Football and the American Character

As I was looking over the Imprimis for September, the entire newsletter was devoted to a speech by John J. Miller of Hillsdale College on Football and the American Character. He starts the speech off as follows:

When we talk about football, we usually talk about our favorite teams and the games they play. The biggest ongoing story in the sport right now, however, is something else entirely. It’s not about the Bears vs. the Packers or Michigan vs. Ohio State, but rather the controversy over concussions and the long-term health effects of head injuries

On August 29, 2013, the National Football League agreed to pay $765 million to settle a lawsuit involving more than 4,500 players and their families, who had claimed that the league covered up data on the harmful effects of concussions. Although medical research into football and long-term effects of head injuries is hardly conclusive, some data suggest a connection. A number of legal experts believe the NFL, which will generate about $10 billion in revenue this year, dodged an even bigger payout.

Football, of course, is much bigger than the NFL and its players, whose average yearly salary is nearly $2 million. Football’s ranks include about 50,000 men who play for schools or in youth leagues whose pockets aren’t nearly so deep. A Colorado jury recently awarded $11.5 million to a boy who suffered a paralyzing injury at his high school football practice in 2008.How long will it be before school districts begin to think football isn’t worth the cost?

Earlier this year, President Obama waded into the debate. “If I had a son, I’d have to think long and hard before I let him play football,” he said. He also called for football “to reduce some of the violence.” Others have called for a more dramatic solution: Malcolm Gladwell, the bestselling author of The Tipping Point and other books, thinks football should go the way of dogfighting. He would like to see America’s favorite sport run out of polite society.

So football’s future is uncertain. But the past may offer important lessons. After all, football’s problems today are nothing compared to what they were about a century ago: In 1905, 18 people died playing the sport. Football became embroiled in a longrunning dispute over violence and safety — and it was almost banned through the efforts of Progressive era prohibitionists. Had these enemies of football gotten their way, they might have erased one of America’s great pastimes from our culture. But they lost — and it took the efforts of Theodore Roosevelt to thwart them.

Now at first blush you might think that this quote from the September issue of Imprimis is nothing, but in fact it is. In my mind we are seeing America being destroyed through the efforts of the current day Progressive era prohibitionists. The only thins is they are called Socialists and Communists. Also, in a way football leads to strengthen the American Character, and I will get into that in a future editorial. However, notice what Obama had said.

“If I had a son, I’d have to think long and hard before I let him play football,” he said. He also called for football “to reduce some of the violence.”

One of the reasons this sticks out to me is the fact that Obama decided to wade into it in the first place. He has many more important things (The economy, jobs, the Middle East) and yet he sees a shiny and is easily distracted by other things.  This shows that he is out to destroy America one principle at a time.

From Pop Warner through high school and onto college and the pro (or semi-pro) level, football was meant to build character not only in others but also in ourselves. I will go through Miller’s speech little by little and pluck out salient points. In the meantime, you can subscribe to Imprimis here and read the September issue here so you can follow along throughout the coming weeks.

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Obama is no Reagan. (he is no Clinton, either)

In During Barack Obama’s first term, we had heard comparisons between him and Ronald Reagan or him and Abraham Lincoln. Now I will not touch the Abraham Lincoln comparison, but will say that there is no comparison between Obama and Reagan. Hell, there is not even any comparison between him and Bill Clinton.

 

What so I mean by that? Well, the past two major times that the economy was on the verge of a shutdown was during the Reagan years and then in 1995 when Clinton was president. Now both Reagan AND Clinton had the decency to reach across the aisle to the House Speaker (Reagan with Tip O’Neill and Clinton with Newt Gingrich) and try to avert or (in Clinton’s case) end a shutdown. In Reagan’s case, he was one who maintained a cordial relationship with O’Neill and would go out for a beer even though they were bitter enemies and possibly rip into each other over the bargaining table if we take what Chris Matthews wrote about in his book about Reagan and O’Neill. Also, I do not think we had read where Reagan or Clinton had deprived guests or veterans from going to the World War II memorial and paying homage to the greatest generation like Obama has done recently.

In fact, the picture (posted to the left) says it all. From Gerald Ford to Bill Clinton, there were 17 prior shutdowns among the five presidents and they were ALL negotiated. There were no shutdowns under George W. Bush probably because of what happened on September 11, 2001 to bring both Republicans and Democrats together. Now under Obama this is the largest shutdown and this is because both Obama and Harry Reid (Senate Democrat, aka Majority, Leader from Nevada, have shut down the Federal Government because they REFUSE to give the common people the same waivers that Obama has ALREADY given to Big Corporations, Unions, Congress, and other Democrat donors. The reason the Republicans took over the House in 2010 is because they had seen Obama ram ObamaDoesn’tCare (f/t to Herman Cain) down out throats, and when Princess Pelosi said that they “need to pass the bill to find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy,” they are looking at it now and are wanting to pull a Snagglepuss and “exit, stage left even” from being subject to ObamaDoesn’tCare.

It seems that Reid had not read ObamaDoesn’tCare nor does he care to find out what is in it, leading the charge in the Congress and in the media by calling the Tea Party anarchists, arsonists, jihadists, and suicide bombers. Well let me tell you something Mr. Reid. If supporting and defending the Constitution of the United States, as well as wanting to get back to the founding principles that made America exceptional, is what makes one a suicide bomber, well then I do not speak for my listeners or my co-host but count me in that number if ANYTHING to deprive you of that cushy Majority Leader office and position you so enjoy in the Senate. Just like Katy Abram told Arlen Specter at a town hall meeting in 2009, “you, dear sir, have awakened a sleeping giant.” Oh sure you might have maintained the majority in the Senate and your golden boy Obama has maintained the White House, but his downfall is coming. I know Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. I have lived under the administrations of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Barack Obama, dear sir, is NO Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton. And the People have seen it and are rising up to try to do whatever they can to make sure Obama’s reign of errors comes to an end in a legal fashion.

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What makes a TRUE AMERICAN?

Over the past 7 weeks on this very show you had heard me go through the article in Imprimis, which is put out by Hillsdale College, from October 2012 entitled “Is America Exceptional?” by Norman Podhoretz. This led me to wondering just what a TRUE AMERICAN really is. My good friend Alan D. Vera had posted the following on Facebook and after reading it, I know just what a TRUE AMERICAN is.

