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blog"},"link":[{"rel":"http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#feed","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/feeds\/posts\/default"},{"rel":"self","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/11368628\/posts\/default\/-\/big+government?alt=json-in-script\u0026max-results=5"},{"rel":"alternate","type":"text/html","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/search\/label\/big%20government"},{"rel":"hub","href":"http://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/"},{"rel":"next","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/11368628\/posts\/default\/-\/big+government\/-\/big+government?alt=json-in-script\u0026start-index=6\u0026max-results=5"}],"author":[{"name":{"$t":"Daniel Greenfield"},"uri":{"$t":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/profile\/13575285186581875356"},"email":{"$t":"noreply@blogger.com"},"gd$image":{"rel":"http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail","width":"20","height":"32","src":"https:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/-ywx0Wkms-cU\/Vm75eobzYVI\/AAAAAAAAPg0\/kAlR7rDxOIc\/s113\/picture%2Bnewspapery%2Bsmall.jpg"}}],"generator":{"version":"7.00","uri":"http://www.blogger.com","$t":"Blogger"},"openSearch$totalResults":{"$t":"9"},"openSearch$startIndex":{"$t":"1"},"openSearch$itemsPerPage":{"$t":"5"},"entry":[{"id":{"$t":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11368628.post-714372039229578819"},"published":{"$t":"2021-07-05T19:13:00.002-04:00"},"updated":{"$t":"2021-07-05T19:13:45.868-04:00"},"category":[{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"big government"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Racism"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"recent"}],"title":{"type":"text","$t":"How Civil Rights Made America a Critical Race Theocracy"},"content":{"type":"html","$t":"When Obama wanted to defend his ties to Jeremiah Wright, he began his speech by denouncing America's \"original sin of slavery\". The phrase is widely and unthinkingly used. And its consequences are the 1619 Project and critical race theory. If slavery is America’s original sin, then the purpose of America and her people becomes striving to atone for that primal sin.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ESuburban Democrat housewives reading Robin DiAngelo and corporate struggle sessions forcing members to affiliate by race are just striving to atone for America’s “original sin”.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAnd if they resemble a cult, it’s because civil rights moved from the legal to the spiritual.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cdiv class=\"separator\" style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-EEIdibpZzdM\/YOOSEm-hTPI\/AAAAAAAATVc\/YkSKSe8GuQo4lC0qwsaspDj30HEbz_z3wCNcBGAsYHQ\/s597\/image_2021-07-05_161319.png\" imageanchor=\"1\" style=\"clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"\u003E\u003Cimg border=\"0\" data-original-height=\"440\" data-original-width=\"597\" src=\"https:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-EEIdibpZzdM\/YOOSEm-hTPI\/AAAAAAAATVc\/YkSKSe8GuQo4lC0qwsaspDj30HEbz_z3wCNcBGAsYHQ\/s320\/image_2021-07-05_161319.png\" width=\"320\" \/\u003E\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/div\u003EDismantling the legal infrastructure of segregation took on religious and psychological overtones. The legitimacy of ending school segregation was tainted by psychosocial nonsense like the ‘Doll Study’ which found that children preferred white dolls to black dolls. Even then the original sin of civil rights was that its more academic proponents could not properly define rights, and sought affirmative remedies that transformed how we thought rather than what we did.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EWhat we do can be in the legitimate purview of government, what we think is not. And yet over the years civil rights became obsessed with the origins of discrimination in the human mind.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ECountless tests were devised, many absurd, (“What color is a gorilla’s skin underneath the fur?” one particularly awkward racist test for racism asked) that were meant to measure our thoughts.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe less racist our society became in function, the more civil rights fixated on a gestalt of psychosocial racism which explained racial disparities by blaming hidden thoughts leading to assumptions that perpetrated systemic racism even as its white perpetrators remained unaware.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe truly dangerous part of this conclusion was that the focus of discrimination had moved from actions to thoughts. Critical race theory is being imposed on everyone from schoolchildren to soldiers because civil rights violations had been redefined from the physical to the mental. Civil rights was no longer fighting separate drinking fountains, but unconscious and implicit biases.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe National Guard wasn’t being sent to open up schools, but to open up the human mind.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EWhen the government tells you what to do, it risks becoming a tyranny, but when it starts telling you what to think, it becomes a theocracy. Critical race theory, like most of America’s experiments in secular theocracy, came out of academia whose experts have failed miserably when it comes to tangible policy results, but excel at telling people what to think.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe original sin of academia is constructing grand theories. The social sciences found the root causes for its grand theories in the interface between society and psychology. Their solutions begin with having the government change how people live and then when that doesn’t work, changing how they think.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe sociologists who wrecked the black industrial communities of the north with welfare refused to accept responsibility for the disaster they helped cause and instead began blaming racial disparities on the hidden workings of society and the human mind.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EWhile academic civil rights was psychoanalyzing America, the civil rights movement had soured from Martin Luther King Jr’s Christian emphasis on national redemption across racial lines to the Islamic tribalism of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam in whose mythology black people were chosen and white people were a tainted race created through eugenic breeding. America was an evil empire doomed to be destroyed by the arrival of UFOs protecting the master race.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe next generation of activist clergy was outwardly Christian, but had come either directly, like Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s mentor, or indirectly like James Hal Cone, \u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/www.frontpagemag.com\/point\/2020\/11\/georgia-dem-senate-candidates-mentor-there-will-be-daniel-greenfield\/\"\u003EWarnock’s mentor\u003C\/a\u003E, through the racist ideology of the Nation of Islam. When Jeremiah Wright shrieked, \"God Damn America! That’s in the Bible,\" he meant it literally with America as Babylon and Rome. To the Black Hebrew Israelites, whose movement has been linked to a number of recent terrorist attacks, America is Edom. The common theme is that America is a mythic evil to be destroyed.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe set of ideas that people associate with critical race theory fuses the two corrupt successors of the civil rights movement, academic racial psychoanalysis and racial nationalism, through the writings of second generation black nationalists who had come through academia, like Ibram X. Kendi, and journalism, like Ta-Nehisi Coates and the 1619 Project’s Nikole Hannah-Jones.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe modern proponents of critical race theory fuse academic beliefs in subconscious systemic racism and black nationalist convictions that America and white people are inherently evil.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThat’s where critical race theory becomes critical race theocracy.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThis brand of ‘wokeness’ is legitimately theological because its origins lie as much in black religious identitarian movements as in the academic jargon in which it cloaks its racism. The synthesis of the two very different literary genres results in strange poetry, personal confessionals wrapped in bad sociology and worse history, mythic appeals and nonsense jargon, that runs through everything from the 1619 Project to ‘Between the World and Me’.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ECritical race theory’s defenders insist that it’s an academic movement, that its proponents are experts, and that it just wants to discuss its ideas, but it operates like a theocracy, silencing and suppressing opponents, critics, and even insufficiently radical supporters. Its entire rationale is built on denying that anyone can legitimately disagree with it or that debate is even possible. A movement that dismisses reason and objectivity as forms of oppressive whiteness has no interest in dialogue, only in terrorizing its way to power as racial nationalists seek to do.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe Nazis decreed theories and creative works off limits because they believed that ideas could not be separated from the race of their creators. Critical race activists agree that theories and works carry the race of their creators in their intellectual DNA. The Nazis banned some works over ‘Jewishness’ while critical race theory activists seek to ban them over their ‘whiteness’.