Retaking College Hill - The Adults Are Back by Walter Donway

This is the 5-Star Review I have just posted on amazon.com: 

A wonderful story of ideas, courage, reason, love, action, and commitment to reform an irrational university

Ideas have consequences.  They have life and death consequences for billions of individuals living their daily lives and pursuing their individual values.  Good ideas are not easy to identify. Very bad ideas are all too often passionately adopted by intelligent people.  Discovering good ideas and rejecting bad ideas demands a commitment to reason, knowledge of mankind’s history, and the willingness to debate those ideas with others.  We rely heavily on the education of young people to provide them with the knowledge that they may engage ideas to improve their lives, the lives of their family members, and the lives of their neighbors.  Education in America has lost its way and betrayed its mission.  This is especially true of our colleges and universities.  

Walter Donway’s new novel Retaking College Hill - The Adults Are Back takes on this most crucial issue in our civilization.  He tells a thrilling story of how a thoroughly postmodern, neo-Marxist, group-identity-centric university might be set back onto its proper education mission.  The story is one of ideas, melded with romance, and acts of courage in the face of intimidation and actual violence.  Men of reason have to confront the howling, brutal mobs that too many students and faculty have joined.

The university is an elite, historic university modeled upon Brown University, from which I graduated in 1969 and from which the author graduated in 1966.  It was in the late 1960s when many elite and many not so elite universities started to seriously take a path away from teaching the intellectual values of the Enlightenment and the history of Western Civilization, or any comprehensive and contextual history at all.  This was certainly true of Brown.  Brown has continued down this path, taking an evermore collectivist, group identity, and anti-individualist direction.

Damian, a graduate of the university returns from service in the Navy to see his father, a dean of the university. His father is alone in the university administration still committed to trying to admit the brightest and best prepared students without regard for group identities.  He is also committed to teaching the values of the Enlightenment and the history and values of Western Civilization.  He has a few, a very few, allies on the faculty.  There is a philosophy professor and a physicist on the faculty who are allies.  The physicist shares my evaluation that catastrophic man-made global warming is a failed hypothesis, so his life is threatened.  Asian and Jewish students must have several hundred points higher scores on their SATs compared to other identity groups to even have a chance of admission.  Courses have to be simplified and made subjective, rather than objective, so that intellectually less capable identity group students can pass the courses.  There is a huge administrative bureaucracy dedicated to diversity.  But worst of all, there are faculty and student groups determined that the only ideas that can be held or discussed on the campus are those of postmodernism, neo-Marxism, collectivism, group identity with oppressor/oppressed tags, anti-carbon fuel, and anti-free market ideas.

A speaker brought to the campus by the philosophy professor to give a talk opposed to these ideas is met with extreme violence.  The dean is also threatened with violence.  Fortunately, Damian has invited a SEAL friend to spend his leave with him.  His SEAL friend is able to help Damian deal with some of the violence on campus and near it.  This is a novel of action as well as one of ideas and their consequences.  It is directed primarily at thinking people, but it is not at all necessary to be an intellectual to enjoy this novel.  The characters are well-developed and just interesting people.  The main characters are people with whom you should enjoy spending some time!

Damian is an admirer of the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, as am I.  There are very brief discussions of her philosophy with Damian’s philosophy professor mentor and with his lively and beautiful girlfriend. She is a very intelligent student thoroughly committed to socialism who grew up in Israel.  Atlas Shrugged has a transformative effect upon her as she reads it to better understand Damian.  It has such an effect upon many young people who want a rational and integrated philosophy of life.  Of course, Objectivism, like all ideas, should be subject to vigorous discussion and evaluation on our college campuses.  It is Damian’s dream to become a college philosophy faculty member to assure this happens.  I wish him the best of good fortune!

The Leftist Media Smear Campaign Continues Against Trump and Individualism

A civilized society minimizes the use of force, denying all groups and individuals the initiated use of force.  A legitimate government has the primary function of protecting individual rights from violence and the threat of the use of force.  There are minor additional functions to protect life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness from some natural threats to life.  The President of the United States has the job of executing the laws that are constitutionally intended to secure the equal rights of all American citizens.

The media dominated by the postmodernist and collectivist viewpoint has an agenda dedicated to painting all who oppose their collectivism and their claims that some factions deserve political dominance over other Americans as racists, as fascists, as angry nationalists with malevolent intent toward all non-Americans, and generally as ignorant boobs.  The factions that should rule are single women, blacks and Hispanics, union leaders, educators, radical anti-human environmentalists, government workers, and one-world collectivists --- all guided by so-called Progressive Elitists. White men and the women married to them, business owners and managers, and non-union, and in some respects union, workers are generally to be forced into submission by a huge government workforce of thugs with no compunction in violating their equal rights to life, liberty, property, self-ownership, the pursuit of happiness, and their equally broad rights to freedom of conscience and association.  To oppose bigger government and more government controls defines one as a racist even as one advances the principle that all American citizens have equal rights which should not be violated by government.  To oppose the designation of some racial or gender groups as worthy of favored government actions earns one the racist epithet.  To oppose collectivism and the lumping of individuals into broad groups and claiming that their rights are defined by the group that they have been deposited into in accordance with Postmodernist feelings, makes one a Deplorable.

The Postmodernist Left has long cast the opposition to this collectivism and the advocates of individualism as fascists and white nationalists.  There are Americans who are fascists, but fascists are in favor of big, collectivist government.  Fascists characteristically favor some factions over other factions, often with a racial basis.  Some American fascists want special favors for white Americans, while others want special favors for other ethnically defined groups.  Facism is actually inconsistent with the general beliefs of vast majority of Republicans who believe in smaller government and more equal rights than do Democrats.  Only a small minority of white fascists vote Republican in reaction to the Democrats policies favoring certain non-white groups upon racial lines.

