53percenter's Blog

How supportive of women!

Via Daily Wire:

For liberal women, feminism only goes so far. Sure, they’re all for independence among their sisters — unless they disagree with them politically. Then, it’s claws out.

Take Barbra Streisand. The limousine liberal thinks all women who voted for President Trump are stupid, saying they “don’t believe enough in their own thoughts” to vote another way than their husbands.

“A lot of women vote the way their husbands vote; they don’t believe enough in their own thoughts. Maybe that woman who’s so articulate, so experienced and so fit for the presidency [Hillary] was too intimidating,” Streisand said, according to the Daily Mail.

Keep reading…

The following is adapted from a lecture delivered at Hillsdale College on September 27, 2018, during a two-week teaching residency as a Eugene C. Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Journalism.

Six years ago I wrote a book about Barack Obama in which I predicted that modern American liberalism, under pressures both fiscal and philosophical, would either go out of business or be forced to radicalize. If it chose the latter, I predicted, it could radicalize along two lines: towards socialism or towards an increasingly post-modern form of leadership. Today it is doing both. As we saw in Bernie Sanders’ campaign, the youngest generation of liberals is embracing socialism openly—something that would have been unheard of during the Cold War. At the same time, identity politics is on the ascendant, with its quasi-Nietzschean faith in race, sex, and power as the keys to being and meaning. In the #MeToo movement, for example—as we saw recently in Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation battle—the credo is, “Believe the woman.” In other words, truth will emerge not from an adversarial process weighing evidence and testimony before the bar of reason, but from yielding to the will of the more politically correct. “Her truth” is stronger than any objective or disinterested truth.

In the Claremont Review of Books, we have described our current political scene as a cold civil war. A cold civil war is better than a hot civil war, but it is not a good situation for a country to be in. Underlying our cold civil war is the fact that America is torn increasingly between two rival constitutions, two cultures, two ways of life.

Political scientists sometimes distinguish between normal politics and regime politics. Normal politics takes place within a political and constitutional order and concerns means, not ends. In other words, the ends or principles are agreed upon; debate is simply over means. By contrast, regime politics is about who rules and for what ends or principles. It questions the nature of the political system itself. Who has rights? Who gets to vote? What do we honor or revere together as a people? I fear America may be leaving the world of normal politics and entering the dangerous world of regime politics—a politics in which our political loyalties diverge more and more, as they did in the 1850s, between two contrary visions of the country.

One vision is based on the original Constitution as amended. This is the Constitution grounded in the natural rights of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution written in 1787 and ratified in 1788. It has been transmitted to us with significant Amendments—some improvements and some not—but it is recognizable still as the original Constitution. To simplify matters we may call this “the conservative Constitution”—with the caveat that conservatives have never agreed perfectly on its meaning and that many non-conservatives remain loyal to it.

The other vision is based on what Progressives and liberals, for 100 years now, have called “the living Constitution.” This term implies that the original Constitution is dead—or at least on life support—and that in order to remain relevant to our national life, the original Constitution must be infused with new meaning and new ends and therefore with new duties, rights, and powers. To cite an important example, new administrative agencies must be created to circumvent the structural limitations that the original Constitution imposed on government.

As a doctrine, the living Constitution originated in America’s new departments of political and social science in the late nineteenth century—but it was soon at the very forefront of Progressive politics. One of the doctrine’s prime formulators, Woodrow Wilson, had contemplated as a young scholar a series of constitutional amendments to reform America’s national government into a kind of parliamentary system—a system able to facilitate faster political change. But he quickly realized that his plan to amend the Constitution was going nowhere. Plan B was the living Constitution. While keeping the outward forms of the old Constitution, the idea of a living Constitution would change utterly the spirit in which the Constitution was understood.

The resulting Constitution—let us call it “the liberal Constitution”—is not a constitution of natural rights or individual human rights, but of historical or evolutionary right. Wilson called the spirit of the old Constitution Newtonian, after Isaac Newton, and that of the new Constitution Darwinian, after Charles Darwin. By Darwinian, Wilson meant that instead of being difficult to amend, the liberal Constitution would be easily amenable to experimentation and adjustment. To paraphrase the late Walter Berns, the point of the old Constitution was to keep the times in tune with the Constitution; the purpose of the new is to keep the Constitution in tune with the times.

Until the 1960s, most liberals believed it was inevitable that their living Constitution would replace the conservative Constitution through a kind of slow-motion evolution. But during the sixties, the so-called New Left abandoned evolution for revolution, and partly in reaction to that, defenders of the old Constitution began not merely to fight back, but to call for a return to America’s first principles. By seeking to revolve back to the starting point, conservatives proved to be Newtonians after all—and also, in a way, revolutionaries, since the original meaning of revolution is to return to where you began, as a celestial body revolves in the heavens.

The conservative campaign against the inevitable victory of the living Constitution gained steam as a campaign against the gradual or sudden disappearance of limited government and of republican virtue in our political life. And when it became clear, by the late 1970s and 1980s, that the conservatives weren’t going away, the cold civil war was on.

