Thursday Morning Breakfast For The Brain

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Is It Any Surprise That A Military That Believes America Is ‘Evil’ Botched The Mission In Afghanistan?

Via The Federalist

If America is as innately evil as some of our educators and “anti-racism” trainers say it is, then what business do we have being in Afghanistan, or anywhere else, for that matter? A nation that preaches these things flirts with the type of debacle we are seeing in Afghanistan.

Maybe there is a silver lining to the national humiliation that just concluded. If anything good can come of the tragedy in Kabul, it should be a national reckoning on whether we have the national unity and confidence that remaining a superpower requires.

The reckoning should include those who want to become our future leaders. Do they think we are systemically racist, and that our founding ideals were evil, as our teachers are now instructing our children, and highly paid anti-racist trainers tell our workers?

To undertake this reckoning will require pluck. The forces behind these curricula and training programs insist that all they are doing is finally confronting America’s foundational racism, and providing remedies — the training programs and the curricula — that will help us work our way out of what they insist is an oppressive system. Who could possibly object?

Supporters range from academics who have long held these views, generally known as critical race theory (CRT), to the consultants who benefit financially from the racial turmoil they have helped create, to the dogmatic leaders of Black Lives Matter, to the part of the general population that can be described as “woke.”

Confronting them is not for the weak-kneed. After all, they claim to be working on behalf of the weakest members of society, and they’re happy to smear as “racist” those who dare question them. But having seen in the Kabul debacle what can befall a superpower when its leadership loses its confidence in the goodness of its people, it becomes clear that a reckoning becomes imperative.

Without national unity, a nation cannot launch itself into what Arthur Schlesinger—no conservative he—called “historic purposes,” and wars should count as one. In a country such as ours with “people of different ethnic origins,” said the top intellectual in John Kennedy’s White House, “unless a common purpose binds them together, tribal antagonisms will drive them apart.”

Journalists misguidedly labeled the riots and destabilization of 2020—what kicked the current racial turmoil into high gear—the year of “racial reckoning” (Google that, and you get close to 630,000 hits). They overlooked the possibility that the Marxist-led BLM organizations were manipulating people’s emotions after the death of George Floyd to achieve the goals they had harbored for decades.

A real national reckoning would take this possibility into account, and put our leaders on the spot.

The current administration constantly uses the catchphrases of CRT like “systemic racism,” “equity,” and “white privilege.” President Joe Biden, a career politician who in 40 years showed not a smidgen of interest in any of this, now mouths these terms with regularity, and signs bills inspired by these beliefs. With Vice President Kamala Harris there is at least no doubt; she has long demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of the philosophies in question.

Even our own United Nations ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, declared earlier this year that “the original sin of slavery weaved white supremacy into our founding documents and principles.”

The military brass that reports to these civilian leaders — not coincidentally the same officers who have overseen the botched Afghan withdrawal — have also paid lip service. Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says he wants to understand “white rage,” another CRT catchphrase. The U.S. military wants its fighting men and women to read CRT texts.

Just so we understand, CRT holds that the Founding and Constitution, the document our fighting men and women swear to protect from enemies foreign and domestic, are illegitimate. It also holds that everything we do, “the ordinary business of society” in the words of CRT architect Richard Delgado, perpetuates white supremacy. This is why the brass is telling soldiers to focus on unintended “micro-aggressions” in interpersonal relations, rather than concentrating on macro-aggressions between adversaries on the battlefield. MORE.

Lawyer Representing 17 Jan. 6 Defendants Has Mysteriously Gone Missing: Court Filings

Via Zero Hedge

An attorney who is representing 17 defendants accused of taking part in the Jan. 6 Capitol breach has disappeared, possibly suffering from COVID-19, according to an Aug. 30 court filing.

Acting U.S. Attorney Channing D. Phillips said in a court document (pdf) that nearly 20 cases related to the Jan. 6 incident aren’t proceeding after John Pierce, the lawyer for the defense, went missing.

Pierce is “reportedly ill with COVID-19, on a ventilator, and unresponsive,” according to the filing. Pierce’s law firm associate, Ryan Marshall—who isn’t a licensed attorney—has been appearing in Pierce’s place at court hearings and proceedings. Marshall was also the one who revealed Pierce’s alleged hospitalization and condition, the filing said.

The lawyer, who generally posts on Twitter several times per day, hasn’t posted since Aug. 20.

“Because Mr. Pierce is unavailable and Mr. Marshall cannot ethically or legally represent Mr. Pierce’s clients, the government is making the Court aware of Mr. Pierce’s reported illness so that it can take any steps it believes necessary to ensure the defendant’s rights are adequately protected while Mr. Pierce remains hospitalized,” Phillips said.

But later in the court filing, the U.S. attorney’s office said it had obtained “conflicting information about Mr. Pierce’s health and whereabouts.”

