"The Republic is Dead"

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
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pwi

I don’t often post on PWI and I don’t know much about politics. I know, I despise politicians on both sides and feel that our country is under attack from within. I would like to see “leaders” either Democratic or Republican put their petty differences aside and lead from the front. I want leaders who will work for the best, to insure a strong country and a strong populace.

I was sent this article this morning. I can identify with the author’s viewpoint, because, like him , I have been there. I am also very torn on everything now, having spent the last 14 years fighting the enemy. Now, just what the fuck was I fighting for? My country which I don’t even recognize anymore?

Anyway, their are a lot of posters here on PWI much smarter than me, I thought this article would open a few eyes to those who have not experienced combat. Granted, it is long, but, it should provide of fuel for your debates.

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One thing that stood out to me is the authors love of American culture and his aggravation at American culture being lost. What makes up the American culture he is so fond of? Is it a different American culture than someone from a different part of the country experienced?

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The author mentions that taxation is theft. The people who promoted that idea also did not believe in the concept of the common good. They believed that democracy was a way for the majority to tyrannize the minority. In other words they did not believe in the Constitution. They also supported policies (this is during the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement in the 50s) that discriminated against blacks and would ultimately, if moral heads did not prevail, make them a permanent underclass with no access to education or the right to vote. This is what happened in Virginia where blacks and poor whites were disenfranchised and there was an attempt to eradicate public education in order to prevent desegregation of schools. The governor actually ordered some public schools closed. Vouchers were introduced but poor whites and blacks were unable to take advantage of them and go to private school. In Prince Edward County public schools were closed for 5 years. Men like Milton Friedman knew what the school voucher system was doing to public education and its effects on blacks (they pretty much did not receive an education) yet he supported it.

In short, the author is supporting the Constitution and our Republic yet invoking ideas from people who would rip it up and start over (with the condition that they don’t have to get back in line and start over as well). Friedman in fact, supported both legal and illegal immigration.

As far as giving medical care to the enemy: that’s the Christian thing to do. It’s what separates us from the enemy.

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I don’t get that logic.
You try to kill someone, if he isn’t immediately dead, you try to heal him? But otherwise, it was perfectly acceptable to kill him?

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You try to eliminate the threat, not kill the threat.

I got my teeny tiny saw out to split that hair haha.

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I would think that if you tried to kill him, but wounded him such that he is no longer in the fight, it might be exceptionally cruel to leave him to more slowly die of his wounds. The closest to agreeing with it is they might euthanize the person. Another thing, there is the off chance that he would survive to be retrieved by his own side and fight again later.

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Can someone die from hyperbole poisoning?

No, but they can turn into a shrieking little bitch.

The nation’s highest office is occupied by a crude, socially retarded Crony Capitalist snake-oil salesman, and people are shitting themselves over a handful of radical progressives. OMG COMMUNISM!!! Don’t worry, pumpkin, banks and oil companies are still in charge.

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Because you aren’t a murderer, you’re a soldier. Besides, being a Christian means accepting the illogical.

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@idaho I’m sorry it’s taken me a while to respond to this thread, but it was a lot to ponder.
Considering your contributions, I wanted to take the time to give you a thoughtful reply.

I certainly share many of your concerns from a civilian point-of-view. The notion of “shadow government” is often treated with conspiratorial mockery in the media, but I think it is a perfectly fine term for the millions of un-elected bureaucrats who all wield their little slices of public power at various levels of government. Some of those slices aren’t so little. I find this very concerning. You have to call them something, so why not something cool like “shadow government”?

I also believe it is apparent that communist ideas have had success in their long-term plan of a slow march through the institutions. I can’t quantify it in a meaningful way because it can’t be accurately measured, but the footprints are clearly there. It is well-documented that the Soviets were waging long-term ideological war on the US with ideas that are clearly infectious, easily-transmitted and easily believed to be “good” or “just”. I think plenty of it is home-grown too, as the ideas are easily dreamed up, easily communicated and very catchy.

I’m not so sure this means McCarthy was right about everything he said, but the slow march away from the Constitution is undeniable. More government, more taxes, more spending, more debt, more dependence, more power, more laws, all culminating in more opportunities for fuckery at all levels of government and business. Most of the country seems to want even more government, or at least no less than what we’ve got right now. Some want more government programs that can’t be un-done without some level of violence and/or massive upheaval. The Rubicon has already been crossed, but there are plenty more rivers for us to march past.

I’m hoping for a slow march to rolling back government overreach and bureaucracy. I’d like a somewhat faster pace than how we got here, but not too fast. Taking a leap in any direction may involve violence. I’d rather that not come to pass.

