The Military Protects Our Borders. Defending Freedom is up to We, the People--as Activist Individuals

[Last year, I published my usual Memorial Day Tribute. I followed it up with this post. You can read my tribute by clicking the link. But the point of this post is no longer an afterthought. Given the sharp turn toward statism that followed the last election, the point that defending and upholding freedom is an intellectual battle that must be taken up by private citizens can't be made strongly enough. There are no credible threats to American freedom coming from the outside. The threat is internal. That point must be put front and center this Memoral Day. The last century, our military defeated the external totalitarian threats from fascism, theocracy, and Communism. The totalitarian threat is now internal. Our military can do nothing about that. Last century, the military did its job. As private citizens, it's now our turn. Honor the memory of Americans who gave their lives on the battlefields of shooting wars by taking up intellectual arms on the battlefield of ideas--the ideas of the American Founding that grew out of The Enlightenment. That is the only way to defeat the advance domestic totalitarianism.

[Thanks] 

American soldiers killed in action certainly deserve our gratitude and honor. But not for the usually recited reason. 

Memorial Day will once again feature the mantra that soldiers died defending our freedom and individual rights. One popular song even includes the phrase, “At least I know I’m free, and I won't forget the ones who died who gave that right to me.” Yet today the news is full of horror stories of business owners being fined and shut down, their livelihoods stripped away, price controls imposed, even their customers arrested, for defying orders by political leaders wielding “emergency” powers. Where’s the military? Today, for the first time since the Jim Crow era, we have an administration and a political partythat has made racism official government policy. One that believes government coercion is the solution to every crisis, real or imagined. One that seeks to roll back First Amendment freedoms. One that seeks to dilute the anti-tyranny checks and balances of our governmental structure our Founders put in place (e.g. neutering the Senate, abolishing the Electoral College) The list of intiatives aimed at attacking our individual rights is seemingly endless. And its increasingly coming from the Right, as well.

In the last 100 years, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers died on the battlefield. In that same 100 years, our general freedom, especially economic freedom, has steadily eroded due to the growth of the regulatory welfare state. While our First Amendment freedoms have fared somewhat better, they today face withering attacks on multiple fronts, as are the governmental checks and balances put in place by the Founders to protect us from tyranny due to concentration of government power. Where was the military? Where is the military?

The fact is, contrary to Memorial Day propaganda, the military’s job is to protect our borders, not our freedom. The fight to establish, maintain, and defend freedom is a philosophical, not a military, fight. It is fought with words and ideas, not guns and tanks. It is fought within, not outside, our borders. It is fought among the civilian, not military, population. The fight for freedom requires, not military combat, but mind-to-mind combat. The Founding generation’s defeat of the British Army, heroic as that was, did not secure our rights. Our rights were secured afterward, on the battlefield of political philosophy and constitutional law. That battlefield—the one of ideas, not arms—is where our Founders took the first and most crucial steps toward fulfilling the promise of the Declaration of Independence, the creation of a government “to secure these rights, drawing their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The enemies of freedom exist not only in foreign dictatorships, but among us right here in America. The military has done a fine job of protecting us from foreign enemies. We, the people of the United States, have done poorly in our job of protecting our rights at home. By the design of some, the neglect and complacence of others, and ignorance of many, and the fear of "argument" or of "offending" by still others, we have granted our government more and more power to restrict our individual rights. We must abandon our false sense of security that we can rely on the military to preserve and restore our liberty. The U.S. military has given us a virtually impenetrable forcefield to live behind. It is entirely up to we, as individual citizens, to secure and restore our freedom and make our rights inalienable--to make sure that impenetrable forcefield continues protecting something worthwhile--a free society.

Happy Memorial Day.

Related Reading:

America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It by C. Bradley Thompson

A Memorial Day Tribute

July 4, 1776: Words that Will Never Be Erased

The Declaration of Independence

Atlas Shrugged: America’s Second Declaration of Independence—Onkar Ghate

On This Constitution Day, Remember the Declaration of Independence

On This Veterans Day, Remember the Productive Americans Who Support the Greatest Military in History

The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty – Timothy Sandefur

A New Textbook of Americanism — edited by Jonathan Hoenig

The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’: Oakland Reprises the Confederacy.

