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A new survey finds that 75 percent of U.S. Catholics view Pope Francis favorably, down 8 percentage points since Pew last asked this question in 2021 and 15 points below his peak favorability rating, which was 90 percent in early 2015. 89 percent of Catholic Democrats hold a positive view of him, compared with 63 percent of Catholic Republicans.

The post Majority of U.S. Catholics view Pope Francis favorably appeared first on The Catholic Thing.

The fact that Dignitas infinita grounds its title in a statement from St. John Paul II gives us a strong indication that it is in the sense of “unending or unbounded” that this recent DDF Declaration is using the term “infinite.” Therefore, the various condemnations from numerous sources of the document for its use of the term “infinite” seem to be hyperbolic and uncharitable. 

The post What is humanity’s infinite dignity? appeared first on The Catholic Thing.

Stephen Leacock, the great Canadian economist (and amateur humorist, 1869-1944), wished to justify his choice of the academic profession when he could perhaps have become a successful businessman.

“In point of leisure, I enjoy more in the four corners of a single year than a businessman knows in his whole life. I thus have what the businessman can never enjoy, an ability to think, and what is still better, to stop thinking altogether for months at a time.”

God, in my opinion, can be blamed (indirectly) for the success of the capitalist system of investment and returns, for He designed the human race with free will, on stochastic principles, such that anyone who puts his mind to something consistently can get good at it.

The Devil, on the other hand, played the larger role in the invention of socialism, in which all investment decisions must be made by a bureaucracy. This is the system in which the State picks winners. It works because the State also picks police.

But is capitalism any better?

I, and Mr. Leacock, too, noticed that some very sub-prime intellects get rich in unquestionably vulgar ways, not simply because their minds are vulgar (though in a mass market, it helps), but because they use their wits day and night only for the purpose of money-making.

It is the system of “try, try again,” and if you play enough times, your score may accumulate. This can be statistically demonstrated by the fact that hardly anyone is trying to lose; and the banks punish the players who are. (Socialist banks do just the opposite.)

Under the capitalist system, this sort of behavior – busy-ness – is praised, and down there in the States you celebrate the “American Dream,” in which everyone makes a lot of money.

While I have emphasized production, there is also the flip, consumption side to this great wheel of fortune. It increases with production – or decreases, once socialism has been achieved.

For if you are not an investor yourself, but a worker under either system, you get what the boss is paying. Under capitalism, this will resemble what you are worth to the company, but under socialism, what you are worth, abstractly. (“We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us,” as they used to sing behind the Iron Curtain.)

In California, for instance, the State has recently ruled that everyone who works in a restaurant is entitled to $20 per hour (less the State’s considerable taxes).

As a critic of fast food, I don’t think this is a very good idea, for it will make unskilled workers too expensive, and close down perhaps half the trade.

The capitalists in this “mixed economy” will still be able to keep a few expensive restaurants open, however. That’s why I would prefer a minimum wage of $50, or perhaps $1,000 per hour, for it would eliminate restaurants entirely.

While this would be all to the good, it does not address the “root” of the problem: people frying, or at least dreaming of frying, fast food.

There are environmental objections if anyone tries to eat the stuff, but they wouldn’t anyway because, under our commercial arrangements, you are either a customer or a server. And once service has been priced out of existence, everyone can starve. We will have achieved socialism!

The only complete equality is death, which, as the economist J.M. Keynes argued, can be anticipated “in the long run.”

But back to present-tense capitalism, provision is made for everyone to live, while they are unequal. Indeed, capitalism has made it possible for more and more people to live, and eat ever more extravagantly, all over the planet.

The trouble is, that while it favors consumers in slightly broader ways, it only rewards producers with money. This is especially a problem for the people who must work for money, alone. All the other avenues of human creativity and expression are cut off.

In fact, capitalism does not encourage productive work, except during the brief moments when that proportion of the population that is in the labor force is actually awake, and not eating or taking one of many breaks.

The economist E.F. Schumacher estimated this at three-and-one-half percent of total human consciousness, in modern, Western societies, but higher in less advanced societies, where the people are happier.

Calculations like this are of a piece with Ivan Illich’s estimate of the average speed of cars. He guessed, I think, that it was just under three miles per hour, after allowing for the time spent in the mining, making, and fueling of them. Walking would be faster, and we could eliminate traffic jams.

But why would we want to eliminate work? For as we learn in the first few sentences of the Bible, the place of work in the human identity was there from the beginning.

