Thoughts on cancel culture, and the freedom of religion and speech

There seems to be no letting up in the manic drive to change everything in the country. From vestiges of the country’s founding, to the War Between the States, to being dissatisfied with one’s gender, to millions of relatively tiny things that trigger somebody’s feelings, such as calling a toy potato “Mr. Potato Head.” A stunning amount of emotional energy is spent on trying to satisfy the myriad of hyper-sensitive displeasures that some Americans agonize over.

One recent change involves the Randolph Township Board of Education in Morris County, New Jersey, where the Board unanimously voted to remove the names of all holidays from the school calendar.

“If we don’t have anything on the calendar, we don’t have to have anyone [with] hurt feelings or anything like that,” board member Dorene Roche told Fox 5 NY.

The board unanimously voted to remove the names of all holidays from the school calendar earlier this month. This decision was prompted by protests of an earlier decision to change the name of Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day.

Some of the people who object to these changes, that are being made to protect the feelings of a few that are upset, are pursuing some cancellations of their own.

“Now they’ve cancelled our holidays,” wrote Laura Assante of Randolph Township, “how will students learn about the significance of these days if our board doesn’t even deem them important enough to keep on the calendar? Enough! It’s time now to cancel the BOE and get a new, honest administration in place who values our children and community.”

And now that “Juneteenth” has been officially declared a national holiday, it will just be a “Day Off” on the school calendar.

The School Board has decided to review the decision.

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Baker Jack Phillips is being punished by a Colorado court for refusing to design a cake that celebrates a person’s gender transition. His reason is that doing so violates his Christian beliefs.

So, if a person born a male believes he is a she, or a person born a female believes she is a he, the rest of us are expected to accept that, and in Phillips’ case, he must recognize it through his work. But a person’s religious preferences that do not recognize gender fluidity opens that person to legal action. Somehow, that doesn’t compute.

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution begins: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …” If Phillips is prohibited by a court order from acting according to his religious beliefs, isn’t that actually “prohibiting the free exercise” of his religion?

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Things get cancelled because some group — however large or small — dislikes them. Realistically, few things, perhaps nothing, can escape being disliked by someone. Thus, if we keep allowing this foolish cancelling of things, since nothing will be acceptable to everyone, therefore everything will be cancelled, and we will all just become dust in the wind.

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The concept of free speech is one of the hallmarks of the United States of America. It separates us from the tyrannically ruled countries across the globe. Humanity benefits from the free exchange of ideas, as demonstrated by the very existence of the United States.

When an idea is brought forth, it will be accepted by some and opposed by others. It just makes sense that in a free country the opposition’s ideas are available to be considered by anyone and everyone. That is how a free people become informed and able to make decisions that are based on a variety of opinions on important topics.

How ironic that huge and popular organizations such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, et al, operate under the protection of the First Amendment’s free speech protections, and then use that protection to arbitrarily deny free speech to expressing other ideas.

Yes, some ideas expressed may not be truthful, or might be harmful. That can occur in a new idea, or in the responses to it. Who gets to decide: the issuer of the new idea, which may be flawed, or a respondent, whose point of view may be flawed? That is why speech must remain free, in all but the most undeniably dangerous cases.

What we have today is a political faction that doesn’t want the concepts it supports to be measured against differing opinions that might lead many people to oppose its concepts. When you fear that your ideas will not win the day, what more effective way to ensure that those ideas will win than to make them the only ideas people can know about?

Such anti-American behavior is the gold standard of Marxism and Communism, among other venomous, malicious and oppressive ideologies. The difference between those regimes and the USA is that here it is not the government that is cheating to get its ideas accepted by controlling what people have access to, it is private companies.

Interestingly, it was the freedoms of America — the very ones they are working so desperately to subvert — that enabled them to become the successful entities that they are.

News media hates Trump more than they love honest journalism

Last year as the pandemic swept the nation, and the presidential campaign heated up, the criticisms of then-President Donald Trump grew beyond fever pitch. Virtually everything the man said was met with denunciations and put-downs from the political left, stoked by the liberal news media that didn’t always probe the issue.

When Trump tested positive for COVID-19 in March 2020, he took a two-week regimen of the drug hydroxychloroquine, and praised it as being useful for treating the virus. The media criticism was immediate and vicious, with physicians and scientists, such as Dr. Anthony Fauci and the World Health Organization, saying that it wasn’t effective for the virus.

Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden joined in, saying at a Yahoo News town hall on COVID-19 and food insecurity, “C’mon, man! What is he doing? What in God’s name is he doing?”

And guess what? “A new study published by medRxiv shows hydroxychloroquine, combined with zinc, increased the survival rate of severely ill Wuhan coronavirus patients by 200 percent,” reported Townhall.com. 

Early on, Trump suggested that the virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab in China, rather than from a nearby wet market. Again, the media had a field day ridiculing that suggestion. 