When it was revealed publicly that Pierce was hospitalized with COVID-19, a report from NPR, citing unnamed sources, said that he may have been suffering from dehydration and exhaustion and that he’s believed to have symptoms related to COVID-19.

And a colleague of Pierce, Brody Womack, told Business Insider that Pierce “appears to have been suffering from dehydration and exhaustion in relation to his tireless work on behalf of his clients, including the many defendants he represents in connection with the January 6, 2021, protest at the Capitol.”

On Aug. 26, Marshall appeared in place of Pierce, telling a U.S. attorney’s assistant that he hasn’t had any contact with Pierce and noting that one of his friends “had told him that Mr. Pierce was sick with COVID-19 and another had said he was not,” the filing states.

“From the government’s perspective, given Mr. Pierce’s reported illness and the fact that Mr. Marshall is not a licensed attorney, this case is effectively at a standstill,” Phillips’ office stated.

Even though Marshall “has been the government’s main or sole point of contact for many of the defendants represented by Mr. Pierce, the government does not believe it appropriate to continue to communicate with him in Mr. Pierce’s absence, during which he would necessarily be acting without supervision by a licensed attorney,” the court document reads.

Some of Pierce’s clients said they’re starting to become concerned. MORE.

Overpaid, Insecure, And Unintelligent — This Is Who You Leave Your Kids With And Who Most Kids Will Therefore Emulate

Via Lew Rockwell

There is a fascinating trend taking place among parents.

They are starting to realize who they are leaving their children in the hands of.

Sure there have always been PTA meetings and parent teacher conferences. There have been open houses and days for parents to come in and volunteer at school. There have been sports leagues and field trips and volunteer activities for you to see a teacher in action and to see how they are at their job and as a person. But if there wasn’t genuine philosophical conflict, there was no way to truly feel them out.

2020 and 2021 made that possible.

Suddenly you found out that if you wanted your kid to breathe freely, you were evil. If you did not want your kid to be a science experiment, you were deserving of arrest and imprisonment — not a fit parent. If you wanted your kid to have face-to-face class, rather than staring at a screen for 80% of his waking day, then you were anti-social.

Yes, I know, plenty of readers of these pages had those realizations before 2020. But for the normies among us, 2020 was a real gift, and in a lot of ways.

It suddenly became obvious to parents in the days and weeks before a Zoom-based circulum became the norm, that doing classwork at the kitchen table with your kids didn’t take 6, 7, or 8 hours, but was more like 90 or 120 or maybe 150 minutes of effort. What were the teachers doing with all the rest of the time then?

Then Zoom-based classes started and you got to see what the teachers were doing with the extra time — not much of anything beneficial to your kid. Then your home became filled with the echoes of their vapid nonsense.

Then you began to learn a little more about how the school was run, and you began to ask questions you never even troubled yourself with. What do these people believe in? How much do they get paid? Who really runs this whole show? Where do they get off putting some of this crap into the curriculum?

You started asking a lot of questions, and before you knew it, you might not have just been asking the questions to your search engine. You might have been asking the questions to people at the school too — maybe a principal, maybe a superintendent, maybe a counselor, maybe a teacher, maybe an aide. And before you knew it, you were told not to be in the room during the Zoom-based classes. You were given attitude. You were told that this isn’t any concern of theirs. You were told how smart people came up with this plan, and that you needed to get in line. You were told to trust the professionals.

Well, the problem really is that you trusted the professionals at all, for any time, for a single second.

If your family ended up in a mess in 2020, that’s probably how you ended up there — by trusting professionals.

Trust is a thing earned and granted to a select few close to you. Trust is not a blanket sentiment given to thousands and millions of people. That’s not called trust. That’s called idiocy.

It is idiocy to see how overpaid, insecure, and unintelligent these people are and to back away from your parental responsibilities like you “trust” them. It’s negligence to see how overpaid, insecure, and unintelligent these people are and to let them have ANY access to your kids. It is hypocritical to see how overpaid, insecure, and unintelligent these people are and to give a single dime to support their efforts, let alone leave your pride and joy with them.

A property tax protest is the right response to the school system after what the months since the Ides of March 2020 have shown us. These people are overpaid, insecure, and unintelligent. If you don’t figure out how to stop paying your property taxes, you are inevitably supporting that.

But let us not stop there. Let us get into the topic of child sacrifice. Let us get into the topic of how virtuous they deem it to turn your child’s body, mind, and soul to rubbish.

Do not pretend they share your values.

Do not pretend they care for your children.

They care for your children enough to get you to leave them your children.

That’s how much they care for your children. What they are banking for is that you are stupid enough to keep leaving them with your children after all the police powers they granted themselves over the past year while you weren’t looking.

Keep leaving them with your children, and you will get a rude awakening one day soon. MORE.

