Tag Archives: progressivism

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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.

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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.