The problem is that the ideas of people like Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell and Adam Smith don’t resonate as easily or as readily as your socialist firebrand professor’s rousing rhetoric. They just don’t tap into the same level of emotional appeal as liberal rhetoric. It takes a lot more work to understand Sowell than it does Bernie Sanders. I should know, I was once a young liberal too. It is very easy and even seductive to parrot what you’ve heard the smart people say, consider yourself smart and even consider yourself virtuous for simply having the right ideas, even if you’ve never actually done anything virtuous.

I think our generation of Americans is going to be a conservative force in the coming decades. We had the benefit of growing up with many of the good ideas that were advanced by liberals. We should be tolerant and welcoming of all people. We should work harder to understand the concerns of people who we may not have much in common with. We should consider harm reduction policies with certain social problems. We should give women every opportunity to rise as high as they can.

We also grew up in a time when PC culture was still a relatively small seed, perhaps a sprout, and we could still speak ideas and even make jokes freely without the consequences of twitter mobs coming to get you fired and inflict whatever ruin they can upon you. I don’t see our generation letting that torch die out to satisfy the demands of the perpetually-offended.
Apparently Dave Chappelle just dropped a culture bomb to that effect with his new Netflix special, and I’m eager to check it out. From what I’ve read it’s a giant FUCK YOU to much of the nonsense we live with today.

On the subject of these twitter mobs (and similar phenomena), we’re also still figuring out the internet. It’s still pretty new and there are some very concerning trends with monopolistic tech companies, but I think we’ll end up voting with our dollars in the long run. Being super-woke doesn’t seem to pay, at least not when you take it too far. It also has the added benefit of putting the more ridiculous ideas on public display, where reasonable people can easily conclude that they’re terrible.

As an aside, I recently learned from a Dan Carlin Hardcore History podcast that Vladimir Lenin was actually a German ideological weapon unleashed on the Russians. According to Carlin, The German High Command understood the destructive nature of Lenin’s ideology and deployed Lenin against the weakened and incompetent Tsar. Even after the setbacks of two devastatingly crushing military defeats, the Germans still managed to out-pace the Russian people, handicapped as they were by Lenin’s poison pill. There’s a lot more to the discussion than that, but the effectiveness of Lenin as a weapon is certainly interesting to ponder.

This is such a heavy question. I can’t give you a remotely meaningful answer. I can only say that we all have choices, and if you choose to fight for another cause or even just fight for your own goals then nobody will fault you.

Who knows? Maybe you can get into politics. Dan Crenshaw is doing a great job at being a conservative in 2019, and he’s still new and figuring it out. I hope to see more like him in politics. He’s one of our best.

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Taken from OP link:

“The concept of America as a nation state with borders is actually-being-debated. We are a nation that has been burdened by perpetual war for over 20 years. American symbols and history are being erased, rewritten and redefined to the perceptions and definitions of an ideology that is completely counterculture to American values…The commerce system is giving way to Marxist Socialism and liberty is dying. Most of all we are a nation divided.”

This quote cannot be reasonably disputed.

Due to demographic changes in particular, Republicans are imminently going to struggle to win national elections again.

Due to entrenched Marxist ideology throughout many institutions, particularly Universities/academia, this is a further result:

A country that doesn’t even want children anymore, is in severe trouble. Combined with little respect for the ideas of a nation and falling applications to join the Armed Forces. This should hardly come as a surprise.

Fill the country with any and everyone from the rest of the planet, and teach the natives from a young age that their own history is of stolen land, racism, slavery, and the subjugation of much of the world, with little to go in the credit column, and this is the obvious outcome. Demoralisation of the concept of nationhood and a weakening of society at large.

Who can name many, or any, prominent Conservative academics or professors in the US? There is a near total dominance of left wing ideology being taught in America, and throughout the West in general as well.

The idea of America as a land of small Government, with liberty of the individual paramount, little to no foreign intervention, and all the rest of it, is gone and will not be returning, without the country engaging in civil war and ultimately starting again. Technology is only going to make the Government ever more totalitarian and powerful too. Tech companies now have almost unimaginable power to continue to push their ideologies, as shown in this clip:

Tens of millions of Americans are grotesquely obese, and barely function without mountains of legal or illegal drugs. There is a near constant push to legalise marijuana across America and much of the West too, to leave the typical person even more stupid and stupored, while raking in ever more tax revenues. Revenues to be spent going to war with Iran or North Korea or some other place that should be of no importance to it.

Add in abortion as a lifestyle choice, 24/7 pornography, casual sex with as many strangers as possible, massive promotion of thuggery and crime throughout music and other entertainment, and what exactly does the society at large even amount to?

As for popular culture, this is what now passes for talent and entertainment, watched by millions of teens and young adults a few days ago:

Just watch that video from start to finish.

