Friday, October 23, 2020
Dem Hive Mind Tries to Cancel Chris Pratt for Avoiding Biden Fundraiser
Welcome to America in the first year of the 2020s, boys and girls. Everything matters. Nothing matters. There is no way to tell up from down anymore.
Enter Chris Pratt — everything people want to like about an entertainer. He’s a decent, God-fearing guy who always seems to be in a good mood. Scandal-free. Heck, even when he and his first wife Anna Faris got divorced in 2018 it was so amicable people were wondering if they were even real.
But in the aforementioned topsy-turvy nature of American society, Pratt’s decency is a hard “no” from enlightened, tolerant leftists.
OK, it’s not just his decency, it’s also his lack of willingness to participate in the leftist hive mind.
Some of Pratt’s Avengers castmates decided to get together for this bit of nonsense:
The Daily Wire:
“On Tuesday, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, Paul Rudd, Don Cheadle, and Zoe Saldana will participate in a fundraising event to support Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his running mate, California Senator Kamala Harris,” Vanity Fair reported.
“Yet while there was broad interest in the latest star-studded push for the Biden campaign, it’s the absence of one key Avengers star that has caused the biggest stir on social media,” the outlet noted. “Shortly after the event was announced, Chris Pratt’s name trended on Twitter, with many criticizing the Guardians of the Galaxy star for his perceived political views.”
As noted by The Daily Wire, Pratt was ridiculed over the weekend for allegedly radiating “homophobic white Christian supremacist energy,” among other left-wing attacks.
Because, of course, everyone who doesn’t support the leftist groupthink mob is homophobic and racist.
They really think that dismissing the over 200 million Christians in the United States as homophobic white supremacists is a sustainable winning political strategy.
I won’t post any of the social media hate directed toward Pratt here because I don’t like giving people like that any kind of publicity. It’s plenty easy to find (especially on Twitter) if you want to.
One of Pratt’s Marvel Cinematic Universe costars was having none of it. Robert Downey Jr. came to Pratt’s defense with a gentle but biting rebuke of those who are attacking his friend:
The “sinless.”
Priceless.
If we just went a few years back in the Wayback Machine we wouldn’t be talking about the need to defend an American because he is a Christian and doesn’t want to support a certain candidate just because some of his friends did, but this is where we are at now:
Yeah, now we have to “defend” someone for being honest and open about his struggle with cancer because he’s a wrongthink Rethuglican. It’s bad to worry about dying in front of all the people who want you dead, after all.
Chris Pratt is being excoriated for openly possessing values that most Americans do. He’s a celebrity, however, and our betters will be having none of that, thank you.
It would be nice if Chris Pratt wasn’t an anomaly in the entertainment industry, but we are well past that point. The fact that he’s there is encouraging, however. The more that the cancel crowd extends its reach like this, the more diluted and weak it gets.
It’s a weird silver lining to see but we have to take the small victories when we can in order to get to the big ones.
What is the antidote to ‘Wokeness’?
Political comedian Evan Sayet says he has long dedicated himself to conserving and promoting the American values that have given him freedom and allowed him to pursue his life of liberty and happiness. His new book, The Woke Supremacy, lays out the history and characteristics of “Wokeness.”
However, in failing to examine the origins of this totalitarian intolerance, he misses the critical difference between old-style Marxism, so-called “Democratic socialism,” and “cultural Marxism” as first delineated by the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci and employed by Chinese dictator Mao Zedong.
That’s okay, though, because Sayet masterfully describes how these subversives operate and lays out the tactical principles (and lack of moral principles) that drive them. Their goal, he says, is to replace Western civilization with a nihilist premise that everything about Western culture is evil.
One fruit of this evil, poisonous tree is that Western society is so racist, Woke activists assert, and so fraught with multiple other evils that it cannot be repaired. Instead, it must be eradicated and replaced.
Philosopher, historian and self-defense advocate Sam Jacobs summarizes the origins of Wokeness by reviewing Gramsci, who spent a decade in Mussolini’s prisons and rejected the twin ideas of a dictatorship of the proletariat and direct ownership of the means of production as losing propositions.
