Monthly Archives: January 2021

Federalist Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway warned leaders ought to be wary of new dangers presented to American civil liberties in the aftermath of the attack on Capitol Hill just as new restrictions were passed following the September terrorist attacks in 2001.

People were terrified, Hemingway said after Al-Qaeda terrorists brought down the World Trade Centers and flew a plane into the Pentagon, and that resulted in a very big constriction of civil liberties that was not always in the countrys best interest and not always constitutional.

Now, Hemingway argued, following another attack on the nations capital this time coming from domestic political extremists, the same reaction repeating itself coming primarily from big tech implementing a widespread purge of non-leftist voices in the 21st-century public square.

Youre having very powerful people, tech oligarchs, and other people working with Democrats and people in the media to suppress all political opposition, Hemingway said. Thats a very real danger that needs to be taken seriously by our leaders.

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Hemingway: Leaders Should Be Wary Of Post-9/11 Style Crackdown - The Federalist

National Review

Joe Biden has not yet been sworn in, but already, he is at war with American energy which is to say, at war with American prosperity. Biden has promised to sabotage the Keystone XL pipeline, a privately financed, multi-billion-dollar project already under way, and cancel it on his first day, according to a briefing document cited by the BBC. The Keystone pipeline would, if it were allowed to, carry crude from the oil sands of Alberta to Nebraska, where the pipeline would link up with the existing distribution network to send that oil on to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. This would benefit Canadian producers and their investors, American refineries and their large, excellently paid work forces those good, high-paying, blue-collar jobs Biden talks about and, most important, American consumers, who would have access to yet another source of fuel at attractive prices from a nearby friendly country. This sort of thing is the point of international economic cooperation. The notional case against Keystone is environmental in the main part, and in the lesser part an issue of Indian lands and rights. The environmental case is unsound: Canada has ratified the Paris agreement and takes environmental issues relatively seriously. Innovation and technological improvements have substantially reduced the greenhouse-gas emissions associated with Canadian tar-sands productions by 30 percent since the 1990s, as the Canadian government calculates. Of course, it matters relatively little whether a gallon of gasoline in the tank of a Cadillac Escalade in Houston is refined from Canadian tar-sands oil or from West Texas oil the relevant emissions come overwhelmingly from the point of combustion. Of course there are environmental challenges associated with the oil sands, as there are with any usable source of energy, including wind and solar. These are regulatory and practical challenges that are perfectly manageable. (Which is not the same thing as a guarantee that U.S. or Canadian authorities, or businesses, will manage them perfectly that kind of oversight is hard work and a serious business.) The same is true of fracking and other petroleum-extraction practices. There are many reasonable ways to manage tradeoffs between economic development and environmental priorities if environmentalists were interested in reasonable tradeoffs, which they arent. Biden, already looking over his shoulder at a restive progressive caucus, apparently intends to buy environmentalists off with other peoples money. Why? Fossil fuels, far from being the great villain of the climate story, have been the main source of greenhouse-gas reductions in the United States over the past several decades, as relatively clean-burning natural gas displaces relatively dirty coal in electricity generation. But that is not the kind of intelligent tradeoff that interests American environmentalists, who are moralists and romantics and committed to the notion that hydrocarbon fuels are, simply, evil and that they must be fought on every front. Hence, the American Lefts comprehensive and total war on any and all infrastructure associated with our most abundant energy sources not only oil pipelines but natural-gas pipelines, too, along with rail-shipping facilities, refineries and other plants, and West Coast export depots intended to help U.S. producers in Asian markets. If it produces, consumes, moves, or processes oil or gas, the American Left opposes it. If Joe Biden is interested in improving the employment and wage outlook for middle-class Americans, he ought not make our industrial, chemical, manufacturing, transportation, and electricity sectors hostage to the narrow-minded concerns of a small group of fanatics. There is a worrying Hayekian lesson in this, too: It is impossible for American businesses to make big, long-term investments in a political environment in which every project is up for renegotiation or summary economic execution every time the White House changes hands. Why invest in building and moving physical goods, and taking on the political risk that goes along with such investments, when you could join the booming financial sector and put your money into the money business? This is not to sniff at finance or other work in the service economy, but, surely, in a continental nation as vast as ours, with an economy as complex as ours, it shouldnt be possible for one man serving a short term in a temporary elected office to undo years of work and billions of dollars in investment. This is pure foolishness, and it will cost us. Joe Biden is getting ready to get off to a poor start. And if he thinks that he can buy off the green lobby by sacrificing Keystone, he is mistaken. Their ambitions are bigger and broader than that, and they will not be easily satisfied: Lapptit vient en mangeant. If you were wondering who actually has Joe Bidens ear, now you know.