What sort of a civilisation has America become, where this stuff is not just accepted, but celebrated?

America should be leading the world in colonising other planets and striving to enhance humanity.

Instead, the Left has taken near total control. Control which is only going to increase as a result of educational policies, immigration and technology.

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Yeah, so it’s discredited from the outset. With due respect to @idaho, this arricle was bad. It was a regurgitation of Rothbardian paranoia.

He author is obsessed with the idea that he has the right views on things and the people who oppose those views are enemies to be destroyed (in some cases literally). This is not only stupid, it’s dangerous.

But I get it - there is this class of individuals (like the author) that are wannabe warriors in politics - they think someone who differs from their way of thinking has “betrayed” the country and they speak in melodramatic language about “fighting the enemy” instead of sitting at a table over beers in a free and open society and engaging that person with a debate.

In short, this author doesn’t want liberty, he wants conformity, at the point of a gun apparently, and if anyone has “betrayed” the concept of liberty, it’s this dude.

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Thank you for your insightful post. I posted the article, not because I agreed with it, but, as an example of some of the thinking I have ran into within my profession. I am not very astute politically and I would never make a politician because, I have a hard time lying or at least avoiding the truth. Not saying they all lie (Crenshaw) , but, its is hard to believe anything a politician says is “truthful”

Do I agree with the author that we are slowly destroying the Constitution? Yes, I do. Do I see a lot of politicians running for nomination on the socialist platform? Yes, I do. Now, maybe I am just stupid, and these individuals are running on some type of platform, I don’t understand. Would not be the first time, I didn’t understand the big picture.

Do I agree with a two or three party system for our country? Yes, I do. But, I want those to have differences in how they will protect our Constitution and out country’s values. All I have seen for the last decade is both parties doing everything they can to destroy this country.

You spend over a decade outside this country, fighting for what you think your country wants and then go into some FOB and watch the news from back home and you think WTF.

Thanks again for the reply.

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I did not agree with most of the article myself and consider the author to be close to the fringe. Since I am not politically astute, I posted the article for others smarter than me to comment. I guess, food for thought.

There is a comment I think you may be interested to read. I have not verified this quote. I am especially worried about Khrushchev’s last comment.

September 18th, 1959 former Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson was tasked with the delegation of former Russian Premier Nakita Kruschev. In a 1966 address to Brigham Young University Benson was recorded and I quote.

“I have talked face-to-face with the godless Communist leaders. It may surprise you to learn that I was host to Mr. Khrushchev for a half day, when he visited the United States. Not that I’m proud of it — I opposed his coming then and I still feel it was a mistake to welcome this atheistic murderer as a state visitor. But according to President Eisenhower, Khrushchev had expressed a desire to learn something of American agriculture, and after seeing Russian agriculture I can understand why.

As we talked face-to-face, he indicated that my grandchildren would live under Communism. After assuring him that I expected to do all in my power to assure that his, and all other grandchildren, would live under freedom, he arrogantly declared, in substance:

You Americans are so gullible. No you won’t accept Communism outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you’ll finally wake up and you find you already have Communism. We won’t have to fight you. We’ll so weaken your economy until you fall like over-ripe fruit into our hands.”

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Communism is dead. It’s a diversion and boogeyman. The people who say taxation is theft are just as much enemies of the Constitution as communists, only there are no communists.

When a president tells American citizens to go back where they came from (America?) because they complain about issues, that doesn’t undermine the Constitution? The fact that many Americans applauded what he said, doesn’t say something about how we view the supposed God given rights the government is supposed to protect?

When the French fought the Spanish in Italy, at the Battle of Ravenna in 1512, the Duke of Ferarra was allied with the French. He positioned his cannon in such a way that some of the shots overshot their target, the Spanish, and hit his supposed allies the French. When told of this he said that it didn’t matter because they are all foreigners and thus, all the enemy.

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There’s no way this was said by Khruschev, as it’s completely out of character not only for him but for any General Secretary of Communist Party of the Soviet Union - or any Marxist for that matter - as it would imply that free peoples living in socialist utopia had some influence on the inner workings of plutocratic capitalism in the US, an anathema for devout communists.

In short, it’s a fake.

Be that as it may, the quote was widely disseminated during the early 1960s via the preferred viral medium of the day, postcards. One well-known purveyor of such literature was a southern California banker named Joe Crail, who, according to author Rick Perlstein ( Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus , New York: Hill and Wang, 2002) distributed as many as two million pieces of far-right propaganda in 1961 alone (much of it, apparently, to his own clientele at Coast Federal Savings and Loan).

