Two Movies You Couldn't Make Again

This is going to be a bit of a movie review, or just commentary. Probably no spoilers. Both are documentaries. Both could probably not be made again.

 

What Is a Woman?

This documentary, by Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire, is worth seeing. He’s dealing with the transgender question by asking the absolutely fundamental question, “What is a woman?” It ought to be simple enough. But in our day, the obviously simple answer is fraught with danger. If you say the basic truth, you’ll be labeled a heinous bigot.

So Matt Walsh covers the country, and the globe, asking this question. He asks it at the annual Woman’s March, wearing a sandwich board sign. He of course gets heckled and ousted, but doesn’t get an answer. He asks it on the streets; I think he’s in Hollywood. People on the street obviously know what a woman is but act like it’s a tough question they can’t answer.

Matt Walsh talking to people on the street in Hollywood
in the film What Is a Woman?

He asks a series of therapists and transgender people (some of the therapists are transgender people as well). They attempt answers, but these are circular. A woman is what a person says it is. But what is it they say they are? A woman. But what is that? It’s whatever they say it means.

You get the picture. Walsh goes through these interviews basically deadpan. He doesn’t indicate an agenda. And this interests me. I wondered how he got these people to talk to him. If they’re going to be angry at him just for asking basic questions, or indicating that he’s trying to get to a truthful definition, why would they submit to his questions?

During some of the interviews and podcasts he’s done since the movie came out last week, he has been giving some behind-the-scenes info. Here’s the thing: they didn’t know who he was.

I’ve been following his blog and podcast for over a decade, since before he was at The Blaze, and long before he joined The Daily Wire crew. He has a sizable following and is fairly well known. To our side. He’s a social conservative opining mainly on social issues. These opinions are essentially unknown to the people he interviewed. They’re aware there’s opposition. But as one therapist (a doctor who performs permanent mutilating surgery on minors) dismisses such opposition as “dinosaurs.” They’re relics of an ancient bone heap of some past generation.

It did not occur to them to look him up. If a person with film crew was coming to ask basic questions—and he submitted the questions to them ahead of time—then it must be an opportunity to declare their message, they seem to assume.

Matt Walsh's bestselling children's book
image found here

Their lack of awareness astounds me. Granted, Matt Walsh had gotten a significant amount of notoriety during the previous year of filming. So most of the interviews were done before he had an infamous encounter asking a trans person to define “what is a woman” on the Dr. Phil show this past February.  And it was before he published a best-selling children’s book, Johnny the Walrus, illustrating the absurdity of letting children decide what they are, with the story of a child who imagines himself to be a walrus. And I guess it is even before he temporarily moved to Loudon County, Virginia, to speak for one minute at a school board meeting. 

Still, like I said, I’ve been following him for over a decade. And his media footprint isn’t invisible for anyone with a search engine.

I think today he could no longer make the movie. He wouldn’t get those people to even respond to his requests, let alone sit in a room with him to answer questions.

A very fun part of the movie was when he goes to Kenya to ask the question of Masai tribesmen, through an interpreter. They thought he was crazy. Everyone knows what a woman is. And if you think you can change from man to woman, they think there’s something wrong with you both for thinking it’s possible and for wanting it to be possible.

Walsh has said in interviews that this part was most painful to his pride. He had to let them think maybe he agreed with these ideas, or at least that he thought they were questions to ask seriously, which meant he left them thinking he was such an idiot—and that people in the US were wacky, and that they’d never want to go there.

I can see he needed to not tell them beforehand, in order to get their honest answers. But I would have thought he’d disabuse them of these misconceptions after the interview. He says he didn’t. To this day they think he’s a crazy American who doesn’t know a man can’t become a woman.

Matt Walsh speaks with Masai tribesmen to ask them,
"What is a woman?" screenshot from here

The point of that adventure was to see if, as is claimed, sex is just a Western social construct. The Masai are about as non-Western as he could find. So, if they know how a man and woman are different, it is not because they have been fed this “social construct” by Western traditions.

The documentary is well done. And Matt Walsh is perhaps the singular person who could ask the question in the way he does.

There’s more to the movie, including the ramifications of society going the way of this war against basic truth. The attempts to hack and prevent this successful film from being seen is evidence the opposition knows the power this movie might have.

You can stream the movie at https://www.dailywire.com/videos/what-is-a-woman and probably some other streaming sources.

Here are some of the movie premiere discussions:

·        “Daily Wire Backstage: What is a Woman? PREMIERE” June 1, 2022. 

·        “What surprised Matt Walsh the most when filming 'What is a Woman' | Will Cain Podcast” June 8, 2022. 

·        “Matt Walsh Revisits His What Is A Woman Interview With Dr. Forcier” June 3, 2022. 

·        “Trans YouTuber Responds To What Is A Woman Trailer” Matt Walsh, May 23, 2022. 

 

2000 Mules

I’ve talked about this movie by Dinesh D’Souza a bit already (here and here). One description of the theater experience was, there was a smattering of clapping afterward, but mostly there was stunned silence. People didn’t immediately get up and leave. They were thinking something like, “Wow! It really happened. What do we do now?” That's still an open questions.

There was an interesting interview Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips did with Roman Balmakov on Facts Matter, for EpochTV. Phillips, who does not seem inclined to overstatement, says what they revealed in the movie is just the beginning. There is game changing information coming out soon. In an interview Phillips did with Patriot Patel, he places the release of this information at about six weeks out, or around mid-July.

Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips talk about 2000 Mules
screenshot from here

I’ve been trying to imagine what this bombshell might be. I’m assuming it’s something that can be shown through data analysis, since that’s what he specializes in. He says it isn’t something that can be turned into a movie. It’s something he can clearly explain in a couple of minutes. But there’s six more weeks of getting ready to lay that out? I don’t know what details have to be checked and rechecked. Some of it has to do with getting the information out. He said he’d be bringing news outlets, such as Patriot Patel, together to lay out the explanation. I presume those outlets won’t include the various censoring media.

So I’m curious.

This is another movie that might not be made at another time. The perpetrators know how they were tracked this time. So will they use burner phones? Will they avoid the multiple drop boxes per mule that they encouraged this time? That was to avoid the sudden overload in a single drop box, which would cause suspicion. If all the nearby drop boxes got, say, around 100 ballots in a day, and this one drop box got 1300, that would be an anomaly.

There’s also the fact that, while video surveillance of the drop boxes is required by law, most did not do it. Video coinciding with geotracking is enough evidence for an indictment. So—do you just “accidentally” fail to provide video? Seems likely.

True the Vote noticed mules during the Georgia runoff using latex gloves—after a case where the perpetrators were caught because of fingerprints on the ballots. So they change their method based on what was done to catch them in the past.

Back in May, I had something weird happen on my phone. I asked this question in a group, but didn’t find anyone who had experienced something similar. Anyway, here’s what I posted:

Sincere question, not sure who to ask: This past Friday I went to the internet on my phone, which I do less frequently than most. A notification popped up—which disappeared before I could figure out how to get a screenshot—telling me, as I recall, that my security agreement was changing. Companies I go to online would no longer be able to track me or purchase my tracking data.

Normally I’d say that’s a good thing. I already opt out of tracking wherever I notice that I can. But this was the week 2000 Mules came out. In that documentary, True the Vote (from here in Houston) used tracking data, available for purchase by companies, and/or used by law enforcement, to identify phone tracking data showing people who went from one mail-in ballot drop box to another, when it is illegal to drop off another person’s ballot.

So, was this announcement a normal phone update? Or was it a response to the knowledge that tracking data can locate illegal voting? And if it’s the latter, does that mean we won’t have the same means of tracking this form of illegal voting in November?

Maybe it was normal, and I’m being a bit paranoid. But the timing of it, just days after the movie premiered, seems odd. And I wonder if it could mean there’s movement to stop mules from being tracked the next time around.

You can find the movie and ways to stream it at https://2000mules.com/.

Here are a few extra videos related to this movie:

·        “EXCLUSIVE: Ballot Mules Funded by Obama-Linked NGOs Pouring Billions Into ‘Local Insurgencies’” June 3, 2022. 

o   Watch the full version on EpochTV May 13, 2022

·        “Patel Patriot Interviews Gregg Phillips” May 28, 2022. 

·        “2000 Mules: Why I Changed My Mind About the2020 Election | Dinesh D’Souza | POLITICS" The Rubin Report, June 5, 2022

·        “FILM REVIEW 2000 Donkeys by Delish” Mr. Reagan podcast, May 9, 2022. 

Misinformation, Disinformation, Malinformation—and Censorship

I looked up the government’s definitions for these three types of information the new Disinformation Governance Board is concerning themselves with:

·        Misinformation is false, but not created or shared with the intention of causing harm.

·        Disinformation is deliberately created to mislead, harm, or manipulate a person, social group, organization, or country.

·        Malinformation is based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.

Notice that this includes false information you didn’t know was false (a mistaken belief), false information you knew was false (a lie), and true information that the government deems evil. In other words, it includes all information, true or false, that the government comes up with a reason to disapprove of.

You’ve been hearing it called the Ministry of Truth, which wouldn’t make sense, since they want to hide inconvenient truth, not declare it—unless you’re familiar with George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.

image from a T-shirt, found here

In that novel, the Ministry of Truth is the censoring department deciding what people are allowed to know or say or even think. Truth, of course, has nothing to do with it. But their language, Newspeak, is a way of saying things to hide what the government is doing, so as to control the people.

Ministry of Truth is a description of the kinds of organizations found in other regimes:

·        The Nazis’ Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, established 1933.

·        Glavlit, the Soviet Union’s propaganda arm, under Stalin.

·        The Kuomintang (KMT) of the Chinese Communist Party.

·        The Juche ideology in North Korea.

·        Castro’s propaganda apparatus in Cuba.

Of Cuba’s propaganda apparatus, Wikipedia says, “Today the Cuban government maintains an intricate propaganda machine that includes a global news agency, magazines, newspapers, broadcasting facilities, publishing houses, front groups, and other miscellaneous organizations that all stem from the modest beginnings of Castro's revolutionary propaganda machine.” Add in a total control of social media, on top of all other media, and a government just might find totalitarianism easy to accomplish and maintain. 

According to the government’ website, they are calling this—this writing that I do here, in the safety of obscurity—terrorism; domestic terrorism. Criticism of the government—including criticism of a current administration while they are undermining our Constitution—is considered a form of terrorism. 

On their website, they say there’s a focus on elections, so today so will I.

They do not bother about preventing election fraud. Instead, they are concerned with conversations that undermine trust in the election system. In other words, instead of increasing trust by increasing election security, they are targeting those who want to increase election security. Expressing questions about things that were not done according to law, or that left open the possibility of fraud, are on the list—I guess qualifying as malinformation, which is true stuff they don’t like.

