Democrat Party of JFK, LBJ, and even Bill “Welfare Reform” Clinton is long gone. The Democrat Party of Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, AOC, and Gavin Newsom has nothing positive to offer and deserves to be voted into oblivion.

Yes. Yes. A thousand times yes.

The problem here is that when we vote, we assume we have conservative candidates running, which is an ignorant assumption these days. Unfortunately, we often end up with establishment “Republicans” like Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney who have an R next to their name but are functional Democrats in practice. That’s why voting “harder” doesn’t really get us anywhere.

However, the Democrats’ threat to our country is so great that getting rid of them is like cutting gangrene out of your foot. You just need to slice it out of the flesh now and worry about reconstructive surgery later.

We’re also a mostly evenly-divided country between Ds and Rs with lots of Independents. The only way to crush the Democrats at the polls in November is if enough indies and disaffected Dems vote Republican. Signs are good that parts of the traditional Dem base are disillusioned with the radicalism of the anti-American left, especially among Blacks and Hispanics.

Josh Hammer in this article wonders aloud just what Brandon’s intent is toward the American people.

[T]he better question to ask is not whether President Joe Biden is engaged in a cold war merely against the “deplorables.” We know the answer to that: yes. Instead, the more relevant question is whether the Biden administration is now engaged in a cold war against a broader target: the entire American citizenry. The answer to that question, based on all relevant data and metrics, seems to be the same: yes.

It’s easy to present the evidence, including inflation, open borders, profligate spending, restricted energy development, climate change alarmism, white supremacy gaslighting, radical abortion laws, sexually grooming school children, and creating a Ministry of Truth, to name a few of the radical Marxists’ tactics.

They’re madmen.

Murdock concludes:

Republicans and Libertarians henceforth should make up America’s two-party system. Voters then can choose between 80-proof and 150-proof varieties of limited, constitutionalist government. The Democrats’ deadly Wokistani socialism should be deported to Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela where it belongs. Better yet, the neo-Marxist Left’s parasitic philosophy should plague no nation and, instead, languish on library shelves.

Sure, but the only way to stamp out Marxism is to make teaching or advocating any of the totalitarian political ideologies illegal. We have free speech, but those ideas are the antithesis of free speech. We can’t allow our freedom to be co-opted by domestic enemies to enslave us, like the radical jihadists did in the “free” elections in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But that’s exactly what the Democrats are doing.

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Daily Broadside | What Leftists Want is Not What They’ll Get

Daily Verse | 2 Kings 5:26
But Elisha said to him, “Was not my spirit with you when the man got down from his chariot to meet you? Is this the time to take money, or to accept clothes, olive groves, vineyards, flocks, herds, or menservants or maidservants?”

Thursday’s Reading: 2 Kings 6-8

Thursday and I don’t know if you’re feeling it, but I am. The latest Issues & Insights editorial is called “America Moving From A Permission Society To A Repressive Regime” and it helps illuminate the slow but perceptible movement toward a society that can only operate as the government sees fit.

The Democrats who for now dominate policy making in Washington believe there is nothing so private that they cannot regulate, nothing so personal that it can’t be intruded upon. The only question is the pace of the arrogation of our freedoms. They have to be taken down in increments, so that the country won’t notice the slippery slope toward tyranny. In many cases, often regarding energy and conservation policies, restrictions are even celebrated by the loudest factions to help numb the public to the constant attacks on liberty.

Timothy Sandefur, author of “​​The Permission Society,” and a vice president of the Goldwater Institute, has said one of the fundamental problems with living in a permission society “is that it violates the principle of equality.”

“Who,” he says, “has to ask permission?”

The answer, of course, is “an inferior has to ask permission of a superior.”

That certainly describes the country we live in. But more and more, our “superiors” are closing our options before we can even ask for approval. What requires a government permit or certificate, or some other consent today will tomorrow by verboten.

They go on to suggest that restrictions on gun ownership, building regulations, and of social media acting as an agent of the state, are all examples of what happens in a “permission” society, then conclude:

There is a reason America’s ruling class, made up primarily of Democrats with a few RINOs on the fringes, is aptly labeled. It has no interest in protecting and promoting a free society – its objective is to control the country in a way that increases and consolidates its power. Small steps such as dishwasher guidelines and pool heater rules don’t do much damage on their own.

But combined with decades of directives, mandates, and restrictions that affect personal choices, manufacturing processes, and even expression, and they become a bulwark of fascism. Small offenses add up. We’ve come to live under a tyranny of regulation that grows without rest, a regime of repressive laws, a bureaucracy that inflates itself while making life harder for the supervised masses. The government has become a blob that ate American liberty.

