I have written several articles on postings related to politics. A list of links have been provided at bottom of this article for your convenience. This article will, however address different aspects on these political events.

This article is a follow-up piece to a previous article I wrote on the left, entitled “How Are The Democrats Changing Our Country, and Can We Survive These Changes?” I have also written other articles discussing similar topics. You may ask why, I say the more information out there the better we will be able to defend our county and our way of life.

The First Step Towards Righting America Is Refusing To Believe The Left About Anything

The weakness and stupidity of America’s right has allowed false narratives to cement in the minds of the public. It’s killing our freedoms. It’s killing our jobs. It’s killing our families.

Did you know that you can see The Great Wall of China from outer space? Is that not absolutely incredible? I heard this cool little fact from a friend some time ago and began telling everyone I knew about this cool trivia nugget.

What really blew me away was how almost everyone I told had already heard this and agreed with me that it is a very cool fact. A man-made wall you can see from outer space. That is just incredible.

I mean, it would be incredible, if it were true. You see, it is not true—not even a little. NASA and multiple individual astronauts have debunked this myth. Yet much of the general public believes it to be a fact, as NASA points out.

But why? The narrative. That is why. There is nothing more powerful (and destructive) in today’s world than the narrative.

The narrative, as I define it, is simply an assumption or set of assumptions widely accepted by the general public as facts. As we know, facts cannot be changed. That is why they are facts.

This is also why it is so critical to ensure the general public gets an accurate narrative. Otherwise, if the base set of publicly believed facts is wrong, every step after that will also be incorrect. It’s like getting swallowed up by an avalanche and digging ferociously in the wrong direction.

The weakness and stupidity of America’s right has allowed false narratives to cement in the minds of the public. It’s killing our freedoms. It’s killing our jobs. It’s killing our families. It’s killing our schools. It’s killing our nation.

Take coronavirus, for example. Remember the beginning? Remember the mass panic pushed from every single American institution? “EVERYONE GO HOME AND HIDE OR MILLIONS WILL DIE!”

News story after news story after social media post after politician’s speech hammered away at the American public. In very short order, even 90 percent of the people on the right were parroting the narrative that you should shut down your business and bunker down at home or everyone will die. After all, shutting down an economy is the only way to stop coronavirus, right?

That’s what the narrative was in the beginning, and to this day the vast majority of Americans believe it. Of course, that all turned out to be wrong. In very short order, the left realized these lockdowns could be a very useful tool in destroying the President Trump economy that was leading to his re-election. Where were your favorite politicians and pundits on the right in the beginning when this false narrative was being set?

Remember George Floyd? I am quite sure you do. How could you possibly forget the modern-day saint honored with more funeral services than any other human being in the history of mankind.

Immediately after the man’s death, everyone with a microphone or a social media account was sprinting to prove how not racist they were. Outcries about cops hunting down black men for the color of their skin were heard from sea to shining sea.

Every major corporation had a statement out dumping on cops and pretending America is some rancid, racist dump. Even my sons couldn’t log into their video games without a special Black Lives Matter landing page. The professional athletes kneeled for the anthem, and Aunt Jemima changed its name and logo.

Of course, none of this narrative, either about how Floyd’s death happened or the riots that followed, was based on facts. Not a single word. Yet where was the right? What did we get out of the single entity with a chance to speak the truth in the face of lies? We got a federal police reform bill and GOP senators talking about the need to change military base names.

Who can forget the violent insurrection at the Capitol building on the 6th? Have you not heard the government was almost taken over and five people were MURDERED?

I heard it on every news channel. I read it in a thousand articles. I saw endless social media posts about it. In fact, it was so violent and insidious, they impeached a guy who’s no longer in office for it. That must be really bad, right?

Five people murdered is no joke. Of course, and please stop me if you’ve heard this before, that is all a complete lie. Would you like to hear about the five “murders” you believe happened on the 6th? One man died of a heart attack, one woman collapsed for yet unknown reasons, one woman was shot and killed by a police officer, one man had a stroke, and one police officer died. As of the time of this writing, the medical examiner has been unable to prove the police officer died from any external force.

There. Those are the five “murders” you believe happened. They are just as real as viewing the Great Wall of China from outer space. Yet to this day the vast majority of politicians and pundits on the right will repeat the “violent insurrection with five murders” lie told by the left.

My point here is not the lies. The left lies. All communists do. Lying is simply part and parcel part of the ideology. My point is that we are in very serious trouble right now in the United States of America.

We are coming apart at the seams. The left has never been in such a position of power in our institutions, and they know it. They are aggressively trying to stamp out the opposition.

Our side needs to be smarter and stronger. We must be the adults who stand soberly by while the whole world shrieks and panics about something.

We no longer have the option of riding the initial news cycle and accepting it at face value. Our failure to hold the line and speak hard truths has made the left’s job of cementing a lie in the minds of the people infinitely easier. From now on, when the next major event arises, let us resolve to set the narrative ourselves instead of being consumed by it.

The Radical Left’s Ideas Could Destroy America for Generations

Rioting. Vandalism. Bullying opponents into silence. Calls to defund the police, abolish the Electoral College, and remake America as a socialist country. It’s hard to believe what we’re now seeing.

For months, the forces of Marxism, socialism, and anarchy have terrorized our streets and threatened the values that make America the greatest nation in the world. They have shown no signs of stopping, and many left-leaning politicians, members of the media, and celebrities either tacitly accept their behavior or openly cheer it on.

Today, America has a choice of two paths. We can embrace the foundational principles that created this nation of limited government and individual liberty. Or we can veer down the path of those who trash those principles, who teach our children that America was illegitimate from the start, and who want to make the vast majority of Americans subservient to an all-powerful government.

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The time has come to fight for America and against the poisonous ideology of the radical left.

But this is not the typical fight between liberals and conservatives over whose vision for America should prevail. This is a much bigger fight.

This is a fight over whether America as we know it continues to exist at all.

This is a fight over whether we have freedom, peace, and prosperity, or speech codes, cancel culture, and enforced ideological conformity.

This is a fight where conservatives, moderates, and even more traditional liberals should be working together on one side to stop the radical Marxists on the other.

Vice President Mike Pence recently summed up this historic point in our history:

We stand at a crossroads of freedom. Before us lie two paths: One based on the dignity and worth of every individual, and the other on the growing control of the state. One road leads to greater freedom and opportunity, and the other road leads to socialism and decline.

Or even more succinctly, “The choice we face is whether America remains America.”

The radical left’s ideas could destroy America for generations. The only bulwark that can stop them is an informed and energized citizenry.

Amazingly, many citizens who are concerned about where they see the far left taking this country aren’t even registered to vote. If you are one of those people, your vote is one of the most effective ways you can stop the march toward Marxism.

Register to vote and make it your project to get 10 relatives and neighbors who aren’t registered to do the same. Then show up for your local, state, and federal elections—and bring them with you. The best way to fight for America is to vote for America.

If there is a candidate in your area who shares your principles and isn’t afraid to actually fight for them, call the campaign office and offer a few hours of your time each week to hand out brochures, stuff envelopes, or put up yard signs.

Additionally, you must arm yourself with facts so you can better understand the issues and you can also help inform your friends, relatives, and social networks about them. Let those in your circles know what’s going on. So many of us are so busy in our lives that we can’t pay attention to everything, and the other side counts on that.

If you are alarmed at the state of our nation and if you believe in America, this is the time to fight for America. This is the time to support law enforcement officers, to call for accountability in an education system that indoctrinates rather than educates, and to go on offense against the extremism of the radical left.

This is the time to fight for a nation where freedom and prosperity flourish, where opportunity abounds, and where civil society brings out the best in all of us. To fight for a nation of free enterprise, limited government, and traditional American values.

These are the principles that have been fought for and preserved by the blood and sacrifice of generations before us. And they are the same principles we must defend and protect today. It’s time to stand up for them, because there is too much at stake to stand on the sidelines.

Letter to the Editor: The Left is destroying our country

We are witnessing attempts of the Democrats and extreme left to destroy this country!

Editor:

We are witnessing attempts of the Democrats and extreme left to destroy this country!

The Left is doing Russia’s bidding. Hillary, Holder, Lynch, Obama, and many more hide in the bowels of our government. They claim to love this country and are patriots. Bull! They are patriots of their cause. Nothing else matters nor does it matter how that goal is accomplished. It doesn’t matter who or what’s destroyed. The love of government and power drives them under the pretext that they’re working for the constituency. Nothing could be further from the truth. Power is their constituency.  These are socialists and communists. They sometimes like to be called progressives. The Left do not cotton well to the loss of that power (election loss) and to an outsider, at that.

The free press socialists continue to serve masters on the extreme left whenever and however they can. These patriots of socialism have severely damaged the FBI and Justice departments in their lust for power and control. This doesn’t matter to them as it helps in the quest to destroy the Constitution, rule of law and justice, and thus a belief in this country – the belief of our founders that we can rule ourselves as we have for hundreds of years, and very successfully I might add!

Is there one other country that can match what we have in freedom and liberty and what we have accomplished as a free people? The answer is no for folks who can’t get enough free stuff and enough big government. Try living in Venezuela, Russia, Cuba, China or in South America if you think socialism is so great! History can be a guide to the right answer. People need to open their eyes and minds to the truth. Freedom has never been free, will never be free! It is up to us, not the government. We pay the ultimate price, not the government. I don’t see markers at Arlington or anywhere else that say government on it! There are American names, they all understood what liberty and freedom are all about. God and country!

The 6 Big Ways Liberals Are Destroying America’s Culture

There was a time when we used to be a nation that pushed freedom, responsibility, decency, patriotism and hard work. Some of us still believe in those things, but because of liberalism, much more destructive values have seeped into our culture like toxic waste. There are many ways that liberals have degraded our culture, but these are the worst of the worst.