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Attorney and Federalist Society member sounds alarm about 'progressive tide' in small towns - Yahoo News

By HILLEL ITALIE AP National Writer

January 15, 2021, 5:06 PM

5 min read

NEW YORK -- When Joe Biden addresses the country for the first time as president, his inaugural speech is likely to echo calls for unity that predecessors have invoked since the first time George Washington was sworn in.

Unity has since been a theme, and an anxiety, for many incoming presidents, who have faced economic and social crises and moments when the very future of the U.S. was in doubt. Historians mention the first inaugural speeches of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln as possible parallels for Biden, who has said his goal is to restore the soul of the country.

Biden, who assumes office just two weeks after an armed seige of the U.S. Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump, will preside over a nation in which millions believe Trump's baseless claims that the election was stolen. Few presidents have faced such questions about their own legitimacy.

Unity has always been an aspiration," says presidential historian Douglas Brinkley. It seems like whenever we have foreign policy flare-ups, we use the word freedom. But when we have domestic turmoil we use the word unity.

The United States was forged through compromise among factions that disagreed profoundly on slavery, regional influence and the relative powers of state and federal government. When Washington assumed office in 1789 he cited the blessings of providence in noting that the tranquil deliberations and voluntary consent of so many distinct communities, from which the event has resulted, cannot be compared with the means by which most governments have been established.

Jefferson was the third U.S. president, and the first whose rise was regarded by opponents as a kind of emergency. The 1800 election won by Jefferson marked the beginning of competing political parties Jefferson was a leader of the Democratic-Republican Party, losing incumbent John Adams a Federalist and critics regarded the new president as a dangerous atheist. "JEFFERSON AND NO GOD!!! was how one Federalist paper described Jefferson's candidacy. Adams did not attend the inauguration, a breach rarely repeated although Trump has vowed to do the same.

Let us then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind," Jefferson urged in his address. "We are all republicans: we are all federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it."

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, a Federalist who administered the oath of office to Jefferson, wrote later that the speech was in the general well judged and conciliatory.

Lincoln's pleas were more dire, and tragically unmet, despite what historian Ted Widmer calls his genius to combine urgency with literary grace. Seven out of 11 future Confederate states had seceded from the U.S. before he spoke, in March 1861, over fears he would end slavery. The Civil War would begin a month later. We are not enemies, but friends, Lincoln had insisted, reminding fellow Americans of their mystic chords of memory while also warning that resistance to the will of voters would destroy democracy.

"A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism, he said.

Historian David Greenberg, whose books include Nixon's Shadow" and Republic of Spin, cites Richard Nixon's inaugural in 1969 as another speech given at a time of social turmoil. The U.S. was violently divided over the Vietnam War and civil rights, and Nixon himself had long been seen as an unprincipled politician exploiting fears and resentments appealing to what he would call the silent majority. His speech at times was openly and awkwardly modeled on the 1961 inaugural of John F. Kennedy, who had defeated Nixon in 1960.

We are caught in war, wanting peace. We are torn by division, wanting unity, Nixon stated. We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.

Some presidents asked for unity, others asserted it.

