Not long ago, the terms “corporate America” and “corporate culture” were synonymous with staid country-club Republican values. Corporate America has been inching left for years, but in recent weeks this trend has exploded. It was once cool and countercultural to be liberal. Today, the left is the establishment, and conservatives are part of a new counterculture that quietly seethes as the companies we patronize inundate us with woke virtue signaling.
Start with my morning coffee. I love La Colombe but was dismayed when the company joined the Facebook advertiser boycott, which now has nearly 1,000 companies. La Colombe said in an Instagram post that it was “calling for an end to hate for profit on social media.” I went to their website and saw a banner on the home page advertising a limited edition coffee and mug with proceeds “supporting the ACLU!”
I switched to tea for a couple of days, then got curious and looked at the website of Numi, my favorite tea company. I learned that Numi “stands in solidarity” with Black Lives Matter and the Anti Police Terror Project, among others. Now I’m drinking water with breakfast.
It should be ironic that La Colombe is on the one hand boycotting Facebook for failing to censor enough content, and on the other supporting an organization that’s supposed to protect civil liberties. In 2018 the ACLU advised Facebook against censoring offensive speech, but it’s been silent on the issue during the current boycott. Its most recent free-speech press releases condemn the EARN IT Act, which seeks to curb the spread of child-abuse images on social media. The ACLU is concerned the bipartisan bill would be “a disaster” for “the LGBTQ and sex worker communities.”
National Review
www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/democrats-make-mockery-of-barr-hearing/
If it’s a “hearing,” Bill Barr asked with an irked tongue in cheek, “aren’t I the one who’s supposed to be heard?”
His frustration was more than justified. Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler (D., N.Y.) and the other Democrats who control the House demanded for months that Barr come to a “hearing” and “testify.” But of course, it wasn’t anything like an actual hearing, and they didn’t want him to testify — as in actually answer questions. The session was a coveted election-year opportunity for Democrats to berate the attorney general of the United States in five-minute installments, accusing Barr of corruption, perjury, violating his oath, betraying the Constitution — at one point, even of killing thousands of COVID-19 victims (apparently, by being attorney general during a pandemic).
Especially at the beginning of the hearing, Barr easily parried the hostile questions — soliloquies with question-marks at the end. He picked apart their misstatements and disingenuous premises, and answered with aplomb. Democrats thus dropped the threadbare pretense that this was a hearing. In the main, the rest of the afternoon was devoted to raging, mock-anguished perorations about how Trump is a dictator and how Barr is helping him destroy our democracy.
These were punctuated by the occasional petulant demand that Barr answer “yes or no” a question that was either loaded or incoherent. When Barr would begin to answer, there would be foot-stomping, indignant, “I’m reclaiming my time” interruptions, claims that there was no question pending (usually after a question had just been posed), and then more Democrat filibustering about how the American people could clearly see that Barr was afraid to answer their questions . . . that they wouldn’t let him answer.
It was an embarrassing spectacle.
By William S. Lind William S. Lind has a B.A. in History from Dartmouth College and an M.A., also in History, from Princeton University. He serves as director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism of the Free Congress Foundation in Washington, D.C., and as a vestryman at St. James Anglican Church in his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio.
July 19, 2018
Sometime during the last half-century, someone stole our culture. Just 50 years ago, in the 1950s, America was a great place. It was safe. It was decent. Children got good educations in the public schools. Even blue-collar fathers brought home middle-class incomes, so moms could stay home with the kids. Television shows reflected sound, traditional values.
Where did it all go? How did that America become the sleazy, decadent place we live in today – so different that those who grew up prior to the ’60s feel like it’s a foreign country? Did it just “happen”?
It didn’t just “happen.” In fact, a deliberate agenda was followed to steal our culture and leave a new and very different one in its place. The story of how and why is one of the most important parts of our nation’s history – and it is a story almost no one knows. The people behind it wanted it that way.
What happened, in short, is that America’s traditional culture, which had grown up over generations from our Western, Judeo-Christian roots, was swept aside by an ideology. We know that ideology best as “political correctness” or “multi-culturalism.”It really is cultural Marxism, Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms in an effort that goes back not to the 1960s, but to World War I. Incredible as it may seem, just as the old economic Marxism of the Soviet Union has faded away, a new cultural Marxism has become the ruling ideology of America’s elites. The No. 1 goal of that cultural Marxism, since its creation, has been the destruction of Western culture and the Christian religion.