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe most brutal theocracies are those which are the most pessimistic about human nature. The Nazis believed that people were animals who could never transcend their biology, Islamists believe that people must be ruthlessly conquered and ruled to bring peace, and leftists believe that power relations doom humanity to cycles of exploitation without an enlightened tyranny.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ECritical race theory is infused with the academic pessimism of the Left, the identitarian racial pessimism of black nationalists, and the spiritual pessimism of black nationalist theology. It exists in a perpetual state of struggle and its exceptionalism is rooted in its victimhood. It needs white people as an ultimate enemy whose existence gives it its negative meaning.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EWhiteness abstracts white people as a perpetual enemy for a racial and a spiritual struggle.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAmerica’s fall into the grip of this racist theocracy obsessed with a struggle against whiteness, driven by racial paranoia and moral despair, is a direct legacy of the intellectual and moral failings of the aftermath of the civil rights era. These failings were as much white as they were black. While the black family disintegrated in the grip of the welfare state, white elites lost their religion and built an alternative culture whose meaning came from politics and pop culture.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EWokeness is just the horrid synthesis of white secularism and black nationalism, of a society where music is worship, politics is religion, self-medicating is meditation, and activism is faith. The endless narcissistic refractions only produced a victimhood culture whose great crusade is enforcing conformity through the only means possible in a fragmented society that has lost its moral and intellectual underpinnings: online bullying and political terrorism.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EKingian civil rights is inaccessible to a secular society with no concept of forgiveness or humility. It’s also inaccessible to people whose warped version of religion teaches them to hate others.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ETo paraphrase John Adams, \"Civil rights was made only for a moral and religious people, it is wholly inadequate for any other.\" Critical race theory is the inadequacy of a political society trying to come to grips with moral and religious questions, but with no other tools than power and the abstractions of a scientism that is suited to studying distant galaxies, but not people.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe Founding Fathers, now the enemies of critical race theory whose statues are being torn down, were humble enough to limit the ambit of government to the realm of government. And they made it clear that it was not their role to tell people what to think or to believe.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAmerica held together through conflicts that should have torn the country apart because we fought over the nature of government, not over the nature of man. The Confederate statues that have occasioned so much ire were the legacy of a country that was able to knit together its wounds as former enemies forgave and honored each other in the aftermath of its worst war.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EEven when we were a moral and religious people, we did not go to war over what was in our souls. The leftist theocracy terrorizing millions of Americans is particularly unfit to judge souls, but the intellectual failures of academia and the moral failures of elite culture and leftist clergy has localized the failures of the black community in the psychosocial gestalt of systemic racism.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe only way to save black people then becomes controlling how everyone thinks.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ELiberal theology had made the civil rights movement into the epochal moral event of America as their ancestors had made the civil war the defining event that transformed the soul of the nation. This was exactly the brand of moral narcissism that Lincoln found so frustrating about the abolitionists long before their distant descendants put on black and began toppling his statues.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ECivil rights became a force that gave white liberals meaning. And that was another way of saying that civil rights became a religion. The devolution of civil rights legislation from inhibiting state discrimination based on race to enforcing state discrimination based on race was the trajectory of a theocracy based on the same sort of realpolitik that corrupts religions.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe Founding Fathers removed government restraint while the new theology of civil rights imposes government restraint, first over actions, then over ideas, and finally over thoughts.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EEquality has made way for equity and the human mind is the new lunch counter. The only way to achieve civil rights is, as in the Soviet Union, Communist China, Cuba, and every leftist tyranny, by removing civil rights from all and distributing them to the most deserving. The hypocritical corruption of the system demands not just tyranny, but theocracy, not just control over bodies, but over the minds whose owners might question this self-serving arrangement.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EWhat was once a supremely achievable goal, the end of government restraint, has made way for the usual unachievable utopian goal of an ideal society of the supremely enlightened.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe paradoxes of critical race theory come from its paradoxical intellectual origins through the social science academics who believe that everyone can be reeducated and the black nationalists who believe that white people are inescapably evil. They compromise by believing that white people are inescapably evil and must be constantly reeducated anyway.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EIt’s a compromise that allows white leftists to pursue meaning through civil rights and black nationalists to pursue racial identitarianism while leaving out non-misanthropes of all races.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EEnding this nightmare will require confronting the corruption of civil rights. Positive rights lead to tyranny and negative rights to freedom. When we define rights as things the government does for us, rather than things the government stops doing to us, we all end up as slaves. Civil rights cannot and should not be used to achieve equity by chasing racial disparities. That sociological and theological rabbit hole inevitably takes us into the realms of psychology and sin.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThose are places where the government does not belong and should not be allowed to venture.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ECritical race theory is less a theory than a theocracy, but both a theory and a theocracy can be torn down by attacking its fundamental assumptions. The failure to challenge theories leads to theocracies. If we want to defeat this theocracy, we need to start with its fundamental assumptions about white evil and black victimhood, and about an original sin that passes not only from fathers to sons, but from plantation owners to recent immigrants.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAmerica and Europe did not invent slavery, but they were the first to comprehensively destroy it. The presumption of guilt that traces every Third World blight or domestic inadequacy to some combination of colonialism, imperialism, and other nonsensical ‘ism’ is false and wrong. We do not need to constantly redeem ourselves for doing what no other civilization managed to do.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EWe already have.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThere is no room for a racial theocracy in America, not in our colleges, our institutions, or our military. Its existence is a declaration of war on not only our past, but our present and our future.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EDestroying a village won’t save it and destroying civil rights in the name of civil rights is a farce.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EWhen civil rights isn’t regulating how you treat others, but how you think about them, and how you think about the theories that explain why they’re the victims, that’s an uncivil theocracy.\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Ci\u003E\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/sultanknish.blogspot.com\/\" target=\"_blank\"\u003EDaniel Greenfield\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/www.frontpagemag.com\/\" target=\"_blank\"\u003EFront Page Magazine\u003C\/a\u003E.\u003C\/i\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Ci\u003EClick\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/sultanknish.blogspot.com\/2005\/03\/blogging-hara.html\" target=\"_blank\"\u003Ehere to subscribe\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;to my articles.\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/i\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Ci\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/i\u003E\u003Ci\u003EThank you for reading.