1) The Politicization Of Everything: Want to watch football? There are players protesting the flag. Turn on a Hollywood awards ceremony? There are actors making political statements. Want to go to the bathroom in peace? Well, first, we need to know if you’re okay with sharing it with someone who feels like the opposite gender today. You’re just a regular person telling an off-color joke you heard? Better be careful; that could turn into a front page scandal if the wrong group gets offended. Want to buy a Halloween costume for your kid? Well, you better make sure it’s someone of the same race or people will be upset. Want to go on a date? If you date someone of the same race, you may be racist. Ready to marry your honey? Then you better support gay marriage or you’re a homophobe. I can remember a time in America where you could just live your life without paying attention to politics at all if you wanted and that was a good thing. Remember that old saying? Never discuss race, religion or politics in polite company? Well, because of liberals, you don’t have a choice anymore.CARTOONS | GARY VARVELVIEW CARTOON

2) Political Correctness: I hate the idea that some normal person can tell a joke on Twitter and have his life destroyed for it by the liberal fun police. I think it’s disgusting to see that liberals have embraced fascism to such an extent that they can’t tolerate a contrary idea on their college campus. It’s like the whole country is in a relationship with someone who has borderline personality disorder. Everyone’s walking on eggshells because some buttercup might get horribly upset at, well….just about anything. Whatever happened to the idea that if some ordinary thing triggers you, YOU have the problem and it’s something YOU need to work on? Oh, yeah, liberals happened to it.

3) Victimhood: Only in America do people get so excited about the idea of being a victim that they will even fake hate crimes against themselves to get that status. Only in America are there women publicly crying that they were sexually assaulted and traumatized because a 93 year old, wheelchair-bound President pinched their butt. Only in America do we have to come up with things like white privilege and institutional racism because there’s not enough real racism happening to allow liberal minorities to feel like victims. There was a time in America when people wanted to feel strong, capable and able to handle their own problems instead of being victims. There still are people like that today and they’re called conservatives.

4) Liberal Feminism: The original “Women should have the same rights as men” feminism has been so widely accepted in society that it made feminism irrelevant. So, liberal feminists reinvented feminism as a combination of man-hating and victimization. Look out, it’s the patriarchy and rape culture! Don’t you dare hold the door for me! Stop mansplaining! Stop saying, “Not all men!” You just sit there in silence thinking about how you’ve oppressed women! Liberal feminism falsely makes women think they could have it all if those awful men weren’t getting in their way and it makes many guys unsure of what reaction they’ll get from women when they behave like men. Forget about the old “Women should be women and men should be men” philosophy; liberal feminism is about women being men and the men being shamed.

5) Tribalism:  Liberals work incessantly to split Americans in ever smaller groups that are at each other’s throats. If you want to get a sense of how bad it has gotten, we’re having ferocious public debates about transsexuals who, depending on how you define it, make up less than .25% to .75% of the population. Increasingly, the attitude is moving from the annoying, “You just can’t understand because of your race/color/gender” to “You HATE ME and I HATE YOU” because of differences that are often unchangeable. This is incredibly dangerous to our future as a country because you can’t hold any group of people including a nation together long term when people no longer believe they share the same goals and values as their neighbors.   Our nation’s motto is E pluribus unum (Out of many, one), but what happens when liberals insist that the many never become one?

6) “Non-Judgmentalism”: We’ve heard so many liberals talk about how important it is to be non-judgmental that it has seeped into the culture at large. When there’s a choice between what’s best for society and best for a particular individual who has done something wrong, we always default to protecting that individual. How’s that working out for us? Since the stigma around getting a divorce, having a child out of wedlock or having an abortion has faded, are we better or worse off? Are the kids who are aborted or who get raised by a single parent instead of a family better off? Are the guys who are extremely hesitant to get married because they fear divorce better off? Are we better off because people no longer wonder whether doing something horrible in public will hurt their good name or ruin their family’s reputation? The very fact that we are so unwilling to draw a line in the sand and say “That’s right” or “That’s wrong” has mired our culture in degeneracy. Maybe if there were more people who feel bad when they do things that “wouldn’t make their mothers proud,” there would be a lot more decent human beings.

5 Big Government, America-Destroying Schemes Democrats are Proposing During COVID-19 Crisis

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” It’s an oft-repeated quote from Democratic politician Rahm Emanuel. It was November of 2008 when Barack Obama had just won the presidential election in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. People often forget the second part of the former Obama Chief of Staff’s famous quote, but it’s actually even more telling.

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” he told the Wall Street Journal and followed it with, “And what I mean by that, it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

As our nation now faces enormous and unprecedented disruptions do to the reactions to public health, Democrats are doing what Democrats do. They are exploiting fear and temporary disruptions to fundamentally transform and ultimately destroy our nation.

Here are just five, America-destroying proposals that we would never seriously consider but are now floated as serious policy proposals during this crisis.

1. Nationalize Industries 

New York City mayor and failed, humiliated presidential candidate Bill de Blasio can’t keep his own city streets clean, but he thinks it’s a good idea for the government to step in and replicate Venezuela.CARTOONS | GARY VARVELVIEW CARTOON

“This is a case for a nationalization, literally a nationalization, of crucial factories and industries that could produce the medical supplies to prepare this country for what we need,” de Blasio told MSNBC’s Joy Reid. 

While major cities across the country chose to close public schools at the suggestion of the Centers for Disease Control in an effort to slow the spread of the disease, de Blasio dragged his feet for days and refused to do the same in New York. While he fiddled and ignored his own responsibilities as mayor, he instead proposed to have the federal government take over entire segments of the medical supply systems because government ownership and control always make things more efficient, or something.

2. Universal Government Controlled Healthcare 

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Sen. Bernie Sanders and liberal intellectuals everywhere seized on the public health crisis to demand universal health care controlled by the federal government. Setting aside the fact that the Left demands this if a person gets a splinter, let alone a worldwide pandemic, the demand for government-run health care in the face of COVID-19 makes no sense at all.

The virus began in China and spread there like wildfire. China has government-controlled medical services and it was miserably inept in controlling the virus. Ditto the other major hot spot in the world, Italy. In fact, left-wing organizations consistently rank Italy as one of the best government-run health care systems in the world, several positions higher than the United States, and by all accounts, Italy was caught flat-footed and entirely overwhelmed by COVID-19. 

So, naturally, Democrats want to replicate their stellar system here. The fact is, the solution to COVID-19 will most likely come from the private sector and the incredible private health care industry still supported and encouraged here in the last relatively free-market economy left on the planet. As long as Democrats aren’t allowed to destroy it.

3. Gun Ban

Not one instance of COVID-19 had appeared in Champaign, IL, but that didn’t stop Mayor Deborah Frank Feinen from declaring a coronavirus emergency allowing her to ban the sale of guns. The executive order gave the mayor tons of other extra-constitutional powers but the gun ban got a ton of attention. 

It’s ironic considering that one thing many Americans are thankful for as basic needs in our society become rationed and stretched thin is our ability to protect ourselves, our property and our families. 

Even in liberal Los Angeles, CA, we saw lines out the door and around the block at the few gun stores that still exist in that state’s already-restrictive anti-gun atmosphere.

4. Empty Prisons

Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley told MSNBC’s Al Sharpton that she was advocating for a blanket commutation of sentences to release prisoners from incarceration in light of the COVID-19 dilemma.

“This pandemic, COVID-19, has certainly highlighted and exasperated every socio, ratio, and political fault line in our country. And I’m just advocating to make sure that when we are talking about those that are most vulnerable, our low-income residents and citizens, those experiencing homelessness, our seniors, that we are also including the incarcerated men and women, who are certainly amongst one of the most vulnerable populations. And given the crowding and overpopulating in our prisons for a confluence of other reasons … are an ecosystem in a petri dish for the spreading of this pandemic, which is why I partnered with my colleagues, Reps. Velasquez, Ocasio-Cortez, and Tlaib, to lobby the Bureau of Prisons to use their full power and to communicate guidance for how we will contain and mitigate this epidemic behind the wall,” she said.

Rep. Pressley didn’t exactly explain how convicted criminals would be safer from the virus when released to roam America’s streets rather than the forced “social distancing” they are currently experiencing in their cells. Even more importantly, she didn’t explain how the law-abiding innocent Americans would be safer with criminals prematurely released.

5. Cease Arresting and Convicting Criminals

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner used concern over the spread of COVID-19 to announce an enormous reduction in arrests for what he called “low-level, non-violent crimes.”

“We want to make sure the police are safe and don’t have prolonged contact with people that have the virus,” he said. “Taking one person back to the police station risks everyone at the station. They go into custody, they endanger other inmates in that great cruise ship that is a jail. And then they go to court.”

So, let’s add up all of these initiatives so we can properly evaluate what Democrats would do if they had complete control over our country during this crisis.

They’d release prisoners, ignore crime, ban private ownership of guns, seize control of private industries and take over the medical industry. In other words, they’d pretty much enact all of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ proposals. Let’s face it though, despite Sanders’ robust socialist inclinations, the Democrats’ platform has inched closer toward these proposals every year over the past several decades.

This crisis just allows them to show their true colors under the guise of “emergency.” This is who they are and this is what they truly want to do… COVID-19 is just the latest crisis that these Democrats don’t want to waste.

The Left Is Trying to Rewrite American History. We Must Stop Them.

George Orwell said, “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

In the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, censorship, rewriting of history, and eliminating undesirable people became part of Soviets’ effort to ensure that the correct ideological and political spin was put on their history.

Deviation from official propaganda was punished by confinement in labor camps and execution.

Today there are efforts to rewrite history in the U.S., albeit the punishment is not so draconian as that in the Soviet Union.

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New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu had a Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee monument removed last month. Former Memphis Mayor A.C. Wharton wanted the statue of Confederate Lt. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, as well as the graves of Forrest and his wife, removed from the city park.

In Richmond, Virginia, there have been calls for the removal of the Monument Avenue statues of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Gens. Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and J.E.B. Stuart.

It’s not only Confederate statues that have come under attack. Just by having the name of a Confederate, such as J.E.B. Stuart High School in Falls Church, Virginia, brings up calls for a name change.

These history rewriters have enjoyed nearly total success in getting the Confederate flag removed from state capitol grounds and other public places.

Slavery is an undeniable fact of our history. The costly war fought to end it is also a part of the nation’s history. Neither will go away through cultural cleansing.

