Monday, August 31, 2020

The Great Society—Not That Great

One truth we often say here at the Spherical Model is,

Whenever government attempts something beyond the proper role of government (protection of life, liberty, and property), it causes unintended consequences—usually exactly opposite to the stated goals of the interference.

I should count how many times I’ve said that. Anyway, it’s something you can count on.

So, back when President Lyndon Johnson developed the Great Society, what did he actually create?

That was the subject of Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s podcast last week with, as his guest, historian Amity Shlaes. You might know her from previous works, The Forgotten Man, about the Great Depression, and her biography on President Calvin Coolidge. Her latest book is Great Society: A New History.

cover image from here

Dan Crenshaw tends to ask a question and then just listen as the guest informs. They went back a couple of decades earlier, to see what was going on. We had won World War II. We were a prosperous nation. We felt omnipotent. So when President Kennedy set a goal to reach the moon, we thought, of course we can. So why not tackle the poverty problem?

Shlaes paraphrases Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, as saying,

AS: “Well, I thought cleaning up poverty would just be basically a mopping up action in the United States,” because he’d seen the achievements of the US in World War II as a soldier. It just didn’t seem like such a big deal.

Dan points out that Kennedy didn’t look like a Democrat of today, so he asks her about that:

Dan: Do you think Kennedy would have, if he was still president, do you think he would have enacted something like The Great Society? You look at a lot of his rhetoric on free markets. He enacted tax cuts and pursued free trade policies and sound budgets. Pro-Second Amendment. It’s hard to see him as a modern-day Democrat. Would he have gone this direction?

She says there are people who have explored that very question. Ira Stoll, in a book called JFK, Conservative. Also Larry Kudlow. Her personal opinion is, no, Kennedy would not have implemented the programs of the Great Society.

He was more conservative than the impulsive progressives around him: his brother Robert Kennedy, his successor Lyndon B. Johnson, his brother-in-law Sergeant Shriver. But once Johnson saw his opportunity, he took it.

Johnson had been involved, years earlier, with President Roosevelt’s New Deal. He thought FDR didn’t get enough done. So he set out to finish. By means of the federal government, of course. And he was very ambitious.

As Shlaes explains,

AS: Lyndon Johnson was a New Dealer. He worked for Franklin Roosevelt. He led the National Youth Administration as a very young man in Texas. So, he said to himself, and to others, “I will finish what Franklin Roosevelt started. He started the New Deal. I will finish the work with The Great Society, and poverty will be cured.” C-u-r-e. That is the verb Johnson used. He didn’t say reduced. A very ambitious goal. And, because we were so wealthy, it seemed eminently possible—get to the moon, cure poverty.

So, what do the metrics say actually happened?

There was poverty. It wasn’t well defined. There wasn’t a metric until a woman in the Labor Department, Molly Orshansky,  invented one. But there were poor people. Shlaes recommended a book, similar to the recent Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance, also about Appalachia, called The Other America, by a Catholic idealist named Michael Harrington. He described the people as really poor. Shlaes says,

AS: And it was true; they were really poor, and they had terrible problems. “So, let’s do something. Surely we can,” was the attitude.

Poverty, nevertheless, was on a downward trend, even in the 50s, because of economic growth. So there was something of an effort to step in front of a trend to take credit for it. Estimates show that the poverty rate was declining downward from 20% toward 10%. It hit 11% in 1973. Dan asks, did that mean the Great Society policies were working? Shlaes says no.

cover image from here

AS: John Cogan wrote a whole book about this, at Stanford. I recommend it. It’s about entitlements. [The book is The High Cost of Good Intentions: A History of US Entitlement Programs.] And what he shows is that, overall—some years you get a different picture—but overall the reduction in poverty decelerated. And then it stalled. So, you look at the result, once all the programs are in place, and in the 70s we kind of got stuck at 10% or so. What does that mean? Maybe 10% of people will always be poor. OK. That’s very sad. But what’s much more important is what we did… and that was to train people to believe they will always get entitlements.

That’s the point that caught my attention. If you want to create a truly great society, how can you get there by incentivizing people not to work?

Shlaes illustrates with the story of a talk she gave at a charter school in Arizona:

AS: I was mentioning food stamps, which exploded at the end of the 60s. And I talked about that. And a student got up and said, “Don’t you care about the poor? My family is on food stamps. We’re not ashamed. How dare you shame us?”

