Former CBS News president Richard Salant (1961 - 64 and 1966 - 79) explained the major media's role: "Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have." ...and to this very day most Americans haven't noticed they're being brained washed! ~ N. Hooben
Wednesday, July 29, 2026
Monday, July 27, 2026
Gavin Newsom, the lily white, urbane, coiffed scion of San Francisco’s posh royalty.
How the Golden State Embraced Corporate Socialism
By Edward Ring ~ January 24, 2020Gavin Newsom, the lily
white, urbane, coiffed scion of San Francisco’s posh royalty, is California’s
highest-ranking Democrat. He presides over a party that has taken progressive
ideals beyond absurdity to the brink of tyranny, a socialist party that openly
disparages whiteness and wealth. One would think that the party of Gavin Newsom
is bent on destroying everything Gavin Newsom represents. So what’s going on?
To understand the rise of
Newsom, and every other hyper-privileged Democrat who even today remain in firm
control of the progressive movement, it is necessary to define a 21st-century
version of corporate socialism. This goes well beyond the use of the term
merely to describe government subsidies for, say, the oil and gas industry, or,
for that matter, the wind and solar industry.
Corporate socialism in
California today is a marriage of convenience between monopolistic corporations
and the oligarchy they’ve spawned on the one hand, and a seething coalition of
progressive socialists with an agenda best described as a self-contradictory
mixture of nihilism and idealism on the other. What California’s corporate
socialists have done is to concoct a profitable interpretation of this agenda,
implementing those elements that will aggrandize them while paying lip service
to the rest. There are ample examples of this practice.
To ensure “diversity,” an
amazingly lucrative profession has emerged, embodied in “Diversity, Equity and
Inclusion” departments inside every institution of higher education, as well as
embedded in the human resources departments of every major corporation.
To protect wilderness,
sound principles of land management such as controlled burns, maintenance
of firebreaks and access roads, selective logging and salvage logging have been
either banned altogether or mired in prohibitive levels of bureaucratic delays,
leading to catastrophic fires that were
blamed on the “climate.”
To protect the “climate,”
land development outside of existing cities has been all but frozen,
restricting the supply of new homes and driving prices to unaffordable levels. For
similar reasons relating to “climate,” clean conventional energy from natural
gas and nuclear power are being systematically reduced in favor of heavily subsidized “renewable” energy providers.
To ensure housing
“affordability,” the Homeless Industrial Complex has
arisen, with budgets so padded that the average cost to build “permanent
supportive housing” in California now exceeds $500,000 per unit.
To respect the rights of
the homeless, as well as “alternative lifestyles,” hundreds of thousands of
vagrants, most of them either insane, substance abusers, predators, or all
three, have been permitted to camp on the sidewalks and in the parks of every
major California city. To assist them, tens of billions are being spent on
public employees and nonprofit personnel, and the problems just get worse.
And finally, central to
all of this, public sector unions have
fervently supported every expansion of government regulation and its requirement
for new agencies and staff. They have “negotiated” pay and benefit packages for
their membership that have made California’s government itself unaffordable,
with personnel costs crowding out investment in infrastructure and public
services.
All of these policies
derive from socialist ideals, but benefit corporate interests. This is
corporate socialism in the 21st century, California is its epicenter, and it is
an unmitigated disaster.
California Before and
After the Rise of Public Sector Unions
It is ironic that
California in the 1950s and 1960s offered a good example of a state government
that respected property rights and nurtured competitive businesses, yet engaged
in massive public investment in those areas where it was not possible to make
competition effective. During this golden age, barely twenty years in duration,
in partnership with the Federal government, the State of California built the
most comprehensive network of water conveyances in the world. At the same time,
they built the finest system of public colleges and universities in the world,
and they built freeways and expressways that enabled urbanization and an
affordable market in housing.
In those days, a
middle-class family could expect to own their home, travel on uncongested
roads, and pay college tuition for their children. Today, none of that is
possible. What happened?
In California’s case, the
simplest explanation would be that the state itself became a special interest,
viewing bigger government as central to its agenda. By the end of the 1970s,
nearly all of California’s state and local government agencies had become
unionized, and these unions increasingly became aggressive pushing their
agenda, which was to grow government in order to collect more union dues and
acquire more power and influence. Like any organization, government unions
sought to aggrandize themselves.
The problem, of course,
was that the government does not operate in a competitive environment.