\u003C\/i\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E"},"link":[{"rel":"replies","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/feeds\/714372039229578819\/comments\/default","title":"Post Comments"},{"rel":"replies","type":"text/html","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/2021\/07\/how-civil-rights-made-america-critical.html#comment-form","title":"4 Comments"},{"rel":"edit","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/11368628\/posts\/default\/714372039229578819"},{"rel":"self","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/11368628\/posts\/default\/714372039229578819"},{"rel":"alternate","type":"text/html","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/2021\/07\/how-civil-rights-made-america-critical.html","title":"How Civil Rights Made America a Critical Race Theocracy"}],"author":[{"name":{"$t":"Daniel Greenfield"},"uri":{"$t":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/profile\/13575285186581875356"},"email":{"$t":"noreply@blogger.com"},"gd$image":{"rel":"http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail","width":"20","height":"32","src":"https:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/-ywx0Wkms-cU\/Vm75eobzYVI\/AAAAAAAAPg0\/kAlR7rDxOIc\/s113\/picture%2Bnewspapery%2Bsmall.jpg"}}],"media$thumbnail":{"xmlns$media":"http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/","url":"https:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-EEIdibpZzdM\/YOOSEm-hTPI\/AAAAAAAATVc\/YkSKSe8GuQo4lC0qwsaspDj30HEbz_z3wCNcBGAsYHQ\/s72-c\/image_2021-07-05_161319.png","height":"72","width":"72"},"thr$total":{"$t":"4"}},{"id":{"$t":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11368628.post-7094519134640534"},"published":{"$t":"2021-04-20T06:17:00.000-04:00"},"updated":{"$t":"2021-04-20T06:17:00.404-04:00"},"category":[{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Biden"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"big government"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"recent"}],"title":{"type":"text","$t":"The Tyranny of Meaninglessness"},"content":{"type":"html","$t":"Joe Biden is always redefining things by Bidenizing them into random strings of gibberish like “lying, dog-faced pony soldier” or turning them into Bidenisms.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EBut these days his administration is ambitiously trying to redefine the entire English language.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cdiv class=\"separator\" style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-WcXkCdvbb8c\/YHz0_swPuiI\/AAAAAAAATA4\/7kGdYTQ9H6Ehh3y7p24huLDIY8g8ei91ACNcBGAsYHQ\/s480\/bidenism.jpg\" imageanchor=\"1\" style=\"clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"\u003E\u003Cimg border=\"0\" data-original-height=\"360\" data-original-width=\"480\" src=\"https:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-WcXkCdvbb8c\/YHz0_swPuiI\/AAAAAAAATA4\/7kGdYTQ9H6Ehh3y7p24huLDIY8g8ei91ACNcBGAsYHQ\/s320\/bidenism.jpg\" width=\"320\" \/\u003E\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E“I want to change the paradigm,” Biden told reporters. “I would like elected Republican support, but what I know I have now is I have electoral support from Republican voters. Republican voters agree with what I’m doing.”\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ELike every other word that comes out of Biden’s mouth, that’s a lie. A Gallup poll in March f\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/news.gallup.com\/poll\/329384\/presidential-approval-ratings-joe-biden.aspx\"\u003Eound that\u003C\/a\u003E Biden’s approval rating among Republicans is at 8%. That’s down from 12% in February.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E“What’s become crystal clear is that Biden has redefined bipartisan,\" Obama crony Rahm Emanuel argued. \"And Washington is slow to catch up to the Biden definition.”\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe Biden definition of bipartisan is having the support of 8% of Republicans.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ENot only is Washington D.C. slow to catch up to the Biden definition of bipartisan, but so is the dictionary. Biden’s advisers however argue that the dictionary’s arc bends toward Biden.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E“If you looked up ‘bipartisan’ in the dictionary, I think it would say support from Republicans and Democrats,” Anita Dunn, who has advised Biden and Harvey Weinstein, argued. “It doesn’t say the Republicans have to be in Congress.”\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EIt doesn’t say that the Democrats have to be in congress either if it’s a book club. But if it’s bipartisan governing, then it has to be Republican and Democrat elected officials.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E“The Biden definition of bipartisanship is an agenda that unifies the country and appeals across the political spectrum,” Mike Donilon, a senior Biden adviser, argued. “Presumably, if you have an agenda that is broadly popular with Democrats and Republicans across the country, then you should have elected representatives reflecting that.”\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe Framers also thought so which is why they put into place a system of elected officials chosen by the people to represent them. Biden would like to replace that with claiming that Republicans support him in a poll so he can eliminate the filibuster, pack the Supreme Court, add Puerto Rico, D.C., and his family home as states, and rule a one-party state.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EFresh off redefining ‘bipartisan’, the Biden administration also redefined ‘infrastructure’ to mean funding the Democrat welfare state.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E“I mean, what is infrastructure? Historically, it's been: What makes the economy move,” Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, contended.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ESince everything makes the economy move, in one direction or another, then everything is infrastructure. But if everything is infrastructure, then nothing is infrastructure.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EIn the hands of lefty linguists, infrastructure, like the Constitution or bipartisanship, ceases to be tethered to the dictionary or the meanings imbued by a bunch of old white male racists, and becomes a universal concept. Or as Granholm argued, “as the president said this week, that infrastructure evolves to meet the American people's aspirations.”\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EInfrastructure, like the living constitution, is constantly evolving to meet lefty aspirations. One day it’s a bridge, another day it’s abortion, and the end of free speech.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E“We don't want to use past definitions of infrastructure, when we are moving into the future,” Granholm whined. Definitions are static. They exist in the past. But the party of progress, as embodied by a 78-year-old man who keeps stumbling over words and falling down, is using definitions from the future for Newspeak dictionaries that haven’t even been invented yet.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EIf ‘infrastructure’ or ‘bipartisanship’ mean whatever Biden says it does, then he’s an absolute dictator, and reality means whatever lying, dog-faced pony soldier decides it does this week.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EBut Biden is always redefining things.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe serial Democrat lecher started out, like Bill Clinton, by redefining sex. Except that Biden, in one of his first executive orders, redefined sex to mean some intangible psychologically subjective concept of sex not based on science or biology, rather than men and women.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EOnce you’ve redefined women out of existence, redefining bipartisan to mean a one-party state, and infrastructure to mean social services is easy. All it takes is the refusal to be bound by the narrow categories of the past and then bridges, gender, and tyranny can be surprisingly fluid.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ELast year, Biden had already redefined being a Catholic.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E “Biden Could Redefine What It Means to be ‘a Catholic in Good Standing,” the Washington Post argued. Predictably, the argument was all about a more fluid definition of Catholicism and “what kinds of Catholicism they think most urgently needs to be advanced”. The Biden brand involves “poverty, refugees and the environment” which has as much to do with Catholicism as Tikkun Olam’s emphasis on “poverty, refugees, and the environment” has to do with Judaism.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EBut when you’re already redefining the Constitution, gender, and the meaning of simple words, why not also redefine religion away from narrow categories of belief, and into an evolving religion of the future in which things mean whatever we want them to mean at any moment.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EWhen words mean nothing, then ideas mean nothing, and it’s easy to redefine Catholicism and Judaism to mean Muslim immigration, Obamaphones, and subsidies for luxury ‘green’ SUVs.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAs George Orwell rightly noted, the refusal to allow words to mean anything is tyranny.