This is far from the first study and review to conclude that head start is actually no such thing.
Category Archives: Education
Far left academics pushing “junk science” at military colleges to indoctrinate students
And junk science it is. This “study” (see below) is filled with very bogus cliché in the book. This “study” , like all too many writings from radicalized academics, is filled with opinion presented as fact, including but not limited too: small government activists are racists, leftists are “future oriented” modern and “progressive” while conservatives are backwards and “in the past”.
The “study” also paints traditional Americans as THE domestic terror threat, but the FBI has listed far left groups such as ALF, ELF and other left-wing groups as the most active and deadly domestic terror groups and have for many years.
The left is future oriented? As if centralized government control of society and the economy is somehow a new concept? On the contrary that idea is as old as the idea of government itself. The vast majority of man throughout history has lived under such rule.
The idea that rights come from God and cannot be usurped by government, government should be limited by rules and separation of powers, and where the minority is protected from the whims of the majority by law are new concepts and the United States was the first country in the history of the world to be founded upon those ideas; so if anything it is American conservatism that is modern, and those who favor a leviathan state, whatever the spin used to sell it, the dinosaur form of government.
The “study” also says that the left values separation of powers. Anyone skilled in politics is already laughing at this one. It is the Democratic Leader in the Senate who is asking President Obama to violate separation of powers by legislating via executive order and unilaterally raise the debt ceiling illegally. It is the left that ignores the limits placed in Article I, Section 8, as well as the 9th and 10th Amendments as well as the 5th Amendment clause about not taking property without just compensation and that is just for starters.
This is far from the first time an “academic study” ended up being nothing more than a vehicle for politically motivated slander. The IU School of Journalism published this study comparing Bill O’Reilly to the Nazi’s using laughable “fast and loose” terms and tactics. These attacks from radicalized academia are used to justify the kind of hate that we saw when far left groups attacked a charity that helps rape victims for the terrible crime of letting Bill O’Reilly raise money for them.
Rowan Scarborough at The Washington Times:
The report issued this week by the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., is titled “Challengers from the Sidelines: Understanding America’s Violent Far-Right.”
The center — part of the institution where men and women are molded into Army officers — posted the report Tuesday. It lumps limited government activists with three movements it identifies as “a racist/white supremacy movement, an anti-federalist movement and a fundamentalist movement.”
The West Point center typically focuses reports on al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists attempting to gain power in Asia, the Middle East and Africa through violence.
But its latest study turns inward and paints a broad brush of people it considers “far right.”
It says anti-federalists “espouse strong convictions regarding the federal government, believing it to be corrupt and tyrannical, with a natural tendency to intrude on individuals’ civil and constitutional rights. Finally, they support civil activism, individual freedoms, and self government. Extremists in the anti-federalist movement direct most their violence against the federal government and its proxies in law enforcement.”
The report also draws a link between the mainstream conservative movement and the violent “far right,” and describes liberals as “future oriented” and conservatives as living in the past.
“While liberal worldviews are future- or progressive -oriented, conservative perspectives are more past-oriented, and in general, are interested in preserving the status quo.” the report says. “The far right represents a more extreme version of conservatism, as its political vision is usually justified by the aspiration to restore or preserve values and practices that are part of the idealized historical heritage of the nation or ethnic community.”
The report adds: “While far-right groups’ ideology is designed to exclude minorities and foreigners, the liberal-democratic system is designed to emphasize civil rights, minority rights and the balance of power.”
The report says there were 350 “attacks initiated by far-right groups/individuals” in 2011.
Details about what makes an attack a “far right” action are not clear in the report, which was written by Arie Perliger, who directs the center’s terrorism studies and teaches social sciences at West Point.
A Republican congressional staffer who served in the military told The Washington Times: “If [the Defense Department] is looking for places to cut spending, this junk study is ground zero.
“Shouldn’t the Combating Terrorism Center be combating radical Islam around the globe instead of perpetuating the left’s myth that right-wingers are terrorists?” the staffer said. “The $64,000 dollar question is when will the Combating Terrorism Center publish their study on real left-wing terrorists like the Animal Liberation Front, Earth Liberation Front, and the Weather Underground?”
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How do people this foolish land jobs in our public schools?
The elite media does a lousy job reporting the civil rights violations that happen almost every day in our public schools. Civil rights organizations such as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the Alliance Defense Fund, the Rutherford Institute, the Student Press Law Center, and more have so many complaints of abuse that they have have no hope of acting upon them all.
We report on a few of the most outrageous cases here, and we spend a lot of time on this issue, but in truth we barely scratch the surface of the problem, as the problem is just that that big.
Bureaucrats, and unfortunately that includes some school administrators seem to have the ability to make the most outrageous behavior sound reasonable. Even now the school principal insists that the school was within its rights (to stick their hands in a boys underwear, not tell the parents, and take the 4th Amendment and toss it out the window) to conduct the strip search. I suspect that the courts are going to give the school a rude awakening. But even so, the administrators won’t be punished, the tax payer will just have to pay the damages and the administrators will just go on violating students.
Notice what national news outlet is reporting this story?
The UK Daily Mail:
Parents’ outrage as school strip searches a 10-year-old boy to find a ‘stolen’ $20 bill that was actually in the cafeteria
North Carolina parents are outraged after an assistant principal strip-searched a 10-year-old boy to find a $20 bill the student didn’t even have.
Union Elementary School assistant principal Teresa Holmes is named in a complaint filed against the school, alleging that she made a young boy strip down to his underwear.
She suspected fifth-grader Justin Cox of having the missing $20 and when he didn’t turn it over she demanded he remove his socks, shoes, pants, and shirt so that a manual search could be done.
Holmes defended herself, saying that other students and faculty had said that the money was missing and that Cox had dived under a table for it.
Holmes told Cox he ‘he left her no choice and that she had to search him,’ according to court records.
She then told him she was ‘within her legal rights to do so.’
The complaint against Holmes states that Cox was deprived of his constitutional rights barring unreasonable search and seizure.
According to court documents, Cox had gone under a lunch table after money a passing girl had dropped. Holmes returned the cash to the girl, and afterwards was told that there was still $20 missing.
When confronted, Cox told her he didn’t have it.
Ordered into her office with a custodian to act as a witness, Holmes went so far as to put her fingers inside the waistband of his underwear and run her fingers on his bare torso.
She explained she had the authority to search him ‘because teachers and students thought Justin had the money.’
But another teacher came into the office to announce that the money was ‘miraculously’ found on the cafeteria floor.
Student rips Chicago teacher to pieces in class for not teaching (video)
God bless this girl. She knows she is getting a bad education and wants something better.
Via the Daily Caller:
At least one student in Chicago’s public school system is mad as hell. And if the YouTube video posted Thursday by the urban culture website World-Star Hip-Hop is any indication, she’s definitely not going to take it any more.
The video shows a student from a high school on Chicago’s South Side berating a music teacher because, she says, he isn’t teaching students anything despite striking for a week for better wages.
“You went on strike for a whole week to get paid to teach us,” the furious student says. “And now you’re here, and you don’t want to teach. Man, you better teach me something.”
“You get paid, right? I want an education!” she continues. “I refuse to sit in this class and not be taught.”
“Every day I walk out of this class with nothing. Why? Because you don’t do your job,” she yells.
Will: Colleges have free speech on the run
Parents, what you are about to read here is commonplace on American universities today. And you may be thinking, “I am in a conservative town so not my local university”…. well you are sadly mistaken.
This very writer is from South Bend, Indiana. Mike Pence is our new governor, Jackie Walorski is our new Member of Congress, and Indiana was the first state to go to Mitt Romney in the election. Yet, I can tell you with absolute certainty that Christians, traditionalists, and conservatives face discrimination and persecution on campus.
This very writer, when faced with persecution on campus, went very high profile on campus and used a strategy of making the left fear me. Having been a radio talk show host and a person with some resources I had that option, but many traditional students don’t.
Pro-life professors at Notre Dame, the largest Catholic University in the world, are persecuted on campus because the radical left has all but taken over the institution since Father Hessburg actively recruited Marxists to work at the university.
Hundreds of thousands of communists didn’t suddenly become libertarians after the East German wall fell. They had to go somewhere and most of them ended up “teaching” our kids. There are plenty of them on almost every campus in America.
At Tufts, a conservative newspaper committed “harassment” by printing accurate quotations from the Koran and a verified fact about the status of women in Saudi Arabia. Lukianoff says that Tufts may have been the first American institution “to find someone guilty of harassment for stating verifiable facts directed at no one in particular.”
He documents how “orientation” programs for freshmen become propaganda to (in the words of one orthodoxy enforcer) “leave a mental footprint on their consciousness.” Faculty, too, can face mandatory consciousness-raising.
In 2007, Donald Hindley, a politics professor at Brandeis, was found guilty of harassment because when teaching Latin American politics he explained the origin of the word “wetbacks,” which refers to immigrants crossing the Rio Grande. Without a hearing, the university provost sent Hindley a letter stating that the university “will not tolerate inappropriate, racial and discriminatory conduct.” The assistant provost was assigned to monitor Hindley’s classes “to ensure that you do not engage in further violations of the nondiscrimination and harassment policy.” Hindley was required to attend “anti-discrimination training.”
Such coercion is a natural augmentation of censorship. Next comes mob rule. Last year, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the vice provost for diversity and climate — really; you can’t make this stuff up — encouraged students to disrupt a news conference by a speaker opposed to racial preferences. They did, which the vice provost called “awesome.” This is the climate on an especially liberal campus that celebrates “diversity” in everything but thought.
“What happens on campus,” Lukianoff says, “doesn’t stay on campus” because censorship has “downstream effects.” He quotes a sociologist whose data he says demonstrate that “those with the highest levels of education have the lowest exposure to people with conflicting points of view.” This encourages “the human tendency to live within our own echo chambers.” Parents’ tuition dollars and student indebtedness pay for this. Good grief.