You might be a TRUE AMERICAN if:
It never occurred to you to be offended by the phrase, 'One nation, under God.'
You might be a TRUE AMERICAN if:
You've never protested about seeing the 10 Commandments posted in public places.
You might be a TRUE AMERICAN if:
You still say 'Christmas' instead of 'Winter Festival.'
You might be a TRUE AMERICAN if:
You bow your head when someone prays.
You might be a TRUE AMERICAN if:
You stand and place your hand over your heart when they play the National Anthem.
You might be a TRUE AMERICAN if:
You treat Viet Nam vets with great respect, and always have.
You might be a TRUE AMERICAN if:
You've never burned an American flag.
You might be a TRUE AMERICAN if:
You know what you believe and you aren't afraid to say so, no matter who is listening.
You might be a TRUE AMERICAN if:
You respect your elders and expect your kids to do the same.
.
God Bless the U S A ! Amen
AND YOU ARE A TRUE AMERICAN, IF YOU THINK THE NATIONAL ANTHEM SHOULD ONLY BE SUNG

As some of you know, when I started this show I started out with Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue by Toby Keith as it is COURTESY of the Red, White, and Blue that I was able to host this very show, which I took the title from if you think on it. In fact, let me play that song for you right now:

After Barack Obama stole the election on November 6, I got to thinking of  a new theme song for the show, and as you heard at the top I had found a good one in Real American by Rick Derringer. Just listen to the chorus:

I am a real American
fight for the rights of every man
I am a real American
fight for what's right
fight for your life

For those of you on Twitter who had seen the #RedRightBlue hashtag you might have seen me mention that it is time for #RedRightBlue on #OTNN – a REAL SHOW for REAL AMERICANS. Well it is true. Just like what Alan said about true Americans, the same thing can be said for Real Americans.

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American Exceptionalism (Part 7)

Podhoretz wraps up his speech on American Exceptionalism with a very exceptional challenge to us

In spite of all this, the liberal community seems to think that the rest of the world would be better off without the United States, or at least with it following the policy of “leading from behind.” Admittedly there are paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan and libertarians like Ron Paul who agree on this point, but most conservatives do not believe that a radical diminution of American power and influence would be good for us or for the world.

Shortly before the election of 2008, then-candidate Obama declared that his election would usher in “a fundamental transformation of America.” The desirability of such a transformation—which would entail the wiping away of as many more traces of American exceptionalism as it will take to turn this country into a facsimile of the social-democratic regimes of western Europe—is the issue at the heart of our politics today. And in the long run, I hope and trust, Americans will reject such a transformation, and elect instead to return to the principles that have made this nation so exceptional—yes, exceptional—a force for good both at home and abroad.

As we had seen in the 2008 election, and again in the 2012 election, Obama is all about the fundamental transformation of America and rooting out those things which made America exceptional. As Norman Podhoretz wrote this in October, he was no doubt warning us not to vote for Obama during the November elections, but the dumbass, dumb masses (as Neal Boortz calls the low-information or no-information voters who do not give a rip about politics) decided to vote Obama for a second term because they wanted their “FREE STUFF” and if Romney were elected, then he would cut that out. We have one more chance in 2014 to elect those who will look after the will of WE THE PEOPLE and not WE THE MOOCHER. Otherwise we will be heading back into slavery (the last step in the Tytler Circle) and we will be living in the same conditions we have seen in Atlas Shrugged and during the Great Depression.

If you want to go back and read the article as a whole, you can find it on the Imprimis Archive site. Just look for the October 2012 issue. I might read more Imprimis articles as an editorial series in the future. For now, I will end with this. What will YOU do to keep America exceptionalism foremost? What will YOU do to make America the greatest country on earth?

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American Exceptionalism (Part 6)

Last week I expanded on the notion that the poor are “comparatively few in number, and the laws don’t bind them together by the ties of irremediable and hereditary penury.” This week I will continue on that and then speak about the U.S in world affairs

As the great economist and social critic Thomas Sowell has demonstrated time and again, it is still the case that the poor in America “are comparatively few in number.” And except for the black underclass—whose size is generally estimated at somewhere between two and ten percent of the black community and whose plight has thus far resisted every attempt at alleviation over the past 50 years—it is also true that penury in the United States is neither irremediable nor hereditary. As Sowell shows, of those who live on the next rung of the economic ladder, more of whom are white than black, only three percent get stuck in the bottom fifth of the income distribution for more than eight years.

Elaborating on Sowell’s analyses, the economist Mark Perry writes:

In the discussions on income inequality and wage stagnation, we frequently hear about the “top 1%” or the “top 10%” or the “bottom 99%” and the public has started to believe that those groups operate like closed private clubs that contain the exact same people or households every year. But the empirical evidence . . . tells a much different story of dynamic change in the labor market—people and households move up and down the earnings quintiles throughout their careers and lives. Many of today’s low-income households will rise to become tomorrow’s high-income households, and some will even eventually be in the “top 10%” or “top 1%.” And many of today’s “top 1%” or top income quintile members are tomorrow’s middle or lower class households, reflecting the significant upward and downward mobility in the dynamic U.S. labor market.

No such mobility can be found in any of the member countries of the European Union, or anywhere else for that matter. Even in the dismal economic state our nation has fallen into today, it is still exceptional where the degree and the distribution of prosperity are concerned. But to this, modern liberals are willfully blind.

With all exceptions duly noted, I think it is fair to say that what liberals mainly see when they look at America today is injustice and oppression crying out for redress. By sharp contrast, conservatives see a complex of traditions and institutions built upon the principles that animated the American Revolution and that have made it possible—to say yet again what cannot be said too often—for more freedom and more prosperity to be enjoyed by more of its citizens than in any other society in human history. It follows that what liberals—who concentrate their attention on the relatively little that is wrong with America instead of the enormous good embodied within it—seek to change or discard is precisely what conservatives are dedicated to preserving, reinvigorating, and defending.

A similar divide separates liberals and conservatives as to the role America has played in world affairs. Consider the many apologies President Obama has issued for the misdeeds of which he imagines Americans have been guilty in our relations with other countries in general and the Muslim world in particular. Never mind that the United States has spilled blood and treasure to liberate and protect many millions of people from the totalitarian horrors first of Nazism and then of Communism, and that since 9/11 we have spilled yet more blood and treasure fighting against Islamofascism, the totalitarian successor to Nazism. And as to the Muslim world in particular, never mind that, as the columnist Mona Charen puts it, “of the last six wars in which the United States was involved (Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya), four were undertaken to rescue Muslims and the other two (Afghanistan and Iraq) had the side benefit of liberating Muslims —to what end remains an open question.”

