Thinkings and questions

 

The war’s happening between Russia and Ukraine… the reason why did Russia attack Ukraine ?

-         No official reason for the war …I have feeling that it’s similar… the war of the Middle Ages, when an atrocious king want to occupy a smaller country and appropriate fortune, and tame the thinking of people in occupied land by obedience…

-         That’s nonsense and a ridiculous story, even if Russia win the war, Russia didn’t think that a lot of countries are standing against them…. 

Today, 2022, what’s the purpose of United Nations organization ?

Russia vetoes… UN’s condemnation ? what ? Russia asks their rights to kill people in the war ? people suffer heavy casualities not government !

A very very bad precedent for the world in very near future with …incessant wars, incessant conflicts in the world between these countries to others countries ...

United Nations, you should think about it, in a longtime in the past, many countries stood up and founded the nation, we are human, we are not sheep in the “Animal Farm”

When I watched TV that the leader of Ukraine asks for help to NATO organization (30 countries ?), most of them kept the silence…

I don’t really understand if NATO didn’t want to admit Ukraine, just told them that Ukraine till now has not intention to participate in this organization, and that’s it! 

But if NATO want to admit Ukraine as member to its organization and NATO has a lot of gigantesque battleships, long range missile…deploy over many oceans

Why didn’t NATO intervene when Russian battleship launched many missiles to destroy Ukraine …?

The enemy’s always afraid of standing people. NATO should help them!

How the Chinese Regime Plans to Destroy Our Civil Liberties

John Mac Ghlionn

October 4, 2021 Updated: October 10, 2021

People gather at Piccadilly Circus during the “Resist the CCP Day” event in London on Oct. 1, 2021. (Qian Cheng/The Epoch Times)

 

Commentary

The Hong Kong of just a decade ago is unrecognizable from the Hong Kong of today. With the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) busy revising university curriculums, collective patriotism has replaced individual freedom; loyalty to Beijing is not just expected, it’s compulsory. Refusal to comply, more often than not, results in punishment.

To date, the CCP’s suppression in Hong Kong has been as brutal as it’s been all-encompassing. In July, five speech therapists were arrested over an alleged “conspiracy to distribute seditious materials.” In reality, the five individuals, all members of the General Union of Hong Kong Speech Therapists, published a number of children’s picture books. According to the CCP, the therapists were attempting to “stir hatred” among children.

“Don’t think that these are simple storybooks,” Hong Kong Police Senior Superintendent Steve Li told members of the press. “These three books have a lot of seditious materials inside,” he said. They didn’t. The five therapists simply painted an accurate picture of Hong Kong. Authoritarian regimes, as we all know, have little regard for truth.

Hong Kong, a place once celebrated for tolerance and openmindedness, is fast becoming a place of intolerance and parochial, partisan politics. On Sept. 19, it spiraled further into the undemocratic abyss. In accordance with the CCP’s “patriots only” system, the political elite, little more than “puppet showmen” for those in Beijing, began selecting a new committee that will eventually select Hong Kong’s new, CCP-backed leader.

Once Beijing passed the Hong Kong law, the territory began to morph into a “society approaching the Orwellian descriptions attributed to mainland China, where dissent is promptly extinguished and penalized,” according to Kevin Drew, assistant managing editor at U.S. News. In other words, Hong Kong is no different from anywhere else in mainland China.

Drew spoke with Dennis Kwok, a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and former lawmaker in Hong Kong. When asked about the territory’s demise, Kwok said, “I think the international community obviously sees Hong Kong as … a warning about international agreements that you signed with China and the implications of that.

“I’m not sure we should be looking at Hong Kong in isolation. We should look at the whole situation regarding China’s policy domestically, whether in Xinjiang, in Hong Kong, or … its policy to Taiwan and the South China Sea.”

Kwok also discussed the CCP’s antagonism toward Australia, as well as the arbitrary detention of two Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor (last month, the two men were allowed to return to their homeland).

“I think all of those need to be looked at in the full context in order to understand what China is doing,” he said.

Kwok is, of course, correct. What happens in Hong Kong no longer stays in Hong Kong. The CCP’s desire for global dominance isn’t a figment of our imagination. It’s a reality. With its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, also known as “One Belt, One Road”), China has a number of countries eating out of its sizable hand. According to a report issued by the Green BRI Center, over the past 18 months, “accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic,” an increasing number of BRI clients “have seen their sovereign debt become unsustainable.” Countries such as Congo, Djibouti, and Angola are heavily indebted to Beijing, and they’re not alone: Pakistan owes $20 billion to Beijing; Kenya owes 7.5 billion; Ethiopia owes $6.5 billion; and Lao PDR, with a GDP of $18 billion, now owes $5 billion.

To paraphrase the French writer François Rabelais, debts and lies are often two sides of the same coin. With its BRI, China has sold expensive lies to a number of countries. The victims have no option but to foot the bill. Then again, like Evergrande, they could opt to default on their payments. Let’s hope they do.