Removing statues of Confederates and renaming buildings are just a small part of the true agenda of America’s leftists.

Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, and there’s a monument that bears his name—the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. George Washington also owned slaves, and there’s a monument to him, as well—the Washington Monument in Washington.

Will the people who call for removal of statues in New Orleans and Richmond also call for the removal of the Washington, D.C., monuments honoring slaveholders Jefferson and Washington?

Will the people demanding a change in the name of J.E.B. Stuart High School also demand that the name of the nation’s capital be changed?

These leftists might demand that the name of my place of work—George Mason University—be changed. Even though Mason was the author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which became a part of our Constitution’s Bill of Rights, he owned slaves.

Not too far from my university is James Madison University. Will its name be changed? Even though Madison is hailed as the “Father of the Constitution,” he did own slaves.

Rewriting American history is going to be challenging. Just imagine the task of purifying the nation’s currency.

Slave owner Washington’s picture graces the $1 bill. Slave owner Jefferson’s picture is on the $2 bill. Slave-owning Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s picture is on our $50 bill. Benjamin Franklin’s picture is on the $100 bill.

The challenges of rewriting American history are endless, going beyond relatively trivial challenges such as finding new pictures for our currency. At least half of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were slave owners.

Also consider that roughly half of the 55 delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia were slave owners. Do those facts invalidate the U.S. Constitution, and would the history rewriters want us to convene a new convention to purge and purify our Constitution?

The job of tyrants and busybodies is never done. When they accomplish one goal, they move their agenda to something else.

If we Americans give them an inch, they’ll take a yard. So I say, don’t give them an inch in the first place.

The hate-America types use every tool at their disposal to achieve their agenda of discrediting and demeaning our history. Our history of slavery is simply a convenient tool to further their cause.

Political Correctness Is Destroying America! (Just Not How You Think.)

The vast, vast majority of political correctness in America is conservative, and it‘s extremely dangerous.

AMERICA TODAY faces a terrifying danger: political correctness. It is an existential threat not just to the United States, but all of human civilization.

By this, obviously, I mean right-wing political correctness.

Maybe you’re surprised to hear this. In the U.S. media, there’s no shortage of lamentations about political correctness and how it chills debate — but they’re almost always about the threat of left-wing PC.

In reality, political correctness, or cancel culture, or whatever it’s called, is not a phenomenon of the left, right, or center. It’s a phenomenon of human nature. All humanity’s infinite tribes are prone to groupthink and punishing heretics. That’s why the principle of free thought has to be defended: It is, unfortunately, a weird and unnatural fit for humans.

There absolutely are examples of ugly political correctness from the U.S. “left,” whatever that means in a country that, by historical standards, doesn’t have a left. But the vast, vast majority of political correctness in America is conservative. Conservative PC is so powerful in the U.S. that much of it is adopted by both political parties and all of the corporate media. Indeed, right-wing political correctness is so dominant that it’s politically incorrect to refer to it as political correctness. Instead, we call it things like “patriotism,” or simply don’t notice its existence.

A full examination of America’s conservative PC culture would take the rest of your life to read. So let’s limit this to four areas where the right’s PC causes some of the most harm: religion, foreign policy, the Republican Party, and police.

Religion

It probably doesn’t surprise you that exactly zero U.S. presidents have been open atheists. But since Congress first convened in 1789, it’s only had one openly atheist member: Pete Stark of California. Stark retired in 2013, so there are currently none.

According to a 2019 Pew Research Center survey, 23 percent of Americans identify as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular.” This means, Pew says, that “by far the largest difference between the U.S. public and Congress is in the share who are unaffiliated with a religious group.”

So there are likely many members of Congress right now who are “in the closet” when it comes to not believing in God. The only explanation? They’re all too cowed by PC to come out.

This isn’t surprising, since the U.S. still demonstrates informal and formal discrimination against atheists. A recent poll found that 96 percent of Americans said they’d vote for a Black candidate for president; 95 percent for a Catholic; and 66 percent for a Muslim. Only 60 percent said they’d vote for an atheist. While it’s unenforceable, the constitutions of eight states actually prohibit atheists from holding office. This includes Maryland, one of the most liberal states, whose constitution also declares that “it is the duty of every man to worship God.” (Maryland women are seemingly free to putter around ignoring the Almighty.)

Pro-religion PC is practiced on both sides of the aisle. In one of the hacked Democratic National Committee emails published by WikiLeaks in 2016, the DNC chief financial officer suggested forcing Bernie Sanders to go on the record about whether he believes in God. “He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage,” the CFO argued. “My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.”

Even if, someday, a few national politicians screw up enough courage to admit that they’re atheists, it’s impossible to imagine any announcing that they’re actively anti-theistic. No member of the House is going to go on the CBS morning show and say, “I think all religion is pernicious, it’s a gross form of brainwashing children, and every religious leader is a con artist, including the Pope.”

No one on this plane of existence can say whether or not atheism is correct. What we can be sure of is right-wing PC has sharply limited free political speech in this area, and that’s made us less skeptical and more prone to authoritarianism.

Foreign Policy

America’s ironclad political correctness on religion plays into another aspect of our PC: The ferocious conservative restrictions on discussions of U.S. foreign policy. Since 9/11, many powerful Americans have demonstrated openness, perhaps even eagerness, for war between Christianity and Islam. Before the invasion of Iraq, then-President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac that he saw “Gog and Magog at work” in the Middle East. President Donald Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon has spoken about “the long history of the Judeo-Christian West struggle against Islam.” When the Christian Broadcasting Network asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo whether God sent Trump “just like Queen Esther to help save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace,” Pompeo responded, “I certainly believe that’s possible.” The right’s yearning to mix religion and violence is incredibly dangerous, yet is a staple of our daily political diet. Few politicians or powerful figures notice, much less attack this.

But our conservative PC on foreign policy goes much further. Everyone in the foreign policy establishment is aware that 9/11 and almost all Islamist terrorism is direct blowback from U.S. actions overseas. As a Defense Department report explained, “Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom’” — i.e., what Bush claimed in front of Congress on September 20, 2001 — “but rather, they hate our policies.” The problem from the establishment’s perspective is that they like those policies, and don’t want to change them just because they get Americans killed. Top members of the military apparently say in private that our deaths are “a small price to pay for being a superpower.”

Yet perhaps the only national-level politician who’s spoken clearly and openly about this is former Rep. Ron Paul of Texas. In 2004, a senior Bush administration official was willing to say that without U.S. actions in the Middle East, “bin Laden might still be redecorating mosques and boring friends with stories of his mujahideen days in the Khyber Pass” — but without his or her name attached. The 9/11 Commission’s report makes glancing reference to reality, but as one member later wrote, “The commissioners believed that American foreign policy was too controversial to be discussed except in recommendations written in the future tense. Here we compromised our commitment to set forth the full story.”

As with the conservative PC about God, Democrats also obey the conservative political correctness about foreign policy. For instance, in then-President Barack Obama’s famous 2009 speech in Cairo, he was too PC to tell the truth. Instead, he mumbled that “tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims,” whatever that means exactly. In 2010, when Obama’s then-counterterrorism adviser John Brennan was asked why Al Qaeda was so determined to attack the U.S., he responded, “I think this is a, uh, long issue.” He did not elaborate.

The PC line on foreign policy extends far beyond terrorism. Israel is one of the most powerful examples. Every American politician who cares to know is aware that of Israel’s dozen or so wars, it was clearly the aggressor in all but two — the 1948 War of Independence and the 1973 Yom Kippur War — and even those are arguable. They also understand that Israel has rejected numerous offers to create a just, two-state solution with the Palestinians. In private, U.S. officials say that Israel has constructed “apartheid” in the West Bank. While a minor glasnost on this subject is currently in progress, this clear reality remains inexpressible by U.S. politicians.

And what about the media, that hotbed of freethinking radicalism? Even rich, famous TV hosts who deviate from the right’s PC line must issue groveling apologies or get canceled, literally. Sometimes they issue groveling apologies and get canceled. After Bush called the 9/11 hijackers “cowards,” Bill Maher took issue on his old ABC show “Politically Incorrect.” “We have been the cowards,” Maher said, “lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away.” Maher immediately said he was sorry, but it was too late: His show lost big advertisers and was taken off the air the next year. In other words, the moment “Politically Incorrect” was genuinely politically incorrect, Maher was yanked off-stage.

Next, in February 2003 just before the invasion of Iraq, Phil Donohue’s MSNBC show got the ax. It had the highest ratings on the network, but as executives fretted in an internal memo, it could become “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.” In other words, since all of the rest of American TV was ultra-PC, and they had to be too. The same channel soon signed Jesse Ventura to a three-year contract for a new show but then found out he was anti-war and so paid him to do nothing.

Other TV figures made sure not to suffer similar fates. “I remember,” Katie Couric later said, “this inevitable march towards war and kind of feeling like, ‘Will anybody put the brakes on this? And is this really being properly challenged by the right people? … Anyone who questioned the administration was considered unpatriotic and it was a very difficult position to be in.” At the time, when it actually mattered, Couric chirped on “The Today Show” that “Navy SEALs rock!”

Then there’s Chris Hayes, another MSNBC host. In a broadcast just before Memorial Day 2012, Hayes expressed exactly the kind of sentiment you’d expect to hear in an honest debate on war: “It is, I think, very difficult to talk about the war dead and the fallen without invoking valor. … I feel uncomfortable about the word ‘hero’ because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war. And I obviously don’t want to desecrate or disrespect the memory of anyone that’s fallen. … But it seems to me that we marshal this word in a way that is problematic.” The freakout from the right was so intense that Hayes immediately said he was “deeply sorry” because “it’s very easy for me, a TV host, to opine about people who fight our wars, having never dodged a bullet or guarded a post or walked a mile in their boots.”

