We Don't Need a 'National Divorce'; We Need More Federalism
Marjorie Taylor Greene says the country needs a "national divorce." "We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government," she tweeted. "Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat's traitorous America Last policies, we are done."
Generally speaking, I'm sympathetic to the idea that the political left is unable to accept a truly diverse nation. Virtually every legislative policy proposal from modern Democrats -- and every policy issued by edict -- strengthens federal power and economic control over states. Modern Democrats are champions of direct democracy, an effort to undercut the choices of local communities and individuals. When they don't get their way, the D.C. bureaucracy steps in to circumvent the will of states. And when courts stop them, Democrats work to delegitimize and weaken the judiciary.
Just this week, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) argued states should simply disregard the Supreme Court when they don't agree with a decision. Ignoring the division of power is far more likely to cause a national schism than any Greene tweet.
None of that means a "national divorce" -- really secession, since other states are unlikely to concede to a split -- isn't a reckless thing for someone who took a vow to defend the Constitution to advocate. Even if we took a moment to seriously contemplate the idea, how would it be achieved? We aren't separated ideologically into large geographic regions or even states, but rather urban, suburban and rural areas. Conservatives like to share that map showing virtually the entire country painted in electoral red -- and it matters more than Democrats like to admit. But we can't discount that density also matters. A "national divorce" would create even smaller minorities and divisions, but little difference in the way of policy.
For that matter, where will Greene's Georgia, which Joe Biden won in 2020 and now has two left-wing senators, end up in this split? How about purple states like Virginia or New Hampshire? Will we have 50 separate referendums? Will there be population exchanges like the one India and Pakistan undertook in 1947? If history is any indication, it's the kind of situation that leads to political violence and economic ruin.
And, you know, you already have the freedom to move about the nation and find a place that suits your lifestyle and politics. That's one of the reasons we're a place that has room for a progressive vegan, the evangelical conservative farmer, the suburban moderate and everyone in between.
During the past 42 years, the federal government has been divided for 30 of them. Over the past three presidencies, the president's party lost at least one house after only two years. The instinct of the American public is to split power. The organic state of a divided nation is glorious gridlock -- which is why the 10th Amendment exists. Now, it's also true that leftists struggle with the notion of letting people in red states think, speak and live in ways they dislike. There is a national political and cultural effort to homogenize us.
And when Republicans appropriate the existing local power Democrats have used for decades to implement their own choices -- as Gov. Ron DeSantis has done in Florida -- leftists act as if we're on the precipice of a dictatorship. But they have no power to stop him. Only Florida voters do. This is why federalism exists. It is why some states thrive and others don't. And federalism is not only a more desirable solution than breaking the country into two, but also far more feasible.
None of this is to argue there aren't serious problems facing the nation, but Big Tech's relentless highlighting of every decisive moment, every rabid voice and every radical position clouds our view of reality. The nastier and crazier you pretend to be, the more misleading your tweets and the more partisan you act, the more followers you can expect. The incentive of social media success is corrosive. Most of it just exacerbates political divisions.
In the real world, you probably live in proximity to plenty of people with different religious, cultural and ideological values, yet, despite what you've heard, we're a nation with negligible political violence. In many ways, despite the mess politicians have made, our lives are better than ever. Let's keep it that way.
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The Great Reset Is Really Great Resentment
This fairly new thing, the so-called “great reset,” is more than the political left acting out their bottled-up fury at successes of the land in which they find themselves. Infuriated at how well freedom is working—the opulence, scientific and technological achievements, personal advancements at every level—even for the “downtrodden” compared to the rest of the world—they grouse. They can see (and deny) how poorly socialist utopian schemes they hold dear are doing. Like spoiled brats they nihilistically seek to overturn everything about this nation that is good and decent and pure.
America is in mortal danger from this actual mass psychosis afflicting so many of our countrymen. The psychiatric community calls it mass formation, a term and effect worth studying if you haven’t. The most striking modern example of course was in Germany before WWII, but communist China soon afterwards under the brutal dictator Mao Tse-dung wasn’t far behind. Pol Pot in Vietnam set new standards of depravity and evil, with popular support. Our own witch hunts in New England soon after we achieved independence were a similar thing—hysteria that knows no controls.