Instead, this son of a low-level Italian bureaucrat argued that for socialism to “take America without firing a shot” (as Khrushchev would later boast) would require a “long march through the institutions” of Western culture in order to penetrate, infiltrate and eventually control them. In the 1960s Marshall McLuhan summed up Gramsci’s argument in his book, The Medium Is the Message.
Both Chairman Mao, beginning in 1966, and Cambodia’s Pol Pot a decade later saw existing cultural institutions as impediments to their quest for absolute power to reshape their societies according to their Marxist ideals. But both revolutions failed, perhaps because they had missed Gramsci’s point. Success comes from slowly subverting the culture rather than destroying it.
Mao’s vision was to rid China of “the four Olds” – Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits and Old Ideas. In other words, everything that pre-dated communism. As Christopher Holton writes in The Hayride, Mao’s Red Guards started out renaming streets, quickly escalated to destroying old buildings, old books, and old art, and ransacking homes of the disloyal. They even desecrated cemeteries, dug up corpses and tore down monuments. Only later did they start killing.
Pol Pot witnessed China’s “Cultural Revolution” and wanted to outdo his mentor via a “Super Great Leap Forward,” instead of a “long march.” He expelled foreigners, closed embassies, shuttered newspapers and TV stations, confiscated radios and bicycles, outlawed mail and telephones, and put those still alive in agrarian camps. People began starving to death.
In his 2012 book, The Kindergarten of Eden, Sayet posited four laws of “modern liberalism,” beginning with “indiscriminateness,” total rejection of the intellectual process. This, he said, leads to a topsy-turvy worldview that always sides with the lesser and against the better, the wrong over the right, and the evil over the good. That is what happened in China and Cambodia.
Promoting the lesser is always paired with denigrating the better. The negative qualities of the Woke (socialists) are ascribed to the un-Woke (nationalists) – and vice versa. Hillary Clinton thus framed President Trump for “collusion with Russia,” which evidence now shows she herself engaged in.
The primary goal of the modern liberal, Sayet contends, is the total regression of man back to his first days on earth. Or as Joni Mitchell wrote, “We’ve go to get ourselves back to the Garden.” The blueprint for cultural Marxism in America, Sayet argues in both books, is John Lennon’s popular song, “Imagine.” The perfect, peace-filled world has no heaven or hell and people live just for the moment, with no countries, no religion, no possessions, and nothing worth dying for.
This Woodstock hippies’ quest for an imaginary simpler time provided the New Left with a ready-made tool for organizing to effectuate institutional control. Their rejection of Western civilization – their search for the innocence of “the Garden” – enabled them to create new curricula that lured “useful idiots” into the halls of academe, the arts and the political arena, where hard-core Woke nihilists could redefine “truth.”
Sayet opens The Woke Supremacy by stating that, while Hitler’s National Socialism was ideologically the polar opposite of Democratic Socialism, ideology has little influence over behavior once any socialist system gains power.
Both rejected nationalism built on a foundation of local leadership (hence our Tenth Amendment) that implements policies which make sense locally even if not nationwide. Socialism, Sayet affirms, requires top-down governance where “one size fits all” (except for governing elites).
Enforcement of top-down government requires tyrannical control, and tremendous energy, to impose a Woke supremacy from which there can be no dissent or even debate. Wokeness thus requires the use of hate and fear. There is no redemption for the apostasy of believing facts when they conflict with “Woke truth.” The “Cancel Culture” can be just as vicious against a prior ally as against longtime opponents.
Conversely, there is no “Woke morality” by which infidelity, theft, property crimes or even murder disqualify a person who is useful in promoting Wokeness. The Woke proudly spotlight even criminals who shot first as “victims” of a “racist” police force that oppresses the entire society. Deconstructing sexual norms is also a powerful tool that confuses what is a “right.” Environmentalism turns science into a Woke morality play, regardless of real-world evidence to the contrary.
The Woke also use modifiers to confuse, divide and conquer. Adding “politically” to “correct” changes objective truth or outright fiction into narratives of “my truth.”
Similarly, the modifier “social” transforms the concept of “justice” notions that “the oppressed” are morally right to steal or commit voter fraud if their “intent” is couched in victimhood that can spark “peaceful protests.” The goal is victory, “by any means necessary,” whether packing the Supreme Court or turning a murderer into a victim to generate hatred of the law.