We were to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it,” implying that we would have work to do, and be full persons in the image of God.

The Lord also said, “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread,” and true, when work degenerates into tedium, it becomes a penance.

But note, nowhere in the Bible, nor any other inspired Christian document, does it say we must work for money, or for money alone (still less State taxes).

And we were to fill the earth and subdue it, not to subdue our neighbor, whether through the instrument of investment or by some other more horrible means.

It is for this reason that Catholic thought has consistently championed the dignity of the person, has promoted the family, the right of property, subsidiarity, and the common good. It has expressed the worth of human labor, too, and of the poor and disabled; for charity, peace. And it has neglected the balance sheet.

The post The Catholic Worker appeared first on The Catholic Thing.

“Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference… The Thought Police would get him just the same… the arrests invariably happened at night… In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your … Continue reading "Warrantless Surveillance Makes a Mockery of the Constitution"

The post Warrantless Surveillance Makes a Mockery of the Constitution appeared first on Antiwar.com.

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April 18 2024

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Calls heresies “different historical expressions of the Christian faith”…

Francis Sends Message to Ecumenical Forum, Praises ‘Beautiful Mosaic of Contemporary Christianity’

Today the Vatican released a message from ‘His Holiness’ (Jorge Bergoglio, aka ‘Pope Francis’) for the Fourth Global Christian Forum, which is currently underway in Accra, Ghana.

It is an ecumenical conference aimed at providing “a ‘space’ where participants all meet on an equal basis, to foster mutual respect, and to explore and address together common concerns” (source). Its sponsor is the so-called Global Christian Forum, an organization that “aims to create a place, independent of existing structures, for the growing unity of the global church [sic]” (source).… READ MORE

The scholar M. D. Aeschliman wrote an essay for First Things last month occasioned by the republication of a little-known 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed. I had not previously heard of this dystopian novel, and Aeschliman’s description drew me to read it: “In the fictional society of The Wanting Seed, abortion, homosexuality, and disdain for the family have become ascendant and are politically privileged.” Because, in the future Burgess imagines, overpopulation has overwhelmed the world’s resources, the state punishes any woman who has more than one child; even if a child dies, a mother is not to have another. This being a work by the author of A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed is unsurprisingly dark, mordantly funny, and written in a richly vivid style that somehow accustoms his readers, without their recoiling, even to scenes of cannibalism as the society appears to collapse. Imagine Evelyn Waugh dropping acid and writing science fiction.

Burgess’s novel got me thinking that a thread running through all dystopias is the totalitarian state’s invasion of every kind of human love (all four loves, as C. S. Lewis might remark). This is true of friendship (philia), familial affection (storgē), and of course charity (agapē), but especially of eros, the love that is fruitful and multiplies. Burgess’s overpopulated state has a Ministry of Infertility—until the cycle of cannibalistic anarchy drives it to drop its prefix and become, at least for the time being, the Ministry of Fertility. To have siblings verges on the scandalous; large families are unheard of; being homosexual is so advantageous to one’s career that one major character pretends to be gay to get ahead.

The all-powerful state’s control of eros is a feature of what is generally considered the first twentieth-century dystopia, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. First published in the 1920s, We depicts a society in which people are known by numbers, not names, and in which every building is made of glass so that there is no privacy. Yet each citizen lives alone. There are no marriages, only couplings prearranged in one’s Sexual Table (during which a shade may be decently lowered over the glass wall of one’s apartment). There are no families: the One State, governing a small remnant of the world’s previous population after a devastating war, takes charge of the rearing of all children. We’s narrator-protagonist, D-503, becomes involved with a mysterious, rebellious woman, I-330, and his yearning for her is a kind of rediscovery of long-suppressed nature. Spoiler alert for those who have not read the book: it does not end well for either of them.

George Orwell is said to have been influenced by Zamyatin’s novel in writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, and inasmuch as Orwell’s Oceania is a totalitarian surveillance state, that influence is evident. Unlike Zamyatin’s One State, there are marriages and families in Oceania, but it quickly becomes apparent that the state rigidly controls all relationships, at least among party members (the “proles” can live as they like). Why else must Winston Smith, who is married but separated and childless, and his lover Julia Worthing, a single woman belonging to the Junior Anti-Sex League, resort to secrecy and deception in order to be together? Does the state care about extramarital sexual relations? Probably not as such; what it wants is complete knowledge and control of every kind of relationship. True, Winston and Julia talk privately about how much they hate Big Brother and would like to join a rebellion against his authority, but it is their meeting in private alone that is their first offense against public order.

