Thomas Jefferson based his claim of human equality and human rights on self-evident truths. Today, the left is trying to replace a belief in objective truths with a system in which “narratives” are the only reality

In a recent interview, Attorney General William Barr said of the dominant news media:

They are projecting a narrative. When the word ‘narrative’ came into currency, I knew we were in trouble, because the word narrative suggests that there’s no objective truth. There’s no real story of what happened, it’s just everyone has their own narrative.

And you get to where the press can justify presenting a story that doesn’t really correspond to objective truth, but ‘It’s our narrative, we have a narrative—you have a narrative.’

Although Barr’s commentary was related to one aspect of American culture, the media, in it we find a microcosm of the pestilence plaguing civil society at large.

For decades, so-called progressives in academia, politics, and religion have cast moral absolutes to the wind in favor of relativism, and now we watch in horror as the whirlwind has its day in cities across our country.

That Barr would point out the danger of our cultural abandonment of objective truth should come as no surprise. Last year at the University of Notre Dame, the attorney general delivered a speech on the role of religion in a free society, and thus the constitutional imperative to protect religious freedom. The oration’s prescience and poignancy were matched only by the humility of the orator.

The attorney general isn’t breaking any new philosophical ground; rather he is, as William F. Buckley Jr. once said, “standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’”

He is in good company.

Thomas Jefferson didn’t claim that human equality and human rights share the same divine source to be theoretical; he declared them to be self-evident truths.

Moreover, Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers did not claim their grievances with King George III to be a matter of differing opinions. As the Declaration of Independence reads:

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

If there were no truth, there could be no facts for a candid world to consider.

The Founders knew freedom without morality inevitably leads back to tyranny. If each man is free to do what is right in the sight of his own eyes, with no common, objective standard of right and wrong, good and evil, then what is to stop the strong from oppressing the weak?

As stated in Federalist 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

So, in establishing the Constitution, the Founders sought to balance mankind’s competing interests in freedom and power by limiting government.

It was a grand experiment based on the idea that men could be good enough to be trusted with self-government, to respect the rights of others, to avoid cultural chaos from which tyranny emerges.

Where would this common notion of “goodness” come from? The answer is enshrined in the first words of the First Amendment to the Constitution. Freedom of religion preserves the proper role of religion in a free society. There is only one source of objective morality and truth: the same God who created all men equal. Religion points men to God.

To be certain, this nation would not declare any official state-approved church, hence the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. Nor would the nation stand in the way of any man living according to his deepest held convictions—the Free Exercise Clause. But it placed the source of truth and morality higher than the state.

We, their posterity, have enjoyed the blessings of liberty ever since.

But as John Adams later noted: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

So today we see the results of years and years of secularist attacks on religion, eternal truths, and the exclusion of religion and morality from public life.

You can’t have the freedom to peaceably assemble for a redress of grievances unless you have the morality not to destroy public property or loot and pillage fellow citizens’ private property. The line from chaos to tyranny is, we are learning, shorter than we could have hoped.

Without a shared conviction among a nation’s people that there is such a thing as objective “truth,” we are left fighting for individual, tribal, and the utterly subjective “my truth.” Or as Barr described, your narrative versus my narrative.

There is only one way to declare a winner under the latter scenario: power. Therein lies the source of the ever-increasing vitriolic rancor of our elections. Ideas aren’t judged objectively true or false. Policies aren’t judged by results; it has become the “oppressed” versus the “oppressor,” with the objective being power.

Far from a competitive marketplace of ideas debated honestly by those who aspire to serve their fellow men, their America more closely resembles the Shakespearean tragedy “Macbeth,” in which “a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

For over two centuries, America has been the exception to the rule of history. We were founded on the truth that freedom and morality are inextricably linked. It is the philosophical difference between the foundation and results of the American Revolution and the revolution in France. If we are to keep this republic, we must remain exceptional.

Alexis de Tocqueville told Americans that we are great because we are good, and if we ever ceased to be good we would cease to be great. Centuries before de Tocqueville, the source of that goodness put it plainly for all humanity, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.”