Government unions collect money through dues withheld from government
paychecks. Public-sector unions do not negotiate with a management accountable
to shareholders, but instead with politicians whom they help elect and,
therefore, are accountable to the unions. Moreover, politicians, unlike
corporate executives, typically occupy their offices for shorter periods of
time. And politicians, unlike corporate executives, don’t own shares that might
be devalued after they leave office due to decisions they made while in office.
Not only are politicians
far more accountable to the unions with which they negotiate than they are to
the people they serve, but the consequences of giving in to outrageous demands
from public-sector unions are much less immediate and personal for the
politicians. When a corporate executive gives in to union demands that are
unsustainable, the corporation goes out of business. Union negotiators know
this, and in the private sector, the possibility of business failure tempers
their demands.
But the survival of
government agencies doesn’t depend on efficiently competing in a market economy
where consumers voluntarily choose to purchase their product or service. When
government agencies incur expenses that exceed revenues, they simply raise
revenues by increasing taxes. Consumers have no choice but to pay the higher
taxes or go to jail.
If electing their own
bosses and compelling taxpayers to guarantee revenue sufficient to fulfill
their demands weren’t enough, public-sector unions have another advantage
denied private-sector unions. They operate the machinery of government. Their
members run California’s public schools, its transportation agencies, its
public utilities, its administrative bureaucracies including code enforcement
and construction permitting, its public safety agencies; everything.
This confers countless
unique advantages. Depending on the intensity of the issue, the percentage of
unionized government employees willing to use their positions as influencers,
educators, gatekeepers, and enforcers may vary. But within the permanent
bureaucracy of government, it doesn’t take a very large minority of committed
operatives to wield decisive power.
Public-sector unions
epitomize the establishment. Politicians come and go. But like the so-called
deep state, public-sector unions are permanent, embedded in the bureaucracy,
running the show. And if the show’s script calls for running in place, or even
running backward, this is what will happen so long as corporations and
bureaucracies can amass more profit and more power—no problem.
How Government Unions
Acquired Allies and Formed the One-Party State
During the 1980s and
steadily thereafter, these unions acquired powerful allies. The rising
environmentalist movement was particularly useful. It is indisputable that
California needed to aggressively address the problem of air pollution in its
coastal cities, boxed in as they are by mountains and beset with unhealthy
levels of smog. But by the 1990s, air pollution had been reduced to a fraction
of what it had been in the 1960s despite the state’s population doubling. Even
so, environmentalism had become full-spectrum, affecting every aspect of
economic life in California.
For a while, California’s
left-wing, the government unions, and environmentalists, fought against
corporate interests in a political battle where neither side completely
dominated. But after the turn of the century that began to change.
The last big chance to
stop California from becoming a one-party state dominated by Democratic
Socialists may have been the special election of 2005. It’s easy now to forget
the excitement incoming Governor Schwarzenegger once generated among the GOP
faithful in California. Here was a candidate, as far removed from the
establishment as Trump was a decade later, sitting in the guest’s chair,
telling Jay Leno and half of America that “it’s the unions that are breaking
California, and I’m going to terminate them.”
Schwarzenegger tried to
work with legislators to enact reforms during his first year as governor, and
he got nowhere. So in 2005 he took his case to the people, filing four
initiatives—a balanced budget, redistricting reform, lengthened evaluation
period for teacher tenure, and paycheck protection. His consultants, what a
surprise, talked him out of a fifth—pension reform. And what happened?
There Schwarzenegger was,
on television again, saying it was up to the people to save California. But he
said it by himself. Alone. Where was California’s GOP during that entire
election season? Instead of tapping into the populist momentum that had put Schwarzenegger
into office, and giving it voice, most of them were running away from
Schwarzenegger as fast as they could.
Nobody who condemns
Schwarzenegger for later pivoting left should forget that back in 2005, while
the unions spent well over $100 million to defeat his initiatives, the GOP and
its donors did not step up to match them in money or, more importantly, in
their tone. They went to their safe spaces, protected their safe seats, and
continued as the minority party, the dwindling opposition. Bleating haplessly.
Losing.
By 2010, with pro-business
Republicans becoming a permanent minority in the state legislature, with every
one of California’s state officeholders from the governor to the superintendent
of public instruction in the hands of Democrats, and with Democrats in firm
control of nearly every major city, it is no surprise that the business
community moved further and further towards also supporting Democratic
candidates. Searching for the candidates least likely to lean far left, up and
down the state, they gave up on conservatives.
