Thursday, November 30, 2017

GOP Saves the NEH -- to Attack America

Today's Washington Times ran an op-ed by Professor Allen C. Guelzo  urging the GOP to save the National Endowment for the Humanities, despite the agency's proven track record of enabling anti-American "scholarship" over the years. I was so outraged that I commented on their website:

Absurd self-serving piffle from a self-interested beneficiary of a corrupt system. Thanks to the work of NEH councils ("Soviet" is the Russian word for council, Professor) people in the USA respect our history so much they are now tearing down historical monuments, banning the Confederate battle flag, removing George Washington's plaque from his church, and kneeling for the Star Spangled Banner. "Heck of a job, Guelzo," as Pres. George W. Bush might have said. Somehow before the crypto-Communists and fellow travelers of the NEH took over, Americans respected our history, honored our flag, and learned patriotism instead of anti-Americanism in schools. I think the Princeton History Department worked pretty well teaching history prior to 1965, something Professor Guelzo apparently doesn't know--another indictment of the baneful influence of this corrupt and corrupting Great Society program.

This is the second pro-Endowment lobbying item I've seen the supposedly Conservative/Republican Washington Times, the first being a pro-National Endowment for the Arts oped by Governor Mike Huckabee, father of President Trump's spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders!

With GOP outlets running commentary like this, one wonders how President Trump will be able to make any serious changes in Washington. Eliminating the NEA and NEH are not only no-brainers--they would deprive the left of cash used to pay anti-GOP--and anti-American--operatives.

Hello, Republicans! How about taking your assailants off your payroll, for starters?

Sunday, October 08, 2017

Filmstruck Now Streaming "Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die?"

Glad to see that Filmstruck is now streaming my 1981 documentary, Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die? with a nice introduction by Columbia University Professor Annette Insdorf...click here to watch: https://www.filmstruck.com/us/watch/detail/1300010061.

Thursday, October 05, 2017

Pamela Geller's CAN'T WE TALK ABOUT THIS?



Pamela Geller's new documentary, CAN'T WE TALK ABOUT THIS? THE ISLAMIC JIHAD AGAINST FREE SPEECH couldn't come at a more appropriate moment, as Americans are experiencing the silencing not only of dissent on college campuses, but also the decline of the "public's right to know"as evidenced by the scarcity of public information about the recent massacre in Las Vegas. 

Instead of talking about the attack, its targets, the possible motivations of the gunman, or the glee with which ISIS and leftists have greeted the bloody deed, the media and political leadership have focused laser-like on the issue of gun-control...which, if this were a terrorist attack, would be supremely irrelevant as terrorists have used every weapon imaginable: guns, bombs, cars, trucks, knives, acid, and sabotage. And they have used these weapons to terrorize Western societies precisely in order to prevent discussion of...Islamic terror!

Geller's superb documentary shows how the inability to talk about Islamic terror since 9/11 has guaranteed defeat in the "war of ideas" currently taking place between the West and the Islamic world. For while Islamic terrorists spread their ideas with "propaganda of the deed," the West doesn't talk about its own ideas in response. It is a form of unilateral intellectual disarmament in a global ideological struggle...

In fact, as the film shows, Western authorities attempt to suppress Western ideas in the face of a Leftist-Islamic alliance against them, attacking critics of Islamic terror like Geller and her all-star cast of witnesses: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Geert Wilders, Mark Steyn, Douglas Murray, Ezra Levant, Lars Vilks, Robert Spencer, Garland Muhammad cartoon contest winner Bosch Fawstin, and Geller herself.

This is reminiscent of nothing so much as the Establishment's response to Communism following the Kennedy assassination. Until JFK's murder in Dallas by Communist assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, American media, colleges, schools, and publications were free to discuss Communist aggression against the West. Afterwards, supposedly Cold-War liberals changed sides, and mention of Communism became taboo in respectable society. Those who worried about the "Red Menace" were mocked, ostracized, and shunned...portrayed as crazy, paranoid, delusional believers in "Reds under the bed" or advocates of "McCarthyism."

Until Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States and defeated the Soviet Union, the collapse of which opened Russian archives that revealed the Comintern had indeed been active to promote worldwide Revolution, the Rosenbergs had been spies, Alger Hiss had been a Russian Agent, and that the USSR had been active in Vietnam and Central America...just as the "crazy" anti-Communists had charged. 

Reagan had succeeded because he refused to adopt the Establishment consensus and avoid the issue of Communism. Rather he called the USSR an "Evil Empire" and confronted it head-on.

Yet, after the fall of Communism, a messianic age of peace and love and understanding did not arrive, despite Clinton administration promotion promotion of Francis Fukuyama's fatuous "The End of History." Rather, what took place was what Fukuyama's teacher, Samuel Huntington, described in his own book, "The Clash of Civilizations." Instead of a "unipolar world," ancient tensions that had been subsumed under the East-West conflict once again bubbled to the surface--a "return of the repressed."