Words Are the Key
Using principles learned from Russian, Chinese and North Vietnamese communists, along with George Orwell, whose 1949 dystopian novel 1984 spelled it out with chilling clarity, leftists understand that whoever controls our language controls us. That battle is on. An entire generation of Newthink terms have entered the public mind, infiltrated newsrooms and classrooms everywhere, and threaten our health and liberty.
It boggles the mind how easily that disease has spread. People at the vaunted Associated Press have picked up the gauntlet, and what used to be a descriptive guide for journalists, like a dictionary, the AP Stylebook has become a proscriptive mandate. It now dictates which terms are acceptable and which must be cast aside as intolerant, offensive, biased and other inaccurate derogatory slurs.
It’s not like this sprang upon us unannounced or unnoticed. As early as 1962, the earth-shaking film Manchurian Candidate, directed by John Frankenheimer, woke this nation up to the effective perniciousness of “commie” brainwashing, a tool used to implement Newthink. That was based on Richard Condon’s 1959 novel of the same name, at the height of the Cold War, filled with gut-level fears many of us still viscerally recall. Those forces have been bubbling under and metastasizing since then.
America’s consciousness of this grew in a quantum leap, especially in the enormously influential Second Amendment community with the development and release in the year 2000 of The Politically Corrected Glossary, published by Bloomfield Press, https://www.gunlaws.com/politicallycorrect.htm . It changed some dialog and terminology, jump-starting reassessments, but the powerful mainstream media steamed right ahead regardless. The terribly sexist slur, gunman, appears constantly instead of killer, murderer or even criminal. Inanimate wholesome products like pistols or sidearms became fearsome semi-automatic handguns, which anti-gun forces publicly acknowledged misleads many into thinking machinegun.
To this day, despite constant complaints, reports call mass murderers “shooters,” denigrating 100 million American shooters who shoot for fun, sport and safety. Simultaneously, this linguistic trick avoids casting any shade on the criminal psychopaths who murder innocent people by the thousands annually. Those culprits are further protected by prosecutors and a judiciary that often avoids going after the perps, a shortening of perpetrators, now also frowned upon by the great resetters.
Assault is a type of behavior, not a type of hardware, outlawed everywhere under multiple laws, as it should be. That does little to stop resetters from attaching assault to weapon, so effective in turning the public against household firearms, the commonly used kind you’ll find in millions of American homes. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that the Second Amendment holds extra special protection for such household arms in common use, a point leftists treat with disdain.
Those usual suspects—Marxist socialist democrats and other malfeasants—are actively pushing the overhaul of our language—and our freedoms. Tough to admit, but they’re pretty good at it. You may not even know you’ve been snookered, it’s so subtle and easy to miss. That’s what makes it so effective. Merely declaring yourself pro gun plays into their hands. How? Because they’ve cast guns as horrific instruments of the devil. If you say you’re pro gun you practically are the devil, to their addled minds. Try instead thinking of yourself as pro rights, a term they avoid, because if that’s you, what are they? Anti rights, which is pure truth on a platter, intolerable to them, and now you’re catching on.
Coming next, an installment of The Politically Corrected Glossary, a lexicon of freedom. Use terms that work for you as a liberty-loving individual, and cast intolerant bigots as intolerant bigots.
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Former Disney CEO privately complained to DeSantis about 'pressure' from woke left amid Florida fight
As the showdown between Florida's legislature and The Walt Disney Company heated up over an education bill that liberal activists incorrectly labeled the "Don't say gay bill," Disney's then-CEO called Gov. Ron DeSantis and complained about the "pressure" he faced.
DeSantis recounts the conversation in a chapter of his new memoir, "The Courage to be Free: Florida's Blueprint for American Revival," which will be released Tuesday by publisher HarperCollins. The chapter, shared exclusively with Fox News Digital, reveals what Bob Chapek, who was Disney CEO at the time, told DeSantis as the fight over Florida's education law heated up in the spring of 2022.
"As the controversy over the Parental Rights in Education bill was coming to a head, Chapek called me. He did not want Disney to get involved, but he was getting a lot of pressure to weigh in against the bill," DeSantis writes.
"We get pressured all the time," Chapek told DeSantis, according to the governor's book. "But this time is different. I haven’t seen anything like this before."