Not only must evil become good to the Woke; actual good deeds must be deconstructed. A major tool is the “dog whistle,” a tactic that asserts the Woke “know” the “real meaning” behind seemingly innocent or even positive words or actions.
Sayet recognizes that even a Trump/Republican political victory this fall will not defeat the Woke Supremacy’s culture war on America. They are too entrenched in schools and universities, in newsrooms and entertainment fields, and across social communications industries, to be easily vanquished.
Jacobs helpfully suggests that the first step in defusing cultural Marxism is to learn what it is and how it operates – and call it out for what it is. Sayet provides an excellent primer for this.
Step 2, says Jacobs, is to learn from the history of society and ideas the many benefits that Western Civilization has brought, including its self-correction of prior evils – and teach them to others.
Step 3 is to reject political guilt and instead recognize that Western civilization is a constant work in progress, a continuing effort to improve society, not a static conspiracy to rob everyone but “old, rich, white men” of their just rewards.
Via email
VP Pence Honors Castro and Che Guevara’s Murder Victims, Obama Honored the Murderers
“It is great to be back in the Sunshine State with so many champions for freedom, just 19 days away from a great victory all across Florida and all across America. But standing here, near the hallowed grounds of Memorial Cubano, it is my great honor, on behalf of our president, to accept the endorsement of these extraordinary heroes of the Cuban exiled community. Thank you so much. I thank you so much for the honor and for the support,” Vice President Pence at the Cuban Memorial, Oct. 15.
Far from honoring communist murder victims, Obama visited Cuba to gift the mass-murderers a financial lifeline, covered his heart while posing with Che Guevara and raised Raul Castro’s arms in triumph. Could the choice in this election be any starker?
You’ll often find people with itchy noses and red-rimmed eyes ambling amidst the long rows of white crosses at Tamiami Park on Coral Way and 107 Avenue in Miami.
It’s a mini-Arlington cemetery called the Cuban Memorial, in honor of Castro and Che Guevara’s murder victims and those who fell trying to free Cuba from the murderous barbarism they imposed with their Soviet overlords while "The Best and Brightest" dithered, bumbled, and finally betrayed.
But the crosses at the Cuban Memorial are symbolic. Most of the bodies still lie in mass graves dug by bulldozers on the orders of the Stalinist dictator who Jimmy Carter called “an old friend” and his mass-murdering henchman who Obama saw fit to pose in front of with hand his over heart.
Never heard of this Cuban Memorial in the mainstream media? Well, it honors the tens of thousands of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s victims (many of them U.S citizens, by the way). Need I say more about the media blackout? I didn’t think so.
Some of these Cuban Memorial visitors will be kneeling, others walking slowly, looking for a name. You remember a similar scene from the opening frames of Saving Private Ryan. Many clutch rosaries. Many of the ladies will be pressing their faces into the breast of a relative who drove them there, a relative who wraps his arms around her spastically heaving shoulders.
Try as he might not to cry himself, he usually finds that the sobs wracking his mother, grandmother, or aunt are contagious. Yet he’s often too young to remember the face of his martyred uncle, father, or cousin — the name they just recognized on the white cross.
"Fusilado" — firing squad execution — it says below it.
According to the Black Book of Communism these total 16,000, all at the orders of the man Democrat presidential candidate George McGovern called “likable and a good friend.” Even many of the older men walking among these crosses will be red-eyed, choked up.
The elderly lady still holds a tissue to her eyes and nose as they wait to cross the street after leaving the memorial. Her red-eyed grandson still has his arm around her. She told him about how his freedom-fighter grandfather yelled "Viva Cuba Libre!" and "Viva Cristo Rey!" the instant before the volley of Russian bullets shattered his body.
They cross the street slowly, silently, and run into a blue and orange-haired harpy waving a Black Lives Matter placard. Her T-shirt sports the face of her husband’s cowardly executioner, Che Guevara. You, friends, tell me how she might feel?
