SavedByGrace1981

So called 'progressives' took over the education establishment sometime during the early to mid 20th century. I've always said that is the real root of the problem. The open borders, globalist/socialist utopia that we are speeding to is just the result. The best thing we might have going for us is the natural 'rebelliousness' of youth. While most kids will not question the indoctrination they are being spoon-fed, the 'rebels' (those who are hard wired to reject their teachers' or parents' ideals) will. In the 60s and 70s, rebellious youth embraced communism. They are now 'in charge.' They will eventually pass, however, and the torch may be passed to a new 'conservative' generation. If we last that long. Blessings, -Ed

According to the crew on "The Five", Pres. Trump has said exactly the same thing about Romney and Cruz as well. So we're they victims of Trump's harassment too? Blessings, -Ed

Cool! This comes at a time when there are a lot of 'mainstream' journalists with excellent 'hate Trump' creds looking for work. Maybe Huffpo can hire Matt Lauer or Charlie Rose. Or they can lift Brian Ross away from ABC. Heck - maybe they can even get Dan Rather or Brian Williams. The possibilities are endless! Blessings, -Ed

Ya beat me to it! Blessings, -Ed

Seems like Mr. Ross has a - shall we say - interesting (read biased) history of jumping to conclusions: 2012: ABC News, Brian Ross apologize for report suggesting shooting suspect tied to Tea Party Blessings, -Ed

True. I've always had an issue with the term "RINO" (republican in name only). The TRUE 'rino' s are the conservatives, given the party's hatred of TRUE conservatives going all the way back to Goldwater and Reagan. It's a sad fact, but the Rockefellers, the Cabot Lodges and the Bushes have always represented the TRUE republicans. And we're still dealing with that, today. Blessings, -Ed

I understand that and I don't disagree. It's just that I am of the opinion that there is more at work here. Otherwise, why is abortion on demand still the law of the land? Especially given all those reasons I listed - republican majorities as appointees on SCOTUS; republican presidents; republican majorities in Congress. I haven't voted democrat since Carter's first term in '76 - and I certainly wouldn't consider doing so now that it is essentially the communist party. Yet I refuse to wear the partisan blinders that on the issues I care about - abortion; illegal immigration; the destruction of our health care system - that the republicans are any better. They're good at running on issues and counting on their voters to support them - no matter that they do nothing to actually AFFECT those issues they run on. People are waking up - that is the good news. At least there seems to be a growing consensus among pro-life conservatives that the fossils in Congress who happen to have an R after their name (the McCains, McConnells, Collins' and others) are NOT necessarily our friends. Blessings, -Ed

Whenever I think that I need to vote for the republican because "he/she is a reliably pro-life vote in the Senate/House/White House", I consider these inconvenient facts: 1. Harry Blackmun, the author of the Roe v. Wade atrocity, was a Nixon (R) appointee. 2. Republican appointees have been the majority on the SCOTUS since as long as I can remember. In that timeframe, Roe has only been strengthened and more etched in stone. 3. Republican candidates perennially run as pro-life candidates. Yet in republican controlled Congresses, Planned Parenthood continues to get funded and - whenever some kind of 'threat' to unlimited abortions might be coming through the congressional pipeline - you can count on 'republicans' like Collins or Snowe to stop it in its tracks. How does the saying go? Oh yeah . . . "fool me once . . . " Face it. Unlimited abortions is one of those issues - like open borders and socialized healthcare - that the ruling party has decreed that we will have. And I ain't buyin' 'republicans are the pro-life party' any longer. Blessings, -Ed

One has to wonder where this is going to stop. I wonder - how many current politicians and media celebrities who have harassment (or worse) skeletons in their closets must be silently quaking in their boots - hoping 'their sins to not find them out'? Blessings, -Ed