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Biden-Sanders Manifesto the Most Radically Left in U.S. History

It's amusingly ironic that the leader of the Democrat Party is not even a Democrat. Yes, the party is propping up Joe Biden at the top of the Democrat ticket in the November election, but Biden is a shell of his former self, hiding in his basement and stumbling and bumbling his way through "interviews" with friendly reporters. But when it comes to the driving force behind today's Democrat Party, the person setting the policy and ideological direction of the party is avowed socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, the far-left Vermont radical who honeymooned in the Soviet Union and praised brutal leftist regimes in Cuba and Venezuela.

Most candidates pander to their base during the primaries, and then tack to the middle for the general election to win over independent voters. Democrats did the opposite. Seeing Sanders pulling away from the field, they scrambled to push the other candidates out of the race to clear a path for Biden, deemed the most electable of the progressive clown show. Yet when Biden secured the nomination, he immediately tacked far left in order to shore up the angry, radical socialist base of the party, the "Bernie bros."

Any advantage Biden had against President Donald Trump evaporated the moment he signed onto the Bernie-Biden manifesto, a cornucopia of radically leftist policy proposals Biden promises to implement if elected.

Biden's policy team joined forces with Bernie's to develop this agenda. Of these combined task forces, Bernie said, "I think if people look at the outcome of those task forces, they'll find the reality that if those task force proposals are implemented ... Joe Biden will become the most progressive president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt."

As The Wall Street Journal editorial board pointed out, "The 110-page Biden-Sanders manifesto is the most radical policy document of either major party in our lifetimes. It leaps to the left of the Obama Administration on nearly every policy area, from education to taxes to climate change." To the left of Obama? Wow.

So, what proposals do the Biden-Sanders team offer up?

For one, they put the United States on the fast track for eliminating fossil fuels by banning all new coal, oil, and natural gas projects moving forward, by "retrofitting" four million buildings and two million households within five years, and by requiring all new buildings to produce "net-zero" carbon emissions by 2030. They also propose replacing all 500,000 school buses in America with "zero-emission alternatives" by 2025.

In other words, Biden and Sanders want all of America to experience the same skyrocketing electricity prices and rolling blackouts California is currently suffering, which caused Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom to recently tell Californians it's time to "sober up" about the limitations of renewable energy. Keep in mind that the Bernie-Biden proposals are far more ambitious than California's current restrictions.

As for the price tag, Biden says his plan is to spend $2 trillion over 10 years. But the price of the Green New Deal is a staggering $93 trillion for just the first decade, or roughly five times the size of the entire American economy.

And at a time when more than 10 million Americans are still out of work, Team Biden-Bernie wants to repeal right-to-work laws and drastically increase taxes, a devastating one-two punch that will cripple an economic recovery.

While avoiding calling for Medicare for All directly, the manifesto achieves the same end through an "installment plan," proposing expanding Medicare to everyone 60+, with a new taxpayer-subsidized "public option" that would compete with private insurers. Of course, it's impossible for private insurers to compete with a taxpayer-subsidized plan, so they would go bankrupt, leaving only the government plan.

It's baffling to see a proposal for socialized medicine when the nations leftists have for decades extolled for their "model" systems of socialized healthcare that are going bankrupt and leaving patients dying in hospital hallways, waiting for treatment that never comes.

This leftist utopia also envisions not just "free" healthcare but "free college tuition," forgiveness of student loans, and schools that provide not just "free" lunches but breakfast and dinner as well.

Of course, these "free" goodies must be paid for by someone, and that would be the working class on the backs of whom higher and higher taxes would be piled. And of course, all of these programs would need an even bigger army of government bureaucrats to manage, with exorbitant salaries and benefits paid by ... the taxpayers.

Biden-Bernie also calls for an end to the "era of shareholder capitalism." Translated, that means private wealth would be subject to public demands, the accumulated wealth of American citizens handed over to "stakeholders" (i.e., government, environmentalists, unions, etc.). In practice, the 401(k) plans of tens of millions of Americans would be seized and liquidated to fund ecofascist agendas and union-pension bailouts, among other things.

Other plans include the elimination of school choice, the end of cash bail, defunding the police, bailouts of Democrat cities and states, a $15/hour minimum wage, massive wealth redistribution, federal control of local zoning laws, and replacing police with social workers, just to name a few.

And all of this implemented under critical race theory, "social justice," and identity politics.

If this sounds like the definition of Hell to you, don't fool yourself. It's much, much worse.