Also happening during the
2010s was the rise of the super billionaires of Silicon Valley. Always a center
of global wealth and a liberal stronghold, the latest tech wave—social media
monopolies—brought onto the scene politically active billionaires who were even
wealthier and even more liberal than their predecessors. With these turns,
California went from being a state dominated by socialists with at least a
viable conservative opposition to being a one-party state dominated not merely
by socialists, but by corporate socialists.
Today Democrats don’t
merely hold a supermajority in the state legislature, they now have what’s been
dubbed a mega-majority. That is, they control not two-thirds of all seats in
both houses, but three-quarters of all seats in both houses. With the
legislature, the governor, the judiciary, and the most powerful special
interests operating in consensus—government unions, the environmentalist lobby,
corporations, and individual billionaires—there are no checks on their power.
The Face of Corporate
Socialism
Every era has its unique
brand of collectivism, and California in the 21st century will not offer exact
analogs to socialist regimes a century ago in Europe, nor should it. California
is not a brutal totalitarian regime, nor has California’s economy come anywhere
close to that most extreme version of socialism, communism where the state owns
all property.
Instead, California is run
by an oligarchy, working in partnership with a legislature that is controlled
by a handful of powerful government employee unions. These oligarchs and their
counterparts, the union leaders, form a de facto politburo.
The most accurate way to
describe the political economy of California would be corporate socialism. A
more vivid, and equally accurate description would be feudalism.
If one were to examine the
concept of California as a feudal state, all the pieces would be identifiable.
The aristocracy is the wealthy billionaires and the titans of the high tech
industry. The knights and the nobles are the public employees. The clerisy
consists of the academics and the nonprofit activists, which include
environmentalists, homeless and low-income housing advocates, and social
justice warriors. Everyone else would be serfs.
California’s serfs would
either be members of the state’s dwindling middle-class and small-business
owners, paying crippling tithes to the feudal regime, or they would be low
income workers and the unemployed, who would rely on alms from the nobles for their
sustenance.
Other metaphors work as
well. To make an analogy to the old Soviet Union, the aristocracy becomes the
politburo, the nobles become the nomenklatura, the clerisy becomes the
commissars, and the serfs become everyone else. The feudal metaphor is perhaps
more applicable for California today, because unlike in the Soviet Union,
private property is alive and well, so long as you are one of the fabulously
wealthy few, and willing to partner with the state legislature.
The darkest but
nonetheless somewhat apt metaphor for California is Nazism, for two fairly
encompassing reasons. First, because the economic models are almost identical;
private oligarchs and subsidized monopolistic corporations operating in
partnership with a micromanaging government. Second, because where the German
Nazis condemned Jewish wealth in particular, and capitalist profiteering wealth
in general, California’s Democrats focus their scapegoating on “fossil fuel”
wealth, or wealth amassed via unwarranted “privilege,” while enacting laws
designed to penalize all wealth.
When individualism gives
way to collectivism, tyranny eventually and inevitably follows. Californians
who are sanguine about the future of their quasi-socialist, one-party state,
may cite the extraordinary cultural revolution taking place, where individual
freedom to express whatever gender they wish is celebrated, as is the freedom
to experiment with any drug. Surely the German Nazis had views antithetical to
this sort of individual freedom! This is true, but it misses the point.
Where the German Nazis had
a collectivist tyranny that suppressed what they considered to be social or
sexual deviancy, California’s Democrats have a collectivist tyranny designed to
suppress any individual who advocates for traditional conservative social or
sexual behaviors. Equally pervasive and equally if not more sinister, they also
have a collectivist tyranny that seeks to suppress and ostracize anyone who
questions “climate change,” and they are using the supposed climate emergency
to enact increasingly restrictive intrusions on property rights and business
operations. Collectivism is creeping into every aspect of life in California.
It might not wear the same exterior mask as Nazism, but it has the same
essence.
California’s Democrats
differ from the German Nazis, of course, insofar as they haven’t opened up
death camps, and probably never will. But they also differ in their level of
hypocrisy. One might argue that California’s state legislature, and the
Democrats that run it, are even more hypocritical than the German Nazis were.