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EWithout objective meanings, there are no laws and therefore no rights. There are no restraints on the power of the state when it refuses to be bound by the mere definitions of words.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EDemocrats spent generations trying to nullify the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights by arguing about the meaning of “arms”. Now they’re trying to do the same thing to the First Amendment by putting forward exciting new definitions of “speech” and the “press”.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ERecent mainstream media editorials attacking free speech include \"Why Is Big Tech Policing Free Speech? Because the Government Isn’t\", \"Free Speech is Killing Us\" and “Why America Needs a Hate Speech Law.”\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThat last one was written by a Biden transition official, who sneered that, “the intellectual underpinning of the First Amendment was engineered for a simpler era” and that, “the framers believed that this marketplace was necessary” from which “magically, truth would emerge.” An important prerequisite for the emergence of truth is the magic of allowing people to speak and for words to mean something. When there’s no free speech or meaningful speech, truth dies.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EIn our exciting leftist future, we know that speech, like gender, infrastructure, and bipartisanship, have to be redefined to mean whatever the government has decided that it should mean.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe truth can only emerge from the government and its political media partners.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAnd if you doubt that, you probably believe that infrastructure means roads, that women exist, that free speech means the freedom to speak, rather than being told what you can say.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EBad speech “undermines the values that the First Amendment was designed to protect: fairness, due process, equality before the law,” the Biden transition official argued.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe only way to save the true values of the First Amendment is to destroy its literal meaning.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThis is the same argument that you will find behind every Biden redefinition which insists on a definition so inclusive that it includes everything except what it actually means.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ECatholicism and Judaism mean everything except their own traditional teachings. Sex means everything except men and women. Infrastructure means everything except roads and bridges.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAnd bipartisanship means everything except elected officials from two parties working together.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAmerica also needs to be redefined from a country and a people to an idea that includes the entire world and everything in it, except its own citizens and a country with borders.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EWhen America, like religion and words, means everything then it means nothing.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAnd who better than Joe Biden, who redefines sentences into incomprehensible word salads randomly assembled from a Scrabble session, to usher in the end of the English language.\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Ci\u003E\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/sultanknish.blogspot.com\/\" target=\"_blank\"\u003EDaniel Greenfield\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/www.frontpagemag.com\/\" target=\"_blank\"\u003EFront Page Magazine\u003C\/a\u003E.\u003C\/i\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Ci\u003EClick\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/sultanknish.blogspot.com\/2005\/03\/blogging-hara.html\" target=\"_blank\"\u003Ehere to subscribe\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;to my articles.\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/i\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Ci\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/i\u003E\u003Ci\u003EThank you for reading.\u003C\/i\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E"},"link":[{"rel":"replies","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/feeds\/7094519134640534\/comments\/default","title":"Post Comments"},{"rel":"replies","type":"text/html","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/2021\/04\/the-tyranny-of-meaninglessness.html#comment-form","title":"3 Comments"},{"rel":"edit","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/11368628\/posts\/default\/7094519134640534"},{"rel":"self","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/11368628\/posts\/default\/7094519134640534"},{"rel":"alternate","type":"text/html","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/2021\/04\/the-tyranny-of-meaninglessness.html","title":"The Tyranny of Meaninglessness"}],"author":[{"name":{"$t":"Daniel Greenfield"},"uri":{"$t":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/profile\/13575285186581875356"},"email":{"$t":"noreply@blogger.com"},"gd$image":{"rel":"http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail","width":"20","height":"32","src":"https:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/-ywx0Wkms-cU\/Vm75eobzYVI\/AAAAAAAAPg0\/kAlR7rDxOIc\/s113\/picture%2Bnewspapery%2Bsmall.jpg"}}],"media$thumbnail":{"xmlns$media":"http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/","url":"https:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-WcXkCdvbb8c\/YHz0_swPuiI\/AAAAAAAATA4\/7kGdYTQ9H6Ehh3y7p24huLDIY8g8ei91ACNcBGAsYHQ\/s72-c\/bidenism.jpg","height":"72","width":"72"},"thr$total":{"$t":"3"}},{"id":{"$t":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11368628.post-3415298107532575883"},"published":{"$t":"2021-01-12T16:58:00.002-05:00"},"updated":{"$t":"2021-01-12T16:58:17.860-05:00"},"category":[{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"big government"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Coronavirus"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"recent"}],"title":{"type":"text","$t":"Democrats Destroyed All the Savings of Americans Three Times Over"},"content":{"type":"html","$t":"Americans have $1.3 trillion in personal savings. A study published in The Economics of Disasters and Climate Change \u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/link.springer.com\/article\/10.1007\/s41885-020-00080-1\"\u003Efound\u003C\/a\u003E that the coronavirus pandemic will result in between $3.2 trillion to $4.8 trillion in GDP losses. That approaches the economic output of Japan.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EMuch of those losses were caused by the lockdowns which could result in a 60.6% fall in GDP.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cdiv class=\"separator\" style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-KObe1X-WY-E\/X_4bbHhHMXI\/AAAAAAAAStQ\/EyLALBCqoC80KU_3Qa-Tw4zC-WXDzdoIwCNcBGAsYHQ\/s300\/nuclear%2Bpublic%2Bdomain.jpg\" imageanchor=\"1\" style=\"clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"\u003E\u003Cimg border=\"0\" data-original-height=\"225\" data-original-width=\"300\" src=\"https:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-KObe1X-WY-E\/X_4bbHhHMXI\/AAAAAAAAStQ\/EyLALBCqoC80KU_3Qa-Tw4zC-WXDzdoIwCNcBGAsYHQ\/s0\/nuclear%2Bpublic%2Bdomain.jpg\" \/\u003E\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/div\u003EGovernors, most of them Democrats, destroyed three times the household savings of the country, not just as an abstract number by piling on more debt and adding more infinite zeros to an impossible number, but by actively destroying small businesses on an unprecedented scale.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe results won’t go away when the virus does. Much of the country may never recover.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe sheer scope of the destruction may be couched in statistics, but it can be seen in empty storefronts, deserted streets, and food bank lines in cities across the country. It’s an act of economic warfare with no precedent in our history waged against a very particular group.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ESmall businesses were shuttered by the lockdowns and then hammered by the race riots.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ECompared to those trillions, the estimated \u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/fee.org\/articles\/george-floyd-riots-caused-record-setting-2-billion-in-damage-new-report-says-here-s-why-the-true-cost-is-even-higher\/\"\u003E$2 billion\u003C\/a\u003E in damage from the Black Lives Matter riots funded, endorsed, and enabled by the Democrats almost seems like nothing. Unless you’re one of the many small business owners who had their stores looted and their insurance rates rise. Or unless you’re one of the many people who need those businesses to be there on the corner.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThat $2 billion is just the insurance claims. The full total of losses suffered by the stores, the toll of the brutal violence inflicted on random people and on police officers, and the dollars and cents cost to taxpayers dealing with the rioting and the aftermath is much higher.