Either way, whether the aforementioned countries repay their enormous debts, Beijing’s influence is undeniable. In fact, the CCP’s presence can be felt in almost every country around the world. To make matters worse, as the journalist John Xie noted, Beijing now controls “more shipping ports than any other country.” With “100 ports in at least 60 nations,” the CCP is busy seeking out more. The importance of these transportation hubs can’t be emphasized enough. As research shows, ports play an essential role in a country’s economic stability. After all, he who controls the water controls the world.

The CCP’s vice-like grip over society knows no bounds. Not only does it control a number of powerful nations, but the CCP also exerts a nefarious influence over some of the world’s most powerful organizations. As the Observer Research Foundation has shown, the World Health Organization (WHO) and China are intimate partners in crime, with the former helping the latter to cover up the origins of COVID-19.

Last year, China, one of the worst offenders of human rights on the planet, was awarded a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council. Fiction simply can’t compete with reality. Granting China a place on the council is the equivalent of giving Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian dictator, a Nobel Peace Prize. More recently, according to a number of highly credible reports, staff members at the World Bank changed data to improve China’s ranking. We’re told the changes were made at the behest of Jim Yong Kim, then-World Bank president, and Kristalina Georgieva, then-chief executive. One assumes that Beijing applied a great degree of pressure on both Kim and Georgieva.

This brings us back to the deteriorating state of affairs in Hong Kong—events there shouldn’t be viewed in isolation. In fact, nothing the CCP does should ever be viewed in isolation. People who doubt the Chinese regime’s growing international clout would do well to remove their heads from the sand.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

 

www.theepochtimes.com

Who Benefits From the Dumbing Down of American Education? China

John Mac Ghlionn

September 12, 2021 Updated: September 12, 2021

 

Graduating students pose for a class picture at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), in Los Angeles, Calif., on June 14, 2019. (Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images)

 

Commentary

Planning, according to the American author Alan Lakein, involves “bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.” If you want to buy a new house in five years, it helps to start saving today. To have a thriving economy going forward, it helps to have well-trained, highly-skilled graduates. That’s good news for China.

Last month, the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), a think tank based in Washington, published a rather telling report. When it comes to the production of STEM PhD graduates, as the authors note, China is fast outpacing the United States. For the uninitiated, STEM refers to the “integrated teaching and learning” of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. In other words, it involves a deep understanding of the very subjects that make our lives possible, and the very subjects that are vital for the progression of humanity. Since the “mid-2000s,” as the report notes, “China has consistently graduated more STEM PhDs than the United States, a key indicator of a country’s future competitiveness in STEM fields.”

The gap between China and the United States, we’re told, “will likely grow wider in the next five years.” Chinese universities, once known for rampant plagiarism and questionable teaching practices, are most definitely improving. The authors findings “suggest the quality of doctoral education in China has risen in recent years, and that much of China’s current PhD growth comes from high-quality universities.” If current enrollment patterns continue on this current trajectory, the authors project that “by 2025 Chinese universities will produce more than 77,000 STEM PhD graduates per year compared to approximately 40,000 in the United States.” With more than “three-quarters of Chinese doctoral graduates” specializing in STEM fields, China’s “robust” education system threatens to undermine the “long-term economic and national security” of the United States.

Why is this report important, and why is it a must read for the Biden administration?

From cancer detecting software to virus protection software, drone strikes to drone deliveries, space travel to air travel, modern society is inextricably linked with STEM subjects. This is not good news for the United States, where a precipitous drop in educational standards can be seen in elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, and elite universities. A number of American educators consider math to be inherently racist. Some people argue that math needs to confront its “white, patriarchal past.” What does this even mean? Empiricism has become the bête noire of many a leftist. Science is not racist. Although science can be carried out by racists, it’s important to make the distinction. A car can be driven by a xenophobe, but we don’t call the car xenophobic. To continue this brief exercise in stating the obvious, math is not racist. Without math, nothing is possible. More importantly, no one gets paid. Regardless of a person’s skin color, we all benefit from math. In a recent piece for Quillette, the authors—three mathematicians “who came to the United States as young immigrants”—describe the ways in which “the nationwide effort to reduce racial disparities, however well-intentioned” only serve to weaken “the connection between merit and scholastic admission.” When everything, including math and science, is viewed through the prism of race, the country suffers.  

 

Yuli Sun, a Chinese language immersion teacher (L) checks her students’ work during a second grade class at Broadway Elementary School in Venice, California on Jan. 31, 2013. (Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images)

 

The trio lament “the deplorable state” of the K-12 “math education system.” A pitiful number of American public-school children, they argue, are prepared for careers in STEM. Not surprisingly, this leaves the United States all too “dependent on a constant inflow of foreign talent, especially from mainland China, Taiwan, South Korea, and India.” As “curricula increasingly shift from actual mathematics knowledge to courses about social justice and identity politics,” expect this trend to continue.

The United States is home to a number of outstanding universities. However, it’s little use having such extraordinary establishments if they’re not being used to breed extraordinary minds. If the United States is to have any chance of competing with China, serious changes are needed, and they’re needed fast.