Over the past 80 years or so, we had to deal with Nazism, Communism, and now Islamofascism trying to take over the world, though we had dealt with Islamofascism in one form or another since the 1780’s. We had always been the world’s savior, so to speak, with Nazism and Communism, and for the past 12 years some people had put the blame on us for the rapid rise of Islamofascism since the attacks on September 11, 2001. With everything that is happening in Europe with the expansion of Sharia Law, I think we are ultimately the last stand in the world in preventing it, no matter how hard Obama is trying to change that with his apology tour and whatnot. If we want to keep America exceptional as WE know it, we need to continue to be the shining light for hope and capitalism in the world.

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American Exceptionalism (Part 5)

Last week we talked about the differences between a nation which put liberty ahead of equality, and those who put equality ahead of liberty. This week we will discuss more from de Tocqueville and what he had said on the differences between Americans and Europeans as well as the gap between rich and poor

Then too there is the assumption, blithely accepted by the party of economic equality, that the gap between rich and poor—or even between the rich and the middle class—self-evidently amounts to a violation of social justice. Yet far from being self-evident, this assumption stems from a highly questionable concept of social justice—one that rules out or minimizes the role played by talent, character, ambition, initiative, daring, work, and spirit in producing unequal outcomes in “the pursuit of happiness.”

Furthermore, both the assumption and its correlative concept of social justice run counter to the American grain. As study after study has shown, and as the petering out of the Occupy Wall Street movement has recently confirmed, what Tocqueville observed on this point in the 1830s remains true today: Americans, unlike Europeans, he wrote, “do not hate the higher classes of society” even if “they are not favorably inclined toward them . . . .” Which is to say that most Americans are not prone to the envy of the rich that eats away at their self-appointed spokesmen on the Left.

Nor are most Americans subject to the accompanying passion for economic egalitarianism that made for the spread of socialism in other countries. What explains the absence of that levelling passion is that it has been starved by the opportunities America has afforded millions upon millions to better their lot and the advantage they have been free to take of those opportunities—which in turn explains how unprecedented and unmatched levels of prosperity have been created here and how they have come to be shared more widely here than anywhere else.

Tocqueville also put his finger on a second and related reason for the persistence of this particular feature of American exceptionalism: “The word poor is used here in a relative, not an absolute sense. Poor men in America would often appear rich in comparison with the poor of Europe.” A story I was once told by a Soviet dissident provides an amusing illustration. It seems that the Soviet authorities used to encourage the repeated screening of The Grapes of Wrath, a movie about the Great Depression-era migration of starving farmers from the Dust Bowl to California in their broken-down pickups. But contrary to expectation, what Soviet audiences got from this film was not an impression of how wretched was the plight of the poor in America. Instead they came away marvelling that in America, “even the peasants own trucks.”

Tocqueville further observed that in America, “the poor, instead of forming the immense majority of the nation, as is always the case in aristocratic communities, are comparatively few in number, and the laws do not bind them together by the ties of irremediable and hereditary penury.”

One thing I had found interesting is what de Tocqueville observed in America, as he wrote in the last paragraph, that the poor are “comparatively few in number, and the laws don’t bind them together by the ties of irremediable and hereditary penury.” Looking at America of the 21^st Century you would have considered de Tocqueville crazy for writing that, but if you look at some of the plantations in the South, as well as some of the homes in the North, during the times before the Civil War you would think different. Actually, it was AFTER the Civil War (or the War Between the States, the war of Southern Independence, whatever you want to call it) where you see the lack of the nouveau riche and the sophistication that was popular before 1861. Keep in mind the South was in a total state of disarray and their main lifestyle was almost obliterated. The South had to rebuild somehow during reconstruction, but the economy had undergone a change in the south, and as such the poor (not only in the south but in the north as well) began to form the immense majority of the nation.

And if you look around the world, this is what Socialism and socialistic policies bring about as well. I am thinking Podhoretz is warning against this in the article, and if we fail to heed his words, then we will wind up like what we had read and seen in Atlas Shrugged.

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American Exceptionalism (Part 4)

 

So far as liberty is concerned, until recently no one but libertarians have been arguing that we were insufficiently free in the United States. If anything, some conservatives, dismayed by such phenomena as the spread of pornography and sexual license, thought that we had too much freedom for our own good. But thanks to modern liberalism’s barely concealed hostility to the free market, not to mention the threat posed by Obamacare to religious and economic freedom, many conservatives are now echoing these libertarian arguments, if in a milder form.

Judging by what they say and the policies they pursue, modern liberals are not all that concerned about liberty. What they really care about, and what they assign a higher value to, is economic equality (as reflected in the now famous phrase, “spread the wealth around”). Yet here is what the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in 1976 about this very issue in connection with the redistributionist ideology then regnant at the United Nations:

And equality . . . what is the record? The record was stated most succinctly by an Israeli socialist who told William F. Buckley, Jr. that those nations which have put liberty ahead of equality have ended up doing better by equality than those with the reverse priority . . . . This is our case. We are of the liberty party, and it might surprise us what energies might be released were we to unfurl those banners.

Four years later, Ronald Reagan came along to unfurl those banners. And just as Moynihan predicted, the result was the release of new political and economic energies that reversed the political and economic decline of the Carter years and that led to our victory in the Cold War.

Of course, the party of liberty Moynihan was talking about was the United States of America and the party of economic equality was the socialist countries of what was then called the Third World. But within America today, an analogous split has opened up, with the Republicans constituting the party of liberty and the Democrats more and more becoming the party of redistribution. Hence the Democrats never stop claiming that the rich are failing to pay their fair share of taxes. Yet after surveying the numbers, the economist Walter Williams of George Mason University asks an excellent question: “What standard of fairness dictates that the top ten percent of income earners pay 71 percent of the federal income tax burden while 47 percent of Americans pay absolutely nothing?” To which an editorial in the Wall Street Journal replies: “There is nothing fair about confiscatory tax policy that reduces growth, denies opportunity, and keeps more people in poverty.”

Normally I would not agree or endorse anything a Democrat says, but I think Moynihan hits the proverbial nail on the head with this statement in regards to American Exceptionalism. Read that one part once more:

The record was stated most succinctly by an Israeli socialist who told William F. Buckley, Jr. that those nations which have put liberty ahead of equality have ended up doing better by equality than those with the reverse priority (emphasis mine)

Even Moynihan, who was a sociologist, recognized the need of putting liberty ahead of equality. In doing so, the nation had ended up doing better by equality than those who put equality ahead of liberty. Today under Obama, and I will go so far as to say under the other two Democrats (Carter and Clinton) as well, America is putting equality ahead of liberty, and as such we are failing. There had been a couple of times (from 1981 – 1989 under Ronald Reagan and also in George W. Bush's first term from 2001 – 2005)  in which America was successful because we put liberty ahead of equality, but that is only 12 years in the past 36 years. All the other times (and granted I did vote for George W. Bush for reelection in 2004) the presidents put equality ahead of liberty, and this is the mess we are in now.