I wasn’t shaming them. The answer to that is, everyone comes to want from time to time. Some people need food stamps. No one would deny them that. It’s not a shame. But what is a shame is to expect, not only yourself, but your children and grandchildren to be on food stamps.

That’s what we did to them. We, the voters, did to poor people. We trained them to dependence. And they don’t deserve that. They’re more talented than that. We trained them to sell dependence rather than look for opportunity. We trained our own children to that. That is a shame.

There was a point where they mentioned Andrew Yang and his universal income. It sounds appealing. But—remember, the consequence is probably going to be the exact opposite of the intention. So what is the intention of a universal income? To alleviate poverty, along with the worry about not having the means for food and shelter. You want people who are free from that worry.

What you will get are people who are not capable of working their way out of poverty—because you take away the incentive. Why work if it doesn’t matter?

I’ve heard the theorists, including Yang, make a relatively convincing argument that changes in technology are going to affect the jobs available—and the level of thinking necessary to do those jobs. Jordan Peterson has talked about this to some extent. There are people that not even the military will accept, because they aren’t trainable. Their IQ is simply too low. It’s a relatively small percentage of the population. Some have a mental defect. Some are simply mentally well below average. Technology could make it so a larger segment of the population fits into that “can’t be trained” category.

But I don’t believe it. We have Down’s Syndrome people among us. Many can be trained. We see them working productive jobs at Walmart and Kroger near us. Can they do all jobs? No, but they can do something worthy of pay. If we didn’t have a minimum wage, there would be more jobs employers would be willing to hire them to do—something commensurate with the value they bring to the employer, so it isn’t merely charity on the employer’s part.

No matter how good technology gets, there’s still a whole lot of menial labor that needs to be done. I think Yang and others overestimate the ability of technology to clean up messes or do physical labor.

But, for argument’s sake, what if we did provide a basic income for those who can’t earn enough—because of their very real limitations? For some, that would mean they’d still need to live with someone who could supervise their daily living. But for the remaining few low-IQ untrained people, it would mean aimless and purposeless lives, to replace their meaningful labor. I don’t think that is a way to improve their lives.

And then you do it for everyone? Universal basic income?

Yang at least does that as a replacement to each and every poverty program now in place. But still. Not a good idea.

Shlaes offers a little history lesson, to show what we’ve already considered.

AS: We tried to do that with the universal income program led by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. It was actually Richard Nixon who led it. It didn’t pass, because Congress saw it was unbelievably expensive. But also because Congress saw it—Congress didn’t want people to think they—it didn’t want to put into concrete the entitlement that you’re supposed to be paid. So, I’m concerned about that, because I do think it’s bad to honor the idea that you should always pay people.

Not to mention, Dan says, “Why would you basically tax people, run that money through a bureaucracy, and then just give them back that money? That doesn’t seem to make any sense.”

What have we learned? What could actually work? Shlaes suggests education and training. She has come to like a historical black civil rights leader named Robert Paris Moses, from New York:

AS: He was a math teacher, and he developed a program called the Algebra Project on the hypothesis that all 13-year-olds should learn algebra. And maybe trig, right? And that all can. And the truth is that almost everyone can learn algebra. They might learn it more slowly than other people.

Almost everyone can be OK in trig. Most of us can’t do calculus. We pretend to, but we can’t. So, we’re all closer to being alike than we imagine.

And, I thought that was a great project. He said African-Americans will have a better life if they can get a skilled job. And, this project, the Algebra Project, won a McArthur grant, a genius grant. It never went scaled. And I think that’s a pity. I liked also about it that it was extremely empirical. “You can learn algebra; let’s be sure you do. And let’s spend endlessly to be sure you know algebra.” If you have algebra and you can talk, you can get a job.

Dan asked about the gap between black and white unemployment, because the Great Society actually made that worse. Shlaes talks about that, reiterating that education point:

AS: We undertook many measures that focused on the black community. And we hurt them. In fact all poor people, but poor people who happened to be black, we accustomed them to the welfare story. And then the question is, why are they unemployed? Some of that is, skills are very important now. We didn’t emphasize skills; we emphasized need. That was a problem. That’s why I like Robert Paris Moses. If you have enough skills, and you can talk to grownups—and that’s important—you can get a job in the United States.

