Monday Morning Breakfast For The Brain

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The Culture War Has A New Target: Independence Day

Via Zero Hedge

Once upon a time in America, journalists wrote “holiday pieces” out of desperation. In a world where amusement parks and beaches beckoned, where businesses carpet-bombed consumers with holiday sales ads, recreation and crass commercialism overmatched the remembrance of important historical persons and events.

The “holiday pieces” were rearguard actions, waged to recall Americans to “the reason for the season.” Now, these holiday defenders are even more badly outnumbered. The Left’s culture warriors have supplanted commercials as the chief enemy of public memory. They don’t aim to hijack commemoration days to serve their commercial ends; they aim to erase the meaning of these holidays altogether.

Consider the efforts of the Randolph School Board in New Jersey. They wanted to remove Columbus Day from the school calendar, renaming the holiday to “Indigenous People Day.” When parents pushed back, the board—acting out of spite—voted to get rid of all holiday names, just calling them “days off.” That triggered national attention and even greater pushback. After a lengthy meeting with angry parents, the board abandoned the whole renaming exercise. The Left lost that skirmish. But they’ll be back.

Even a few years ago, such antics would have been unthinkable—but not anymore. This fight has become America’s new endless war.

School boards are, in fact, just the point of the spear in the culture wars, targeted by the left and right as a choice objective for reshaping America’s civil space. Civics have been a prime target in these campaigns, reshaping the American political identity as a precursor to reshaping American politics.

One of the most prominent controversies in the culture wars swirls around curriculum that would implement concepts introduced by Critical Race Theory, the 1619 Project and anti-racist doctrine. These beliefs insist that our nation’s civic structures are inherently oppressive, biased, and racist. Historical persons and events become fodder for this fight because historical memories are the billboards of these racist structures. They must be torn down. That’s why the Randolph School Board went after Columbus.

That is also why July 4th and other patriotic holidays are on the purge list. The radical agenda to reimagine civic memory would reconceptualize Independence Day as an event not worth celebrating or, even “better,” a day to protest against what is wrong with America.

If this agenda wins out, the rising generation of Americans will grow up unable to describe what happened on Independence Day, much less its critical importance to the worldwide advance of human rights and liberty. They will know it only as an important occasion for criticizing and denigrating the idea of America.

Independence Day should be marked to affirm the importance of political freedoms and recognize importance of fighting to secure and protect them. This is a day to honor the virtue of battling to secure the right of the Randolph School Board to debate whatever it damn well pleases. Generations of Americans fought and died so generations of Americans could argue over how to teach civics. MORE.

Is It a Conspiracy Theory to Say All This Racial Discord Is Intentional?

Via The American Thinker

A conspiracy theory is a statement of fact, or implication of personal knowledge, of a conspiracy that is simply not credible to rational people. QAnon’s assertion that Democrats are murdering children to harvest their adrenal glands to make adrenochrome, a chemical that can be purchased legally without resorting to murder, is an excellent example. The motive is simply not there, and neither is the opportunity, as even one mistake in such a scheme would result in a widespread criminal investigation. It is another matter to point out, without claiming any personal or inside information about the matter, that foreign enemies of the United States have both the means (money and intelligence networks) and motive to support Critical Race Theory, the 1619 Project, Black Lives Matter, and white supremacists, whether overtly or covertly. We already know that these enemies have engaged in cyber-warfare against the United States, so they are ethically capable of waging psychological warfare on us as well.

What do CRT, the 1619 Project, BLM, and white supremacists have in common? All promote the depraved idea that some Americans are sufficiently different from others not to have a common interest in a unified country, a melting pot of immigrants of all races and ethnicities connected with the binding force of nationalism. The left denounces nationalism repeatedly even though it is the sole force that holds an entity like the United States together. French president Emmanuel Macron, meanwhile, denounced nationalism even though it is the same force that makes French people French rather than Burgundians, Gascons, Bretons, Normans, and so on.

Vladimir Putin, the first suspect who comes to mind, grew up in an empire that stretched from Central Europe to the Pacific Ocean. He knew that it had taken various tsars and tsarinas such as Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, and the dictator Joseph Stalin, centuries to build this empire from many conquered nations. Putin was about forty years old when he saw this empire collapse utterly because Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Azerbaijanis, Uzbeks, Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, and others remembered that they were not Russians, had never been Russians, and did not want to be Russians. The Czechs, Poles, East Germans, and Hungarians also knew. This led quickly to the breakup of the Warsaw Pact. The multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed in 1918 for similar reasons, and I am sure Putin knows it.