Even opinions on events from a lifetime ago must be politically correct. After Jon Stewart said on “The Daily Show” that he believed Harry Truman was a “war criminal” for using atomic weapons on Japan, he came under immediate attack, and quickly came crawling for forgiveness. “I walk that back because it was in my estimation a stupid thing to say,” Stewart pleaded in a tone recognizable from any of history’s struggle sessions. “You ever do that, where you’re saying something, and as it’s coming out you’re like, ‘What the fuck?’ And it just sat in there for a couple of days, just sitting going, ‘No, no, [Truman] wasn’t, and you should really say that out loud on the show.’”

With no critiques about specifics permissible, a broad discussion about U.S. foreign policy is light years away. There won’t be any politicians or TV hosts anytime soon who’ll consistently emphasize Martin Luther King Jr.’s position that America is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

No one knows what foreign policy Americans would choose after an open debate. But it’s manifestly true that the current one, shaped overwhelmingly by right-wing PC, has caused gigantic damage to the U.S. and the world.

Democrats out to destroy the country

We are seeing the fading of Democracy in our country as it was founded. We are seeing our rights be whittled away that our founding fathers thought they had protected America from.

We see our military will miss a commander in chief who always had their back, kept them out of endless wars and tried to bring them home, a leader who took a depleted military of the Obama/Biden era to a well-staffed and well-equipped military ready for any adversary and to defend America and its allies.

We saw federal judges and, yes, the Supreme Court more or less call most Americans liars or someone who fantasizes about what they witnessed on voting, counting and ballots. When Americans signed sworn affidavits on witnessing wrong-doing and probably fraud, it fell on deaf ears of the judiciary. The Democrats say that the judges and the courts gave their stamp of approval to what went on in states. Those who had counting issues and mail-in ballot issues, what does that say for our courts and the judiciary system in America?

We now can take the Democrats at their word when they say, “When we take the White House, we will change America.” Just look at the voting process. This may be a change America may not recover from.

The Green New Deal is a job killer. Businesses will go under to remodel for solar. China and the other polluters will continue to build 300-plus coal-fired plants all over the world. The Democrats have to make drastic changes to the U.S., and foreign countries get a pass. Changes have been made, but there is more to do. But not at the expense of the downfall of America or American jobs.

Opening the borders for free amnesty to illegals, they will know nothing of America or its founding and don’t want to. They don’t know the language and don’t want to learn. They are here for the free free, not to give back to society or fit into society.

We see the Democratic Left got their pound of flesh with their slander, their spread of repulsive vile. The constant columns of Kathleen Parker telling the world how she hates the president, the Trump Family and conservatives. The media anchors and the newspaper reporters have forgotten what it is to be impartial. What it is to be unbiased to do honest reporting instead of offering your opinion.

You helped destroy Democracy in America. You brought more division.

America will be changed forever and may not recover from it thanks to the Democratic left which may be Socialist Marxist. Reap what you sow.

How to destroy America from within

What would you do if you wanted to destroy America?

The first thing you would do is take control of the education system and teach children that they are living in an evil country. Then you would undermine the police, the military, and law enforcement. You’d use every opportunity you can to divide people by race, religion, and class. You would stoke feelings of grievance regardless of how much progress was being made to promote racial reconciliation and equal opportunity.

You would attack churches, too. You’d teach children that there is no God, thus eliminating an important way of transcending racial tension, which is the knowledge that we are all created equal by that God. You would take prayer out of schools and systemically try to eliminate religion from the public square. And then you’d tell people that the churches represent a form of modern fascism and must be condemned and closed. And you would try to elevate science in place of the transcendent. It wouldn’t be objective science — but a politicized science that serves only to reaffirm the socialist mindset.

You wouldn’t stop at the church — you would weaken as many bedrock institutions as possible.

You would defund the military and police, leaving us vulnerable to enemies abroad and criminals within. You would turn the media into a propaganda arm of the progressive mindset, where objective truth no longer matters. Blinded by greed, you would invite foreign adversaries in to take over sensitive industries, such as telecommunications. You would wash out the foundation of America, the family, and act like men are superfluous to the raising of children. You would convince people that killing their unborn children is a human right and the very essence of being a woman instead of the barbaric reality of infanticide.

All of these things have been done by the cultural and political left over the last 50 years. Unless the forces of family and faith rally soon, we will lose our constitutional republic.

So, has our country been lost?

Recent news would suggest that many people believe it has. A recent study found that 83% of Americans are very stressed over the future of the country, and 72% believe this is the lowest point in the country’s history that they’ve witnessed. A May survey found that people are the unhappiest we’ve been in 50 years. Just 14% of people say they are “very happy.” The survey further found that just 4 in 10 expect their children to have a better standard of living than they have, the lowest percentage since the question was first asked in 1994.

According to the Pew Research Center , 21% of Americans believe other countries are “better than the United States.” But here’s the truly disturbing part: Among those between the ages of 18 and 29, the figure jumps to 36%.

Most ominously, a third of voters think a civil war is “likely” sometime in the next five years.

There are many reasons for all of this doom and gloom. But it’s no accident that it’s happening at a time when pride in America has fallen to an all-time low. According to a June Gallup poll , just 42% of Americans say they are “extremely proud,” and only 21% say they are “very proud” to be American. Both of those numbers are the lowest recorded since the question was first asked in 2001.

These statistics partly explain why we see the destruction of monuments and memorials to America’s heroes and history. In the wake of protests and riots over the police killing of George Floyd, the Lincoln Memorial and other monuments to the Great Emancipator have been vandalized. Statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and the World War II Memorial, dedicated to the Greatest Generation who defeated fascism, have been damaged. Some activists are now even calling for depictions of Jesus Christ to come down. Meanwhile, most of the media, corporate America, and many politicians have remained silent or even encouraged the mob.

To many on the Left, the problem isn’t the existence of statues or memorials; it’s the existence of the American republic and Judeo-Christian civilization itself.

This weekend, Americans are celebrating our nation’s founding. But it’s not the formation of our great nation that will be foremost on many Americans’ minds, but rather its destruction.

We are locked in a battle for the heart and soul of our country. This is no longer a dispute between two parties or movements that broadly share the same goals but merely disagree on how best to achieve those goals. This is battle over diametrically opposed worldviews, informed by different values and different notions about the very meaning of America.

How America will collapse (by 2025)

Four scenarios that could spell the end of the United States as we know it — in the very near future

A soft landing for America 40 years from now? Don’t bet on it. The demise of the United States as the global superpower could come far more quickly than anyone imagines. If Washington is dreaming of 2040 or 2050 as the end of the American Century, a more realistic assessment of domestic and global trends suggests that in 2025, just 15 years from now, it could all be over except for the shouting.

Despite the aura of omnipotence most empires project, a look at their history should remind us that they are fragile organisms. So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly bad, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, 11 years for the Ottomans, 17 years for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, 22 years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003.

Future historians are likely to identify the Bush administration’s rash invasion of Iraq in that year as the start of America’s downfall. However, instead of the bloodshed that marked the end of so many past empires, with cities burning and civilians slaughtered, this twenty-first century imperial collapse could come relatively quietly through the invisible tendrils of economic collapse or cyberwarfare.

But have no doubt: when Washington’s global dominion finally ends, there will be painful daily reminders of what such a loss of power means for Americans in every walk of life. As a half-dozen European nations have discovered, imperial decline tends to have a remarkably demoralizing impact on a society, regularly bringing at least a generation of economic privation. As the economy cools, political temperatures rise, often sparking serious domestic unrest.

Available economic, educational, and military data indicate that, when it comes to U.S. global power, negative trends will aggregate rapidly by 2020 and are likely to reach a critical mass no later than 2030. The American Century, proclaimed so triumphantly at the start of World War II, will be tattered and fading by 2025, its eighth decade, and could be history by 2030.

Significantly, in 2008, the U.S. National Intelligence Council admitted for the first time that America’s global power was indeed on a declining trajectory. In one of its periodic futuristic reports, Global Trends 2025, the Council cited “the transfer of global wealth and economic power now under way, roughly from West to East” and “without precedent in modern history,” as the primary factor in the decline of the “United States’ relative strength — even in the military realm.” Like many in Washington, however, the Council’s analysts anticipated a very long, very soft landing for American global preeminence, and harbored the hope that somehow the U.S. would long “retain unique military capabilities… to project military power globally” for decades to come.

No such luck. Under current projections, the United States will find itself in second place behind China (already the world’s second largest economy) in economic output around 2026, and behind India by 2050. Similarly, Chinese innovation is on a trajectory toward world leadership in applied science and military technology sometime between 2020 and 2030, just as America’s current supply of brilliant scientists and engineers retires, without adequate replacement by an ill-educated younger generation.

By 2020, according to current plans, the Pentagon will throw a military Hail Mary pass for a dying empire. It will launch a lethal triple canopy of advanced aerospace robotics that represents Washington’s last best hope of retaining global power despite its waning economic influence. By that year, however, China’s global network of communications satellites, backed by the world’s most powerful supercomputers, will also be fully operational, providing Beijing with an independent platform for the weaponization of space and a powerful communications system for missile- or cyber-strikes into every quadrant of the globe.

Wrapped in imperial hubris, like Whitehall or Quai d’Orsay before it, the White House still seems to imagine that American decline will be gradual, gentle, and partial. In his State of the Union address last January, President Obama offered the reassurance that “I do not accept second place for the United States of America.” A few days later, Vice President Biden ridiculed the very idea that “we are destined to fulfill [historian Paul] Kennedy’s prophecy that we are going to be a great nation that has failed because we lost control of our economy and overextended.” Similarly, writing in the November issue of the establishment journal Foreign Affairs, neo-liberal foreign policy guru Joseph Nye waved away talk of China’s economic and military rise, dismissing “misleading metaphors of organic decline” and denying that any deterioration in U.S. global power was underway.

Ordinary Americans, watching their jobs head overseas, have a more realistic view than their cosseted leaders. An opinion poll in August 2010 found that 65 percent of Americans believed the country was now “in a state of decline.”  Already, Australia and Turkey, traditional U.S. military allies, are using their American-manufactured weapons for joint air and naval maneuvers with China. Already, America’s closest economic partners are backing away from Washington’s opposition to China’s rigged currency rates. As the president flew back from his Asian tour last month, a gloomy New York Times headline  summed the moment up this way: “Obama’s Economic View Is Rejected on World Stage, China, Britain and Germany Challenge U.S., Trade Talks With Seoul Fail, Too.”

