Civics Lesson

 

Government MUST Obey the Constitution

None of our problems are beyond our constitutional order’s power to solve. What is it we need, after all? We need a Congress that acts like a legislature rather than a company of moralizing performance artists. We need a president who acts like a responsible chief executive rather than a drunken king. We need a judiciary that acts impartially in accordance with the Constitution and the laws of the land rather than in a partisan manner. And we need to disperse the political power that is now concentrated in the hands of the Washington establishment.

In short, the solution to our problems is not to scrap or transcend the Constitution, but to start obeying and applying it again. Under that document, “We the People” already possess every power we need to reestablish majority rule, minority rights, democratic accountability, equal justice under law, and national sovereignty.

Kevin D. Roberts, Populist Conservatism and Constitutional Order, Imprimis, October 2024

We Need to Overrule the LEFT

With few exceptions, the Left as we know it today has rejected populism out of hand, embracing instead Big Government, Big Business, Big Banks, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Labor, Big Ag, Big Media, and Big Entertainment. For the most part, today’s Left is hard at work fortifying the power these institutions wield against the rigors of democratic accountability.

Thus the only hope for a sustainable, democratically legitimate populist reform movement today is on the Right. The question is whether the leaders of the movement can harness the highly negative energy from which the populism emerges and channel it toward a coherent, positive politics of national renewal and reform.

Kevin D. Roberts, Populist Conservatism and Constitutional Order, Imprimis, October 2024

A Prodigal Son

When a prodigal son wants to follow his appetites, or the latest fashion in idols, he tells himself that he has made a careful evaluation of everything when he is in reality just going along with the crowd. At such time, the last thing he wants to listen to is wise counsel.

Phillip E. Johnson, The Wedge of Truth

The Only Foundation

Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for liberty, but it is religion and morality alone which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free constitution is pure virtue.

John Adams, 21 June 1776

Society Shifting to a Dangerous Worldview

The view that treats puberty and pregnancy as undesirable processes stems from a more fundamental shift in thinking. Society has slowly abandoned the Christian worldview and its theistic implications. If there’s no God, then there’s no Creator who made our bodies to operate in a certain way. Organs don’t have a teleology—a way that they’re designed to function. If there’s no design, no standard, or no optimal way for organs to operate, then there can be no substandard or less-than-optimal way they function. A uterus can gestate a fetus or not. It can grow fibroids or not. It can be kept in a woman’s body or removed. Likewise, it is reasoned, genes and the endocrine system can progress a body through puberty or not. We can accept the process of puberty or block the hormonal pathways that lead to it. There’s no way our body is supposed to be. It just is, and we can do what we want with it.

As a result of this worldview shift in our culture, some people think it’s possible that any process of the body is optional. That’s why they think puberty might need consent. Indeed, even life itself is a matter of consent for some, which is why physician-assisted suicide is gaining in popularity.

Alan Shlemon, Do Children Need to Consent to Puberty?

You Don't Have to Defend Truth

Truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.

Augustine of Hippo (AD 354 to AD 430)

Origin Ideas Steer Values

A culture’s understanding of the origins issue steers the value of its people: The Judeo-Christian origins perspective tells the story of morally culpable human beings made in God’s image and for companionship with one another. This understanding alone leads to a particular view of free will, the intrinsic value of human life, and traditional marriage as a part of God’s plan. The Darwinian origins story, on the other hand, is one of individuals in constant competition, seeking not to flourish in harmony but to survive at the expense of the other, which justifies Nietzsche’s view of the world—the pursuit of unbridled power. Where you begin will determine where you end up, and this carries great consequences for everything in our lives, especially how human society should be organized.

Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, pg. 256.

LEFTISM Doesn't Work

 

A Warning to Heed

Ethics of Marxism

The value of hatred is right and good in the Marxist ethical code as long as it is directed toward the property owners, the bourgeoisie. Hatred is needed to fuel the clash between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. To keep their followers in a perpetual revolutionary mind-set, Marxist leaders, such as Mao Tse-tung, Joseph Stalin, Fidel Castro, and Kim Jong Eun, decades after their respective revolutions wound down, dressed in military garb and peppered their speeches with revolutionary language. Marxism draws its inspiration from the hope of a more harmonious future but draws its energy from the rehearsal of grievances against the bourgeoisie.

Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, pg. 235-236.

Tolerance vs Intolerance?

Sometimes Christians are criticized as intolerant busybodies who make rules about other people’s business. However, intolerance works both ways. Those who become angry at restrictions on which gender of person they may marry are often delighted to support policies requiring employers to provide contraception and abortion services to their employees.

Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, pg.227

Parents vs Public School

 

Liberty Needs Religion and Morality

Liberty considers religion as the safeguard of morality, and morality as the best security of law and the surest pledge of the duration of freedom.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Sounds Like Democrats!

The value of hatred is right and good in the Marxist ethical code as long as it is directed toward the property owners, the bourgeoisie. Hatred is needed to fuel the clash between proletariat and the bourgeoisie. To keep their followers in perpetual revolutionary mind-set, Marxist leaders, such as Mao Tse-tung, Joseph Stalin, Fidel Castro, and Kim Jong-Eun, decades after their respective revolutions would down, dressed in military garb and peppered their speeches with revolutionary language. Marxism draws its inspiration from the hope of a more harmonious future but draws its energy from the rehearsal of grievances against the bourgeoisie. 

Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, pg.235-236

Democrat Welfare Has Harmed Blacks

Reams of data have shown how the Johnson administration’s 1964 introduction of new welfare programs, many specifically designed to address black poverty, decimated marriage in the black community. While marriage rates have declined among all ethnicities, black families have been by far the hardest hit.  Today, nearly half of black men and women have never married by age forty—the highest percentage of any ethnic group by a full 19 points. Because of that, almost 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers, and nearly 40 percent of women who get abortions are black, even though African Americans are only 12 percent of the population.  Yet more than half of Americans who receive food assistance (SNAP), income supplements (TANF), and rental subsidies are black.

Megan Basham, Shepherds For Sale, pg.54

Rewarding Illegal Immigration?

If we incentivize illegal immigration by rewarding those who ignore our laws and fail to ensure that those to whom we grant citizenship understand and respect the founding ideals that made this nation great, the United States will soon look little different from the countries these immigrants are fleeing. We will no longer have anything good to share.

Megan Basham, Shepherds For Sale, pg.50

America’s Founding

Yes, we did produce a near perfect republic. But will they keep it? Or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom?

Thomas Jefferson, cited by Donald Jeffries, Hidden History: An Expose of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-up in American Politics, pg.351

Diversity

Can you cite one speck of hard evidence of the benefits of “diversity” that we have heard gushed about for years? Evidence of its harm can be seen—written in blood—from Iraq to India, from Serbia to Sudan, from Fiji to the Philippines. It is scary how easily so many people can be brainwashed by sheer repetition of a word.

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.335

Apologizing for Slavery?

Among the most absurd apologies have been apologies for slavery by politicians. For one thing, slavery is not something you can apologize for, any more than you can apologize for murder. …

Slavery is too serious for an apology and somebody else being a slaveowner is not something for you to apologize for. When somebody who has never owned a slave apologizes for slavery to somebody who has never been a slave, then what began as mushy thinking has degenerated into theatrical absurdity—or, worse yet, politics.

Slavery has existed all over the planet for thousands of years, with black, white, yellow and other races being both slaves and enslavers. Does that mean that everybody ought to apologize to everybody else for what their ancestors did? Or are the only people who are supposed to feel guilty the ones who have money that others want to talk them out of?

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.238

These Statements are FINAL

If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.

President Calvin Coolidge, on 150th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Elementary School Indoctrination

When we see children in elementary schools out carrying signs in demonstrations, we are seeing the kind of mindless groupthink that causes adults to sign petitions they don’t understand or—worse yet—follow leaders they don’t understand, whether to the White House, the Kremlin or Jonestown.

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.236

I've Seen This--Have You?

 

Orwellian Culture

Our society has come to adopt many of the draconian measures Orwell tried to warn us about. Cameras monitor citizens from nearly every street corner in the United Kingdom, and there are a steadily growing number of them mounted traffic lights in America. The fact that Orwell’s 1984 remains a part of the required reading in many high schools across the country is laughably ironic. What is truly sad is how many readers acknowledge the brilliant foresight of Orwell yet fail to grasp how closely present-day America (and England) resemble Winston Smith’s Oceania.

Donald Jeffries, Hidden History: An Expose of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-up in American Politics, pg.337

Intolerance of the LEFT

Sometimes Christians are criticized as intolerant busybodies who make rules about other people’s business. However, intolerance works both ways. Those who become angry at restrictions on which gender of person they may marry are often delighted to support policies requiring employers to provide contraception and abortion services to their employees.

Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, pg.227

Warning: It’s Not A Joke!

A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it’s a joke.

Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or.

Educating to Stupidity

People are all born ignorant but they are not born stupid. Much of the stupidity we see today is induced by our educational system, from elementary schools to the universities. In a high-tech age that has seen the creation of artificial intelligence by computers, we are also seeing the creation of artificial stupidity by people who call themselves educators.

Educational institutions created to pass on to the next generation the knowledge, experience and culture of the generations that went before them have instead been turned into indoctrination centers to promote whatever notions, fashions or ideologies happen to be in vogue among today’s intelligentsia. 