 

2000 Mules

In a spirit of rebellion against Big Brother, then, I suggest you find a theater to go see Dinesh D’Souza’s new documentary 2000 Mules, which details a particular type of voter fraud, the kind that combines ballot harvesting and/or weak rules surrounding mail-in ballots and unmanned drop boxes. It’s illegal to handle anyone’s ballot but your own. So when you find people going from drop box to drop box—particularly after stopping at Democratic headquarters or other election fortification nonprofits—then you look at those.

True the Vote, the organization from here in Houston that taught me how to be a poll watcher, gathered the evidence. They thought to use geo-tracking data from cell phones, the kind of widely used information purchased by companies for marketing purposes. They targeted a few cities, I think five around the country. And they eliminated any chance of coincidental traffic, such as a person dropping off their own ballot and then by happenstance going to a store near the next drop box. They’ll spell out the details, but I think their targets had to go to at least five drop boxes plus the nonprofits.

Then, where it was available, they got public security camera footage, targeting the time stamps when the “mules” were dropping off ballots. Then they had not only phone tracking but photos of the person and what they were doing. There could be no excuses like, “I loaned my phone to my brother,” or “I was just going to that store there; I wasn’t even using the drop box.”

screenshot from the 2000 Mules movie trailer

The documentary is showing this week (May 2 and May 4). Tickets are only available at their website, not at theaters, so there can be no intimidation of theater employees. Unfortunately, I hesitated to coordinate with my husband, and all tickets within driving distance were sold out for May 2, when we were available. There will also be a livestream on Saturday, May 7. That is an election day here in Texas, so poll workers will miss that opportunity. I’m guessing that there will be additional opportunities after this initial viewing, because the idea is to get all the election fraud deniers to see it.

It appears that just the cities investigated, with the limitations True the Vote imposed on themselves, provided enough instances of voter fraud to have flipped the election.

There’s a Townhall article here. 

 

Another Data Scientist Proves Voter Fraud

While we’re on this to-be-censored subject, I saw yet another data scientist’s take on election fraud, which seems to me a reasonable focus for investigation. He has found an anomaly in the machine counting that took place in 2020. The data scientist is Jeffrey O’Donnell, whose company is Ordros Analytics. You can see the full interview here. 

This story is out of Mesa County, Colorado. Their Dominion machines were due for an update in May 2021. But a wise county clerk, Tina Peters, thought to ask what that update would do to the data already on the machines. Federal law requires keeping all election-related materials for 22 months after an election; Colorado requires 25 months. It’s fortunate she asked, because that update was going to do a clean wipe of the hard drive. So they took an image of the hard drive first—that is, an exact digital replica of the hard drive. It’s a process used by organizations to backup their data, to preserve it, or to present it elsewhere such as in a court proceeding. It’s how we are learning what is on Hunter Biden’s laptop without having the actual laptop; images were made and shared. (I do not suggest looking for that image, since there’s illegal stuff on Biden’s hard drive.)

Anyway, they took this digital image of what was on their machines after the 2020 election. And, since they could, they made it available, in case somebody out there wanted to go through the data. Friends of O’Donnell thought he was the right person to take that on.

The first step of a computer audit is to look at the numbers and see if they add up. They did not. He tells the story, using the timeline:

They started counting ballots on the 19th of October. And these were, of course, mail-in ballots that had come in at that point. And over the next three days until halfway through the 21st, they had counted about over 25,000 mail-in ballots at that point. And what happened is that at 2:00 or so in the afternoon, something woke up inside the machine.

This was not caused by anything the clerks did. This was not a normal procedure. Some bit of code inside the Dominion machine woke up and decided that it needed to create some new databases, copy some ballot information to those new databases—not all but some of that—and essentially went through that reprocessing of about 20,000 of the 25,000 ballots.

We know that they are reprocessed, because there’s a thing called adjudication, or manual adjudication. And that’s simply that, when a ballot gets put into the system, if the computer can figure out what the voter meant to do by the dots, then we’re fine. It registers those votes. If it can’t, then it kicks them out to a couple humans that have to look at them and at the image of the ballot and see if they can determine what the voter meant to vote for. That’s what we mean by adjudication. Or, I call it manual adjudication just to kind of make clear it’s a human being doing it.

Well, when those 20,000 or so were run through again, the number of ballots that were kicked out for this manual adjudication process wasn’t the same.

Now, the same ballots run through the same computer with the same software should have had the same results. And the only way to explain that is, something had changed in the ballots at that point. Which, to me, points to where— Well, what I’ve told you so far is already proof of ballot manipulation. That it went through this process that nobody told it to do and nobody— There’s no way to explain it terms of normal processing.

It's unauthorized. And it is on a very deep level, illegal. And by the fact that these were reprocessed, then, if it had the opportunity then to overwrite any votes that were counted the first time it was through, it was a do-over on those 20,000. And then after that was done, it just kind of went on to the rest of the election as normal.

the anomalous reprocessing in Mesa County, Colorado during mail-in ballot counting 2020
screenshot from the O'Donnell video interview

Lest you think this was a one-off, an anomaly, a “mouse running across the keyboard” sort of scenario, there’s more. Mesa County had an additional election in April 2021, with mail-in ballots starting to be counted in late March. The same anomaly happened again, in the same way. For this one, O’Donnell says,

They were about 40% through the election [the count of existing mail-in ballots]. And suddenly this rogue process woke up. It can't read some of the ballots, and reprocessed and left others in there. It was, you know, different numbers obviously, because it was a different election and a smaller number, but it was the same unauthorized process that occurred again.