In Sandra Newman’s 2023 novel Julia, a retelling of Nineteen Eighty-Four from the titular character’s perspective, the Party’s control of eros among its members is an even more prominent feature. In Newman’s tale, Julia Worthing becomes a serial seductress in the employ of the Inner Party mastermind O’Brien, luring not only Winston Smith but two of his co-workers at the Ministry of Truth into affairs in the same dingy upstairs room in a prole district. Julia and Winston are not simply found out by the Thought Police, as in Orwell’s story; she is his knowing betrayer, though she pays a price as heavy as his own.

Newman’s shift of our perspective to Julia rather than Winston enables her to add some features to life in Oceania that are not in Orwell’s book but are consistent with it. The young women in the dormitories of the Anti-Sex League, like Julia, are evidently pledged not to marry, but are eligible to go to a clinic for Artsem—artificial insemination—and thus contribute their offspring to be reared by the state. A select few are even chosen for the Big Future program, to be impregnated by the (purported) seed of Big Brother himself, and given a badge to wear in public announcing the honor that has been bestowed on them. (It is an open secret, however, that single women in the Anti-Sex League sometimes go for Artsem as cover for a pregnancy that has already begun.)

A very different kind of control over eros and reproduction is central to Margaret Atwood’s 1986 novel The Handmaid’s Tale. In Atwood’s dystopian Gilead, a substantial part of North America, a pseudo-Christian, male-dominated tyranny deals with a crisis of infertility by enslaving fertile young women as “handmaids” to the ruling class, to bear the children that cannot be borne by the wives of Gilead’s “commanders.” (To my fellow Christians and conservatives who know Atwood’s book only by reputation, I should say: Never mind the enormous popularity of the book [and of its television adaptation] among progressives for its dark view of a kind of “Christian nationalism,” which is the book’s weakest feature; it is nonetheless a very well told tale.) Each handmaid is a precious broodmare, too important to the society’s future to be given any freedom at all to marry, to raise her own children, to go where she pleases, dress as she likes, live as she likes, even to have her own name. So few and valuable are these handmaids that only a high-status man can have one in his household.

Swinging in quite the opposite direction is This Perfect Day, a 1970 novel by Ira Levin (better known for Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives, among other books). Like Burgess, Levin imagines a world in which the problem is controlling population growth; unlike The Wanting Seed, This Perfect Day depicts a one-world government that has pretty much solved the problem. A single great computer, Unicomp, runs everything, and its subjects are told what their job will be, where in the world they will do it, whether they may marry and have children—and how long they will live: at age sixty-two, each person is quietly euthanized. Individuals not permitted to marry have girlfriends or boyfriends, but with no possibility of procreation. Every month each person goes for a “treatment,” an injection cocktail of contraceptives, vaccinations against disease, and psychoactive drugs to control mood, disposition, ambition, and curiosity. Regular meetings with one’s “adviser” help to monitor whether any adjustment is necessary in one’s treatments.

Where Burgess and Levin give us overpopulation as the rationale for tyranny, and Zamyatin and Atwood give us underpopulation as its cause, the totalitarian state in Orwell and Newman’s Oceania seems to be both the effect and the cause of endless war. The state’s external enemies serve as justification for its relentless hunt for its internal enemies. But the upshot for the erotic relations of human beings is the same in principle in every case. No one’s loves are his or her own; even the dearest thing of which we say “mine,” another person whose good is identical to our own, is placed beyond our reach, prevented from being really ours.

Nowhere is this sundering of natural loves more central to a dystopian story than in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In the World State, in the year A.F. (After Ford) 632, promiscuity is an ethical expectation, attachment to one person is suspect, babies are gestated entirely in laboratories, children are raised in state nurseries, and the word “mother” is an obscenity. The benign tyranny of empty pleasures, with its cinema “feelies” and the ubiquitous drug “soma,” is the state’s chosen means of control not in order to reduce population or to increase it. Nor is this an Orwellian state at war, its boot stamping on the faces of its own citizens in a desperate bid for order and loyalty. Huxley’s society seems to have achieved a perfect stasis, a status quo of bred-to-purpose class hierarchy with a stable population, and war has apparently been eliminated. Here there is sex but no love; there are co-workers and castes but no friends or families; there are pleasures but no passions, and soma to chase the blues away.