***

Confronted by sharper, deeper, and more compelling accounts of the conservative Constitution, the liberals had to sharpen—that is, radicalize—their own alternative, following the paths paved by the New Left. As a result, the gap between the liberal and conservative Constitutions became a gulf, to the extent that today we are two countries—or we are fast on the road to becoming two countries—each constituted differently.

Consider a few of the contrasts. The prevailing liberal doctrine of rights traces individual rights to membership in various groups—racial, ethnic, gender, class-based, etc.—which are undergoing a continual process of consciousness-raising and empowerment. This was already a prominent feature of Progressivism well over a century ago, though the groups have changed since then. Before Woodrow Wilson became a politician, he wrote a political science textbook, and the book opened by asking which races should be studied. Wilson answered: we’ll study the Aryan race, because the Aryan race is the one that has mastered the world. The countries of Europe and the Anglophone countries are the conquerors and colonizers of the other continents. They are the countries with the most advanced armaments, arts, and sciences.

Wilson was perhaps not a racist in the full sense of the term, because he expected the less advanced races over time to catch up with the Aryan race. But his emphasis was on group identity—an emphasis that liberals today retain, the only difference being that the winning and losing sides have been scrambled. Today the white race and European civilization are the enemy—“dead white males” is a favored pejorative on American campuses—and the races and groups that were oppressed in the past are the ones that today need compensation, privileges, and power.

Conservatives, by contrast, regard the individual as the quintessential endangered minority. They trace individual rights to human nature, which lacks a race. Human nature also lacks ethnicity, gender, and class. Conservatives trace the idea of rights to the essence of an individual as a human being. We have rights because we’re human beings with souls, with reason, distinct from other animals and from God. We’re not beasts, but we’re not God—we’re the in-between being. Conservatives seek to vindicate human equality and liberty—the basis for majority rule in politics—against the liberal Constitution’s alternative, in which everything is increasingly based on group identity.

There is also today a vast divergence between the liberal and conservative understandings of the First Amendment. Liberals are interested in transforming free speech into what they call equal speech, ensuring that no one gets more than his fair share. They favor a redistribution of speech rights via limits on campaign contributions, repealing the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, and narrowing the First Amendment for the sake of redistribution of speech rights from the rich to the poor. Not surprisingly, the Democratic Party’s 2016 platform called for amending the First Amendment!

There is, of course, also a big difference between the liberal Constitution’s freedom from religion and the conservative Constitution’s freedom of religion. And needless to say, the liberal Constitution has no Second Amendment.

In terms of government structure, the liberal Constitution is designed to overcome the separation of powers and most other checks and balances. Liberals consistently support the increased ability to coordinate, concentrate, and enhance government power—as opposed to dividing, restricting, or checking it. This is to the detriment of popular control of government. In recent decades, government power has flowed mainly through the hands of unelected administrators and judges—to the point that elected members of Congress find themselves increasingly dispirited and unable to legislate. As the Financial Times put it recently, “Congress is a sausage factory that has forgotten how to make sausages.”

***

If one thinks about how America’s cold civil war could be resolved, there seem to be only five possibilities. One would be to change the political subject. Ronald Reagan used to say that when the little green men arrive from outer space, all of our political differences will be transcended and humanity will unite for the first time in human history. Similarly, if some jarring event intervenes—a major war or a huge natural calamity—it might reset our politics.

A second possibility, if we can’t change the subject, is that we could change our minds. Persuasion, or some combination of persuasion and moderation, might allow us to end or endure our great political division. Perhaps one party or side will persuade a significant majority of the electorate to embrace its Constitution, and thus win at the polling booth and in the legislature. For generations, Republicans have longed for a realigning election that would turn the GOP into America’s majority party. This remains possible, but seems unlikely. Only two presidents in the twentieth century were able to effect enduring changes in American public opinion and voting patterns—Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. FDR inspired a political realignment that lasted for a generation or so and lifted the Democratic Party to majority status. Ronald Reagan inspired a realignment of public policy, but wasn’t able to make the GOP the majority party.

Since 1968, the norm in America has been divided government: the people have more often preferred to split control of the national government between the Democrats and the Republicans rather than entrust it to one party. This had not previously been the pattern in American politics. Prior to 1968, Americans would almost always (the exceptions proved the rule) entrust the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the Presidency to the same party in each election. They would occasionally change the party, but still they would vote for a party to run the government. Not so for the last 50 years. And neither President Obama nor President Trump, so far, has persuaded the American electorate to embrace his party as their national representative, worthy of long-term patriotic allegiance.

Trump, of course, is new to this, and his party in Congress is basically pre-Trumpian. He did not win the 2016 election by a very large margin, and he was not able to bring many new Republicans into the House or the Senate. Nonetheless, he has the opportunity now to put his mark on the party. In trying to do so, his populism—which is not a word he uses—will not be enough. He will have to reach out to the existing Republican Party as he has done, adopt some of its agenda, adopt its electoral supporters, and gradually bring them around to his “America first” conservatism if he is to have any chance of achieving a political realignment. And the odds remain against him at this point.

As for moderating our disagreements and learning to live with them more or less permanently, that too seems unlikely given their fundamental nature and the embittered trajectory of our politics over the last two decades.