It is a known fact that these kinds of labs, wherever they may be, have leaks, so the possibility that Wuhan’s lab could have had one is not crazy. Furthermore, we now know that three researchers at the Wuhan lab suffered from symptoms consistent with COVID-19 in November 2019, before the virus was heard of.

On an episode of CBS "Face the Nation" last month, former head of the Food and Drug Administration, Scott Gottlieb, said that the case for COVID-19 originating in a lab has become increasingly likely, and the likelihood that it came from an animal is dwindling. 

Trump was also ridiculed and chastised for urging against lockdowns. However, generally, the states with the strictest COVID lockdowns caused huge losses of jobs, but those with less severe restrictions have experienced low levels of unemployment

And the New York Post reported: “The five states with the strictest lockdowns over the last year — Hawaii, California, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York — have an average unemployment rate of 8.06 percent. In the five states with the lightest restrictions, unemployment sits at just 3.48 percent — lower than the 3.5 percent national rate before the pandemic hit the US.”

“At the same time,” the Post report continued, “ample scientific evidence points to the fact that lockdowns did not save lives, regardless of the media force-feeding its preferred narrative to the public.”

Trump early on initiated Project Warp Speed to quickly create a vaccine. The Washington Post reported Trump’s statement on the vaccine’s early completion at a coronavirus roundtable meeting on March 2, 2020: “We’re moving aggressively to accelerate the process of developing a vaccine. … A lot of good things are happening and they’re happening very fast,” he said. 

“Trump is not wrong in saying that scientists are rapidly developing a vaccine to combat the novel coronavirus,” The Post article said. “However, he seems to be overstating when a vaccine will be available to the public. Experts have emphasized that actual deployment of the vaccine is more than a year away, not a few months, as Trump has suggested.”

And a headline on NBC News’ Website read: “Trump says, without evidence, vaccine could be ready by Election Day.”

While the vaccines were not ready by Election Day, they were ready five weeks later, and far ahead of the one-to-ten-year timeline that skeptics expected.

And then there is the situation at Lafayette Square where “peaceful” protesters were attacked with “flash-bang explosions and doused with tear gas,” according to The New York Times. This was supposedly done to clear the way for Trump to walk over to the St. John’s Church for a photo op. That is the same church that the “peaceful” protesters had set afire earlier.

The problem is that none of the country’s finest reporters did their jobs as professionals should. Had they done it right, they would have learned that the clearing of the crowd was decided before Trump even planned on going to the church.

“But an investigation released this week by Interior Department IG Mark Lee Greenblatt says U.S. Park Police and the U.S. Secret Service deemed it necessary to remove protestors from the park on June 1, 2020, in order to install anti-scale fencing,” as reported by Fox News. “The decision was reached after at least 49 U.S. Park Police were injured while policing protests days earlier.”

Other “journalists” also got it wrong. MSNBC’s Joy Reid and CNN's Anderson Cooper also parroted that it happened so Trump could have a photo op. 

Though you don’t have to be a big city newspaper or network TV reporter to actually think about what you are doing and seek out accurate information, you might expect those folks would be the ones that would. But, no.

Much or most of the major media outlets relinquished their professional ethics and replaced them with political interests. Feelings trumped integrity.

Honest, objective news journalism is not something we can rely on.

Being soft on crime is a recipe for more crime, as we have seen

America has been known as a nation of laws. It has a system that catches criminals and those suspected of crimes, tries them, and when found guilty, metes out prescribed punishments. It is not a perfect system, as it has occasionally convicted innocent people, and sometimes meted out punishments more severe, or less severe than appropriate. But, it has worked pretty well.

For more than 20 years, the violent crime rate has been dropping. However, today, we find the justice system being undermined, crimes becoming more and more frequent, while proper consequences are applied less frequently. 

A commentary from Real Clear Politics (RCP), written by Bernard Kerik, a former police commissioner and Department of Correction commissioner in New York City, commented on this. “Effective Jan. 1, Democratic legislators in New York eliminated pre-trial detention with cash bail for about 90 percent of arrestees, including those charged with serious offenses such as burglary.”

Kerik continued, saying that “this law means more potentially violent criminals will be back on the street shortly after their arrests, without even a bail bond over their heads to keep them honest.”

The danger in this foolish plan was pointed out by New York public safety and law enforcement officials, who advised that this idea should be reversed, or things would quickly get worse. They were right.

“On the very first day that ‘bail reform’ was in place, a judge was forced to release a drunk driver with three prior DWI convictions, six total felonies, six misdemeanor convictions, and five charges of failing to appear on his own recognizance,” Kerik wrote. The man was then charged with another drunk driving offense less than two weeks later, this one killing a college student. And guess what? When in front of the judge for this charge, the judge was again forced to release him on his own recognizance.