Despite their ritual demonization of profits and wealth, the private wealth
that has accumulated in California in recent years, with the social media
monopolies piling countless billions onto the piles of wealth already amassed
in previous tech booms, has few if any rivals in the history of civilization.
The Consequences of
Corporate Socialism
As California’s
aristocracy has consolidated its power, an epic transfer of wealth has
occurred. Corporate monopolies, financial intermediaries, wealthy individuals,
public sector treasuries and public employee pension funds have all become
spectacularly endowed. At the same time, at the other extreme, California has
become a magnet for welfare recipients and economic refugees from around the
nation and the world, who survive by collecting state-funded benefits.
Meanwhile, California’s middle class and small businesses, beset by a high cost
of living and crippling regulations, watch their investments and their
enterprises dwindle away.
The consequences of
California’s descent into feudalism are well documented. High Taxes. Over regulation. Record high homelessness with feces and
discarded needles littering the streets. High gas prices. Spikes in crime. Crumbling infrastructure due to green
initiatives. Failing public education. Middle-class flight to other states.
Housing policies that limit new housing construction. Rent control policies
that limit private investment.
But these failures serve a
purpose. They are the products of California’s long-standing one-party regime
controlled by oligarchs and public sector unions, buttressed by the politically
useful fanaticism of social justice warriors and environmentalist extremists.
They have disenfranchised the middle class, at the same time as they have
rendered low income and undocumented communities utterly dependent on
government handouts, and to the extent those groups vote, turned them into
reliable Democratic voters.
Meanwhile, public
employees don’t have to suffer the consequences of what California’s Democratic
politicians are doing. Why should it matter if housing is expensive if you are
collecting a pay and benefits package that amounts to twice what you would make
in a market-based hiring environment? Why should you feel pressure to pay off
your exorbitant mortgage before you retire, if you will be collecting a pension
that is likely to be equal or greater than the pay you received while you were
working?
Giving public employees
job security, compensation, and benefits far in excess of private sector norms
creates a conflict of interests between public employees and the citizens they
serve. It undermines the value of citizenship itself, by making ordinary
private citizens eligible for a package of government benefits that is more
comparable to (if not less than) what undocumented immigrants receive, while
the far better path to job security, a middle-class lifestyle, and retirement
security lies with the privileged public sector.
This inherent conflict of
interests plays out in countless ways that damage trust in government and
undermines faith in American institutions. Why should we control our borders if
membership and dues revenue in the teachers union depends on increasing public
school enrollment by any means necessary? Why, for that matter, should
immigration laws bother to favor newcomers who have job skills and can support
themselves, if that would mean fewer unionized employees in public education
and elsewhere within the public bureaucracies to provide for the special needs
of the illiterate and the destitute?
And how, for the record,
does it help nations with out-of-control birthrates if a few hundred thousand
migrants end up in the public schools of Los Angeles County, when tens of
millions are added to their burgeoning populations every year? But it surely
does benefit the teachers union.
The cold, hard truth
confronting ordinary Californians is that they can expect no help from the
oligarchs. They have secured for themselves obscene profits and investment
returns thanks to a regulatory environment where only the biggest corporations
can afford to comply and, thanks to politically contrived artificial scarcity,
has rewarded preexisting holders of assets and locked out newcomers.
Ordinary Californians may
eventually find growing support, however, from members of public sector unions
who, one at a time, drift away from their leadership’s blind adherence to the
corporate socialist agenda. The plain and obvious fact that this agenda is not
working—not in any phase of public policy, from public education to housing,
homeless, and transportation—will move many of them to support alternative
policies. For the sake of their less fortunate cousins, in-laws, neighbors and
friends they may begin to question current policies, and seek new solutions.
It is possible they will
mount an insurgency within their unions, and turn some of that public-sector
union political power to work for all the people.
Fight for lower barriers
to building new suburbs on open land, instead of letting the oligarchs and
greenies cram everyone into the footprint of existing cities.
Fight for water infrastructure projects—storage, desalination plants, aqueduct
upgrades—that are completed on time and under budget, like they were back in
the 1960s. Fight to build more freeways instead of “light rail” that nobody
wants to ride, and fight to build practical inter-city commuter trains instead
of a grossly overpriced “bullet train.”
Fight to get help for the
mentally ill and substance abusers, instead of only helping a fraction of them
by building a boondoggle archipelago of “affordable”
apartments that cost taxpayers up to $500,000 per unit. Fight to restore sensible wildland management
practices to prevent future infernos. And fight for school vouchers so we can save a
generation of school children, regardless of where they come from and what they
bring to the classroom.