This also leads to the Tytler Cycle that I had mentioned many times in the past.

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government.  It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury.
"From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising them the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
"The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.  These nations have progressed through this sequence:
"From bondage to spiritual faith;
from spiritual faith to great courage;
from courage to liberty;
from liberty to abundance;
from abundance to selfishness;
from selfishness to apathy;
from apathy to dependence;
from dependency back again into bondage."

There had been a few times in which both Reagan and Bush 43 have kept or put us back into the courage to liberty stage, but more often than not the presidents had moved us into the selfishness to apathy or even apathy to dependency stage, with Obama doing his damnedest to put us in to the dependency to bondage stage. The reason he has not is because of we the people and how WE maintain those traits which make America great and exceptional.

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American Exceptionalism (Part 3)

Last week we had explored what Alexis de Tocqueville and Henry Adams had said about American Exceptionalism. This week I will just ask a simple question: Compared to what is America so bad?

On the other hand, there have always been defenders of American exceptionalism as a vital force for good. Thus, several decades before switching sides, Henry Adams charged America’s foreign critics with blindness to the country’s amazing virtues. Whereas, Adams wrote, European philosophers and poets could see only rapacity and vulgarity here, the poorest European peasants could discern that “the hard, practical money-getting American democrat was in truth living in a world of dream” and was “already guiding Nature with a kinder and wiser hand than had ever yet been felt in human history.” It was this dream, Adams went on to say, that beckoned to the poor of the old world, calling upon them to come and share in the limitless opportunities it offered—opportunities unimaginable anywhere else.

For a long time now, to speak personally, I have taken my stand with the young Adams, to whom America was exceptionally good, against his embittered older self, to whom it had become exceptionally bad. In my own younger days, I was on the Left, and from the utopian vantage point to which leftism invariably transports its adherents, it was the flaws in American society—the radical 1960s trinity of war, racism, and poverty—that stood out most vividly. It rarely occurred to me or my fellow leftists to ask a simple question: Compared to what is America so bad?

From our modern perspective, much more was wrong with Periclean Athens, or the Italy of the Medicis, or England under the first Queen Elizabeth, or 19th-century Russia under the Romanovs. But this has not disqualified them from being universally ranked among the highest points of human civilization and achievement. After more than 40 years of pondering the question “Compared to what?” I have come to believe with all my heart that the United States belongs on that exalted list. It is true that we have not earned a place on it, as the others mainly did, by our contribution to the arts. Yet it is worth pointing out that even in the sphere of the arts, we have not done too badly. To speak only of literature, names like Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Robert Frost, and many others attest that we have, in fact, done far better than might generally have been expected of a nation conceived primarily to achieve other ends. These ends were social, political, and economic, and it is in them that we have indeed excelled the most.

We have excelled by following our Founding Fathers in directing our energies, as our Constitution exhorts us to do, to the preservation of the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, as well as to the pursuit of happiness tacitly understood by the Declaration of Independence to require prosperity as a precondition. (In his original draft of the Declaration, of course, Jefferson used the word “property” instead of “pursuit of happiness.”) By remaining faithful in principle—and to a considerable extent in practice—to the ideas by which the Founders hoped to accomplish these ends, we and our forebears have fashioned a country in which more liberty and more prosperity are more widely shared than among any other people in human history. Yes, even today that holds true, despite policies unfaithful both to the letter and to the spirit of the traditional American system that have resulted in a series of political and economic setbacks.

The question Podhoretz asked (Compared to what is America so bad?) is one we should be asking all of our liberal friends. See if this will get them to think and find out just WHY they think America is so bad. This will force them to do what Andrew Breitbart had said in Righteous Indignation when he brought up his Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Revolutionaries. If you remember, Rule 9 of the Primer dealt with not letting them pretend to know more than they do. In fact, let me read just a small excerpt from it when I did my editorial on that particular rule.

“Your opponents will pretend to be experts if you don't, but that's okay, because you can always puncture their balloon with one word: why. Asking them to provide evidence for their assertions is always fun, and it's even more fun asking them to provide the sources for that evidence. Attacking the fundamental basis of their arguments if fun, too - if they tell you health care is a right, ask why. Liberals don't have a why, other than their own utopianism and their dyspeptic view of the status quo and America. Reason is not their strong suit - emotion is. Force them to play on the football field of reason.”

As Andrew said, there is one word which we can use to puncture the false narrative propagated by the left, and even a few kooks on our own side. That word is why, a simple three-letter word with a lot of power and oomph behind it. If we ask why they think that, then they will have to come up with a reason. As we all know, reason is not their strong suit because they always rely on emotion.

As I had said at the end of that particular editorial, “We have the tools to force our opponents to play on the football field of reason. The thing of it is do we have the WILLPOWER to confront them and force them to play on that football field of reason, or are we afraid to do it?”

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American Exceptionalism (Part 2)

Barack Obama says that there is no such thing as American Exceptionalism as much as there is British Exceptionalism or Greek Exceptionalism. Well there are many reasons to make America MORE exceptional, and I brought it out in last week’s editorial. Now we will discuss just how people had lost sight of American Exceptionalism.

At first, anti-American passions were understandably fuelled by the dangerous political challenge posed to the monarchies of Europe by the republican ideas of the American Revolution. But the political side of anti-Americanism was soon joined to a cultural indictment that proved to have more staying power. Here is how the brilliant but volatile historian Henry Adams—the descendent of two American presidents—described the cultural indictment as it was framed in the earliest days of the Republic:

In the foreigner’s range of observation, love of money was the most conspicuous and most common trait of the American character . . . . No foreigner of that day—neither poet, painter, or philosopher—could detect in American life anything higher than vulgarity . . . . Englishmen especially indulged in unbounded invective against the sordid character of American society . . . . Contemporary critics could see neither generosity, economy, honor, nor ideas of any kind in the American breast.

In his younger days, Adams defended America against these foreign critics; but in later life, snobbishly recoiling from the changes wrought by rapid industrialization following the Civil War, he would hurl the same charge at the America of the so-called Gilded Age.