Viewed historically, the question is not whether the United States will lose its unchallenged global power, but just how precipitous and wrenching the decline will be. In place of Washington’s wishful thinking, let’s use the National Intelligence Council’s own futuristic methodology to suggest four realistic scenarios for how, whether with a bang or a whimper, U.S. global power could reach its end in the 2020s (along with four accompanying assessments of just where we are today). The future scenarios include: economic decline, oil shock, military misadventure, and World War III. While these are hardly the only possibilities when it comes to American decline or even collapse, they offer a window into an onrushing future.

Economic Decline: Present Situation

Today, three main threats exist to America’s dominant position in the global economy: loss of economic clout thanks to a shrinking share of world trade, the decline of American technological innovation, and the end of the dollar’s privileged status as the global reserve currency.

By 2008, the United States had already fallen to number three in global merchandise exports, with just 11 percent of them compared to 12 percent for China and 16 percent for the European Union. There is no reason to believe that this trend will reverse itself.

Similarly, American leadership in technological innovation is on the wane. In 2008, the U.S. was still number two behind Japan in worldwide patent applications with 232,000, but China was closing fast at 195,000, thanks to a blistering 400 percent increase since 2000. A harbinger of further decline: in 2009 the U.S. hit rock bottom in ranking among the 40 nations surveyed by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation when it came to “change” in “global innovation-based competitiveness” during the previous decade. Adding substance to these statistics, in October China’s Defense Ministry unveiled the world’s fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, so powerful, said one U.S. expert, that it “blows away the existing No. 1 machine” in America.

Add to this clear evidence that the U.S. education system, that source of future scientists and innovators, has been falling behind its competitors. After leading the world for decades in 25- to 34-year-olds with university degrees, the country sank to 12th place in 2010. The World Economic Forum ranked the United States at a mediocre 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly half of all graduate students in the sciences in the U.S. are now foreigners, most of whom will be heading home, not staying here as once would have happened. By 2025, in other words, the United States is likely to face a critical shortage of talented scientists.

Such negative trends are encouraging increasingly sharp criticism of the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency. “Other countries are no longer willing to buy into the idea that the U.S. knows best on economic policy,” observed Kenneth S. Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. In mid-2009, with the world’s central banks holding an astronomical $4 trillion in U.S. Treasury notes, Russian president Dimitri Medvedev insisted that it was time to end “the artificially maintained unipolar system” based on “one formerly strong reserve currency.”

Simultaneously, China’s central bank governor suggested that the future might lie with a global reserve currency “disconnected from individual nations” (that is, the U.S. dollar). Take these as signposts of a world to come, and of a possible attempt, as economist Michael Hudson has argued, “to hasten the bankruptcy of the U.S. financial-military world order.”

Economic Decline: Scenario 2020

After years of swelling deficits fed by incessant warfare in distant lands, in 2020, as long expected, the U.S. dollar finally loses its special status as the world’s reserve currency. Suddenly, the cost of imports soars. Unable to pay for swelling deficits by selling now-devalued Treasury notes abroad, Washington is finally forced to slash its bloated military budget. Under pressure at home and abroad, Washington slowly pulls U.S. forces back from hundreds of overseas bases to a continental perimeter. By now, however, it is far too late.

Faced with a fading superpower incapable of paying the bills, China, India, Iran, Russia, and other powers, great and regional, provocatively challenge U.S. dominion over the oceans, space, and cyberspace. Meanwhile, amid soaring prices, ever-rising unemployment, and a continuing decline in real wages, domestic divisions widen into violent clashes and divisive debates, often over remarkably irrelevant issues. Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair, a far-right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal. The world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.

Oil Shock: Present Situation

One casualty of America’s waning economic power has been its lock on global oil supplies. Speeding by America’s gas-guzzling economy in the passing lane, China became the world’s number one energy consumer this summer, a position the U.S. had held for over a century. Energy specialist Michael Klare has argued that this change means China will “set the pace in shaping our global future.”

By 2025, Iran and Russia will control almost half of the world’s natural gas supply, which will potentially give them enormous leverage over energy-starved Europe. Add petroleum reserves to the mix and, as the National Intelligence Council has warned, in just 15 years two countries, Russia and Iran, could “emerge as energy kingpins.”

Despite remarkable ingenuity, the major oil powers are now draining the big basins of petroleum reserves that are amenable to easy, cheap extraction. The real lesson of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was not BP’s sloppy safety standards, but the simple fact everyone saw on “spillcam”: one of the corporate energy giants had little choice but to search for what Klare calls “tough oil” miles beneath the surface of the ocean to keep its profits up.

Compounding the problem, the Chinese and Indians have suddenly become far heavier energy consumers. Even if fossil fuel supplies were to remain constant (which they won’t), demand, and so costs, are almost certain to rise — and sharply at that. Other developed nations are meeting this threat aggressively by plunging into experimental programs to develop alternative energy sources. The United States has taken a different path, doing far too little to develop alternative sources while, in the last three decades, doubling its dependence on foreign oil imports. Between 1973 and 2007, oil imports have risen from 36 percent of energy consumed in the U.S. to 66 percent.

Oil Shock: Scenario 2025

The United States remains so dependent upon foreign oil that a few adverse developments in the global energy market in 2025 spark an oil shock. By comparison, it makes the 1973 oil shock (when prices quadrupled in just months) look like the proverbial molehill. Angered at the dollar’s plummeting value, OPEC oil ministers, meeting in Riyadh, demand future energy payments in a “basket” of Yen, Yuan, and Euros. That only hikes the cost of U.S. oil imports further. At the same moment, while signing a new series of long-term delivery contracts with China, the Saudis stabilize their own foreign exchange reserves by switching to the Yuan. Meanwhile, China pours countless billions into building a massive trans-Asia pipeline and funding Iran’s exploitation of the world largest percent natural gas field at South Pars in the Persian Gulf.

Concerned that the U.S. Navy might no longer be able to protect the oil tankers traveling from the Persian Gulf to fuel East Asia, a coalition of Tehran, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi form an unexpected new Gulf alliance and affirm that China’s new fleet of swift aircraft carriers will henceforth patrol the Persian Gulf from a base on the Gulf of Oman. Under heavy economic pressure, London agrees to cancel the U.S. lease on its Indian Ocean island base of Diego Garcia, while Canberra, pressured by the Chinese, informs Washington that the Seventh Fleet is no longer welcome to use Fremantle as a homeport, effectively evicting the U.S. Navy from the Indian Ocean.

With just a few strokes of the pen and some terse announcements, the “Carter Doctrine,” by which U.S. military power was to eternally protect the Persian Gulf, is laid to rest in 2025. All the elements that long assured the United States limitless supplies of low-cost oil from that region — logistics, exchange rates, and naval power — evaporate. At this point, the U.S. can still cover only an insignificant 12 percent of its energy needs from its nascent alternative energy industry, and remains dependent on imported oil for half of its energy consumption.

The oil shock that follows hits the country like a hurricane, sending prices to startling heights, making travel a staggeringly expensive proposition, putting real wages (which had long been declining) into freefall, and rendering non-competitive whatever American exports remained. With thermostats dropping, gas prices climbing through the roof, and dollars flowing overseas in return for costly oil, the American economy is paralyzed. With long-fraying alliances at an end and fiscal pressures mounting, U.S. military forces finally begin a staged withdrawal from their overseas bases.

Within a few years, the U.S. is functionally bankrupt and the clock is ticking toward midnight on the American Century.

Military Misadventure: Present Situation

Counterintuitively, as their power wanes, empires often plunge into ill-advised military misadventures. This phenomenon is known among historians of empire as “micro-militarism” and seems to involve psychologically compensatory efforts to salve the sting of retreat or defeat by occupying new territories, however briefly and catastrophically. These operations, irrational even from an imperial point of view, often yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the loss of power.

Embattled empires through the ages suffer an arrogance that drives them to plunge ever deeper into military misadventures until defeat becomes debacle. In 413 BCE, a weakened Athens sent 200 ships to be slaughtered in Sicily. In 1921, a dying imperial Spain dispatched 20,000 soldiers to be massacred by Berber guerrillas in Morocco. In 1956, a fading British Empire destroyed its prestige by attacking Suez. And in 2001 and 2003, the U.S. occupied Afghanistan and invaded Iraq. With the hubris that marks empires over the millennia, Washington has increased its troops in Afghanistan to 100,000, expanded the war into Pakistan, and extended its commitment to 2014 and beyond, courting disasters large and small in this guerilla-infested, nuclear-armed graveyard of empires.

Military Misadventure: Scenario 2014

So irrational, so unpredictable is “micro-militarism” that seemingly fanciful scenarios are soon outdone by actual events. With the U.S. military stretched thin from Somalia to the Philippines and tensions rising in Israel, Iran, and Korea, possible combinations for a disastrous military crisis abroad are multifold.

It’s mid-summer 2014 and a drawn-down U.S. garrison in embattled Kandahar in southern Afghanistan is suddenly, unexpectedly overrun by Taliban guerrillas, while U.S. aircraft are grounded by a blinding sandstorm. Heavy loses are taken and in retaliation, an embarrassed American war commander looses B-1 bombers and F-16 fighters to demolish whole neighborhoods of the city that are believed to be under Taliban control, while AC-130U “Spooky” gunships rake the rubble with devastating cannon fire.

Soon, mullahs are preaching jihad from mosques throughout the region, and Afghan Army units, long trained by American forces to turn the tide of the war, begin to desert en masse. Taliban fighters then launch a series of remarkably sophisticated strikes aimed at U.S. garrisons across the country, sending American casualties soaring. In scenes reminiscent of Saigon in 1975, U.S. helicopters rescue American soldiers and civilians from rooftops in Kabul and Kandahar.