Sadly, the only changes we’re seeing are harmful ones. If in doubt, let me point you to Oregon. Governor Kate Brown recently signed Senate Bill 744 into law. For the next five years, all Oregonian high school students who wish to graduate will be exempt from having to demonstrate proficiency in the areas of reading, writing, and mathematics to graduate. The bill, according to reports, was introduced in order to help “Oregon’s Black, Latino, Latina, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color.” One wonders how dumbing down graduation requirements helps anyone.

Many progressive-minded educators are determined to “reimagine” the way subjects like math and science are taught in schools. But they don’t need to be “reimagined.” They need to be left alone and they need to be taught properly. The United States is currently ranked 31st in math literacy out of 79 countries. China, meanwhile, ranks 1st in mathematical proficiency. Now, with the average IQ of American children continuing to fall, and the dumbing down of education in full swing, expect the proficiency gap to widen. Without enough STEM graduates, how is the United States expected to compete with China? This is an important question that requires immediate answers.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

 The Epoch Times.

 

Rise of ‘Fed Ed’ Accelerated Demise of Real Education

Alex Newman

December 9, 2019 Updated: June 16, 2020

 

President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Public domain Wikimedia Commons

Commentary

This article is part 10 in a series examining the origins of public education in the United States.

The U.S. public school system was collectivist from the start, as this ongoing series on government education has extensively documented. But as the feds got involved, it quickly went from bad to worse, with the slow and steady decline in education turning into a precipitous collapse.

Today, the schools are a disaster, even by the government’s own measures. Consider, for instance, that the latest scores from the federal government’s National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed that more than two-thirds of eighth-graders aren’t proficient in any core subject. It would be hard to do worse.

The U.S. government bears a big part of the blame. And there should be no doubt that it was deliberate, experts and former insiders tell The Epoch Times.

Because the U.S. Constitution delegated absolutely no power over education to the federal government—and because the 10th Amendment specifically reserves all non-delegated powers to the states or the people—it wasn’t easy for the federal camel’s nose to get under the tent. Indeed, it took almost two centuries for Washington to get seriously involved in public schools.

But communists worked diligently toward that goal for decades. In his 1932 book, “Toward Soviet America,” Communist Party USA leader William Z. Foster boldly outlined the agenda for his fellow revolutionaries. The goal: A U.S. Department of Education that would eventually replace patriotism and Christianity in school with communism and globalism.

“Among the elementary measures the American Soviet government will adopt to further the cultural revolution are the following: the schools, colleges, and universities will be coordinated and grouped under the National Department of Education and its state and local branches,” Foster declared, an idea that was almost unthinkable to Americans of the day.

He also outlined what this anticipated U.S. Department of Education would do once in charge of schools.

“The studies will be revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of the bourgeois ideology,” he said. “The students will be taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism, and the general ethics of the new Socialist society.”

Of course, it took a long time to make that a reality. But anyone who has studied even briefly what is going on in the federally controlled public schools of America today can see that Foster’s agenda has been thoroughly implemented in every respect, all over the country. Unless dealt with, the disease will likely prove fatal.

Federal Involvement Begins

Aside from a few insignificant offices to collect statistics over the years, and Congress recommending Bibles printed by Robert Aitken of Philadelphia “for use in the schools” in the late 1700s, the feds played virtually no role whatsoever in education in America.

Indeed, it wasn’t until the 1960s, long after the government school system created by collectivists had started destroying traditional education, that the federal government took its first major steps into education.

It began in 1962 and 1963, as documented in this series, with two U.S. Supreme Court rulings declaring that it was somehow a violation of the First Amendment to have prayer or Bible readings in public schools. These lawless opinions, as admitted by one of the justices in his dissent, replaced Christianity at school with the collectivist “religious humanism” of John Dewey, one of the socialist founders of America’s public school system.

Well-educated Americans would have instantly recognized the absurdity of the ruling. After all, when the First Amendment was written and ratified, most of the states had established churches. The idea that this amendment, designed to prevent a national religion, was supposed to prohibit states and communities from having prayer or Bibles in schools, would have been laughed at even in the 1940s or ’50s.

But by the ’60s, public education had already been in place for generations, dumbing down Americans and erasing their understanding of history to the point that such an outlandish anti-constitutional ruling became feasible.

Not long after that rogue court ruling, Congress—almost certainly emboldened by the high court’s flagrant constitutional intrusions into state and local education—launched the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson under the guise of “helping” states to “educate” all “disadvantaged” students, this statute opened up the floodgates of federal funding to K-12 public schools.

As the old cliché goes, with federal funding comes federal control. And in exchange for federal taxpayer money, first released under ESEA, schools were forced to accept a growing array of federal regulations. At this point, the feds have effectively nationalized the public school system; globalizing it is the next frontier.

There are more than 100 subsidy programs now in place under the department, which has a budget approaching $100 billion including “discretionary” and “mandatory” spending. Everything from discipline and academic standards to lunches, data collection, and even the gender of textbook writers is now subject to federal intrusion.