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E2020 was the worst year for the American middle class in almost a century. Millions of small business owners \u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pmc\/articles\/PMC7461311\/\"\u003Efell off the charts\u003C\/a\u003E. A SCORE survey found that\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/smallbiztrends.com\/2020\/12\/score-survey-covid-impact-small-business.html\"\u003E only 34%\u003C\/a\u003E of small business owners were turning a profit. Meanwhile Yelp claimed that 800 small businesses are closing every day. The scope of this disaster extends to their workers, their suppliers, and the buying habits of their customers. The retail sector has been gutted and the winner is Communist China.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EWhen shoppers shifted to Amazon in greater numbers than ever, they were really buying from \u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/www.frontpagemag.com\/fpm\/2020\/10\/china-using-companies-twitter-interfere-election-daniel-greenfield\/\"\u003EChinese third party sellers\u003C\/a\u003E who are using the Bezos platform to sell directly to Americans. The retail sector in this country was cut out of the loop leaving few jobs except those of Amazon warehouse workers and executives as Made in China didn’t just mean factories, but retail.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EBig Tech’s real business model is a trojan horse offering free services in exchange for user data that helps Chinese businesses target Americans. It’s why Facebook takes in\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/www.frontpagemag.com\/fpm\/2020\/10\/china-using-companies-twitter-interfere-election-daniel-greenfield\/\"\u003E $5 billion a year\u003C\/a\u003E in ad money from China even though it's not allowed to operate in the Communist dictatorship.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EDemocrats are happy to move sales away from the domestic retail sector, which is traditionally more conservative, and to Big Tech which has poured unprecedented amounts of capital into their operations while acting as a political gatekeeper for their agendas. Wiping out the middle class and turning business owners and workers into welfare cases wraps up the Dem deal.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ERepublicans benefit from economic improvements while Democrats benefit from economic declines. Every time in the last thirty years that a Democrat replaced a Republican in the White House was during an economic decline. Voters are more receptive to Democrat promises that Washington D.C. will take care of them when times are hard and the future appears uncertain.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EDemocrats claim that they hate big business. But what they really hate are the small businessmen who are the backbone of local politics. Each economic disaster is built to thin out the ranks of the local businessmen and replace them with subsidized political operatives who benefit from generous bank loans and affirmative action government contracts. And then the Democrats can hit up Chinese oligarchs for bribes in exchange for contracts on terms that will wipe out the rest of the economy and reduce America to a third world welfare state. Again.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe Democrat playbook under Bush and Trump was to cause massive economic disasters, run for office promising to take care of the little guy, and then wipe out small businesses nationwide. Now they’re doing to the retail sector what they already did to manufacturing in America. The Rust Belt wasn’t enough and they intend to add a Broken Glass Belt across the nation.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 were the biggest national disaster in terms of cost in a century. But this disaster was not caused by earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes or wildfires. It wasn’t even an act of international terrorism, or the work of a few domestic radicals huddled in a basement. Instead it was funded, planned, and carried out by some of the biggest donors and organizations affiliated with the Democrats and their political nonprofits.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThink of the riots as a $2 billion version of 9\/11 whose leadership isn’t hiding in a cave or in Pakistan, but is meeting openly in D.C. hotels while buying elections from coast to cost.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EBut that $2 billion orgy of rioting, looting, burning, maiming, and killing still pales when compared to the largest disaster of the pandemic lockdowns which cost trillions of dollars. A sum amounting to several times more than the household savings of the country was burned in that fire and will go on burning if Democrat leaders and their leftist activist base has its way.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe fact that both the lockdowns and the riots targeted small business is not a coincidence.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EWhile the lockdowns were presented as being all about science and the riots as a populist response to racial injustice, both emerged from policy shops and think tanks. Neither were a natural response to conditions and neither came close to achieving their stated goals.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe lockdowns did not stop the surge and the race riots did nothing for black lives. Instead pandemic deaths and the deaths of black people actually increased in the wake of these measures. But the lockdowns and the riots did achieve their true goals which, among others, was to decimate the retail sector in order to reconstruct the economy and local politics.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EEvery disaster is followed by a recovery. And the Democrat playbook is to cause the disaster and then control the recovery. The Obama recovery was just another kind of disaster and the pandemic recovery will be as devastating in some ways as the pandemic and the riots.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe recovery is the carrot while the disaster is the stick, but both reconfigure the economy to undermine the independence of businesses and the social mobility of individuals, moving money and jobs away from conservative areas and businesses, and into leftist areas and organizations, while deepening big government’s death grip on the economy.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EEven as the pandemic may be approaching its end, the next stage of the disaster is here.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EDemocrats may have destroyed a sum equal to the household savings of the country three times over, but that was just the warm-up act. After the crisis comes the recovery. And if you thought the crisis had hit small businesses hard, wait until you see how hard the recovery is.\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Ci\u003EDaniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.\u003C\/i\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Ci\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/i\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Ci\u003EThis article first appeared exclusively at\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/frontpagemag.com\/\"\u003EFront Page Magazine\u003C\/a\u003E.\u003C\/i\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E"},"link":[{"rel":"replies","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/feeds\/3415298107532575883\/comments\/default","title":"Post Comments"},{"rel":"replies","type":"text/html","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/2021\/01\/democrats-destroyed-all-savings-of.html#comment-form","title":"5 Comments"},{"rel":"edit","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/11368628\/posts\/default\/3415298107532575883"},{"rel":"self","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/11368628\/posts\/default\/3415298107532575883"},{"rel":"alternate","type":"text/html","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/2021\/01\/democrats-destroyed-all-savings-of.html","title":"Democrats Destroyed All the Savings of Americans Three Times Over"}],"author":[{"name":{"$t":"Daniel Greenfield"},"uri":{"$t":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/profile\/13575285186581875356"},"email":{"$t":"noreply@blogger.com"},"gd$image":{"rel":"http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail","width":"20","height":"32","src":"https:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/-ywx0Wkms-cU\/Vm75eobzYVI\/AAAAAAAAPg0\/kAlR7rDxOIc\/s113\/picture%2Bnewspapery%2Bsmall.jpg"}}],"media$thumbnail":{"xmlns$media":"http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/","url":"https:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-KObe1X-WY-E\/X_4bbHhHMXI\/AAAAAAAAStQ\/EyLALBCqoC80KU_3Qa-Tw4zC-WXDzdoIwCNcBGAsYHQ\/s72-c\/nuclear%2Bpublic%2Bdomain.jpg","height":"72","width":"72"},"thr$total":{"$t":"5"}},{"id":{"$t":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11368628.post-6153771644928029183"},"published":{"$t":"2021-01-10T12:18:00.002-05:00"},"updated":{"$t":"2021-01-10T12:18:28.633-05:00"},"category":[{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"big government"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Big Tech"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"California"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"censorship"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"recent"}],"title":{"type":"text","$t":"California’s Internet Censorship Office is Watching What You Say"},"content":{"type":"html","$t":"\"Report misinformation,\" a flier from California's Office of Election Cybersecurity blares. Social media users are urged to report \"misleading\" materials to the Secretary of State's office.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EA government office created by California Democrats is monitoring hashtags, classifying political speech it opposes by “threat level”, taking screenshots of posts, and then storing the information indefinitely, before reporting the offending speech to social media companies for censorship.