We see a similar conflict in Tocqueville. Democracy in America was mainly a defense of the country’s political system and many of its egalitarian habits and mores. But where its cultural and spiritual life was concerned, Tocqueville expressed much the same contempt as the critics cited by Henry Adams. The Americans, he wrote, with “their exclusively commercial habits,” were so fixated “upon purely practical objects” that they neglected “the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts,” and it was only their proximity to Europe that allowed them “to neglect these pursuits without lapsing into barbarism.” Many years later, another Frenchman, Georges Clemenceau, went Tocqueville one better: “America,” he quipped, “is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone from barbarism to decadence without the usual interval of civilization.”

The main reason for the enduring power of the cultural critique was its fervent embrace, beginning in the late 19th century, by the vast majority of the writers, artists, and intellectuals who followed Tocqueville. And so it still goes in 2012, when the putative materialism and crassness of American life are harped upon in movies, television shows, novels, volumes of social criticism, and op-ed pieces too numerous to count.

Like Tocqueville and the foreigners cited by Henry Adams, moreover, these more recent works attribute this crassly philistine attitude to the love of money and “the exclusively commercial habits” that went with it—in other words, to the species of freedom that has done more than anything else ever invented to lift masses of people out of poverty and that would later be known as capitalism. America, these critics were declaring, was exceptional all right—exceptionally bad, or even downright evil.

We had seen the decline of American Exceptionalism in the late 19th century with the advent of the Gilded Era. This was also about the time that the government decided that they are best suited to teach out students and also when many had thought America was a democracy and not a Republic, but I will get to them in a later editorial. Today we see many not interested in politics (when it is all around us) or even sat that greed is bad and we need to share the wealth. That is NOT what American Exceptionalism is supposed to be about, and the more we fall down that path the worse off America will be.

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American Exceptionalism

A couple of weeks ago I had said that someone had said that a friend and I just destroyed 60 years of “American Exceptionalism” for him. That got me to thinking, and in the Hillsdale College publication called Imprimis, there was an interesting article by Norman Podhoretz, former Editor-in-Chief of Commentary Magazine, entitled “Is America Exceptional?” Over the next few weeks I will be reading from it during this editorial. Here is the first part:

ONCE UPON A TIME, hardly anyone dissented from the idea that, for better or worse, the United States of America was different from all other nations. This is not surprising, since the attributes that made it different were vividly evident from the day of its birth. Let me say a few words about three of them in particular.

First of all, unlike all other nations past or present, this one accepted as a self-evident truth that all men are created equal. What this meant was that its Founders aimed to create a society in which, for the first time in the history of the world, the individual’s fate would be determined not by who his father was, but by his own freely chosen pursuit of his own ambitions. In other words, America was to be something new under the sun: a society in which hereditary status and class distinctions would be erased, leaving individuals free to act and to be judged on their merits alone. There remained, of course, the two atavistic contradictions of slavery and the position of women; but so intolerable did these contradictions ultimately prove that they had to be resolved—even if, as in the case of the former, it took the bloodiest war the nation has ever fought.

Secondly, in all other countries membership or citizenship was a matter of birth, of blood, of lineage, of rootedness in the soil. Thus, foreigners who were admitted for one reason or another could never become full-fledged members of the society. But America was the incarnation of an idea, and therefore no such factors came into play. To become a full-fledged American, it was only necessary to pledge allegiance to the new Republic and to the principles for which it stood.

Thirdly, in all other nations, the rights, if any, enjoyed by their citizens were conferred by human agencies: kings and princes and occasionally parliaments. As such, these rights amounted to privileges that could be revoked at will by the same human agencies. In America, by contrast, the citizen’s rights were declared from the beginning to have come from God and to be “inalienable”—that is, immune to legitimate revocation.

As time went on, other characteristics that were unique to America gradually manifested themselves. For instance, in the 20th century, social scientists began speculating as to why America was the only country in the developed world where socialism had failed to take root. As it happens, I myself first came upon the term “American exceptionalism” not in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, where it has mistakenly been thought to have originated, but in a book by the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, who used it in connection with the absence in America of a strong socialist party. More recently I have discovered that the term may actually have originated with Joseph Stalin, of all people, who coined the term in the same connection but only in order to dismiss it. Thus, when an American Communist leader informed him that American workers had no intention of playing the role Marx had assigned to the worldwide proletariat as the vanguard of the coming socialist revolution, Stalin reputedly shouted something like, “Away with this heresy of American exceptionalism!” And yet Stalin and his followers were themselves exceptional in denying that America was exceptional in the plainly observable ways I have mentioned. If, however, almost everyone agreed that America was different, there was a great deal of disagreement over whether its exceptionalism made it into a force for good or a force for evil. This too went back to the beginning, when the denigrators outnumbered the enthusiasts.

Notice the three things that Podhoretz said which made America exceptional:

1. A self-evident truth that all men are created equal.
2. To become a full-fledged American, it was only necessary to pledge allegiance to the new Republic and to the principles for which it stood.
3. In America, the citizen’s rights were declared from the beginning to have come from God and to be “inalienable”—that is, immune to legitimate revocation.

Other characteristics had come about in the 20th century that also made America exceptional, but for the purposes of today’s editorial I will focus on these three just briefly because these three have caused a lot of controversy today. Numbers 1 and 3 go together because we see them in the Declaration of Independence with the phrase “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that ALL MEN  (i.e. humankind) are created equal, that they are endowed BY THEIR CREATOR WITH CERTAIN INALIENABLE RIGHTS, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” This proves that America was founded on a JUDEO-CHRISTIAN heritage. However, not many believe we were founded on a Judeo-Christian heritage, and I will be devoting an entire show to it. I will say to start of with that if Jefferson were to see what people had done to the phrase “Separation of Church and State” today as opposed to when he wrote it in 1802, he would be livid.

The second cause of what made America exceptional deals with citizenship. Not only were we the first nation to say that if you pledge allegiance to the Republic and the principles for which it stood, then you are a citizen but I will go ONE STEP FURTHER and say that if you recite this when you are a child AND you are born here, irregardless of your parents’ citizenship status, then you ARE A NATURAL BORN CITIZEN. Many people say that the ONLY time children are national born is if their citizens are parents, and that is so far from the truth it is unreal. I can spend an entire show on this in the future, and I will, but today is not the day to do it.

Look for me to bring these three issues out in a later editorial and possibly show. America IS and ALWAYS HAS BEEN exceptional, and I aim to bring that out more on this show.