Obama Lied: Cuts Pell Grant Eligibility after Promising Opposite
This is no different than the Obama Administration targeting women’s cancer screenings for rationing while fully admitting that it will increase women’s mortality rates.
Why is it that women’s and minority health are the first to be targeted for cuts as ObamaCare takes over? Why is it that Pell Grants for college are already being targeted? It is because those groups vote Democrat in such large numbers, that the Democrat leadership can do whatever it wants and likely keep that group secured as a voting block.
With the elite media, and in the case of the young being barraged by leftist professors, covering for them most of the time Obama can get away with it. Do you ever wonder why inner city minorities get the worst teachers, worst schools, worst city services and worst police protection in cities and areas ran by Democrats? It is for the same reason. No matter what the Democrats do they believe they will always get 85% or better of the black vote, so they put resources in swing districts to win swing voters.
Victor Medina:
Sorry, college students. President Obama has cut your access to Pell Grants by 33%; he just forgot to mention it before Election Day.
During the recent campaign, President Obama claimed credit for increasing funding to the Pell Grant program, which provides college funds, free from repayment, to millions of students. However, an email sent out Tuesday to some Dallas college students is revealing a detail the President forgot to mention: the time a student can receive a Pell Grant has been cut, by as much as three years. With Pell Grants for the fall semester now dispersed, colleges are informing students of their options, bringing the cuts to light.
The email, sent out by the Dallas County Community College District, informed students of the changes to the Pell Grant program. It revealed that the number of semesters a student could receive a Pell Grant had been cut from 18 semesters down to 12. It is a detail likely unknown to most students; in fact, the cut in grants has gone largely unreported by the media.
The email states that the cut in eligibility was part of an education bill President Obama signed into law in 2011. “On December 23, 2011, President Obama signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2012 (Public Law 112-74). This new federal law states that the amount of Federal Pell Grant funds a student may receive over his or her LIFETIME will be reduced to the duration of a student’s eligibility from 18 semesters (or its equivalent) to 12 semesters (or its equivalent). This new law applies to ALL Federal Pell Grant eligible students effective with the 2012-2013 award year beginning July 1, 2012. (DCL-GEN-12-01)”
The cut in grant eligibility has serious ramifications for non-traditional students. Part-time students who do not receive a full semester grant may lose out on funds if they do not earn an undergraduate degree within 12 semesters. Adults who go back to school, including retraining for a new career, will also have limited access to grants.
The amount of the grant varies based on family income (with a current yearly maximum grant of $5,550). If a student gets a grant less than a maximum, and a year later finds their income level has been reduced, they will not be able to recoup the difference in the lower amounts earned in a previous year. The cut in eligible semesters makes it difficult for students to make up that gap in later years.
This cut in eligibility was never mentioned by President Obama during the campaign, and when he boasted about increasing funding to the Pell Grant program, CNN fact-checked his claim as true. While the amount of government funding to the program is going up in future years, CNN failed miserably by not pointing out the cuts in eligibility to students. The cuts could be a rude awakening to students who thought President Obama was expanding their educational opportunities.
U. Texas Journalism Prof: US Founding Fathers like “Nazi’s”,
Parents, this kind of nuttery on campus is not uncommon. Most universities pay very low wages, barely enough to pay one’s student loans, so universities tend to often attract the least capable of academics who cannot make it in the private sector, or ideologues like Prof. Jensen who are so radical that the private sector is out of their reach.
Forget all that turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie, today should be a day of fasting and atonement for American “sin.” That’s according to Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Jensen, known for his hard-left politics, also calls Thanksgiving a “white-supremacist holiday.”
Jensen’s opinion piece “No Thanks for Thanksgiving,” appeared on the far-left, Soros-connected website Alternet on Thanksgiving eve. In it, he wrote how Native Americans suffered because of the “European invasion of the Americas.” He went on to compare the Founding Fathers to Nazi Germany. “How does a country deal with the fact that some of its most revered historical figures had certain moral values and political views virtually identical to Nazis?” he asked.
British Meteorology Office: No Global Warming for 16 Years
The British Meteorology Office, commonly referred to as the “British Met” has been on the paranoid tip of global warming fraud and alarmism for years. After the Climategate scandal where “top” climate scientists own emails revealed that they were rigging some data-sets and hiding others to make it appear as if man made global warming was real resulted in more oversight and ethics rules. After years of false claims of doom and incorrect predictions the British Met is now admitting the truth.
UK Daily Mail:
Global warming stopped 16 years ago, reveals Met Office report quietly released… and here is the chart to prove it
- The figures reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012 there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures
- This means that the ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996
The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week.
The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures.
This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years.
The new data, compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea, was issued quietly on the internet, without any media fanfare, and, until today, it has not been reported.
This stands in sharp contrast to the release of the previous figures six months ago, which went only to the end of 2010 – a very warm year.
Ending the data then means it is possible to show a slight warming trend since 1997, but 2011 and the first eight months of 2012 were much cooler, and thus this trend is erased.
Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia [Editor’s Note – Jones is one of the busted Climategate scientists and had a long record of making over the top doomsday claims], last week dismissed the significance of the plateau, saying that 15 or 16 years is too short a period from which to draw conclusions.
Others disagreed. Professor Judith Curry, who is the head of the climate science department at America’s prestigious Georgia Tech university, told The Mail on Sunday that it was clear that the computer models used to predict future warming were ‘deeply flawed’.
Russian Columnist: Americans are repeating “The Soviet Mistake”
It is interesting to see how those not influenced by our elite media and our union controlled public schools view American politics.
It reminds me of my Eastern European friends I went to college with who told me that American News Media read like Communist propaganda. Those who are from Europe and Russia know very well what how a Marxist and a Communist behave, but unlike too many Americans, they are not afraid to call it what it is [except several foreign professors I had who would say this privately, but were very clear that if they told the truth about this it would be the end of their teaching career as American universities are heavens for radicalized ideologues who cannot function in the private sector – Editor].
Russian columnist Xavier Lerma asks how can Americans be so foolish as to elect a communist like Obama again, how can they not see that he says one thing and does the opposite, don’t they read history in America?
Bye, bye Miss American Pie. The Communists have won in America with Obama but failed miserably in Russia with Zyuganov who only received 17% of the vote. Vladimir Putin was re-elected as President keeping the NWO order out of Russia while America continues to repeat the Soviet mistake.
After Obama was elected in his first term as president the then Prime Minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin gave a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January of 2009. Ignored by the West as usual, Putin gave insightful and helpful advice to help the world economy and saying the world should avoid the Soviet mistake.
Recently, Obama has been re-elected for a 2nd term by an illiterate society and he is ready to continue his lies of less taxes while he raises them. He gives speeches of peace and love in the world while he promotes wars as he did in Egypt, Libya and Syria. He plans his next war is with Iran as he fires or demotes his generals who get in the way.
Putin said regarding the military [militarization is what the author meant as Russian is his first language],
Well, any normal individual understands that as true but [American style] liberalism is a psychosis . O’bomber even keeps the war going along the Mexican border with projects like “fast and furious” and there is still no sign of ending it. He is a Communist without question promoting the Communist Manifesto without calling it so. How shrewd he is in America. His cult of personality mesmerizes those who cannot go beyond their ignorance. They will continue to follow him like those fools who still praise Lenin and Stalin in Russia. Obama’s fools and Stalin’s fools share the same drink of illusion.
Xavier Lerma Continues to show that Obama is “repeating the Soviet mistake” by comparing what Obama is doing with what the Russian government now admits was their mistake:
“…we are reducing taxes on production, investing money in the economy. We are optimizing state expenses.The second possible mistake would be excessive interference into the economic life of the country and the absolute faith into the all-mightiness of the state.
There are no grounds to suggest that by putting the responsibility over to the state, one can achieve better results.
Unreasonable expansion of the budget deficit, accumulation of the national debt – are as destructive as an adventurous stock market game.
During the time of the Soviet Union the role of the state in economy was made absolute, which eventually lead to the total non-competitiveness of the economy. That lesson cost us very dearly. I am sure no one would want history to repeat itself.”
President Vladimir Putin could never have imagined anyone so ignorant or so willing to destroy their people like Obama much less seeing millions vote for someone like Obama. They read history in America don’t they? Alas, the schools in the U.S. were conquered by the Communists long ago and history was revised thus paving the way for their Communist presidents. Obama has bailed out those businesses that voted for him and increased the debt to over 16 trillion with an ever increasing unemployment rate especially among blacks and other minorities. All the while promoting his agenda.
Colleges start cutting professors work hours because of Obamacare
Elections have consequences. In a future post we will list the job layoffs that have resulted from Obama’s re-election and the slew of tax increases businesses and individuals will be paying as of January 1st. The number of layoffs are staggering and keep growing.
Companies that have employees work more than 28 hours a week are now considered full time by the law and employers must buy federally approved health insurance, which Obamacare has caused premiums to rise by $2,500 per year because of it’s mindless one sized fist all coverage and new taxes on insurance and health care. If employers do not provide the insurance they will have to pay a tax penalty….unless employees get less than 28 hours a week.
Welcome to mass layoffs and hiring of part timers only.
The first ones hit were not just the evil capitalists, this counts for most everyone, including university professors who are now feeling the heat. Radicalized academia actively supported and campaigned for Obama. Enjoy.
I am running into all sorts of people who voted for Obama again that had no idea about “Taxmageddon“. Most are shocked when they learn the truth, some just go into denial and even deny that anyone is getting laid off. Some even believe that we will have free health care and “gubmint” will just pay for it.
Pennsylvania’s Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC) is slashing the hours of 400 adjunct instructors, support staff, and part-time instructors to dodge paying for Obamacare.
“It’s kind of a double whammy for us because we are facing a legal requirement [under the new law] to get health care and if the college is reducing our hours, we don’t have the money to pay for it,” said adjunct biology professor Adam Davis.
On Tuesday, CCAC employees were notified that Obamacare defines full-time employees as those working 30 hours or more per week and that on Dec. 31 temporary part-time employees will be cut back to 25 hours. The move will save an estimated $6 million.