The Democrats have a very long history of racial favoritism and have only recently in that history switched from favoring white Americans at the expense of other Americans to favoring black and Hispanic Americans at the expense of white Americans.  This kind of factionalism has been long opposed by Republicans, as has big government, although only in comparison with the Democrat's advocacy of constantly larger government.  The push of the Democrat Party to selectively prevent the exercise of the rights of white Americans, especially those of men, has pushed a few white nationalists, including some fascists, into supporting Republicans in some cases.  Those few cases have been used to paint all Republicans as welcoming fascists and white nationalists into their ranks. This is not the case, but the ballot box is secret.  The leftist media does not care about the truth.  For them, the truth is not about reality, it is defined as that which supports their agenda.

The Enlightment, or Modernist, philosophy holds that man can know reality through the use of his mind, that his efforts to think rationally are not guaranteed success without error, that he must test his observations and deductions in the management of his own life and in the choice of his values, and that he must have the opportunity to both profit from his correct thoughts and to learn from his mistakes.  The rights of the individual follow from this need to use his own mind to manage his own life.

Postmodernism fundamentally undermines this philosophy and claims that man cannot use his mind to know reality, that in reality man only acts upon his feelings, that his feelings are determined by an array of group identities, and that a huge government apparatus is required to determine which factions will prevail at the expense of which other factions because in a society governed only by feelings and group identities conflict is the expected constant.  Harmony is impossible.  Only the warfare of one faction against another for raw power is realistic.  Man cannot govern his actions by reasoned principles.  Consequently, the government must use force constantly to control the outcomes among factions.  This philosophy is the basis for a belief in socialism and in collectivism at the most fundamental level.  It produced both the Communist and Fascist versions of socialism, including the fascist variant National Socialist Workers Party Nazism. Postmodernists control most American universities and trained most American journalists and bureaucrats.  The mainstream media is thoroughly indoctrinated in this Postmodernist belief which fundamentally embraces violence first in the streets and then exercised by an all-powerful government under their control.

One can only understand the leftist media treatment of the violence in Charlottesville, VA in this context.  The leftist, collectivist media is determined to make it appear that Trump has been reluctant to condemn fascists and white nationalists, despite the fact that he did so in very clear and strong terms.  Listen to his complete press conference for yourself.  Trump also condemned violence by all factions and he was right that there were opposing groups at Charlottesville that were eager for violence and that did become violent.  It is hardly surprising that leftist forces were eager for battle in the streets.  They have a long history of this with street riots against the war in Vietnam, Republican and Democrat National Conventions, Capitalism, globalization, and the inauguration of Trump. Street riots and the use of violence are a long accepted and utilized tactic of the left and of major factions in the Democrat Party.  Why not?  Their constant advocacy of collectivism and ever more controlling government is itself dependent upon a willingness to use force to suppress the rights of individuals. As for the Nazis, they were violent in the streets from the beginning of their history as the main socialist alternative to the also violent Communists in Germany between the World Wars.

My identity is not defined by the fact that I am a so-called white American male.  My identity is defined by the use of my mind for 70 years to understand reality.  When I was a small child I realized that it was critically important to use my mind and to be as rational as possible.  The observations I have made of life, the evaluations I have made of those observations, the integration of my evaluations into a self-consistent viewpoint and philosophy, the totality of the decisions I have made and of the values I have chosen play a much, much greater role in determining my identity than does the fact that I am a white American male.  The fact that I am a white American male and was raised in a middle class military family is significant, but it most definitely is not at all adequate to understanding who I am.  There are many, many ways in which I chose how to develop my identity.

There is no way that the Postmodernists can tolerate the existence of such an individual as myself.  Apparently in the last Presidential election, many Americans had at least a significant realization that the Postmodernist media and the Democrat presidential candidate would not tolerate their deplorable natures either.  Many of us Deplorables think the natures we have developed for ourselves in our lifetimes are actually pretty decent and suit us quite well, thank you very much.  We do not intend to see our individual identities crushed by Postmodernists.

Trump may not be as smooth and consistent as we would like, but he has been courageous in opposing the media in its Postmodernist, collectivist agenda.  Compared to most politicians, he has risen for the most part as an advocate of equal rights for all Americans and for some considerable relief from oppressive government dictates.  He is trying to fight back against the Left's use of racial identity politics to rob us all of our individual identities.  It would appear that as a problem-solver in the construction industry, Trump came to hold reason in much higher regard than do his collectivist, Postmodern opponents in academia, the media, and the bureaucracy.

Obama Nonsense on Islam and Its Claim to Freedom of Religion

In his speech Sunday night, Obama claimed that those who use violence as a means to advance Islam are practicing a perverted form of Islam.  Since Islam is essentially a religion that obligates its believers to emulate Mohammad's life practices and Mohammad used violence and terror to advance his religion, it is nonsense to claim that people who believe they are using violence and terror to advance Islam are practicing a perverted form of Islam.  In the context of Islam, they are not radical, however radical they are as human beings.