Franklin Roosevelt, elected in a landslide in 1932 during the Great Depression, said in his first inaugural speech: If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other. Four years later, having won by an even greater landslide, he declared the country had recognized a need beyond financial help, a deeper need, to find through government the instrument of our united purpose.

Unity can prove more imagined than real. When James Buchanan spoke in 1857, three years before the Civil War, he claimed that all agree that under the Constitution slavery in the states is beyond the reach of any human power except that of the respective states themselves wherein it exists. Rutherford B. Hayes, whose presidency was marked by the retrenchment of federal troops from the post-Civil War South and ongoing resistance from Southern whites to equal rights for Blacks, declared during his 1877 inaugural that true peace could be achieved through the united and harmonious efforts of both races and the honest work of local self-government.

A president often claims the country is united behind a belief when its more wishful thinking than reality, Widmer says. Im not sure how many Americans wanted to do something for their country after JFK asked them to although there were impressive new kinds of volunteers, like the Peace Corps. And I think that many Americans still appreciated help from the government, even after Ronald Reagan declared that government is the problem. Thats the problem with soundbites: They often oversimplify.

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Unity has long been a theme, and anxiety, for new presidents - ABC News

Well, weve seen the first Star Wars series on Disney+ in The Mandalorian, and now, were treated to the first Marvel series for the Mouse House streaming service: WandaVison. This homage to sitcoms of yesteryear is not your typical television show, and thats what makes it fun.

Each less than thirty-minute episode is a journey through a trippy, alternate reality version of Nick at Nite. The first episode is a nod to the classic 1950s television series like I Love Lucy and the 1960s mainstay The Dick Van Dyke Show. Wanda Maximoff and Vision live in an idealized suburban TV community, but dont seem to know how or why they are there.

Of course, if youre even a passing fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe you might be asking, Isnt Vision dead? Yes, yes, he is, which makes this entire situation all the weirder. Vision died during the events of Infinity War, so the fact that Wanda has recreated him or resurrected him and thrust the couple into this strange version of a sitcom life is all the more curious.

What makes all these odd references, homages, and peculiar situations work are the stellar acting chops of Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany. In the first episode, Bettany is buried in 1950s style physical comedy gags like broken plates on his head and moments at work when hes trying to figure out exactly what it is that his company does.

The other great episode-long gag is watching both Wanda and Vision figure out why their day is supposed to be special. Being a fake couple in what seems to be a fake world, theyre not sure why there is a heart on their kitchen calendar. Wandas neighbor, played by the great Kathryn Hahn, convinces her that it must be the couples anniversary and sets about planning a very 1950s era evening complete with candles, a seductive dress, and a fancy dinner. Meanwhile, Vision is at work and eventually realizes that the heart on their kitchen calendar was to remind them that his boss, Mr. Heart, and his wife, played by Fred Melamed and Debra Jo Rupp, were coming to dinner.

So, at the end of his workday, Vision arrives home, boss and wife in tow, only to find candles, romantic music, and his wife dressed in a negligee. Hilarity ensues with Wanda passing it off as being European and then scrambling to make lobster thermidor, chicken a la king, and steak Diane. As you would expect from a twenty-something superhero, she has no idea how to make a 1950s gourmet meal and instead settles on breakfast for dinner.

Once theyre sitting down to dinner the couple gets peppered with questions about when they got married, where they moved from, and who they are, none of which theyre prepared to answer. Indeed, a great thing about the series is that Wanda and Vision are sometimes just as lost and puzzled by the whole thing as the viewer is. When his boss starts choking on his dinner, Vision reaches into his throat, because hes a superhero and can do that, and plucks out the obstruction in his airway, saving the day and earning a promotion to boot.

By the time we get to the second episode, were in a tribute to Bewitched complete with the cheesy animations and a matching theme song. We also start to get a glimpse that something here is wrong.