“While it is of course the college’s preference to provide coverage to these positions, there simply are not funds available to do so,” said CCAC spokesperson David Hoovler. “Several years of cuts or largely flat funding from our government supporters have led to significant cost reductions by CCAC, leaving little room to trim the college’s budget further.”
The solution, says United Steelworkers representative Jeff Cech, is that adjunct professors should unionize in an attempt to thwart schools seeking similar cost-savings efforts from avoiding Obamacare.
“They may be complying with the letter of the law, but the letter of law and the spirit of the law are two different things,” said Mr. Cech. “If they are doing it at CCAC, it can’t be long before they do it other places.”
Under the new CCAC policy, adjunct professors will only be allowed to teach 10 credit hours a semester. Adjuncts are paid $730 per credit hour.
That is $14,600 dollars a year. You have a Masters or a PhD and you are just a tick above the poverty level. Good luck paying your student loans. How can you attract the best teachers when you can make more money working at Walmart?
Dr. Walter Williams: Central Planning Defined (video)
Famed economist and scholar Dr. Walter E. Williams:
“Central Planning is nothing more than the forcible superseding of someone else’s plan by the powerful elite.”
Teachers flock to Northwestern University “Marxism Conference”
UPDATE – Former KGB Agent Yuri Bezmonov on how the KGB targeted public education:
Most parents have no idea how well marxists, communists and similar far left radicals have infiltrated our public education system. We have been covering this story for a long time and we encourage readers to go through our coverage and see for yourself.
This is coverage that you will never see in the elite media, which is ironic because the marxism conference is held at NWU’s school of journalism.
Related: Campaign donations from university employees went overwhelmingly to Obama
This Saturday, the Midwest Marxist Conference was held at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. The event was teeming with teachers who spoke about the new found bond between the radical socialists and their Teachers Union. The all-day event, which collected money to support Chicago Socialists and featured a communist bookstore, provided students on-campus along with the radical left community to plan the next phase in their activism.
Becca Barnes, a Chicago Teachers Union teacher and organizer with Chicago Socialists, proclaimed at the beginning of the conference that “the struggle here in the United States has entered a new phase. Nowhere have we pointed the way forward more clearly than here in Chicago with the teachers union strike.”
After the opening plenary, breakout sessions addressed more specific topics like the history of the Democratic party, education, and case studies in Russia. In these sessions, speakers continued to celebrate the use of education as a mechanism to insert Marxism into public institutions. In one session, the idea of targeting their message to students, even over “the working class,” was debated.
One teacher, who spoke in an afternoon session, described his tactics to overcome the problem of teachers’ unwillingness to take part in the strike, while Chicago Teachers Union Vice President Jesse Sharkey underscored Barnes’s earlier point when he spoke about the “struggle” of Chicago teachers and the need for additional support from other revolutionary movements. Through a renewed focus on the “strike weapon,” Socialist organizers remarked that they felt their movement had rediscovered its vigor—and the path forward ought to include “mass strikes,” they said.
Eric Ruder of the ISO spoke about the Socialists’ partnership with the Chicago Teachers Union during “The Meaning of Marxism” breakout session:
There are big moments in the sort of chain of historical development that we have to be able to intervene… And in order to that, you need an organization. That’s really the sort of thing you saw in the Chicago teachers strike. In a situation where there was a huge struggle, our organization threw itself in the middle of that and had a demonstrable impact on it.
Because we’ve been rooted, experienced activists who worked together in a collaborative way to try to build up that influence over the long haul… I think when you get in revolutionary moment where your ability to quickly assess what’s happening and make strategic and tactical shifts on the fly, that is essential.
Working class revolutions have never succeeded without the existence of a revolutionary party that’s capable of making those sorts of decisions and providing that kind of leadership. And that’s what we’re asking you, the members of this group, to join and help in that process. We need you to be able to have enough size and influence to matter, but you need us to be able to be part of a force that could intervene in that sort of chain in historical development.
The reporter who covered the event had this to say about the treatment he received while trying to cover the event:
After attending the all-day event, which began at 11 a.m., I was singled out as “not in solidarity” by International Socialist Organization (ISO) organizer Dennis Kosuth around 4 p.m, and removed from the premises for “not being a Communist.”
Despite registering for the event, the group of socialists that removed me, including pre-school teacher Kirstin Roberts, social worker Alison McKenna, printer Eric Kerl, Socialist organizer Shaun Harkin, and others. They surrounded me at the edge of a staircase, proceeded to push their way closer to me to force me down the stairs, and hurled insults at me as I attempted to find a way to leave safely. Even after leaving the conference, the group continued to bully me, with one larger man saying under his breath that “you know what would happen at Teamsters meeting” inferring a more violent solution to my presence:
How important is cultural diversity at your school? (video)
What did you learn from this? After some time I will post what I learned – Editor
American High School Commemorates Russian Communist Revolution….
We have said it hundreds of times and the evidence never stops piling up, leftist universities and union leaders are pushing this nonsense on our kids. I took an economic class in 2009 and I asked the students if they had ever heard anything good about capitalism in any class ever and the answer was no; and that is not unusual.
A Pennsylvania high school marching band is raising eyebrows with a halftime performance that commemorates the Russian revolution, complete with red flags, olive military-style uniforms, and giant hammers and sickles.
“St. Petersburg: 1917” is the theme for the New Oxford High School Marching Band. Ironically, the school’s athletic teams are called the Colonials and their colors are red, white and blue. The band’s website features a picture of the group with students holding a hammer and sickle. [Which they have no taken down and password protected their entire web site. I guess the publicity wasn’t so good. Anyone with a residue of common sense knows such publicity is what happens when you trick kids into celebrating the birth of a regime that killed over 100 million people – Political Arena Editor.]
“There is no reason for Americans to celebrate the Russian revolution,” said one irate parent who alerted Fox News. “I am sure the millions who died under Communism would not see the joy of celebrating the Russian revolution by a school 10 miles from Gettysburg.”
The parent, who asked not to be identified, attended a football last Friday night with his children. He said he was shocked by what he saw. “It was Glee meets the Russian Revolution,” he told Fox News. “I’m not kidding you. They had giant hammers and sickles and they were waving them around.” “Who thought this was a good idea?” [A radicalized academic maybe? – Political Arena Editor.]
Rebecca Harbaugh, the superintendent for the Conewago Valley School District, told Fox News that the band’s performance was “not an endorsement of communism at all.”
“It’s a representation of the time period in history called St. Petersburg 1917,” she said. “I am truly sorry that somebody took the performance in that manner. I am.”
“If anything is being celebrated it’s the music,” she said. “It is what it is. I understand people look at something and choose how to interpret that and I’m just very sorry that it wasn’t looked at as just a history lesson.”
Besides, she explained, “in 2008 we did an entire show on freedom.”
But some critics said it’s outrageous for any American school to be celebrating such a violent era.
“It would be tantamount to celebrating the music of 1935 Berlin,” the parent said. “If I was Lithuanian, Estonian, or Ukrainian, I’d be a little hot. I’d be really hot. It’s insulting to glorify something that doesn’t need to be glorified in America.”
Paul Kengor is the executive director for the Center for Vision & Values at Pennsylvania’s Grove City College.
He initially thought the halftime performance was a joke.
“This is surreal,” he told Fox News. “This is like something out of the Twilight Zone – but it’s even stranger than that.”
Kengor said even if the school was not celebrating the revolution “they seem to be commemorating this to some degree.”
“The Bolshevik Revolution launched a global Communist revolution that from 1917 through the 1990s was responsible for the deaths of over a hundred million people,” he said. “What the Russian revolution unleashed was a nightmare – a historical human catastrophe. This is something that should be condemned and not in any way commemorated or laughed at.”
Gerson Moreno-Riano, dean of Regent University’s College of Arts & Sciences, told Fox News the performance is shocking.
“The Russian revolution was one of the most violent episodes of the 20th Century,” he said. “Lenin put into place a doctrine of mass terror to crush the opposition and thousands and thousands of people were murdered.
The history professor said there’s very little to celebrate in that movement.
“It’s full of violence, terror, destruction and in some weeks thousands of people were executed – some thrown with rocks around their necks into the river to drown,” he said.
“It’s quite frankly horrific that a high school would be celebrating that at a football game,” he said.
He was even more disturbed by the group photograph of the band in front of the hammer and sickle.
“To raise the emblems of the hammer and sickle – the emblems of so much violence, destruction and terror – is a lack of knowledge of history,” he said.
In the best case scenario, he said the editors were simply ignorant of the era. [Teachers and school administrators ignorant of the evils of collectivism and communism? How could this be? – Political Arena Editor.]
Saudi funds to schools used to teach students Al-Qaeda talking points as fact (video)
Brigitte Gabriel, who watched Islamists take over Lebanon from within and slaughter the Christians there with the help of leftist Christians and secularists who did so in the name of “fairness and social justice”, founded ACT for America to warn people about radical Islamic influence in our government and universities.
NEA General Counsel Bob Chanin 2009 – It’s Money & Power, Not Education (video)
It speaks for itself.
False Narratives, Group Think, & Ideological Boxes.
Editorial by Political Arena Editor Chuck Norton
People like to believe in the veracity of their own perceptions; literally they want to believe what they believe is in fact true. That has always been a fact of life, and this writer isn’t going to change it. However, what has changed is that our culture and society no longer reinforces practices, ideas and daily rituals that helped to keep that particular problem in check, making Americans better critical thinkers, and gave Americans a special collective wisdom.
Years ago Professor Christopher Lasch penned an article in Harpers titled “The Lost Art of Argument” where he lamented the so called “objective journalism” (which is anything but) model (from Walter Lippmann) as a tool for elites to set agendas and control the conversation on main street. The power of the elite media narrative is difficult to overstate, as it is much like group think. Everyone wants to be included and accepted, and if you stand out against such group narratives some will resent it. Most people do not realize just how easily they are persuaded by manufactured group narratives. Allow me to demonstrate with a few examples of popular group think narratives that many people still believe.