So that meant they needed to look deeper. He has spent the last seven months preparing his report. And he calls this Mesa County information the Rosetta Stone that is giving them the clues to know what to look for in other elections.

They are finding some serious anomalies. There’s what he calls the Law of Big Numbers. He explains:

The best way to think about that is as if you flip a coin and it comes on some coin twice; it comes up once heads and once tails. So, if you look at, I have half heads and half tails. If I flip it again the third time, whichever one comes up, it's going to be I have a third now of one and two thirds. So it's a big jump from 50% to 66% or whatever percent.

But imagine if you flip the coin a thousand times and you're keeping track of what percentage of heads tails. On the thousand and first flip, that count where you get the heads or tails of that coin can only affect the percentage by 1/1000^th, because you've already had a thousand flips into that data.

What they saw was that, in the counting of mail-in ballots, after a large number were counted, you’d expect only a very little affect in percentage with each additional ballot counted—because you’d expect some randomness in how they were turned in. But what you actually see is, late in the process a huge percentage go a certain way and no other.

As he explains, in olden days of voter fraud, the fraudulent actors would wait until well into the process to find out what number they needed in order to accomplish their win, and they would suddenly come up with those ballots. Someone comes in with—"these boxes of ballots I had forgotten were in my shed” (actually happened in Washington State a couple of decades ago).

These days it’s less physical. It’s in the numbers being counted. They’ve done a hyper-accurate calculation of how many votes they need under what circumstances; they’ve pre-loaded the expectation into the machine. And when the machine sees they’re not going to reach their plan, the algorithm kicks in to “reprocess” ballots to get a new count.

When we should expect to see very little affect on the percentage with each additional vote—

Instead, we see wild rises and falls in the last portion of these races.

That's the fingerprint, or one of the fingerprints, that we see once we're out 100,000 votes or so…. Suddenly have a swing, and that swing can be frankly in either direction.

Theoretically it could be either direction. In this particular election it was one particular direction—the Democrat direction. He adds, in case it’s not clear yet,

This is an unnatural pattern of voting. This is not how people vote. This is not how large numbers work. It points to manipulation. There has to be something manipulating the votes in order to get this kind of pattern of voting.

Theoretically, you could have a place where this unnatural pattern happens. You could get a sudden string of 100 “tails” in your coin flip following a randomly even first 1000 tosses. But you wouldn’t see it over and over in different places. Other places would even out the percentages. The odds are so astronomically against this anomaly that it’s impossible for it to happen naturally.

When asked whether they’d found this anomaly elsewhere around the country, the answer is a definitive Yes:

We have found the same fingerprints in all states, all counties, and all vendors that we have looked at so far. And it’s considerable now.

He's saying it isn't just Dominion machines; it's every counting machine they've looked at. 

A machine to count votes—its one task—ought to be fairly simple. These machines are not simple. They contain 300 or so complex tables in dozens of separate files and folders—only one table of which is the actual vote count. But the machines seem to be whirring along, sorting votes, apparently to keep better track of when an algorithm needs to kick in and reprocess some votes.

O’Donnell was asked where his report and the investigations in other states are all going. He says,

I think that things are finally moving at comparatively breakneck speed as we get close to the 22-month period, where they are allowed. As I've said, that we're right now, I guess four months from the biggest coordinated bonfire since Nero burned down Rome.

And so everyone—that I deal with anyway—is fully aware of this. And there’s really a three-pronged effort going on. And there's no reason why we can't do all three at the same time, because we've got a lot of good people. And one is exposing everything about 2020.

I still think we're going to see a number of states decertify. Unfortunately, I can't wave my magic wand and make it happen, but I think it's going to happen. That's going to have a huge emotional, if no other, impact on the process and start the ball rolling at the same time.

 

Recommendations

O'Donnell suggests we learn from 2020, “to make sure that they don't do the same things in 2022.” He recommends several things: don’t use machines to count, for one. Humans haven’t actually forgotten how to count. 

I would interject here that it isn’t quite that simple. I had a state rep who told the story of his first run for office. He lost by a few votes. An alternate judge and clerk of his party followed the presiding judge and another clerk to drop off the ballot box, back when they were paper ballots. The relatively short trip took hours. They could see the people in the car with the ballot box, shaking it and removing ballots they didn’t like—until they had taken out as many of the ballots for my rep that they needed for their candidate to win. So you’ve still got to deal with chain of custody, counting with both parties present and witnessing, and you need a definitive way of deciding what a ballot says. But all that might be doable—with willing people of good intention.

He also recommends getting rid of universal mail-in ballots. We’ll probably always have mail-in ballots for people documented to be out of town or in nursing homes, etc. But that should be a small number so that it can’t likely sway an election.

We ought to clean the voter rolls—accurately. We shouldn’t be outsourcing that to ERIC (Electronic Registration Information Center, a Democrat-aligning nonprofit) or any non-local entity. Some states had thousands of double voters—people who have changed their registration, because of getting married or some other reason, so they get a new registration and the old one is dormant; but both show up as voters who voted in the election. Thousands of these in some states—in addition to all the other election issues.

And of course we need Voter ID laws.