It may not be a good job, but from that job you can learn. And then you move towards the job that you want. That whole culture is gone.

She then mentioned that unions, another outgrowth of the Great Society, added to the problem:

AS: Unions were a big problem in the period too. Unions demanded very high wages. Who loses when unions are powerful? Underskilled people. New arrivals. That’s very sad. So, I’m mainly concerned about education and looking forward.

image from here

Dan, as a legislator, questioned what is the federal government’s role in that. He mention some successes of the private sector, in his Houston area district.

Dan: There’s a lot of private sector places, especially around the Houston area that do really incredible training programs, and they basically want us to just leave them alone. Which seems right. But how do I encourage more companies to do what they’re doing. They’re putting people through—these are definitely low-income, low-skilled people—through a training program that ends up starting, I think, $70,000 a year. Maybe welding pipes or whatever it is. And it’s incredible.

That is incredible. These are jobs people who don’t go to college are getting. Shlaes told another story about free-market solutions.

AS: In New Mexico, a lot of the Great Society was for Native Americans as now. Poverty was sometimes appalling, and people improve that on reservations. The company called Fairchild, whose executives later became the leaders of Intel, the chip maker, decided they were going to open a factory in the reservation area in Shiprock, New Mexico. They even had some cooperation from the government. And they quickly became the largest private sector employer of Native Americans in the United States. They employed hundreds and hundreds of Native Americans in chip making.

It was actually something that Native Americans were really good at, because they had worked with their hands on needlework. And, you know, that was opposed to having a factory abroad.

Eventually… the more left-leaning radicals tried to take over the factory, and the company did what companies always do, which is to withdraw and make the chips elsewhere. Because companies can’t handle big trouble.

But the point was, the private sector generally comes up with great solutions to help poor people by giving them work and training them.

That is the alternative to the Great Society programs: free market innovations. She summarizes the actual solution—instead of federal Great Society programs, which haven’t worked.

AS: A strong economy is the best way to help people out of poverty. It’s actually a fact.

Imagine if the interferences of FDR had never happened. Then imagine that the interferences of LBJ and beyond hadn’t happened. Then add into the equation the boom that happened in the first three years of the Trump administration, after the Obama malaise—and despite the still existing interferences. What if we allowed growth to just keep happening?

You want a truly great society? Follow the rules for freedom, prosperity, and civilization. Limit government to its proper role of protecting life, liberty, and property. Get out of the way so a free market can innovate solutions to problems. And, I’ll add, for when there are times when people need a temporary help—or long-term help that is due to circumstances beyond their control: charity and philanthropy. 

That system works. It takes a self-governing people to do it. But it works a whole lot better than government programs.

Thursday, August 27, 2020

Like Night and Day

Some years ago, for an election, I prayed that the differences would be obvious, so that when the people make a choice, it is for what is real, and not for what they have been deceived into believing.

Like a sunrise, with light beginning to glow, then brightening, as day dawns, that clarity has been coming. It is now the brilliant explosion of light that happens as a dawning sun rises above a mountain. It’s almost glaring.

So there ought to be no difficulty in seeing which side brings light and which side brings darkness. This, despite the MSM attempts to sell a false narrative. So there’s a caveat about seeing this light of truth: you have to open your eyes. As the scriptures put it, have eyes to see and ears to hear.

With this sharp contrast, I thought it might be an appropriate time to do a side-by-side comparison of how well the different sides align with the principles that lead to freedom, prosperity, and civilization—and away from tyranny, poverty, and savagery.


The Spherical Model
Political, Economic, and Social spheres

As a refresher, here’s the thumbnail version of the principles.

Political Sphere—toward freedom (For more detail, read this.)

·       Is the policy being debated something that an individual has the right to do, and therefore has the right to delegate to his/her government?

·       Does the policy infringe in any way on God-given natural rights, such as those enumerated in the Bill of Rights?

·       Is the idea being debated a proper role of government: some aspect of protection (including national defense, protection from interstate crime, enabling international and interstate commerce, standardized weights and measures and currency to protect the value of wealth, the judiciary that guarantees the protective laws), as enumerated in the Constitution?

·       Is the perspective appropriately local? It is important that any issue be handled at the most local level possible.