“Gravitas”. For those who are politically aware, and were so before the 2000 election, the word gravitas conjures up an image of former Vice-President Dick Cheney. Why? Dr. Thomas Sowell explained it well:
RUSH LIMBAUGH has been having some fun lately, playing back recordings of politicians and media people, who have been repeating the word “gravitas” like parrots, day after day. Before Dick Cheney was announced as Governor George W. Bush’s choice for vice presidential candidate, practically nobody used the word. Now everybody and his brother seems to be using it.
The political spin is that Governor Bush lacks “gravitas” — weight — and that Dick Cheney was picked in an effort to supply what the governor lacks.
In other words, the fact that Bush picked somebody solid for his running mate has been turned into something negative by the spinmeisters. The fact that media liberals echo the very same word, again and again, shows their partisan loyalties — and their lack of originality.
How many people believe that “former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is ignorant”?
Perhaps some of you who are reading this very piece continue to buy into this false narrative. Just so you realize how much you have been effected I will pose the following: did you know that in her infamous interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson ABC had edited out portions of her substantive answers to make her look ignorant? Did you know that ABC did this again in her interview with Barbara Walters. Remember when Charlie Gibson asked her a question about the Bush Doctrine that “Palin got all wrong”? Well, depending on what political historian you talk to there are five or six Bush Doctrines of which Governor Palin and Charlie Gibson each described one accurately. Atlantic Monthly, a left-wing political magazine, went back and did an exhausting review of her time as governor and concluded that she did a great job and pointed out how she was an innovative and competent executive. Odds are that people who buy into the false narrative that Palin is ignorant don’t know any of this.
“Republicans want to gut Social Security.”
The truth is that Reagan (Republican) saved the program with key reforms without decreasing benefits. It was President Clinton (Democrat) who increased the tax on Social Security benefits on the middle class which amounted to a benefit cut. It was George W. Bush (Republican) who tried to get at least a part of Social Security put into individual growth accounts so that Congress couldn’t spend your money (Democrats in Congress stopped him), and it was President Obama (Democrat) who has kept up a Social Security payroll contribution cut that is blowing an even bigger whole in the program. Odds are that people who bought into this narrative didn’t know any of that.
“Republicans want to get rid of Medicare.”
I regularly encounter uninformed voters who buy into this particular false narrative. It was Democrats, with Obamacare, who gutted $716 billion (over 10 years) from an already in trouble Medicare program without a single Republican vote. It was Republicans who added the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit (Part-D) which is not only popular, but gives seniors a choice of plans. This was accomplished at 40% under budget because the program was designed so well. One current Republican idea is to redesign the other parts of Medicare to work in a way that is similar to Medicare Part-D, so that it too can be more efficient and save money to help rescue the program. Democrats say no. Odds are that people who bought into this narrative didn’t know any of that (gee I am getting repetitive).
“Democrats want to tax the rich.”
This is perhaps the biggest false narrative of all. The Democratic Party leadership has never been interested in taxing the very rich. They have been “taxing the rich” for 50 years. Is it just a coincidence that they just happened to keep missing the target? President Obama gave the speech at Google, which paid 2.4% federal tax on 3.1 billion in income. In that speech he trashed the Chamber of Commerce for fighting against raising the tax on most small businesses which actually employ people from 35.5% to 39.9% . In the 2008 elections President Obama railed against Wall Street, but not only did he take more money from Wall Street and “the big banks” and such, but as if to add insult, their executives became the who’s who of those running his administration (LINK – LINK). Keep in mind that CNN once said Obama attacks private equity at 6am and is fundraising with private equity at 6pm. Wall Street and the big banks made more under three years of Obama than they did under eight years of Bush. His Treasury Secretary says that taxes on small businesses must rise so that government doesn’t shrink, and Obama’s new health care taxes target you, not just the rich. All of the stimulus and spending and so forth all in the name of the poor sounded nice, but look who got rich. Odds are that people who buy into this narrative know none of this (really there is a point to this).
Such false narratives are not merely myths that people fall into, they become emotionally invested in them, to the point where some people will say anything to support them:
MORE – Watch people lie about the political debate they never saw – VIDEO
False narratives rely on three crutches:
1 – The first is the selective promotion of key facts, combined with the suppression and/or omission of key fundamental truths. The use of a key fact that is partially true, when inserted into the false narrative, creates clear disconnects from the fundamental truths of the situation or event.
Politicians are masters of this. The second Obama/Romney debate is a classic example. In the debate section on the brutal slaughter of Americans at our consulate in Libya, the administration knowingly put out a false narrative that our people were killed by a flash mob upset by a video on YouTube. The White House created this deception because it was caught in a “Mission Accomplished” moment from having created a false narrative which stated that because Usama bin Laden was out of the picture, Al-Qaeda was beaten (The truth is that Al-Qaeda’s umbrella organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, has been actively helped by this Administration) . When caught, the White House tried to rewrite history, and focused on a key assertion–that Obama used the word terror in one speech describing the attack, as if that somehow dismantles two weeks of willing deception.
2 – Delivery of the few selected facts delivered with an attitude (an emotional trigger) that creates the false narrative.
A good example of this comes from a piece I read in the Washington Post some years ago. The article stated there had been documented misuses of the Patriot Act in order to wrongly access the private information of innocent citizens, and the Attorney General refused to state whether he would press criminal charges. This sounds quite ominous doesn’t it? Thirteen paragraphs later we learn that the error rate had been about 1.5%, comprised of honest mistakes, and all were caught by the internal Justice Department Inspector General whose job it is to find and correct errors. Consider the entirety of the pertinent facts, remove the emotionally charged delivery, and the message is quite different from the headline, would you not agree? Most newspaper editors know that the majority of readers never get passed the fifth paragraph in a newspaper piece. This type of deception is known as attitude change propaganda. Attitude change propaganda is not produced by accident. [Note – today reported abuses of the Patriot Act are higher. We are aware of this, so please do not blow up our inbox – Editor]
3 – Repetition. Joseph Goebbels said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie”.
This is why truth itself can become an enemy to some, and why those telling the truth are often disregarded, maligned and ridiculed. Once again we can look to the Washington Post for an example. Remember the Valerie Plame story? Remember when the White House outed a CIA Agent because her husband, Joe Wilson, had written a letter saying that President Bush made false claims in a speech? Well there was one problem; this entire story was based on a small stack of lies, and virtually none of the narrative that was repeated over and over in the Washington Post and the elite media was true, and the Post well knew it. This very writer wrote a 40 page article on the Washington Posts’ coverage of this story. Day after day, on page one, the Post repeated Joe Wilson’s lies and perpetuated the false narrative, while at times even on the very same day on the editorial page or buried in the paper, they would tell the truth about what was going on and explain how the evidence clearly showed that Wilson lied about nearly every aspect of his story.
I have been pretty tough on the left in this article because deception and propaganda is fully endorsed by many leftist/progressive thinkers such as Mao, Walter Lippmann, Joseph Goebbels, nearly all writers from the Frankfurt School, and Saul Alinsky. The progressive leadership in this country uses lies as a tool for calculated aggression.
This is not to say that the American right is free of the problems of false narratives, group think, and ideological boxes either.
There are/were many in the State Department, elite media and some in the Republican Party who have totally bought into the propaganda from the Muslim Brotherhood–that they want peace, free elections, and so forth–when anyone who studies their history going back to WWII knows very well what their agenda is. Bill Kristol from the Weekly Standard, as well as some on the famed internet Republican Security Council, fell for the “Arab Spring” false narrative. How quickly we forget history. The Mullah’s in Iran spoke to the Carter Administration about freedom, democracy and social justice; look at what they did as soon as they got into power. The same goes for what happened in Lebanon, and then Gaza when they had elections. Now look at the disaster that is Egypt and Libya, and yet some Republicans continue to say we should help Syrian rebels with arms, which would essentially be handing Syria as well to the Muslim Brotherhood/Al-Qaeda.
Republicans would love to see a genuine democratic, pro-western revolution in the Muslim world as we had in Eastern Europe, but today many forget that it took years of cooperation between Reagan, Thatcher, and the Vatican to cultivate pro-western forces and influences in secret right under the communist’s nose. We were ready to come in with monetary, logistical and other support when those forces made a major push. We knew very well who it was we were supporting, and we had an overall strategic concept in mind. Many Republicans jumped on the Arab Spring bandwagon because they bought the pie in the sky narrative from the State Department and they really wanted to believe it. Why? Because the false narrative targeted the freedom loving sensitivities of most Republicans perfectly. In short, they selected tidbits of truth, omitted others, and made a false reality that fit ever so perfectly into an ideological box.
Some so called “neo-cons” (by their critics) of the GOP may like to shape reality into something neat and tidy, but they aren’t the only ones. Many Ron Paul supporters are just as guilty of this. They argue that the U.S. should adopt some form of neo-isolationism. While it is clear that for the sake of finances we need to have a foreign policy that is less flamboyant, trade still needs to be protected with a serious Navy; the diplomatic credibility of the United States must still be backed up with military capability. If you want to see an economic collapse like the world has never witnessed, park the US Navy at home and it won’t take long. Many Ron Paul supporters say that “neo-cons” are “chicken-hawks” who have never served in the armed forces, and who would never send their sons to die “in some Middle East hell hole” (their words not mine). While it is true that some who may be labled as neo-cons have never served, the truth is that many who agree with at least some of that policy have served and have family who are serving.
Another example of taking reality and manipulating it is the often heard claim from Ron Paul supporters that militant Islamists attack us because of our foreign policy, and the argument that if it wasn’t for “neo-cons” we would not get attacked. When I run into people who say this I ask them, “Militant Islamists attack and kill Hindus in India. What is it about Hindu foreign policy that makes Islamists do this? How about the Buddhists who lived in Afghanistan? In Afghanistan the Islamists ran the Buddhists out and blew up their monasteries and artifacts. What about the Islamists in Southern Thailand who like to kill school teachers who dare to educate little girls? When the Muslim Brotherhood took over Egypt with the aid of the Obama Administration, what is it that Coptic Christians did to cause the Muslim Brotherhood to attack them with armored vehicles? This is usually about that time where I start getting called all sorts of colorful names. The most experienced Middle-Eastern war correspondent says that those who believe the “its because of our policy” argument are fooling themselves.