Yes, most people who think of themselves as Muslims are not themselves violent in their practice of the religion.  Many are good people.  Nonetheless, those of us who are not practicing Islam have often observed that far too few Muslims are openly critical of those who use violence or terror to advance the religion.  Well, there is a very logical reason why Muslims do not offer such criticism as much as good people should.  They cannot criticize the present-day advocates of violence against non-Muslims without making an implied criticism of Mohammad himself for using violence and terror to spread his religion.  They must be silent.  Their silence is in some part due to fear, but it is also due to the fundamental beliefs of the religion itself.  Many of those Muslims who do not themselves use force to make others observe Islam make "charitable" contributions to organizations that advocate or actually use force for that purpose.

Contrary to Obama's claim that we owe Muslims all of the rights we usually allow people under the freedom of religion, we do not owe this religious freedom to any religion that advocates the use of force to make others practice that religion.  Freedom of religion, as with all freedom of conscience, has to have a foundation in the prohibition of the use of force against others as a means to practice the religion.   Given that prohibition of force, we can and should allow others their freedom of conscience, even as we claim the exercise of our own freedom of conscience.

Given that Islam is in essence the emulation of Mohammad, we can very reasonably ask if Mohammad were alive today, would we allow him to enter the United States?  I would not allow him in.  He is much too dangerous, too violent, and too committed to terrorism.  Neither would I allow those who followed his commands to commit violence against non-believers to enter the U.S.  In doing so, I would not be in violation of anyone's legitimate claim of freedom of religion.  I would be protecting most Americans from violence.

The Pre-Conditions for Religious Freedom Unmet by Islam

Religious freedom is a result of the individual right to freedom of conscience and thought.  Religious freedom is a subset of these broader freedoms.  Since religion usually calls on individuals to join with other individuals in activities including joint worship, it is also a result of freedom of association.  Religion commonly calls on people to act in prescribed ways, which they are allowed to do because individuals have a broad freedom of action, including freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the freedom to assemble, and the freedom to contribute one's time, effort, and wealth to a religious cause.

Note that freedom of religion exists in the context of broad individual rights.  These individual rights enable individuals to survive and flourish in life while preventing others from threatening them with violence and force.  Every individual has equal, sovereign individual rights based on his nature as a rational being who must use his mind and take action to sustain and maintain his life.  Man institutes government for the sole, legitimate function of protecting his and everyone else' individual rights, as properly stated in our Declaration of Independence.  When a highly limited government well-instituted, as by our Constitution, provides this protection, a very robust and choice-rich private sector results in which individuals can revel in their full individual complexity and differentiation, while cooperating for their mutual benefit with others for purposes of their choosing.  Thus men commonly live creative and productive lives in harmony and prosperity.

This understanding of the nature of man and his individual rights was unknown until the Enlightenment developed in Europe.  It mostly developed in England, Scotland, France, and the Netherlands.  These were generally Christian countries.  Christianity, as practiced for at least 1000 years prior to this, had been deeply entwined with government, actively invoking the force of governments to force the people of each country to believe in the religion, or at least to pretend to believe in it and to be constrained in their actions by its tenets.  Christianity during this period was guilty of many terrible acts of evil.  But, Christianity had a key individual at its root, Jesus Christ, who had not advocated the use of force to impose his religious ideas.  He had pointedly refused to interfere with the rule of Rome, admittedly maybe only because that would have been a pretty futile effort at the time.  The fact that Jesus Christ had not preached that Christians take control of government and use it to force people to practice his religious ideas made it feasible to reform Christianity after the Enlightenment to a sufficient degree that religious freedom became broadly possible to extend to the various forms of religions in the Enlightened countries.  The people who were brought up in this tradition came to believe that all religions should be granted freedom of religion.

Unfortunately, few people have a clear understanding of the conditions which must exist for it to be possible to have a broad freedom of religion without undermining the many individual rights that make freedom of religion possible.  It simply is not possible to offer freedom of religion to a religion which embraces the use of force to spread the religion and to subjugate those people who refuse to adopt it.

Islam became known to man through Mohammed in 610 AD in the Arabic peninsula.  The land was very primitive with many contending tribes, some of which were polytheistic and some of which were Jewish.  When Mohammed had few followers, he formed alliances of convenience with Jewish tribes and often proclaimed his desire for peace with at least some other tribal groups.  However, as he became more and more powerful, he became much more ready to use force to suppress any peoples who did not join him as followers and believe in his teachings.  He taught that Islam required Jihad, which generally was implemented by using force to conquer other people.  He developed Islam as an integrated set of religious and political beliefs in which Islam was established by the state through the Sharia Law.  Government was to advance Islam, to suppress non-believers often to the point of killing them, to collect tribute from those who submitted but did not believe, and to conquer new lands and people.  It was also to punish any Muslim who became a non-believer with death.  Basically, the integrated religion and tyrannical government model is not compatible with individual rights.

It will not be possible to extend religious freedom to Islam until and unless it reforms itself to eliminate its political component that uses force to limit greatly many individual rights.  The integrated rights of the individual cannot be in conflict with one another.  Whenever someone proposes a conflict of rights, that person has failed to correctly identify the rights of the individual.  It is very common that people do this and then they commonly say that rights bring with them responsibilities.  Meeting those responsibilities is supposed to reduce the friction, nay the conflict, of one person's rights with those of others.  Those responsibilities commonly include obligations of service to others and out and out self-sacrifice.  This is all nonsense.  Properly identified individual rights allow men to live in harmony, not conflict.