Economic Sphere—toward prosperity (For more detail, read this.)

·       Is the person who did the work the one deciding how to use the fruits of that labor?

·       Is voluntary charity/philanthropy the method of taking care of the needs for food, shelter, and medical care of those who cannot meet their own needs.

Social Sphere—toward civilization (For more detail, read this, and this.)

·       Is the society a free and open religious society?

·       Through laws, mores, tastes, institutions, and behaviors, does the society honor God, life, family, truth, and property ownership?

·       Does the society recognize, protect, and preserve the family—married mother and father raising their children—as the basic unit of civilization?

Those are the ingredients necessary for life in the northern hemisphere.

So, if you’re going to decide how to vote, there’s the standard. The standard is not, is this a nice person? Does this person have good intentions? Does this person sound smarter than I am, or smarter than the other candidate? Does this person have an innate right to rule over me because of some elite status? Is this person more popular than the other candidate? Throw all that out and use the actual standard.

So let’s take a look at the two major sides. This is, of course, my wording. I’m sure the “blue” side would “not say it that way.” But I have attempted to accurately say their views without embellishment.

 

Trump/Republican

↑ or

Biden/Democrat

↑ or ↓

The Constitution is the basic rule of law for our Republic. We believe it is inspired, and the best system of government ever devised on earth.

The majority opinion is the ruling factor in our laws. A constitution is just a paper and was written for its own time, not ours.

We believe that, in order to have the rule of law, judges must adhere to the actual written language of the law.

We believe that the law is what the judge decides it is in order to get the outcome we believe is the right outcome.

We believe the federal government is limited to the powers enumerated in the Constitution; all other rights are reserved by the states and by the people.

We believe the federal government has the right to do what it deems is in the best interests of the government. If a large enough interest asks for something, the federal government is empowered to provide it.

We believe in encouraging the free exercise of religion, unhindered by government. We encourage people to be religious in order to be self-governing.

Religion is tolerable in private, but it shouldn’t extend to where it can make someone uncomfortable—with the exception of Islam, which we go out of our way to accommodate to show we are not Islamophobic.

We encourage freedom of speech, especially on issues of disagreement.

We should protect people from speech they find offensive, because speech is violence. We claim the right to shut down speech we don’t like in any forum or platform we choose.

We encourage the freedom to peaceably assemble, for worship, learning, socializing, and even protesting.

Government should decide whether people have the right to assemble, but we can curtail it, for example, in times of a widespread disease. Also, we retain the right to declare a protest we approve of as safe from disease, and we’ll call a riot peaceful if we approve of the message.

We have an inherent right to self-defense, which must include the right to own and bear arms.

Government should decide when/if a person should be allowed a weapon or even permission to defend themselves; nor should a person assume they have the right to have the police protect them or their property—that is an artifact of their white privilege.

America is an exceptional nation, based on ideals of equal opportunity. It is inherently good, and remains so as much as we adhere to the ideals of our founding.

America is inherently racist and evil. Overthrow is better than small improvements. Since blacks were enslaved, they should now be given power.

All human beings are created equal before the law. We measure the content of a person’s character, rather than the color of their skin.

Since America is inherently racist, the solution is to be racist against anyone of a race that wasn’t previously oppressed.

We will maintain our freedoms and sovereignty by standing strong against our enemies, foreign and domestic, and standing with our allies.

We have been oppressing the world by being a superpower, so we should allow ourselves to be weakened, and hope that mollifying our enemies will convince them to treat us more mercifully than we deserve.

We work to protect the innocent and the victims of crime, using lawful justice, including at times capital punishment for heinous crimes such as aggravated capital murder.

We work to protect the perpetrators of crime, who are the victims of an inherently unjust society. We oppose capital punishment, since that is taking a life.

We believe in protecting innocent life, which begins in the womb, where it is a separate human being from the mother, and as a human being is entitled to human dignity and care.

We believe in a woman’s right to choose whether her fetus should be allowed to live; it isn’t a life unless she wants it to be a life—up until birth. And we should be open to a conversation about post-birth abortion. Also, taxpayers should pay for abortions and birth control, since those are a woman’s rights.

We believe in end-of-life care that honors life; we oppose euthanasia or assisted suicide. And we oppose hospital panels determining, against the will of the patient and family, to terminate life-sustaining care.