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.234-235

Politics

Those who want more power have known for centuries that giving people somebody to hate and fear is the key.

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.226

Words Make a Difference

Calling an unborn human a “fetus” or “product of conception” but not a “baby” or “person” changes people’s perceptions of unborn human’s value and makes abortion more permissible.

Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, pg.210

Federal Reserve?

The “Fed” in Federal Reserve is purposefully misleading; the Federal Reserve is a private corporation, not a government agency. Of course, most people don’t even know that, let alone understand the concept of fractional banking, which is legal counterfeiting. How many people in the course of history have been sentenced to prison for doing what every bank does routinely? When you hear the candidates, and their mouthpieces in the mainstream media, bemoaning the “debt” we must pay, remember how our system really works. That debt is not the responsibility of the taxpayers; why should the public assume the incomprehensible loans that bankers brokered from Communist China, for instance? In reality, we need to repudiate the interest on the national debt and force the banks to manage their own faulty business transactions.

Donald Jeffries, Hidden History: An Expose of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-up in American Politics, pg.319

Banking

Under fractional lending, banks are only required to have 10 percent in reserve, which means they can “lend” out $100 for every $10 they actually posses. This is why all economic debates between Republicans and Democrats are meaningless; they don’t address the core issue, which is that 90 percent of all principal in circulation from various loans is counterfeit and was created out of thin air. Obviously, as such, it can never be retrieved, and every penny of the usurious interest rates on every loan is imaginary, again conjured up out of nothing.

Donald Jeffries, Hidden History: An Expose of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-up in American Politics, pg.318-319

When Government Silences Opposition

Extended Adolescence?

The truly dangerous period in life is the time when the child has learned the limits of his parents’ control, and how to circumvent their control, but has not yet understood or accepted the underlying reasons for doing and not doing things. This adolescent period is one that some people—intellectuals especially—never outgrow.

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.222

Being “Non-Judgmental” is a Value?

The problem is not that particular people do particular things to get attention. The problem is that the society at large no longer has standards by which to deny or rebuke attention-seekers who have nothing to contribute to society. Do not expect sound judgements in a society where being “non-judgmental” is an exalted value. As someone has said, if you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything.

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.203

If God?

If God does not exist, theology is a waste of time. If God does exist, though, everything else is a waste of time if it does not take theology into account.

Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, pg.174

Getting Attention?

People can get attention either from their accomplishments or from their deliberate attempts to get attention. Today, almost everywhere you look, people  seem to be putting their efforts into getting attention. Wild hairdos, huge tattoos, pierced body parts, outlandish clothing, weird statements—all of these have become substitutes for achievements.

Some parents give their children off-the-wall names, as if that is the way to give them some kind of individuality. On the contrary, it means joining a stampede toward showiness,

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg. 201

Ethanol Is a Waste of Resources

Ethanol is hailed as an environmentally friendly fuel because it supposedly generates less carbon during combustion.  Ask any mechanic which fuel provides more engine power: ethanol or gasoline.  And let’s not forget the inconvenient truth: producing ethanol requires massive amounts of water, land, and energy.  Some experts argue that when you factor in the entire production process, ethanol may actually consume more natural resources than petroleum.  But who cares about the details when we’re saving the planet? … 

But wait, there’s more!  Ethanol is being touted as the answer to our energy prayers, overshadowing hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (FCEVs).  It’s a breakthrough, they say.  Yet despite all the hype, ethanol still faces the same old criticism.  It’s a resource hog.  It diverts crops from food production, sending food prices sky-high.  So what good is it to have an “efficient” car when you can't afford to drive it to the grocery store since you can’t afford a $10 loaf of bread?

Gerald McGlothlin, Did the world's largest car company just make the world's biggest blunder?

Do You Read?

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.

Mark Twain

Beware of Dishonorable People

 

Are We Not There?

There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak. Producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.

Aldous Huxley, U.S. State Department sponsored speech to the Tavistock Group in 1961.

Tyranny Is Taking Over the USA

Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day. But a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers [administrations], too plainly proves a deliberate systematic plan of reducing us to slavery.

Thomas Jefferson. Cited by Donald Jeffries, Hidden History: An Expose of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-u in American Politics, pg.5

The New Tolerance

 

Losing Our Freedom

When words lose their meanings, people lose their freedom.

Confucius. Cited by Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, pg.168

Common meaningless words nowadays, slowly eroding our freedom, are marriage, male, female, terrorist, climate, hate crime, fetus and many more that you can probably think of.

Getting Attention?