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Rundown for July 13, 2013

Join Rick Bulow and Billie Cotter as they bring you the week in news. The show is in Verdict Watch because the jury had received their instructions in the George Zimmerman trial for the murder of Trayvon Martin. What happened the last few days? Also, why was the judge so hard on the Defense team? The White House is now distancing itself from the Trayvon Martin case and also from Barack Obama’s previous comments. In other news outside of the George Zimmerman murder, Elisabeth Hasselbeck is making the move from ABC’s “The View” to Fox News Channel, where she will take over for Gretchen Carlson (who will be moving to a show in the afternoon) on the “Fox & Friends” Curvy Couch in between Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade. What did Elisabeth say on her last day? What did Kilmeade say about The View? All that and more including your calls and the ever popular Schmuck of the Week coming up.

Join us today at 1:30 PM Eastern, 12:30 PM Central for Red, Right, and Blue. I will be in the chatroom, which can be accessed at http://www.ownthenarrative.com/live, 30 minutes early for some last minute show prep and also a meet and greet. If you want to engage the conversation during the show, there are three ways to do so

• Call 832-699-0449
• Skype in to OTNNetwork
• If you are unable to be in the chatroom, then use the hashtags #RedRightBlue and #OTNN

Tell your friends. Tell your enemies. Hell, tell a liberal. While we are on verdict watch here on Red, Right, and Blue, we still manage to condense 168 hours of news into 2 hours and have fun doing it too!

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Jimi Hendrix: A Great American and Patriot

I had played this video for the 4th of July last year, and it is just as relevant today as it was then

For today’s editorial, I will introduce you to a great American Patriot. Listen to this clip by Alfonzo “Zo” Rachel of “ZoNation” as he speaks on the Great American Individual and Patriot

And for those of you who had not heard the entire version, you can catch the entire clip here.

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Time to give up or time to fight on? (Part 2)

In my editorial on January 5, I read from the December 2012 issue of Imprimis where Hugh Hewitt had an interview with the president of Hillsdale College Larry P. Arnn. Here is just a short sampling of that editorial:

. There was a very interesting dialogue at the beginning of the newsletter in which Hewitt had mentioned that “there are a lot of people who are close to saying “game over,” who are tempted now to retreat from politics—to go do missionary
work, for instance—and give up on the republic. But you have made your life’s work the studying of leaders who have refused to do that.” Dr. Arnn’s answer is one in which many people should read many times and commit it to memory.

That’s right. And the reason you can’t do that, by the way—the reason you can’t retreat into private life and give up on politics—is that the cost of doing it is overwhelming. If you don’t live under good laws, life becomes truncated and less happy, injustice becomes customary, civilization is compromised. And one
cannot acquiesce in that. One has to be involved. And since politics is natural to us—man is essentially political, as Aristotle says—and since we do live in the greatest modern country—founded that way at least—we owe it a lot. And many of the people who have seen the republic
through to where we are today have gone through things that are worse than this. So first of all, it’s a duty not to give up. But second, there are good reasons to
know that the game isn’t over.

When pressed by Hugh what he meant, Dr. Arnn went on to say,

One of them is that the election is shot through with contradictions. The obvious contradiction is that we have a divided government. The presidency and the Senate are in the hands of one party, and the House of Representatives and most governorships are in the hands of the other. A second contradiction is that a large majority of people continued to say in the exit polls that they were against raising taxes in order to cut the deficit.
One might be cynical and put that down to an irresponsible refusal to pay for existing benefits—to get more and more “free stuff.” But for a long time now, opinion polls have pointed towards the existence of a broad majority of Americans who favor smaller government. This obviously contradicts the re-election of the president and the Democratic gains in the Senate. The
country is still a house divided against itself, and that’s dangerous. But it doesn’t mean that there’s been a resolution. It means in fact the opposite: there is not a
resolution. That resolution still has to be made, and the making of it lies ahead of us, and not behind us.

Later on in the same interview, Hewitt said someone will go and the transcription and say that Arnn is comparing Obama and our government now to Hitler and the Third Reich. Arnn then replied by saying that the principles of Progressivism that animate our government today, which are antithetical to the principles of the American Founding, lead to policies that cannot work, will not work, and result into obvious injustices. you can read the entire issue here and also subscribe to Imprimis for free here.

We definitely see that with Facebook and how it bans conservatives for speaking out against Obama but allow sites such as “It sickens me to wake up and see Sarah Palin is still alive” to remain. In fact, that is what this show today is about. Many conservatives have been banned from Facebook for certain things, whether it is sending too many friend requests or posting things that they knew FOR SURE they did not post or even speaking out in many ways against the Obama regime. That is why this Thursday there is an event put on by my guests Diane Sori of The Patriot Factor and Joe Newby of The Examiner called Freedom from Facebook Day. Diane and Joe are two people who had not given up the fight against Obama and are continuing to fight on even when Facebook shows its liberal bias. They are TRUE PATRIOTS and two people I am glad are on our side. I asked the question at the end of the editorial on January 5, and I will ask it again.  “Will you give up, or will you fight on?”

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The IRS

Over the past few weeks we had been hearing of the IRS denying certain statuses to organizations that have the words “Tea Party", “Patriot”, or “Constitution” in it’s name. That is in and of itself profiling, and one of the things that the IRS should NOT be a part of. In fact, the IRS should be defunded and/or abolished because they are rewarding bad behavior and punishing good behavior.

I know most of you are asking what to replace the IRS with if it is abolished. The answer in my mind is simple. I had devoted earlier rants on this blog (see my Second Rant and my 13th Rant back in 2005 as well as my 19th rant in 2010) to the messed up Federal Tax System and said that we should go to the Fair Tax. In later editorials I will go into why I think the Fair Tax is the way to go, but will ask you this. Take a look at the following picture and tell me just which one you prefer.

The two paychecks look similar, don’t they? Well take a closer look. The current paycheck has you losing all your hard earned money before it even reaches your hand due to all of the taxes that Uncle Sam inflicts. This is called taxing PRODUCTIVITY. Normally people who make $5 an hour (for instance) should expect to take home $400 every 2 weeks (not counting taxes) but instead they are taking home $275 – $300 (I know it might not be just like that, but am trying to give an example) every 2 weeks due to Uncle Sam taking that hard earned money out of your pocket.

Now with the FairTax, when you make $5 an hour which leads to $400 every two weeks you TAKE HOME $400 every two weeks. “Well now what about all of the taxes? How does the government get it’s share?” you ask. Well the answer is simple. Let’s say you go to the hardware store and buy a $10 hammer. The hardware store get $7.70 of the money and the remain $2.30 goes to the government. That is called taxing CONSUMPTION or WHAT YOU BUY.