Because those who practice Islam are required to emulate Mohammed, they are essentially required to emulate his use of force to spread and maintain its integrated religious and political system.  Some may choose to emulate his earlier stage of operations when his forces were weak and he was less aggressive.  Others will follow his later actions when his forces were strong and quite ruthless in their conquering sweep across the Arabic peninsula.  People most often acquire their religious and political beliefs from their family and the society into which they are born.  They come to see their realistic choices as limited by their culture and will mostly allow their developed beliefs to vary but little from those common in their culture.  The Muslim cultures strongly discourage a wide range of beliefs within Islam itself in given areas.  Some more substantial variations do exist among Muslims as a whole, such as those between the Sunnis and the Shiites, who often have very nasty wars with each other.  We should realize that some Muslims do try hard to be decent people despite the limitations of Islam.  While we must work and fight to maintain an Enlightenment culture that honors and preserves individual rights, we do not want to be at war with all Muslims.

It is not an abberation when an Islamist uses force to advance Islam, however.  It cannot truthfully be said that the use of force means someone is not practicing Islam.  I understand this representation to be an attempt to discredit such Islamists and to limit the number of followers of Islam with which we have to contend in violent confrontations.  However, this is an attempt to deny the truth.  Islam is not so easily reformed to separate the control of government and the use of force from the religion as was the case with Christianity.  Mohammed was not Jesus Christ.  The brutal Arabic peninsula of 610 AD was not the somewhat civilized Roman Empire of Jesus' time.  The reformation of Islam may well take hundreds of years, given that the easier case of Christianity took hundreds of years.  Violence in the name of Islam may well continue for that entire time.  That violence may be extreme or radical in our Western Civilization context, but it is manifestly not extreme or radical in the context of Islam. 

There are many non-violent Islamists and many who are nice people when we interact with them on a personal basis.  We need not be at war with everyone who believes in Islam.  But, many of the personally peaceful Muslims do believe it is their religious duty to support and contribute to those who use violence to advance their religion.  Many believe that when it becomes possible for them to make Sharia Law the law of the land, they should do so.  This would trample individual rights and with the loss of those rights, a complete loss of freedom of conscience and its subset freedom of religion will result.  Understanding what is at stake in refusing to have our own society taken over by Islam is necessary if we are to maintain our precious individual rights.

It is vital that we also understand that the use of force is a true emulation of Mohammed's acts by present day Islamists and not an abberation despite Obama's and other Progressives' adamant claims that it is.  We must not lose focus on the fact that Islam is an integrated system of religion and government, not just another religion.  Islam is not compatible with individual rights and in its present common forms does not meet the conditions of a belief system that qualifies for religious freedom.  The present common effort to grant it religious freedom undermines religious freedom, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, and self-ownership.  Islam is unfortunately a very tyrannical religious and political system.

Socialized Medicine and a Doctor's Moral Obligation

A friend asked this question:

One of the arguments I have heard from proponents of socialized medicine is that it is immoral to stand by while someone dies, and therefore society is obligated to help when someone is facing a life threatening illness but can't afford the treatment. Although there is much to refute in this type of statement, I am wondering about the more difficult refutation. As a personal decision of each doctor, is it rational to make the decision to deny treatment based upon the fact of a patient's inability to pay?

The moral argument against socialized medicine, or ObamaCare in particular, is based on our equal, sovereign individual rights. It is not dependent upon whether a particular doctor decides that he must act to save a life independent of remuneration or not. It is an important moral principle that he is free to either be benevolent or not be benevolent. Now, I do believe benevolence is an important virtue, but benevolence is virtuous in the context that the person helped has value to the doctor.  Benevolence is not about self-sacrifice, since that would hardly be benevolent to oneself. 

If the person has an entitlement mentality, then the doctor generally has no rational reason to help that person without remuneration. It is perfectly moral for him to walk away. In the context of a society of largely productive and benevolent people, a doctor may be rationally inclined to provide help to those who cannot afford to pay for their care, especially if they have become ill or hurt through no great fault of their own. But, even that depends on context, such as the expense the doctor will have in helping him and whether his helping the unfortunate person means that he is not able to help someone else who can pay. He is not obliged to save the poor man, while letting the financially prepared man die! If he gives too much of his time to helping the poor, he may not be able to generate enough income to buy the medical equipment that will enable him to save many lives in the future or he may simply go out of business. The doctor must make difficult moral decisions based on a very complex context. Some may appear to make a greater effort in benevolent acts than others, but still may not be saving the most lives possible.

Rational men are going to balance these difficult decisions differently and we should be careful in our appraisals of their morality.  A doctor may be willing to give his services free in a given case, but he may be unable to convince a nurse and other assistants to give their time free.  Or the hospital may be unwilling to make an operating room available.  Now the proponent of socialized medicine will want to use force to make all of these needed experts and facilities available, but this is a violation of everyone's rights and cannot be tolerated in a civilized society.

My grandfather was a physician in the Great Depression. He was a surgeon who operated in the Mayo Clinic and all of the hospitals of Minneapolis and St. Paul. He did a very unusual number of operations on people who could not pay for them. But, people were different back then. A farmer might not have any money, but he would give Harry Christianson a chicken, which to the farmer was his fortune. Then very likely for 20 years after, when he could, he would stop by grandpa's home and leave a bag of potatoes or a bushel of corn. This was very welcome when rationing was going on in WWII for instance. Harry and his wife Bess always had free food and there was so much that Bess and her daughter Betty organized ways to get it into the hands of those in need in the city. One man decided he would paint grandpa's house in payment for an operation, but while he was painting the upper part of the exterior, union thugs knocked him off the ladder and shattered his leg. The man was not a union painter. He was just a farmer who wanted to pay a debt he believed he had. Harry and Bess put him up in one of their rooms until he was healed. The union later burned down their home because they did this.

So this is another important issue of context. There is value in helping people who put value on the help they receive. There is value in helping people who fundamentally believe that one should trade values for value.