People can get attention either from their accomplishments or from their deliberate attempts to get attention. Today, almost everywhere you look, people  seem to be putting their efforts into getting attention. Wild hairdos, huge tattoos, pierced body parts, outlandish clothing, weird statements—all of these have become substitutes for achievements.

Some parents give their children off-the-wall names, as if that is the way to give them some kind of individuality. On the contrary, it means joining a stampede toward showiness,

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg. 201

How To Be Safe

There is no safety for honest men, but by believing all possible evil of evil men, and then by acting with promptitude, decision, and steadiness on that belief.

Edmund Burke. Cited by Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.106

Government vs Medical Insurance

Politicians are already one of the main reasons why medical insurance is so expensive. Insurance is designed to cover risks but politicians are in the business of distributing largesse. Nothing is easier for politicians than to mandate things that insurance companies must cover, without the slightest regard for how such additional coverage will raise the cost of insurance.

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.93

Sad State of Education

In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school  to teaching remedial English in college.

Joseph Sobran

An Upside Down Culture

Living in a society where it is norm for females to take roles to protect men from physical threats would have been unthinkable back in America’s saner days. It would be like imagining that when the Titanic ship famously sunk, instead of men sacrificing their lives for the women and children, women tried to save the men. If this kind of warped thinking had dominated society back then, America’s rise to greatness would have sunk right along with the Titanic. No nation can stand unless the strong protect the weak.

Yet what “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) proposes is that women act like men and become equal protectors in America. DEI is Democrats’ made-up initiative that seeks to implement a radical progressive agenda by erasing men and women’s biological differences (an ideology that mirrors the transgender movement).  

John K. Amanchukwu Sr., DEI Is Emasculating The FDNY Too, Just Like The Secret Service

Government “Goodies”

The most politically painless way to hand out goodies, without taking responsibly for their costs, is to pass a law saying that somebody else must provide those goodies at their expense, while the politicians take credit for generosity and compassion.

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.81

Politics

No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems—of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.77

Dumbing Down of Education

Thousands of students graduate each year, from even the most prestigious schools and colleges in the country, with no real knowledge of history and no real analytical skills at dissecting opposing views. It was once the proud boast of educators that “We are her to teach you how to think, not what to think.” But today, all too many educators see the classroom as a golden opportunity for them to indoctrinate a captive audience.

The specifics for their indoctrination are not the biggest problem. Quite aside from the merits or demerits of the specific indoctrination—whether “global warming” or the new trinity of “race, class and gender—what the indoctrination process does is get students used to hearing one side of issues and being urged to reach conclusions and act on that grossly inadequate basis. Such an “education” sets them up to become victims of the next skilled demagogue who comes along and who knows what kinds of rhetoric will get them to respond as automatically as Pavlov’s dog.

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.72

Common With Demokrats

Soviet America May Be Sooner Than You Expect

Among the elementary measures the American Soviet government will adopt to further the cultural revolution are the following: the school, colleges and universities will be coordinated and grouped under a National Department of Education and its state and local branches. The studies will be revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of the bourgeois ideology. The students will be taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism and the general ethics of the new Socialist society.

William Z. Foster, Toward Soviet America (1932). Cited by Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, pg.111.

President Carter gave us the Department of Education and the LEFT is continuing to follow the plan of education cited by Foster.

Socialism to Communism

To the Marxist, socialism is the first phase or first stepping the transition to the perfect economic system, which is communism. Socialism begins with heavy taxation, government takeover of businesses, and the elimination of laws protecting private property.

Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, by Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, pg. 106-107.

Sound familiar?

The Real Reason for Abortion

When Democrats and progressives argue that abortion is about “women’s health” or “choice,” what they actually mean is they want to be able to have sex with whoever they want, whenever they want, without any responsibility whatsoever—even at the expense of sacrificing their children.

Marsha West, Pagan Idolatry and The Democrats’ Quest For Unfettered Sex

1984?

How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain meaning of words!

Samuel Adams

Post-modern Ideology

To Postmodernists there is no human nature. There is only and ever-evolving, highly sexual social animal with multiple subjective interests crying out for recognition and acceptance.

Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, pg.163

Universal Health Care?

People who believe in “universal health care” show remarkably little interest—usually none—in finding out what that phrase turns out to mean in practice, in those countries where it already exists, such as Britain, Sweden or Canada

For one thing, “universal health care” in these countries means months of waiting for surgery that Americans get in a matter of weeks or even days. In these and other countries, it means having only a fraction as many MRIs and other high-tech medical devices available per person as in the United States.

In Sweden, it means not only having bureaucrats deciding what medicines the government will and will not pay for, but even preventing you from buying the more expensive medicine for yourself with your own money. That would violate the “equality” that is the magic mantra.

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.57