Deep in the tarnished
Golden State, one may still hope.
Friday, July 24, 2026
If the correct conditions are present, then a war can be justified. THE CORRECT CONDITIONS ARE PRESENT war is imminent
Thursday, July 23, 2026
THE BATTLE OF KING'S MOUNTAIN Because ordinary citizens refused to be threatened... This story re-posted here to encourage ordinary citizens to prepare to re-enact the battle of King's Mountain; for in the near future, you will be called to engage the enemy within. The enemy has already occupied Dearborn, Michigan, parts of Texas and many areas throughout the country.
“joyful annunciation of that turn of the tide of success which terminated the Revolutionary War, with the seal of independence.”, as noted by [Teach Tennessee History]
| Formal Report of The Battle of King's Mountain Oct 1780 |
A Statement of the proceedings of the Western Army, from the 25th of September, 1780, to the reduction of Major Ferguson, and the army under his command.Only three days after their Letter to General Gates requesting a Continental Commander to oversee their regiments, the Overmountain Boys met on top of King's Mountain, and in an engagement that lasted only one hour and five minutes, totally routed Col. Patrick Ferguson's "superior force."
On October 7, 1780, the one-thousand plus all-volunteer frontier troops met up with the English Colonel's larger, and allegedly better-trained force with the result that Ferguson was slain, and his army decimated.
A formal report of the battle, signed by Cols. William Campbell, Isaac Shelby and Benjamin Cleveland, was given to General Gates when they passed through Hillsboro a few days after the battle:
On receiving intelligence that Major Ferguson had advanced as high up as Gilbert Town, in Rutherford county, and threatened to cross the mountains to the Western waters, Col. William Campbell, with four hundred men from Washington county, of Virginia; Col. Isaac Shelby with two hundred and forty men from Sullivan county, North-Carolina, and Lieutenant-Col. John Sevier, with two hundred and forty men from Washington county, North-Carolina, assembled at Watauga on the 25th of September, where they were joined by Col. Charles McDowell, with one hundred and sixty men from the counties of Burke and Rutherford, who had fled before the enemy to the Western waters.
We began our march on the 26th, and on the 30th, we were joined by Col. Cleveland, on the Catawba River, with three hundred and fifty men from the counties of Wilkes and Surry. No one officer having properly a right to the command-in-chief, on the 1st of October, we despatched an express to Major General Gates, informing him of our situation, and requested him to send a general officer to take command of the whole. In the meantime, Col. Campbell was chosen to act as commandant till such general officer should arrive.
We reached the Cow Pens, on the Broad River, in South Carolina, where we were joined by Col. James Williams, on the evening of the 6th October, who informed us that the enemy lay encamped somewhere near the Cherokee Ford of Broad River, about thirty miles distant form us. By a council of the principal officers, it was then thought advisable to pursue the enemy that night with nine hundred of the best horsemen, and leave the weak horses and footmen to follow as fast as possible. We began our march with nine hundred of the best men about eight o'clock the same evening, marched all night, and came up with the enemy about three o'clock P.M. of the 7th, who lay encamped on the top of King's Mountain, twelve miles north of the Cherokee Ford, in the conficence they could not be forced from so advantageous a post. Previous to the attack, in our march the following disposition was made:
Col. Shelby's regiment formed a column in the centre on the left; Col. Campbell's another on the right; part of Col. Cleveland's regiment, headed by Major Winston and Col. Sevier's, formed a large column on the right wing; the other part of Col. Cleveland's regiment composed the left wing. In this order we advanced, and got within a quarter of a mile of the enemy before we were discovered. Col. Shelby's and col. Campbell's regiments began the attack, and kept up a fire on the enemy while the right and left wings were advancing forward to surround them. The engagement lasted an hour and five minutes, the greatest part of which time a heavy and incessant fire was kept up on both sides. Our men in some parts where the regulars fought, were obliged to give way a small distance two or three times, but rallied and returned with additional ardour to the attack, and kept up a fire on the enemy while the right and left wings were advancing forward to surround them. The engagement lasted an hour and five minutes, the greatest part of which time a heavy and incessant fire was kept up on both sides. Our men in some parts where the regulars fought, were obliged to give way a small distance two or three times, but rallied and returned with additional ardour to the attack. The troops upon the right having gained the summit of the eminence, obliged the enemy to retreat along the top of the ridge where Col. Cleveland commanded, and were there stopped by his brave men. A flag was immediately hoisted by Captain Dupoister,(1) the commanding officer, (Major Ferguson having been killed a little before,) for a surrender. Our fire immediately ceased,(2) and the enemy laid down their arms--the greater part of them loaded--and surrendered themselves to us prisoners at discretion. It appears from their own provision returns for that day, found in their camp, that their whole force consisted of eleven hundred and twenty-five men, out of which they sustained the following loss:--Of the regulars, one Major, one captain, two lieutenants and fifteen privates killed, thirty-five privates wounded. Left on the ground, not able to march, two captains, four lieutenants, three ensigns, one surgeon, five sergeants; three corporals, one drummer and fifty-nine privates taken prisoners.