These dystopias—each of which is challenged by characters who glimpse what has been taken from them—raise a question about utopias as well. Is any political order that strives to straighten the crooked timber of humanity once and for all bound to rob us of love?

The answer seems to be yes. I have written elsewhere of the strong affinity of Huxley’s Brave New World to Plato’s Republic. As I read Plato, the “city in speech” described by Socrates is a fantastically ironic project, each outlandish proposition outdoing the previous one. When one reaches the fifth book of the dialogue, one finds Socrates arguing that, for the sake of their total dedication to the city, the guardian class must be deprived of all “mine and thine”—stripped of all property, all privacy; to have no spouses of their own, no children of their own, nothing that can rival their love of the city they govern and defend. It’s quite mad, and there is every indication that Plato knows it is. The reasons given at each step of the argument seem sound; but human lives and human communities are not amenable to being organized into perfect order by abstract reason. Our need for one another—for particular others—cannot be suppressed without unbearable cost.

This is evident, finally, even in the work that gave the genre its name, Thomas More’s Utopia. A subtle and ingenious work with clear debts to Plato, Utopia gives us milder instances of the same tyrannical meddling in natural human loves. Utopians all wear the same drab clothes; the doors of homes have no locks; meals are taken not at home but in common dining halls; after several years families are compelled to change houses, and meanwhile, those with too many children send their excess offspring to homes with too few. All this is by way of attenuating people’s attachment to things, places, and even persons we will claim as peculiarly our own. True, marital fidelity is very strictly enforced; but before any marriage, each spouse is shown completely naked to the other, just as we would expect the saddle and blanket to be removed when we are “buying a colt.” (A pretty shocking idea in the Christendom of 1516.)

It seems the utopian impulse and the dystopian nightmare are never very distant from one another. If we are to love Big Brother, as Winston Smith does at the end of Orwell’s novel, all our other loves must be intruded upon, damaged, even sacrificed entirely. The case for freedom begins with the case for love.

Image by fantom_rd and licensed via Adobe Stock.

This is great news, but let's be clear, the language of SB 1196 is the goal of the assisted suicide lobby but the bill was determined to have gone too far too fast.

Based on the summary of SB 1196 by Senator Blakespear I stated that the bill would have:

1. Allowed euthanasia by IV (intravenous), as in Canada. Currently, California permits assisted suicide (lethal poison that a person takes orally at the time and place of their own choosing, with or without witnesses). This bill allowed for death by IV. This constitutes euthanasia/homicide.
2. Changed the criteria from terminally ill (6 month prognosis) to the Canadian model: “a grievous and irremediable medical condition.” Thus, there would be no time limit  and no terminal illness requirement.
3. Allowed people with early to mid-stage dementia to consent to assisted suicide or euthanasia, even though they have a condition that impairs their capacity to consent.
4. Removed the California residency requirement. California would join Oregon and Vermont, dropping their residency requirements and allowing for suicide tourism.
5. Removed the 2031 sunset clause in the California assisted suicide law.

I published an article on March 18, 2024, stating that the California bill would legalize medical killing. After the language of SB 1196 was released I further explained how SB 1196 would have expanded medical killing in California.

SB 1196 would have changed the law from requiring ingesting of the lethal poison to utilizing the lethal poison. Utilize was not defined in the bill but it could be defined as: "to make practical and effective use of."

SB 1196 would have changed the law from requiring a terminal disease to a grievous and irremediable medical condition.

Terminal disease was based on a 6 month prognosis whereas grievous and irremediable medical condition had a long definition that essentially mean't that the person has a serious chronic condition that will continue to decline.

The bill stated:  

SB 1196 permitted non-doctors to participate in the law. SB 1196 added the following: nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and registered nurses.

SB 1196 removed the residency requirement in the California law by striking out the words - is a resident of California.

SB 1196 allowed the use of an IV (intravenous) catheter to "utilize" the poison. SB 1196 stated:  

This statement did not limit the use of the IV catheter to assisted suicide and may have allowed for euthanasia/homicide.

Later SB 1196, stated:  

This statement inferred that the person must somehow utilize the IV catheter. The IV could be placed but the health care provider could not "assist". This was intentionally confusing. There may also have been circumstances, such as ALS, where the person has difficulty "utilizing" the IV catheter without assistance.

On June 22, 2022, a California federal judge rejected a case designed to permit euthanasia within California's assisted suicide act. Shavelson, a doctor that solely focuses on assisting suicide and Sandra Morris, who had ALS, argued that the state's assisted suicide law discriminated against people who had difficulty self-ingesting the lethal drugs and to remedy the situation the state needed to permit euthanasia in those cases.