Once the camel’s nose was under the tent, it didn’t take long for the entire smelly beast to shove its way in. The relatively new U.S. Department of Education, which has centralized control over education in an unprecedented manner, has also played a crucial role in weaponizing America’s public education system against individual liberty.

Established in 1979 under President Jimmy Carter, the cabinet-level department was basically part of a quid pro quo agreement with the socialist-controlled National Education Association (NEA). The powerful union, which named the socialist and humanist Dewey as its “honorary life president,” was already acting as a sort of national ministry of education.

With the birth of the actual department, it sealed the deal.

By the time the U.S. Department of Education was established, Congress’s investigative committees charged with exposing communists and preventing infiltration of the federal government had long since been disbanded. As such, it’s difficult to determine how many actual communists worked within the department.

But as the Bible says, “by their fruits, ye shall know them.” And the fruit coming from the Department of Education has been rotten to the core from day one.

Whistleblower From Belly of the Beast

From the start, using grants and other means, this unconstitutional behemoth began working to bring all education in the United States under federal control. Worse than that, it worked to systematically dumb down the American people and transform the values of children, according to whistleblower Charlotte Iserbyt, who served as a senior policy adviser on education in the Reagan administration.

All of it was in line with what the mass-murdering Soviet regime was doing. Indeed, from its earliest days, the U.S. Department of Education was involved in helping to “sovietize” the American public school system, Iserbyt told The Epoch Times in an interview. This agenda has been extremely successful in facilitating the disaster now unfolding in America, she explained.

Upon taking up her post at the Department of Education, Iserbyt found documents revealing that public schools in America were introducing Soviet quackery and curricula in the classroom, with help from the major foundations. In response, the patriotic Iserbyt began leaking the official documents to the press in an attempt to blow the whistle and stop the madness. She eventually compiled the smoking-gun evidence in her explosive book, “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America.”

“When I was there, what I saw, I realized in retrospect, ‘The Nation at Risk’ report was very important,” Iserbyt said, referring to a government report commissioned by Reagan arguing that the U.S. education system threatened America’s future. “They needed that to convince America that we had terrible schools so they could bring in the reforms they wanted.”

Pointing to the Soviet education system and the forces that worked to bring similar schemes to America, Iserbyt is also convinced that communism was the goal. U.S. Secretary of Education Terrel Bell “wanted to put in the communist system,” Iserbyt argued. “I believe he was a communist. If you read in my book the things he said, there is no way to come up with any other conclusion.”

Among other schemes, Iserbyt said Bell was the one responsible for bringing in the methods of “education” advocated by anti-Christian behaviorist B.F. Skinner and Soviet “psychologist” Ivan Pavlov to American schools.

“These Pavlovian and Skinnerian methods destroy free will by treating people like animals to be trained and to give reflexive responses to stimuli,” said Iserbyt. “This is animal training, not education. This is what was being used in communist countries to train and brainwash their populations, not educate them.”

Because of the Department of Education, it’s being used all over America, too.

“Their agenda was to have absolute control of the American population through these changes in teaching and instruction being brought into the schools through the Department of Education,” she continued, pointing to the important role of the Carnegie Endowment in negotiating with the Soviets on education. “So they claimed all these national reforms were needed to change education from what you know in your head, to what you can do, which is Soviet-style workforce training.”

Iserbyt also witnessed how great educators with valuable experience who loved liberty, such as Edward Curran, who led the National Institute of Education at the U.S. Department of Education, were purged and driven out. Meanwhile, collectivists and quacks continued moving quickly up the ranks.

“The political appointees—most of them were rotten,” said Iserbyt.

To impose the radical “reforms” on America, Iserbyt said she witnessed the Department of Education handing out all manner of enormous grants to fund dangerous quackery, data-gathering, and “efforts to transform the values of children away from traditional Americanism” through education.

“I believe these were very abusive toward traditional values,” she said, pointing to her important short publication, “Soviets in the Classroom, America’s Latest Education Fad.”

The Extremism Continues

Today, even with a Republican president in the White House, the Department of Education remains firmly under collectivist control. During the 2016 presidential election, for example, an analysis by The Hill revealed that 99.7 percent of all political spending by Department of Education bureaucrats went to Hillary Clinton—the highest of any federal department.

Even after Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos took up her post, the left-wing extremism from the department continued to spew forth. Indeed, on Feb. 12, 2017, the department’s Twitter account posted a quote by Communist Party USA member W.E.B. Du Bois—with his name misspelled, no less, drawing national ridicule.

Among other absurdities, Du Bois claimed the USSR, led by one of the most brutal and murderous regimes in human history, was the “most hopeful country on earth.” During the darkest depths of the “Great Leap Forward,” Du Bois even held multiple meetings with mass-murdering communist Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, and the two were always pictured with smiles on their faces.

These are some of the people who control U.S. education. Under the previous administration, the department, using “stimulus” money to bribe states into compliance, even imposed Obama-backed national standards on the nation—standards that are aligned with international schemes, too. Common Core will be dealt with in a future article in this series.