Loss of the tories, two colonels, three captains, and two hundred and one privates killed; one Major and one hundred and twenty-seven privates wounded and left on the ground not able to march; one colonel, twelve captains, eleven lieutenants, two ensigns, one quarter-master, one adjutant, two commisissaries, eighteen sergeants and six hundred privates taken prisoners. Total loss of the enemy, eleven hundred and five men at King's Mountain. 3
Given under our hands at camp, WILLIAM CAMPBELL, ISAAC SHELBY, BENJAMIN CLEVELAND The loss on our side-- Killed—1 colonel, Wounded—1 Major, 1 Major, 3 captains, 1 captain, 3 lieutenants, 2 lieutenants 55 privates 4 ensigns, 19 privates 62 total wounded.* 28 total killed. Published by order of Congress 4 CHARLES THOMSON, Secretary
(Virginia Gazette, 18 Nov 1780, King's Mountain and Its Heroes: History of the Battle of King's Mountain, October 7th, 1780, and the Events Which Led to It by Lyman C. Draper, Cincinnati, 1881, pp. 522-24. Also published in The Annals of Tennessee to the End of the Eighteenth Century, J.G.M Ramsey, Walker and Jones, Charleston, SC, 1853, reprinted by the East Tennessee Historical Society, Knoxville, Tennessee, 1967, pp. 243-5, which shows 53 privates wounded for total of 60 wounded)1 Captain Abraham De Peyster
2 That the cease fire was not immediate upon the white flag being raised is documented by a number of other first-hand accounts, including British Capt. Andrew Chesney, and other Men of King's Mountain
3 No mention is made in this report of the "impromptu court marshall" held a few days after the battle. Those executed may have been included in the above report of numbers killed (not researched).
4 The Journal of the Continental Congress, Monday, November 13, 1780, includes the order that the above report be published, referencing a letter from Virginia Governor Thomas Jefferson dated 7 Nov 1780 that was accompanied by a letter from General Gates dated 1 Nov 1780, with the above report enclosed. The actual date of the report is not known, other than that it was written between Oct 7th and Nov 1st. Draper postulates that it was written after Lacy and Sevier retired at Quaker Meadows [Oct 11th] or their signatures would have also been appended, and before October 26th when Campbell turned over the command at Bathabara to Cleveland.
Tuesday, July 21, 2026
WEEDS ARE GROWING IN OUR WHEAT FIELDS... Shall we burn the weeds as the Gospel suggests?
GospelMatthew 13:24-43Douay-Rheims Bible text for study
Jack Cashill
Jul 20, 2026
The geniuses who drafted “Workers Deserve More,” the manifesto of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), either don’t know their history or don’t care about it or, most likely, both. In any event, they seem hell bent on recreating the events of 1789 and the years following. Not America’s 1789, but France’s.
On April 30, 1789, President-elect George Washington arrived at Federal Hall in New York City. There he was greeted by both Houses of Congress, and at 2 p.m. he was sworn in as the first president of the United States. In the inaugural address that followed, Washington paid homage to that “Almighty Being who rules over the Universe.” Washington elaborated, “No People can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand, which conducts the Affairs of men more than the People of the United States.”
In that same year, 1789, in Paris, a caucus of increasingly radical deputies broke away from an Estates General that included both the nobility and the clergy and formed their own National Assembly. In the days to come, the deputies added weak-kneed members from the other estates who feared being left behind. From that point on the outspoken “progressives” in France progressed and pulled their feckless followers increasingly leftward.