In their idyllic suburban setting, Wanda and Vision are now concerned with participating in the town talent show to raise money for the children. Theyre going to do a magic act, the fitting being that shes the Scarlett Witch, and he can fly. Theyre also each trying to fit into this new environment theyre living in, Wanda by joining the local womens group and Vision by becoming part of the neighborhood watch.

While heading to the womens group, we get our first experience of someone trying to break through this comedic setting to get to Wanda. A red and yellow toy helicopter with the S.W.O.R.D. logo on it shatters the black and white esthetic of the episode when it falls into the front yard rose bushes with a loud thud. We get another clue that something is amiss at the womens luncheon when a radio playing The Beach Boys Help me Rhonda in the background suddenly says, Wanda can you hear me? Whos doing this to you, Wanda?

We also meet the adult version of Monica Rambeau, played by Teyonah Parris, who we first met as a kid in Captain Marvel. Here shes going by Geraldine, and shes not quite sure why shes here. In the comics, Monica Rambeau eventually takes over the moniker of Captain Marvel. Here she may be an agent of S.W.O.R.D., the intergalactic answer to S.H.I.E.L.D. Yes, Marvel, like the federal government, loves its acronyms.

We also get a series of great gags when Vision goes to the meeting of the neighborhood watch group at the local public library (remember those?). We get perfectly timed for the era jokes about mastication, communism, and Vision trying to deflect that he doesnt eat (because hes a robot superhero and all).

As an essentially drunk magician who has forgotten that he has to conceal his superhero identity from the town flies lifts a piano with one hand and leaves his wife scrambling to cover for him, making the assembled town folks laugh and keeping them off the scent that theres something quite different about this couple of newlyweds.

By the end of the episode, Vision and Wanda are back at home and Wanda has a visible baby bump. Standing in their living room theyre disturbed by a sound, which upon further investigation turns out to be a beekeeper in a S.W.O.R.D. outfit coming out of the manhole cover in the road. Wanda says No, and were rewound to the moment they realize shes pregnant. Suddenly the whole world is in brilliant Technicolor. As the show fades out, we hear again, Whos doing this to you, Wanda?

We dont know exactly who the big band guy is in this show yet, or how exactly it plays into the next phase of the MCU, but we do know that WandaVision leads us straight into the next Doctor Strange movie, Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, followed by the third Spider-Man movie. There has been lots of speculation online as to which Marvel villain could be pulling the strings here, but I think we have to wait for a few more episodes before we get a clearer view of exactly whats happening. Until then, bring on the continuing tributes to classic American sitcoms!

Brad Jackson is a writer and radio personality whose work has appeared at ABC, CBS, Fox News, and multiple radio programs. He was the longtime host and producer of Coffee & Markets, an award-winning podcast and radio show with more than 1,500 episodes. Brad covers all things edible and cultural for The Federalist. You can find him on Twitter and Instagram at @bradwjackson.

Photo Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff and Paul Bettany as Vision in Marvel Studios' WANDAVISION exclusively on Disney+. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. Marvel Studios 2020. All Rights Reserved.

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Disney And Marvel's 'WandaVision' Is As Fun As It Is Weird - The Federalist

Most conservatives have settled on school choice as the solution to most, if not all, of todays education problems. It makes sense. In most of the country, public schools have a monopoly on K-12 education and therefore have little incentive to deliver quality instruction to students. They will receive funding whether or not students actually learn anything. In states with teachers unions, schools are even less accountableto the point that teachers can refuse to work for all kinds of flimsy pretexts.

While school choice would definitely help break up the public school monopoly and power of teachers unionswhich is why unions absolutely revile school choice advocates like Betsy DeVosthis alone would not immediately reform education. As fellow public school teacher Ryan Hooper notes in a recent column, content-based instruction and building character are also pressing issues, if not more pressing: if the Right wants to keep winning and improving education in the future, it must need to shift its focus from school choice exclusively to other areas primarily content and character.