And the only way to escape it is to vote for Donald Trump.

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Extinction Rebellion facing 'organised crime' curbs
Government crackdown on extremist group after 'unacceptable' attack on free press

Extinction Rebellion could be treated as an organised crime group as part of a major crackdown on its activities that may also include new protections for MPs, judges and the press, The Telegraph can disclose.

Whitehall sources said Boris Johnson and Priti Patel have asked officials to take a "fresh look" at how the group is classified under the law, after the Prime Minister described its blockading of major printing presses as "completely unacceptable".

On Saturday, police were criticised for failing to act more quickly after the blockade began on Friday evening.

Hertfordshire police faced anger for stating that officers were “working to facilitate the rights of both the protesters and those affected by their presence” but protesters were not cooperating.

"It's clear they're not your normal protest group, so you have to look at them in a different way," said one Whitehall source.

Ministers are also considering new powers making it easier for police to stop demonstrators from entering particular areas, bolstering protections for parts of the UK's critical national infrastructure, and explicitly outlawing disruption to "tenets of democracy", such as MPs voting in Parliament, judges attending court, and the printing and distribution of the free press.

The move comes after nearly 200 activists used vehicles and bamboo structures to block roads outside major printing works at Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, and Knowsley, near Liverpool.

The presses print The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, along with Rupert Murdoch-owned News Corp titles including the Sun and the Times.

Extinction Rebellion (XR) accused the newspapers of failing to report on climate change and chained themselves to the bamboo structures to obstruct the roads outside the works.

But there are fears the group has been infiltrated by far left groups, who want it to pursue a more overtly militant socialist agenda.

By Saturday night, 80 people had been arrested after the blockades resulted in delays to the distribution of several national publications to shops across the country.

Many readers of The Daily Telegraph were among those prevented from accessing a newspaper.

The Met Police issued fines totalling £200,000 to activists after they exceeded the limit of 30 people in any one gathering.

The demonstrations were condemned by Labour, whose shadow culture secretary Jo Stevens said: "A free press is vital for our democracy. People have the right to read the newspapers they want. Stopping them from being distributed and printers from doing their jobs is wrong.”

However Conservative MPs questioned why Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, failed to personally condemn the blockade.

Amanda Milling, the Conservative chairman, said Sir Keir should say whether he stood by previous comments that it was "completely wrong and counterproductive" to place Extinction Rebellion on a list of extreme ideologies.

On Saturday Mr Johnson held talks with Cressida Dick, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, amid concerns that the blockade had had a "hugely damaging effect not just on the businesses themselves but also the newsagents and other shops which sell them".

The Prime Minister was "extremely concerned", said a source.

Mr Johnson tweeted: "A free press is vital in holding the government and other powerful institutions to account on issues critical for the future of our country, including the fight against climate change.

"It is completely unacceptable to seek to limit the public's access to news in this way."

Ms Patel also held talks with police chiefs, including agreeing on a plan for a major police presence to protect a reoccurrence at printworks on Saturday night.

She is said to have told officers to "get stuck in".

Lord Blunkett, the former Labour home secretary, said: "I think they're mixing up historic debate about picketing with protest relating to political issues, which can be dealt with through the normal democratic process."

He added: "Peaceful protest using distancing is acceptable, anarchy is not."

Richard Walton, a senior fellow at the Policy Exchange think tank and former head of the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command, said: “The actions of Extinction Rebellion cross the line from protest into planned criminality and should be treated as such. The police need to get better at gathering intelligence pre-emptively and intervening to prevent such acts of criminality and upholding the rule of law."

The Government is considering bolstering powers in the Public Order Act to allow police to tackle unauthorised protests, as well as possible new powers to "protect elements of critical national infrastructure and tenets of democracy" - including the freedom for MPs to take part in Commons votes and the distribution of newspapers.

On Saturday, senior ministers were also discussing whether and how the group could be reclassified to help police to crack down on its activities.

A Whitehall source said one option under discussion was for XR to be viewed as an organised crime group, which could result in its members being policed primarily by the National Crime Agency - Britain's FBI.

Under the 2015 Serious Crime Act an organised crime group "has at its purpose, or one of its purposes, the carrying on of criminal activities, and consists of three or more people who agree to act together to further that purpose".

Those found to have participated in the activities of an organised crime group can be imprisoned for up to five years.