There is little value in helping the ungrateful, however. Any deserving person, any person whose welfare one has reason to care about, will recognize the value they have received and will not presume that they have the rights of a master, while the doctor who worked so hard to develop his healing skills and knowledge is treated as his slave.  A doctor or any other service provider has the right to choose his own values and to pursue his own happiness in terms of his values.

The need of a poor person does not deprive him of this equal individual right to pursue his happiness.  Every man, whether poor or rich, whether a professional or a low-skilled worker, has this magnificent right to pursue his happiness.  No one has the right to dictate the values or the moral code which will define what his happiness will be.  All that can be required of another is that they are not allowed to initiate the use of force as a means to pursue their happiness.

This is very adequate for each of us when we exercise our freedoms and act within the private sector of our society.  In the private sector we have a wealth of potential opportunities to cooperate with others whose values are sufficiently similar to ours or in some way complementary so that each of us can pursue our goals defined by our individually chosen values.  When our values are not approved of by others, they are free to choose not to associate with us.  This is the realm of the voluntary and is relished by those who want rich choices and who abhor being forced to bend to the will of others.

In contrast to this natural realm of freedom, we have the realm of the government.  The principal property of government is its monopoly on the use of force in a society.  Because a wise society seeks to minimize the use of force and seeks to maximize individual freedom of choice and association with others, such a society has a minimal government.  Such a limited and legitimate government uses force only for the purpose of protecting the equal, sovereign rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

When government attempts to do more, it must necessarily do violence to the rights of the individual as it imposes values and moral codes upon the People.  With this loss of freedom to choose one's values, one loses many of the freedoms to use one's own mind.  One loses the choice of one's own goals.  With the loss of one's own goals, one loses all hope.  It is no accident that unfree societies become depressed societies with large increases in drug use, excessive alcohol use, and increased numbers of suicides.  Big governments do much harm to individuals and are notable in the brutally of their violence against their people should any insist on exercising their sovereign rights.  We see the party of biggest government verging close to a desire to let loose the hounds of hell upon the Tea Party people for just this reason.  Over and over they have tried to label the Tea Party people who simply want to preserve some of their individual rights as terrorists and subversives.  This makes the brutal nature of unlimited government all the more clear in our time.

The Progressive's Call for Toning Down the Rhetoric

Immediately following the awful shooting incident in Tucson, Arizona, the local sheriff called upon everyone to tone down the rhetoric, which he claimed was at a maximum in Arizona.  He implied that the shooter, who turns out to be an incoherent and truly weird leftist of some sort, performed his evil deed because the rhetoric was so angry.  Many others have joined the sheriff in calling for a reduction in the rhetoric.  This is simply a pulse in such calls ever since the agenda of the Progressive Socialist Elitists began to meet considerable resistance as the Tea Party movement grew.  Before that, for decades, the Progressive Socialist Elitists felt very much at home with such groups as the Students for a Democratic Society, the Socialist Workers Party, the Weatherman underground, the Black Panthers, socialist labor unions with numerous thugs on-board to intimidate companies and workers, and a constant propensity to support one new government program after another to force people to kowtow to one government mandate, act of thievery, or act of enslavement after another while threatening to use as much force as necessary to intimidate the people from asserting their individual rights.  It was the left who continuously made the governments more and more powerful so that special interests were induced to fight for the power over them to either protect themselves or to take advantage of that huge, unbounded power.

To some degree in 1980, the people woke up from their usual inattention and backed Ronald Reagan to rein in the growth of government.  When George H. W. Bush betrayed them with tax increases and allowed the government to grow more, they rebelled a bit again.  They put Clinton in office, who tried to thumb his nose at them with a government takeover of the medical system in his first two years.  The People became enough aroused that he backed off and soon said the era of big government was over.  After that, with a Republican Congress to hold him in check, he mostly backed policies favorable to the economy and the private sector.  For a Democrat, he was thereafter surprisingly decent on economic matters and the economy did grow, albeit with too much easy credit.  When George Bush became president, the economy was slammed both with 9/11 and with the first collapse of the bubble economy in the dot.com recession.  After his tax cuts, the economy grew, but was held back by a huge growth in the size of government at all levels and it was still plagued with too much easy credit.  Then came the oil price spike in 2007 and the precarious easy credit market collapsed.

Obama came in with his agenda to massively redistribute the income and wealth of the private sector.  He came straight from the tradition of revolutionary socialism with his links to the Weatherman Bill Ayers and many other such people.  His onslaught of government theft backed by all the force of the government soon riled up many long comatose Americans, who rediscovered the fundamental American Principle that that government which did more than protect the equal, sovereign individual rights to life, liberty, property, the ownership of one's own body and mind, and the pursuit of happiness, must of necessity be an illegitimate government as defined by our Declaration of Independence.  These Americans often recalled that the Constitution established a contract with the People for a highly limited government mostly dedicated to dealing with foreign nations and peoples and with very few powers internally.  When the politicians in power, mostly Democrats, but sometimes Republicans, refused even to listen to them and did everything they could to pass unread bills in the middle of the night and even bills whose content was mostly to be determined by unelected bureaucrats over the course of years so that no one would know what effects they would have for years, the People sometimes became angry.  This anger was pointed at by the Progressive Socialist Elitists as the equivalent of violence or at least as an incitement to violence.  They followed this up with accusations that the Tea Party people were racist and insisted on their gun rights for the purpose of promoting violence in our society.