On one level, Hooper is right. What most upsets parents about public school right now is mediocre teaching based on bad pedagogy along with leftist indoctrination that results in young adults who are unprepared for life after school and lack any capacity to think for themselves. Instituting school vouchers and allowing money to follow students will not mean much if charter and private schools end up offering more of the same thing.

Moreover, if choice alone is the one thing pushed by conservatives, and if by some miracle it happens, it is entirely possible to have charter and private schools that do little besides functioning as glorified test prep centers where uncertified teachers do drill-and-kill from 8 to 4 every day. Without any care for how instruction works or cultivating well-rounded adults, this is what school can become, as seen in many lower performing charter schools.

On a deeper level though, Hoopers argument doesnt go far enough, nor does it acknowledge the barriers that exist. To begin, changing to an emphasis on content would require a complete reversal of the reigning pedagogical theory (best represented by Common Core) that stresses skills over content. This means taking on nearly every entity involved in creating curriculum and instructional materials.

It also means explaining what is meant by content-centered learning. As Hooper suggests, it has to do with materials that will provide students with strongbackground knowledge. As opposed to curriculum that isolates skills and often bypasses lower-order thinking (memorization and literal comprehension) in favor of higher-order thinking (evaluation and analysis), content-centered curriculum works on building up a base of knowledge and puts more emphasis on lower-order thinking.

Wherever it has been tried, content-centered curriculum has proven more effective since, as I explain in another essay, higher-order thinking requires lower-order thinking. Evaluation and analysis become possible when the mind sufficiently grasps the basic details of a classic text that lends itself to deeper probing. Hence, even on tests designed to assess skills, students with a deeper background knowledge that comes from a content-centered curriculum will usually do better.

Even so, no one should discount the pushback of entrenched educrats and specialists who resist any change. Additionally, one must know that merely discussing content could threaten the leftist narratives that have emerged with more engaging, diverse, skills-based curricula. Facts would start mattering much more in subjects like science and history, English teachers would have to consider readopting the rejected Western canon, and math teachers would have to start asking students to do math without a calculator.

Concerning character training, Hooper and others need to clarify what they mean by this. Is this instituting a culture of excellence and charity that fosters virtue in students? Or is it just implementing therapy sessions on emotional wellness and building relationships?

If its the latterand his link to the Positivity Project suggest that it ismany public schools already include such things, and it doesnt improve matters much. In the wake of recent school shootings, many districts now include periodic advisory sessions meant to promote watchfulness and inclusivity while offering strategies to curb depression and suicidal and homicidal behavior. Students will usually watch videos, have discussions, and fill out surveys to prove they have participated in the lesson.

Despite the good intentions, these character lessons do little to build character (which means much more than positive thinking), nor does anyone really take them seriously. Teaching character and kindness in isolation is like teaching most subjects in isolationit is rarely applied in real situations and is quickly forgotten.

It would be better to define character building in terms of actual virtue, not self-esteem. This is effected by rigor (academic, moral, and physical) and personal discipline. When so many schools adopt policies that water down instruction and enable cheating, they also produce thin-skinned, dishonest students who never develop a work ethic. (This has been made all the worse with virtual learning.)

By contrast, full accountability and challenging work forces students to develop study habits, deal with failure, and take real ownership of their learning. In her book The Smartest Kids in the World, Amanda Ripley notes how the rigor in Finnish classrooms is worlds apart from that of most American classrooms and how this difference accounts for the Finnish system being the best in the world despite receiving far less funding.

As with attempting to change the focus of curriculum, pushing rigor would meet the same resistance from the same people. They would counter that pushing a culture of excellence and achievement would hurt student self-esteem, make classes less engaging, and strain teachers, who would endure much pushback from parents whose children have never earned any grade but A. True, what currently prevails disenfranchises students and may actually contribute to student depression, but the alternative is frankly unfathomable to most educators.

So, to amend what Hoopers argument somewhat, true reform will require an enactment of all three issues in the proper sequence: first, allow school choice, then use this opportunity to introduce a different educational model that employs content-based curriculum and builds character through rigor. As it stands, there are aspects of this in the top prep schools, but systematic change at the state and district levels could make such campuses mainstream.