So if we won’t change our minds, and if we can’t change the subject, we are left with only three other ways out of the cold civil war. The happiest of the three would be a vastly reinvigorated federalism. One of the original reasons for constitutional federalism was that the states had a variety of interests and views that clashed with one another and could not be pursued in common. If we had a re-flowering of federalism, some of the differences between blue states and red states could be handled discreetly by the states themselves. The most disruptive issues could be denationalized. The problem is, having abandoned so much of traditional federalism, it is hard to see how federalism could be revived at this late juncture.

That leaves two possibilities. One, alas, is secession, which is a danger to any federal system—something about which James Madison wrote at great length in The Federalist Papers. With any federal system, there is the possibility that some states will try to leave it. The Czech Republic and Slovakia have gone their separate ways peacefully, just within the last generation. But America is much better at expansion than contraction. And George Washington’s admonitions to preserve the Union, I think, still miraculously somehow linger in our ears. So secession would be extremely difficult for many reasons, not the least of which is that it could lead, as we Americans know from experience, to the fifth and worst possibility: hot civil war.

Under present circumstances, the American constitutional future seems to be approaching some kind of crisis—a crisis of the two Constitutions. Let us pray that we and our countrymen will find a way to reason together and to compromise, allowing us to avoid the worst of these dire scenarios—that we will find, that is, the better angels of our nature.

On September 28, I left for El Salvador.  On October 19, I went to Los Angeles for Politicon, where I represented Urban Game Changers Texas in six presentations.  On October 27, I led a conference in Killeen, Texas.

On November 5, four colleagues and I launched our website announcing a conference in Oklahoma for next February, called “God’s Voice: A Biblical Response to the Queering of the Church.”  It provoked a strong reaction.

On November 6, the midterm elections took place.  On November 8, I flew to Washington for a summit of faith leaders in education, organized by the White House and conducted at the Department of Education.

I felt confirmed in my conservative beliefs.  But I am also more skeptical of the conservative movement’s strategies.

What the Conservative Movement Looks Like

We conservatives tend to neglect our strongest points and try to win based on our weakest points.  We have hoped that Trump’s economic progress would carry us through the midterms and position us well for 2020.  This bodes disaster for us.  Economic fundamentals rise and fall.  Trump’s economy will eventually slow down and contract.  Our free-market values can promise prosperity, but only for a season.

Moral values paint a different picture.  Civilization provides a long history of success for nations with conservative values.  While economic fortunes rise and fall, cultural transformations can be irreversible.  When you lose a value like chastity or godliness, it is entirely possible never to regain it.  Your nation may unravel and become defunct in its decadent state.

On moral issues, our values and the left’s values show a starker contrast.

Our values could resonate powerfully, if we worked hard to proclaim them and to denounce the false values of the left.  We don’t do that, as you can see by looking at how conservatives deal with the all-important issue of education.

Education Is the Biggest Issue for 2020

To save America, conservatives need to dismantle the enormous social machineries the left has set up, especially in our schools and churches.  Time and again, our side avoids attacking the left’s strongholds, opting for evasive arguments that focus on “liberty,” “freedom of conscience,” “local control,” “deregulation,” and “small government.”

All these catchwords are good ideas, but they are amoral in and of themselves.  Unless we supplement these ideologies with strong advocacy for our specific ideals – responsibility, faith, chastity, obedience to God, decency, family integrity, and the Western tradition – the conservative case for “liberty” merely advances relativism and thereby allows the liberals to pervert us with their falsehoods and distorted values.

We must also publicly repudiate the left’s false pretenses of tolerance, equality, utopian sexual license, etc.  But this entails denouncing the left on specifics, not objecting to the left’s mismanagement of due process (i.e., proving the left immoral, not complaining that the left will not let us talk).

Liberty arguments presume an underlying relativism.  In the world of education, this is catastrophic.  While the left has placed its moral advocates in power in every educational institution in America, including private Christian schools, so-called “conservative” colleges like Grove City College, and every public school in America, American conservatives have collectively refused to embattle educators who advance godless and perverted liberal ideology.

At the summit on November 9, the depth and resilience of the swamp shocked me.  After almost two years of a Trump presidency, education officials have doubled down on the alternatives that have failed conservatives since the Reagan Era.  The Department will take no position on curriculum, quality of research, content, ethics, or appropriateness of things like sex education or trans policies.  Kenneth Marcus, the head of the office of civil rights for the department, stated explicitly that his office will deal with racial and sexual discrimination but will do nothing about discrimination against people based on religious beliefs.

I presume that conservatives agree with Marcus’s approach because they think this will protect Christian schools from lawsuits.  Such a calculation becomes quicksand.  Christian schools get infiltrated and turn into fraud engines.  People will see easy money in charging Christian parents for an education that ends up involving all the filth and perversion that takes place in public schools (look at how Catholic schools have devolved).  In the meantime, the massive numbers of Christians in federally funded schools can get no relief from the increasing repressiveness of LGBT, feminist, and other liberal curricula.

Oldies but Goodies: Greatest Hits from Our Losing Playbook

We need a revolution.  This is basically too much work, too costly, and too shocking for conservatives, so instead, the right wing returns to its vomit like the dog of Proverbs.  One conservative panacea is to issue vouchers, which will prove fruitless due to the pervasiveness of the left’s moral rot in all schools.  Parents will take their children out of an urban school full of sexual perversion and place them into a suburban school full of sexual perversion where classmates have more money to spend on drugs and lax parents are more approving of social decadence.  School “choice” presents the same conundrum.