More than a thousand XR members have been arrested amid demonstrations since 2018. Activists have been convicted for public order offences, criminal damage and obstructing an engine or a carriage using a railway.

A second Whitehall source said: "They do this in a way that makes it as hard as possible for the police to remove them. The Home Office is looking at various ways we could deal with this kind of incident."

Some discussions have taken place about whether the group could even be proscribed as a terror organisation, but the source said it was thought to be highly unlikely that it would meet the legal threshold for such a move.

Last year, in a report published by Policy Exchange, Mr Walton said XR should be treated as an extremist anarchist group, after finding that it had a “subversive” agenda rooted in the “political extremism of anarchism” rather than just campaigning on climate change.

Responding to the report, an XR spokesman said the research’s conclusions were inaccurate and did not reflect the movement.

“The subversive and extreme agenda is that espoused by the government: ignore the crisis, occasionally say something that sounds as if they get it, then proceed with business as usual at full pace," the group claimed.

SOURCE





Australia: Sydney Anglicans, religious schools declare support for Latham discrimination bill

A number of powerful interest groups including the Sydney Anglican Diocese, the Association of Independent Schools and Catholic Schools NSW have declared support for One Nation leader Mark Latham's bill to amend the state's discrimination laws in favour of religious freedom.

But other church groups, as well as the peak body promoting diversity in Australian workplaces, have condemned the bill, arguing it would permit vilification and harassment in the name of faith and prevent firms from fostering "inclusive cultures".

The comments are contained in submissions to a state parliamentary inquiry which are yet to be published but have been obtained by The Sun-Herald.

Mr Latham's bill would explicitly make it unlawful for a person to be discriminated against on the basis of their religion, bringing NSW into line with other states. However, it would also go much further, protecting people such as former rugby union player Israel Folau from adverse action by employers for comments made outside the workplace that are motivated by religious belief.

It would be unlawful to discriminate against any employee for their religious activity, as long as the activity did not contain "direct criticism" of their employer, or cause "direct and material financial detriment" to the employer.

Mr Folau settled an unlawful dismissal case with Rugby Australia last year after his contract was terminated for his repeated comments on social media that homosexuals, adulterers, drunks and liars were sinners and would go to hell.

In a note accompanying his diocese's submission, Anglican Archbishop of Sydney Glenn Davies lamented that in the social media era, "even the private, social and charitable lives of people of faith become subject to workplace scrutiny and assessment", and required protection.

Dr Davies said there was a growing but "ill-informed" idea in the community that religious people could leave their faith at home, in the private sphere. "A person can no more leave their faith at home as they can temporarily abandon their ethnic identity," he said.

The Association of Independent Schools of NSW said it particularly supported section 22M of the bill which would allow "religious ethos organisations" to discriminate in line with the tenets and doctrines of its faith, including giving preference to people of that faith when hiring and firing.

Catholic Schools NSW, responsible for educating about one in five NSW students, supported the bill's aims but was concerned certain clauses were contradictory and would inadvertently limit Catholic schools' ability to preference Catholic staff and students.

However, some church groups opposed the bill in its current form, including the Uniting Church in NSW and the national Anglican church, which is separate to the Sydney Anglicans.

Carolyn Tan, chair of the Public Affairs Commission of the Anglican Church of Australia, told the inquiry: "We are concerned that the bill does not provide adequate mechanisms for ensuring that religiously-motivated activities do not prevail over the fundamental rights of others and over attempts by employers, law enforcement bodies and others to protect such rights and to enforce public safety, order and health."

Diversity Council Australia, which was founded by large listed companies such as ANZ, AMP, BHP, Coles, Myer, Rio Tinto and Westpac, strongly opposed the bill, warning it prioritised religion above other human rights and would inhibit corporations from creating inclusive workplaces.

For example, DCA suggested the bill could permit an employee to make derogatory comments to a homosexual colleague during an off-site lunch break.

"The proposed legislation would give licence to a wide range of potentially harmful and offensive statements to be made by people 'motivated by a religious belief'," DCA told the inquiry. "Allowing such comments would not enhance social cohesion in NSW, or in workplaces."

The parliamentary inquiry is ongoing and will hold public hearings before the bill is voted upon.

SOURCE 

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here.
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