We are experiencing a wholesale breakdown of critical thinking in this country and most of the learned academics I know have confided this to me directly. I have noticed this myself in my studies. How did this happen? Professor Lasch was rather fond of the old fashioned “partisan press” that we used to have before the “Lippmann Objective Model”. In those days each town had two or more newspapers, each with its own partisan or philosophical viewpoint. Each day citizens would read them all and discuss the arguments of the day at the local barber shop, soda shop, or even at work. There is no better exercise for creating an informed, thinking electorate. Today we live in an electronic society where people can just push a button and anything that puts them out of their comfort zone vanishes instantly.
We have an elite media that too often behaves as state-run apparatchiks, and we have a public university system that states openly that “A debate is something we are highly disinterested in. This is not something our university would want on our campus”. As a result we have educated people, and even professors, who strive for ideological conformity. We have a major university whose administrators reportedly “forged an agreement to conceal sexual attacks” against children, and we have a Climategate scandal in which professors from multiple universities were caught in their own emails actively conspiring to pervert the peer review process and smear anyone who would challenge the global warming alarmist orthodoxy.
American society has become a place where people get beyond offended when told that they are wrong. We have teachers who too often cannot understand the difference between being presented an inconvenient truth that scuttles their narrative and a personal attack. We have people who refuse to take the argument of another seriously, so any truths another may have will not be accepted or even considered. Truth has become the new hate speech.
This must stop.
The sting in any rebuke is the truth – Ben Franklin.
[Editor’s Note – For a short video followup on this story click HERE – you won’t regret it.]
British Meteorological Office: No Global Warming for 16 Years
The significance of this admission from them cannot be understated. The British Met is the academic epicenter of global warming alarmism. They work closely with the University of East Anglia and other ClimateGate hoaxers like Michael Mann at the disgraced Penn State University.
Global warming stopped 16 years ago, reveals Met Office report quietly released… and here is the chart to prove it
- The figures reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012 there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures
- This means that the ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996
By David Rose
The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week.
The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures.
This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years.
The new data, compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea, was issued quietly on the internet, without any media fanfare, and, until today, it has not been reported.
This stands in sharp contrast to the release of the previous figures six months ago, which went only to the end of 2010 – a very warm year.
Ending the data then means it is possible to show a slight warming trend since 1997, but 2011 and the first eight months of 2012 were much cooler, and thus this trend is erased.
Florida Passes Education Proficiency Goals Based on Race
Political Arena Editor Chuck Norton – I am just about ready to adopt the position of “separation of school & state” or at least that state and federal dollars in education should follow the student and the relationship should end there. That position may seem extreme, but as I have been doing research for my upcoming book on public education I can tell you with absolute certainty that the overwhelming majority of parents of public schoolers have no idea how bad the education is their child is getting, or the degree of indoctrination the children are subjected to.
When inner city minority students get in charter and public schools they do better.
Of course, in reality this is about putting the lower scoring kids with the worst teachers. Think about it. If a teacher isn’t very good and needs to only get a 74% student proficiency to meet goal those teachers will be with the black kids, and the most brilliant teachers will be put with the Asian kids. This may be a play to help the teacher’s union.
The Florida State Board of Education passed a plan that sets goals for students in math and reading based upon their race.
On Tuesday, the board passed a revised strategic plan that says that by 2018, it wants 90 percent of Asian students, 88 percent of white students, 81 percent of Hispanics and 74 percent of black students to be reading at or above grade level. For math, the goals are 92 percent of Asian kids to be proficient, whites at 86 percent, Hispanics at 80 percent and blacks at 74 percent. It also measures by other groupings, such as poverty and disabilities, reported the Palm Beach Post.
The plan has infuriated many community activists in Palm Beach County and across the state.
California Gas Stations Close as Rationing Hits Consumers
When governmet demonizes and industry, scapegoats it, seeks to make it unprofitable with excessive regulation, the result is much less incentive to produce the product. Production drops and the shortage begin. Rent control has the exact same affect. Similar policies caused the gas lines and shortages under Carter as well. Those with even the most rudimentary understanding of economics understand this and yet new university trained leftist academics keep causing these same problems and keep expecting a different result.
This administration seems to think that by making regulatory war on refineries, drilling, coal technology and power plants people will rush out to pin a solar panel on their car (a solar panel made in China no doubt).
Gasoline station owners in the Los Angeles area including Costco Wholesale Corp. (COST) are beginning to shut pumps as the state’s oil refiners started rationing supplies and spot prices surged to a record.
Valero Energy Corp. (VLO) stopped selling gasoline on the spot, or wholesale, market in Southern California and is allocating deliveries to customers. Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) is also rationing fuel to U.S. West Coast terminal customers. Costco’s outlet in Simi Valley, 40 miles (64 kilometers) northwest of Los Angeles, ran out of regular gasoline yesterday and was selling premium fuel at the price of regular.
The gasoline shortage “feels like a hurricane to me, but it’s the West Coast,” Jeff Cole, Costco’s vice president of gasoline, said by telephone yesterday. “We’re obviously extremely disheartened that we are unable to do this, and we’re pulling fuel from all corners of California to fix this.”
Spot gasoline in Los Angeles has surged $1 a gallon this week to a record $1.45 a gallon premium versus gasoline futures traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange, data compiled by Bloomberg show. That’s the highest level for the fuel since at least November 2007, when Bloomberg began publishing prices there. On an outright basis, the fuel has jumped to $4.3929 a gallon.
Prices Jump
Gasoline at the pump gained 8.3 cents to $4.315 a gallon in California yesterday, according to AAA.com, 53.1 cents more than the national average of $3.784. In Los Angeles the price was $4.347. Gasoline futures for November delivery on the Nymex rose 14.34 cents to settle at $2.9429 a gallon, after falling yesterday to a 10-week low. Retail price movements tend to lag behind those of futures.
“Product supply in California has tightened, especially in Southern California, due to refinery outages,” Bill Day, a Valero spokesman at the company’s headquarters in San Antonio, said by e-mail.
Related:
More energy price hikes and power shortages on the way due to government regulation – LINK
Obama’s EPA Shutting Down 10% of America’s Power Plant Capacity – LINK
Obama’s EPA crushing coal-fired power plants, electricity bills rise… – LINK
Candidate Joe Kennedy III Calls for End To “Cheap Oil” – LINK
Gas Prices Under President Obama – LINK
EPA Official on Video: We Are “Crucifying” Oil And Gas Companies – LINK
Under Obama, Price of Gas Has Jumped 83 Percent, Ground Beef 24 Percent, Bacon 22 Percent – LINK
Obama Green Energy Program Cost $9.8 million Per Job – LINK
15th Green Energy Company Funded by Obama Goes Under – LINK
On Oil Obama Says One Thing & Does Another – LINK
GAO: Recoverable American oil in a single location equal to the entire world oil reserves – LINK
ACLU Forces School to Ban Father-Daughter Dances
…because this is the critical issue of our time? What kind of radicalized whack job sues to do something like this? What kind of radicalized whack job attorney actually takes a lawsuit to do this? I will tell you; it is the kind of person who is radicalized by our public schools and universities.
A school district in Rhode Island has ended the traditional father-daughter dance because the longtime tradition violated the state’s gender discrimination law.
Judith Lundsten, an assistant school superintendent in Cranston, tells Fox News the move came in response to a complaint from a single mother after her daughter wasn’t allowed to attend a father-daughter dance.
“The parent felt it was not appropriate and filed a complaint with the ACLU,” she said.
The American Civil Liberties Union sent a letter to the district demanding that all father-daughter and mother-son events be cancelled.
Lundsten said school attorneys found while federal gender discrimination laws exempt such events, Rhode Island’s does not.
“At this point, the law states that we cannot have these gender-specific type activities,” Lundsten told Fox News. “
Northwestern University Targeting Campus Jewish Groups
Unfortunately this is not an unusual happenstance at our universities today. The progressive secular left is very well entrenched in public education and antisemitism is very fashionable on campus and as actively promoted by many faculty and university administrators. Unless one is active on following campus issues, one would have no idea how extreme and prevalent antisemitism on campus has become. Colleges across the country even sponsor “Israeli Apartheid Week” on campus with student funds. At these events they call for the genocide and elimination of Israel.
To combat this, famed actor Robert Davi has narrated and helped create the following video to combat the lies used to indoctrinate students with at these events and to show what happens at events at colleges across the country. This is a must see video.
You had no idea such nonsense is being preached to your kids on campus did you? Most parent’s don’t.
At universities that are not quite so entrenched by progressive secular antisemitism the hated and discrimination is not so bold, but rather is demonstrated in other ways such as the denial of Jewish and Christian student groups for recognition, which is illegal, and groups such as FIRE and the Alliance Defense Fund have been somewhat successful and overcoming such tactics by campus administrators. As a former Chief Justice of Student Government at my alma mater I was made aware of several cases if professors and administrators discrimination against such students (fortunately a warning from me was enough to help make the offender back off in most cases). It amazed me the leaps of “logic” that academics and radicalized administrators would take to justify their illegal actions and it amazed me how they could make the most unreasonable positions sound reasonable in order to justify their outrageous actions.
I contacted R. Tamara de Silva of the Thomas Jefferson Legal Institute, the attorney involved in the case, to comment but she informed me that the judge in the case has asked both sides to not speak to the press. The institute has said that “religious freedom goes to the heart of the First Amendment. The desire of people to freely exercise their religion has been and is, one of the most powerful political forces in the world”.
CHICAGO (CN) – Northwestern University is discriminating against the Jewish faith by dissociating with a Chabad organization that has been on its campus for 27 years, the group claims in federal court.