If you want to know more about the FairTax, I will go into the truth of it in later editorials, but one thing I recommend is to go to the Fair Tax website at http://www.fairtax.org and check it out. There are also some videos as well on YouTube which I will be playing and discussing in future rants. However, I will say that the FairTax will bring money, jobs, and growth back to the United States of America.

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I am an Andrew Breitbart Conservative!

A while back on Facebook I had read somewhere that a couple of people call themselves Frederick Douglass Republicans. Well I would like to toss another term into the mix: Andrew Breitbart Conservative.

Over the past 13 weeks I had been going through the Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Revolutionaries during these editorials, and in my research on the topics, I realize that I am an Andrew Breitbart Conservative. When I began introducing the Pragmatic Primer, I mentioned that this battle is not Left v. Right, Liberal v. Conservative, or even Democrat v. Republican. This battle is one step DEEPER than that: Alinsky v. Breitbart. The seeds for the major part of this battle were laid when Andrew gave his wonderful speech at the 2012 CPAC just a few weeks before his death.

During that speech he said that many are on to the “Saul Alinsky Bullshit ways” of the Progressive Left and that the 2012 election would be forever known as the “dogwhistle” election. We were right on the cusp of victory with Mitt Romney only to have it grabbed away from us at the last minute. It also showed down the ticket as we barely kept the House and failed to grab the Senate.

In order for us to win the Senate and increase our lead in the House in the 2014 midterms, we have to learn where we went wrong in the 2012 House and Senate elections. Then when we find out where we went wrong we have to learn to not repeat the same things if AND ONLY IF we are serious about winning in 2014 and carry that momentum into 2016. One of the main things that Andrew said, and I use it as my own motto ever since, is “Anyone that’s willing to stand next to me and fight the progressive left, I will be in that bunker, and if you’re not in that bunker, more than shame on you. You’re on the other side!” In fact, let me just play that entire clip for you right now:

 

After hearing that speech, I knew I was an Andrew Breitbart Conservative, but did not fully embrace it until after I got his book Righteous Indignation for Christmas and then went through the Pragmatic Primer. Now, after reading it many times and going over the Pragmatic Primer on my radio show, I fully embrace it because just like Andrew said at the end of the book on page 232 in the hardback edition:

“These are the years that we will look back on and question whether we did enough for our country and for out children. That’s why I’m so determined, so pissed, so righteously indignant. Excuse me while I save the world.”

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Breitbart Rule 13: Believe in the Audacity of Hope

Andrew Breitbart has given us all the tools to help defeat the Complex, but he gives us one more thing to believe in. Hence his 13th and final rule in the Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Revolutionaries.

13.) Believe in the audacity of hope: It's too bad President Obama is such a joyless, politically correct automaton, because he's terrifically agile with his prepared words. To paraphrase his victory speech after the 2008 election, the rise of the New Media alone is not the change we seek - it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you.

It can't happen without hope for America and faith in its people - two things Obama and his leftist ilk don't have, which is why they try to shut it down in others. We have the power to unravel the Complex and destroy the Institutional Left. It won't be easy. It will take time and effort, and there will be false starts and roadblocks, but we'll do it, because we have to do it. Apathy in the face of determined Frankfurt School/Alinsky/critical-theory-trained activists is national suicide.

As one who loves to shine a light on the progressive left and become a rod for the truth and for conservatism, Breitbart wrapped it all up in a short, simple paragraph. We indeed have the power to unravel the Complex and destroy the Institutional Left. However, we also know that there will be times in which for every step we take forward, we take 4 steps back. Right now is NOT the time to give up and give in to the Left and even to those on our own side. We need to get out there and take the fight to them and push them back. If we do not, then it is just national suicide because the Frankfurt School/Alinsky/critical-theory-trained activists like the Occupy movement, like the Organizing for America group, like the Move On crowd, have had the upper hand for close to 3 or 4 decades now. Yes ladies and gentlemen, this change had not been done overnight but over time. Remember what Kurt Dillon said in the book Escape to Freedom by AJ Reissig:

A long time ago, one of the Soviet Leaders...and I can't remember which...said that Americans will never jump from capitalism to communism. However, if American leaders dished out small doses of socialism, then the American people would one day awaken to find they have communism. We didn't get here overnight, and if all of the socialist changes had taken place at once, the people would have had none of it. But a gradual change...most people didn't realize it was happening.

We are at that path as we speak, and even Alexander Tytler spoke of it about 250 years ago:

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government.  It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury.
"From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising them the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
"The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.  These nations have progressed through this sequence:
"From bondage to spiritual faith;
from spiritual faith to great courage;
from courage to liberty;
from liberty to abundance;
from abundance to selfishness;
from selfishness to apathy;
from apathy to dependence;
from dependency back again into bondage."

Breitbart must have known and realized that we are on our way back to bondage, which is why he came up with the Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Revolutionaries as a way for us to destroy and dismantle the Media Complex and the Progressive Left, as well as the kooks on our own side. All we have to do is not be afraid and to go out there, putting our knowledge of the Primer to good use.

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Breitbart Rule 12: Truth isn’t mean. It’s truth

As Andrew Breitbart had come to the close of his Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Revolutionaries, he brings about a VERY important issue and rule which many on the left do NOT want to think about, which is why they rely on Alinsky Tactics and smears.

12.) Truth isn't mean. It's truth: I know that some of you are going to feel rotten about using some of these tactics. We can ignore the tactics, but the left will continue to use them to their benefit; just as the Frankfurt School relied on the good nature and honesty of Americans who wouldn't engage in un-Christian tactics in order to achieve their massive victory, the left continues to rely on our honesty and aboveboard good nature in order to achieve theirs.

We can't let them.

We start by uncovering the truth and telling everyone about it. I'm not religious, and I'm certainly no theologian, but if there is one thing in religion that speaks to me, it is the idea of absolute truth. In fact, the word truth has meaning only if it's absolute. And absolute truth will set us free from the grip of the Complex, because the Complex lives in the clouds, in the theoretical heavens - the Frankfurt School was successful only because they were able to shift Marxism's basis from real-world predictions to descriptions of supposed historical processes, making Marxism unfalsifiable. We have to falsify their theory by presenting unvarnished truth after unvarnished truth until the light dawns on everyone just how right we are.

In my travels on Twitter, I have met many who spread lies about anything and everything, and when I confront them with the truth they call me racist, mean, or say that I don’t know what I’m talking about. Then when I provide them with links which show where I know what I am referring to they proceed to say that the site or blog has errors even though it is a HIGHLY REPUTABLE site which many use. One of the many things I also like to bring up is that “Common sense dictates …” which I use to say that those who even have any sort of common sense and decency would look at what is read and determine for themselves if it is true or not. Sometimes people just need a 10 pound sledgehammer of common sense upside the head or a cheese grater of decency right in the yambag region to see that what they had said or read has been wrong. However, there are times in which you have to use it on people more than once to try to get it to sink in. No matter what, we need to reach out to people with the truth, and for those who do not want to hear it, well all we have to do is channel our inner Jack Nicholson from A Few Good Men and let them have it.