O’Donnell suggests we ought to train people the way we train bank tellers—not to assume that nobody would ever do anything wrong, but to think that, if there’s a way to game the system, somebody’s going to do it, so you’ve got to be vigilant.

He’d like to see total transparency. Like with that image of the Mesa County election—anyone could see it, go through the data on their own. You don’t include data that connects the voter to how that person voted, but everything else ought to be available for viewing. The only reason not to do that is that you’re hiding something.

 

Conclusion: The 2020 Election Was Stolen

Let’s note that Colorado wasn’t one of the few swing states in question in 2020. It was just another place using those machines. What would we find if we did this careful look at every location using voting machines?

If you look at only the six counties in the swing states, you have enough evidence to show the election outcome was rigged. If you look at just the evidence of illegal mail-in ballots in 2000 Mules, you’ve got more than enough to show the election outcome was rigged. The various states that held hearings to hear about the voting irregularities—many showed enough evidence to indicate that their election results should not have been certified; decertifying those few states would have changed the outcome.

I think anyone who looks honestly at that election can see that the sitting President of the United States was ousted by voter fraud. You might call that a coup. Many people knew that right away—well ahead of January 6^th. Evidence continues to verify that the election was stolen.

We don’t have a solution for this unprecedented theft of our country and our freedoms. But awareness is a first step.

And we become aware when there is the free exchange of information. You cannot restore the people’s confidence in the election process until you make the system transparent and honest—something they might call malinformation: truth that they don’t like. But it’s what we’re going to have to insist on.

Self-Hatred Isn't Virtuous

Maybe you remember from junior high or high school, the girl (maybe it was you) who believed all kinds of negative things about herself: her thighs were fat; her tummy bulged, her hair was stringy (or too curly or frizzy); she had a gap between her teeth that she thought everyone was aware of; she wasn’t smart enough; her clothes never fit right, or looked cool enough. The list goes on. But you looked at her and wondered where this was coming from, because what you saw was a girl who was pretty enough, maybe even very pretty. And she was friendly and sweet and thoughtful of others. And you had to wonder where all that anti-self negativity was coming from.

It's not uncommon among early teens, girls especially. There may be attached to it an erroneous belief that it’s not right to like yourself; that means you’re conceited and narcissistic. So putting yourself down is only proper. But you, looking from the outside, can see she’s not only wrong; she’s harming herself and limiting the good she could do in the world, if only she stopped worrying about her flaws and started growing herself and sharing her potential with the world.

Even this cute girl (our daughter, Social Sphere)
had a few brief moments of not realizing
how beautiful she was, but we got her over
that using some reality.

The cure seems to be growing up, gaining confidence, and getting a clearer picture of self. And maybe cutting out the comparisons of only her personal flaws with only the admirable qualities of her peers.

In other words, she’s wrong, and she needs to come to learn that. Because tearing herself down is just making herself miserable with no good purpose.

If you’re any kind of friend, or even a decent person, you do what you can to get her to see herself more accurately and to stop tearing herself down.

So, how does this relate to the Spherical Model and what we talk about here?

Take a look at this quote of yesterday from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo: “We're not going to make America great again. It was never that great." 

And can we forget that former first lady Michelle Obama who, in 2008, said, “For the first time in my adult life, I’m proud of my country”? That was, of course, related to her husband’s election to fundamentally transform the most free and prosperous country in human history into—something else. 

It’s symptomatic of a rather large segment of our society that looks at the United States and doesn’t see what Reagan metaphorically called the “shining city on a hill.” Instead they see a dung heap. A garbage dump. A deteriorating ghetto. We should be more like Sweden. Or Finland. Or Denmark. Or almost anywhere else.

Are they right? I believe they’re like that middle school girl, thinking it’s virtuous somehow to denigrate their own country—seeing only bad here, while seeing good everywhere else but missing their bad. So, no, they’re not accurate. And they’re not more virtuous for being “open-minded” enough to “see” their country as flawed.

Of course there are flaws. But they aren’t the flaws these people claim. And their blindness to the astounding good in "this greatest nation on God’s green earth,” as Michael Medved says on his show every day, is so dense as to be willful.

In the spirit of teenage girl magazines, maybe it’s time for a self-assessment quiz, to determine whether you (or a friend or frenemy you’re assessing while reading this) are suffering from this self-disparagement syndrome.

1.       T of F: The Founding Fathers were a bunch of racist old slaveholders, so that means the country they founded is fatally flawed to begin with.

2.       T or F: The phrase in the Constitution about slaves being counted as 3/5ths of a person was to institutionalize and endorse racist slavery.

3.       T or F: The imperialist United States stole most of the Southwest from Mexico.

4.       T or F: The rights in the Constitution are granted by government, and they can be taken away by government if a majority decides they’re not good to have—like freedom of religion if it’s offensive, or freedom of speech if it’s offensive.

5.       T or F: Racism is every bit as bad today as it was during slavery or the Jim Crow eras.

6.       Which Superman slogan do you prefer?

a.  The original classic, from comic books, television series, and older movies: “truth, justice, and the American way.”

b. The updated version (from the movie Superman Returns): “truth, justice, and all that stuff.”

7.       Agree or Disagree: A country that doesn’t provide free health care and free education through college is out of step with the rest of the world and should step up.

8.       Agree or Disagree: America should never have gotten involved in the war in Iraq—or, for that matter, Vietnam, or any other war since WWII.

9.       Agree or Disagree: America should intervene with food supplies and anything else to rescue people in failing economies such as Venezuela.