To understand anything, we have to know its history. To understand who stole our culture, we need to take a look at the history of “political correctness.”
Early Marxist theory
VIDEO – CONSERVATIVE CANDACE OWENS ON THE REAL GEORGE FLOYD AND PROBLEMS WITHIN THE BLACK COMMUNITY
The “broken-windows” school of policing says that you can help maintain public order by taking care of even small examples of disorder—such as fixing broken windows. Liberals scorned that policy in the last decade as somehow racist. Well, in recent days we’ve learned that America’s left does have a broken-windows policy: Let rioters break enough windows and loot enough stores and maybe their righteous anger will be satisfied.
That’s certainly how it looked when the June sun rose Tuesday over the broken glass, looted storefronts, burnt-out cars, and vandalized buildings in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Madison and other American cities. Public officials let rioters exploiting the memory of George Floyd run wild in the streets. Even after nearly a week of violence, these and other liberal Democratic cities let lawless radicals harass and plunder almost at will.
In downtown St. Louis, four police officers were shot after midnight. “I believe some coward randomly shot at the police line,” said police chief John Hayden. A 7-Eleven was looted and set afire, but firefighters were deliberately slowed by protesters in responding. “We had people lying down in the street” and trash cans were placed as obstacles to block fire trucks, said fire chief Dennis Jenkerson.
In Philadelphia, city of brotherly vandals, gangs of rioters rolled through several neighborhoods Sunday burning businesses and cars. They returned for more on Monday, shutting down the highway that bisects the city at evening rush hour.
I verified that there was a H3N2 pandemic in 1968 – 1969 and the CDC states that 100,000 Americans died. www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1968-pandemic.html
Nancy
Woodstock Happened During a Pandemic & Nobody Cared
By May 5, 2020
Remember Woodstock?
It was the summer of love: in 1969 a half a million people gathered together to listen to music, take drugs, have sex, roll around in the mud, and share a densely populated area for one long weekend.
And guess what? The whole thing happened during a health pandemic.
In 1968 the H3N2 pandemic came to the US from Hong Kong. It killed more than 100,000 Americans, mostly over the age of 65, which was more combined fatalities than both the Vietnam and Korean Wars.
Schools, movie theaters, bars, tattoo parlors, restaurants, and, of course, concerts venues stayed open. The stock market didn’t crash, Congress didn’t issue a lock down order, the Federal reserve had no involvement, there was no spike in the suicide rate, violent criminals weren’t freed from jail, and nobody arrested surfers or hair stylists.
The only actions governments took was to collect data, watch and wait, encourage testing and vaccines, and so on. The medical community took the primary responsibility for disease mitigation, as one might expect. It was widely assumed that diseases require medical not political responses.
It’s not as if we had governments unwilling to intervene in other matters. We had the Vietnam War, social welfare, public housing, urban renewal, and the rise of Medicare and Medicaid. We had a president swearing to cure all poverty, illiteracy, and disease. Government was as intrusive as it had ever been in history. But for some reason, there was no thought given to shutdowns.
Which raises the question: why was this different? We will be trying to figure this one out for decades.
In nominating Joe Biden, Democrats aren’t choosing a “moderate.” They’re choosing liberalism over revolution. “Joe and I have a very different voting record,” Bernie Sanders said after Super Tuesday. That is demonstrably true. Their records differ in substantial ways. He went on: “Joe and I have a very different vision for the future of this country.” That is not quite right. The idea that Mr. Biden has a “vision for the future” is preposterous. He has a vision for the past, and even that is cloudy.
I don’t criticize him for it. I am a conservative. “Vision,” in my understanding, is for prophets, not statesmen. But Mr. Biden is no conservative. He is a liberal, and liberalism needs vision.
Mr. Sanders is a radical, not a liberal. The liberal worldview seeks a more equitable and open polity by means of piecemeal political reform. The radical outlook envisions a new world, not an incrementally better one. He wants to remake the U.S. economy and banish all forms of inequality.
With Mr. Biden’s ascension and Mr. Sanders’s decision this week to suspend his campaign, Democrats are again choosing liberalism. The important thing to understand about modern American liberalism, though, is that it is a spent force. It is out of ideas. It is visionary, but it no longer sees much of anything. That Mr. Biden has been reduced to protesting the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak, safely tucked away in his basement, nicely symbolizes liberalism’s impotence.