“In a typical blitz,” Perlstein writes, “account holders received a red postcard bearing a spurious quote from Khrushchev: ‘We cannot expect the Americans to jump from capitalism to communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving Americans small doses of socialism, until they suddenly awake to find they have communism.’”

Sound familiar?

When pressed by Senator Lee Metcalf of Montana to provide a source for the quote in 1962, Crail admitted he could not. The mailings were discontinued.

Boller and George: The quote is a ‘deliberate fabrication’

According to Paul F. Boller and John H. George, authors of They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions (Oxford, 1989), the quote was, in fact, a “deliberate fabrication of some radical rightists in this country, who thought it summed up Khrushchev’s attitude” (which it actually did not — like most Marxists of his time, Khrushchev believed the capitalist system was inherently unjust and unstable and doomed to collapse of its own accord).

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Thank you, like I said, I had not verified the quote. I appreciate the background information.

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Something else to consider is that historically anti communist demagoguery has often led to antisemitism.

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This is an article about the UK, but by simply looking at a country such as America, it can easily be seen that there are clear parallels in how their societies have changed and how these changes may have been implemented.

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.spectator.co.uk/2018/06/marxism-didnt-die-its-alive-and-well-and-living-among-us/amp/

You can’t say Communism is dead and is just a boogeyman. And there may be some semantics over Communism/Bolshevism/Marxism/Socialism/cultural Marxism/postmodernism/‘progressivism’ etc.

But they are all part of essentially an identical world view.

What else are “diversity” and “equality” and “multiculturalism” aside from Communist-type buzzwords? And these words are literally pumped 24/7 into the minds of people. You will struggle to find some early 20s women who can avoid saying the world “equality” every other sentence they speak.

What other explanation is there for transgenderism to be such a popular topic in the current culture?

I mean, what tiny percentage of people are even transgender? And of that tiny number, how many transgenders are in such positions of power that they have managed to get their cause so spoken about across social media, television, Government laws, etc? Yet it is a huge talking point across America.

In which case, how and why is this topic so big? What else is current militant feminism aside from a form of Marxism? Why else are these types such rabid supporters of abortion and debasing themselves in some manner or other ‘just like men’?

Or look at the education of the young, it is about “participation trophies” and making public examinations ever less rigorous and making education of the young easier, not more difficult. Excellence is not celebrated in the same manner as “everyone doing their best.”

Look at popular culture at large. Listen to some of the most popular music and what passes for ‘talent’ or how vile the lyrics are, or how monstrously ugly so many public and other buildings popping up are. Steel and glass monstrosities a thousand miles high everywhere. Little concern for beauty.

Why do people talk about “white privilege” and “unconscious bias,” especially in Universities of all places, when such people should be able to see straight through these utterly laughable notions?

Why is America still so obsessed with ideas of race? Why is the topic of race one of the only ones a Democrat will even talk about?

Why else do the Democrats want millions of foreigners moving in? Because they typically vote Left, will rely on the State, vote almost solely for more State power, and hopefully in the Dems view, lead to a one party nation through these demographic changes. How is this anything other than Communism?

How is multiculturalism and “open borders” anything other than Communism? And this is replicated across the West. The EU is solely about creating a European superstate and having as much unaccounted for State power as possible. Why are there “open borders” across much of the West?

For all the same reasons they are in America. These ideas are spreading concurrently across America, Europe and other nations, but few other places on Earth. How could this be arising naturally? It isn’t!

Glasgow University in Scotland has just agreed to pay £20m in “slavery reparations” and a University in Australia has just yesterday taken down paintings of alumni due to a lack of “diversity” and students in America want to pull down statues of historical figures - how the fuck else can this all be happening across the West at the exact same time, under the exact same ideological outlooks? It isn’t a boogeyman, these are simple facts.

Almost all of the below words are connected to standard beliefs of Marxist zero sum games, or are otherwise similar Communist type ideas:

  • white privilege
  • diversity
  • equality
  • feminism
  • transgenderism
  • multiculturalism
  • racism
  • no borders
  • no human is illegal

And why else is America so beholden to ideas of “equality”, when Christianity, upon which it was founded, makes clear all are to be seen as equal. When women, other races, homosexuals, etc, are and have long been “equal” in the eyes of the law? Things are as equal as they can be. Nature is not equal.

Yet, “equality” is screamed day and night. The explanation for this is entrenched Communism.

What do Conservatives do in the face of all of the above? Absolutely nothing. Look to line their pockets and turn the other way. See how these ideologies have gained power, and simply join in. Show how woke and enlightened they themselves are, in a never ending race with the Left to the bottom.

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This was enlightening. Turns out our Founding Fathers were Communists then. Who knew? Our Founding Fathers betrayed us by founding a country on Marxist principles.

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Next step is the antisemitism.

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