Chapek told shareholders that he had called DeSantis on March 9 to urge him not to sign the bill, which restricts schools from teaching gender and sexuality to children in kindergarten through third grade. Activists nicknamed it the "Don't say gay bill" despite the legislation not using those terms.
"I called Gov. DeSantis this morning to express our disappointment and concern that if the legislation becomes law, it could be used to unfairly target gay, lesbian, non-binary and transgender kids and families," Chapek said, according to FOX 35 Orlando.
According to a report from the New York Post, Chapek had privately expressed his hesitancy to involve his company in the political issues in Florida, the home of Disney World, in the months prior. But the pressure campaign within Disney and from Democrats nationwide ultimately convinced him take a stand.
DeSantis, however, issued a warning: If Disney got involved with the legislation, "People like me will say, ‘Gee, how come Disney has never said anything about China, where they make a fortune?’" DeSantis told Chapek.
The Florida governor said if Disney stayed out of the politics, Disney would face 48 hours of outrage when the bill passed. "[And] when I sign it, you will get another 48 hours of outrage, mostly online,'" DeSantis said, adding, "Then there will be some new outrage that the woke mob will focus on and people will forget about this issue, especially considering the outrage is directed at a political-media narrative, not the actual text of the legislation itself."
DeSantis wrote that Chapek and Disney "ultimately caved to leftist media and activist pressure and pressed the false narrative against the bill."
After the bill passed and DeSantis signed it into law, the governor was surprised that Disney chose to "escalate the battle" by vowing to fight the legislation in the courts. DeSantis signaled publicly that he would be willing to reevaluate Disney's special tax district and favorable corporate agreements due to their insistence on "woke" political activism.
Other reports showed that Disney had been pushing messages that conservatives blasted as "woke" — like enforcing gender and sexuality messages in movies and television shows. A show producer reportedly said on a leaked Disney staff call that she had a "not-at-all secret gay agenda" and had been "adding queerness" to kid's programming.
"Behind the scenes, I was not, as a father of children ages five, four, and two, comfortable with the continuation of Disney’s special arrangement," DeSantis wrote in his memoir. "While the Walt Disney Company and its executives had a right to indulge in woke activism, Florida did not have to place the company on a pedestal while they do so—especially when the company’s activism impacted the rights of parents and the well-being of children."
As Florida moved to strip Disney of its Reedy Creek district and revoke the company's self-governing status, DeSantis was surprised to see left-wing voices side with a large corporation.
"Even though Democrats often rail about the nefarious power exerted over politics by large corporations, and supposedly oppose special carveouts for big companies, they all dutifully lined up in support of keeping Disney’s special self-governing status," he wrote.
Chapek left Disney late in 2022, replaced by his predecessor, Bob Iger, who first left Disney in 2020. At a Disney town hall in November, Iger told the company, "Do I like the company being embroiled in controversy? Of course not. It can be distracting, and it can have a negative impact on the company. And to the extent that I can work to kind of quiet things down, I’m going to do that."
The lesson of the Disney saga, according to DeSantis, is that in an environment of "woke capital" where large companies employ their influence to advance left-wing political agendas, "old-guard corporate Republicanism is not up to the task at hand."
DeSantis' book aims to showcase his governing thesis that fighting for conservative principles paid off for Florida and could benefit other states and even the whole country. As a rumored 2024 presidential hopeful, DeSantis has led former President Donald Trump in a few early primary polls. He has not announced whether he will run.
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Australia: Another Leftist discovers reality
Just when you think all hope is lost for the Victorian Liberal Party to ever regain its conservative political roots, along comes a candidate like Moira Deeming. Deeming is the type of grassroots politician the luvvies love to hate; young, articulate, passionate, and an ex-progressive.
Which is precisely the reason they’ve given her the moniker, ‘Labor Party Princess’. Quoting the great Robert Menzies in her maiden speech to parliament, Deeming captured something of your widespread appeal:
‘The real life of this nation is to be found in the home of the people who are nameless and unadvertised. And who, whatever their individual religion or dogma, see in their children their greatest contributions.’
In her own words, Deeming says, ‘She was born and bred on the political left coming from a long line of union leaders, card-carrying Labor Party members, and Labor MPs.’ Indeed, her great-grandfather was John Joseph Holland, a western suburbs Labor MP for over thirty-five years as well as a councillor for the city of Melbourne. All of which is to say, Deeming comes from ‘good Catholic Labor stock’.