Antifa teacher set to be fired by school after attempting to radicalize children

Via The Post Millennial

A California school district is planning on firing one of its teachers after an undercover Project Veritas video revealed he was radicalizing the students. According to Natomas Unified School District, “Yesterday, a group released an undercover video that has been covered extensively. In this video, a teacher at Inderkum High School was recorded sharing his educational approach that is disturbing and undermines the public’s trust.”

The Project Veritas report released on Tuesday exposes Inderkum High School AP government teacher Gabriel Gipe for politically indoctrinating students and stating that he is turning his students into “revolutionaries.” “I have 180 days to turn them [students] into revolutionaries … Scare the f— out of them,” said Gipe in the undercover footage filmed by Project Veritas.

Despite initially ignoring Project Veritas when approached, the district now says, “As of today, this teacher was placed on paid leave because of his actions and choices in the classroom. Natomas Unified will be taking the legally required next steps to place the teacher on unpaid leave and fire the teacher.”

The district also addressed the imagery in Gipe’s classroom, including the Antifa flag and the poster of the murderous dictator Mao Zedong. In their statement, the district notes they removed the imagery and also found more disturbing political material.

“Additionally, the teacher, using his own money, purchased a series of rubber stamps. These stamps include an inappropriate image of Josef Stalin with an insensitive phrase, as well as other stamps with Fidel Castro, Kim Jung Un and others,” the statement reads, noting the teacher used these stamps to mark work as complete. MORE.

The Rise of Corporate-State Tyranny

Via The Center For The American Way Of Life

In explaining his shift away from Maoist economics, Deng Xiao Ping, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, described his market-oriented changes as “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Today, American businesses, as well as the media and academic establishments that serve them, increasingly embrace what can best be described as “Chinese capitalism with American characteristics.”

A convergence between the world’s two superpowers is taking place. In the United States, as property and power further consolidate, the “diffusion of power,” so critical to democracy, erodes and autocracy develops naturally. Only players at the highest level possess the heft and the motivation to influence policy.1 This powerful front consists of a new alliance between large corporate powers, Wall Street, and the progressive clerisy in government and media.

Its agenda consists of several goals. On the corporate front we have the emergence of “stakeholder” capitalism, which embraces the state’s priorities implicitly and those of the progressives generally, as a way to please regulators, the woke among their employers, and, to some extent, their own consciences. In this they resemble companies in authoritarian states—like Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, and today’s China—where private capital accumulation is permitted but dissent from the agreed norms of the media-government-academy, once the privilege of individuals and corporations, is now largely verboten.

Yet complicity in the West differs from fascist or corporate socialist standards in one important way. In wealthy societies, a large part of the corporate elite does not see widespread economic growth or rising living standards as a goal but as an impediment to meeting the demands of the “stakeholders,” who are largely defined by the clerisy, their orbit of nonprofits, cowed media, and their academic mentors. Profits are fine in this arrangement but only if they do not increase the material consumption of the populace while allowing new advantages to select racial or lifestyle minorities. The new corporatism is not bad for established capitalists but offers little to the middle or working classes, or, for that matter, to smaller independent businesses.

The New Convergence

The concentration of power in few hands, whether in the Chinese or American variant, has its true antecedents not in Marxism, as is often claimed, but in European fascism. Benito Mussolini, who viewed himself as a “revolutionary” transforming society, not a traditionalist, wanted the state to become “the moving center of economic life.”2 He successfully co-opted Italian industrialists to build new infrastructure and the military, and he used them to fight off Italy’s historically militant and socialist-oriented unions.3 Corporate power was essential to the ideology of fascism; it was critical to achieving its revolutionary goals. Not only did Mussolini rely heavily on large landowners and companies for his seizure of power in the run-up to the March on Rome. Once the fascists were in power, Confindustria, the leading organization of Italian industrialists, was glad to see the end of class-based chaos and welcomed the state’s infrastructure surge. This may have not made all capitalists fascists at heart but it preserved what Mussolini called “formal adherence to the regime.”4

Most importantly, fascist corporatism, by rejecting the autonomy of private interests, parallels today’s fashionable theories like “stakeholder capitalism” and the environmental “Great Reset.” As in the fascist state, corporations now take it on themselves to be conscious change agents for particular political and moral agendas. Two doctrines guide these actions. First, “stakeholder capitalism,” which holds that corporations must push onto society doctrines concerning gender, “systemic racism,” and other elements of the woke agenda. Second, the “Great Reset,” which seeks to have companies essentially “save” the planet by slowing material growth for the working and middle classes while maintaining rich profit opportunities through “disruption” of energy and other industries. Both doctrines currently guide the majority of America’s major corporations.

China has already followed this model, and America’s corporations are on the cusp of doing so. In China, as one scholar observes, corporatism is “a socio-political process” where monopolies flourish with the assistance and connivance of state agencies. They follow state strictures by embracing the official ideology, celebrating the Communist Party’s vision, and enforcing ideological conformity among employees and even foreign business partners. MORE.

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