10.   Agree or Disagree: America is unfair because it doesn’t just open its borders and let anyone in who wants to come in.

11.   Agree or Disagree: Businesses should be forced to pay their people enough to live on (housing, food, clothing, transportation) for even an entry-level job.

12.   Agree or Disagree: Inequality is the worst thing about America; money should be taken from the rich and redistributed to the poor.

13.   Agree or Disagree: People who don’t do as well as others are being oppressed.

Scoring

The T or F questions are all False. So count one point for each T you answered. (See discussion of answers below.)

If you answered B on 6, count one point. For question 7-13, count one point for each statement you Agree with.

If you got 0-3 points, pretty good (but if you don’t have 0, you need to do some soul searching).

If you got 4-7 points, you’re probably suffering from some bad information in schools and media, and you need to get some better sources. (See suggestions below.)

If you got 8+ points, you’re an America hater for no good reason. In fact, your reasons aren’t just random opinions; you have chosen to buy in to the America hating rhetoric of false history teachings, much of it based on the history/propaganda of Howard Zinn that has made its way into our education system. You need to do some de-programming to get yourself in touch with reality before you harm yourself and others—and your country.

Discussion of Answers

Question 1: While there were slaveholders among the Founders, they all agreed it was an evil that needed to be done away—something that was a new idea in world history, since slavery was the norm throughout history up until the Founders started this nation based on an idea, rather than on a geography or tribalism. The idea: that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, related to life, liberty, and property.

Question 2: The purpose of the 3/5 phrase in the Constitution was to prevent the perpetuation of slavery. The slaveholding states wanted to count their slaves in order to boost their population and give them more representation, thus ensuring the continuation of slavery. But the Founders, including those from southern states who were representing their states’ interests but were also looking for ways to end the practice, used this compromise to reduce the power of slaveholding states. PragerU has a good discussion: “Why the 3/5ths Compromise Was Anti-Slavery.” 

Historian Carol Swain,
screenshot from this PragerU video

Question 3: The Tejanos who fought with the Texians (that is, the Hispanic people living in current Texas along with the Americans who immigrated to what was then part of Mexico) fought long and hard for independence from the tyrannical dictator who had taken over Mexico and deprived them of their rights. And further, the later war that led to New Mexico, Arizona, and California becoming parts of the United States—Mexico was the aggressor, lost, and in fact lost most of what is current Mexico today, but that was given back, unfortunately for them, because they’d have been better off joining America. Dinesh D’Souza has a good discussion of this in America: Imagine a World without Her, pp. 107-119.

Question 4: “Being endowed by their Creator” means being given by God, and “unalienable,” or “inalienable,” depending on who’s spelling it today, means that it can’t be taken. Government doesn’t grant those rights; government is tasked with protecting those rights. The Bill of Rights, which consists of the first ten amendments to the Constitution, weren’t originally included, because they were considered so obvious and so well understood, that they went without saying. But then several states worried that later generations might not find them so obvious, so they spelled them out and included them in the Constitution before it was ratified.

Question 5: Another PragerU video is helpful here: “Is America Racist?” 

The remaining questions are opinions, but there’s good information on these as well. I’ll offer just a few.

About foreign wars, there are a number of helpful PragerU videos:

·         “Why America Invaded Iraq” and “How Iraq Was Won and Lost”   

·         “The Truth about the Vietnam War”  and “Why Did America Fight the Vietnam War”

·         “Why Did America Fight the Korean War” 

·         “What Was the Cold War?” 

There are PragerU videos on a great many other topics as well, including some economic ones. For other sources with a more America loving presentation of reality, you might finish Dinesh D’Souza’s book America: Imagine a World without Her, and also Mark Steyn’s America Alone, Glenn Beck’s The Real America, and W. Cleon Skousen’s The Five Thousand Year Leap.

For education, try the free online Hillsdale College courses. Start with Constitution 101 and 201.

For daily information doses, try podcasts of Ben Shapiro and Andrew Klavan, and maybe even Michael Knowles.

For some economic truth, you might try anything by Thomas Sowell. Start with Basic Economics. Or, if you need to battle some of that social justice dogma, you might try Discrimination and Disparities or Wealth, Poverty and Politics.

At the very least be skeptical of self-hatred. What’s behind it? Do you really think it’s virtuous to be desperately ashamed of a nation with so many positives that people around the world want to become Americans? Or is it a dysfunctional delusion? 

Just like the 13-year-old girl who responds to your compliment with, “Really? But my shoes are awful, don’t you think?” maybe someone needs to stand her in front of a full-length mirror and let her see how beautiful she is. Take a look at America; she’s beautiful!

Unrevising History

I went to a matinee showing of Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary, HIllary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party, this past Saturday. There was only one showing that day at the neighborhood theater. And the theater wasn’t one of the larger ones. But it was pretty full. And people clapped at the end.

Here's the 3-minute trailer.

I didn’t take notes in the dark theater, and it’s a couple of days later. So it’s better to refer to the movie or the associated book for facts. But I’ve tried to increase my accuracy with some basic research.

D’Souza’s makes two main points about the Democrat Party:

·         They have been racist since the beginning.

·         They are corrupt through and through.

The Racist History

There’s a lot of history in the movie. He spends some time on Andrew Jackson, a vicious southern slaveowner. I never liked Jackson mainly because of his willingness to ignore the Constitution the way Democrats do. But I had been unaware of the personal cruelty and sexual predation against his slaves.