Without school choice, conversations about content and character tend to go nowhere. Decades of mediocrity demonstrate that without the freedom and incentive to reform, there will be no reform. That said, Americans (of all political backgrounds) who have an interest in improving education through school choice should follow Hoopers lead and start considering exactly how to define improvement. Its not just about taking down education cartels, but about lifting up todays youth and making their dreams possible.

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Why School Choice Isn't Enough To Really Improve American Education - The Federalist

Joe Bidens inauguration is a sad day for those of us on the right, and its not just because either through actual votes or through deliberate election confusion we lost the Senate and presidency. Its because so many of us are deeply aware of what Democrat reign means.

It means the acceleration of mass murder and forcing taxpayers to pay for it. It means, as my boss Ben Domenech puts it, nuns are back on the menu. It means, as Ive pointed out, the increase of public schools destroying childrens innocence and facilitating minors access to drugs that enable HIV-positive sex. It means an entrenchment of the institutional racism of critical race theory in every institution possible, also pushed by taxpayer funds.

It means Democrats rig more structures of American life against those who disagree with them, possibly preventing us from ever having a meaningful voice in our own governance again. It means the proliferation of government spending that accelerates our nations likelihood of devastating economic collapse. It means frighteningly labeling half the country domestic terrorists, a label that prepares for stripping more of our rights. All this, in turn, makes us increasingly vulnerable to foreign enemies, propagandists, and demagogues.

This is a weight that is difficult for the perceptive to bear. Those of us who deeply treasure what makes America itself are again staring into the abyss of the genuine possibility that what we love about our country may be truly lost forever, as not just lambasted authors of Flight 93 essays but also highly studied, more tonally measured observers such as Charles Murray think is quite clear from the data.

While these losses do mean the increase of genuine moral evils and therefore deserve to be mourned, all is not lost. Yes, were forced to retreat, but let it be a strategic, orderly, cunning retreat, not a chaotic retreat that breaks into a rout.

There are now numerous strategic advantages and strategies available to the people who love America, if we choose to employ and enlarge them. With them we may begin, if not to save America, at least to enlarge some space for living more closely to Americas founding principles than we inhabit now and to mitigate the evils that are to come.

Those of us who have been paying attention are now highly aware that corporate media and corporate tech are a bicephalic propaganda monster. Weve learned through a 2020 of constant lies, information control, and gaslighting from COVID to Hunter Biden that the quickest way to guess the truth is, as in communist countries, to read what state media are saying and then assume the opposite.

While its frightful that corrupt, pedophile-enabling corporate media control our lives right down to the air we are allowed to breathe and whether we are allowed to honestly support our families, and that the majority of Americans either believe their outright lies or are heavily influenced by them, this knowledge is also highly useful. For it means that Americans are not necessarily supportive of socialism and baby murder and all the other things that Democrats do when in power. It means that our country still includes a lot of well-meaning people who love America but have been deeply deceived enough to turn it over to its worst enemies.

This means Democrats do not have, in any way, shape, or form, a mandate to perpetrate the policies upon which they are about to embark. Their empire is built on a throne of lies. And empires like that are weak and unstable, as Democrats fortification of the capitol and crazy accusations that U.S. soldiers who voted for Trump are traitors also projects.

This weakness means danger, but also opportunity. We must be ready to bind up the wounds and welcome to our ranks those the lefts culture war has devastated. We must do our utmost to dispel the lies that give the left power. Information warfare in education and media contexts, primarily should be a top priority.

Additionally, this means (metaphorical) war against corporate and tech media dominance is highly needed and will be effective. It has plenty of room and need for growth. It also means that citizens need to do more to combat media lies and provide the basic information Americans need and which big media takeovers have entirely hollowed out. Their lies need to not only be exposed, but replaced with truth.