The Wages of Inversion BY DAVID SOLWAY NOVEMBER 27, 2017 We live in an age in which things are no longer what they are supposed to be. Words have come to denote the opposite of what they signify. Cultural institutions on which we rely to serve our personal and national interests have morphed into caricatures of their original intentions, working against their foundational purposes. Linguistic and institutional inversion is the time-dishonored strategy of totalitarian systems and is generally associated with the theory and practice of the Left, which has infiltrated the culture and polity of the free world, particularly in the areas of language use, the media, education, the arts and gender relations. The democratic West is now at the mercy of its own reverse polarity. Language One recalls the famous slogans of Orwell’s Ingsoc: War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. These contradictions are no longer as absurd as 1984 makes them out to be. What Orwell called Newspeak has entered the practice of the West at levels never before seen. A society in which language has been so denatured as to operate on the principle of inversion, beyond even the institutional euphemisms of political correctness, has no future. Samuel Butler saw this coming in his premonitory steampunk novel Erewhon, an anagram for Nowhere. We have got things backward. Thus a blood-saturated religion is rinsed for public consumption as the “religion of peace.” An insurgent army of fascist brownshirts calls itself Antifa. “Inclusion” has come to mean the exclusion of those who do not conform to a prescribed ideology. “Diversity” is an antonymic synonym for monolithic groupthink. “Affirmative action” affirms racism in the guise of anti-racism. Sexual jokes, lewd comments and even innocent displays of affection or interest on the part of men are subsumed under the category of “sexual assault” and are said to constitute infallible signs of male depravity; similarly the term “rape culture,” prominent on campus, refers to a non-existent entity and has come to describe normal sexual and romantic behavior. The mantra of “Social Justice” is the conceptual umbrella under which all such aberrations take shelter. It is nothing but a stand-in for flagrant injustice, exacting tribute from decent hardworking people and struggling entrepreneurs to benefit a largely parasitical class of those who claim to be oppressed or who affect to be offended. Indeed, what Michael Walsh calls the “decriminalization of crime in the name of ‘social justice,’ long a goal of the cultural-Marxist left, [leads to] social disruption, mistrust, resentment, lawlessness and, if left unchecked, anarchy and civil war.” What social justice has to do with a just society escapes us almost perfectly. In fact, the former is the diametric opposite of the latter. As philosopher Roger Scruton writes in The Meaning of Conservatism, “the greatest threat to just dealings between people is the attempt to remake society from above, in conformity with a conception of ‘social justice’.” The Media In her recent book The Smear, investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson, ostracized by the press elite for her unvarnished truth-telling, has analyzed the scandal of today’s “industry of smears and fake news,” which she calls “transactional journalism,” i.e., returning favors for privileged information, writing what you’re told to write. This has “opened the floodgate to clandestine collusion between reporters and special interests. As a result, it can be impossible to separate fact from fiction.” Moreover, the line between news reports and partisan editorializing has become blurred, so that opinions are routinely cast as fact. “The media had functioned as a powerful institution,” writes Daniel Greenfield, “because of its pretense of objectivity. When it tossed aside objectivity, all it had left was power”—that is, the power to obfuscate, deceive and drive the course of events toward its own political ends. This violation of journalistic ethics is now pretty much universal. News is agitprop and editorials are political spin, almost always under the sign of left-wing advocacy masking as objective scrutiny and disclosure. Attkisson reminds us of Joseph Goebbels’ dictum in his Diaries, “those who control news policies [must] endeavor to make every item of news serve a certain purpose.” Just as today’s universities have taken a page from the Nazified German universities of the 1930s and the installation of the Nuremberg Laws, so contemporary journalism has learned from the dark master of deception and persuasion. A lie—the bigger the better—repeated with dinning regularity becomes, as Goebbels instructed us, the truth. Education In a letter of 1822, collected in The Founders’ Constitution (Vol.1, Ch.18, Doc.35), James Madison wrote: “The American people owe it to themselves, and to the cause of free Government, to prove by their establishments for the advancement and diffusion of Knowledge, that their political Institutions… are as favorable to the intellectual and moral improvement of Man as they are conformable to his individual & social Rights.” This is a document which should be taught to students at every level of the educational establishment, especially in its current state of academic desuetude and ideological depravity. In an important article for FrontPage Magazine, Bruce Bawer writes of “the staggering ignorance of millions of young Americans when it comes to certain fundamental and crucially important matters.” The curriculum in place is one that validates programmatic stupefaction: the serial failures of socialism are glossed over, capitalism is denounced as an unmitigated scourge, America is castigated as “uniquely evil,” Islam is uniformly extolled and terrorists are excused as merely misguided. In addition, standards have been debased all across the board in admission, hiring and graduation policies. Intellectual debate has been shut down as conservative speakers are routinely ostracized or disinvited. Students are coddled in “safe spaces” where they are spared unfamiliar or disturbing ideas. When the object of the educational institution is to dumb down and indoctrinate, then it has nothing in common what we once understood as education: the acquisition of knowledge and fostering the ability to think. The Arts As Sohrab Ahmari laments in The New Philistines, a devastating critique of contemporary art, “the loss of technical mastery and the erosion of standards” have become epidemic in our “identitarian age.” Since social power dynamics and collective identity are all that postmodern art knows, “its practitioners can’t grapple with individuality, with things of the soul, with the inner life—the very things that draw most of us to art in the first place.” Writers and artists who trade in the business of “radical feminism, racial grievance, anti-capitalism and queer theory” are now the poster children for a politically correct and ultimately boring belletristic community. Art in the widest sense of the term—painting, sculpture, drama, poetry, fiction—has betrayed its fundamental mandate of producing meaning and beauty. It has become increasingly ugly, trivial, self-referential and devoid of both aesthetic value and authentic content, a vacuous parody of its ancestral vitality. A phrase from a 19th century Spectator review of a particularly bad play, “a weighty baldness,” comes to mind as now generally applicable. Gender Sexual relations have always been complexified by variation, but the fact remains that a culture cannot survive without orthodox matrimonial standards and procreative couples. As I’ve written before, the contemporary focus is now on “sexual politics, sexual performance, sex education, sex scandals, same-sex marriage, sexual coercion (the rape culture meme), and sex changes, cosmetic, chemical, and surgical.” This phobic obsession does not stop there. The male-female binary has been reconceived as a “social construct” that must be unlearned, a relic of the oppressive and unenlightened past. Consequently, linguistic and doctrinal abominations like the LGBTIQCAPGNGFNBA sodality covering the proliferating abundance of gender orientations seem here to stay. We have reached the point in the West where traditional sexual standards have been misgendered and fatally compromised. Sterile variations are celebrated and even legislated, burlesque has become commonplace (transgenderism, sologamy, etc.), abortion is rampant, and the reproductive ratio has grown unsustainable. Normal sexuality has been severed from its original function and reduced to its biological antithesis. Sex and marriage may be individual choices but they are also civilizational imperatives in the absence of which a viable future diminishes by the day. ________________________________________________ In Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Noam Chomsky, always the contrarian, argues that political conditioning, far from being antithetical to democracy, is “the essence of democracy…[the] Creation of necessary illusions.” Of course, some degree of thought control is inevitably part of media, commercial and political organizations, but the critical element is “some degree.” In the society which Chomsky envisioned, his book would never have seen the light of print. But the cloak of indoctrination now tends to shadow almost everything we see, hear and read, and it requires dedicated and time-consuming labor to ferret out the truth of current affairs. We live in a time of inversion in which, in almost every social category of serious endeavor, truth is denounced as a lie and the lie is elevated to the status of truth. Inversion is the order of the day. It may well be too late to turn things around. Our cultural momentum has carried us, like Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus caught in the “winds of history,” past the point of no return. The reckoning that seems to await us may be deferred but it most likely cannot be avoided. The application of genuine conservative principles—limited government, respect for tradition, resistance to newfangled fads and fallacies (e.g., the worship of Gaia, global warming), rigorous education, the sanctity of procreative marriage, prudent immigration protocols and defended borders, social progress by slow, tested increments—can postpone the inexorable by perhaps a generation or two, but the rot has gone too deep to be scoured. The social, cultural and political vectors we have examined here appear definitive, violations of “the desire for continuity, the bond of allegiance, the pursuit of excellence [and] institutional autonomy,” properties which Scruton lists as native to the conservative sensibility. If the purpose of culture is to ensure human survival, then we live in a culture that has perversely consummated its antipodal reflection, engaged in an act of culturecide. Perhaps the only solution to our dilemma is, paradoxically, nothing other than the looming collapse of a once vigorous and in many respects glorious civilization, from the ashes of which it may phoenix-like arise renewed, or from which some as yet undefined hybrid may gradually emerge. But as we continue to invert the beliefs, disciplines, meanings and practices that have sustained us, what is clear is that what once was can no longer be, and we are the worse for it. https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-wages-of-inversion/