Another woman will go home after placing flowers under her father’s cross — a father she never knew. "Killed in action, Bay of Pigs, April 18th, 1961" reads the inscription on his cross. She was 2 at the time. "We will not be evacuated!" yelled her father’s commander into his radio that day, as 41,000 Red Troops and swarms of Stalin tanks closed the ring on her father and his 1,400 utterly abandoned Band of Brothers. "The Best and Brightest" all had important social engagements that day.
"We came here to Fight!" her father’s commander kept yelling at the enraged and heartsick CIA man offering to evacuate them from the doomed beachhead. "Let it end here!" was his last yell, barely audible over the deafening blasts from the storm of Soviet artillery.
Her 23-year-old father — an accountant in Cuba a year before, a dish-washer in a Miami Hotel only two months before, and now grim-faced, thirst-crazed, and delirious after three days of continuous ground combat — heard the order from his commander: "No Retreat! We Stand and Fight!" and rammed in his last clip. By then he’d long realized he’d never see his daughter’s graduation.
His ammo expended, and no more coming on the specific orders of "The Best and Brightest," he fell among the bodies of 100 of his Band of Brothers, after mauling his communist enemies to the score of 20 to one. "Wimps! Yes, Wimps!" the woman hears Democrat Party Golden Boy Michael Moore label her father and his Band of Brothers in one of America’s best-selling books. "Crybabies too!"
Again, friends, you tell me how she might feel.
Castro murdered her relatives, shattered her family and plunged a nation — which had double Japan’s per capita income in 1958, plus net immigration from Europe — into a pesthole that repels even half-starved Haitians. He jailed, tortured, and murdered more political prisoners than pre-war Hitler, and about 20 times as many as Mussolini.
He asked, pleaded, and finally tried to cajole the Butcher of Budapest into an obliterating nuclear strike against America. Failing there, he tried to blow up Macy’s, Gimbels, Bloomingdale's, and Grand Central Station with more TNT than used by Madrid subway terrorists.
Yet he’s hailed as "One Helluva Guy" by Ted Turner; as "Very likable, a man I regard as a friend!" by George McGovern; and "Way Too Cool!" by Bonnie Raitt, among dozens upon dozens of other accolades by dozens of other liberal scoundrels and imbeciles. Tens of thousands of Cubans (and dozens of Americans) fought him. "We were fighting for Cuba’s freedom as well as America’s defense. To call us mercenaries is a grave insult," says Alabama Air guard officer Albert Persons about his and his Alabama comrades’ heroism during the battle of The Bay of Pigs. The Ivy League’s Best and Brightest might sell our comrades out, they snorted. We sure as hell won’t.
It was more than bluster, too. Four U.S. volunteers — Pete Ray, Riley Shamburger, Leo Barker, and Wade Grey — suited up, gunned the engines, and joined the fight. These were Southern boys, not pampered Ivy Leaguers, so there was no navel-gazing. They had archaic notions of right and wrong, of honor and loyalty, of who America’s enemies really were. Their Cuban comrades — men they’d trained and befriended — were being slaughtered on that heroic beachhead. Knowing their lumbering B-26s were sitting ducks for Castro’s unmolested jets and Sea Furies, all four Alabama air guard volunteers flew over the doomed beachhead to lend support to their betrayed brothers in arms.
All four were shot down. All four have their names in a place of honor next to their Cuban comrades on the Bay of Pigs Memorial, plus streets named after them in Little Havana, plus their crosses at the Cuban Memorial.
When Doug MacArthur waded ashore on Leyte, he grabbed a radio: "People of the Philippines: I have returned. By the grace of Almighty God our forces stand again on Philippine soil — soil consecrated in the blood of our two peoples."
Cuban soil was similarly consecrated.
Women’s March Unites Against a Woman: Amy Coney Barrett
The second 2020 Women’s March, held on October 17, centers on sending an “unmistakable message about the fierce opposition to Trump and his agenda, including his attempt to fill Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court. This comes after the president nominated Judge Barrett, a brilliant jurist admired even by legal experts who disagree with her, as the late justice’s replacement. This latest march takes a stand against Barrett, even as so many American women identify with her story.