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cdiv class=\"separator\" style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-UjE6pdMVZRU\/X_s2vxoHVjI\/AAAAAAAASss\/7XpJnMkgkks-UxKW-1A380f3eLJBB-U9gCNcBGAsYHQ\/s683\/caoffice.png\" imageanchor=\"1\" style=\"clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"\u003E\u003Cimg border=\"0\" data-original-height=\"593\" data-original-width=\"683\" src=\"https:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-UjE6pdMVZRU\/X_s2vxoHVjI\/AAAAAAAASss\/7XpJnMkgkks-UxKW-1A380f3eLJBB-U9gCNcBGAsYHQ\/s320\/caoffice.png\" width=\"320\" \/\u003E\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E“Election Security is our number one priority,” the Office claims. But its focus isn’t securing elections by fighting hackers or voter fraud. Instead it’s fighting “the spread of mis- and disinformation”. That’s an Orwellian way of saying that it’s fighting and censoring online speech.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E“We created the CA Office of Election Cybersecurity to keep your vote safe - so you don’t have to worry! The Office is a non-partisan government arm dedicated to ensuring your vote is safe,” Secretary of State's office unconvincingly tweeted.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EWhat sort of speech is a government office run by Democrats trying to censor? One example of political speech successfully censored by the Office of Election Cybersecurity is a tweet that “alleged thousands of 2020 ballots were tossed out\".\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThere's nothing that reassures voters that their elections are safe like a government office spying on anyone who says that they're not, and taking immediate steps to silence them.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe Office of Election Cybersecurity isn’t securing the technology of elections, instead it’s monitoring online speech and flagging views that the government office disagrees with to be taken down by its political allies in California’s Big Tech monopolies that dominate social media.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EJenna Dresner, the senior public information officer for the Office of Election Cybersecurity, boasted that the government office\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/www.thereporter.com\/2020\/12\/30\/california-worked-with-social-companies-to-remove-election-misinformation\/+\u0026amp;cd=9\u0026amp;hl=en\u0026amp;ct=clnk\u0026amp;gl=us\"\u003E maintains an internal\u003C\/a\u003E database of online speech coded by threat level, and that its censorship calls had resulted in removals 77% of the time.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EDesner is a member of the Los Angeles County Young Democrats, who had formerly worked for Rep. Karen Bass, Attorney General Xavier Becerra, and other Democrat figures. The Office of Election Cybersecurity operates under Secretary of State Alex Padilla, who was chosen by Governor Newsom to replace Senator Kamala Harris. And the bill creating California’s own office of internet censorship was sponsored by two Democrats.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe internet censorship office was promoted in Padilla’s Vote Safe California campaign \u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/www.ocregister.com\/2020\/12\/06\/the-rise-of-questionably-nonpartisan-spending\/\"\u003Erun by a consulting firm\u003C\/a\u003E featuring the “mastermind” of Biden’s campaign, which developed Biden's vote-by-mail programs in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe Office of Election Cybersecurity isn’t non-partisan and it isn’t keeping anyone’s votes safe. It’s in a position to use government power to censor questions about election fraud by its party, while working with a consulting firm involved in one of the most contentious elements of the election, whose results the office’s boss expects will put him in the United States Senate.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ECorruption is one thing. Government censorship of complaints about corruption is another.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E70 years after George Orwell wrote 1984, California Democrats had created their own Ministry of Information inside the government in a blatant violation of the First Amendment. The Democrat operatives running the government censorship office claim that they aren’t engaging in censorship because they’re not the ones directly censoring online speech. Yet.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E“We don’t take down posts, that is not our role to play,” Dresner insisted. “We alert potential sources of misinformation to the social media companies.\"\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThat’s the difference between the government sending in jackbooted thugs to smash up a printing press and putting in a call to the editor warning him not to print a particular article.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EFreedom of Speech doesn’t just refer to the former, but also to the chilling effect of the latter.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\"The Bill of Rights was designed to keep agents of government and official eavesdroppers away from assemblies of people. The aim was to allow men to be free and independent and to assert their rights against government,\" Justice Douglas once wrote. \"When an intelligence officer looks over every nonconformist's shoulder in the library... the America once extolled as the voice of liberty heard around the world no longer is cast in the image which Jefferson and Madison designed, but more in the Russian image.\"\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThat’s exactly what California Democrats have in mind by creating databases of political enemies, ranking them by “threat level”, and pressuring their allied monopolies to silence them.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EDemocrats had previously claimed that they were not engaging in censorship because they were pressuring Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and others to remove general categories of speech in hearings and statements. That was enough of a chilling effect and an assault on the First Amendment. But in California, an actual government office is monitoring speech, treating it as a threat, and directing social media companies to remove specific speech by individuals.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThese days the former liberals who once upheld the “chilling effect” in Gibson v. Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, and who denounced McCarthyism, are assembling lists, and censoring their political opponents to fight the dreaded scourge of “misinformation”.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\"It is a fine line between opinion and misinformation,\" Dresner admitted. It’s a fine line because misinformation is a political category invented by the Left to justify its censorship campaign. One of the two employees of California’s internet censorship office can’t actually explain the difference between an opinion and misinformation. That means her office is censoring opinions.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E“We aren’t worried about what people are saying in the privacy of their own homes, we are worried about what they are putting out there for the world to see,” Dresner insists.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EFor now. How long until the same Democrat operatives who claimed that public speech poses a threat to “election security” start making the same claims about private speech? As public speech is censored and goes underground, the push will be on to monitor private speech.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EIf Aunt Mary saying on Facebook that thousands of ballots were thrown out is a threat to “election integrity”, won’t it still be a threat when she whispers it to Grandma Sue?\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EA government office telling the citizenry that it only monitors what they say in public, not what they say \u003Cdiv class=\"separator\" style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-sS96IGAjSjU\/X_s20f6Ka8I\/AAAAAAAASsw\/vNYghsoNuIsY8DqOoqCRv9fUhcy71vT-wCNcBGAsYHQ\/s404\/image_2021-01-10_091809.png\" imageanchor=\"1\" style=\"clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"\u003E\u003Cimg border=\"0\" data-original-height=\"395\" data-original-width=\"404\" src=\"https:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-sS96IGAjSjU\/X_s20f6Ka8I\/AAAAAAAASsw\/vNYghsoNuIsY8DqOoqCRv9fUhcy71vT-wCNcBGAsYHQ\/s320\/image_2021-01-10_091809.png\" width=\"320\" \/\u003E\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/div\u003Ein private, is not reassuring. The First Amendment was meant to protect public speech, not merely private speech. American political freedom was built on people putting their speech “out there for the world to see”. Democrats used to embrace that. Now they view it as a threat.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ECalifornia's Office of Election Cybersecurity is the latest attempt by Democrats to use a fake crisis of disinformation that they invented as a pretext for political censorship. And the use of a government office to monitor, record, and track speech for censorship makes it impossible to classify internet censorship as anything but an unconstitutional assault on the Bill of Rights.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EWe’re no longer just dealing with legislators pressuring Facebook indirectly. A government office is now specifically tracking political speech and boasting of a 77% censorship rate.