College Campuses And The Origins Of The New Totalitarianism By ABRAHAM H. MILLER November 27, 2017 Amazon has sold out of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, a work that engaged the question of why totalitarianism came into being. Speculation has it that the newfound interestin Arendt emanates from the rise of Donald Trump. If so, readers of The Origins are going to be sadly disappointed. For the precious few who will attempt to wade through Arendt’s subtle and difficult concepts, not to mention sentences that seem to go on forever, it will become obvious that ground zero of totalitarianism’s resurgence is not the White House but the college campus. Whereas the essence of democracy, as Tocqueville so brilliantly notes, is compromise and conciliation, the essence of totalitarianism is that truth is whatever the movement says it is. Different ideas are to be quashed. The individual who believes that politics is a series of negotiations or deal making is hardly a totalitarian. By contrast, the diversity administrator who organizes a bunch of pubescent thugs who have been inculcated in the belief that truth is that which advances the interests of their identity and those who share it, is a totalitarian. He or she is no different from those who mobilized Hitler’s Brownshirts to shut down intellectuals whose ideas were not sanctioned by the Nazi movement. As Nazism rose, Einstein’s theory of relativity became Jewish physics. Freud’s psychoanalysis became Jewish psychology. In 1933, when Hitler consolidated his power, Jews dominated classical music in both Germany and Austria. Yet, not only were Jewish conductors and musicians banned, so too were works written by Jews. The same censorship extended to art and literature. This is the campus mentality that prevents conservative speakers from setting foot on campus and disrupts their speeches when they do. They have either the wrong identity or the wrong ideas and sometimes both. Some years ago, I attended a lecture by Daniel Pipes at the University of California, Berkeley. At the venue, we were required to go through security procedures almost identical to those at any airport. Inside, university police lined the walls on both sides of the auditorium. Pipes had barely begun to speaking when some started shouting him down. Campus police repeatedly had to physically remove the disrupters, who were mostly Muslims. After a series of orchestrated disruptions, the group of protesters got up as one and left. By contrast, the most radical speakers from the Left can appear on any campus without the need for police protection or concern about disruption. It cost the University of California, Berkeley $600,000 in security expenses to guard against threats when mainstream conservative Ben Shapiro spoke on campus. Generally, schools are as unlikely to discipline students who disrupt conservative speakers as they are to wage demonization campaigns against radical leftist speakers the way they do against conservatives. On nearly every campus there is now a diversity bureaucracy whose very existence depends on characterizing people as enemies of identity groups and mobilizing compliant students to oppose them. Conservative speakers provide justification for the bureaucracy’s ludicrous existence. The disruption of the free exchange of ideas transforms the very essence of a university from a place dedicated to the search for the truth to a place where only certain ideas can be heard, a place dedicated to propaganda. This is not just a breakdown of an institution but the beginning of the breakdown of society. Individuals are important only insofar as they fit into identity categories. The truth is whatever advances the interests of protected groups. Compromise and conciliation are not valued, for compromise and conciliation are not possible with the oppressor. Normalization is viewed as the enemy of the chaos and disruption on which totalitarian mindset feeds. These are values that are antithetical to the functioning of a viable democracy. They are, as Arendt notes, the basis of totalitarianism. They are not the values our universities should teach. Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science, University of Cincinnati, and a distinguished fellow with the Haym Salomon Center. Follow him @salomoncenter http://www.dailywire.com/news/23984/college-campuses-and-origins-new-totalitarianism-abraham-h-miller