The parallels to today’s Democratic Party are hard to miss. In 2016 and 2020 the Democratic Party establishment sabotaged the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders fearing he was too far left to be elected. Although still the figurehead of the Democrat Socialist movement, he has all the makings of an American Robespierre, a radical Jacobin leader who gets offed—in Sanders’ case, likely metaphorically—by the revolution he helped launch.
Hang on with both hands, Bernie
The Democrat Socialist movement parallels the French Revolution most conspicuously in its call for an end to the U.S. Senate and two-party democracy. Just as the French Old Order yielded to the uni-cameral National Assembly, so DSA commissars demand an abolition of the electoral college. Scarier still, they want a uni-cameral people’s Congress to appoint both the president and the Supreme Court, both of which would be “subordinate to Congress.” As in France, Congress would be subordinate to the mobs, but the drafters of “Workers Deserve More” have left that part out.
In 1791, the French National Assembly drafted the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.” Although democratic in its concept, one clause would forever distinguish this declaration from America’s founding documents: “The source of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body, no individual can exercise authority that does not expressly proceed from the latter.”
By contrast the Declaration of Independence argues that men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The elevation of the nation over the individual would set the French revolutionaries on a statist, collectivist, godless path that inevitably led to their undoing.
While Jacobin-led mobs were dictating justice in the streets of Paris, here at home the separate states were peacefully deliberating on a Bill of Rights, one crafted by the very first Congress to protect the citizen’s God-given freedoms. In 1791, Congress ratified ten of the proposed twelve amendments.
The first of these remains the most essential: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” The Second—“The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”—guaranteed the First.
In France, the revolutionary government was quickly consumed by the anti-Christian chaos it helped create. America, however, endured and prospered. In recent decades, however, America has developed its own increasingly faithless elite, one that eerily mimics the French Jacobins. Thinking themselves wiser than the God that humbled the nation’s founders, these new Jacobins have set out to “fundamentally transform” America in their own light.
As in the early days of the French Revolution, America’s Jacobin elites stage managed the fervor of the masses. They paid lip service to the progressivism they used as bait to attract the woke among their intersectional ranks—the blacks, the browns, the greens, the gays, the lesbians, trans, the feminists, the Muslims, and any other “marginalized” group willing to make noise in the street. But for club members in the know, the ultimate goal was power, global power. Having transcended the nation state, they allied themselves with Jacobin elites throughout the world.
Historian Victor Davis Hanson crystalized this class’s way of thinking: “We are morally superior to the old America. This is a new America, and that gives us the right to use any means necessary to achieve a morally superior end.” The old America—grounded in faith, family, Judeo-Christian morality, property rights, and the freedoms enshrined in the U.S. Constitution—stood in the way of the Jacobins’ “new America,” the cornerstone of a “new world order.”
America’s Jacobins presumed too much. The emergence of New York Mayor Mamdani and his communist allies has shown our Jacobins that they have already lost control of their own revolution. As in France, the clergy and the elite will soon find themselves expendable as will the gays and the feminists and other weak-willed followers.
America’s “reign of terror” has already begun, but it has confined itself largely to the Democratic Party. Party leaders are not being assassinated, not yet at least, but they are being shouted down routinely. Bernie Sanders still has his head, but if I were he, I would hold on with both hands.
The DSA revolution will overwhelm the Democratic Party but will soon exhaust itself. America’s founding documents have imbued millions of American patriots with a will to resist and the arms to resist with. I doubt we will be forced to the barricades, but if we are, this may be the one case in which God actually does takes sides.
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Captain Al Francis1d
In my opinion, we are rapidly being drawn to the point where our second Civil War is becoming inevitable. Whether this one creates rivers of blood as the first did is strictly in the hands of God. There has been a great resurgence of churchgoing among conservatives, which contrasts with a renouncement of religious belief among progressives. As was the case with the Bolsheviks, our left's new religion is the communist state they desire. We have two adversaries to fight simultaneously: the Islamists and the Democratic Socialists. They are equally dangerous to our Republic and liberties. May God bless us and give us the strength of will to join this fight and save our nation for our children, grandchildren, and generations yet to come.
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Rick Janes1d
Polish journalist RafaÅ‚ Gan-Ganowicz was a patriotic anti-communist who had fought them in battle. Later, when asked what it felt like to kill other human beings, Rafal said "I don’t know, I’ve only ever killed communists."
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