In that case, Shavelson argued that allowing the administration of lethal drugs by IV catheter when a person has difficulty self-administering the lethal drugs was necessary. Justice Chhabria rejected the argument and stated:

If SB 1196 would have changed the California law by removing self-administer, removing the terminal illness requirement and allowing the utilization of an IV catheter, these changes would make it impossible to distinguish between an act of assisted suicide and an act of euthanasia/homicide. 

Assisted suicide is receiving lethal poison and self-administer it for the purpose of causing death.

Euthanasia is when another person, usually a medical professional, administers the lethal poison for the purpose of causing death. Euthanasia is a form of homicide/murder.

Since SB 1196 did not require a "third/independent party" to witness the act, therefore SB 1196 would have enable euthanasia under the guise of assisted suicide and achieve for the euthanasia lobby what was denied to them by Justice Chhabria in 2022.

SB 1196 was a "Trojan horse" euthanasia bill.

SB 1196 is the end goal of the assisted suicide lobby.

The government long ago sold us out to the highest bidder.

The highest bidder, by the way, has always been the Deep State.

What’s playing out now with the highly politicized tug-of-war over whether Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act gets reauthorized by Congress doesn’t just sell us out, it makes us slaves of the Deep State.

Read the fine print: it’s a doozy.

Just as the USA Patriot was perverted from its stated intent to fight terrorism abroad and was instead used to covertly crack down on the American people (allowing government agencies to secretly track Americans’ financial activities, monitor their communications, and carry out wide-ranging surveillance on them), Section 702 has been used as an end-run around the Constitution to allow the government to collect the actual content of your conversations (phone calls, text messages, video chats, emails and other electronic communication) without a warrant.

Now intelligence officials are pushing to dramatically expand the government’s spying powers, effectively giving the government unbridled authority to force millions of Americans to spy on its behalf.

Basically, as Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has warned, the Deep State wants to turn the American people into extensions of Big Brother.

This is how an effort to reform Section 702 has quickly steamrollered into an expansion of the government’s surveillance powers.

We should have seen this coming.

After all, the Police State doesn’t relinquish power easily, the Surveillance State doesn’t look favorably on anything that might weaken its control, and Big Brother doesn’t like to be restricted.

What most Americans don’t get is that even without Section 702 in play, the government will still target the populace for warrantless, suspicionless mass surveillance, because that’s how the police state maintains its stranglehold on power.

These maneuvers are just the tip of the iceberg.

The police state has passed the baton to the surveillance state.

On any given day, the average American is now monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it will all be recorded, stored and used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.

Talk about a system rife for abuse.

Now, the government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from its mass spying program because they’re only looking to get the “bad” guys who are overseas.

Don’t believe it.

The government’s definition of a “bad” guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale.

Indeed, the government has become the biggest lawbreaker of all.

According to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the FBI repeatedly misused Section 702 in order to spy on the communications of two vastly disparate groups of Americans: those involved in the George Floyd protests and those who may have taken part in the Jan. 6, 2021, protests at the Capitol.

This abuse of its so-called national security powers is par for the course for the government.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, intelligence agencies conduct roughly 200,000 of these warrantless “backdoor” searches for Americans’ private communications each year.

No one is spared.

Many of the targets of these searches have done nothing wrong.

Government agents have spied on the communications of protesters, members of Congress, crime victims, journalists, and political donors, among many others.

The government has claimed that its spying on Americans is simply “incidental,” as though it were an accident, but it fully intends to collect this information.

As journalist Jake Johnson warns, under an expanded Section 702, U.S. intelligence agencies “could, without a warrant, compel gyms, grocery stores, barber shops, and other businesses to hand over communications data.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, “The Securities and Exchange Commission is deploying a massive government database—the Consolidated Audit Trail, or CAT—that monitors in real time the identity, transactions and investment portfolio of everyone who invests in the stock market.”

Journalist Leo Hohmann reports that the government is also handing out $20 million in grants to police, mental health networks, universities, churches and school districts to enlist their help in identifying Americans who might be political dissidents or potential “extremists.”

Ask the government why it’s carrying out this far-reaching surveillance on American citizens, and you’ll get the same Orwellian answer the government has been trotting in response to every so-called crisis to justify its assaults on our civil liberties: to keep America safe.

What this is really all about, however, is control.