Abraham Lincoln is essentially the founder of the Republican Party. He and his party were anti-slavery. And it was Lincoln, followed by other Republicans, who guaranteed the elimination of slavery and other deprivations of Constitutional rights based on race. D’Souza showed that the Democrats all along resisted any movement against racism. For example, the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments:

·         13^th Amendment (1865)—outlawing slavery and involuntary servitude: proposed and supported by Republicans with 100% voting in favor, opposed by 77% of Democrats (including northern Democrats)

·         14^th Amendment (1868)—granting full citizenship and protection under the law: 94% of Republicans supported it, 0% of Democrats

·          15^th Amendment (1869)—prohibits states or local governments from denying the right to vote based on race or previous involuntary servitude:  144 Republicans in favor and 3 against in the House and 39 in favor with 5 against in the Senate;  all 39 Democrat votes in the House went against and all 8 in the Senate went against. (Some in both parties did not vote; at least one abstaining Republican was because it didn’t also prohibit poll taxes and literary tests.)

He pointed out that even northern Democrats approved of slavery; it wasn’t a simple case of south vs. north culture. And there’s the fact that there were exactly zero Republican slaveowners.

The Democrats grew the Ku Klux Klan to enforce their racism when the laws didn’t go their way. The Klan was mostly wiped out (at least publicly) by the turn of the century. But President Woodrow Wilson, a racist Democrat (redundant in those days), reignited the KKK as the military arm of the Democrat Party.

Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was not about choice for women; she was about wiping out blacks, the disabled, and anyone else she disfavored. Forced sterilization was among her favored practices.

If you think that was just the olden days, then maybe you should look at the current stats: 80% of all Planned Parenthood clinics are located in minority neighborhoods; from 1973 on black women's share of abortions has consistently been at least twice their share of live births, at 16% of live births but 32% of abortions.[i]

The Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s was led by Republicans. Martin Luther King, Jr., and many other black Civil Rights leaders were Republicans. A greater percentage of Republicans voted for that legislation than of Democrats. Democrats filibustered the legislation in 1964. It is true that Democrat President Lyndon B. Johnson favored the legislation. But for him it was a political strategy. He followed up the Civil Rights legislation with his War on Poverty policies, which keep people weak, dependent, and impoverished. He is quoted as saying,

These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference... I'll have them n-----s voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.[ii]

The claim today is that there was a Great Switch, with racists leaving the Democrat Party for the Republican Party. So D’Souza did the research, looking at the various Democrat officials, leaders, and prominent civilians. Only 1% switched; the other 99% remained Democrats for life.

The lie was told with the help of complicit media and academia—enough times that it was taught as true. But it has never been true. Republicans were for equality for all before the law from the party’s inception. The Democrats have been racist, and now race-card players to this day.

The Corruption

The movie begins with D’Souza’s experience in prison—because he gave more than was allowed to a friend’s political campaign (without telling the friend, so not as an attempt to buy influence). He’s the first and maybe only person imprisoned for this infraction. And it wasn’t a white-collar-criminal-type imprisonment; he was among thieves and murderers. After a couple of months of adjustment (he was out of prison daytimes and returned to prison nightly), he started getting acquainted to learn what he could. What he says he discovered was that corruption in government was pretty much exactly the same pattern as the four-part pattern of The Con.

The Con Pattern

·         The Plan

·         The Pitch

·         The Play (This is two days later. I didn’t take notes, and I don’t remember how it was worded.)

·         The Cover-up: Deny Deny Deny

The segment on Hillary Clinton was at least an hour into the movie. D’Souza covered her history, radicalized by Saul Alinsky—and going beyond him, believing they could get more of their radical ideas realized by infiltrating government at the highest levels.

The Clinton couple, he claims, is a combination of the basic big-talking conman (Bill) and the fixer (Hillary). His flaws, particularly his sexual predatory practices, required clean-up, and that made him dependent on her. That is one explanation of why these two have stayed together. I don’t know if it’s entirely the truth but it fits this narrative.

The players in the Democrat Party do fit the pattern of The Con, as he lays it out. D’Souza has been

Dinesh D'Souza
photo from here

outspoken against Obama first, and now the Clintons, in his movies. Clearly he speaks from a point of view that isn’t likely to see the Democrat Party favorably. But he uses the storytelling of history to make his points. It could be effective—if only the people who have been duped were willing to see it.

Part of his restitution included doing community service, which he portrays as being able to teach ESL classes, and he gladly took that opportunity. He asked the question, “How do you become an American?” At the end of the credits, he answers that question: “You know you’ve become an American when you become a Republican.”

While I was looking up a few details for this post, I came across this review by Chuck Norris, highlighting 10 points made in the movie, which you might enjoy reading. 

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[i] Again, I don’t remember all exact details from the movie, which mentions the data. So I found this data online, which is slightly old, but probably close to current. 

[ii] I didn’t memorize the quote, so I looked it up and found it here. 

America--Worth Seeing, Worth Saving

Read the book, watch the movie.

This past weekend we finally got to see Dinesh D’Souza’s movie America—Imagine a World without Her. For someone who loves America, it was beautiful. For someone who hates America, they probably didn’t go, but they need to.

It’s always been puzzling to me that people hate America and list all these evils we’ve done, some of which I have personal memory to disregard, but some are supposedly the history that was glossed over in my education.