It is clear that the calls for a reduction in the intensity of rhetoric are mostly designed to keep the People from asserting their new-found interest in their liberties.  This has been a clear attempt to reduce the calls of the People for a reduction in the size and scope of government.  Much of the latest rhetoric that the People must be moderate and meekly ask the politicians and special interests to return their rights to them, is an attempt to keep the power of government as it is now.  We ought not to give up in the least on our demands that government's size and scope be greatly reduced.

It was a serious breach of our trust in the Republicans when they backed off on the effort this week to repeal ObamaCare.  Removing the massive and blatant acts of force to be aimed at the People under ObamaCare is one of the most important ways we can reduce violence and the use of force in our society.  We must not be intimidated from calling for the removal of that violence to the very ownership of our bodies by our own government.  Imagine the violence in throwing someone in jail for 5 years because he claims he owns his own body.  Imagine the violence directed at anyone who would assert his right to his body by refusing to go to jail for 5 years or paying outrageous fines.  If the Progressive Socialist Elitists actually wanted no violence, they would not be backers of ObamaCare.  They are complete hypocrites.  The movement to reduce the size and scope of government, that monopoly on the use of force and violence, is that of the side actually opposed to violence.

Law Should Minimize the Violence in a Society

Our Founding Fathers in America thought of the function of government in very fundamental terms.  They realized that a people with no government were the prey of internal gangs of thieves and warlords and of foreign nations whose armies might sweep over them and extract tribute and servitude from them.  On the other hand, they also knew that where nation states existed, they had usually generated too many laws and had too arbitrarily changed those laws with the effect that their people were subjugated and suppressed.  The government itself, not brigands, was the main source of violence against the people in these nations.

The People of America could not freely and effectively exercise their sovereign, unalienable individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness without a government to protect them or with a government whose powers were too great, as was the case with every government of Europe at that time and of most governments throughout history.  Rational laws were essential for the purpose of giving the People the protection they needed to exercise their individual rights, but these laws had to be developed in a careful balance and with great care to keep them from becoming excessive restraints on the freedom of the People.

How could the right balance be attained?

• It had to be clear that any law was justified only to the extent that it protected the equal rights of the individual.
• The laws must be consistent with justice.
• The laws must be consistent with domestic tranquility.
• They must be consistent with the general welfare of the People and their posterity.
• The laws must be within the powers delegated to the federal government, which powers were few and explicitly delineated by the Constitution.
• The laws should be few enough and simple enough to be understood by the People.  The Supreme Law of the Land, the U.S. Constitution, was written as such a simple example.
• The laws were to be made by a bicameral legislature and had to be signed into law by the President, which was to ensure that laws were made deliberately and with a high measure of consensus by the representatives of the People.  The process was to be rather slow and to help ensure that too many laws would not be passed and that the laws could not become too complicated.  This slow, cumbersome process was also to keep the laws from changing too often.
• Because some rights of the individual had been commonly trampled by governments, many of those most often trampled were explicitly protected in the Bill of Rights and then in later Amendments to the Constitution.  In realization that men had still other rights, the 9th Amendment provided for their protection.
• Some legitimate functions of government were recognized as being best provided by the states and other local government.  The federal government was prevented from interfering with the state governments' powers by the 10th Amendment.

The Framers of the Constitution carefully crafted a federal government with all of the above limitations.  They recognized that the federal government did not have the purpose of providing for the General Welfare of the People in a broad sense, because much of the General Welfare was provided by the People for themselves and by their local government.  It had the purpose of protecting their equal, unalienable individual rights within the context of exercising some few and precisely defined powers in a manner consistent with their General Welfare.  This was an additional restriction, not a source of unenumerated powers.  One can similarly substitute the words Justice or Domestic Tranquility for General Welfare in the sentences above in this paragraph.

What is the consequence of a federal government exceeding these many strict limitations laid upon it by the Constitution?  The consequence is almost always one of suppressing the freedom of the individual to exercise his right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  In almost every excessive law, or every law exceeding the powers granted to the federal government by our Constitution, there are acts of violence called for against the individual.  This is because the individual has the sovereign, unalienable right to his life, his liberty, and his pursuit of happiness.  Every American individual has the right to think for himself, to express his thoughts in speech, to associate with and trade with others, to earn his living, to develop and own property, to choose his own values, and to manage his life in accordance with his chosen values.  But, if an individual asserts his rights and tries to defend them against their suppression by an excessive government, the response of government is to use force to enforce its laws.  But government which does not protect the rights of the individual is illegitimate and tyrannical, just as our Declaration of Independence clearly states, and such government is properly overturned by the People.  Fortunately, in the United States of America, we can do that in the next few elections.

It is a constant tactic of the Democrat socialist party that when the People become angry at the federal government and the socialists in control, that they scream that the People angry about their endangered individual rights are violent.  In the wake of the recent socialist federal government's takeover of medical care in complete disregard for the rights the People and their clearly and vehemently stated opposition to this takeover, the Democrats have used this tactic shamelessly to frighten other Americans and to seek sympathy.  Yet, these same Democrat socialists have just passed an unconstitutional law for which they have no delegated power in the Constitution and which is a clear violation of the individual's right to his own life, his own freedom to act to preserve his health and the ownership of his body, and his ability to pursue his happiness.  They have also forced the states to take on duties, which they have no power to do.