Amanda Prestigiacomo reports on a horrendously immoral, anti-American, and racist policy imposed on the residents of Oakland, California by its mayor, Libby Schaaf, and its city government. In Democrat Mayor Giving $500 A Month To Families Of Color To Shrink ‘Racial Wealth Gap’, Prestigiacomo explains that poor white families are excluded from the program.

Democratic Mayor Libby Schaaf of Oakland, California, announced a new program Tuesday that would give $500 a month no-strings-attached checks to some low income families of color, though low income white families are expressly excluded.

Starting this spring, about 600 randomly selected families of color in Oakland will receive $500 checks each month for at least a year and a half. The included families will have to make less than $30,000 annually and have at least one child.

And, again, they cannot be white.

“To qualify, families must have at least one child and make less than 50 percent of the area median — about $59,000 annually for a family of three,” The Washington Post detailed. “And they must be Black, Indigenous or otherwise identify as people of color.”

It’s not your standard forced redistribution of wealth, legalized theft. It is not just racist. The ugly hand of egalitarianism tops off this program. The phony “problem” of economic inequality is being applied:

“There are huge [wealth and income] gaps between people of color and our white residents,” Schaaf told The Washington Post, seemingly rationalizing the express exclusion of poor white people. “With the limited resources of this pilot, we would like to understand better how we can understand these disparities as well as address overall poverty.”

How do mere statistical disparities justify stealing money from taxpayers to hand out to people who didn’t earn it? They don’t, any more than the money in your wallet justifies a burglar’s robbing you. While this program is voluntarily funded—

The money comes from a $7 million fund raised through the Oakland Resilient Families program, according to the New York Post. The program is “100% funded through philanthropic donations,” the City of Oakland noted in a March 23 announcement.

—this is a trial balloon that advocates hope will serve as a model for a federal program.

Schaaf’s program is ostensibly intended to be temporary, but the Democrat makes clear that she’d like the program to be adopted federally.

“The federal government is the only one that can provide an entitlement to meet whatever need there is,” said Schaaf.

People could spend their money any way they want, of course. But the federal connection is one reason why this program should be called out. Another is that no United States governmental entity should ever be involved in this or like programs. Despite the philanthropic funding source, the government is bound by the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Just as a government cannot favor one religion over another, the government cannot discriminate based on skin color, as this program does. The private Oakland Resilient Families can discriminate, of course. Racial discrimination is evil, but private individuals have that right. Not so, governmental entities. While I’m not a constitutional expert, and there are narrowly defined allowances for governmental racial discrimination, my view is that by actively promoting this program, the Oakland government is violating the U.S. Constitution and likely the California State Constitution.

This is more evidence of the racism of the Anti-Racists. That this Oakland program is racist and violates the14th Amendment guarantee of equality before the law requires no further commentary. And it is only one of many similar mostly Democratic policies coming down the pike. (Vermont’s vaccine distribution program, though superficially “justified” for medical reasons, is racially biased. President Biden’s Covid relief bill contains an explicitly racist farm subsidy program. And Marin County, California, has a racist guaranteed income program similar to Oakland’s, but that includes public (taxpayer) funding.)

This is not merely another welfare state forced transfer program, which are meant, at least on paper, to lift the poor. Oakland is not even about reparations, which carry an element of plausibility and arguability—actual victims of racist government policies should be compensated. More deeply, this is egalitarianism in action. Egalitarianism holds that equality of material and spiritual outcome is the fundamental moral value and standard of good and evil, regardless of individual attributes, achievements, character, or moral standing. These individual diversities and many others that affect individual outcomes, natural as they are, are irrelevant to the egalitarian. Human beings are devoid of souls, or their souls are irrelevant, according to egalitarianism. They are hollow shells. Statistical group disparities, or “gaps”—collectivism—is all that matters. Justice has no place in the egalitarian universe. Yet, no one has ever offered a rational argument in favor of the premise that inequality in, say, income and wealth (aka "wealth gaps') is in any respect problematic, or that equality of any kind other than equal rights before the law is good.