It’s true that Ginsburg’s seat is a big one to fill – and should be approached with thoughtful consideration. At her nomination, Barrett herself recognized the late justice as a “woman of enormous talent” who “not only broke glass ceilings” but also “smashed them.”
But this march isn’t just against President Trump nominating a new justice – the timing of it, or the politics surrounding it. It’s also specifically against his nominee, a woman: Judge Barrett.
Confirming this, the Washington Post named its live stream of the D.C. event, “Women's March protests Amy Coney Barrett.” And, in the promo video, the Women’s March included a clip questioning Barrett and her abortion position.
“Amy Coney Barrett won’t say if climate change is real, if presidents should commit to a peaceful transfer of power, if cases protecting marriage equality and our right to birth control were correctly decided,” the Women’s March tweeted on October 14. “Not only is her nomination illegitimate, it's a danger to our future.”
In other words, according to the Women’s March, Judge Barrett “is an affront to everything that Justice Ginsburg fought for.”
Among other things, she stood against women, the group complained on September 28.
“All of the progress that has been made—for women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and more—could be rolled back if Barrett is confirmed,” it urged.
The Women’s March also accused her of being an “anti”: “anti-immigrant,” “anti-choice,” “anti-lgbt,” and “anti-gun control.”
She was also anti-feminist, it said.
“Her presence on the Supreme Court would be a direct threat against all the freedoms, rights, and feminist values we've fought so hard to defend under Trump,” it added in another tweet on September 26.
And yet, in its haste to condemn her, the Women’s March overlooks the American women who identify with Amy Coney Barrett. They exist.
“For Conservative Christian Women, Amy Coney Barrett’s Success Is Personal,” one New York Times headline read on September 28. A Politico opinion headline declared, “Amy Coney Barrett: A New Feminist Icon” the day before. Another opinion piece, in America magazine, announced, “I see my own pro-life feminism in Amy Coney Barrett” on October 14. “Feminists Should Be Celebrating Amy Coney Barrett,” another piece, published by National Review, argued.
Each was written by a woman.
That’s something that should attract the Women’s March, which tries to come across as inclusive. Its self-described mission, after all, is “to harness the political power of diverse women and their communities to create transformative social change.”
“We must create a society in which women - including Black women, Indigenous women, poor women, immigrant women, disabled women, Jewish women, Muslim women, Latinx women, Asian and Pacific Islander women, lesbian, bi, queer, and trans women - are free and able to care for and nurture their families,” the Women’s March declares, “however they are formed, in safe and healthy environments free from structural impediments.”
The list notably doesn’t include pro-life or conservative women who, from the beginning, have been excluded. But pro-life groups, such as New Wave Feminists, and conservative groups, such as Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), still attend in an unofficial capacity – or host their own rallies.
Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, the head of New Wave Feminists, which was uninvited as a partner from the first Women’s March in 2017, has stressed that even women marching in the Women’s March support them.
“We were so overwhelmed by the positivity of women coming up to us and saying, ‘We disagree with that decision’ and ‘We’re so glad you’re here,’” she said last year, referring to the reaction of women at past marches.
This year, New Wave Feminists had a presence again, as did IWF, which hosted an “I’m with Her” rally – “her,” meaning Amy Coney Barrett.
“The Women’s March is a picture of today’s feminist movement,” IWF President Carrie Lukas told the Washington Times. “It purports to speak for all women, but it ignores all of the women who reject its extreme progressive agenda.”
Tammy Bruce, the president of Independent Women’s Voice, IWF’s sister organization, added that the “so-called women’s movement is standing by while the mainstream media questions if Amy Coney Barrett can be a Supreme Court justice and a good mother, in addition to vilifying her background and her faith.”
At the same time, Barrett stresses that she values women and their choices. She addressed this while answering the question, “Can women really have it all?” at a Hillsdale College event last year.
“I think each woman is called to a unique path,” she urged. “I don’t think there’s one cookie-cutter way that women should proceed.”
“One thing I think that is really important not to lose sight of, is that we are so fortunate as women living in 2019 to have so many more doors open to us, and so many choices,” she said. “But I think as part of that conversation, I always want to be careful never to devalue the choices that women make that are different.”
That’s a message that the Women’s March should embrace, too.
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http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
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http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
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http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
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