Id start with forming local blogs focused on local information-sharing about basic entities like the school board, city council, election laws and procedures, and district attorney. Its not that hard to go to a meeting and write a 800-word summary of what happened. Get a dozen friends and divide up the job.

Ask DA and county sheriffs candidates their positions on the crazy things Democrats are doing like springing rioters and enabling opioid spread, and publish what they do or dont say. Stop railing on Facebook and start attending public meetings and writing about them on your own local group blog.

As a part of Democrats lack of awareness they lack a mandate other than dont be Trump, they are going to overshoot, big time. They are going to enact many extremist ideas. Even the propaganda media wont be able to entirely hide this from Americans. And there will be backlash.

This will heighten the contradictions between Democrat leadership and many current Democrat base voters who are staying with the party even though its priorities hurt them and the nation. The lack of Trump as an all-purpose leftist scapegoat will assist with this.

As has been widely noted, Trump was able to break through some of the racial stereotypes about what it means to be a Republican or Democrat and earn more nonwhite support. With him in retirement, those of us on the right have the opportunity to continue making his case without being saddled with his baggage.

This is a huge opportunity. Without Trump to use as an excuse for everything, Democrats are going to provide clarity to many more voters that they are actually the totalitarians they project onto the right. They are going to harass nuns, foster parents and agencies, Christian camps, and minorities who disagree with them. They are going to be more obviously the party of the rich and corrupt.

Its a bad look. And it will turn voters away. Again, we need to be ready to welcome these voters even if they are not ideologically pure. Id rather have a wasteful social welfare state that murders fewer babies, supports free speech, and doesnt harass nuns than a corporate welfare state that harasses the poor and religious. If that is the tradeoff we get, Ill take it.

In the wake of the capitol riots that werent perpetrated by Black Lives Matter, big corporations and chambers of commerce have pulled their high-dollar donations from many Republicans and Republican political funds. Good.

For years, elected Republicans offered lip service and placebos to their base voters and did what big corporate donors actually wanted, which hurt their voters and structurally undermined their long-term support, such as through mass illegal immigration. This has rightly fueled the public perception that Republicans care only about money and rich people, rather than an equal playing field for all and the common good. Now without those donations, they have no reason to offend and harm large numbers of voters to suck up to a small number of donors. This will make them more competitive and less corrupt.

Behavior like the below, for example, will erase the financial incentive for Republican officeholders to provide special breaks and bailouts for businesses that pay politicians big money to slant the legal playing field in their favor. Trump has made for a GOP that is far more competitive in the small-dollar online donor space. This will further help low-information voters see that Democrats are the party of the corrupt at the expense of the people, and make the GOP less so.

COVID shutdowns with no end in sight are a violation of our natural, constitutional, and human rights. However, as with a Biden administration coming to power, this evil also will cause damage to those who attempt to wield it against their enemies.

It will mean a quicker downfall of many corrupted institutions, from churches that dont proclaim orthodox theology losing parishioners who will never come back from virtual church to the death of higher education institutions that have been colluding with corrupt politicians to scam gullible young people out of their futures.

Our country is populated by people who fail to the top. But the more of them there are, the more enemies they make and the weaker their rigged systems become. And the more aware their opponents and the people caught in the middle become of their decay.

This will mean more cultural, theological, and philosophical refugees. Ready the lifeboats for them now.

The Trump era has revealed the complete corruption of Americas ruling class to many more people. This stress test gives us an excellent template for what to target for fixing or elimination.

Let every locale where it is possible create the most secure voting systems in the world. Let every locale where it is possible elect and support sheriffs who will not allow a Biden administration to crush Americans Second Amendment rights. Let every Republican governor and member of Congress who has lost corporate support now make a ruthless plan to eliminate corporate favors from the entire legal code over which they have jurisdiction.