Chabad-Lubavitch is a hasidic movement and major form of Orthodox Judaism with more than 3,300 institutions, or Chabad houses, worldwide.
“At the very inception of the Tannenbaum House, in the early 1980s, Chabad had to litigate its right practice religion freely in the city of Evanston,” according to the complaint. “The court, in hearing the matter, determined that ‘the real fear of the defendant city and intervenors is that [Chabad] will use its property to permit the plaintiffs to practice their ancient religion in the way they have conducted it for the past centuries.’ Today, Chabad once again has to fight for that right.”
As a university chaplain, Rabbi Dov Hillel Kelin uses a stipend to obtain kosher food from a third-party vendor, Sodexo.
But on Sept. 11, 2012, the university allegedly sent Klein a letter that it was disassociating from Tannenbaum House.
Though the complaint does not quote from the letter, it says hints that allegations of misconduct against Klein are at the root.
“Northwestern had no legal reason to disassociate from the Tannenbaum House,” the complaint states. “The university knew that its proffered reasons were specious and based upon innuendo and falsehood. The reasons offered for that disassociation were wholly pretextual and meant to single out Chabad against all other faiths for removal from Northwestern University.
“Even if the reasons offered for that disassociation were not false, many other campus organizations including religious organizations, had committed the same acts for which Rabbi Klein stood falsely accused,” it continues. “The university was aware of this, and chose only to disassociate with Chabad.”
The Chabad House says Northwestern disassociated “solely on the basis of Rabbi Klein’s, LCI’s and the Tannenbaum Chabad House’s affiliation with Chabad Chassidism.”
“Northwestern University would not have taken this action if plaintiffs were not adherents of Chabad Chassidism,” it adds.
Northwestern has allegedly barred Klein from renewing his contract with Sodexo or “sponsoring a Birthright Israel trip.
“If Rabbi Klein is enjoined from participating in the above referenced activities, and contracts, and if Rabbi Klein is cut off from providing authentic Jewish and Chassidic experiences to Northwestern University students, it would case irreparable harm to Rabbi Klein, to the charter and purposes of the Tannenbaum Chabad House, and to Lubavitch-Chabad of Illinois,” the complaint states. “It would also cause irreparable harm to Jewish students of Northwestern University.”
Klein, Lubavitch-Chabad of Illinois and Lubavitch-Chabad of Illinois dba The Tannenbaum Chabad House sued Northwestern University, University Chaplain Timothy Stevens and Vice President for Student Affairs Patricia Telles-Irvin.
They seek punitive damages for violations of the Civil Rights Act, and an injunction for Klein.
Tamara de Silva represents the Chabad House and Klein.
Northwestern spokesman Al Cubbage told Courthouse News that he was not aware of the lawsuit and declined to comment on Northwestern’s motivation for dissociating from Chabad House.
Obama Attorney General Eric Holder: Brainwash People to Surrender Second Amendment (video)
From a speech Eric Holder made in 1995:
Prager University Video: What is Ideology & How Does the Left Portray It?
With Jonah Goldberg:
U.C. Berkley Lecture: “Teaching as a Subversive Activity” – How to Politically Indoctrinate Students….
This is one subject that we have covered relentlessly. And behind the scenes they admit what they are doing.
See and hear the lecture HERE.
Included is a couple of screenshots from the lecture:
Survey: Liberal profs admit they’d discriminate against conservatives in hiring, advancement…
The “statistically impossible lack of diversity” on campus demonstrates ideological discrimination.
It is not surprising how willing leftist academics were willing to admit that they engage in such persecution and discrimination. This is how entrenched the far left is on campus. This problem is so bad that groups such as FIRE, the ACLJ and the Alliance Defense Fund routinely take action against universities whose faculty and administrators actively conspire to engage in such persecution.
If you doubt it I will just provide a few of the thousands of examples we could list here LINK – LINK :
Missouri State University orders Christian student to engage in homosexual sex act, abandon Christian beliefs, engage in far left political advocacy…or else:
In 2007, the University of Delaware’s Office of Residence Life used mandatory activities to coerce students to change their thoughts, values, attitudes, beliefs, and habits to conform to a highly specified social, environmental, and political agenda:
Teacher Michele Kerr describes how Stanford University’s Teacher Education Program (STEP) tried to oust her for her for not being a leftist:
It’s not every day that left-leaning academics admit that they would discriminate against a minority.
But that was what they did in a peer-reviewed study of political diversity in the field of social psychology, which will be published in the September edition of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science.
Psychologists Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers, based at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, surveyed a roughly representative sample of academics and scholars in social psychology and found that “In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists admit that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues.”
This finding surprised the researchers. The survey questions “were so blatant that I thought we’d get a much lower rate of agreement,” Mr. Inbar said. “Usually you have to be pretty tricky to get people to say they’d discriminate against minorities.”
One question, according to the researchers, “asked whether, in choosing between two equally qualified job candidates for one job opening, they would be inclined to vote for the more liberal candidate (i.e., over the conservative).”
More than a third of the respondents said they would discriminate against the conservative candidate. One respondent wrote in that if department members “could figure out who was a conservative, they would be sure not to hire them.”
More:
But Harvey Mansfield, a conservative professor of government at Harvard University, argues that the anti-conservative bias is real and pronounced. He says conservatism is “just not a respectable position to hold” in the academy, where Republicans are caricatured as Fox News enthusiasts who listen to Rush Limbaugh.
Beyond that, conservatives represent a distinct minority on college and university campuses. A 2007 report by sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons found that 80 percent of psychology professors at elite and non-elite universities are Democrats. Other studies reveal that 5 percent to 7 percent of faculty openly identify as Republicans. By contrast, about 20 percent of the general population are liberal and 40 percent are conservative.
Mr. Inbar and Mr. Lammers found that conservatives fear that revealing their political identity will have negative consequences. This is why New York University-based psychologist Jonathan Haidt, a self-described centrist, has compared the experience of being a conservative graduate student to being a closeted gay student in the 1980s.
In 2011, Mr. Haidt addressed this very issue at a meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology — the same group that Mr. Inbar and Mr. Lammer surveyed. Mr. Haidt’s talk, “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology,” caused a stir. The professor, whose new book “The Righteous Mind” examines the moral roots of our political positions, asked the nearly 1,000 academics and students in the room to raise their hands if they were liberals. Nearly 80 percent of the hands went up. When he asked whether there were any conservatives in the house, just three hands — 0.3 percent — went up.
This is “a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Mr. Haidt said.
Editorial: I Was at Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day!
Let me be CLEAR! This issue is not about gays, it is about freedom. The “gay” issue is just the crutch being used today to disguise an attack on capitalism and freedom. Next time it will be some other crutch, but the attack will be the same. The gay people on my friends list support capitalism and freedom as well as anyone can and in that cause they have my support!
No matter the charge when the left cries wolf:
GAYS! (insert leftist cause here – this time it is let politicians punish freedom of religion)…
RIGHTS FOR WOMEN! (government forces the church and all private enterprises to pay for your birth control)…
RACE! (let government regulate all sorts of things that violate property rights)…
DISABLED VETS! (let government micromanage all sorts of aspects to private business including how high your mirrors are and how the steps to your door are built) …
ENVIRONMENT! (allow government to regulate all forms of production and virtually take over the energy industry picking winners and losers)…
DRUG GANGS! (Efforts to take away guns specifically from the law abiding – LINK)….
GLOBAL COOLING! (Solution is centralized control of the economy, the expansion of the state and abandoning of limited government and capitalism)…
GLOBAL WARMING! (Solution is centralized control of the economy, the expansion of the state and abandoning of limited government and capitalism)…
The waving left hand is the wedge issue, the right hand is doing what they want to accomplish. This is the modus operandi of the far left. The headline from the Huffington Post below is merely an example of this truth”
An association of black church leaders has come out against the attempt to redefine marriage and has spoken out against the Democrat Party leadership. You will notice that the so called “gay groups” have nothing to say about it. Why? Because the leadership of groups such as GLAAD could give a rip about gays and are functioning as a leftist radical group of pure ideology, much like the NAACP whose leadership constantly acts against the interests of inner city black families to support teachers unions and a far left political agenda. If this is about principle why aren’t these same “gay advocacy groups” doing “kiss off” protests at black inner city churches? [Answer – because it could chase away votes from Democrats].
Please enjoy this slideshow from Chick-Fil-A at South Bend and Mishawaka, Indiana
Radicalized homosexual groups problem is not that they are homosexual, that is just the wedge issue they are using as a distraction, the problem with them is that they are radicalized leftist groups that use the claim that they speak for homosexuals as just another vehicle to attack capitalism and their pro-capitalist political enemies which is their true objective.
The case of MN Forward is another example of this truth – “radicalized homosexual activists” called MN Forward a hate group using all the same rhetoric. MN Forward is a group that supports business in Minnesota, their “crime” is that they gave a small donation to a Republican candidate who supports small business and happens to support traditional marriage. MN Forward is a small group that few had heard of that has no stake in the culture war, but they are effective at lobbying state government in Minnesota in preserving an free economic environment that is favorable for creating wealth and jobs. The average voter didn’t know that MN Forward even existed.
When people act on principle they have no need to lie and in fact have a vested interest in telling the truth to support their cause. GLAAD had this to say about actor Kirk Cameron:
“Saying that gay people are ‘detrimental to civilization’ might be ‘loving’ in Kirk Cameron’s mind, but it’s gay youth and victims of bullying who truly suffer from adults like Cameron who espouse these ideas. Cameron used his platform to attack gay Americans and is now attempting to play victim in an effort to sell his upcoming movie. That Cameron would risk the health and safety of young people in order to do so speaks for itself.
There is one problem, Cameron did not say that. Actually there are two problems, GLAAD changed what Cameron said, and then used the false accusation to paint him as an accessory to violence. GLAAD is making a bogus case that Cameron engaged in some kind of crime, or at least what should be considered a crime. By tying Cameron to violence falsely they are inciting others to do violence to him.