Homeschooling comes up as the constant refrain.  This would be a great conservative alternative for individual families, if there were not a widespread rot in popular culture brought on by the homeschoolers’ peers enrolled in schools run by depraved liberals.  Like Lot homeschooling his daughters in Sodom, this delays the inevitable collision with the cultural decadence promoted in public schools.

Homeschooling provides a pleasant experience for some individuals, assuming they do not turn into the odious Kathryn Brightbill.  But the vast majority of Christian conservatives cannot afford to homeschool, and our movement’s avoidance and refusal when it comes to fighting to dismantle the educational establishment leaves those conservatives in a worse position.

At the college level, the conservative answers suffer from similar myopia.  One “solution” has been to avoid fighting with secular liberal colleges and to create a bubble of our own institutions.  We congregate in alternative colleges like Wheaton or Pepperdine, only to see them become another liberal abyss as liberals infiltrate them the way the LGBTs have infiltrated Azusa Pacific.  I’ve had awful run-ins with graduates of Hillsdale, Liberty, and Baylor.  Let’s not even talk about Catholic colleges.

Another “solution” is to harp on free speech and beg for a chance to bring conservative speakers to campus.  This becomes, first of all, a money-making scam for self-promoting raconteurs (remember Milo’s whirlwind tour of campuses?).

The campus brushfires caused by the Ben Shapiros, Jordan Petersons, and Christina Hoff Sommerses do nothing to diversify the university faculty.  Most college students neither participate in extracurricular activities like a conservative club nor go to hear guest lecturers talk.  The colleges’ main influence consists of the thousands of hours youths spend listening to professors teach in the classroom – and this gets more and more biased, even as the Ben Shapiro cottage industry grows in fame and fortune.  To reverse the bias on the faculty, conservatives would have to use government to coerce university administrations and committees to drop their current criteria of teaching, publications, and service.  Conservatives will not do this because it sounds like interfering with local control (which it is and should be!).

Many times, these “conservative” speakers do not share our social values but oppose socialism, political correctness, and rules against Halloween costumes.  They may or may not describe themselves as libertarian.  At Politicon I saw that calling someone a “socialist” does not instill alarm in anyone under the age of forty.  It is a word that shocks people at Heritage and means nothing to the people we hope to turn Republican.

The emphasis on conservative guest speakers backfires.  After these firebrands leave campus, the faculty become more ferocious against conservative colleagues (wherever they may hide).  The whole affair swells the already outrageous student activities budgets with the high price of honoraria and security.  We need to force colleges to strip away their godless involvement in people’s social lives, political engagement, and cultural development, not add a frivolous layer of conservative expenses to make the bloat worse.

Conservative intellectuals, to the extent such a small constituency exists, do not want schools’ structures to change.  This leads to the advice from ostensible sages like Robert George, who tell young conservatives on campus to work from within, navigate through the Ph.D., and delay change until they have tenure.  This never happens.  Even when you do get tenure, your story ends the way mine did in 2016.

After 20 years in higher education, I know that colleges will not change if you sue them, embarrass them, or protest them.  They will change only if you cut off their money.

At one panel at Education, a speaker revealed that 40% of higher education spending comes from the federal government.  Why don’t we just threaten to cut off all their money? Lobby Trump’s people to force DeVos and her people to issue policy guidance the way they just did regarding Title IX.  Lobby Trump to fire DeVos if she won’t do it.  And let’s find revolutionary people to run for Congress who will bring this scenario to the public arena, proposing legislation even if we know that it will fail many times before passing.

Read this old gem for a playbook of how.  Lay down eligibility requirements for tax exemptions, student loan funding, and grants or other outlays that would force them to offer job training programs, eliminate tenure, abolish non-instructional spending, and cut out bad curricula like gender studies.  (By the way, Hungary did this!)

Conservative platitudes about local control, staying out of colleges’ business, not seeking to police ideas, and leaving curricula to the experts are insane!  The left has no scruples about micromanaging content, values, and ideas.  At some point, we do have to crush the left if we want to save our country.

The Churches Are Just as Bad, but That’s a Different Article.

Two massive institutions – the schools and the churches – are entirely controlled by the left now.  They militate against conservatives and mobilize for elections.  The Democrats will have an unbeatable and renewable army that will overwhelm the right.  The conservatives’ answers all involve leaving the left alone on details and instead asking that people have the freedom to disagree with them.  This will never work because the “details” of the left involve taking over every part of society and forcing total compliance on everyone.

Conservatives have to destroy the left’s social machine, which means two Herculean labors.  First, they must crush the teachers’ unions and dismantle education as we know it by taking over the federal government and using its powers.  Second, they must carry out a massive Christian reformation by staging aggressive takeovers of the major denominations and using the central denominations’ power to purge churches of unorthodox teaching.

In an ideal world, we could hold on to our discreet small-government ideals and stay above the fray, claiming we do not want to interfere with others.  But remember what Paul said in Ephesians:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Think of the tasks that faced kings like Hezekiah and Josiah.