We believe in the dignity of a worthwhile life, but when life is no longer productive, or is a drain on societal resources, ending a life should be an acceptable choice for whoever is making the decision.

We believe in the free and fair exchange that happens in a free market; government should protect the free market from monopolies and illegal dealings, but should otherwise get out of the way.

We believe in more government control of the economy, to determine what businesses can open, what they must pay, what benefits they must offer, and we will use regulatory agencies to make the laws governing commerce, and to adjudicate and employ penalties for those laws.

We believe the person who does the work, takes the risks, and earns the money should decide how to spend it.

We believe that government should decide when a person has more than they need so that their surplus can be taken and given to someone it decides is more worthy to use that money.

We honor those who risk their lives to keep us safe: the military, the police, firefighters, and other first responders.

We see systemic racism in our police forces and call for defunding them. We purposely cut spending for our military. But we’re willing to support those that unions tell us to support.

We believe education is an essential part of preparing our next generation to sustain this nation’s greatness, but the federal role is support and information; states take on the role of public education; parents above all own the responsibility for what, how, and where their children will be taught.

We believe education is an excellent tool for molding the type of citizen we want. We therefore use schools for indoctrination and inculcation of our chosen doctrines. We unite with teachers’ unions and experts in academia to determine what, where, and how children should be taught. Parents should get out of the way and let the experts handle it. We oppose school choice in any form.

We believe, and we’re in agreement with thousands of years of history and all the social science, that a married mother and father are the best ones to raise their children. We therefore honor and protect family as the basic unit of civilization.

We believe that sex is a natural and normal human requirement, in any and all its forms, and therefore any sexual relationship should be given equal honor with that antiquated idea of traditional marriage. After all, it is government that determines what is best for children, and we will update the definition of marriage and civilization as we see fit.

We believe in remembering and honoring our heritage. We behold with reverence our monuments and memorials, and remember those who contributed to our great history. We love our flag, our pledge, and the many reverent places that remind us where we’ve been and what it takes to go forward. “Americans build their future. We don’t tear down our past.”[i]

We believe that progress is evolutionary and inevitable, so we don’t need to learn from history. Instead, we’ll eschew the past and all its symbols. We look to modern sources for the ideas of our time: Black Lives Matter, Planned Parenthood, the Green New Deal, the United Nations, international NGOs,

 

This list is clearly not exhaustive. But it’s enough to show a clear pattern, useful for this upcoming election. During President Trump’s acceptance speech, which I listened to before I finished writing, he mentioned this too. It’s like the difference between light and darkness.

It’s clear that one side is about freedom, prosperity, and civilization. The other side, regardless of their rhetoric, is about tyranny—ruling over the people who give them any power. And about poverty—which has been the result every time their controlled economy theories have been tried. And about savagery—which we see on the riot-ruined streets of our country right now.

My words are probably not the last word. Here’s someone’s compilation, on Facebook, answering the question, “What Has Trump ActuallyDone?” And here is the Trump/Pence campaign page on what they plan to do in a second term. 



[i] From President Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, August 27, 2020.

Monday, August 24, 2020

It's Already a War

I was listening to a news show the other night, and when it got to this part, I paused it, re-listened, and then set up so I could later transcribe it. Next morning, Mr. Spherical Model had seen the same news show, and when I told him a part had gotten my attention, he guessed it was this part. Let’s proceed before further comment.

The daily news broadcast is Crossroads, with Joshua Philipp, a production of The Epoch Times. This is from late Friday, August 21, 2020. CCP refers to Chinese Communist Party.


Joshua Philipp reporting on CCP role in US riots
screenshot from here

The Chinese regime may have played a hand in the mass protests and the riots that have been sweeping across the United States. They’ve allegedly identified and sent guidance to people who are aligned with Black Lives Matter and the far-left radical organization Antifa. This is according to a recent article by Radio Free Asia, which also noted the CCP’s actions played a role in the US ordering the closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston.

According to the story, the CCP had sent soldiers from the Second Department of its General Staff Department to the Chinese consulate in Houston. They were equipped with fake IDs as well. From there they used data from a large video platform to identify people whose interests suggested that they may participate in protests around Black Lives Matter and Antifa, and then created and sent them customized videos on how to organize riots and how to spread their messages. The story does not name the companies that were involved in the operations.