Programs like Oakland's are meant to equalize people's lives, as an end in itself. This is unnatural and, I submit, evil. That's egalitarianism—evil stripped naked of all pretense. It begins with theft and ends in Killing Fields.

The 19th Century Abolitionists fought a long hard ideological “cold Civil War” against the remnants of slavery in America, culiminating in a long and bloody hot Civil War that finally eraticated slavery in the South. But the anti-slave forces didn’t stop there. They solidified their victory over slavery with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments—the Civil War Amendments—clarifying the intent of the “glorious liberty document” by explicitly guaranteeing full citizenship and equality before the law for the emancipated slaves and all Americans regardless of color or economic status. The Civil rights Movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. fought, and won, the battle against race-based Jim Crow laws. The racist, egalitarian Oakland program is a direct rollback of at least the 14th Amendment, and more broadly the spirit of the Civil War Amendments, as well as a repudiation of the Civil Rights Movement. This is not only Jim Crow 2.0. The ghost of the Confederacy hangs over the Oakland government and this anti-American program. For shame.

Related Reading:

Racism— by Ayn Rand

The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’

Heather McGhee Shamefully Links Racism to ‘Whites’, Anti-Racism to Socialism, and Capitalism to Racists

The Racism of the Anti-Racists: Dr. Jill Biden, Wanda Blanchett, and Dr. Bob Harris

The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’: San Diego’s ‘Educators’

The Racism of the 'Anti-Racists': 'This New America' - Apartheid?

The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’: The NJ State Budget

The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’: NJ Governor Murphy’s Strange and Discriminatory ‘Baby Bonds’ Scheme

An Anti-Racist Education for Middle Schoolers by ROBBY SOAVE for Reason

QUORA: ‘What is the best argument you have for owning a gun?’

 QUORA: ‘What is the best argument you have for owning a gun?’

I posted this answer:

The right of self-defense.

Fortunately, we have a government that’s essential purpose is to protect individual rights to life, liberty, and property. This means acting as our agent of self-defense.* The government’s existence derives from our individual right of self-defense, but does not supersede it. 

But the government can’t be your bodyguard 24/7. At any time, criminals can threaten or harm a law-abiding citizen[s]. These rights obviously imply the right of a citizen to act in his own self-defense when the option of calling on a government agent like a policeman does not exist, such as during the commission of a crime when the threat is imminent. It logically follows that the citizen has the right to possess the adequate means of self-defense, which includes ownership and use of a gun, and to use that means when it is reasonable to do so. The job of the government is to regulate gun ownership, to define the circumstances under which the private citizen may legitimately use the gun, and to establish oversight of usage after the fact, within the bounds of the individual right of self-defense as it relates to the rights of others. Resolving those issues is the province of the philosophy of law.

* [The government has steadily gone further and further beyond this function, becoming a major rights-violator. But that is a subject for another day.]

Related Reading:

Answering QUORA Questions About the Second Amendment

Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens’ Scary Attack on the Right of ‘Personal Self-Defense'

The Second Amendment Is About an Individual Right, Not a Collective One by Michael Marshall for The University of Virginia School of Law 

Burden of Proof is On Government in Concealed Carry Case

Gun Control Should focus On Principles, Not Guns

What does it Mean to Say that Government is the Individual's "Agent of Self-defense?"

Is There a Right to Carry a Gun in Public?

Biden’s Racist Education Trial Balloon

In Biden Administration Prioritizes "Wokeism," Critical Race Theory In Schools, Kerry Mcdonald reports for The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE):

The Biden administration is taking new steps to promote Critical Race Theory and The New York Times’s controversial 1619 Project in US education programs. In a proposed federal rule issued on Monday, the US Department of Education indicated that it will be using taxpayer funds to award millions of dollars in American history and civics education grants that prioritize the belief that America is systemically racist.