The first two thirds of the movie specifically deal with these accusations, or indictments, against America. I don’t know how D’Souza accomplished it, but he spends a lot of time with spokespeople for the various indictments, to give them latitude to express their point of view, without comment or debate, just building their case. It’s kind of painful, because, sitting there, you get the urge to defend. Only knowing who did the movie gives you the patience to sit through this painful part.

Visually, with each of the indictments, he takes a symbol of America and dissolves it—literally uses CGI to turn the symbol into tiny particles that fall to smithereens. He does this with Mount Rushmore, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, the Statue of Liberty. I’m probably missing some.

Then he takes the indictments, point by point, and gives a different side. He doesn’t erase the accusations, but he does give perspective that changes the sense of anger and shame to something much closer to “way to go, America!”

It was dark in the theater, so I couldn’t take notes. I had bought the book the day before (at Sam’s Club, as a statement against Costco, which had temporarily taken the books off their shelves for obviously political reasons, until the backlash shamed them into reordering the books—but in fairness, I have a Sam’s membership because it is nearby, and don’t have a Costco membership, because it’s a half hour drive). I had hoped, for the sake of this post, that the book would be arranged in the same way as the movie. I haven’t read it yet, but a cursory glance doesn’t give me that straightforward list of indictments. So I’ve probably missed something (I think there were five or six), and won’t say them as well as the movie does:

·         America stole the land from Native Americans.

·         America stole half of Mexico.

·         America earned its wealth on the backs of slaves.

·         America has been imperialistic throughout the world.

·         Capitalism steals from the poor.

D’Souza is surprisingly calm throughout the assault of indictments. I guess that’s how he persuaded the haters to participate in his movie. But they must have known he would go on to give the other side. Which he does quite beautifully.

He identifies much of these indictments coming from a “history” book written by Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States. Early in the book D’Souza says,

This is probably the most influential history book of the past half century. Zinn makes no effort to conceal his perspective. “I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American war as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America.”

Zinn is not afraid to give a one-sided picture. He does not believe there is such a thing as objective history; therefore, he wants to present his side. And what is his side? Zinn believes in global economic equality, looking forward, as he puts it, to “a time when national boundaries are erased, when the riches of the world are used for everyone.” (pp. 13-14).

Zinn wants worldwide socialism, with America totally out of the picture. He wrote a “history” book as a persuasive tool toward that end. Zinn’s book is widely used in high schools and colleges—as a text, not as supplemental reading of a different point of view. But he isn’t a history scholar; he is a man with an anti-American agenda, and he cherry-picks details to form propaganda that will serve his ends. In the movie, D’Souza interviews a historian, whose name unfortunately I don’ remember (and haven’t uncovered yet in the book), who verifies that Zinn is not a historian; Zinn is content with distorting facts and context, and even putting forth verifiable untruths as “facts.” Zinn is nothing more than a public opinion manipulator--unfortunately a successful one.

An obvious point here is, if young people are being taught Zinn’s America-is-guilty-of-great-evil theme, they’re being duped. And the lies need to be laid bare, so we can see America clearly. [May I add here—this is yet another reason to homeschool.]

The most beautiful part of the movie came at the conclusion of the defense against the indictments. D’Souza debunks them point by point, with evidence. And then, with that done, he “rebuilds” the symbols. From disintegration, Mount Rushmore re-solidifies into reality, as do the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, Statue of Liberty and the rest. And we are so relieved to see them as they are again.

Mr. Spherical Model suggests the movie, up to this point, could easily be shown in schools, as a nonpolitical educational movie. I even thought for a moment, while viewing the movie, that this was the end. It would have been satisfying with just that much.

But then I remembered that the previews had suggested the movie would talk about, “Obama didn’t create this movement; the movement created him.” So there had to be more.

The remaining third of the movie answers the question, Why do people choose to hate America? A stunning point in the movie comes during D’Souza’s interview with America hating professor Ward Churchill. D’Souza asks him, if America is indeed as guilty of the evils he claims, would it be “just” to destroy America with a nuclear bomb. Churchill seems to be thinking through the full line of his reasoning, and then concludes the answer is yes. He believes America—even while he lives in it—should commit suicide.

The movie covers the plotting of Saul Alinsky, with his Rules for Radicals, including its dedication to Lucifer. A young Hillary Rodham Clinton was introduced to Alinsky and given his book as a gift. Her later contribution was to take his ideas, which worked first to manipulate public opinion through community organizing, and push them through politics, which she saw as a quicker means to the socialist end. A young Obama was attracted to these radical socialist ideas, sought them out, and then went to serve the cause in the central headquarters for idea manipulation through community organizing: Chicago.

One of the interviewees is Stanley Kurtz, who wrote Radical in Chief, about Obama and his connections to a long, interconnected list of these extremists. I wrote about the book, during the first month of this blog, back in 2011 (Part I, Part II, and Part III). I knew enough of the details in 2008 to know who Obama was. The information is there, for anyone with eyes open and willing to see. But for those who have kept themselves unaware, this portion of the movie is a pretty clear indictment, especially following the first two-thirds of the movie.

It was kind of painful, however, to go on from the “We have reason to love America” conclusion, and wade right into “We’re surrounded by elected officials, media, and other powerful elites that are trying to destroy the America we love.”

But we have to see the truth of where we are, diagnose it, see it clearly—so we can take action to restore America after the decay.

God bless America! I pray that we can restore her.

Here’s one of the movie trailers: