Since everybody seems to be criticizing Israel for its military response to the rockets being fired into their country from the Gaza Strip, let me add my criticisms as well. The Israelis traded land for peace, but they have never gotten peace, so they should take back the land.
Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.14
Even in an era of much-ballyhooed “change,” the government cannot eliminate sadness. What it can do is transfer that sadness from those who made risky and unwise decisions to the taxpayers who had nothing to do with their decisions.
Worse, the subsidizing of bad decisions destroys one of the most effective sources of better decisions— namely, paying the consequences of bad decisions.
Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.25
Another dangerous power toward which we are moving, bit by bit, on the installment plan, is the power of politicians to tell people what their incomes can and cannot be. Here the resentment is being directed against “the rich.”
The distracting phrases here include “obscene” wealth and “unconscionable” profits. But if we stop and think about it—which politicians don’t expect us to—what is obscene about wealth? Wouldn’t we consider it great if every human being on earth had a billion dollars and lived in a place that could rival the Taj Mahal?
Poverty is obscene. It is poverty that needs to be reduced— and increasing a country’s productivity has done that far more widely than redistributing income by targeting “the rich.”
You can see the agenda behind the rhetoric when profits are called “unconscionable” but taxes never are, even when taxes take more than half of what someone has earned, or add much more to the prices we have to pay than profits do.
Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.12-13
If eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, incessant distractions are the way that politicians take away our freedoms, in order to enhance their own power and longevity in office. Dire alarms and heady crusades are among the many distractions of our attention from the ever increasing ways that government finds to take away more of our money and more of our freedom.
Magicians have long known that distracting an audience is the key to creating the illusion of magic. It is also the key to political magic.
Alarms ranging from “overpopulation” to “global warming” and crusades ranging from “affordable housing” to “universal health care” have been among the distractions of political magicians. But few distractions have had such a long and impressive political track record as getting people to resent and, if necessary, hate other people.
The most politically effective totalitarian systems have gotten people to give up their freedom in order to vent their resentment or hatred at other people— under Communism, the capitalists; under Nazis, the Jews.
Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, pg.11
Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Every leftist movement wishes to challenge and ultimately destroy the society they feel has “oppressed” them. The LGBT movement is no different. It wants to completely annihilate anything resembling traditional sexual or romantic norms, and “Pride Month” serves as the bridgehead for pushing the societal envelope even further, until eventually it breaks down altogether.
Above all, rainbow activists crave opportunities to push their sexual fetishes on normal Americans and innocent children and receive a “thank you” in return from a thoroughly browbeaten and brainwashed populace. Judging by those loud cheers in the videos above, they’ve convinced a large section of the population to applaud the annihilation of foundational cultural mores and revere the vanguard of this degenerate revolution.
Hayden Daniel, ‘Pride’ Parades Are Nothing But Massive Humiliation Rituals
At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child — miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.
P.J. O’Rourke
Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.
Charles Spurgeon
In the post-George Floyd era, black juveniles are shot at 100 times the rate of white juveniles. Blacks between the ages of ten and 24 are killed in drive by shootings at nearly 25 times the rate of whites in that same age cohort. Dozens of blacks are murdered every day, more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined, even though blacks are just 13 percent of the population. The country turns its eyes away. Who is killing these black victims? Not the police, not whites, but other blacks.
As for interracial violence, blacks are a greater threat to whites than whites are to blacks. Blacks commit 85 percent of all non-lethal interracial violence between blacks and whites. A black person is 35 times more likely to commit an act of non-lethal violence against a white person than vice versa. Yet the national narrative insists on the opposite idea—and too many dutifully play along.
These crime disparities mean that the police cannot restore law and order in neighborhoods where innocent people are most being victimized without having a disparate impact on black criminals. So the political establishment has decided not to restore law and order at all.
Heather Mac Donald, Disparate Impact Thinking Is Destroying Our Civilization. Imprimis, February 2024.
Secularists can be viewed in their natural habitat at nearly any of America’s more than three thousand colleges and universities. Here Secularists have found success, capturing impressionable young adults as they are released into the wild. Many Secularists see themselves as liberators, lifting students out of religious superstition and other nonsense holding back society’s progress.
Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, by Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, pg. 81.
Religion is concerned with morals, Philosophy with ethics: the difference between the two being essentially this, that morals have to do with man’s relationship to God and ethics with man’s relationship to man. Morals are absolute, ethics are relative. If we may substitute meta-nature for metaphysics we may say that the subject matter of Philosophy is meta-nature (as the subject of Science is Nature) but the subject matter of Religion is super-nature. In Religion, miracle is in one sense and essential adjunct, but in Philosophy miracle is simply of no concern. The end object of all Religion is to find God, but the end object of Philosophy is to find truth. This does not mean that Religion does not have the discovery of truth as and object, but only that it is a secondary one.
Arthur C. Constance, The Doorway Papers: Shem, Ham, and Japheth in World History, pg.18
Shariah law governs everything from diet and sexual practices to the punishment of crime. Many of its aspects are shockingly harsh, legitimizing slavery, advocating physical abuse of wives, demanding heavy taxation of Christians and Jews living in Muslim lands, and calling for the killing of Muslims who convert to another faith.
Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, by Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, pg.54
Islam is an ideology—a worldview—that by its nature demands political control at the expense of democracy, freedom, and constitutional government.
Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, by Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, pg. 54.
Leftist politics are one part perpetual outrage, two parts magical thinking and four parts pagan godhood. The old days when powerful men could pretend to be gods were dashed by religion and then democracy. Until socialism, wealth bought you only so many privileges. Now it buys you the privilege of looking down and toying with the less well off in the name of social justice.
Daniel Greenfield, The View From Mount Olympus
Every perversion known to mankind is being embraced and gradually legalized. The idea that morality is created by each individual as he makes decisions throughout each day is a step beyond anarchy.
Since Lawrence v. Texas decriminalized homosexuality, we have been in a state of moral anarchy. Crude and licentious parades with many naked or almost naked men celebrating sodomy are considered by many to be positive and invigorating.
The abrogation of Roe v. Wade in the recent Dobbs decision does not end abortion, but simply leaves the existence of abortion laws up to each separate state. There are so many different laws now on when it is legitimate to abort a baby. Thus, the people have decided that it is legitimate for citizens to decide when a life is a life.
E. Jeffrey Ludwig, Moral Anarchy: An Understatement
The Left is not just a movement: it is a state of mind. Like all evils, it will not vanish. Just when you think it might be on the way out, it emerges again. Its ideas rebound no matter how often they have been discredited because its seed is present in every human soul.
It will not disappear, because human nature is not about to change.
To fight the Left, we must beat it at its own game. The Left operates by infiltrating and corrupting our institutions, and the minds and hearts of a new generation. We must build better than they do, to uphold what they want to destroy, and to fight the inner battle for the soul of America. Then we will not simply be fighting out of outrage or pain, we will have something to fight for.
Daniel Greenfield, Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left, pg.236
I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past.
Patrick Henry, cited in Daniel Greenfield, Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left, pg. 235
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. … Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
C.S. Lewis