Meanwhile, angry at the endless, decades-long stalemate over Palestine, OPEC’s leaders impose a new oil embargo on the U.S. to protest its backing of Israel as well as the killing of untold numbers of Muslim civilians in its ongoing wars across the Greater Middle East. With gas prices soaring and refineries running dry, Washington makes its move, sending in Special Operations forces to seize oil ports in the Persian Gulf. This, in turn, sparks a rash of suicide attacks and the sabotage of pipelines and oil wells. As black clouds billow skyward and diplomats rise at the U.N. to bitterly denounce American actions, commentators worldwide reach back into history to brand this “America’s Suez,” a telling reference to the 1956 debacle that marked the end of the British Empire.

World War III: Present Situation

In the summer of 2010, military tensions between the U.S. and China began to rise in the western Pacific, once considered an American “lake.” Even a year earlier no one would have predicted such a development. As Washington played upon its alliance with London to appropriate much of Britain’s global power after World War II, so China is now using the profits from its export trade with the U.S. to fund what is likely to become a military challenge to American dominion over the waterways of Asia and the Pacific.

With its growing resources, Beijing is claiming a vast maritime arc from Korea to Indonesia long dominated by the U.S. Navy. In August, after Washington expressed a “national interest” in the South China Sea and conducted naval exercises there to reinforce that claim, Beijing’s official Global Times responded angrily, saying, “The U.S.-China wrestling match over the South China Sea issue has raised the stakes in deciding who the real future ruler of the planet will be.”

Amid growing tensions, the Pentagon reported that Beijing now holds “the capability to attack… [U.S.] aircraft carriers in the western Pacific Ocean” and target “nuclear forces throughout… the continental United States.” By developing “offensive nuclear, space, and cyber warfare capabilities,” China seems determined to vie for dominance of what the Pentagon calls “the information spectrum in all dimensions of the modern battlespace.” With ongoing development of the powerful Long March V booster rocket, as well as the launch of two satellites in January 2010 and another in July, for a total of five, Beijing signaled that the country was making rapid strides toward an “independent” network of 35 satellites for global positioning, communications, and reconnaissance capabilities by 2020.

To check China and extend its military position globally, Washington is intent on building a new digital network of air and space robotics, advanced cyberwarfare capabilities, and electronic surveillance. Military planners expect this integrated system to envelop the Earth in a cyber-grid capable of blinding entire armies on the battlefield or taking out a single terrorist in field or favela. By 2020, if all goes according to plan, the Pentagon will launch a three-tiered shield of space drones — reaching from stratosphere to exosphere, armed with agile missiles, linked by a resilient modular satellite system, and operated through total telescopic surveillance.

Last April, the Pentagon made history. It extended drone operations into the exosphere by quietly launching the X-37B unmanned space shuttle into a low orbit 255 miles above the planet.  The X-37B is the first in a new generation of unmanned vehicles that will mark the full weaponization of space, creating an arena for future warfare unlike anything that has gone before.

World War III: Scenario 2025

The technology of space and cyberwarfare is so new and untested that even the most outlandish scenarios may soon be superseded by a reality still hard to conceive. If we simply employ the sort of scenarios that the Air Force itself used in its 2009 Future Capabilities Game, however, we can gain “a better understanding of how air, space and cyberspace overlap in warfare,” and so begin to imagine how the next world war might actually be fought.

It’s 11:59 p.m. on Thanksgiving Thursday in 2025. While cyber-shoppers pound the portals of Best Buy for deep discounts on the latest home electronics from China, U.S. Air Force technicians at the Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) on Maui choke on their coffee as their panoramic screens suddenly blip to black. Thousands of miles away at the U.S. CyberCommand’s operations center in Texas, cyberwarriors soon detect malicious binaries that, though fired anonymously, show the distinctive digital fingerprints of China’s People’s Liberation Army.

The first overt strike is one nobody predicted. Chinese “malware” seizes control of the robotics aboard an unmanned solar-powered U.S. “Vulture” drone as it flies at 70,000 feet over the Tsushima Strait between Korea and Japan. It suddenly fires all the rocket pods beneath its enormous 400-foot wingspan, sending dozens of lethal missiles plunging harmlessly into the Yellow Sea, effectively disarming this formidable weapon.

Determined to fight fire with fire, the White House authorizes a retaliatory strike. Confident that its F-6 “Fractionated, Free-Flying” satellite system is impenetrable, Air Force commanders in California transmit robotic codes to the flotilla of X-37B space drones orbiting 250 miles above the Earth, ordering them to launch their “Triple Terminator” missiles at China’s 35 satellites. Zero response. In near panic, the Air Force launches its Falcon Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle into an arc 100 miles above the Pacific Ocean and then, just 20 minutes later, sends the computer codes to fire missiles at seven Chinese satellites in nearby orbits. The launch codes are suddenly inoperative.

As the Chinese virus spreads uncontrollably through the F-6 satellite architecture, while those second-rate U.S. supercomputers fail to crack the malware’s devilishly complex code, GPS signals crucial to the navigation of U.S. ships and aircraft worldwide are compromised. Carrier fleets begin steaming in circles in the mid-Pacific. Fighter squadrons are grounded. Reaper drones fly aimlessly toward the horizon, crashing when their fuel is exhausted. Suddenly, the United States loses what the U.S. Air Force has long called “the ultimate high ground”: space. Within hours, the military power that had dominated the globe for nearly a century has been defeated in World War III without a single human casualty.

A New World Order?

Even if future events prove duller than these four scenarios suggest, every significant trend points toward a far more striking decline in American global power by 2025 than anything Washington now seems to be envisioning.

As allies worldwide begin to realign their policies to take cognizance of rising Asian powers, the cost of maintaining 800 or more overseas military bases will simply become unsustainable, finally forcing a staged withdrawal on a still-unwilling Washington. With both the U.S. and China in a race to weaponize space and cyberspace, tensions between the two powers are bound to rise, making military conflict by 2025 at least feasible, if hardly guaranteed.

Complicating matters even more, the economic, military, and technological trends outlined above will not operate in tidy isolation. As happened to European empires after World War II, such negative forces will undoubtedly prove synergistic. They will combine in thoroughly unexpected ways, create crises for which Americans are remarkably unprepared, and threaten to spin the economy into a sudden downward spiral, consigning this country to a generation or more of economic misery.

As U.S. power recedes, the past offers a spectrum of possibilities for a future world order. At one end of this spectrum, the rise of a new global superpower, however unlikely, cannot be ruled out. Yet both China and Russia evince self-referential cultures, recondite non-roman scripts, regional defense strategies, and underdeveloped legal systems, denying them key instruments for global dominion. At the moment then, no single superpower seems to be on the horizon likely to succeed the U.S.

In a dark, dystopian version of our global future, a coalition of transnational corporations, multilateral forces like NATO, and an international financial elite could conceivably forge a single, possibly unstable, supra-national nexus that would make it no longer meaningful to speak of national empires at all. While denationalized corporations and multinational elites would assumedly rule such a world from secure urban enclaves, the multitudes would be relegated to urban and rural wastelands.

In “Planet of Slums,” Mike Davis offers at least a partial vision of such a world from the bottom up. He argues that the billion people already packed into fetid favela-style slums worldwide (rising to two billion by 2030) will make “the ‘feral, failed cities’ of the Third World… the distinctive battlespace of the twenty-first century.” As darkness settles over some future super-favela, “the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression” as “hornet-like helicopter gun-ships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts… Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions.”

At a midpoint on the spectrum of possible futures, a new global oligopoly might emerge between 2020 and 2040, with rising powers China, Russia, India, and Brazil collaborating with receding powers like Britain, Germany, Japan, and the United States to enforce an ad hoc global dominion, akin to the loose alliance of European empires that ruled half of humanity circa 1900.

Another possibility: the rise of regional hegemons in a return to something reminiscent of the international system that operated before modern empires took shape. In this neo-Westphalian world order, with its endless vistas of micro-violence and unchecked exploitation, each hegemon would dominate its immediate region — Brasilia in South America, Washington in North America, Pretoria in southern Africa, and so on. Space, cyberspace, and the maritime deeps, removed from the control of the former planetary “policeman,” the United States, might even become a new global commons, controlled through an expanded U.N. Security Council or some ad hoc body.

All of these scenarios extrapolate existing trends into the future on the assumption that Americans, blinded by the arrogance of decades of historically unparalleled power, cannot or will not take steps to manage the unchecked erosion of their global position.

If America’s decline is in fact on a 22-year trajectory from 2003 to 2025, then we have already frittered away most of the first decade of that decline with wars that distracted us from long-term problems and, like water tossed onto desert sands, wasted trillions of desperately needed dollars.

If only 15 years remain, the odds of frittering them all away still remain high. Congress and the president are now in gridlock; the American system is flooded with corporate money meant to jam up the works; and there is little suggestion that any issues of significance, including our wars, our bloated national security state, our starved education system, and our antiquated energy supplies, will be addressed with sufficient seriousness to assure the sort of soft landing that might maximize our country’s role and prosperity in a changing world.

Europe’s empires are gone and America’s imperium is going. It seems increasingly doubtful that the United States will have anything like Britain’s success in shaping a succeeding world order that protects its interests, preserves its prosperity, and bears the imprint of its best values.

Biden and Dems Are Set to Abolish the Suburbs

President Trump had a great riff at his rally the other day in Phoenix. It was all about “abolish,” about how the Left wants to abolish the police, ICE, bail, even borders. Trump’s riff is effective because it is true. The Left has gone off the deep end, and they’re taking the Democrats with them.

Well, there’s another “abolish” the president can add to his list, and it just might be enough to tip the scales this November. Joe Biden and the Democrats want to abolish America’s suburbs. Biden and his party have embraced yet another dream of the radical Left: a federal takeover, transformation, and de facto urbanization of America’s suburbs. What’s more, Biden just might be able to pull off this “fundamental transformation.”

The suburbs are the swing constituency in our national elections. If suburban voters knew what the Democrats had in store for them, they’d run screaming in the other direction. Unfortunately, Republicans have been too clueless or timid to make an issue of the Democrats’ anti-suburban plans. It’s time to tell voters the truth.