With around 4,000 employees, the Education Department’s budget has been ballooning since it was created. And that’s despite President Ronald Reagan promising to abolish it, and President Donald Trump saying on the campaign trail, “If we don’t eliminate it completely, we certainly need to cut its power and reach.”

There’s currently a bill in Congress, H.R. 899, to abolish the department. When asked why the bill was needed, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), the chief sponsor, replied in an interview, “How much time do you have?”

“The left understands that this is where you win or lose—in the schools and in the teaching of the children,” the Kentucky congressman continued.

Massie also noted that under the current administration, there’s a tremendous opportunity to make abolishing the department a bipartisan endeavor. Liberals and progressives, of course, don’t want Trump in charge of their children’s education, any more than conservatives want Obama or Biden running it.

“Unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. should not be in charge of our children’s intellectual and moral development,” Massie said. “States and local communities are best positioned to shape curricula that meet the needs of their students.”

The group U.S. Parents Involved in Education (USPIE) is working to end all federal involvement in education, too.

“Although this experiment with federal control of local public schools has gone on for half a century now, it has failed,” USPIE President Sheri Few told The Epoch Times. “The U.S. Department of Education has existed because it is about control and not about children.

“We need to stop treating children like guinea pigs in some social engineering laboratory.”

The U.S. Constitution and common sense both demand that the federal government gets out of education. That would be a great step forward. However, as this series has documented, the government education system has been controlled by collectivists from the very beginning. That means getting the feds out, by itself, won’t solve the systemic problems plaguing education in the United States today.

Still, ending all “Fed Ed” may be a decent place to start. And with Trump in the White House, perhaps both sides of the aisle could work together on this, as a first step to much more far-reaching reforms.

Alex Newman is an award-winning international journalist, educator, author, and consultant who co-wrote the book “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children.” He also serves as the CEO of Liberty Sentinel Media and writes for diverse publications in the United States and abroad.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

 

Alex Newman

Follow

Alex Newman is a freelance contributor. Newman is an award-winning international journalist, educator, author, and consultant who co-wrote the book “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children.” He is the executive director of Public School Exit, serves as CEO of Liberty Sentinel Media, and writes for diverse publications in the United States and abroad.

The Epoch Times

Orwell and the Woke

Victor Davis Hanson 

September 30, 2021 Updated: September 30, 2021

 

Commentary

“Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” — George Orwell, “Animal Farm”

What were we to make of multimillionaire Barack Obama’s 60th birthday bash at his Martha’s Vineyard estate, and the throng of the woke wealthy and their masked helot attendants?

Was socialist Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) suffering for the people when she wore a designer dress to the more than $30,000-a-ticket Met gala? Her entourage needs were certainly well-attended to by masked Morlock servants.

Did the leftist celebrities at the recent Emmy awards gather to discuss opening Malibu beaches to the homeless when the (unmasked) stars virtue-signaled their wokeness?

For answers about these hypocritical wokists, always turn first to George Orwell. In his brief allegorical novella, “Animal Farm,” an array of animal characters—led by the thinking pigs of the farm—staged a revolution, driving out their human overseers.

The anti-human animal comrades started out sounding like zealous Russian Bolsheviks (“four legs good, two legs bad”). But soon they ended up conned by a murderous cult of pigs under a Joseph Stalin-like leader. And so, the revolution became what it once had opposed (“four legs good, two legs better”).

Our own woke, year-zero revolution is now in its second year. Yet last year’s four-legged revolutionaries are already strutting on two legs. They are not just hobnobbing with the “white supremacists” and “capitalists,” but outdoing them in their revolutionary zeal for the rarified privileges of the material good life.

The Marxist co-founder of BLM, Patrisse Cullors, is now on her fourth woke home. She has moved on from the barricades to the security fences of her Topanga Canyon digs in a mostly all-white, all-rich rural paradise—the rewards for revolutionary service.

Professor Ibram X. Kendi has evolved from the edgy revolutionary work of flying all over the country, hawking his Orwellian message of “All racism bad! But some racism good!” Now he has mastered the art of zooming the wannabe woke for his $20,000 an hour avant-garde hectoring.

What of Colin Kaepernick, the mediocre second-string quarterback turned sudden firebrand? He refused to stand for the national anthem and spread his “take a knee” kitsch throughout professional sports.

Kaepernick became a boutique revolutionary multimillionaire. For $12 million a year, he pitches Nike sneakers, often made in Chinese forced-labor camps.

Woke NBA star LeBron James, from his $23 million Brentwood mansion, blasts America for its endless unfairness—in service to his totalitarian Chinese paymasters who will ensure his good life with an eventual lifetime $1 billion payout for hawking their goods.

Our other elite wokists navigating around the revolution are even more cynical. The corporate and Wall Street capitalists feel that a little virtue signaling, showy diversity coordinators, and woke advertising will more or less buy off the latest version of Al-Sharpton-like shake-down artists.

Then there are the trimmers and enablers. These are the wealthy, rich, and the professional classes. They feel—in abstract—absolutely terrible about inequality, but hardly enough in the concrete to mix with the unwashed.