One task is an electoral one, and the other an ecclesiastical one.  They both require a frightening amount of work, steel nerves, and unflinching discernment in the wake of massive propaganda.  The churches are a more tragic case but just as much of a problem for conservatives.  More on that another day.

In the meantime, let’s get to our war rooms.

Robert Oscar Lopez can be followed at English Manif.

That old cliché holds here: “I can’t say I have all the answers.”  My musings today may sound critical of others.  They are.  But they apply to myself, too.  At any rate, we must face reality: conservatives cannot keep doing what we have been doing for the last thirty years.

I offer this critique having been through two months of intense political experience.

On September 28, I left for El Salvador.  On October 19, I went to Los Angeles for Politicon, where I represented Urban Game Changers Texas in six presentations.  On October 27, I led a conference in Killeen, Texas.

On November 5, four colleagues and I launched our website announcing a conference in Oklahoma for next February, called “God’s Voice: A Biblical Response to the Queering of the Church.”  It provoked a strong reaction.

On November 6, the midterm elections took place.  On November 8, I flew to Washington for a summit of faith leaders in education, organized by the White House and conducted at the Department of Education.

I felt confirmed in my conservative beliefs.  But I am also more skeptical of the conservative movement’s strategies.

What the Conservative Movement Looks Like

We conservatives tend to neglect our strongest points and try to win based on our weakest points.  We have hoped that Trump’s economic progress would carry us through the midterms and position us well for 2020.  This bodes disaster for us.  Economic fundamentals rise and fall.  Trump’s economy will eventually slow down and contract.  Our free-market values can promise prosperity, but only for a season.

Moral values paint a different picture.  Civilization provides a long history of success for nations with conservative values.  While economic fortunes rise and fall, cultural transformations can be irreversible.  When you lose a value like chastity or godliness, it is entirely possible never to regain it.  Your nation may unravel and become defunct in its decadent state.

On moral issues, our values and the left’s values show a starker contrast.

Our values could resonate powerfully, if we worked hard to proclaim them and to denounce the false values of the left.  We don’t do that, as you can see by looking at how conservatives deal with the all-important issue of education.

Education Is the Biggest Issue for 2020

To save America, conservatives need to dismantle the enormous social machineries the left has set up, especially in our schools and churches.  Time and again, our side avoids attacking the left’s strongholds, opting for evasive arguments that focus on “liberty,” “freedom of conscience,” “local control,” “deregulation,” and “small government.”

All these catchwords are good ideas, but they are amoral in and of themselves.  Unless we supplement these ideologies with strong advocacy for our specific ideals – responsibility, faith, chastity, obedience to God, decency, family integrity, and the Western tradition – the conservative case for “liberty” merely advances relativism and thereby allows the liberals to pervert us with their falsehoods and distorted values.

We must also publicly repudiate the left’s false pretenses of tolerance, equality, utopian sexual license, etc.  But this entails denouncing the left on specifics, not objecting to the left’s mismanagement of due process (i.e., proving the left immoral, not complaining that the left will not let us talk).

Liberty arguments presume an underlying relativism.  In the world of education, this is catastrophic.  While the left has placed its moral advocates in power in every educational institution in America, including private Christian schools, so-called “conservative” colleges like Grove City College, and every public school in America, American conservatives have collectively refused to embattle educators who advance godless and perverted liberal ideology.

At the summit on November 9, the depth and resilience of the swamp shocked me.  After almost two years of a Trump presidency, education officials have doubled down on the alternatives that have failed conservatives since the Reagan Era.  The Department will take no position on curriculum, quality of research, content, ethics, or appropriateness of things like sex education or trans policies.  Kenneth Marcus, the head of the office of civil rights for the department, stated explicitly that his office will deal with racial and sexual discrimination but will do nothing about discrimination against people based on religious beliefs.

I presume that conservatives agree with Marcus’s approach because they think this will protect Christian schools from lawsuits.  Such a calculation becomes quicksand.  Christian schools get infiltrated and turn into fraud engines.  People will see easy money in charging Christian parents for an education that ends up involving all the filth and perversion that takes place in public schools (look at how Catholic schools have devolved).  In the meantime, the massive numbers of Christians in federally funded schools can get no relief from the increasing repressiveness of LGBT, feminist, and other liberal curricula.

Oldies but Goodies: Greatest Hits from Our Losing Playbook

We need a revolution.  This is basically too much work, too costly, and too shocking for conservatives, so instead, the right wing returns to its vomit like the dog of Proverbs.  One conservative panacea is to issue vouchers, which will prove fruitless due to the pervasiveness of the left’s moral rot in all schools.  Parents will take their children out of an urban school full of sexual perversion and place them into a suburban school full of sexual perversion where classmates have more money to spend on drugs and lax parents are more approving of social decadence.  School “choice” presents the same conundrum.

Homeschooling comes up as the constant refrain.  This would be a great conservative alternative for individual families, if there were not a widespread rot in popular culture brought on by the homeschoolers’ peers enrolled in schools run by depraved liberals.  Like Lot homeschooling his daughters in Sodom, this delays the inevitable collision with the cultural decadence promoted in public schools.

Homeschooling provides a pleasant experience for some individuals, assuming they do not turn into the odious Kathryn Brightbill.  But the vast majority of Christian conservatives cannot afford to homeschool, and our movement’s avoidance and refusal when it comes to fighting to dismantle the educational establishment leaves those conservatives in a worse position.

At the college level, the conservative answers suffer from similar myopia.  One “solution” has been to avoid fighting with secular liberal colleges and to create a bubble of our own institutions.  We congregate in alternative colleges like Wheaton or Pepperdine, only to see them become another liberal abyss as liberals infiltrate them the way the LGBTs have infiltrated Azusa Pacific.  I’ve had awful run-ins with graduates of Hillsdale, Liberty, and Baylor.  Let’s not even talk about Catholic colleges.

Another “solution” is to harp on free speech and beg for a chance to bring conservative speakers to campus.  This becomes, first of all, a money-making scam for self-promoting raconteurs (remember Milo’s whirlwind tour of campuses?).

The campus brushfires caused by the Ben Shapiros, Jordan Petersons, and Christina Hoff Sommerses do nothing to diversify the university faculty.  Most college students neither participate in extracurricular activities like a conservative club nor go to hear guest lecturers talk.  The colleges’ main influence consists of the thousands of hours youths spend listening to professors teach in the classroom – and this gets more and more biased, even as the Ben Shapiro cottage industry grows in fame and fortune.  To reverse the bias on the faculty, conservatives would have to use government to coerce university administrations and committees to drop their current criteria of teaching, publications, and service.  Conservatives will not do this because it sounds like interfering with local control (which it is and should be!).

Many times, these “conservative” speakers do not share our social values but oppose socialism, political correctness, and rules against Halloween costumes.  They may or may not describe themselves as libertarian.  At Politicon I saw that calling someone a “socialist” does not instill alarm in anyone under the age of forty.  It is a word that shocks people at Heritage and means nothing to the people we hope to turn Republican.

The emphasis on conservative guest speakers backfires.  After these firebrands leave campus, the faculty become more ferocious against conservative colleagues (wherever they may hide).  The whole affair swells the already outrageous student activities budgets with the high price of honoraria and security.  We need to force colleges to strip away their godless involvement in people’s social lives, political engagement, and cultural development, not add a frivolous layer of conservative expenses to make the bloat worse.

Conservative intellectuals, to the extent such a small constituency exists, do not want schools’ structures to change.  This leads to the advice from ostensible sages like Robert George, who tell young conservatives on campus to work from within, navigate through the Ph.D., and delay change until they have tenure.  This never happens.  Even when you do get tenure, your story ends the way mine did in 2016.

After 20 years in higher education, I know that colleges will not change if you sue them, embarrass them, or protest them.  They will change only if you cut off their money.

At one panel at Education, a speaker revealed that 40% of higher education spending comes from the federal government.  Why don’t we just threaten to cut off all their money? Lobby Trump’s people to force DeVos and her people to issue policy guidance the way they just did regarding Title IX.  Lobby Trump to fire DeVos if she won’t do it.  And let’s find revolutionary people to run for Congress who will bring this scenario to the public arena, proposing legislation even if we know that it will fail many times before passing.

Read this old gem for a playbook of how.  Lay down eligibility requirements for tax exemptions, student loan funding, and grants or other outlays that would force them to offer job training programs, eliminate tenure, abolish non-instructional spending, and cut out bad curricula like gender studies.  (By the way, Hungary did this!)

Conservative platitudes about local control, staying out of colleges’ business, not seeking to police ideas, and leaving curricula to the experts are insane!  The left has no scruples about micromanaging content, values, and ideas.  At some point, we do have to crush the left if we want to save our country.

The Churches Are Just as Bad, but That’s a Different Article.

Two massive institutions – the schools and the churches – are entirely controlled by the left now.  They militate against conservatives and mobilize for elections.  The Democrats will have an unbeatable and renewable army that will overwhelm the right.  The conservatives’ answers all involve leaving the left alone on details and instead asking that people have the freedom to disagree with them.  This will never work because the “details” of the left involve taking over every part of society and forcing total compliance on everyone.

Conservatives have to destroy the left’s social machine, which means two Herculean labors.  First, they must crush the teachers’ unions and dismantle education as we know it by taking over the federal government and using its powers.  Second, they must carry out a massive Christian reformation by staging aggressive takeovers of the major denominations and using the central denominations’ power to purge churches of unorthodox teaching.

In an ideal world, we could hold on to our discreet small-government ideals and stay above the fray, claiming we do not want to interfere with others.  But remember what Paul said in Ephesians:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Think of the tasks that faced kings like Hezekiah and Josiah.

One task is an electoral one, and the other an ecclesiastical one.  They both require a frightening amount of work, steel nerves, and unflinching discernment in the wake of massive propaganda.  The churches are a more tragic case but just as much of a problem for conservatives.  More on that another day.

In the meantime, let’s get to our war rooms.

Robert Oscar Lopez can be followed at English Manif.

Two years ago, we heard that Fidel Castro died of whatever.  