The grant program seeks “projects that incorporate racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse perspectives into teaching and learning,” and refers to President Biden’s Inauguration Day executive order that explains how our country is plagued by “systemic racism” and “deserves an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda” to address this issue.

The new federal proposed rule refers to the 1619 Project and related curriculum resources as a “landmark” model for US history and civics education, despite its agenda-driven hostility against capitalism, its flawed historical analysis that many scholars have deemed false, and the Times’s own correction of the project.

The grant prioritization also pushes for greater emphasis on “anti-racism” training in schools, and quotes the work of Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist.

The 1619 Project reinterprets the American Founding so as to cancel liberty equality and prioritize slavery, in contradiction to the plain words of the Declaration of Independence and the history of the period between 1619 and 1776, when the influences that shaped the minds of the Founding generation congealed and which is to be cancelled out. Critical Race Theory is the centralizing of “race” (skin color) as the primary consideration in every cultural and political issue. If that sounds like racism, you’d be correct. If you think that’s an exaggeration, read on.

In White House Tiptoes Into 'Anti-Racism' Culture War, The Dispatch objectively analyzes Biden’s initiative. Here are some excerpts from the article, with my annotates, which are highlighted. All italics are my emphasis.

[Biden’s] proposed Department of Education rule prioritizing civics projects concerning 'systemic marginalization' may be small, but critics are alarmed by what it symbolizes. 

The American History and Civics Education programs, through which the Department of Education distributes a handful of grants per year for teachers and high school students to learn more about their country and its history, are a tiny backwater of the sprawling $74 billion department. But thanks to a new proposed rule, the longstanding program stands to become a culture-war flashpoint as the Biden administration’s first foray into the world of “anti-racist” education.

Never mind that this is "small" and "a tiny backwater." This is a dangerous trial balloon. It must be called out and stopped. Evil often starts as a trial balloon.

The rule, a draft of which was entered into the Federal Register last week, would prioritize “projects that incorporate racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse perspectives into teaching and learning.”

This is not meant as it sounds, tolerance of different viewpoints. It is the postmodern premise that there is no objective reality or facts, but only equally valid "perspectives." This is not an educational principle. It is anti-mind and anti-reason. 

Anti-racism is the principle—newly in vogue among progressives in recent years—that it is insufficient for white people to simply be “not racist,” in the sense of not harboring personal prejudice against minorities. Rather, anti-racism theory states, there exists a society-wide moral imperative to actively work to fight systemic racism wherever it exists—which is, by definition, anywhere one racial group is doing better on aggregate than another.

Which means, a collectivist backdoor into Egalitarianism, plain and simple. No need to investigate the causes of the disparities. Just assume racism is the cause. “Systemic racism” is the catch phrase that announces, “I have no evidence for racism, nor do I need any.”

Scholar Ibram X. Kendi, whom the proposed rule also cites, argued in his book How to Be an Antiracist that “racial discrimination is not inherently racist.” In fact, racial discrimination can be anti-racist so long as it “is creating equity.”

“The only remedy to racist discrimination,” Kendi wrote, “is antiracist discrimination.”

Kendi’s book has become a kind of “bible” or reference for the Anti-Racist movement. Kendi reinterprets racism from a concept with an objective definition to a means to an egalitarian/socialist end. But what Kendi actually makes clear is that Critical Race Theory is openly and by design a racist theory. Biden’s “education” initiative is not only Egalitarian, but explicitly racist.

It isn’t unprecedented for the White House to weigh in on the cultural debate over how slavery and racism should be taught in schools. In an attempt to counterprogram the 1619 Project with “patriotic history,” the Trump administration empaneled a “1776 Commission” in September 2020.

Trump set the precedent. In another Fee article, Kerry Mcdonald presses this important point:

“Emboldening the federal government to execute education policy may seem appealing when your preferred politician or party is in power, but that power remains when leadership inevitably sways to another politician or party. If you wouldn’t support a Biden ‘1619 Commission,’ then you shouldn’t support Trump’s ‘1776 Commission.’ If you wouldn’t support mandatory ‘critical race theory’ taught in your local schools, then you shouldn’t support mandatory ‘patriotic education’ either.”