Now, this is interesting from a few different angles. When it comes to the soldiers the CCP sent to the consulate, the General Staff Department is the war fighting branch of the Chinese military. The Second Department, the spy branch, operates alongside its Signals Intelligence Branch known for its military hackers, which is a Third Department. You might remember those individuals indicted during the Obama administration with unit 61398. Those were Third Department.

Now, why were spies from the war fighting branch of China’s military sent to the United States to stir up unrest?

It’s also interesting that soldiers from the CCP’s military spy agency were sent to the United States with fake IDs. This may relate to the recent announcement from US Customs and Border Protection that it seized close to 20,000 fake IDs in Chicago and said the majority of them had arrived from China.

When it comes to the CCP getting involved in the protests and riots in the United States, it’s also interesting to note that Russia was found to have done something very similar ahead of the US elections in 2016. And now that we move on to the 2020 elections, this is a big deal in that context. This is among the few points that were used as evidence of Russia meddling in the elections. The Russian trolls were exposed for buying advertisements in different social media platforms that promoted civil unrest.

And as Slate noted at the time, the findings emerged that “Russian trolls were obsessed with Black Lives Matter.” Part of this ties to long-running operations around ideological subversion. These were Soviet era methods of demoralizing and destabilizing a country. Part of the idea was to encourage and to accelerate what would have otherwise been grassroots unrest.

The CCP appears to have taken this even further, however, by deploying soldiers on American soil, then using big data technology to identify and target Americans directly, with their guidelines on how to organize riots.

In Shanghai, meanwhile, the personal information of more than 1.9 million Communist Party members was leaked. And The Epoch Times received Excel files containing details on CCP members in Shanghai’s municipal government institutions and businesses. The leaked records contain names, birthplace, ID numbers, home addresses, and communication information of the Shanghai members of the Chinese Communist Party. And Epoch Times was able to confirm the legitimacy of these documents. The leaked list of party members began to circulate online after the United States announced potential visa restrictions on CCP members and their families. While the documents were only leaked recently, it does appear they come from as early as July 2016.

And why does this matter? This adds to fear among CCP officials, both of the discussions are on travel restrictions on CCP members, and of the possibility that they could be hit by US sanctions for carrying out abusive orders from the Chinese Communist Party.

Interesting.

This is the Radio Free Asia story referred to, which I had Google translate for me: “The last straw that overwhelms the Houston Consulate.” Here’s a key statement:

According to reports, the Second Department of the General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army recruited people from a major Internet company, used false identities to go to the Houston consulate, used the background data of a major audio-visual platform in the powerful country [China] to assist BLM and ANTIFA, and sent "tailor-made" to African Americans. A promotional video for the riot organization; in a word, it is to "weaponize" big data.

Photo from Reuters profile, found here.

The Epoch Times is more attuned to China news than most outlets, and Joshua Philipp’s report in particular tends to cover China news before other world news. But wasn’t this a huge story that ought to be appearing elsewhere?

Earlier today I came across one other source. This is a story by Texas writer Bryan Preston for PJ Media, “Did China’s Consulate in Houston Use TikTok to Stir Up Antifa BLM Riots?” He refers to the same Radio Free Asia “ChinaScope” story, and observes this:

If this ChinaScope report is true, and the Houston Chinese consulate was the hub of unrest via TikTok, it makes sense of the recent events noted above. It also makes some sense of the riots themselves. Antifa got its start as the communists’ street fighters in Weimar Germany. Black Lives Matters’ leaders have openly stated they are trained Marxists. The strongest communist regime on earth today is the one in Beijing under its most authoritarian leader in decades, Xi Jinping. The rioters’ goal is not any particular policy outcome, but to subvert and weaken America. Destroying our cities, defunding law enforcement, agitating against ICE, and dividing America along racial lines all support the goal of weakening the United States, which happens to be China’s long-term foreign policy goal.