Two years later, the dissidents are complaining that they didn’t get the political reform memo.  This is from Briebart:    

Speaking to Breitbart News, leaders of the Cuban counter-revolution – which, contrary to the Aspen Institute analysis, does exist — lament that any opportunity to ease the repression of dissident voices in the country appears to have passed without incident. 

Both Fidel Castro’s death and the substitution of Raúl Castro as the Revolution’s international envoy with loyalist Miguel Díaz-Canel in April have done little for political freedom in the country, they agree.

“The situation in Cuba for dissidents remains very similar to that which we had during Fidel Castro’s life, and in some ways is even worse,” José Daniel Ferrer, the General Coordinator of one of Cuba’s largest dissident groups, the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU),” told Breitbart News. 

“The current dictator, Miguel Díaz-Canel … takes orders directly from Raúl Castro [and] leaves clear who truly wields power.”

So let me translate: the old boss dies, his brother appoints a successor and nothing changes in Cuba.  Cue the Four Tops: ”It’s the same old song.”

The good news for dissidents, and those of us outside who want real reforms, is that the Cuban economy is on an unsustainable path.

In other words, there is no USSR out there to bail out the regime or European banks lending money to the regime.  On the contrary, more and more countries are treating Cuba like a nation that can’t pay its debts, i.e. no cash no laundry!

Back in July, President Diaz-Canel lamented that the island’s economy is slowing down and the country faces a liquidity crisis.  The economy grew 1.1% in 2018 after 1.6% the year before.  

Castro is still dead but repression is alive and well.

PS: You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.

Two years ago, we heard that Fidel Castro died of whatever.  

Two years later, the dissidents are complaining that they didn’t get the political reform memo.  This is from Briebart:    

Speaking to Breitbart News, leaders of the Cuban counter-revolution – which, contrary to the Aspen Institute analysis, does exist — lament that any opportunity to ease the repression of dissident voices in the country appears to have passed without incident. 

Both Fidel Castro’s death and the substitution of Raúl Castro as the Revolution’s international envoy with loyalist Miguel Díaz-Canel in April have done little for political freedom in the country, they agree.

“The situation in Cuba for dissidents remains very similar to that which we had during Fidel Castro’s life, and in some ways is even worse,” José Daniel Ferrer, the General Coordinator of one of Cuba’s largest dissident groups, the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU),” told Breitbart News. 

“The current dictator, Miguel Díaz-Canel … takes orders directly from Raúl Castro [and] leaves clear who truly wields power.”

So let me translate: the old boss dies, his brother appoints a successor and nothing changes in Cuba.  Cue the Four Tops: ”It’s the same old song.”

The good news for dissidents, and those of us outside who want real reforms, is that the Cuban economy is on an unsustainable path.

In other words, there is no USSR out there to bail out the regime or European banks lending money to the regime.  On the contrary, more and more countries are treating Cuba like a nation that can’t pay its debts, i.e. no cash no laundry!

Back in July, President Diaz-Canel lamented that the island’s economy is slowing down and the country faces a liquidity crisis.  The economy grew 1.1% in 2018 after 1.6% the year before.  

Castro is still dead but repression is alive and well.

PS: You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.

The use of non-lethal tear gas against caravan members storming our border and throwing rocks at our guardians already has evoked a response from a sitting senator so shamefully hysterical that the tweet was deleted. Getting excited over the use of this unpleasant but relatively benign tool of crowd control requires both ignorance and chutzpah, but these qualities are in abundant supply on the left.

Ignorance is essential to the hysteria we will be treated to all day because, as my friend Mark J. Fitzgibbons reminds us in tweet:

 

Exoneration by Obama DOJ of lethal force by border patrol against rock-thrower probably won’t be covered by media over next few days, but here it is:

Federal Officials Close Investigation into the Death of Sergio Hernandez-Guereca https://t.co/4KVj9YeG2a

— MarkFitzgibbons (@MarkFitzgibbons) November 26, 2018

 

Laughter is the appropriate response to any Democrat who paints the Trump administration as brutal or heartless by defending our border with nonlethal force.

 

The use of non-lethal tear gas against caravan members storming our border and throwing rocks at our guardians already has evoked a response from a sitting senator so shamefully hysterical that the tweet was deleted. Getting excited over the use of this unpleasant but relatively benign tool of crowd control requires both ignorance and chutzpah, but these qualities are in abundant supply on the left.

Ignorance is essential to the hysteria we will be treated to all day because, as my friend Mark J. Fitzgibbons reminds us in tweet:

 

Exoneration by Obama DOJ of lethal force by border patrol against rock-thrower probably won’t be covered by media over next few days, but here it is:

Federal Officials Close Investigation into the Death of Sergio Hernandez-Guereca https://t.co/4KVj9YeG2a

— MarkFitzgibbons (@MarkFitzgibbons) November 26, 2018

 

Laughter is the appropriate response to any Democrat who paints the Trump administration as brutal or heartless by defending our border with nonlethal force.

 

A UK primary school threatened with legal action over an LGBT pride parade for young children has been accused of intimidation after a concerned mother was met by a member of staff wearing a T-shirt which “belittled” Christian views.