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EDemocrat administrations refuse to implement basic election security protocols such as voter ID, claiming it’s too onerous, and deny that election fraud is a problem, but insist that political speech is an urgent threat and must be met with relentless censorship and surveillance.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ETo paraphrase Yakov Smirnoff, \"In America, people secure elections. In California, elections secure people.\"\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThat is how totalitarian regimes behave and it’s a threat to elections and to the Bill of Rights.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ECalifornia's Office of Election Cybersecurity is one of the best possible test cases for fighting political censorship. It’s not an issue of private companies controlling their own platforms, but of a government office monitoring speech and classifying the views it wants to see eliminated.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe First Amendment threat of internet censorship is no longer something that might happen.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EIt’s here. Now. Republicans just have to decide if it’s a battle they’re willing to fight. But if they don’t act soon, their own speech might find its way into a government political threat database.\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Ci\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/i\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Ci\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/i\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Ci\u003EDaniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.\u003C\/i\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E"},"link":[{"rel":"replies","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/feeds\/6153771644928029183\/comments\/default","title":"Post Comments"},{"rel":"replies","type":"text/html","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/2021\/01\/californias-internet-censorship-office.html#comment-form","title":"13 Comments"},{"rel":"edit","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/11368628\/posts\/default\/6153771644928029183"},{"rel":"self","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/11368628\/posts\/default\/6153771644928029183"},{"rel":"alternate","type":"text/html","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/2021\/01\/californias-internet-censorship-office.html","title":"California’s Internet Censorship Office is Watching What You Say"}],"author":[{"name":{"$t":"Daniel Greenfield"},"uri":{"$t":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/profile\/13575285186581875356"},"email":{"$t":"noreply@blogger.com"},"gd$image":{"rel":"http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail","width":"20","height":"32","src":"https:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/-ywx0Wkms-cU\/Vm75eobzYVI\/AAAAAAAAPg0\/kAlR7rDxOIc\/s113\/picture%2Bnewspapery%2Bsmall.jpg"}}],"media$thumbnail":{"xmlns$media":"http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/","url":"https:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-UjE6pdMVZRU\/X_s2vxoHVjI\/AAAAAAAASss\/7XpJnMkgkks-UxKW-1A380f3eLJBB-U9gCNcBGAsYHQ\/s72-c\/caoffice.png","height":"72","width":"72"},"thr$total":{"$t":"13"}},{"id":{"$t":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11368628.post-2394489119302670185"},"published":{"$t":"2020-06-18T11:14:00.000-04:00"},"updated":{"$t":"2020-06-18T11:14:21.868-04:00"},"category":[{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"big government"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"culture war"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"gender"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"judicial activism"},{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Supreme Court"}],"title":{"type":"text","$t":"Xer The People"},"content":{"type":"html","$t":"When peaceful protests injure hundreds and destroy entire neighborhoods, and the coronavirus infects protesters depending on the cause they’re protesting for, words don’t mean very much. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAnd reality itself is under siege in the minds of the men and women who run the country. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EA Southern Democrat segregationist inserted “sex” into the Civil Rights Act as a poison pill. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ERep. Howard Smith had introduced what eventually became Title VII, with a letter which asked, that since there were more women than men,  \"why the Creator would set up such an imbalance of spinsters, shutting off the 'right' of every female to have a husband of her own, is, of course, known only to nature... but I am sure you will agree that this is a grave injustice to womankind and something the Congress and President Johnson should take immediate steps to correct... especially in this election year.\" \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ETo add to the already hilarious joke, six Supreme Court justices just decided that what the Southern racist really meant by “sex” was gay and transgender because in Washington D.C. no joke is too funny that it can’t be taken seriously as a basis for judicial activism and lawsuits. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EIt’s still a joke, but we’re not allowed to laugh anymore. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Ctable align=\"center\" cellpadding=\"0\" cellspacing=\"0\" class=\"tr-caption-container\" style=\"margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;\"\u003E\u003Ctbody\u003E\u003Ctr\u003E\u003Ctd style=\"text-align: center;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-RbhFEI9gbIw\/XuuEXaxIbJI\/AAAAAAAASOA\/eeEcXfYqU_s7ZjQAQskSFaoytO4na5yPQCNcBGAsYHQ\/s1600\/xer.jpg\" imageanchor=\"1\" style=\"margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;\"\u003E\u003Cimg border=\"0\" data-original-height=\"901\" data-original-width=\"1600\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-RbhFEI9gbIw\/XuuEXaxIbJI\/AAAAAAAASOA\/eeEcXfYqU_s7ZjQAQskSFaoytO4na5yPQCNcBGAsYHQ\/s640\/xer.jpg\" width=\"640\" \/\u003E\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/td\u003E\u003C\/tr\u003E\u003Ctr\u003E\u003Ctd class=\"tr-caption\" style=\"text-align: center;\"\u003E(\u003Ci\u003EImage by \u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com\/\" target=\"_blank\"\u003EBosch Fawstin\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/i\u003E)\u003C\/td\u003E\u003C\/tr\u003E\u003C\/tbody\u003E\u003C\/table\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\"Few in 1964 would have expected Title VII to apply to discrimination against homosexual and transgender persons. But legislative history has no bearing here,\" Gorsuch writes.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EIf the actual purpose and meaning of the law doesn’t matter, then what does? \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EWhat Gorsuch, Roberts and his leftist colleagues believe matters. Nothing else. Rights are as imaginary as gender and legislative history gets in the way of legislating from the bench. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe Gorsuch decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia finding that “sex” in Title VII covers any group having anything to do with sex in a trendy way has been described as “textual”. It’s only textual if you think the text of legislation should be read through a contemporary definition rather than the definition of the time. When President Taft’s wife was discussing their “gay season”, it didn’t mean gay any more than “sex” does. Except maybe according to Gorsuch. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EBut words can mean anything and nobody cares about facts anyway. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EGerald Bostock, who is at the center of this Supreme Court precedent, claims that he was fired for being gay while Clayton County claimed that the child welfare services coordinator had spent money meant for Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) at Cowtippers and F.R.O.G.S.: a cantina in Atlanta. Cowtippers does not appear in Gorsuch’s decision though it seems more germane to the question than the Los Angeles Department of Power and Water, which does. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe Gorsuch judicial activist revision of Smith’s legislation is bad news for those organizations protected by that piece of paper known as the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\"Compelling a religious organization to employ individuals whose conduct flouts the tenets of the organization’s faith forces the group to communicate an objectionable message,\" Justice Alito notes, paraphrasing these groups. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EBut these days there’s a new faith in town and people are being fired left and right for flouting it. If you run afoul of social justice mobs, your job will be gone because the company that employs you will blame you for “communicating an objectionable message”. Like the worth of all lives. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThere’s a new heresy in town and the social justice inquisition is always waiting. The essential premise of that faith is that everyone must be made to kneel to it or lose their heads. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E“These questions are going to create a tsunami of new litigation and create a huge amount of uncertainty going forward,\" Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, cautioned. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\"Can a Catholic school deny employment to a teacher whose sexual lifestyle blatantly flouts millennia of Catholic moral teaching? Can an Orthodox Jewish day school refuse to hire a male teacher who self-identifies as a woman, contravening traditional teaching rooted in Genesis?\" Josh Hammer, Of Counsel at the First Liberty Institute, asked. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe answer is obvious and the lawsuits are inevitable. And thus Smith’s old joke translates into the effective criminalization of traditional religious morality at the institutional level. That’s the problem with writing jokes into legislation, they end up packing a hell of a punchline. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe Gorsuch decision has put the Bible on the same level as the code of the Klu Klax Klan and that great legislator’s response to the First Amendment question is that it will be settled in future cases. There’s little doubt that it will, and on the terms of Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EOur constitutional legacy, like our religious foundations, is based on the belief that words matter. Judicial activism is based on the opposite belief that words can and do mean anything. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\"Legislators actually won’t know what they are voting to pass—because words might change cultural meaning dramatically between the time of passage and some future court case,\" Russell Moore, of the Southern Baptist Ethics \u0026amp; Religious Liberty Commission, warns. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EWhen words mean nothing, rights mean nothing. Rights derive not from foundational documents grounded in eternal truths, but from social trends and the whims of political appointees. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EBill Clinton had famously debated the meaning of “is” and of sex. Gorsuch and his five accomplices claim that they’ve settled the question of “sex”. Now comes the battle over defining “religion” and the “free exercise” of it. Are teachers in religious schools exempted? What about bookkeepers? Civil rights has long since become a zero sum game with winners and losers. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe winners advance to the next stage of suing people and the losers retreat to defending them. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EReligious organizations will be forced to defend the religious role of teachers. And, once that battle is lost, the religious role of rabbis and ministers. Then they’ll be told to ‘bake the cake’. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe larger question, the one that Gorsuch so casually loses sight of in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, is where do rights come from. The Declaration of Independence had a compelling answer to that question that enabled Americans to defy the will of a king. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E“All men are created equal,” wrote a long-dead Virginian whose statues are being toppled, “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Equality was not in contradiction with religion, but derived from it. Our common origin as children of G-d made us equal. The whim of a court or any human ruler could not make or unmake our equality. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EContemporary judicial activism has pitted religion against equality and we are less equal for it. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EJudicial activism began by taking away the equality of Natural Law and replacing it with the inequality of judicial whim which inevitably nullifies whatever good it sets out to create. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EBostock v. Clayton County, Georgia reinvents the meaning of sex, based on the deeply serious work of a Dixiecrat trying to make a joke of the Civil Rights Act, while treating the First Amendment, that is the work of our Founding Fathers, as an awkward footnote. Title VII requires treating Rep. Howard Smith’s joke more seriously than the work of James Madison, and then dismissing Smith as irrelevant to the question of what sex was meant to mean. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EWhat then is this whole thing based on beyond the prejudices of 6 contemporary justices? \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAs the crank said to William James, “it’s turtles all the way down.” \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E“Some of those who supported adding language to Title VII to ban sex discrimination may have hoped it would derail the entire Civil Rights Act. Yet, contrary to those intentions, the bill became law. Since then, Title VII’s effects have unfolded with far-reaching consequences, some likely beyond what many in Congress or elsewhere expected,” Gorsuch's opinion concedes. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ETake Title VII, which was blown up out of a segregationist’s joke into the ultimate expression of protecting women as a “sex” against discrimination, which now eliminates womanhood. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAs Justice Alito notes, “The effect of the Court’s reasoning may be to force young women to compete against students who have a very significant biological advantage, including students who have the size and strength of a male.” \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThat’s far-reaching alright compared to Smith giggling about an entitlement to husbands. Some half a century later we live in a strange new world in which the dominant elite consensus is that women don’t exist except as a set of outfits, injectable hormones and a state of mind. The most popular children’s author in the world is under attack for asserting that women really do exist. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EOur elites used to mock Galileo's interrogators only to deny the existence of something far more real and obvious than the motions of planetary bodies. And the Supreme Court is on board. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EBostock v. Clayton County, Georgia continues the process of ushering in a world in which rights are as fluid as the definitions of words and the shifting nature of ideas in a society going mad. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ESmith’s joke continues to resound long after his death by not merely wiping out the Civil Rights Act, but the entire Bill of Rights. That old segregationist’s joke is now set to destroy, as Alito pointed out, Freedom of Religion, Freedom of Speech and women’s rights.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe joke hath given. Now it taketh everything away. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ECivil rights have come so far that women and religion both have to defend their right to exist.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cdiv style=\"font-family: \u0026quot;times new roman\u0026quot;;\"\u003E\u003Ci\u003E\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/sultanknish.blogspot.com\/\" target=\"_blank\"\u003EDaniel Greenfield\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"https:\/\/www.frontpagemag.com\/\" target=\"_blank\"\u003EFront Page Magazine\u003C\/a\u003E.\u003C\/i\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cdiv style=\"font-family: \u0026quot;times new roman\u0026quot;;\"\u003E\u003Ci\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/i\u003E\u003Ci\u003EClick\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/sultanknish.blogspot.com\/2005\/03\/blogging-hara.html\" target=\"_blank\"\u003Ehere to subscribe\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;to my articles. And\u0026nbsp;\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/paypal.me\/DgreenfieldWriting\" target=\"_blank\"\u003Eclick here to support my work with a donation\u003C\/a\u003E.\u003C\/i\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cdiv style=\"font-family: \u0026quot;times new roman\u0026quot;;\"\u003E\u003Ci\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/i\u003E\u003Ci\u003EThank you for reading.\u003C\/i\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E"},"link":[{"rel":"replies","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/feeds\/2394489119302670185\/comments\/default","title":"Post Comments"},{"rel":"replies","type":"text/html","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/2020\/06\/xer-people.html#comment-form","title":"4 Comments"},{"rel":"edit","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/11368628\/posts\/default\/2394489119302670185"},{"rel":"self","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/11368628\/posts\/default\/2394489119302670185"},{"rel":"alternate","type":"text/html","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/2020\/06\/xer-people.html","title":"Xer The People"}],"author":[{"name":{"$t":"Daniel Greenfield"},"uri":{"$t":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/profile\/13575285186581875356"},"email":{"$t":"noreply@blogger.com"},"gd$image":{"rel":"http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail","width":"20","height":"32","src":"https:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/-ywx0Wkms-cU\/Vm75eobzYVI\/AAAAAAAAPg0\/kAlR7rDxOIc\/s113\/picture%2Bnewspapery%2Bsmall.jpg"}}],"media$thumbnail":{"xmlns$media":"http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/","url":"https:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-RbhFEI9gbIw\/XuuEXaxIbJI\/AAAAAAAASOA\/eeEcXfYqU_s7ZjQAQskSFaoytO4na5yPQCNcBGAsYHQ\/s72-c\/xer.jpg","height":"72","width":"72"},"thr$total":{"$t":"4"}}]}});