Here is the video of what Kirk Cameron really said – http://piersmorgan.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/02/kirk-cameron-on-homosexuality-its-detrimental-and-ultimately-destructive/.
Radicalized leftist groups such as GLAAD falsely accuse the political enemies of the left of being tied to violence, and are, in turn trying to incite others to do violence against them, in this case Christians. It is the worst form of bigotry imaginable. The leadership of GLAAD does this because Christians are more likely to vote for free market Republican candidates and as we pointed out above, you won’t see GLAAD attacking associations of black churches who oppose gay marriage. Why? Because they tend to vote for Democrats who oppose free markets and favor government control of the economy. Such leftist groups are not even the slightest bit interested in protecting the freedom of religion, conscience, speech and association of those with whom they disagree.
Disgraced Penn State President Hired by Obama Administration for Top Secret National Security Post
You just cant make this stuff up folks. Of course Spanier has been shilling and covering for the progressive secular left for years – LINK and was invested in the child sex abuse cover-up according the the investigation of Penn State by former FBI Director Louis Freeh.
Political commentator Marie Garr said it best, “Guess they figure he can keep a secret……….GEEZ!”
Our take: What if Bush had done this?
Graham Spanier might have been ousted from his post at the helm of Penn State over the sex-abuse scandal that engulfed the university, but it seems he’s found a backup employer: the American taxpayer.
Only a disgraced public figure would consider joining the much-maligned ranks of the federal workforce as a step up, reputation-wise. We can assume there were no openings for a used-car salesman.
Spanier was faulted in an internal Penn State report after the conviction on child-molestation charges of former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. The report said he, head coach Joe Paterno and others helped cover up Sandusky’s abuse.
His lawyer confirms to the Loop that Spanier is working on a part-time consulting basis for a “top-secret” agency on national security issues. But the gig is so hush-hush, he couldn’t even tell his attorneys the name of the agency. In April — months after his ouster as president but before the release of the internal report — he told the Patriot-News of central Pennsylvania that he was working on a “special project for the U.S. government relating [to] national security.”
But who’s he working for? The CIA? Homeland Security? Or maybe just a dull consulting firm with a government contract?
“I have no idea,”says his lawyer, Peter Vaira. “We know the work is in security and he’s prohibited from disclosing which agency or agencies he’s working for.”
Here is the rub. Even if he is not working for a government agency directly and he is a contractor for an intelligence agency he would still have to submit an SF86 and still pass the most rigorous national security scrutiny – unless of course that process was greased for him just like it has been for others in the Obama White House who couldn’t pass such scrutiny normally on their best day. One thing is almost a certainty; someone tipped off the Washington Post to this and they almost certainly know more than what they are reporting here.
Highest Ranking Soviet Defector: Marxism is on the rise again, and people are not paying attention…
Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa:
“Communism is dead,” people shouted in 1989, when the Berlin Wall began to come down. Soviet Communism is indeed dead as a form of government. But Marxism is on the rise again, and people are not paying attention. Why not? Because most people do not seem to be familiar with the undercover forms of Marxism we are facing today.
Absolutely. When the wall came down 100,000 million dedicated communists didn’t suddenly become libertarians. They took over tax free foundations, took control of most public universities, environmental pressure groups, most union leadership positions and much of Hollywood. Not to mention the leadership of the Democratic Party.
I usually do not publish articles from WND, because what appears there is not as reliable as I would like, but some pieces there are still very good and this is one of them. This interview is an important piece of history so we are glad to help preserve it here.
WND:
Please tell me, did America win the Cold War? If so, why are we fighting Marxism in our own country today? And if not, what really happened?
Pacepa: Yes, we won the Cold War, but unlike other wars the Cold War did not end with an act of surrender and with the defeated enemy throwing down his weapons. But no, we are not fighting Marxism in our country, because the American people have not yet been warned that their country is being contaminated by Marxism. A few conservative luminaries like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly have warned that Marxism is infecting the United States, but neither the Republicans’ “Pledge to America” nor the Tea Party’s “Contract from America” has mentioned the word Marxism.
So far, to the best of my knowledge, only your “Marxism, American-Style” (June 2012 Whistleblower magazine) and PJ Media’s “Say No To Socialism” have called attention to the looming dangers of Marxism, a heresy that killed some 94 million people and transformed a third of the world into feudal societies in the middle of the 20th century.
There is still a widely popular belief in the U.S. and Western Europe that the nefarious Marxist legacy was uprooted in 1991 when the Soviet Union was abolished, just as the Nazi legacy was extirpated in 1945 when World War II ended. That is simply wishful thinking. There is a considerable difference between these two historical events.
In the 1950s, when I headed Romania’s foreign intelligence station in West Germany, I witnessed how Hitler’s Third Reich had been demolished, its war criminals put on trial, its military and police forces disbanded and the Nazis removed from public office. I also saw how West Germany’s economy was being rebuilt with the help of Marshall Plan money and how the country had become a multi-party democracy and a close friend of the United States. In 1959, when I returned to Romania, West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) made it the leading industrial power in Europe.
None of those things have happened in the former Soviet Union. No individual has been put on trial, although its Marxist regime killed many more millions than the Nazis did. Most Soviet institutions, under new names, have been left in place and are now run by many of the same people who guided the Marxist state. The KGB and the Red Army, which instrumented the Cold War, have also remained in place with new nameplates at their doors.
“Communism is dead,” people shouted in 1989, when the Berlin Wall began to come down. Soviet Communism is indeed dead as a form of government. But Marxism is on the rise again, and people are not paying attention. Why not? Because most people do not seem to be familiar with the undercover forms of Marxism we are facing today.
Hiding the ugly face of Marxism behind a smiling mask has become a Marxist science, which I described in a large piece recently published in PJ Media. Here let me just say that until 1963, Marxism was mostly camouflaged as “socialism.” The 1962 missile crisis generated by the socialist República de Cuba gave the socialist mask of Marxism a dirty name in the West and few Marxists wanted to be openly associated with it anymore. They therefore began hiding their Marxism under a new cover called “economic determinism,” which became all the rage among leftists who no longer wanted to be labeled socialists.
Economic determinism is a theory of survival rooted in Marx’s “Manifesto” (another theory of survival), but it pretends that the economic organization of a society, not the class war, determines the nature of all other aspects of life. Over the years, economic determinism has assumed different names. Khrushchev’s dogonyat i peregonyat (catching up with and overtaking the West in 10 years) and Gorbachev’s perestroika are the best known.
I wrote the script of Nicolae Ceausescu’s determinism, which was hidden behind the nickname “New Economic Order.” Most Americans, who are not used to dealing with undercover Marxists, have problems recognizing one. In April 1978, President Carter publicly hailed Ceausescu as a “great national and international leader who [had] taken on a role of leadership in the entire international community.” At the time, I was standing next to Ceausescu at the White House – and I just smiled.
Three months later, I was granted political asylum in the United States, and I informed President Carter how Ceausescu had been feeding him a pack of lies. The admiration for Ceausescu’s undercover Marxism had, however, taken on such a life of its own that the U.S. Congress, dominated by President Carter’s Democratic Party, brought the United States a sui-generis version of Ceausescu’s economic determinism. That move generated double-digit inflation. The U.S. prime rate hit 21.5 percent, the highest in U.S. history, and people had to spend long hours in line waiting to buy gas for their cars.
Laura D’Andrea Tyson, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Clinton and later an economic adviser to President Obama, has kept that undercover Marxism alive in the U.S. She even wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on the merits of the allegedly “mixed” socialist-capitalist economies in Ceausescu’s Romania and Tito’s Yugoslavia. Two American presidents went to Bucharest to pay tribute to Ceausescu’s Marxism disguised as economic determinism. None had ever gone there before.
A few months ago, when the devastating economic crisis in Greece exploded, economic determinism lost credibility and our Democratic Party replaced it with “progressivism,” which is the current cover name for American Marxism. The real Progressive Movement was born after the U.S. financial crisis of 1893, which the country tried to solve by redistributing America’s wealth. The progressives pushed through the first federal income tax and they created a string of labor standards that opened up the floodgates of corruption and financial excess that generated the Great Depression. A new Progressive Movement, dubbed the New Deal, led to steep top tax rates, strict financial regulations, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, eventually generating the current economic crisis.
Today’s Progressive Movement was born in New York’s Zuccotti Park. It was first known as the “Occupy Wall Street” movement and advocated the abolition of “capitalist America.” The Democratic Party strongly embraced it and made “Progressive” its new byword. “God bless them,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told the U.S. Congress. “It’s young, it’s spontaneous, it’s focused and it’s going to be effective.”
WND: You have said, “In the Soviet Union, the KGB was a state within a state. Now the KGB is the state.” Please explain that.
Pacepa: General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, the Soviet gauleiter of Romania, who afterwards rose to head the almighty Soviet espionage service for 15 years of the Cold War, used to tell me that “every society reflects its own past.” Sakharovsky, who was a Russian to the marrow of his bones, believed that someday “our socialist camp” might wear an entirely different face, and that even the Communist Party might have become history, but that would not matter. The party was a foreign organism introduced by Lenin into the Russian body, and sooner or later it would be rejected. One thing, though, was certain to remain unchanged: “our gosbezopasnost” (the state security service).
Sakharovsky used to point out that “our gosbezopasnost” had kept Russia alive for the past 500 years, “our gosbezopasnost” would guide her helm for the next 500 years, “our gosbezopasnost” would win the war with “our main enemy, American Zionism,” and “our gosbezopasnost” would eventually make Russia the leader of the world.
Sakharovsky was right. Marxism triumphed in feudal Russia, which had been a police state since the 16th century’s Ivan the Terrible. There Marxism evolved into a secret samoderzhaviye or autocracy, the historical Russian form of one-man totalitarian dictatorship, in which the new Marxist tsar’s political police first exterminated the entire leadership of Lenin’s Communist Party and then, behind a facade of Marxism, quietly took precedence over the original tools of ideology and the Communist Party for running their country.