When Izzy Montague met with the head of Heavers Farm Primary School to discuss concerns that teachers’ promoting of LGBT lifestyles conflicted with Christian beliefs, she was confronted by a member of staff wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan: “Why be racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic when you could just be quiet?”

“Given the nature of my complaints it was obviously a deliberate act to wear the T-shirt. I believe it was intended to belittle my views and intimidate me into silence,” she told the British Mail on Sunday tabloid.

Mrs Montague made the appointment with headteacher Susan Papas in September to discuss the school’s refusal to excuse her five-year-old son from its ‘Proud to be Me’ parade during so-called gay pride month in June, which a number of Christian parents of children at Heaver Farm have complained was set up to promote LGBT lifestyles.

“I thought this was completely unreasonable … Our children were being indoctrinated with values that they do not need to be taught at such a young age,” she said, telling the newspaper other parents had spoken of teachers reading children storybooks about homosexual penguins and that “no one consulted us about this”.

Six-Year-Old School Children Instructed to Write Gay Love Letters to Make Them ‘Accepting of Diversity’ https://t.co/HrnwmEvwuN

— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) October 1, 2018

“Schools are supposed to be tolerant of different faiths as well as different sexualities,” stressed Mrs Montague, who has now pulled her son out of the Croydon primary school.

“Within our faith we teach that a man and a woman together is what makes a family, but in my eyes the school were promoting a different type of lifestyle to the pupils.”

Mrs Montague has now launched an official complaint about the T-shirt, which was worn by Attie Copeman-Papas — the school’s ‘deputy safeguarding manager’ and the head teacher’s daughter — who sat in during the meeting.

“It was highly unprofessional and surely does not adhere to the school policy dress code for staff,” she wrote in the letter, which accuses Copeman-Papas of failing to respect her Christian beliefs.

Ms Papas said the “threat of legal action” meant she was unable to comment on Mrs Montague’s case, but stated that the T-shirt worn by her daughter — a graduate student of ‘sports sociology and feminist theory’ whose papers include “A Feminist Psychoanalytic Approach to the Roles of the Penis, the Phallus and Hegemonic Gender Norms in ‘Feminist Porn’” — was not in breach of the school’s code of conduct.

Proactive Transgender agenda established in British schools by government https://t.co/um01J2URgi

— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) December 14, 2017

It was reported last week that Heavers Farm has been threatened with legal action, with 14 Christian parents complaining that the school is “forcing a very aggressive LGBT agenda on to young children in a manner which abuses parental rights and victimises parents”.

Claiming “most of the feedback” to June’s parade “was really positive”, Ms Papas insisted that the school would not “shy away from issues that are important for children to learn about”.

She added: “With pride in British values we have a thread of work – on black history, disability awareness, 100 years since women got the vote – but generally talking to the children about matters of inclusion and diversity.

“Last year we did something for Pride month and focused on what children were proud of.

“Alongside that we were doing work on anti-bullying, anti-transphobic and anti-homophobic language. The older children were looking at the history of LGBT rights.”

While denying anyone had been directly forced to participate in the event, the headteacher did say “[Heavers Farm] would expect children to go to any assembly, class or event put on by the school”.

Kids Being ‘Groomed’ into Copycat Sex Swaps, Warns Whistleblower at School with 17 ‘Trans Pupils’ https://t.co/76ywRrEzVF

— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) November 19, 2018

It is by now abundantly clear that the youngest person ever elected to Congress is an ingenue ignoramus, serenely unaware of the depths of her obliviousness.  For someone who grew up in New York City – oops, make that Westchester County (but it’s a suburb, so kinda counts) — to compare fleeing systematic extermination in the Holocaust to people seeking more lucrative employment and better welfare benefits in this country is obscene. It trivializes the Holocaust, period.

Yet, glamour girl Ocasio-Corte did exactly that in  a tweet yesterday:

I don’t recall Jews fleeing Hitler announcing they would violate our borders if not accorded entry on demand. And I certainly don’t recall  Jews storming the border, throwing rocks at our Border Patrol.

But these differences, as important as they are, pale beside the comparison of the Holocaust to economic deprivation.

The Anti-Defamation League, before it became a shill for Democrats, used to criticize those who compared the Holocaust to lesser perils.  So far, there is nothing on the ADL website concerning Ocasio-Cortez’s trivialization of it.

It is by now abundantly clear that the youngest person ever elected to Congress is an ingenue ignoramus, serenely unaware of the depths of her obliviousness.  For someone who grew up in New York City – oops, make that Westchester County (but it’s a suburb, so kinda counts) — to compare fleeing systematic extermination in the Holocaust to people seeking more lucrative employment and better welfare benefits in this country is obscene. It trivializes the Holocaust, period.

Yet, glamour girl Ocasio-Corte did exactly that in  a tweet yesterday:

I don’t recall Jews fleeing Hitler announcing they would violate our borders if not accorded entry on demand. And I certainly don’t recall  Jews storming the border, throwing rocks at our Border Patrol.

But these differences, as important as they are, pale beside the comparison of the Holocaust to economic deprivation.

The Anti-Defamation League, before it became a shill for Democrats, used to criticize those who compared the Holocaust to lesser perils.  So far, there is nothing on the ADL website concerning Ocasio-Cortez’s trivialization of it.