Chief among these was the rise of Islam as a competitive and adversarial ideology opposed to bourgeoise Western democracy, most dramatically in the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11th, 2001. As damaging as the Kennedy assassination had been to the US, apparently nothing had been learned. Once again, ideological underpinnings were willfully ignored. Just as it had become a career-ender to call someone a Communist in the latter half of the 20th Century, it became a career-ender to call someone an Islamist in the first half of the 21st.

And just as in the Post-Vietnam era, the West began to lose its mojo. Afghanistan and Iraq became costly, futile quagmires instead of quick, decisive victories. Americans saw the social fabric fray under domestic attacks reminiscent of the 1960s.

All this is either discussed or implied in Geller's brilliant film. The West defeated Communism only when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan allied to directly confront it ideologically as well as military and economically.

The takeaway from CAN'T WE TALK ABOUT THIS? is perfectly clear: Until Americans are free to confront Islamic terror directly, it cannot be defeated. To silence criticism of Islam is to surrender to the enemies of America and Western Civilization.

The next step to Making America Great Again is to talk openly about Islam. And the best way to do that, in my opinion, would be for President Trump to broadcast CAN'T WE TALK ABOUT THIS? on Radio Free Europe, the Voice of America, and PBS--just as President Reagan sponsored the broadcast of LET POLAND BE POLAND, a film that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Evil Empire.

Broadcasting Pamela Geller's film on US-Government sponsored channels as soon as possible would be a signal to the world that the Islamic fundamentalists and their supporters no longer had America running scared.








Friday, September 15, 2017

Milo Announces Berkeley Free Speech Week Speakers

Sept. 24: “Feminism Awareness Day”
  • Miss Elaine
  • Lucian Wintrich
  • Lisa DePasquale
  • Chadwick Moore
  • Milo Yiannopoulos
Sept. 25: “Zuck 2020”
  • Heather Mac Donald
  • Monica Crowley
  • SABO
  • Professor Jordan Peterson
  • James Damore
Sept. 26: “Islamic Peace and Tolerance Day”
  • Michael Malice
  • Raheem Kassam
  • Katie Hopkins
  • Erik Prince
  • Pamela Geller
  • David Horowitz
  • Milo Yiannopoulos
Sept. 27: “Mario Savio is Dead”
  • Mike Cernovich
  • Charles Murray
  • Ariana Rowlands
  • Stelion Onufrei
  • Alex Marlow
  • Milo Yiannopoulos
  • Steve Bannon
  • Ann Coulter

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

The Political Limitations of the Private Sector

 Kenneth Frazier, CEO, Merck; Brian Krzanich, CEO, Intel; Kevin Plank, CEO, Under Armour
resigned from Pres. Trump's Manufacturing Council in protest.


Recent news reports about Silicon Valley mega-corporations such as Pay Pal, Google, Facebook and Twitter banning conservatives from their services should give pause to GOP "thought leaders" who have argued that privatization is a panacea.


In fact, in the Trump Era, the time has come for a change of course by those fighting Political Correctness, to recognize that "a government of the people, by the people, and for the people" cannot be permitted to fall under the control of one political party indefinitely--and that GOP policies which enabled Democratic hegemony over the "permanent government" may have contributed to the current crisis of legitimacy.


If 50% of the population is not represented in the government workforce, then it cannot be said to be a representative government. Indeed, it is by definition unrepresentative--no matter that the elected officials sitting on top of the pyramid may differ. When Democratic Party civil servants openly announce their intention to "resist," then a constitutional crisis is inevitable.


Quite simply, no country can afford to have a political party which has been defeated at the ballot box in a position to determine the allocation of government goods and services to its opponents. It is not only undemocratic, it is a recipe for political corruption, chaos and abuses of the highest order.


However, in order to effectively combat this dangerous situation, the GOP must abandon its fetishistic commitment to "privatization" as the sole tool in their toolkit to deal with government issues.


It is quite clear that the Democratic party has corrupted a willing private sector to the point where American businesses now are more than happy to sacrifice markets, customers, and profits for Political Correctness--whether Merck, Intel, UnderArmour, Target, Apple, Google, Facebook, or Camping World, or dozens of others. 


This represents a fundamental and problematic change in prior business norms.


In the recent past--I taught in a business school for some 15 years--it was axiomatic that businesses should steer clear of politics to the maximum extent possible.


While individual business people were free to be political in their private lives, companies should try avoid political controversy--on the understanding that large numbers of customers disagreed about politics, so why risk losing sales?


However, this prior consensus obviously no longer applies.


Today, companies seemingly go out of their way to adopt controversial positions which alienate and even insult considerable segments of their customer base, with ostentatious "grandstanding" such as Merck's resignation from the President's Manufacturing Council, or Apple's $1 million donation to the SPLC. 