What would motivate her then to change to the Liberal side of politics? According to Deeming:
‘There is a long tradition in Australian politics of those raised on the gospel of unity who come to learn firsthand the value of liberty and who then switch to the liberal side of politics. Sadly, they’re often referred to as “Labor rats” but in reality, they were just ordinary people who foresaw the problems which are plaguing all political parties that refuse to tolerate independent thinking and the tragic consequences of idolising economies which are controlled by the State.’
After quoting the famous examples of three former Labor politicians who switched sides throughout their careers – such as former Prime Ministers Joseph Cook and Joseph Lyons as well as Warren Mundine – a former president of the Labor Party to chairman of CPAC – Deeming commented:
‘I grew up idolising the Left, unions, and the Labor Party. But when taken to an extreme, these ideals have a “dark side”. As a teenager, I witnessed first-hand the corruption and the coordinated bullying of anyone who doesn’t think and act in “unity” with the Left.’
For Deeming, her political paradigm shifted though, by concerns she observed firsthand as a teacher in state schools. Deeming said:
‘Lessons on tolerance were being replaced with lessons on inclusion. It wasn’t enough to just accept each other’s differences with respect. Now students were required to affirm and celebrate beliefs which they just did not share. Perfectly reasonable religious and moral differences were being framed as discriminatory, intolerant, and a new vocabulary was introduced categorising people as “allies” or “enemies”.
‘Instead of being inspired by history’s heroes, students were being chastised and even told to stand up in class and apologise for historical crimes they had neither committed nor condoned.
‘They were told that the physical world is on the brink of doom. But rather than assigning research projects to find practical solutions, they were being assigned activism as work. Including, social media awareness campaigns, ideological fundraisers, and even attendance at protests during school hours.
‘Instead of being taught the life-changing value of grit and character, my most vulnerable and disadvantaged students were being weighed down and discouraged with spectres of insurmountable social forces all arrayed against them; capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy.’
These are serious issues. And every Australian citizen should be alarmed at what is occurring in Victorian schools because that particular state seems hell-bent on leading the way socially for the rest of the country. According to Deeming though, the proverbial ‘final straw’ in her deciding to challenge the government was as follows:
‘I discovered that school policies and curriculums had been radically altered to remove almost every child safeguarding standard that we had.
‘Primary school children were being subjected to erotic sexual content.
‘Female students no longer had the right to single-sex sports teams, toilets or change rooms.
‘And teachers – like me – were being forced to secretly lie to parents about their children who were secretly living one gender at school and another gender at home.
‘I realised then that my teaching career was over because I simply would not ever do the things I was being asked to do.
‘I would never ask the class which sexual experiences they’d had and which they were willing to do. I would never tell girls to bind their breasts. I would never accuse gay students of being transphobic. I would never tell my female students they had to tolerate a male teacher supervising their change room. And I was never ever going to lie to parents about what was going on with their own children at school.
‘But I also knew that if I spoke out that I was going to be vilified and that I would never work in a public school again. And that is exactly what happened.’
Somewhat surprisingly, even the Sun Herald joined in accusing deeming of promoting ‘extremist views’ whilst Daniel Andrews resorted to his usual tactic of dismissing Ms Deeming’s concerns as ‘shameful’. But listening to Deeming’s maiden speech, there is nothing extreme, let alone shameful, about it.
Deeming explicitly called on the Victorian government to amend the law in three ways. First, to protect sex-based rights to protect female-only sports, change rooms, and other activities while ‘maintaining the safety and dignity of transgender people’. Second, to make it illegal for children to be present in brothels. And third, to make it legal for parents and clinicians to seek treatment that alleviates gender dysmorphic feelings in children.
Deeming is a politician with the courage which we need right now. Sadly, though, the Liberal Party leadership have basically thrown her under the proverbial bus, distancing themselves from her convictions.
How tragic. When a former ‘Labor Party Princess’ cannot find a home in a party supposed to represent Liberal democratic values. No wonder the Liberty party lost the last election with little prospect of winning the next.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/02/moira-deeming-former-labor-party-princess/
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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