In a different opinion piece, author J.B. Shurk writes of the Ten Steps to Totalitarianism:

  • Destruction of Religion
  • Gun Confiscation
  • Control Over Energy
  • Control Over Communication
  • Control Over Money
  • Doomsday Fearmongering
  • School Indoctrination
  • Elimination of Family
  • Elimination of Cars
  • Digital Identity Tracking

All noted and agreed. The only one I think is missing is Centralized Health Care. But we’re already on our way there with the creation of Obamacare and the refusal of the RINOs under Paul Ryan’s leadership to repeal that law when they had the chance under Trump.

Everyone can name something for each of the categories on that list. Religion? See the infestation of woke thinking and social justice practice under the guise of “church.” Guns? The never-ending assault on our Second Amendment rights with new restrictions imposed every time some lunatic shoots up a subway. Energy? Look at the instant destruction of our self-sustaining energy position as soon as the fool in the White House took office. Doomsday Fearmongering? What do you think the climate change alarmism is about? Indoctrination in schools? That’s the anti-American Howard Zinn agenda in our schools along with the sexualization and moral corruption of our kids.

And we’ve all recently heard about the government’s plans to digitize money. If that happens, which is likely, our self-determination and ability to make choices will be severely curtailed. We’ll be living in a social credit society.

The worst of it is that large segments of our society don’t, can’t and won’t see what’s happening. In 1984 an ex-KGB agent named Yuri Bezmenov talked openly about how the Soviets were undermining the patriotism of Americans. Listen to it and see whether what he said then still holds true today.

“What [psychological warfare] basically means is to change the perception of reality of every American, to such an extent, that despite of the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country. It’s a great brainwashing process that goes very slow and is divided in four basic stages.”

The KGB spent 85 percent of their time on psychological warfare against the U.S. And as he says, there’s no way to undo what has already been done. The most chilling irony is when he says that those who were brainwashed into a Marxist way of thinking and seeing and welcoming that ideology would be some of the first to be eliminated under such a regime. Why?

“Simply because the psychological shock when they will see in future what the beautiful society of equality and social justice means in practice, obviously they will revolt. They will be very unhappy, frustrated people. And the Marxist/Leninist regime does not tolerate this people … In future, this people will be simply fffp.”

They get the bullet, too.

That interview was in 1984—almost 40 years ago. Just think of how many more generations have been brainwashed and now occupy stations of influence in all of our major institutions. It would take another 40 years to replace them all if we started right now, as you read this. And starting right now is not going to happen.

I know you think I’m crazy for saying this, but … pay attention, pray, buy a gun if you haven’t, and make sure you have lots of ammo. You’re going to need it.

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Daily Broadside | A Powerful Church is at the Core of the American Experience

Daily Verse | 2 Samuel 7:25-26
“And now, Lord God, keep forever the promise you have made concerning your servant and his house. Do as you promised, so that your name will be great forever.”

Tuesday’s Reading: 2 Samuel 8-10

Since this blog is concerned with faith, culture and politics, I look for the intersection of the three but spend a lot of time on the political state of our country. Today I want to take a brief look at how the cultural ethos of our country, supported by the political regime we live under, is affecting the church—specifically what we’d consider the “evangelical” church in the U.S.

The threat to the Church is the same threat that is grinding down our culture—that of cultural Marxism.

This danger is the subject of a new film, Enemies Within the Church, produced by Cary Gordon, Trevor Loudon, and Judd Saul.  It chronicles the destructive infiltration of the churches and the injection of “wokeism” – Marxism, social justice, Critical Race Theory, gender fluidity – into church doctrine.  The choir of radical Left ideology, having targeted and gradually co-opted the media, Hollywood, Big Tech, the unions, and the political parties, set its sights on penetrating and controlling the churches, a difficult, long-term endeavor.  And, as the film explains, the communists eventually succeeded in penetrating the Bible colleges, seminaries, and pulpits of many denominations to push Christianity in the direction they want.

In the article, the author reviews the film and reports on its themes, concluding,

The subversion of the Church has meant that religious terms have been redefined and recontextualized.  The film shows how seminaries have now become places to deconstruct Christian truth, thereby leading people away from G-d and Christ.  One heretical doctrine that’s gaining ground – antinomianism – claims that Christians are exempt from the obligations of the Ten Commandments and that feelings are more significant than facts.  Churches are now embracing LGBTQ in contravention of Christian doctrine and pastors are even repenting for past Biblical positions that rejected homosexuality.  Traditional clerics maintain that without the law of G-d to lean on, situationalism fills the void: right and wrong are decided not by ethics but by the cynical evaluation of the potential consequences of a decision.

But why attack the Church? Because the Church is at the core of the American experience. In Niall Ferguson’s book, Civilisation: The West and the Rest, he refers to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences twenty-year study of western society in which an official said:

‘One of the things we were asked to look into was what accounted for the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world. We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realised that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West is so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubt about this.’

You would think that if the Chinese have figured this out, then maybe we wouldn’t be so quick to destroy our Christian heritage. It’s what gives us our strength.

But American Marxists also know this, which is why they are trying to subvert the Church. It’s the one truly significant obstacle to completing a Marxist takeover of the country.