Putin now looks at the United States to see a multiracial and multi-ethnic nation that is very similar to the former Russian Empire in terms of everything except the binding force of nationalism — the idea that an American is an American regardless of what he looks like or where his ancestors came from. His obvious course of action is therefore to promote the depraved and Balkanizing idea that Caucasians can be at most “allies” of Black Americans as opposed to fellow citizens. Another equally obvious move is to promote the 1619 Project and Black Lives Matter to spread the diseased ideology that the United States was, is, and always will be a racist country that hates Black people while he supports, perhaps with cryptocurrency as well as agents provocateurs, white supremacists as evidence of the “systemic racism” in question.

This is by no means an accusation that anybody involved is knowingly in league with a hostile foreign government. The real-life counterparts of Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale don’t come up to us and say, “We work for Vladimir Putin; we want to offer you money to undermine your country.” They pretend to be one of us, or an “ally,” and offer both money and direction to support what we think is our cause but is really theirs. This makes us dupes rather than willing accomplices or fellow travelers. Home-grown race-hustlers, meanwhile, stand to gain personally from interracial tensions. There is a stereotype of Ku Klux Klansmen in cheap shoes because they are so ignorant, and accordingly poor, that they cannot afford better, but David Duke has a three-piece suit. Al Sharpton’s followers live in the “hood,” while Sharpton himself gets speaking engagements, a radio show, and photo-ops with prominent Democrats including presidential candidates. Patrisse Cullors has gotten valuable attention, although not substantial income, from BLM. Cui bono? (Who benefits?) We don’t have to look far for the answers.

The rulers of Communist China, who have their own problems with ethnic minorities who do not want to live under their rule, also have both the motive and opportunity to promote these agendas. The United States’ very existence is a daily and worldwide reminder of the inferiority of their form of government, as shown by American flags waving in Hong Kong, just as Israel’s very existence is a daily reminder to the subjects of neighboring dictatorships that their own rulers have nothing to offer but poverty, squalor, hate, and violent ideologies. When a beacon on a hill, or a light unto the nations, exposes your government as despotic and dysfunctional, you have one of two choices. Light your own beacon, or extinguish the other. Here is how you achieve the latter. MORE.

Who’s Next In Biden’s War On America?

Via The American Mind

The Biden Administration’s Domestic Terrorism Strategy is an announcement that they’re coming for you.
The Biden Administration’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism is, by its own admission, the first of its kind. The authors call it “America’s first government-wide national Strategy” to eradicate internal opponents of the regime—that is, not only to deter “violent extremism,” but even, in the words of Biden’s opening memo, “to root out the hatreds that can too often drive violence.”

This unprecedented state intervention into every level of American life is justified, the Administration claims, by the unrest that occurred at the Capitol on January 6. That event, while regrettable and ill-judged, has also been thoroughly mythologized into a veritable Reichstag Fire by Democrat politicians, Republican enablers, and a chorus of willing journalists.

A few buffoonish and overzealous protestors have been narrativized into a cabal of organized insurrectionists who brought us, in the words of Democrat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to the brink of “a martial state.” One must admire the sinister rhetorical economy of a Party that can invent a threat of martial law while working steadily, and quite in the open, to impose it themselves.

At the heart of this assault on Americans by their government is a lie: the lie that Trump supporters killed Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick on January 6. As Northeastern Political Science Professor Max Abrahms notes in this feature, “Even after the official medical examiner concluded in April that Sicknick died from natural causes, President Biden, MSNBC, and CNN have continued to promote the politically self-serving fiction that he was killed in a terrorist attack.” Now, in the Administration’s new document, this invented murder is presented as the disastrous climax of an equally dishonest story about a supposed plague of right-wing terrorism in America.

“Domestic terrorism is not a new threat in the United States,” the Strategy explains. “It has, over centuries, taken many American lives and spilled much American blood—especially in communities deliberately and viciously targeted on the basis of hatred and bigotry.” What this means in practice is spelled out by a list of gunmen and bombers, all of them inheritors of a line tracing back to the Ku Klux Klan. There is Santino William Legan, who killed three shoppers in northern California, and Patrick Crusius, the suspect in the deadly El Paso shooting. There is Timothy McVeigh, an ex-Army man who bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City. And there is a general reference to “violence and xenophobia directed against Asian Americans; the surge in anti–Semitism; and more.”