Let every single town board and town council put Comcast, Verizon, and all other ISPs and broadband providers on notice that if they do not adhere to First Amendment protections for all customers, these local governments will be finding another business to profit from the public infrastructure in their towns. Let every single legislature controlled by Republicans ban the institutional racism of critical race theory in every single public workplace in their state, including universities and public schools. If every elected Republican will not support this, they should be put on record explaining why not, by citizens and their local news blogs.

If the United States is to live under neo-feudalism, in which our rights are subject to the whim of whoever is in power and shift with every election instead of being protected forever equally for all under the Constitution, then let these neo-feudal lords begin to stake their territorial claims and protect their citizens as best they can, severing the levers the abusers of our rights deploy against us (such as federal funding).

Let sanctuary cities and states no longer be only for California. It will be a good thing for the federal government to have more difficulty forcing its schemes on states and local governments.

All this will only accelerate the migration from blue to red states that is already underway.

The sheer extent of the degradation of Americas founding principles and the citizenry who once had the character to live under them clarifies what is at stake. No longer can we pretend that identity group antidiscrimination rules are compatible with equal protection or the First Amendment. No longer can we pretend that a government that can dole out unfathomable amounts of money can do so without corrupting both those who give and those who receive this false charity.

We now live among the real-world results of implementing leftist ideology, and its not pretty. And no one can really deny it. This is why Democrats take refuge in the culture war, the cult at the core of their secular religion they have nothing left to offer the masses but bread and circuses.

This is pushing people to make significant life changes towards a more meaningful and integrity-filled way of life, and to seek other people to join this journey. It is also pushing the truly awake people and a few of our lawmakers to reach down into the well of first principles to find water in a parched land.This well is an abundant source of life and renewal that many people would not seek if life stayed comfortable.

This is precisely the time for we anti-wokesters to coalesce around principles on which we can all agree. This may be our only hope of survival, in fact. As in the Cold War era, to defeat our common foe we need a broader coalition that is necessarily going to include a lot of people who disagree on a lot of particulars.

To work out our strategies and points of agreement to fight not against each other but against our common foe in the ideology of the totalitarian left, we need to encourage more speech, not less. We need to engage more points of view and be willing to let more people speak, not fewer. We need to not be primarily attacking and tone-policing people of good will who love our country, but primarily facing outward at the barbarians who control the gates and want to destroy our country.

This doesnt mean there are no morals, that people should be relieved of the burden of proving their assertions, or that we should elevate the voices of people who believe things that have been soundly proven to be wrong (such as Holocaust deniers). It means, however, that instead of banning them from the Internet or refusing to allow them to air their ideas, we should listen with empathy and try to understand their points of view. Our primary orientation should be persuasion, conversion, discussion, and openness, not eradication.

Instead of shutting people up because we disagree with their conclusions, we should ask them to prove their assertions and explain what led them to their stances, as James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian recommend in their excellent book.If it works with Ku Klux Klan members and people in divorce counseling, it can help our country too.

As regarding the capitol rioters, the propaganda narrative depicts us and Trump making a cacophonous, beaten-puppy exit. But in fact, as this weeks impeachment vote and more prove, we are highly unified. The outliers are given outsized voices by corporate media to deceive and demoralize us.

We are not like these rioters in any way, including in making an ignominious exit. Yes, were headed for the wilderness circuit that befalls a party out of power, but the truth is, weve been out of power this whole time. Trump was undermined and lied to continuously by every branch of the government he was elected to command. The past four years have made this and many other truths much plainer to see. Seeing clearly makes it possible and necessary for us to act prudently.

Being in the wilderness also has its advantages. They include loyalty not sycophancy, but loyalty of the kind that only arises amid brothers and sisters in arms under constant attack. It teaches us to sacrifice, to become tougher, leaner, smarter, more agile. These are all great assets that may or may not give us a political advantage here in this temporal life, but absolutely make us better fit for eternal life. And the left can never truly command people whose souls are free, no matter how strong they appear to be.

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8 Strategies For Exiting The Biden Years Stronger Than The Right Went In - The Federalist