The law has established several layers of penalties for individuals who do not bow to this suppression of their liberties.  It tries to intimidate those who would dissent by putting us all further under the heel of the much despised IRS.  It forces many companies to provide a health insurance plan to be determined by government for its employees or pay a fine of $2,000 per employee.  In some cases, if a company does provide this health insurance coverage, the government may still fine it $3,000 per employee if the employee complains that the plan is too expensive for him.  In some cases, the fine for someone non-compliant with the law is $25,000 and up to 5 years in prison.  These are draconian threats which are meant to scare the People into compliance and submission to this tyrannical and unconstitutional law.  In this way, the socialist rulers hope to avoid the awkwardness of actually having to use force often to suppress the many angry Americans who rightly see this law as an infringement of their rights.  Of course, should any American proceed to actually protect his rights by taking up arms against this tyrannical government, he will be killed.  After all, these socialists are great admirers of Mao and Castro and other great socialist leaders, who would brook no resistance on the part of any backward peasants who had ancient and out-dated ideas of having individual rights.

It is socialists who are the ultimate in violent people.  They are brutal in enforcing their tyrannical laws and decrees.  It takes a great deal of violence to overcome a People's love of their individual rights, especially a People who have a long tradition of enjoying such rights, as the American People have had.  The socialists have added laws enforcing new socialist powers of government over the last 100 years at the federal government level and, periodically, the People have pushed back.  When these laws have been added slowly and in pieces, the socialists have generally managed to suppress more and more of our individual liberties.  Since Obama became the great socialist leader with the socialist radicals Pelosi in the House and Reid in the Senate, they accelerated their socialist program for the suppression of the American People.  Over and over, they have taken our hard-earned money, put us in intolerable debt, and mandated that we will do this, that, and everything else at their command.  They have consistently attacked the private sector and sucked its blood and vitality to feed the carnivorous public sector.  They have bought off some industries and special interests and damaged many others.  They have attacked our property rights and our freedom of contract.  They have gained even stronger control over education, so they can better indoctrinate our youth.  They want more power to deny us energy, which they largely do already.  They want more controls over industry and our finances.

How ridiculous that these violence-loving, tyrannical socialists are making a habit of complaining that Tea Party Americans are violent.  I have been at several Tea Party demonstrations and the police have never put on shields and visors for protection, they have never been attacked, and they have never been verbally abused to my knowledge.  The Tea Party People believe in the bulleted principles I laid out above, including the desire for Domestic Tranquility.  To be sure, if the ruling socialists were to refuse to hold the 2010 election or they were to steal even more votes than they usually do, then perhaps some Tea Party People might decide the time for armed rebellion had come.  After all, that is what our Declaration of Independence says the People will do.  It says:

WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness -- That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.  Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed.  But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.

The socialists have certainly shown us real Americans, who love our individual rights and our liberty, this long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, and evincing a Design to reduce us under an absolute Despotism.  They had better not interfere with the elections in 2010 and 2012, or freedom loving Americans will throw off such a tyranny, as is their right and their duty.  However, it is unlikely that these cowardly socialists will interfere with those elections to such a degree that we will not throw all of the rascals and scalawags out of office.  We must then roll back the many laws anchoring socialist tyranny about our necks and renew American understanding of the necessity of constitutional, republican government in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.  We must renew our commitment to the leadership of our Founding Fathers and the Framers of the Constitution who tried so hard to establish the Principles of individual Rights in the great American Experiment, making America the most Exceptional Beacon of Freedom and Prosperity the World has ever known.  It is the Right of the American People and their Virtue to live their Lives in American Liberty.

Dept. of Homeland Security on Rightwing Extremism

The Washington Times ran an article by Audrey Hudson and Eli Lake on 14 April 2009 called "Federal agency warns of radicals on right." You can link from the article to the Office of Intelligence and Analysis assessment report itself, by the Extremism and Radicalization Branch, Homeland Environment Threat Analysis Division. This is actually a rather vague and strange report, as noteworthy for those reasons as for any reasons some of us may have concerns that we are being targeted by government for simply believing in the Constitution of the United States. It has become clear that the government itself believes in very little of the Constitution.

In its discussion of Key Findings, the report starts off by saying, "The DHS/Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) has no specific information that domestic rightwing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence." What a curious statement. The rightwing terrorists are not currently planning acts of violence. If they were doing so in the past, shouldn't they be in jail now? If some group is free and is not planning acts of violence, then how is it called a terrorist group? Is it a terrorist group because someone in government is afraid of some group? If a grassroots mother's club called for a decrease in government power by calling for a transfer of secondary education from the public sector to the private sector, would this put the fear of God in this government branch and qualify the mother's club to be called a terrorist group even though it was not calling for acts of violence?

Apparently, this is not just a badly worded sentence, because the second paragraph says

Threats from white supremacist and violent antigovernment groups during 2009 have been largely rhetorical and have not indicated plans to carry out violent acts.

So, again I am puzzled. A violent antigovernment group is one which has no plans to carry out violent acts? What does this mean? It appears to mean that as an adjective, violent means anything that threatens a very expansive role of government. When the government has been taken over by socialists, as it now has, anyone who opposes socialism is now defined as "violent." This seems to be the criteria for the reporting by some reporters from CNN on the many local Tea Parties on 15 April. One woman CNN reporter was claiming that the protest she was at was no place for a family to be due to its threatening nature, though numerous people were there with their children and there were no acts of violence. Go figure.

A footnote at the bottom of this Key Findings page sort of defines "rightwing extremism." It says

Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.

Now this is not actually a definition at all. It does give the impression that if someone hates some other group then they are rightwing. Does this mean that those who hate the rich are rightwing extremists, or would this government agency call them leftwing extremists? Or, rightwing extremists may simply favor state or local government or some concept of minimal government, much as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson did. So, are they trying to say that George, Tom, and I are rightwing extremists and that we should be watched with care because we are (or were) trying to convince others of our viewpoint? Do they have any interest in distinguishing those who oppose illegal immigration and those who simply do not want the U.S. to allow any immigrants to come legally to the U.S.?