Nowhere in this sordid tale do we find mentioned the scores of young men, almost all of them Muslim, who were arrested throughout the 2010s under suspicion of collaborating with ISIS. There is not a word about the BLM- and Antifa-led guerilla campaigns that claimed the lives of police officers like David Dorn and ravaged the property of American workers—to the tune, as Pedro Gonzalez notes, of “$1 billion to $2 billion in paid insurance claims.” MORE.

Former Police Officer Recounts Witnessing “Industrialized” Organ Harvesting In China

Via The Epoch Times

At the sound of gunshots, prisoners fell lifeless to the ground. Their bodies, still warm, were carried to a nearby white van where two white-clad doctors awaited. Behind closed doors, they were cut open, the organs carved out for sale on the transplant market.

The grisly scene, which sounds more like the plot of a horror movie, took place in China more than 20 years ago at the direction of state authorities. It was witnessed by Bob (pseudonym), then a police officer who provided security at the execution sites where death-row prisoners were executed.

“The harvesting of death-row prisoners’ organs was an open secret,” Bob, a former public security officer from central China’s Zhengzhou City who is now based in the United States, told The Epoch Times in an interview.

Bob described being an unwitting participant in an “industrialized” supply chain that converted living humans into products for sale in the organ trade. The players in this macabre industry include the judicial system, police, prisons, doctors, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials who issue the directive.

The former officer used a pseudonym in sharing his experience to protect his safety. The Epoch Times has verified his police ID and other personal information.

His account from the mid-1990s sheds light on one stage in the disturbing evolution of the CCP’s long-running practice of harvesting organs from non-consenting donors. While Bob witnessed organ extraction from prisoners who were already dead, in the following years the regime would go on to implement—and deploy on a mass scale—a practice far more sinister: harvesting organs from live prisoners of conscience, particularly Falun Gong practitioners.

Bob joined the police force in 1996 and worked as a civilian police officer. From time to time, he assisted in maintaining order at a court where executions are confirmed and various execution sites in the city. Later, in 1999, as a result of an online post critical of the authorities, Bob himself was put in detention for more than a year. Inside, he was able to observe the handling of death-row prisoners,, and thus piece together the process from conviction to execution to organ harvesting.

After being sentenced to death, an inmate would be slapped in hand and ankle cuffs, the latter weighing up to 33 pounds to prevent a possible escape. One or two other prisoners would keep them on watch at all times. A blood test—a step to identify possible donors—and a check up on their mental and physical health would also run during this time at a dedicated medical room in the detention center.

“As far as I know, no one told the death-row prisoners their organs would be extracted,” Bob said.

Executions typically occurred ahead of major holidays, he said. MORE.

Poll: 57 Percent of Americans Believe They Have Less Personal Freedom Today than Before Coronavirus

Via True Pundit

A Wednesday poll indicates 57 percent of Americans believe they have less personal freedom today than before the coronavirus pandemic.

The Trafalgar Group asked respondents, “Do you believe Americans have as much personal freedom today as we did before the COVID-19 pandemic?”

Nearly 57 percent said they have less personal freedom today, while nearly 36 percent said their freedom has remained the same

The mistrust of the federal government’s coronavirus response comes as Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins reportedly refused former President Donald Trump’s order to cancel virus research grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) connected to the Wuhan Lab.

Meanwhile, federal government investigators launched an investigation June 15 into how the NIH “manages and monitors” its ongoing grant program to foreign labs, such as the one in Wuhan. MORE.

Facebook Warns Anyone Attending 4th Of July Fireworks That They May Have Been Exposed To Extremist Activity

Via The Babylon Bee

U.S.—According to reports, millions of Americans will be attending 4th of July celebrations today, many of which will feature problematic displays of the American flag and extreme levels of patriotism.

“Latest government intelligence says that people who feel proud to live in America are more likely to be insurrectionist Trump supporters or colorblind racists,” said Facebook content moderator and CCP party member Xiu Zhao. “We want people to realize they are putting themselves in danger by attending these hotbeds of extremist activity.”

Facebook will be sending notifications to any user found to have attended a patriotic parade, fireworks show, or cookout. Users will be directed to totally confidential resources to help cure them of their extremism.

“I’m glad Facebook is taking steps to prevent people from going down these dangerous roads,” said Robin Diangelo, racism expert and author of White Fragility. “We as Americans must always remember that America is not for people of color. It’s only for white people. Every time a white person acts in a patriotic manner, he is reminding BIPOCS that they have no place here.”

According to sources within Facebook, users who ignore the extremism warnings will have all their personal information sent directly to the FBI.

Check out all of the Bee’s takes on a world gone mad HERE.

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