NOV 23 2017, 6:11 PM ET Woman raises more than $250,000 for homeless man who helped her by PHIL MCCAUSLAND A homeless man outside of Philadelphia has a lot to be thankful for this year: After he helped a New Jersey woman who ran out of gas on an interstate last month, she returned the favor by raising money for her rescuer. Kate McClure's online effort has ballooned to more than a quarter of a million dollars. McClure, of Florence, was driving into the City of Brotherly Love and ran out of gas on Interstate 95 at around 11 p.m. "My heart was beating out of my chest," McClure, 27, told the Philadelphia Inquirer. "I didn’t know what the heck to do." A man she identified only as "Johnny" came up to her car, told her that it wasn't safe for her to leave her vehicle and went to purchase her gas with his last $20. "Johnny did not ask me for a dollar, and I couldn't repay him at that moment because I didn’t have any cash, but I have been stopping by his spot for the past few weeks," McClure said in her GoFundMe post, which has now raised more than $250,000 for the homeless man as of Thanksgiving Day. Kate McClure stands with Johnny, the homeless man that gave her his last 20 dollars to fill her car with gas when it broke down on the side of I-95. Kate is trying to raise money for Johnny so he can get back on his feet. Kate McClure / via GoFundMe "I repaid him for the gas, gave him a jacket, gloves, a hat, and warm socks, and I give him a few dollars every time I see him,” McClure wrote. McClure only aimed to raise $10,000 initially to help her rescuer find an apartment, a vehicle and four to six months of expenses. But her fundraising has now gone well beyond that goal. For the holiday weekend, McClure was able to put Johnny in a hotel and take him shopping for some essentials — but the possibilities do not stop there for the once homeless man. According to McClure’s posts, Johnny was in the Marine Corps and had been a firefighter and paramedic before becoming homeless. McClure did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday. "This changes my life right there," Johnny said in a video posted to the GoFundMe page after only $1,700 had been raised. "I'm not gonna sleep," he added later, when told he could get a room for two months in Philadelphia with that money. The fundraising page was taken down for a time at Johnny's request when it had raised more than $100,000, but McClure said in a subsequent post that she restarted it because interest had not abated. McClure wrote that Johnny has said that he is more than happy with the amount that has been raised and doesn't "want to seem like he is taking advantage," so he plans to donate the rest to a good cause. McClure told the Inquirer that Johnny told her that he hopes to get a job at an Amazon warehouse in Robbinsville, New Jersey. According to McClure, Johnny will announce the donation at a later time. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/woman-raises-more-250-000-homeless-man-who-helped-her-n823681 POSTER'S COMMENT: It's nice to be able to post a positive, uplifting story for a change.