There are repeated statements of concern that rightwing extremists continue "to focus on the economy, the perceived loss of U.S. jobs in the manufacturing and construction sectors, and home foreclosures." Heck, there are a lot of people discussing these things. Is there some reason to believe that discussing these topics makes one dangerous?

The report notes

Many rightwing extremists are antagonistic toward the new presidential administration and its perceived stance on a range of issues, including immigration and citizenship, the expansion of social programs to minorities, and restrictions on firearms ownership and use.

WELL. I suppose that covers about everyone who did not vote for Obama, except perhaps for the curious reference to minorities. Most social programs for a very long time have been preferentially expanded for the sake of certain minorities. That is not a change at all.

There is a lot of concern that rightwing extremists, whatever they actually may be, are having discussions about important issues and that they are exercising their right to bear arms. It seems that just the act of exercising your right to bear arms is almost alone considered reason to classify someone as a rightwing extremist. This means you are an extremist if you do nothing in violation of the Constitution. Yes, this is a bit odd. Apparently, you are a rightwing extremist if you oppose gun restrictions such as the Brady Law or think that federal law enforcement mishandled the confrontations at Waco, Texas and Ruby Ridge, Idaho.

Then there is the section called "Disgruntled Military Veterans", which I have been since the Democrat Congress stopped supporting South Vietnam, leaving it to fall to North Vietnam and the lives of 56,000 Americans to go for nought, not to mention many more good South Vietnamese. We disgruntled returning soldier's need special watching as enemies of the state.

While "rightwing extremist" was not well-defined, it appears that I clearly am considered a rightwing extremist. Hopefully considered one who is not currently planning violence against the hugely arrogant and overblown federal government or state and local governments. I hope they recognize that I am simply executing my rights to freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of assembly, freedom of petition, and my property rights. But despite all that, I am to be watched closely as a rightwing extremist because racists and small government people are assumed by our government to be in a state of near kinship. Thanks government. I'm going to add that to my list of grievances! I sure do not trust you anti-Constitutionalist tyrant running dogs either.

Tracinski - Why Women Matter - Women's Rights as a Measure of Civilization

Robert Tracinski puts out a very good e-mail subscription service in which he points out and comments on most of the key issues of our times, with many useful links to news articles and commentaries. It is called TIA Daily and is very reasonably priced. In addition, he offers a free 30-day trial, which I encourage you to take him up on.

Today's issue of TIA Daily was shorter than most and limited to one topic, a Feature Article called Why Women Matter - Women's Rights as a Measure of Civilization. It is an excellent essay and one with which I am in full agreement.

He begins by pointing at the recent public flogging of a Pakistani girl by a Taliban thug. He notes that the left and, in particular, feminists are not the foremost protesters against such evils practiced in Muslim societies because of their "deeper commitment to 'multicultural' subjectivism." The political conservatives, while lacking proper concern for other of women's rights, are better defenders of women with respect to the violent use of force by peoples of other cultures.

He points out that women are the physically weaker sex and hence the manner in which a society treats women is "a revealing measure of that society's attitude toward physical force." He goes on to say:

In a society where might makes right, where the rule of brute force has been thoroughly unleashed, women are always the first victims. Even the poorest and meanest man, the guy on the lowest rung who is oppressed by others above him who are bigger and stronger—even he can find one person he is still able to dominate and oppress: a woman, whether it is his mother, his wife, or his daughter. And he will oppress her—if the oppression of others by force is the accepted norm of the society he lives in. For examples, look to the Muslim world with its "honor" killings, arranged marriages, sexual segregation, and special restrictions on the travel and attire of women.

This is a complete contrast to the kind of society in which force is subordinated to morality. A society in which a woman can do whatever she wants without fear is a society in which the physically weak can rely on being protected from the physically strong. In fact, in a civilized society the physically weak feel safe because of the physically strong. The mark of such a society is a sense of chivalry—the idea that a man's superior physical strength is properly used to protect rather than to dominate, to serve the cause of justice and freedom rather than to assert arbitrary power over others.

He goes on to discuss some of Islam's foundational affinities for using force and violence and I will not discuss that here, since it is not for me to put him into such danger as that might engender. But he goes on to say:

This is the broader significance of the new Taliban video: it demonstrates the central failure of Islamism, revealed clearly even to those in the Muslim world. The Islamic theocrats offer their supporters one central promise: to establish the rule of virtue on earth. But they always provide the exact opposite: the rule of brute force and the doctrine of "might makes right." Their code actually banishes morality from public life, subordinating it to force. The routine brutalization of women and girls under the rule of Islam is a constant and vivid reminder of this fact.

I have always maintained that the reason men evolved to be stronger physically than women was because it was an essential part of their function to protect women and children and to provide for them using those abilities dependent upon strength, such as were once required of hunters. When a man fails to use his strengths to protect women and children, then he is unmanly and an abomination. Such a man is useless.

Great civilizations put fewer demands upon a man's physical strength and make women less dependent upon men specifically because the use of force between people is set aside and rational, voluntary trade of values takes over. In such a civilization, men, women, and children all thrive in harmony. In such a society, the values women can offer in such trades are understood to be of great value and women are treated with great respect. Unfortunately, some societies maintain the use and threatened use of force as primary in the relationships of men and women and in these societies there is no such harmony of interests.