For them, wokism is like party membership in the late ethically bankrupt Soviet Union. It is necessary for peace of mind and good income, but otherwise not an obstacle for the continuance of the privileged, comfortable life.

The more TV news hosts rant about “systemic” this and “supremacy” that, and the more college presidents write stern penance memos to their faculty about “that’s not who we are,” the more they feel not just good about themselves, but relieved of any real obligation to live and socialize with the Other.

As for the self-declared non-white Other, wokism is also a top-down revolution of celebrities, intellectuals, actors, activists, academics, grifters, lawyers, and the upper-middle class and rich. And they are not calling for a Marshall Plan to bring classical education to the inner city. They themselves have little desire to move in or spread their wealth. They rarely mentor others on their shrewd capitalist expertise that made themselves rich.

They are far more cynical than that. The regrettable violence of the street, the 120 days of 2020 looting, death and arson, are the levers of the woke professionals. They fight with the various tribes of the same class and mindset over the slices of the same coveted elite pies. But they bring to the scrap the unspoken cudgel that without greater non-white de facto quotas in comic books, TV commercials, Ivy League faculties and students, symphonies, and sit-coms, then “systemic racism” could once again ignite downtown Portland or Seattle or Baltimore.

Orwell would say of the woke Obamas, Nancy Pelosi, AOC, Bernie Sanders, LeBron James, or Ibram Kendi—and their supposedly unwoke, but similarly rich and privileged enemies—“It was impossible to say which was which.”

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Victor Davis Hanson

Follow

Victor Davis Hanson is a conservative commentator, classicist, and military historian. He is a professor of classics emeritus at California State University, a senior fellow in classics and military history at Stanford University, a fellow of Hillsdale College, and a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. Hanson has written 16 books, including “The Western Way of War,” “Fields Without Dreams,” and “The Case for Trump.”

 

(The Epoch Times.)

 

 

 

 

We Are in a War for America’s Soul

Michele R. Weslander Quaid

September 17, 2021 Updated: September 21, 2021

Commentary

My career has taken me around the world, including the combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan to support our troops. Those travels have helped me appreciate how fortunate I am to have been born in America—home of the free because of the brave.

On the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, people across our nation gathered in remembrance of the lives lost and the heroes who selflessly gave their lives to save others. On Sept. 11, 2001, I was in Washington and saw the hole in the Pentagon. Later, I traveled to New York and saw the massive hole where the Twin Towers had once stood. Those are images I’ll never forget.

In 2002, I was recruited into government service to lead necessary change and transformation in the intelligence community (IC), including better integrating our imagery and signals intelligence enterprises—America’s eyes and ears. I was sworn in as a senior executive in defense intelligence and was a civilian peer to general and flag officers. After the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) was established, I was sworn in as the first IC deputy chief information officer at ODNI. In that role, I worked across the 17 agencies that are a part of the U.S. IC and regularly met with the leadership of both the IC and the Department of Defense.

Through my 25 years of service in the national security community and my study of history, I’ve become aware of the techniques, tactics, and procedures that our enemies use. Though the Cold War ended 30 years ago, our nation is still in a war that has been brewing for decades—a war for America’s soul.

Nikita Khrushchev, who ran the Soviet Union from 1958 to 1964, openly predicted the destruction of the United States and said it would happen in the way that every society eventually collapses.

“We will take America without firing a shot,” he said. “We do not have to invade the U.S. We will destroy you from within.”

He was talking about an entire system of Marxist indoctrination and takeover that had been refined and executed in country after country during the 20th century.

Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov, a former KGB operative and high-level Russian propagandist, escaped to the West in 1970. He warned the United States about the KGB tactics used to subvert a nation that he witnessed firsthand in the Soviet Union. Those tactics amounted to a planned process of altering the way people think for a particular purpose, which is to affect a regime change. It’s effectively the brainwashing of society—a slow, methodical transformation. Those who conduct that ideological subversion are very patient to employ the tactics over decades.

Ideological subversion has four stages and follows the Hegelian dialectic, a tactic long exploited by Marxists and Fascists to control people.

Stage 1: Demoralization. This is the destruction of faith in the government and society. Believing that society is broken, systems are failing, and patriotism is evil are three key beliefs that are promoted to create guilt. This leads to the acceptance of radical new ideas, because the current structure is believed to be harmful. Traditional Judeo-Christian morality, classical education, and U.S. patriotism are discarded.

Stage 2: Destabilization. With the decision-making ability of Americans negatively affected through demoralization, the next step takes a foothold—destabilization of the nation’s foundations. Destabilization causes citizens to believe the worst of what they hear about their nation and form of government. Supporters of traditional values and foundational structures in the nation are ostracized and even demonized.

Stage 3: Crisis. The altered values of Americans cut to the root of the current systems. Upheaval presents opportunities for change. Once a society is destabilized, it begins to collapse into chaos. At that point, citizens want the government to provide stability. We saw that recently as a demoralized and destabilized society responded with fear and panic when a “pandemic” faced our nation. Americans are willingly trading civil rights and freedoms for authoritarianism and overreach that they believe will keep them safe. The messaging in all of this is key. The mainstream media and their “tell-a-vision” programming play a key role in framing the prescribed narrative as truth.

