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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 | Cultural Marxists Arrive on America’s Shores

Daily Verse | Psalm 112:1
Blessed is the man who fears the Lord, who finds great delight in his commands.

Friday and as we head into the weekend, take some time to celebrate America’s founding on July 4, 1776, when we declared our independence from Great Britain. While the current version of America is a wreck compared to what the Founding Fathers envisioned, it’s greatness is still there. We should be glad that we’ve all had the undeserved privilege of living here. I love this country—always have, always will—and refuse to submit to her critics.

Speaking of critics, today is the fourth in a series of short posts I’m doing on the development of cultural Marxism in the United States, based on Andrew Breitbart’s Righteous Indignation. The first three are here, here and here.

In summary, we started with Jean-Jacques Rousseau who believed men were essentially good but that society was a corrupting influence that limited their freedom, and the answer was a new “social contract.” Rousseau was followed by Karl Marx, who thought human nature was formed by society and that the workers were exploited by the owners, limiting their economic freedom and creating inequality. The answer was to tear down society so that communism would naturally take its place, and he predicted (influenced by G.W.F. Hegel’s dialectic theory) that capitalism would eventually fail in favor of socialism.

Surprisingly, two U.S. presidents—Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson—embraced Marxist theory, putting it on equal footing with the vision of the Founding Fathers. Fortunately, their policies didn’t get too far, but they opened the door for later politicians to challenge the necessity of the U.S. Constitution. That brings us to the 1920s.

The next stage in the development of cultural Marxism is when those evil seeds were firmly planted in the United States. To get there took a few years.

It started in the early 1900s with Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), an Italian socialist and founding member of the Communist Party of Italy. He believed socialism hadn’t yet come into existence in force because capitalism produced “cultural hegemony” through its dominant ideological position in its cultural institutions to maintain power.

“He argued that capitalist power needed to be challenged by building a counter-hegemony. By this he meant that, as part of the war of position, the organic intellectuals and others within the working-class, need to develop alternative values and an alternative ideology in contrast to bourgeois ideology … He believed that a final war of manoeuvre was only possible, in the developed and advanced capitalist societies, when the war of position had been won by the organic intellectuals and the working-class building a counter-hegemony.”

(This is what we know today as “the long march through the institutions,” a phrase coined by the German Marxist activist Rudi Dutschke after studying Gramsci’s philosophy. It meant that to bring about socialism, socialists had to embed themselves in a capitalist society’s cultural institutions and work from the inside out to transform its values.)

After Gramsci came György Lukács (1885–1971), a Hungarian Marxist philosopher. He built on Gramsci’s views, believing that Marx’s dialectic materialism wasn’t really a tool for predicting the future as much as it was a tool for tearing down society itself. Here’s how Breitbart describes Lukacs:

“Lukacs’s view was so influential that for a time, he actually became deputy commissar of culture in Hungary, where he proceeded to push a radical sex-ed program encouraging free love and rejection of Judeo-Christian morality. In that role, he tried to live out his ideology of destruction: ‘I saw the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution….A worldwide overturning of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old values and the creation of new ones by the revolutionaries” (RI, p.112).

While Lukács’s political ambitions were short-lived, he eventually landed a role in the Frankfurt School, a German institute funded by a rich socialist activist, Felix Weil. Along with Lukács, Weil brought in Max Horkheimer (1895–1973). And Horkheimer lit the fuse. He “coined a term that would embody the whole corrupt philosophy of his fellow travelers’ mission to destroy society and culture using the Marxist dialectic: critical theory” (emphasis mine; RI, p.113).

It’s important here that I quote Breitbart at length:

“Critical theory … was, quite literally, a theory of criticizing everyone and everything everywhere. It was an attempt to tear down the social fabric by using all the social sciences (sociology, psychology, economics, political science, etc.); it was an infinite and unending criticism of the status quo, adolescent rebellion against all established social rules and norms” (emphasis mine; RI, p.113).

Sound familiar?

“The real idea behind all of this was to make society totally unworkable by making everything basically meaningless. Critical theory does not create; it only destroys, as Horkheimer himself openly stated, ‘Above all … critical theory has no material accomplishments to show for itself'” (emphasis mine; RI, pp.113-114).

Again, does any of this ring some bells?

Horkheimer took over the Frankfurt School in 1930 and brought in “fellow devotees of critical theory like Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse. Each agreed with the central idea of critical theory, namely that all of society had to be criticized ad nauseam, all social institutions leveled, all traditional concepts decimated” (RI, p.114).

They would have stayed in Germany except for a little problem called Adolf Hitler, whose rise to power caused them to flee to the United States (almost all of the Frankfurt School scholars were of Jewish heritage). And when they landed here, they found easy access to our cultural institutions because of our tradition of freedom and liberty. They exploited our freedoms to inject their poisonous ideology directly in the veins of our society and culture. The Frankfurt School was almost immediately accepted at Columbia University and

“With the tentacles affixed to the institutions of American higher education, the Frankfurt School philosophy began eking its way into every crevice of American culture. Horkheimer’s ‘critical theory’ became a staple of Philosophy, History, and English courses across the country … Erich Fromm … was pushing cultural Marxism through psychology by blaming Western tradition for the rise of Nazism and the rejection of Marxism … Theodor Adorno was sliding Marxism into the American consciousness by attacking popular trends in the world of art” (RI, pp.116-118).

But as bad as Fromm and Horkheimer were, the worst of them all was Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), who founded the “New Left” for breaking down American society. We’ll pick up with him on Monday.

Have a great weekend, and may God bless America!