No. If it is proven that Moore is a child predator to the degree that the case against Kennedy was proven (by the facts that a woman drowned in his car and he waited 8 hours to report it) then he shouldn't serve. The voters of Alabama will have their say. After that, if they elect Moore and additional facts do come out supporting the charges, then he should be expelled from the Senate. In the morally relative world of politics, a child predator is worse than a drunk who commits manslaughter. (I know, I know. Kennedy was never CONVICTED - it was Massachusetts, after all. And we can only speculate that he was drunk since in the 8 hours he waited he likely sobered up. So don't bother to point that out.) Blessings, -Ed

" . . . because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen." ~Romans 1:25 Blessings, -Ed

I have a question: When it comes to Al Franken, what should be the REAL outrage? Satire website: Al Franken Didn't Do Nothing When 1,099 felons vote in race won by 312 ballots Blessings, -Ed

Wow - I didn't know that. I wonder why he doesn't play his 'Democrat - get out of jail free" card? Blessings, -Ed

He certainly knew about Chappaquiddick when he referred to Kennedy as " . . . my good friend, Ted Kennedy." I don't know about you, but I would have a difficult time considering someone who left a young woman to drown in his car under the circumstances that Kennedy did "a good friend." Even if the drowning DID take place in 1969. You have so-called republicans - McCain included - coming out of the woodwork basically saying Moore isn't fit to serve in the Senate. If Moore is guilty of what is alleged, then yes - he is a creep and a child predator. But the so-called standards of the Senate - given the late Kennedy's "lion of the Senate" status - are laughable to say the least. Talk about "he who is without sin, let him cast the first stone . . . " Blessings, -Ed