Stage 4: Normalization. The “new normal” is a term we’ve heard constantly lately, and it’s an accurate description of what the normalization stage is all about. When the government and societal structures have changed to restrict liberty, citizens are told the radical transformation is “the way it has to be.” Ironically, it’s described as normal when it’s not normal at all. Normalization creates a new baseline for what a nation will accept, value, and promote. The cycle is complete.

Those steps are repeated over and over, bringing a greater result with each cycle, until there’s a controlled collapse. The United States could be on the verge of collapse right now, unless we collectively wake up to reality and take a stand to stop tyranny.

The Hegelian dialectic is the framework for guiding people’s thoughts and actions into conflicts that lead them to a predetermined solution. The enemies of the United States are using that tactic to create fear, turn citizen against citizen, and divide our nation. A house divided can’t stand.

If people don’t understand how the Hegelian dialectic shapes their perceptions of the world, then they don’t know how they’re helping to implement the agenda, which ultimately is to advance humanity into a dictatorship—whether by the fascists, the communists, or the globalists and their New World Order. We must step outside the dialectic so that we can be released from the limitations of controlled and guided thought.

The most important thing about America is liberty. America is what has stood between power-hungry people and their goals of world domination. The true enemies of the United States are trying to convince us that we’re each other’s enemies and that big government and control of the lives of the many by a few is the cure for what ails us.

We must all recognize that they’re weaponizing the crisis and that this narrative is a lie. Government bureaucrats are now labeling anyone who thinks that they’ve overstepped their constitutional bounds as enemies of the state—“patriot terrorists.” What liberty-loving people are now combating is pure evil.

All it takes for evil to prosper is for good people to do nothing. As we reflect back on Sept. 11, 2001, one thing that stands out about that time following the terrorist attacks is that we forgot about the things that divided us. We united as Americans. There’s no better example than what we saw in New York. We were united together in support of one another fighting a common enemy.

So many have sacrificed so much to secure our liberty and preserve it for future generations. Many of us have lost a loved one on a foreign battlefield or from a service-connected illness after they had returned, or in the line of duty here at home. How do we honor their sacrifice and that of so many others in our nation’s 245-year history? We stand and fight to uphold liberty and our unalienable rights enshrined in America’s founding documents. If liberty is to be lost, it won’t be on our watch.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Read more:

Taliban Hangs Four Bodies in Public Square in Western Afghanistan: Witnesses

Theepochtimes.com

Who Would Hide a Jew If Nazis Took Over America?

Dennis Prager

September 28, 2021

Commentary

There is something about most Jews that few non-Jews know: We Jews often ask ourselves if a non-Jew in our lives would hide us in the event of a Nazi-like outbreak.

I don’t know if young Jews think about this, but nearly all Jews who grew up in the decades following the Holocaust often wondered: Would this non-Jew hide me?

I have thought about this all my life because the question, “Who hid Jews?” is one of the most important questions anyone—Jew or non-Jew—needs to think about. That question is far more important than “Who didn’t hide Jews?” because great goodness is rarer than great evil and even rarer than simple moral cowardice. Yet, a vast number of books have been written attempting to understand evil, while relatively few have been written attempting to explain good.

The reason for this is simple: Since the Enlightenment, i.e., since the decline of Judeo-Christian thought, most secular people have believed, and nearly all secular thought has been predicated on, the reality-denying idea that human nature is essentially good. As a result, scholars regard good as the norm and evil as the aberration. So, they study evil far more than good.

That is why the question, “Who rescued Jews?” should be of overwhelming importance to humanity as a whole. If people are interested in increasing good and in decreasing evil, what question could be more important?

A lifetime of study of this question has led me to the following answers:

No. 1: Sam and Pearl Oliner, two professors of sociology at California State University at Humboldt, were the authors of one of the most highly regarded works on altruism, “The Altruistic Personality.” The book was the product of the Oliners’ lifetime of study of non-Jewish rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. They themselves had been hidden by non-Jews in Poland, and I had the privilege of interviewing them.

I asked Sam Oliner, “Knowing all you now know about who rescued Jews during the Holocaust, if you had to return as a Jew to Poland and you could knock on the door of only one person in the hope that they would rescue you, would you knock on the door of a Polish lawyer, a Polish doctor, a Polish artist, or a Polish priest?”

Without hesitation, he responded, “Polish priest.” And his wife immediately added, “I would prefer a Polish nun.”

I should note that neither had a religious agenda, as both were secular Jews.

Of course, most Christians in Europe failed the moral test of the Holocaust, but so did nearly all secular intellectuals. And few Christians today deny this. But any honest person would still bet on a priest before a doctor, artist, lawyer, or professor. It is one reason I believe that the decline of Judeo-Christian religions is a calamity: We will produce fewer people who will do great good.