What we are dealing with is a government so power-hungry, paranoid and afraid of losing its stranglehold on power that it is conspiring to wage war on anyone who dares to challenge its authority.

When the FBI is asking banks and other financial institutions to carry out dragnet searches of customer transactions—warrantlessly and without probable cause—for “extremism” indicators broadly based on where you shop, what you read, and how you travel, we’re all in trouble.

You don’t have to do anything illegal.

For that matter, you don’t even have to challenge the government’s authority.

Frankly, you don’t even have to care about politics or know anything about your rights.

All you really need to do in order to be tagged as a suspicious character, flagged for surveillance, and eventually placed on a government watch list is live in the United States.

As long as the government is allowed to weaponize its 360 degree surveillance technologies to flag you as a threat to national security, whether or not you’ve done anything wrong, it’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it won’t be long before Big Brother’s Thought Police are locking us up to “protect us” from ourselves.

At that point, we will disappear.

Reprinted with permission from The Rutherford Institute.

Texas Is Being Turned Into a Woke Democrat State

Paul Craig Roberts

The Biden Regime is using federal money to bribe the Aggies, Texas A&M University, to come up with ways to advance “race-based hiring” in public schools. https://texasscorecard.com/investigations/texas-am-advancing-race-based-hiring-in-schools/

Possible you remember or have heard that Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement was about judging “people by their character and not the color of their skin.” Once perhaps, but it has been a long time since. For half a century skin color has had preference, if it is non-white, in university admissions, employment and promotion.

Feminists latched onto the scheme and the female gender was also privileged.

This is not to say that no blacks and no females are qualified for their position. Many of them are. It is to say that they are in their position despite their qualifications because they constitute a privileged category before the law, a total violation of the US Constitution and its 14th Amendment.

The emphasis on “diversity” has prevailed over the merit-based system into which I was born and grew up. Today merit is considered racist, a white supremacy tool. Many gifted student programs and high schools for the exceptional have been shut down because two few blacks are qualified, and small presence of blacks violates the sacredness of “diversity” and “equity.”

A country whose education, employment and promotion is based on diversity and not on merit is a country that is failing, and most certainly America has long been a failing country. For example, we now have “diversity” appointments to prosecutorial offices such as prosecutors and attorney generals and as judges who have no understanding of law as a shield of the people, but who see it is a weapon to be used against disapproved parties. We see the total collapse of justice in America in the many examples of the Democrats’ Stalin show trials against President Trump and against the alleged “insurrectionists” who attended the Trump rally..

To the few remaining people of my generation it is astonishing that merit, which made America great and a ladder of upward mobility, has been officially cast aside for “diversity” in which advance is based on skin color, gender or self-proclaimed, non-biological gender.

Have the people who have created this deplorable situation ever wondered how a non-merit based mediocre society can be a superpower, an unipolar, a hegemony whose exceptional and indispensable existence gives it right to hegemony over the world?

China, the host of most of American manufacturing must wonder at the American Delusion.

Russia, whose power and economy have been greatly elevated by the mindless American sanctions, must wonder if the USA even qualifies as an opponent.

Even Iran no longer fears the US.

If you are so unfortunate as to live in New York City or other blue cities, your home and your rental properties can be stolen from you by the Democrats’ massive and ongoing wave of immigrant-invaders who can occupy your property in your absence and occupy your rental property between leases and you cannot evict them.

Regardless of the reality in which they live, many Americans still vote Democrat. When a people vote for their own-self destruction, it is clear that the country is finished.

Fort Worth, Texas, has a “cultural awareness program,” called “Diversity Matters Champions.” The city’s Diversity and Inclusion Department lists events, such as LGBT Pride Month, Juneteenth, and Hispanic Heritage Month. If a city employee attends 5 events, they will qualify as a “Diversity Matters Champion” and be qualified for advancement. https://texasscorecard.com/local/fort-worth-employees-can-become-dei-champions/

This is America today. The youth are lost to us, because they are no longer schooled in the virtues of a free society but are propagandized against it as white supremacy. Moreover, the freedom my generation experienced is almost gone, so American youth do not know freedom.

How can this be repaired? How can freedom be resurrected? Not in the public schools. University “education” departments turn out woke morons alienated against their country. Law schools turn out alienated graduates who regard the US Constitution as a racist document and prosecutors who regard law not as a shield of the people but as a weapon to be wielded against the people.

This is all serious and truth. There is no free country here.

As Parts 1, 2, and 3 of The Great Dispossession make clear, our remaining independence is about to be brought to an end.