Joe Biden’s housing plans have been studied and what I’ve seen is both surprising and frightening. It expected that a President Biden would enforce the Obama administration’s radical AFFH (Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing) regulation to the hilt. That is exactly what Biden promises to do. By itself, that would be more than enough to end America’s suburbs as we’ve known them, as I’ve explained repeatedly here at NRO.

What is surprising is that Biden has actually promised to go much further than AFFH. Biden has embraced Cory Booker’s strategy for ending single-family zoning in the suburbs and creating what you might call “little downtowns” in the suburbs. Combine the Obama-Biden administration’s radical AFFH regulation with Booker’s new strategy, and it is not clear how the suburbs can retain their ability to govern themselves. It will mean the end of local control, the end of a style of living that many people prefer to the city, and therefore the end of meaningful choice in how Americans can live. Shouldn’t voters know that this is what’s at stake in the election?

It is no exaggeration to say that progressive urbanists have long dreamed of abolishing the suburbs. Initially, these anti-suburban radicals wanted large cities to simply annex their surrounding suburbs, like cities did in the 19th century. That way a big city could fatten up its tax base. Once progressives discovered it had since become illegal for a city to annex its surrounding suburbs without voter consent, they cooked up a strategy that would amount to the same thing.

This de facto annexation strategy had three parts: (1) use a kind of quota system to force “economic integration” on the suburbs, pushing urban residents outside of the city; (2) close down suburban growth by regulating development, restricting automobile use, and limiting highway growth and repair, thus forcing would-be suburbanites back to the city; (3) use state and federal laws to force suburbs to redistribute tax revenue to poorer cities in their greater metropolitan region. If you force urbanites into suburbs, force suburbanites back into cities, and redistribute suburban tax revenue, then presto! You have effectively abolished the suburbs.

Obama’s radical AFFH regulation puts every part of progressives’ “abolish the suburbs” strategy into effect. Once Biden starts to enforce AFFH the way Obama’s administration originally meant it to work, it will be as if America’s suburbs had been swallowed up by the cities they surround. They will lose control of their own zoning and development, they will be pressured into a kind of de facto regional-revenue redistribution, and they will even be forced to start building high-density low-income housing. The latter, of course, will require the elimination of single-family zoning. With that, the basic character of the suburbs will disappear. At the very moment when the pandemic has made people rethink the advantages of dense urban living, the choice of an alternative will be taken away.

That’s all bad enough. But on top of AFFH, Biden now plans to use Cory Booker’s strategy for attacking suburban zoning. AFFH works by holding HUD’s Community Development Block Grants hostage to federal-planning demands. Suburbs won’t be able to get the millions of dollars they’re used to in HUD grants unless they eliminate single-family zoning and densify their business districts. AFFH also forces HUD-grant recipients to sign pledges to “affirmatively further fair housing.” Those pledges could get suburbs sued by civil-rights groups, or by the feds, if they don’t get rid of single-family zoning. The only defense suburbs have against this two-pronged attack is to refuse HUD grants. True, that will effectively redistribute huge amounts of suburban money to cities, but if they give up their HUD grants at least the suburbs will be free of federal control.

The Booker approach — now endorsed by Biden — may block even this way out. Booker wants to hold suburban zoning hostage not only to HUD grants, but to the federal transportation grants used by states to build and repair highways. It may be next to impossible for suburbs to opt out of those state-run highway repairs. Otherwise, suburban roads will deteriorate and suburban access to major arteries will be blocked. AFFH plus the Booker plan will leave America’s suburbs with no alternative but to eliminate their single-family zoning and turn over their planning to the feds. Slowly but surely, suburbs will become helpless satellites of the cities they surround, exactly as progressive urbanists intend.

If America’s suburban voters understood that all this is what Biden and the Democrats have in store for them, it could easily swing the election. That means President Trump now has another “abolish” to add to his list: Joe Biden and the Dems want to abolish America’s suburbs.

There’s just one hitch. Incredibly, although AFFH is arguably Obama’s most radical initiative, Ben Carson’s HUD has still not gotten rid of it. Instead, Carson suspended enforcement of the rule early on and then tinkered around for three years trying to come up with a replacement. What Carson has developed so far is something you might call “AFFH lite.” While this possible replacement removes many of the regulation’s excesses, Carson has so far retained the most egregious feature of AFFH. He still wants to use HUD money to gut suburban single-family zoning. How Carson can even think about taking this stance in the face of President Trump’s explicit directive to reduce and remove excessive federal regulation is a mystery.

It will be very tough for President Trump to make a political issue out of Biden’s housing plans so long as his own cabinet secretary is talking about killing suburban single-family zoning with AFFH. I think Carson’s wobbling on AFFH explains a lot about why Democrats have become so bold with their plans to undo suburban zoning. If even the Trump administration goes along with federal attacks on suburban zoning, the Dems figure they’ve got political cover. Time was when Obama administration officials would turn somersaults to deny that they were going to control suburban-zoning decisions, even when it was obvious that this was their plan. Now, Biden and Booker are remarkably open about their desire to densify the suburbs and get rid of single-family zoning.

The Democrat war on the suburbs is a golden gift to President Trump, but he won’t be able to make use of it until he throws over Carson’s AFFH lite and completely guts Obama’s wildly radical regulation. Then Tump can go to town on Biden and the Dems for making war on the suburbs.

If there were ever proof that Biden has shed his centrism and been taken over by the Left, this is it. Biden got the nomination by declining to endorse the most radical plans of his rivals. But take a look at Biden’s housing plans and it’s clear that he is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Left. Progressive urbanists’ long-cherished dream of abolishing the suburbs is now within reach. With AFFH restored to its original form by a President Biden, enforced to the hilt, and turbo-charged by the Booker strategy, suburbs as we know them will pass from the scene.

With them will disappear the principle of local control that has been the key to American exceptionalism from the start. Since the Pilgrims first landed, our story has been of a people who chose how and where to live, and who governed themselves when they got there. Self-government in a layered federalist system allowing for local control right down to the township is what made America great. If Biden and the Democrats win, that key to our greatness could easily go by the boards.

I am going to wrap up this article the following question.

Does Biden Want to Destroy America?

President Biden said he would bring America back. No, the Taliban is back. In little more than seven months, he seems to be doing everything he can to bring America down.

A guest on Dan Bongino’s radio show asked a question that demands an answer—If Biden wanted to destroy this country, would he do anything differently than what he has been doing? By looking at some of his policies and decisions in his first seven months, it could be argued that President Biden and his administration seem committed to destroying America as a beacon of freedom, law and order, and opportunity! The list of evidence keeps growing:

If you want to destroy America, open our Southern border to all who want to come in.Instead of continuing the work of his predecessor to secure our Southern border, Biden has opened America to unprecedented numbers of illegal aliens, M13 gang members, drug dealers, and potential terrorists from around the world. Even illegal immigrants with COVID have been welcomed and transported to states throughout the country at American taxpayer expense. Thankfully, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling has revived Trump’s “Stay in Mexico” policy, but implementation requires Mexico’s cooperation and that’s far from sure.

If you want to destroy America, do everything you can to end our energy independence. While giving his stamp of approval to Russia’s oil pipeline to Europe, President Biden has sabotaged President Trump’s progress in securing energy independence, He has halted construction on the Keystone XL Pipeline, closed drilling on federal lands, and is working to revive our support for the Paris Climate Accord that promises to dampen our country’s economic growth for years to come. He has called for electric cars without adequate plans to establish charging stations that can sustain the mass use of such vehicles.

If you want to destroy America, stoke the fires of racial hatred in an already divided country.President Biden has legitimized and supported the teaching of critical race theory and white privilege. Instead of unifying our country, he’s fueling a new racism that sees every white citizen as a privileged racist. We need another Martin Luther King Jr., not a Black Lives Matter movement that feeds racial hatred, demands reparations, encourages racial segregation, and fuels racial mistrust. The progress America has made in civil rights is in danger of being reversed while fracturing our country across racial lines.

If you want to destroy America, allow crime on the streets to go unpunished.President Biden and his Democratic colleagues continue to rail about Trump’s supposed January 6^th ‘insurrection” even when the FBI has found no evidence supporting such allegations of a planned breach. At the same time, he remains silent about the real “insurrection” on the streets of many of our major cities. Democratic district attorneys are failing to prosecute low level looting, destructive rioting, and even arson. When you do not hold criminals responsible and set them free, crime is rewarded. Even worse, President Biden wants to take guns away from responsible citizens while not protecting citizens from crime on the streets.

If you want to destroy America, keep calling for lockdowns and strict mask guidelines. Under the guise of protecting Americans from COVID-19, President Biden has defended economic lockdowns, unproven mask requirements, and restrictive requirements that have closed many small businesses forever and cost Americans jobs. What’s worse is some Democratic leaders don’t even consistently follow the very requirements they institute. Such hypocrisy undermines respect for leaders and the laws they create.

If you want to destroy America, allow congress to pass reckless deficit spending creating government dependence and rampant Inflation. President Biden is supporting drastic increases in government spending. Inflation rate has already increased to 5%, hitting the citizens who are already struggling to make ends meet. No wonder they are demanding more support from government and limits on evictions. There are jobs available, but the costs for housing, food, and gas for their cars is going up beyond what they can afford with the jobs available. Biden is doing all he can to make socialism appear the only answer possible.

If you want to destroy America, establish the federal control of elections.At a time trust in our elections is at an all-time low, President Biden has fully supported the federal takeover of our elections from the states. Biden’s supported “reforms” literally outlaw states from requiring verification of citizenship. By expanding the times and ways you can vote without increasing necessary controls will just ensure further opportunities for cheating and creating more distrust in our elections. 

If you want to destroy America, project military weakness and failed leadership in times of crisis.President Biden’s poorly planned military withdrawal from Afghanistan has resulted in unnecessary deaths of our soldiers, citizens, and Afghan allies. By going it alone, he earned the criticism and condemnation of some of our best allies. By failing to expedite withdrawals before initiating the military departure, many have been left stranded at the mercy of Taliban rule. His failure to get critical military systems and equipment out has equipped potential enemies. The strengthened Taliban rule has once again provided a haven for and emboldened terrorists eager to attack America. The death of 13 American soldiers by two ISIS suicide bombers is but a foretaste of terrorist attacks to come.