And the Church is being subverted, especially by LGBTQ+XYZ activists.

Calvin University finds itself facing an awkward news headline. A lesbian staff member at the university, Nicole Sweda, married her live-in partner. That’s not all. An assistant professor of sociology at the college, Joseph Kuilema, presided over their ceremony. The problem? Calvin University claims an evangelical identity and is affiliated with the Christian Reformed Church in North America, which holds confessionally to Biblical definitions of sexual morality. This entails defining marriage as between a man and a woman, as well as prohibiting all sexual activity outside the bonds of matrimony.

You can read about it in the link above and find more here and here.

The point is that as secular morality has shifted away from a Judeo-Christian ethic, the Church has been pressured to conform to the new morality. In turn, that means that some churches have abandoned or explained away biblical standards for, in this case, sexual behavior.

I’ve seen it firsthand.

The move to normalize gay and lesbian men and women and to enfold them in the church I had attended for 30+ years was one of the factors that led to my leaving that fellowship. Church leadership had been imperceptibly moving us in a more progressive direction and I began to hear (or not hear) things that increased my concern. For instance, when SCOTUS decided in Obergefell v. Hodges “that state bans on same-sex marriage and on recognizing same sex marriages duly performed in other jurisdictions are unconstitutional,” effectively granting same-sex marriages the same force and elevation as biblical marriage, our senior pastor said exactly zero about it.

And that said something to me.

A little over a year later the same pastor gave a sermon in which he effectively blamed the Church for “oppressing” the LGBTQ+ community. It was during that sermon that I stood up and walked out, never to go back. The church had gradually allowed a progressive thinking to infiltrate and corrupt its allegiance to Jesus Christ and to biblical ethics, especially as it concerned sexual immorality, and I could no longer be a part of it.

All this to say that if you’re a follower of Jesus, stay alert and hold strong to your convictions. It is what gives our country the remaining strength it has, as expressed through the body of Christ, the Church. And our neighbors need to hear it.

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Daily Broadside | Leftists Are Going Full Nazi and You Should Pay Attention

Daily Verse | Genesis 50:19
“Am I in the place of God? You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.”

Thursday’s Reading: Exodus 1-6

Just before publishing I learned that Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), joined all 50 Republicans in voting down the federal voting rights legislation in the Senate. So not everything is awful. But most of it is.

Thursday and if you’ve been keeping up with the Bible reading plan, we’re done with Genesis—and it’s not even the end of January! Hopefully you’re finding new things you hadn’t known before as you read through the scripture. If you’d like to join us on the journey this year, you can download the plan here:

BibleReader_C2C2022Download

I hope you’re reading it because you need to be sure of Who is unchanging and True in an age of deceit, betrayal and threats to the safety and freedom we’ve taken for granted in the greatest country ever founded. If you’re not sure in whom your ultimate confidence rests, let me jolt you into thinking it through.

Almost half of Democratic voters—48 percent—think the government should be able to fine or imprison individuals “who publicly question the efficacy of the existing COVID-19 vaccines on social media, television, radio, or in online or digital publications.”

This is not the most astonishing finding of a poll just released by Rasmussen. Let’s go through the relevant points: Nearly the same percentage of Democratic voters—47 percent—think the government should be able to put a tracking system, like an ankle monitor or a locked collar, on people who refuse the vaccine. And 45 percent favor putting the unvaccinated in camps. Camps.

More than half of Democratic voters—55 percent—think people who refuse the vaccine should be fined. Fifty-nine percent favor confining all unvaccinated people to their homes. More than a quarter of Democratic voters—29 percent—think that the government should be able to confiscate the children of unvaccinated parents . . .

Is any of this Nazi enough for you yet? You are living next door to the people who would have turned you over to the Comité de salut public for opposing the “Law of Suspects”—the law that authorized the arrest of all suspected enemies of the Revolution and ushered in the Reign of Terror. You are living next door to the people who would have turned you over to the NKVD for “moral sabotage of the Soviet Union.” You are living next door to the people who would have called up the Gestapo and said, “My neighbor is hiding a Jew.”

Examine these historical personages from Revolutionary France or Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany (or Nazi France): It’s not just that they were following orders. On the contrary, they thought they were doing a positive good for society. They were eager to help rid their community of dangerous elements. They were proud of what they did.

Some of your Democratic neighbors will likewise be proud to lock you up, put a tracking collar on your neck, take away your children—all for the public good. These are people who would murder you for the public good. 

This is the poisonous rot that has leeched into our culture over the last few decades. And, lest you think that the government is just rattling their sabers without intent to use them, The US Army is set to conduct a “guerrilla warfare exercise” later this month in North Carolina where troops will battle against “freedom fighters.”

The two week “unconventional warfare exercise” will take from Jan. 22-Feb. 4 on privately owned land in a remote location which remains unknown.