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Breitbart Rule 11: Don’t let them get away with ignoring their own rules

Not only did Andrew Breitbart say Alinsky was right about ridicule being man’s most potent weapon, he also agreed with Alinsky on another rule. Hence, Rule 11 in the Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Revolutionaries.

11.) Don't let them get away with ignoring their own rules: Alinsky is right again. They set up this PC Complex, and they have to be held accountable to it, if only for honesty's sake, and we're the only ones who will do it. Joe Biden is still vice president of the United States even though he called the first black president "clean" and "articulate." Harry Reid is still Senate majority leader even though he said Obama was "light-skinned" and could drop his "Negro dialect" on cue. Until his death in 2010, Robert Byrd was "a lion of the Senate" even though he was a former Kleagle of the KKK. If these had been Republicans, they would have been hounded from office. They're Democrats, so they're not.

But that doesn't mean we can't hold them responsible for breaching their own standards. Every time they say things like this, we need to force them to back down and apologize, and we can't allow their allies to let them off the hook with excuses about how they stood for the right policies. Frankfurt School tactics can't work here - standing for liberalism doesn't mean you're allowed to violate the conventions of PC. At the very least, we need to force these hypocrites to stand up against their own PC regime in order to defend themselves.

Over the past 10 years or so, there had been a vast difference in the way Republicans and Democrats are handled. Among the ones I can think of:

• Trent Lott (Republican from Mississippi) was forced out of the Senate Republican Leadership because of his words at the celebration of Strom Thurmond’s (Republican from South Carolina) 100^th birthdate.
• Mark Foley (Republican from Florida’s 16^th District) resigned from the House because he was caught in bed with a minor.
• John Ensign (Republican from Nevada) resigned from the Senate because of ethics violations.

These were forced out of office while the Democrats only get a slap on the wrist. What makes these three different from the Democrats Andrew mentioned in his rule? The fact that the Democrats can do anything, even get away with murder (a la Hillary Clinton with Vince Foster and Whitewater, or Obama with the Ambassador and company in Benghazi as well as Navy SEAL Team 6 which killed Osama Bin Laden) at every turn.

We need to turn the tables on the Democrats and make them live by the EXACT SAME set of rules that they expect us to live by. If we do not, then they will run roughshod. In sports, both teams play by the same set of rules. It is time those in politics do the same thing.

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Breitbart Rule 10: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon

It is rare to see someone on the right agree with Alinsky, but in studying him and also Rule For Radicals, it is clear that Andrew Breitbart had found a way to use Alinsky’s rules to OUR advantage. Hence Rule 10 in his Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Revolutionaries:

10.) Ridicule is man's most potent weapon: Here, Alinsky and I agree. It's the truest of Alinsky's statements, and it's the most effective. Tina Fey, not the MSM, sullied Sarah Palin's image. Chevy Chase brought down Gerald Ford. Jon Stewart brought down Bush.

And we'll bring down Obama, but not unless we're willing to get unserious. Stuffy old white guys wearing bow ties and talking about the danger of national deficits don't get much done - talented people who can translate political chaos into merry pranksterism do.

We have seen the Left roll out a few people to impersonate our presidents or even political heroes. Case in point is Tina Fey with the legendary Saturday Night Live skit where she impersonated Sarah Palin with the ever popular saying “I can see Russia from my House” which many low-information voters think that those words actually came from Sarah Palin’s mouth.

 

That video goes to show that the Left has the keys to pull out the merry pranksterism on America and get away with it. That is one of the ways they won in 2008 and again in 2012. We have to turn the tables and take the merry pranksterism away from them. I had seen a couple of ways that we could do it. One main person who can do such is Reggie Brown who does a WONDERFUL impersonation of Barack Obama.

Another way is what the WWE had done to promote Capitol Punishment, their Pay Per View which was held in Washington DC in June 2011. They had spliced some clips of Obama’s press conferences with questions pertaining to their Pay Per View.

We can do the same in our own way, but the key is to not just talk about it but actually DO it. Instead of being a stuffed shirt spouting off numbers and pretending like we know what we are talking about, we need to let our hair down and just have some fun doing what we do best.

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Breitbart Rule 9: Don’t let them pretend to know more than they do

Just as we should not pretend to know more than we do, as I had discussed last week, we should not let the Left pretend to know more than they do. Hence Rule 9 in Andrew Breitbart’s Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Revolutionaries:

9.) Don't let them pretend to know more than they do: This is really the converse of the last rule. Your opponents will pretend to be experts if you don't, but that's okay, because you can always puncture their balloon with one word: why. Asking them to provide evidence for their assertions is always fun, and it's even more fun asking them to provide the sources for that evidence. Attacking the fundamental basis of their arguments if fun, too - if they tell you health care is a right, ask why. Liberals don't have a why, other than their own utopianism and their dyspeptic view of the status quo and America. Reason is not their strong suit - emotion is. Force them to play on the football field of reason.

As Andrew said, there is one word which we can use to puncture the false narrative propagated by the left, and even a few kooks on our own side. That word is why, a simple three-letter word with a lot of power and oomph behind it. If we ask why they think that, then they will have to come up with a reason. As we all know, reason is not their strong suit because they always rely on emotion. Granted, the kooks on our own side say their strong suit is reason, but in the conversations I have had with them, it seems like they do not have a reason except “Read the Constitution!” and “We need to get back to the Constitution!”

THIS is where doing research and knowing what we are talking about comes into play. The more research we do and the more we know, the better we can be at puncturing the false narrative that is out there. I know that in my own conversations at first I had not had a lot of good research on my side to puncture their balloon, but over the past year I had read and listed all of the sites and articles I had read. This way, if people say something that I know is false, I go right to a certain article and show them where they are in error.

This is also handy in the classic “He said, She said” cases as well. One thing I had been doing since 2006 is saving every conversation I have with people, whether in a chatroom or even on instant messenger. This way if they say something which they had been corrected on in the past I can go right to the file and say that this had been talked about before and that they were wrong then and are still wrong.

We have the tools to force our opponents to play on the football field of reason. The thing of it is do we have the WILLPOWER to confront them and force them to play on that football field of reason, or are we afraid to do it?

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