Only a handful of people working in extremely close proximity to the Soviet and East European rulers knew that after Lenin died his Communist Party gradually became a scramble of bureaucrats, playing no greater role in the Soviet Union than did Lenin’s embalmed corpse in the Kremlin mausoleum.
So far, Sakharovsky has proved to be a dependable prophet. His successor, Vladimir Kryuchkov, who later authored the August 1991 coup that briefly deposed Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, clearly shared the same fanatical belief in gosbezopasnost. Kryuchkov’s successor, Yevgeny Primakov, who was an undercover KGB officer under Sakharovsky, rose to become Russia’s prime minister.
On Dec. 31, 1999, Russia’s first freely elected president, Boris Yeltsin, stunned the world by announcing his resignation.
“I shouldn’t be in the way of the natural course of history,” Yeltsin explained, speaking in front of a gaily decorated New Year’s tree and blue, red and white Russian flag with a golden Russian eagle.
“I understand that I must do it and Russia must enter the new millennium with new politicians, with new faces, with new intelligent, strong, energetic people.”
Yeltsin then signed a decree “On the execution of the powers of the Russian president,” which stated that under Article 92 Section 3 of the Russian Constitution, the power of the Russian president should be temporarily performed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Yeltsin also announced that a special presidential election would be held around March 27, 2000, and he made a strong appeal for people to vote for Putin, who was “a strong person worthy of becoming president.” For his part, the newly appointed president signed a decree pardoning Yeltsin, who was rumored to be connected to massive bribery scandals, “for any possible misdeeds” and granted him “total immunity” from being prosecuted (or even searched and questioned) for “any and all” actions committed while in office. Putin also gave Yeltsin a lifetime pension and a state dacha.
To me, that had all the appearances of a KGB palace putsch.
Indeed, as of June 2003, some 6,000 former KGB officers were holding positions in Russia’s central and regional governments. Among them:
Vladimir Putin, elected president of Russia; Vladimir Osipov, head of the Presidential Personnel Directorate; Sergey Ivanov, defense minister; Igor Sergeyevich Ivanov, minister of foreign affairs; Viktor Ivanov and Igor Sechin, deputy directors in the Presidential Administration; Vyacheslav Soltaganov, deputy secretary of the Security Council; Viktor Vasilyevich Cherkesov, chairman of the State Committee on Drug Trafficking; Vyacheslav Trubinkov, deputy foreign minister; Vladimir Kozlov, deputy media minister; Gennady Moshkov, first deputy transport minister; Nikolay Negodov, deputy transport minister; Vladimir Strzhalkovsky, deputy minister for economic development; Vladimir Makarov, Leonid Lobzenko and Igor Mezhakov, deputy chairmen of the State Customs Committee; Sergey Verevkin-Rokhalsky and Anatoly Sedov, deputy taxes and duties ministers; Anatoly Tsybulevsky and Vladimir Lazovsky, deputy directors of the of the Federal Tax Police Service; Alexander Grigoriev, general director of the Russian Agency for State Reserves; Alexander Spiridonov, deputy chairman of Russia’s Financial Monitoring Committee; Vladimir Kulakov, Voronezh governor; Viktor Maslov, Smolensk governor.
Can you imagine a democratic Germany run by Gestapo officers?
Putin is indeed trying to make Russia the first intelligence dictatorship in history. In 2004, nearly half of all top governmental positions were held by former officers of the KGB. The Soviet Union had had one KGB officer for every 428 citizens. In 2004, Russia had one intelligence officer for every 297 citizens.
A new generation of Russians is now struggling to demolish the barriers Soviet Marxism spent over 70 years erecting between themselves and the rest of the world, and to develop a new national identity. If history – including that of the last 22 years – is any guide, these Russians, who are now enjoying their regained nationalism, will not truly turn westward. They will struggle to rebuild a kind of an Old Russian Empire by inspiring themselves from old Russian traditions and by using old Russian ways and means.
This does not mean Russia cannot change, but for that to happen, it will need help. In order for us to help, we should first fully understand what is now going on behind the veil of secrecy that still surrounds the Kremlin. Man would not have learned to walk on the moon if he had not first studied what the moon was really made of and where it lay in the universe.
WND: Gen. Pacepa, you are credited with playing a pivotal role in waking up the Romanian people and inspiring the overthrow of the tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu. Why is it that a communist nation like Romania could hear and heed your message, but not America?
Pacepa: Emil Constantinescu, the second post-Communist president of Romania, once said:
The missiles that destroyed Communism were launched from Radio Free Europe, and this was Washington’s most important investment during the Cold War. I do not know whether the Americans themselves realize this now, seven years after the fall of Communism, but we understand it perfectly.
The serialization of my book “Red Horizons” by Radio Free Europe was just one of the missiles fired against the Romanian version of Marxism during the Cold War years. We need a kind of Radio Free America. Let’s hope that others, many others, will join our efforts to help the new generation of Americans – who have no longer been taught real history in schools and know little if anything about America’s 44 years of war against Marxism – to understand the deadly danger of this heresy.
American essayist George Santayana, an immigrant like me, used to say that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Let’s hope that others, many others, will help America understand this truism.
WND: Many Americans would roll their eyes at the phrase “Marxism in America,” even though with every passing year we are becoming more and more Marxist. Why are so many Americans so blind?
Pacepa: They are not blind. They just do not really know what Marxism is. Few Americans will roll their eyes hearing the world “Nazism.” Why? Because the hideous crimes committed by Nazism were publicly exposed and their main authors were publicly tried and hanged. Unfortunately, there was no trial of Communism, although this Marxist heresy had killed 10 times more people than Nazism killed. Nazi archives have been opened to the public, who could learn about Nazism’s atrocities from the horse’s mouth. Most Soviet archives are still sealed.
Stalin was famously quoted as saying: If it is not written, it did not happen. But Marxism did happen, it generated a dreadful empire of gulags and it spawned a 44-year Cold War. Let’s open that Pandora’s box. The United States of America is a unique country of freedom, built by people who came to this land of opportunity in search of religious, economic and personal freedom. Once Americans know the truth, they will never allow themselves to become puppets of Marxism.
WND: General, you were the head of Romania’s Presidential House – the equivalent in the U.S. of being White House chief of staff and director of the CIA, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security – but you ultimately defected to the West. You radically changed, and gave your loyalty to America. What woke you up? What changed you?
Pacepa: Michelle Obama once confessed in front of television cameras broadcasting her statement worldwide: “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.” When I was Michelle’s age I also liked to believe that history started with me. It took me a very long time to see the light. Power can generate blindness and it did in my case. It took me many more years to find the courage to renounce my exorbitantly luxurious existence and to face up to the truth about the hidden face of Marxism. Communist rulers have always been very generous with their spy chiefs – that is until they tire of them and kill them off.
It was noon when the U.S. military plane that was bringing me to freedom landed at Andrews Air Force Base outside of Washington, D.C., on that memorable July 28, 1978, and I was sitting up front in the cockpit with the pilots. It was a glorious, sunny day outside, which only magnified the fireworks popping off inside of me. For many, many years I had learned to hide my personal feelings. For that was the way of life in a Marxist society, where the government had its informants everywhere and where microphones covered you everyplace you went, from the office to the bedroom. But on that unforgettable day I had an overwhelming desire to dance around in a jig all by myself.
I was a free man! I was in America! The joy of finally becoming part of this magnanimous land of liberty, where nothing was impossible, was surpassed only by the joy of simply being alive.
It was my desperate hunger for freedom that woke me up.
WND: What will it take for Americans to wake up?
Pacepa: A “Campaign of Truth” like the one unleashed by President Harry Truman in 1950. I still keep the declassified version of his NSC 68/1950 on my desk. That 58-page document put together by the U.S. National Security Council set forth the strategy of exposing and containing Marxism and Soviet Communism.
“The issues that face us are momentous,” the document stated, “involving the fulfillment or destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself.” Truman reasoned that Marxism and Soviet Communism were the mortal enemies of freedom and religion – of all religions – and he believed their expansion could be stopped only “through a concerted effort” that would place the superiority and strength of what he called “truth and freedom” before the peoples of the world.
Marxism is now threatening our country again. Let’s unleash another Truman-style campaign of truth. Let’s remind the leaders of the Democratic Party that Truman was a Democrat. Let also remind them that John F. Kennedy, another Democrat, was ready to start a nuclear war in order to protect the United States from the danger of Marxism. And let’s remind America that the peace and freedom of the world depend on the economic power of United States and the united resolve of its public opinion, as was always the case.
If our capitalist economy and national unity go, so will our prosperity, our security and the peace of the world.
Poland unveils new statue of President Reagan with the Pope
Several Reagan statues have appeared in Poland. It makes you wonder what the Poles know that too many of our public school teachers don’t.
A new statue of President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II that was unveiled in Gdansk, Poland, on Saturday, July 14, 2012. Both late leaders are highly revered in Poland for their role in helping to topple communism.
Michelle Malkin has commentary:
George Santayana said those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, and the people of Poland have not forgotten:
Polish officials unveiled a statue of former President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II on Saturday, honoring two men widely credited in this Eastern European country with helping to topple communism 23 years ago.
The statue was unveiled in Gdansk, the birthplace of Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement, in the presence of about 120 former Solidarity activists, many of whom were imprisoned in the 1980s for their roles in organizing or taking part in strikes against the communist regime.
The bronze statue, erected in the lush seaside President Ronald Reagan Park, is a slightly larger-than-life rendering of the two late leaders. It was inspired by an Associated Press photograph taken in 1987 on John Paul’s second pontifical visit to the U.S.
[…]
Reagan and John Paul shared a conviction that communism was a moral evil, not just a bad economic system. And Lech Walesa, founder of the Solidarity movement that led the anti-communist struggle in Poland, has often paid homage to both men and told the AP in a recent interview that he deeply respected Reagan.“Reagan should have a monument in every city,” Walesa said.
The money for the statues (about $59,000 US dollars) was raised from former Solidarity members, “many of whom are today living on small pensions and could only afford the smallest of donations” according to the AP.
Political Arena 