This is what you get when you have a thorough-going pragmatist as a stand-in for Americanism. While Trump's banning of CRT in federal training was appropriate, his foray into federal control of public education curriculum is a disaster. More harm than good. The Dispatch elaborates on this point.

But former Trump Department of Education officials point out one critical qualitative difference: The 1776 Commission entered the trenches of the history-of-racism debate, but the department under Trump never used federal funding to incentivize the teaching of either side of that debate in school curricula. “Despite clear preferences and views on what is proper or appropriate, for four years Secretary DeVos and the Trump administration steadfastly avoided putting a thumb on the scale in terms of any curriculum decisions,” said Nate Bailey, who served as chief of staff to Betsy DeVos, Trump’s secretary of education. “I can’t tell you how many times Betsy said, to friends and foes alike, ‘There is no role for the federal government when it comes to curriculum.’ That’s a local decision.”

But is that enough? Just opening the door implies the next step. 

Since its inception, the Department of Education has been prohibited by law from mandating or prescribing curriculum content or standards.

It’s a prohibition that has long been accompanied by general public hostility toward top-down curricular directives. Even efforts to standardize curricula via the voluntary adoption of national standards typically fail to evade suspicion that Washington is butting in where it doesn’t belong—think of the controversies surrounding Common Core during the Obama years.

A ban on mandating content doesn’t necessarily prevent the department from incentivizing specific types of programs by including funding for them in discretionary grants. Still, it’s unusual for grant priorities to focus on curriculum content.

See what I mean? The law prohibiting the federal Education Department from “mandating or prescribing curriculum content or standards” falls apart when that same department funds education. Government funding implies control, because funding grants can’t be without conditions. If you want an effective ban on federal control of local education, you need to eliminate the grants or, better yet, eliminate the federal Department of Education altogether.

Need more evidence? Continue.

But what is unquestionably significant is what the rule signifies about what the Biden administration sees as the sort of civics education worth investing federal money in. That doesn’t mean much now—but it’s likely to become more important in the months ahead. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have been tossing around the idea of dramatically beefing up federal investment in civics education. The Educating for Democracy Act, which would appropriate $1 billion of federal money per year for new discretionary grants for teaching civics, was introduced last year with bipartisan cosponsors in both the House and the Senate.

According to Finn, the question is what will happen “if the federal money gets authorized and appropriated in large quantities and is then administered through the same political sensibility as this little program we’ve been talking about.”

“There is a larger-scale mischief on the horizon,” he said, “if we get a big bucks program on the heels of this little one.”

Exactly! 

I have often stated that Critical Race Theory, aka “Anti-Racism”, is the re-mainstreaming of racism in America. But that understates the corruption of CRT. Even in the times when American culture was the most racist, there were many Americans who were not racist, and who fought against it. These genuine anti-racists were individualists. CRT, which is thoroughly collectivist, means to make everyone racist, viewing every aspect of American culture through the lens of skin color, divided between oppressor and oppressed groups. Reprising the barbarians that sacked the Roman Empire, CRT is primitive tribalism invading civilization.

We should not take comfort in the belief that this is a relatively inconsequential part of the Department of Education. It is part of Biden’s core mission to forge an “ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda.” “Equity” here does not mean fairness or justice. It means tyrannical form of socialism imbued with totalitarian Egalitarianism. No one will be safe from this evil agenda.

RELATED READING:

You Have to Read This Letter: A New York father pulls his daughter out of Brearley with a message to the whole school. Is the dam starting to break? Posted by Bari Weiss

I Refuse to Stand By While My Students Are Indoctrinated: “Children are afraid to challenge the repressive ideology that rules our school. That’s why I am.” A teacher at Grace Church High School in Manhattan. posted by Bari Weiss

‘Anti-Racism’, or the re-Mainstreaming of Racism

The ‘1619 Project’ Fraud Begins its Poisonous Infiltration into American Politics

 

The Collectivist Left Appropriates an Inhumane Christian Doctrine to Obliterate Americanism

Discrimination and Disparities by Thomas Sowell

Individualism vs. Collectivism: Our Future, Our Choice—Craig Biddle

QUORA: 'I haven't heard any valid reason to restrict [Voting] other than felony crimes. Why are so many state legislatures trying to put restrictions?'