Could be worse . . . he could be a truther who believes Nixon pardoned the Russians and McCain killed JFK. Blessings, -Ed

I don't "know" any such thing. As I've stated previously, the only ones who know are the accused, the accuser, and God Himself. I'm none of those. My post was actually aimed at the hypocrisy of McCain and others who said nary a word about the FACTS of Ted Kennedy's immorality. Blessings, -Ed

Washington GOP tries to oust Republican nominee Roy Moore in Alabama Senate Overheard, just the other day . . . SHAM: Good news!!! The republicans are finally united about something!!! SAM: Repealing Obamacare? SHAM: Well, no . . . SAM: Comprehensive tax reform? SHAM: No, not quite . . . SAM: I know! Building the wall and dealing with illegal immigration! SHAM: No. SAM: Well, what is it then? The deficit? North Korea? What?? SHAM: No, and no. The republicans are UNITED against . . . [wait for it] . . . The republicans are united against . . . Republican Senate candidate ROY MOORE!!! Blessings, -Ed

I'm posting this link without comment: https://i.imgur.com/L4elDJC.jpg It is sarcasm, but it makes a point. I wonder if the honorable Senator John McCain - who was best buds with the late Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), would care to comment? Blessings, -Ed

Exactly . . . why would they want to stop him? Mueller is one of them. Blessings, -Ed

I don't live in Alabama, but I think I remember hearing about Judge Moore many years ago when he was involved in a 'Ten Commandments' controversy. He became somewhat of a hero in conservative circles nationwide. Whenever that happens, anyone who is in such a position automatically becomes a target for 'the other side.' Even though he didn't hold national office, a juicy tidbit such as this (especially in the era of Swaggart and Bakker) would have made bringing down Moore a 'feather in the cap' for someone. But like I said, we'll probably never know for sure. While most, if not all, Christians have done things in their (our) past that we're ashamed of, this one's a biggie. Unfortunately, if it is true, it's not a surprise. What is wrong with men who profess Christ that causes them to do this? I'd like to think that if one REALLY has a serious Christian perspective, and is a genuine Christian (as Moore claims to be), then if this is a true allegation - how could he lie about it? Is he not afraid of God and of Judgement? A senate seat is temporal. Eternity is . . . forever! Blessings, -Ed

If the allegations aren't true and it is instead a hit job, I'd put my money on McConnell, Ryan and company rather than Nancy, Barack and Chucky. It's true they're part of the establishment/ruling class, but I don't think they're technically 'Left.' Though at the end of the day, what does it really matter. Blessings, -Ed

It's possible. It would be 'red' vs. 'blue'. Therein lies a problem - perhaps THE problem. If you look at an election map of the last few election cycles (especially one that breaks it down by counties) you see it's as much an urban vs. rural thing as anything else. At first glance, you could say the coasts are 'blue' and the center of the country is 'red.' But closer inspection shows that there are large 'red' areas (even in blue California and NY) and large blue areas in the center of the country (Illinois and other urban areas). Plus, the center of the behemoth federal government is in Washington, DC and the surrounding areas. It doesn't get bluer than that. And all the 'power' (military, etc.) is there. I happen to live in probably the most conservative county in ultra-blue NY state. Our local Congressional rep. is an R (and a fairly conservative one), but as for representation at the state and federal level, conservatives like me have none. The governor, a couple of years ago, declared that '[conservatives] have no place in NY state" (except of course when the tax bill comes due. Pay up, and shut up.) Would I (and other conservatives/libertarians) be worse off in a blue United States of Socialist America? And on the flip side - would progressives/socialists/communists who live in red areas feel they were better off in a United States of Conservative America? And how would the land be divvied up? It presents a lot of questions. I think I'll buy stock in U-Haul and Ryder Truck rentals . . . Blessings, -Ed