The part of the story that is not new related to TikTok, and Thousand Talents, a CCP effort to infiltrate and subvert US science and medical research. It related to the spying coming out of China's recently closed Houston consulate, among other consulates to be closed. Preston says this:

That talent plan is Thousand Talents, a large and sprawling effort on the part of the Chinese Communist Party to subvert top-level researchers in the United States and across the free world in a variety of key fields and buy their research, which is turned over to the People’s Liberation Army. That’s China’s ironically named military, which liberates no one, threatens its own citizens, and helps maintain the communists’ police state. Thousand Talents has been uncovered and several arrests have been made this year, including the high-profile arrest of Dr. Charles Lieber of Harvard. Lieber is one of the world’s top nanoscientists. The Department of Justice accuses him of secretly working for the communists in Beijing via the Wuhan University of Technology.

Someone passed along a video to me today, of a dad in California, whose child’s school lesson on day 4 was pro-Black Lives Matter, under the pretense of teaching against racism, which he got to see because they're doing distance learning. (This propaganda to kids is yet another reason to homeschool.)

Screenshot (flipped) from here

I was curious about that raised fist symbol, which I remember as a black power symbol over many decades. According to Wikipedia,

The black fist, also known as the Black Power fist is a logo generally associated with Black nationalism, defiance, solidarity, and socialism. Its most widely known usage is by the Black Panther Party, a socialist group, in the 1960s. 

Wikipedia also informs us,

Different movements sometimes use different terms to describe the raised fist salute: amongst communists and socialists, raised right fist is sometimes called the red salute, whereas amongst some African-American activists, especially in the United States it has been called the Black Power salute. The Rotfrontkämpferbund paramilitary organization of Communist Party of Germany used the right hand fist salute as early as 1924. 

Different organizations may add elements to use it for their purposes. One example is the hammer and sickle being combined with it, used as part of communist symbolism.

Interestingly, the raised fist is also used by officials in China when being sworn into office.

The symbolism is just another clue. These are the same forces fighting a war against our liberty for a very long time.

Black Lives Matter is Marxist. (And, I might as well add, so is Antifa, which is about as anti-fascist as Nazi Germany of the 1930s-1940s was.) BLM has been open about that on their website, and their founders brag of being “trained Marxists.” Who trains a Marxist? Somebody already steeped in that philosophy. Rumors have flown about George Soros funding. I wouldn’t discount that; he’s definitely an authoritarian, and a Marxist, with a stated intention of bringing down the United States, as well as other countries.

Another possibility is Russia. They’ve worked against the US since—well, probably since they became Marxist at the inception of the Soviet Union. But they’ve been weakened recently. And even in 2016 their efforts were a relatively minor continuation of ongoing disinformation practices.

Then there’s China—the largest and most threatening Marxist regime on the planet. We have a president who has stood up to them, and the US is both their biggest rival economically and philosophically. That is, the real America, with a constitution that is antithetical in every way to Marxist authoritarian rule. Wouldn’t it be in their interest to attempt to get the US to collapse from within?

Preston ends with this:

This report, if true, connects several dots and casts the riots of the past few months in a new light. It’s an effort on the part of a hostile regime to weaken our nation’s integrity. Its leaders and operators on U.S. soil are, knowingly or not, doing the bidding of a hostile foreign government.

To summarize, for clarity, the Chinese government has been conducting a war against the United States. At this point it is a cold war, rather than a full-on hot one, but a war nevertheless. They have put their military on US soil. And they have been targeting Americans to recruit to the anti-American side.

The protests you are seeing—the supposed peaceful ones, where it’s just about speaking out against racism—those are a propaganda movement. Those attending have been targeted through social media to have their opinions manipulated; their news has been controlled so they don’t see another side. What ought to be a reliable US media has been willfully complicit.

And what about the riots—the actual violence against property and people, such as has been going on for 13 weeks and counting in Portland, as well as elsewhere around the country? A few rioters might be opportunists. But mainly those are people targeted, recruited, and trained by our enemy, a Marxist authoritarian regime, in league with other Marxists around the world, intent on the overthrow of our Constitution and the subjugation of free American people.

Next time someone insists that you have to support Black Lives Matter or you’re a racist—let them know that you know the truth. If they’re really about making America better, they’ll hear you. If they won’t hear you, they’re among those targeted and recruited by our deadliest enemy.

Do you give up on such a person? It depends on how much you love and care about that individual, and how much energy you can devote to deprogramming them while we’re in a war in defense of our liberty, our lands, our families, and our religion[i].



[i] Alma48:10 uses this list and calls it the cause of Christians.