 QUORA: 'The constitution gives the right to vote. I haven't heard any valid reason to restrict other than felony crimes. Why are so many state legislatures trying to put restrictions?'

I posted this answer:

Let me first state that I do not like the use of the words “restrict” and “restrictions” in the question. First of all, laws do not “restrict” felony crimes. They forbid them. The term “restrict” means “to confine within bounds.” Well, any rule does that. And any right, properly understood, implies boundaries--the boundary being that no one can exercise their rights in a way that violates the rights of others. 

So when the question states “I haven't heard any valid reason to restrict voting, the questioner implies that elections should have no boundaries--i.e. no rules. Then should elections be chaotic free-for-alls in which anyone can vote without registration or identity, as many times as they want, on behalf of anyone they please, dead or alive, whether one month old or 100,  under as many different names as they feel like, with votes counted in any way anyone feels like counting them? Who would trust the outcome of such an election?

All voter laws are restrictive, because they set boundaries, or rules. And these rules, like any rule, takes effort on the part of citizens. So the question “Why are so many state legislatures trying to put restrictions” on voting begs the question, Why should there be any election laws at all? The answer is obvious. The question should be, are the rules easy enough for any reasonable adult with the legal right to vote to comply with, while maintaining fair and trustworthy elections and minimizing the potential for voter fraud? 

As to why so many states are revising their election laws, it probably has a lot to do with the chaotic 2020 elections, when COVID-19 compelled states to change election procedures “on the fly” in order to have the elections. Many of the changes have proved to be popular, like early and mail-in voting, so legislatures are trying to incorporate some of the emergency changes into their general election laws. Former HHS Secretary Ben Carson made this point on CNBC in regard to early voting, which has proved very popular. My home state of New Jersey just instituted in-person early voting into its election laws for the first time, allowing for up to nine days to vote early. Georgia’s new election law codifies a minimum of 17 days for early in-person voting.

Almost all states are in the process of revising their election laws. Partisans in the press spin these proposed laws as “restrictive” if proposed by Republican legislatures and “expansive” if proposed by Democratic ones. But in fact all of these laws are restrictive in the sense of instituting or revising rules for elections. We can debate any particular election rule on the merits. But I have seen no evidence as of yet to suggest that any feature of these new election laws prevent any reasonable person, willing to make minimal effort to comply, from voting, or are intended to do so.

Of course, the U.S. Constitution doesn’t “give the right to vote.” The right to vote is a derivative of our inalienable rights, which are mentioned in the Declaration of Independence and which predate the government, as per the Declaration. The phrase “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” obviously implies some method for the people to give their consent -- i.e., the right to vote. I skipped explaining why the Constitution doesn’t “give” rights because that issue was handled reasonably well by Galen Barnaby here, although his answer goes off the rails near the end when he peddles the vast voter fraud theory.

Related Reading:

Voting laws: How Georgia compares to other states -- By David Wickert forThe Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Statistical Disparities Don’t Proof Discrimination in Voter ID Laws

The Vote: Get Off Your Butt and Register—But Keep the Nanny State Out of It

Voting Rights are Not the ‘Most Fundamental Right’—or Even a Fundamental Right

16 Year Old Voters? How About 21?

Memo to John D. Atlas: How About Let's Not Suppress Anybody's Vote, or Voice

Freedom Is Not About the Right to Vote, So I’m Voting Anti-Democrat Across the Board

HR-1 is An Assault on Free Speech, Property Rights, Freedom of Conscience, and Privacy

Democracy Doesn’t ‘Win’ When Free Speech is Suppressed, Voting Rights of No Voting Rights.