No. 2: Another study of rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust offered four characteristics of rescuers. I read this book about 40 years ago and I do not remember the name of the book or three of the four characteristics. But I remember one of them because it struck me as an original insight and because it made so much sense. According to this study, individuals who were considered “eccentric” prior to the war were disproportionately represented among those who hid Jews.

Now, why would that be? Why would people regarded as eccentric be more likely to risk torture and death to hide a member of a persecuted group they weren’t part of?

The answer is obvious: Eccentrics are, by definition, people who march to the beat of their own drummer, who are nonconformists, and who don’t seek social approval.

That should give us some major insights into who would save Jews—or any other group targeted for death (such as landowners in communist countries)—if our society were taken over by Nazis or communists.

If this theory about eccentrics is correct, it should give us pause.

When I observe Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, and, for that matter, the citizens of most countries at this time, this observation about who would risk their lives to hide a Jew leaves me pessimistic with regard to how any of these groups would act under a Nazi or communist regime.

We have seen herdlike behavior and an unquestioning obedience to authority that few expected to witness in previously free countries such as the English-speaking ones. Worse, we have seen unquestioning obedience to irrational authority.

Wearing masks outdoors is irrational. Yet a vast number of Americans have, sheeplike, obeyed irrational government demands to wear them. Telling people who have had COVID-19 to take a vaccine against COVID-19, when natural antibodies are longer lasting and more effective, not to mention safer, than a vaccine is irrational. Telling people who have been vaccinated or had COVID-19 to wear masks is irrational. Prolonged lockdowns of healthy people are irrational.

Yet tens of millions of Americans are unquestioningly obeying irrational orders and castigating those resisting or even questioning them.

It was “eccentric” Christian pastors who kept their churches open and an “eccentric” Catholic priest who sued the state of California for denying him his constitutional right to minister to his flock—and who prevailed against the state. Except for these clergymen and a handful of eccentric restaurant owners, almost all other Americans obeyed the state’s irrational orders.

That is frightening because people who obey irrational orders and despise those who do not are precisely the type of people who didn’t hide Jews.

So, then, here are two questions for American Jews to ponder:

If a Nazi-like doctrine took over America, and you could knock on the door of someone who obeyed all government orders regarding masks, regardless of their rationality, or someone who questioned government authority and obeyed few or none of its mask orders—on whose door would you knock? If you were given the choice between knocking on the door of an atheist professor and the door of an Evangelical pastor or a Catholic priest—on whose door would knock?

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

The Epoch Times.

The Chinese Regime’s Billion Dollar Organ Harvesting Operation

Ryan Yang

September 27, 2021

 

Dr. Torsten Trey, director of Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting, speaks an event on organ harvesting at the Harvard Club on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York City on Sept. 25, 2019. (Cathy He/The Epoch Times)

 

Commentary

Since coming to power in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party has only ever focused on one goal: profit.

During the early years of the party, then-leader Mao Zedong set forth ambitious “5-year plans” that solely emphasized economic growth. These “5-year plans” featured wildly unreasonable production targets, which caused government officials to utilize unethical methods to meet them. In many cases, local officials resorted to collecting excessive amounts of agricultural produce from rural farmers to meet production quotas. While this method did help fulfill the party’s export objectives, it resulted in The Great Chinese Famine that killed between 15 and 55 million people, making it the largest famine in human history.

Now, more than 50 years later, we see this same pattern repeating itself in China today. In their attempt to dominate the organ transplant industry, the Chinese Communist Party has turned to a system of forced organ harvesting. Ignoring any ethical considerations, the party utilizes its extensive number of detention camps spread across the country to fuel its massive forced organ harvesting program. These detention camps hold prisoners of conscience who have been imprisoned solely for refusing to submit to the will of the Chinese Communist Party.

Recent evidence suggests that the country’s organ trade industry is worth over $1 billion every year. But this method of using prisoners of conscience also serves another purpose in addition to profit. The Chinese regime uses this opportunity to suppress specific groups in the country, namely, members of the Muslim Uyghur community, religious Christians, and practitioners of Falun Gong. These are not even criminals, but everyday citizens who are imprisoned for holding political or religious views contrary to those of the Chinese Communist Party.

The Chinese Communist Party has tried to cover up the widespread nature of their forced organ harvesting program, whether through bribes or intimidation. But this hasn’t prevented international pressure from numerous governments calling on China to end the horrific practice. In addition to international human rights circles such as the U.N., the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom have all publically called on the Chinese regime to end the practice.

Yet, the practice of forced organ harvesting in China is still ongoing today. Prisoners of conscience are still being held in detention camps as a living pool of human organs to be used in the regime’s billion-dollar organ harvesting program.

 

Join host Joshua Philipp on Epoch TV as he interviews Dr. Torsten Trey, founder of Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH), to uncover the truth behind the Chinese regime’s massive murder-for-profit operation.
_

CCP's ‘Commercialized Murder’ in Organ Transplant Industry Must End, UK Official Says

 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/EpochTVus

Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/EpochTV

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

The Epoch Times.