One should note that Steve Jobs did not believe in making any charitable donations, so Tim Cook's action is in direct contradiction to the business legacy of the company's founder, which I discussed in Corporate Social Responsibility and Its Discontents: Contradictions in ISO 26000: 2010 (August 15, 2014).

 1.   Steve Jobs & Apple—an anti-­‐CSR CEO of an anti-­‐CSR company. 

Walter Isaacson’s magisterial biography of Steve Jobs (2011) does not contain a single entry in the index under “Charity,” “CSR,” “Corporate Social Responsibility,” “Social,” or “Responsibility.” This is not surprising. Jobs did not believe in spending company money on charity. He was so Scrooge-­like that he did not pay dividends to stockholders. Job’s control-­freak style of management at Apple, and what Isaacson characterizes as his “nasty” and “mean” personality, enabled him take the company from one-­twentieth the value of Microsoft in 2000, to parity in 2010, to being worth 70% more than Microsoft in 2011—a year in which Mac’s market share grew by 28% as Microsoft’s shrank 1%. Yet no one can deny that Apple products have in fact added value to society.

Their user-­friendly, easy-­to-­use, and simple design made computing accessible to a wide range of people alienated by Microsoft’s difficult interface…and helped move computing from the corporate office to the individual home and pocket. This, in turn revived an endangered American electronics industry through the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and MacBook computers. Indeed, Isaacson called Jobs “the greatest business executive of our era, the one most certain to be remembered a century from now." 

One reason for Jobs’ success at Apple, is that rather than diverting attention and resources to CSR initiatives, Apple remained focused on its core business, and in Jobs’ own words, put “humanity into innovation.” Isaacson concluded Jobs’ focus was “to a create a company to last, not just to make money.” 

In putting his company first—above employees, customers, or society—Jobs exemplified [Milton] Friedman’s theory of the responsibility of the business executive. Did it lead to a successful business? Yes.

In other words, as Steve Jobs knew but Tim Cook does not, the proper business of business...is business.


That said, it would be remarkable if one could rely upon business to counter a determined political movement, especially as many of America's CEOs currently seem to follow the Chinese model, with the Democratic Party as the Communist Party, as explained in Bruce Dickson's Wealth into Power: The Communist Party's Embrace of China's Private Sector.


This would indicate that the traditional model that the GOP represents the private sector while the Democratic Party the public sector is in need of revision.


Indeed, with the government sector (federal, state & local) accounting for more than half of all jobs in the USA--more if one includes contracts and grants--the time has come for the Trump Administration to force pushback in the public sector.


Quite simply, the principle of representation and diversity must be expanded to promote inclusion of Republicans and Independents on the public payroll in proportion to the American population. What would that mean?


It would mean that the government workforce profile should be adjusted through goals, timetables and affirmative action programs to match Gallup survey results on political affiliation of the American public, the latest presented below:


In politics, as of today, do you consider yourself a Republican, a Democrat or an independent?








RepublicansIndependentsDemocrats
%%%
2017 Aug 2-6284128


Some things to note: (1) survey results do not match Congressional or Senate ratios, due to the systematic exclusion of independents from the political process; (2) Independents are the largest political group in the United States; (3) Pres. Trump owes his victory to Independents, many of them former Democrats; (4) the GOP does not have sufficient public support to govern without Independents--however, for the past 16 years they have been in a coalition with the Democrats instead, marginalizing the largest voting block in the country.


The explanation for this is probably simple greed. Making deals with Democrats--political opposites--allows for a roughly 50-50 split of the spoils, and permits a "coalition of the extremes against the middle" with a maximum return of investment. Were the GOP to ally with the middle-class ordinary American Independents, they would be a minority partner in the business.


This dynamic may explain establishment GOP politicians like Cong. Ryan's and Sen. McConnell's strange support for Antifa and other Democratic interests. One can assume that Pres. Trump is aware of his middle-class backing, but to share the wealth with Trump supporters, the GOP would have to become a junior partner to the more numerous Americans who support the President.


In other words, two minority parties--Democrats and the GOP--can rule over a larger population of Independents simply by horse-trading with one another and ignoring the excluded middle-class.


This could be countered by President Trump, if he manages to reduce popular support for both the establishment GOP and Democrats by 5% each in the next few years.


Such a strategy could call for running a large number of 3rd-party candidates in selected liberal districts, as well as primarying "Never Trumpers" in GOP strongholds. The goal would be to either bring the Independents into the GOP as "Trump Republicans" (like "Reagan Democrats"), making the party more representative, or laying the groundwork for a Third Party such as the one which replaced the Whigs, or Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party.


At a minimum, this means that the current GOP marriage to the private sector--especially now openly hostile corporate CEOs--must be dissolved and replaced with a marriage with the broad majority of American people, a marriage which would include government jobs as part of the pre-nup...something Pres. Trump could probably negotiate.