In short, those of you who voted for President Biden, this is all on you. Yes, you may not have liked President Trump’s brash attacks and egotistical tweets. But by voting for Joe Biden, you took down a President who projected no-nonsense strength and resolve in making America strong. He unleashed the economy to record levels curtailed only by the pandemic. He was quick to free big pharma to produce vaccines to counter the COVID threat. Instead of begging for oil, he created energy independence. He lowered taxes on all Americans and small businesses. You traded an amazing future for weak leadership, uncertainty, and growing chaos for our country and our world. New elections cannot come soon enough to stop the downward American spiral Biden’s presidency has unleashed. 

References

realclearpoltics.com, “The Left’s False Narratives Are Destroying the Country.” By Jesse Kelly; thedailysignal.com, “The Radical Left’s Ideas Could Destroy America for Generations.” By Kay C. James; nvdaily.com, “Letter to the Editor: The Left is destroying our country: We are witnessing attempts of the Democrats and extreme left to destroy this country!” By The Northern Virginia Daily; townhall.com, ” The 6 Big Ways Liberals Are Destroying America’s Culture.” By John Hawkins; townhall.com, “Does Biden Want to Destroy America?” By Terry Paulson; thedailysignal, “The Left Is Trying to Rewrite American History. We Must Stop Them.” By Walter E. Williams; the intercept.com, “Political Correctness Is Destroying America! (Just Not How You Think.) The vast, vast majority of political correctness in America is conservative, and it‘s extremely dangerous. Jon Schwarz; register-herald.com, “Democrats out to destroy the country.” By Carole Williams; townhall.com, “5 Big Government, America-Destroying Schemes Democrats are Proposing During COVID-19 Crisis.” By Larry O’Connor; washingtonexaminer.com, “How to destroy America from within.” by Gary Bauer; salon.com, “How America will collapse (by 2025): Four scenarios that could spell the end of the United States as we know it — in the very near future.” By ALFRED MCCOY; nationalreview.com, “Biden and Dems Are Set to Abolish the Suburbs.” By STANLEY KURTZ; dailywire.com, “The Mental, Emotional And Financial Benefits Of Going To Church: Weekly churchgoers are happier, have better relationships and make more money.” By Ben Johnson;

Addendum

The Mental, Emotional And Financial Benefits Of Going To Church

Weekly churchgoers are happier, have better relationships and make more money.

(Update 5/7/2022)

The legacy media never seem more enthusiastic than when they are reporting about the decline of church membership. Only 36% of Americans say they attend religious services at least weekly, while 30% say they attend “seldom/never” — and both trends are moving in the wrong direction. In 2020, the number of Americans who consider themselves members of a church or other religion fell below a majority (47%) for the first time. And the younger the respondent, the less likely they are to attend church or to believe in God at all. 

That’s lamentable for numerous reasons. For believers, the biggest issue comes in their alienation from God and the atrophying of their soul’s higher functions. But a series of studies prove that those who do not attend church, or do not attend regularly, miss out on a host of secular benefits, as well. Those benefits include:

Churchgoers are happier than secular people. 

Multiple studies have found that people who regularly attend religious services have a more cheerful heart than those who do not. “Happiness is a crowded pew,” wrote NBC News in 2010. The author was remarking on a study conducted by Robert Putnam and Chaeyoon Lim, published that December in the American Sociological Review, which found weekly churchgoers were more likely to say they are “extremely satisfied” with life than non-churchgoers. “We found that people are more satisfied with their lives when they go to church, because they build a social network within their congregation,” said Lim. Nine years later, a Pew Research Center survey found strikingly similar results about happiness. “Sometimes the gaps are striking: In the U.S., for instance, 36% of the actively religious describe themselves as ‘very happy,’ compared with 25% of the inactively religious and 25% of the unaffiliated,” noted the 2019 Pew study. “Notable happiness gaps among these groups also exist in Japan, Australia and Germany.” How long will it be until psychiatrists prescribe “church attendance” to depressed Americans?

Regular church attendance helps poor children excel at education.

Although the media and academia regularly associate religion with ignorance and obscurantism, a new study shows that caricature could not be further from the truth. Regular church attendance actually increases the likelihood that working-class young people will excel in high school and go on to receive a college education. “My research focused on Christian denominations because they are the most prevalent in the United States,” wrote Ilana M. Horwitz, an assistant professor of Jewish studies and sociology at Tulane University, in The New York Times in March 2022. She tracked the lives of 3,290 teenagers by correlating data from the National Study of Youth and Religion and the National Student Clearinghouse and found the importance of church attendance. In high school, religious working-class boys proved twice as likely to earn high grades than those not raised going to church. “Those raised by professional-class parents, for example, do not experience much in the way of an educational advantage from being religious. … However, teenage boys from working-class families, regardless of race, who were regularly involved in their church and strongly believed in God were twice as likely to earn bachelor’s degrees as moderately religious or nonreligious boys.” Horwitz believes the optimism and purpose infused by church teachings help religious adherents overcome the depression, despair and lethargy engendered by other parts of their environment. 

Practicing Christians are more likely to enjoy flourishing relationships. 

Practicing Christians are twice as likely as the average American to be content with their personal and emotional life, and experience deep and fulfilling relationships with other people. A study released by the Barna Group in March 2022 found:

• 29% of all U.S. adults said, “My relationships are as satisfying as I would want them to be,” compared with 60% of practicing Christians;
• 34% of all U.S. adults said, “I am content with my friendships and relationships,” compared with 67% of practicing Christians; and
• 28% of all U.S. adults said they experienced “relational flourishing,” compared with 61% of practicing Christians.  

“A church that not only welcomes and connects people but also operates out of an awareness (if not a proficiency in) in the realities of what it takes to be content and satisfied in relationships today is key in supporting the whole-life flourishing of congregants,” the study noted. This Barna study had a 2.9% margin of error and a 95% confidence rate.

Churchgoers earn more money. 

One economist found that regularly attending religious services results in a “better economic outcome.” Specifically, households that attend church twice as often as another household will earn 9.1% more income, according to economist Jonathan Gruber of MIT. Gruber did not explain how church attendance benefited believers’ bottom lines, although he speculated four possible reasons: Church attendance may create broader social networks; parochial schools may offer a better education than public schools; churches provide charity to help its struggling members; and it may be that people with “more faith may be less stressed out about daily problems that impede success in the labor market and the marriage market, and are therefore more successful.” 

Young churchgoers are less likely to commit crime. 

The more often young people attend church — and the greater importance they place on religion — the less likely they are to commit juvenile legal offenses. Marripedia, an online database related to everything concerning family formation and religious observance, said: “In a major national survey of adolescents, a 6 percent reduction in delinquency was associated with a one-point increase on an index that combined adolescents’ frequency of religious attendance with their rating of religion’s importance. Each unit increase in a mother’s religious practice is associated with a 9 percent decline in her child’s delinquency. The adolescents at lowest risk for delinquency typically have highly religious mothers and are themselves highly religious.” 

Churchgoers are more likely to donate to/volunteer for charity. 

People who regularly attend church services do not merely receive benefits; they are also more likely to bestow them on others. Surveys have found those who attend church weekly are more likely to give money to charitable organizations and substantially more likely to volunteer their time to the cause. “Overall, 93% of weekly or nearly weekly churchgoers say they donated money to a charity, compared with 82% of those who seldom or never go to church,” a 2006 Gallup poll found. “However, more than three in four weekly churchgoers (79%) say they volunteered their time for a charity in the past year, while fewer than half of those who rarely or never attend church (47%) say they volunteered their time.”

This takes into account a mere handful of the vast number of surveys, polls, studies and social data correlating regular church attendance with better educational attainment, personal happiness, relationship stability, law-abiding behavior and pro-social activity.

When the media celebrate the death of religion in America, we must remember that this is what they are celebrating: a poorer, less educated, more incarcerated population less likely to be satisfied with themselves or others. One can hardly call that progress.

Governmental and Political Posts Both National and International
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/11/04/is-the-democratic-party-the-judas-party/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/10/15/what-are-the-panama-papers/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/10/11/what-amendments-will-be-in-jeopardy-under-a-democratic-government/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/10/04/nominating-and-vetting-supreme-court-justices/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/09/24/george-soros-revealed/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/08/24/hud-housing-mandates/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/09/28/roe-vs-wade-redux/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/09/14/chinas-100-year-plan-for-world-domination/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/09/13/when-the-soviet-union-collapsed-what-type-of-government-did-it-take-and-does-it-still-exist/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/09/11/israel-and-the-united-arab-emirate-brokered-deal-how-big-is-this/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/09/11/the-plot-to-destroy-america-when-and-how-did-it-start/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/08/26/what-ruined-this-country/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/08/25/how-to-make-our-country-great-again/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/08/18/socialism-explained/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/08/17/communism-explained/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/08/05/can-american-win-the-war-for-the-world-market/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/07/30/do-you-remember-the-movie-independence-day/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/07/22/why-does-the-left-hate-this-country/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/07/16/essential-and-non-essential-businesses-blast-from-the-past-or-not/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/07/13/cancel-culture-needs-to-end-its-unamerican/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/07/09/financial-disclosure-for-politicians/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/07/10/athletes-speak-out-but-who-cares/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/26/why-democratic-leaders-are-okay-with-the-destruction-of-our-statues/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/25/how-would-the-left-respond-to-the-right-if-they-reciprocated-with-violence/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/25/what-drives-the-agenda-of-the-democratic-party-fear-or-far-left-ideology/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/23/violence-and-fear-as-a-tool-of-the-left/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/23/why-are-state-and-local-leaders-allowing-looting-and-rioting-to-occur/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/21/did-christopher-columbus-deserve-a-statue/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/20/give-an-inch-take-a-mile-the-age-of-aquiescence/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/19/daca-right-or-wrong/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/18/should-tax-payer-dollars-be-used-to-rebuild-decimated-cities/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/18/the-national-debt-dangerously-high/
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