“Called Robin Sage, the exercise serves as a final test for Special Forces Qualification Course training and it places candidates in a politically unstable country known as Pineland,” reports the Charlotte Observer.

“These military members act as realistic opposing forces and guerrilla freedom fighters, also known as Pineland resistance movement,” said the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center.

Maybe they’re just practicing for when they help Ukraine defend itself against Russia?

As Chris Menahan notes, a similar Robin Sage exercise in 2019 showed resistance fighters displaying a flag that says “liberty.”

“They could tell these soldiers they’re battling the Chinese, Russians, Iranians, North Koreans or other foreign enemies but instead they have them training to kill “freedom fighters” with “Liberty” flags,” writes Menahan.

The exercise will do little to dampen concerns that the Biden administration is launching a de facto ‘domestic war on terror’ targeting patriots and Trump supporters.

Oh.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of any good reason for our troops to be war-gaming a battle against us. I mean, besides BLM and Antifa, but they don’t wave the “Liberty” flag. On the other hand, Paul Eaton, a retired U.S. general and a senior advisor to the far-Left VoteVets, has reasons:

Eaton told NPR that military leaders needed to “war-game the possibility of a problem and what we are going to do” while warning that the United States is “compromised… as far as 39% of the Republican Party refusing to accept President Biden as president.” He suggested that a scenario in which the military is “compromised” needs to be “addressed in a future war game held well in advance of 2024.”

Remember when we held war games to fight our enemies rather than to purge our own people?

Eaton, a Hillary Clinton adviser, isn’t however worried about the 33% of Clinton supporters who claimed that Trump was not the legitimate winner right after the election, or the 56% of Democrats who viewed him as illegitimate a year later. Polls actually show that much higher numbers thought that Bush and Trump were illegitimately elected than the number that thought Obama and Biden were illegitimately elected. Should the military be purging Dems or holding “war games” to determine what will happen if Democrats try to live out their coup fantasies?

Hey, how come it’s only conservatives and Republicans that need to be purged?

Notice, too, that Eaton isn’t addressing an uprising with rioting and burning and looting and murder. He’s talking about 39% of Republicans who merely don’t believe Biden was legitimately elected. But that kind of thinking is now a threat that apparently needs to be addressed.

Are you awake? Don’t make the mistake of smugly dismissing all of this because “it can’t happen here.” It is happening here, right before our eyes.

Listen to Brandon and our current or “retired” military leaders when they talk about “domestic terrorists.” Pay attention when your military prepares to battle “freedom fighters.” We need to take them seriously because they’re telegraphing their intent. And you and I are the targets.

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Daily Broadside | Ring Found with Image of Good Shepherd from Third Century

Daily Verse | Genesis 14:13
One who had escaped came and reported this to Abram the Hebrew.

Friday’s Reading: Genesis 15-17
Saturday’s Reading: Genesis 18-20

It’s Friday and the end of the first week of January 2022, the 93rd week and third year of “two weeks to flatten the curve.” It’s also the 50th week since the disaster known as Brandon was foisted on these United States. I think just as the Democrats commemorated the January 6 riots with melodramatic speeches, a performance by the cast of Hamilton and a candlelight vigil organized by an antifa-linked group, the Republicans should hold a memorial on January 20 to mourn the death of America as founded, reciting all the failures of the current administration and the malfeasance of the Democrat Party that is now a rabid anti-American Marxist cabal.

But enough of that. Let’s close out the week with a stunning discovery reported just before Christmas.

Israeli researchers on Wednesday displayed a Roman-era golden ring with an early Christian symbol for Jesus inscribed in its gemstone, found in a shipwreck off the ancient port of Caesarea.

The thick octagonal gold ring with its green gemstone bore the figure of the “Good Shepherd” in the form of a young shepherd boy in a tunic with a ram or sheep across his shoulders.

In the Facebook post linked from the image, the Israel Antiquities Authority writes:

This image, of the ‘Good Shepherd’, is known in ancient Christian art as a symbol of salvation; it is a parable of Jesus as the merciful shepherd of mankind, or as the one who has shown the protection of man or the testimony of his believers. The investigators are sobbing, who carried the ring, was one of the first Christians; the ring was revealed in the vicinity of Caesarea, which has great significance in the Christian tradition, as in Caesarea was one of the oldest centers of Christianity.

The shipwreck from which the ring was taken was dated to about 1,700 years ago.

Sokolov said that while the image exists in early Christian symbolism, representing Jesus as a caring shepherd, tending to his flock and guiding those in need, finding it on a ring was rare.

The presence of such a symbol on a ring probably owned by a Roman operating in or around Caesarea made sense, given the ethnically and religiously heterogenous nature of the port in the third century, when it was one of Christianity’s earliest centers.

I’ve written before about discoveries like this, which are always exciting because they independently fortify our faith in Christ. If you’re a believer, you understand what I mean. If you’re not, perhaps it appeals to your curiosity about the veracity of the Bible.

Have a good weekend.

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Daily Broadside | The Insidious Strategy of the Cultural Marxists Deserves a Response

Daily Verse | Psalm 133:1
How good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity!

It’s Wednesday and we’re back to work after the annual celebration of our independence as a country. It’s unfortunate, but the blathering ninny pretending to be president is visiting near where I live today. If I could, I’d go stand by the road and hold up a sign that reads, “BIDEN IS A FRAUD.” I’d like to say that (and much, much more) to his face and have him tell me I’m a lying dog-faced pony soldier. But, like most responsible Americans, I’ve got work and personal appointments to keep, so I’ll just read about it in the paper tomorrow.

Hopefully you’ve stayed with me for the last week as I’ve traced the development of cultural Marxism in the United States based on Chapter 6 of Andrew Breitbart’s book, Righteous Indignation. Here is the series so far:

  1. DAILY BROADSIDE | CULTURAL MARXISM GOT ITS START IN THE 1700s
  2. DAILY BROADSIDE | MARX FOLLOWED ROUSSEAU WITH A VIOLENT TWIST
  3. DAILY BROADSIDE | TWO U.S. PRESIDENTS EMBRACED MARXIST THEORY—AT THE START OF THE 20TH CENTURY
  4. DAILY BROADSIDE | CULTURAL MARXISTS ARRIVE ON AMERICA’S SHORES
  5. DAILY BROADSIDE | THE APOSTLE SAUL AND HIS RULES FOR RADICALS

According to Breitbart’s pithy summary prior to looking at Saul Alinsky:

“Marx and Hegel had paved the way for the Progressives, who in turn had paved the way for the Frankfurt School, who had then attacked the American way of life by pushing ‘cultural Marxism’ through ‘critical theory'” (RI, p.124).

And then Saul David Alinsky took Marcuse’s vision of dismantling American society through diversity and multiculturalism and developed the playbook which he executed via “community organizing.” It was Alinsky more than anyone else who figured out how to successfully agitate for Marxist change.

So, here we are, 50 years later (Alinsky’s book, Rules for Radicals, was published in 1971) and we’re in the midst of a creeping anarchy. We have sitting Congress members openly savaging America on July 4, advocating for socialism, and agreeing that the greatest threat to our nation is “white supremacy.” Critical Race Theory, which demonizes white people for “systemic racism,” is being taught in our schools. The “1619 Project” seeks to replace our historic founding with an outright lie. Criminal penalties in many large cities have been so eviscerated by activist district attorneys that groups of young men and women now brazenly steal in broad daylight. We now have a “Black National Anthem” competing on equal footing with “The Star Spangled Banner,” our true, historic, national anthem. BLM, Inc., and Antifa spent most of last year burning, looting and murdering, not to mention pulling down statues of everyone from Christopher Columbus to Abraham Lincoln to Frederick Douglass. (Frederick Douglass!)

If those current circumstances didn’t grow out of the critical theory, multiculturalism and Marxist ideology, how do you explain this young woman who is advocating for the abolition of “the United States as we know it”?

Here’s how Tyler O’Neil explains it in the article about Sinclair (with my emphasis):

Sinclair believes that white “oppression” is so ingrained in the minds and attitudes of supposedly oppressed people that they have to “unlearn” the “colonized thought” of Christianity and the “gender binary” — which is rooted in the scientific binary of biological sex. She seems to believe that certain “cultural expectations” rooted in the “genocide” upon which America was founded have brainwashed her and she needs to unlearn basic truths like the fact that people are male or female.

This comes from Marxist critical theory, which analyzes the world in terms of power and oppression. The evils perpetrated against both black slaves and Native Americans supposedly sully the entire American project, which must be uprooted in order for people to be truly free.

[…]

Yet Sinclair believes this because so many powerful institutions teach it. Just last month, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) released a horrifying Marxist lesson on whiteness that “deconstructed” various aspects of American and Western culture, including capitalism, science, the nuclear family, and Christianity, as nefarious relics of white supremacy. The lesson also claims that a work ethic, delayed gratification, being polite, and getting to meetings on time are aspects of the “whiteness” culture that must be deconstructed and rejected.

The philosophical infrastructure of Marxism evolved over 200 years but was operationalized in the United States through academia and then community organizing during the last 70. Cultural Marxism is so obviously embedded in our society that there can be no easy fix.

So what can we do about it? Breitbart had 13 rules (mimicking Alinsky’s) in Chapter 7 of his book, called “Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Revolutionaries.” I’ll list them and quote a sentence summing up the idea.

  1. Don’t be afraid to go into enemy territory. “Groupthink happens, and we have to take it head-on. We can’t win the political war until we win the cultural war.”
  2. Expose the left for who they are—in their own words. “Today, we all have the power to be citizen journalists via the Internet.”
  3. Be open about your secrets. “If you’re going to go out in public, be absolutely open about what you’ve done in the past … we have to out ourselves before the left does it for us.”
  4. Don’t let the [Media] Complex use its PC lexicon to characterize you and shape the narrative. “The fact is this: if you refuse to buy into their lexicon, if you refuse to back down in the face of those intimidation tactics, they can’t harm you.”
  5. Control your own story—don’t let the [Media] Complex do it. “Serialization is good … Keep your story alive by planning its release down to the minutest detail.”
  6. Ubiquity is key. “When playing for political or cultural keeps, impact matters most … That means developing relationships with like-minded allies or even enemies and news junkies and allowing them to share in the good fortune of a good scoop.”
  7. Engage in the social arena. “A well-socially-networked person can soon carry more weight than a household-name columnist at your local news daily.”
  8. Don’t pretend to know more than you do. “Don’t be the guy with a knife at the gunfight. It rarely ends well.”
  9. Don’t let them pretend to know more than they do. Ask them “to provide evidence for their assertions is always fun, and it’s even more fun asking them to provide the sources for that evidence.”
  10. Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. “It’s the truest of Alinsky’s statements, and it’s the most effective.”
  11. Don’t let them get away with ignoring their own rules. “At the very least, we need to force these hypocrites to stand up against their own PC regime in order to defend themselves.”
  12. Truth isn’t mean. It’s truth. “We have to falsify their [Marxist] theory by presenting unvarnished truth after unvarnished truth until the light dawns on everyone just how right we are.”
  13. Believe in the audacity of hope. “We have the power to unravel the Complex and destroy the Institutional Left. It won’t be easy. It will take time and effort … but we’ll do it, because we have to do it.”

Breitbart was concerned with the liberal media’s monopoly on the press, so some of these seem a bit irrelevant for your average patriot or like-minded conservative. But there’s a few of them we can all do:

“Don’t be afraid to go into enemy territory.” That might mean engaging in debates with others online (“the social arena”) or in person. It might be joining a counter-demonstration at a local event. Show up where the enemy is and don’t be afraid to give your opinion. Doing so inspires like-minded others, gives them material to work with, and adds to the growing chorus of those of us who refuse to cave to the extremists.

“Expose the Left for who they are—in their own words.” Don’t let Joe Biden get away with saying racist things such as, “if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.” Yes, others called it out, but don’t be afraid to do the same. Fear of reprisal and intimidation allows Marxist thought to proceed unchecked. Remember, truth is truth and we should never shy away from telling the truth.

“Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” It’s okay to point out the absurd and to do so by over-exaggerating or being absurd yourself to make a point. Leftists are seriously unserious, so why shouldn’t we point that out? Joe Biden has a penchant for nuzzling and putting his hands on women and children, and has been credibly accused of “penetrating” a female intern when he was a Senator. But the MSM ignored it, unlike how they piled on Trump’s one comment that “when you’re a star” women let you “grab ’em by the p***y.” So why not draw attention to the double-standard by calling Biden “Gropey Joe”?

This is a light touch on responding to the situation we find ourselves in. I’ve got more thoughts about what we can do, but I’ll save those for another post.

Chapter 6 of Breitbart’s book was massively helpful to my understanding of how we’ve gotten to where we are today. I hope that this series has been helpful to you, too, and that you’ll be able to make sense of why it’s showing up in our culture and recognize it when it does.

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Daily Broadside | The Apostle Saul and His Rules for Radicals

Daily Verse | Psalm 122:1
I rejoiced with those who said to me, “Let us go to the house of the Lord.”

Tuesday and with today’s “Daily Verse,” we start the second half of the year. If you’ve been keeping up with reading through the Bible in a year, congratulations! You’re half way there. Again, for those of you who are joining us late, you can download the reading plan we’re using here:

BibleReader_C2C2021Download

We’re also in the home stretch as we trace the beginnings of what eventually became cultural Marxism, with its most virulent form, Critical Race Theory, or CRT. Before we get there, though, there was one more piece of the puzzle that Andrew Breitbart identified in Righteous Indignation as key to the destructive behaviors and thinking that currently plague us.

“Marx and Hegel had paved the way for the Progressives, who in turn had paved the way for the Frankfurt School, who had then attacked the American way of life by pushing ‘cultural Marxism’ through ‘critical theory.’ The Frankfurt School thinkers had come up with the rationale for radical environmentalism, artistic communism, psychological deconstruction of their opponents, and multiculturalism. Most of all, they had come up with the concept of ‘repressive tolerance,’ aka political correctness” (RI, p.124).

Breitbart then makes an interesting observation:

“Frankfurt School philosophy was all about criticizing from the outside. It was about tearing down society by taking it apart, piece by piece, razing it to the ground … how did this outsiders’ philosophy penetrate our hearts and minds?” (p.125).

That, as they say, is the million-dollar question. I’ve asked it like this: “How in the world did we let some European malcontents—foreigners!—subvert our national culture, including our traditions, values and moral fortitude?”

And that’s where the final piece of the puzzle comes in. Breitbart writes,

“Then I read Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: if Marcuse was the Jesus of the New Left, then Alinsky was his Saint Paul, proselytizing and dumbing down Marcuse’s message, making it practical, and convincing leaders to make it the official religion of the United States, even if that meant discarding the old secular religion of the United States, the Constitution.

“Rules for Radicals might just as well be entitled How to Take Over America from the Inside. It’s theory made flesh. Alinsky laid it out step-by-step, but we were too busy fighting the results to read his game plan” (RI, p.125).

Alinsky was born in 1909 in Chicago and became “an avowed communist dedicated to communism in America from the inside, using the most clever tactical means he could devise” (RI, p.125).

“One of the crucial lessons he learned was that he had to work from the inside. Whereas New Left leaders like Marcuse preferred to bash the system from the outside and alienate all those who were part of it, Alinsky knew that it was more important to pose as an insider to achieve his aims” (emphasis mine; RI, p.125).

So Alinsky disguised himself as a patriotic American conservative, knowing that our openness and freedom provided a perfect opportunity for exploitation.

He was a pragmatist and rejected the passive methods for creating change in place at the time. In 1971 he wrote Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. In it, he summarized his strategy for implementing Marxist change in America.

He explained what he looked for in a “community organizer” (e.g. his warriors): 1) flexibility (do what you have to in order to win); 2) confidence (being unafraid of conflict, a la Hegel); 3) experience (trying new things and ignoring the wisdom of the past); and 4) certain personal qualities such as sincerity, curiosity and irreverence, and humor.

Once he had identified his foot soldiers, Alinsky laid out 13 tactics for warfare. I can’t go into detail on any of them, but I’ll list them for you here:

  1. Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.
  2. Never go outside the experience of your people.
  3. Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy.
  4. Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
  5. Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.
  6. A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
  7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
  8. Keep the pressure on.
  9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
  10. The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure on the opposition.
  11. If you push a negative had and deep enough it will break through to its counterside.
  12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
  13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize, and polarize it.

The best known of these are #5 (remember Tina Fey’s portrayal of Sarah Palin on SNL?) and #13, which is also known as the politics of personal destruction (think Brett Kavanaugh).

Alinsky’s final piece of advice: the real action is in the enemy’s reaction. You want to provoke your target into reacting because that’s when they may make a mistake—one that you can exploit for your benefit.

Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were deeply influenced by Alinsky. Clinton knew Alinsky personally and corresponded with him while in law school. Obama was a community organizer in Chicago from 1985-1988, hired by Jerry Kellman who had been trained in Alinsky’s organizing school.

We are now 50 years downstream from Alinsky’s published strategy. Did it work? And if it did, how do we counteract it and reverse the damage that has been done?

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Daily Broadside | Two U.S. Presidents Embraced Marxist Theory—at the Start of the 20th Century

Daily Verse | Psalm 111:1
I will extol the Lord with all my heart
    in the council of the upright and in the assembly.

July 1 and we’re in the middle of a series of short posts on how the craziness of the Left became what we call “cultural Marxism.” In the last two posts (here and here) I laid out, based on chapter six of Andrew Breitbart’s book, Righteous Indignation, how today’s insanity is rooted in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx.

Rousseau believed that humans are intrinsically good but are corrupted by society. That belief doesn’t square with either the Scriptures or with the Founders’ beliefs about human nature. As James Madison wrote in Federalist 51,

“If Men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and the next place, oblige it to control itself.”

Karl Marx, who lived during the 19th century, believed that society itself formed human nature. Both Rousseau and Marx believed that men were not free or equal and that society was to blame. Both envisioned replacing the current society with a new one—Rousseau with a new “social contract” and Marx by destroying the surrounding society and replacing it with communism. Both believed that “communism” was the natural and best organizational structure for a flourishing society.

What’s amazing is that near the turn of 20th century, we elected two presidents who embraced what we call “Progressivism.” As Breitbart puts it, “Progressivism was a strain in American thought that merged the Hegelian dialectic with Marxism, backed by a rosy Rousseau-ian view of humanity and the general will—basically, it was soft Marxism without the class struggle” (RI, p.109).

The first president with this ideology was Teddy Roosevelt, who served from 1901 to 1909; the second was Woodrow Wilson, who held the office from 1913 to 1921. Both loathed the Constitution’s place as our authoritative document for how America’s government should work. Roosevelt said, “To hell with the Constitution when the people want coal!” and Wilson said, “Justly revered as our great constitution is, it could be stripped off and thrown aside like a garment, and the nation would still stand forth clothed in the living vestment of flesh and sinew, warm with the heart-blood of one people, ready to recreate constitutions and laws” (RI, pp.110-111).

We don’t need no stinkin’ constitution!

Breitbart goes on to write,

“Both Roosevelt and Wilson were far less concerned about the rights of individuals or the value of republicanism; it was the job of Great Leaders to hand down good governance. They thought that great decisions should be made on high by men of high thought, and that the dirty process of democracy just blocked any chance at true change. The philosophy paved the way for FDR, and it echoes all the way down to Obama” (RI, p.111).

Breitbart wrote this in 2011 and died in 2012; therefore, he wouldn’t have known that it now echoes all the way down to the dementia patient currently occupying the White House.

Nevertheless, there were two U.S. presidents in the early 1900s who embraced Marxist ideology, challenging the Founding Fathers’ ideology. I never knew that. Did you?

But that was just the beginning of it. Tomorrow we’ll look at the Frankfurt School, and that’s when this gets really interesting.

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Daily Broadside | Cultural Marxism Got Its Start in the 1700s

Daily Verse | Psalm 97:10
Let those who love the Lord hate evil,
for he guards the lives of his faithful ones
and delivers them from the hand of the wicked.

Happy Tuesday, my friends. It’s good to be back in the digital saddle after a couple of weeks away from the keyboard. A hearty “THANK YOU!” to my friend, Bruce Gust, at muscularchristianity.com, who admirably filled in for me during my absence. His writing adds a different flavor to daveolsson.com and I’m hoping we’ll hear more from him in the future.

One of the things I’ve learned while blogging is that a lot of my discretionary time is eaten up every evening, which leaves me less time for doing something else that I love—reading. What I love about reading is learning, because learning enlarges knowledge, understanding and imagination.

Parenthetically, that’s why tyrannical regimes always burn books or, in our day, get them cancelled on Amazon. Can’t have the peasants thinking for themselves, can we? Independent thinking poses a threat to the experts with the guns. I encourage anyone with young kids to regularly read to them and, as they get older, to give them books to read on their own and then to discuss what they learned in their reading. Get them thinking independently!

That’s why I made it a point to bring several books with me while vacationing, including a couple of novels, a commentary on the Gospel of John, two political books and three sociology books. No, I didn’t read them all—there was sleeping and beaching to do!—but Andrew Breitbart’s Righteous Indignation proved to be the most potent for me.

CULTURAL MARXISM

In chapter six Breitbart traces, in the most lucid and easy-to-follow explanation I’ve ever read, the roots and evolution of cultural Marxism. Cultural Marxism encompasses everything that seems upside-down in America these days, from the anarchy of Antifa to the 1619 Project to BLM to transgenderism—(hey, by the way, did you see that SCOTUS refused to hear an appeal of a lower court ruling that struck down a school board’s transgender bathroom ban, effectively making transgender bathroom use the law of the land? Newly minted justice Amy Comey Barrett sided with the libs. Great to have such a staunch Catholic on the court in whom the “dogma lives loudly”!)—to Critical Race Theory (CRT) to tearing down statues to cancel culture to fake personal pronouns to open borders to … you name it, it’s all of a piece.

I knew that cultural Marxism came out of the German Frankfurt School in the mid-1940s, but this chapter, called “Breakthrough,” put all of the pieces together, from the philosophical foundations to the practical outworking that we are experiencing today.

Over the next couple of days, I want to outline it for you, too. I expect that most of us who pay attention to the news are shocked by the flood of insanity that we witness night after night, day after day, from coast to coast. If you want to know why it’s happening, we need to understand what is happening, where it came from, and what, if anything, we might be able to do about it.

So I’ll start with the philosophical underpinnings of cultural Marxism and quote Breitbart where it makes sense (and throughout this series of posts).

THE PHILOSOPHICAL UNDERPINNINGS OF CULTURAL MARXISM

This is where it all starts. You’ve heard the phrase, “ideas have consequences”? They do indeed, and the ideas that gave birth to cultural Marxism have reverberated down through the centuries. And, I might add, they are straight from the pit of hell.

The seeds of cultural Marxism are found in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), the Swiss-born philosopher, political theorist, composer, novelist, botanist and pioneer of the autobiography. His view of humanity and thus the foundation of his philosophy is that “human beings are good by nature but are rendered corrupt by society.” Rousseau also believed that modern society destroyed the natural state of communism that originally existed in human communities.

Although born in Geneva, Switzerland—the home of John Calvin—Rousseau’s belief that humans are naturally good flies in the face of what the Bible teaches: that mankind is born corrupted and evil.

“There is no one righteous, not even one;
there is no one who understands;
    there is no one who seeks God.
All have turned away,
    they have together become worthless;
there is no one who does good,
    not even one.”

— Romans 3:10-12

On the other hand, our Founders knew the truth about human nature. Writes Breitbart:

“To sum up, the Founders’ view was this: human nature is variable and requires training in virtue; no government should be given too much power, or the people comprising that government will use the power in the worst ways possible; individual freedom, when used within the boundaries of morality, is the highest good” (p. 107).

Rousseau believed that there needed to be a new “social contract” in which the “general will” of the people prevailed. Modern society itself was the problem. Re-ordering modern society was the solution. Sound familiar?

We’ll look at the next phase of development tomorrow.