Some more data on this topic comes from Yolo County, California:  “Individuals released in the county on $0 bail committed over 300 new crimes,” according to a statement from the Yolo County District Attorney, reported last October in the Woodland, CA Daily Democrat. “The DA’s data also shows that there is a 33 percent rearrest rate among inmates who were released on zero bail.”

California is not alone in this ridiculous process. The New York Daily News reported in March of 2020 that “Mayor de Blasio and the city’s top cop unveiled stats Thursday they say show many suspects freed under new bail reforms are going on to commit major crimes. During the first two months of the year, 482 people charged with a felony were released without bail only to [be] rearrested for new crimes 846 times, according to officials.”

If that wasn’t bad enough, there is the totally irrational “defund the police” movement. As budgets were cut, and restrictions put in place, many officers retired or merely left their job. Finding new recruits has become difficult, as there is much public sentiment against police officers, and violence against them has increased substantially.

While most other countries experienced a decrease in both violent crime and overall crime during the coronavirus pandemic, many U.S. cities saw the opposite occur. Large cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, and smaller cities such as Portland, Milwaukee, Louisville, and Minneapolis, have suffered large increases in crime.

Fortunately, officials are beginning to understand just how goofy this idea is, and refunding police — quietly, in some cases — has begun.

In addition to go-easy laws, and the defund the police movement, there are also prosecutors who have soft on crime attitudes. An article on the Heritage Foundation’s Website addresses this, saying, “One of the most disturbing features of rogue prosecutors is their utter disregard for real victims of crime and for victims’ rights under state law.” 

Authors Zack Smith and Charles "Cully" Stimson say this “new breed of prosecutors” usurps the constitutional power of the legislative branch by refusing to prosecute entire categories of crimes; abuse their offices; enable crime to explode under their watch; and harm the very people they pretend to care about the most, including low-income and minority individuals.

Smith and Stimson, as well as the National Police Association (NPA), reference billionaire George Soros’ efforts to support so-called “social justice” prosecutor candidates.

The NPA article stated, “Today, Soros supports candidates for public prosecutor’s offices who are anti-police. He funds them through massive donations to a collection of charities paradoxically called Open Society Foundations,” and it further said that Soros has reportedly spent more than $13.4 million supporting these candidates.

America suffers from significant weaknesses in several areas. They include, in addition to the damaged criminal justice system, an education system that is fast becoming a political indoctrination system; fair, balanced, and objective news journalism that is in many instances promoting leftist politics; continued devolution of strong, positive traditions, like the family and marriage; and large corporations that have gained far more control over our lives than they deserve or are supposed to have. 

The radical left is tearing America apart, and resistance to it is not nearly strong enough.

What’s happening to our country? The United States of Anti-America

Those Americans who have been around for a while may be wondering what is happening to their country. While there have been periods of disruption before, such as the anti-war/peace movement of the 60s, the magnitude of what is going on today surpasses previous challenges. America is under attack from within.

Merely being a member of the largest subgroup of people in the country — the primary group which founded and developed the country: white people — has each of them being regarded as a “supremacist,” a “racist,” and “privileged.” These people had no say in who their parents were or where they were born and grew up, yet they are now persona non-grata in the country their ancestors created.

This comes from a concept known as Critical Race Theory (CRT). It has the support of the woke among us, and seeks to persuade everyone that in America there are only two classes of people: oppressors and their victims. And white people are the oppressors.

CRT evolved from the Critical Theory attributed to socialist Karl Marx, author of “The Communist Manifesto.” CRT differs in that it includes racism as a fundamental factor. It focuses on cancelling the traditional American values such as family, democracy, honesty and truth. And traditional practices like hard work, learning, rational thinking and obeying time schedules are not sound practices leading to success, but racist values imposed by white supremacists.

Through the years, CRT has been sneaking into classrooms, and is now being touted by President Joe Biden’s administration to be part of the K-12 curriculum to replace what’s left of traditional civics instruction and history that taught hundreds of millions of Americans through the decades the truth about their country, its founding and how it operates. 

Instead, CRT will teach young students to focus on skin color and power, revising history to tell the story of a nation founded on white oppression. The goal of CRT is teaching white kids to hate themselves and their families, and teaching other kids to hate their country.

A tool used in this “progressive” destruction of America is “The 1619 Project.”

“The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”

That is the opening of the New York Times Magazine’s (NYTM) description of “The 1619 Project.” A different organization, calling itself Project 1619, has the following statement about the NYTM’s mission: “Project 1619 Inc. was not consulted or involved in their production … [and] does not support or endorse their opinions.”

The NYTM’s 1619 Project suffers from both conceptual and data errors. First, it attempts to shift the beginning of America from its actual formal beginning in 1776 to a time when only one of the 13 colonies that formed the United States of America existed: Virginia, the English settlement established in 1607. At that time, and extending to 1619 and for many more years there was no drive to form a new nation.

Second, the first slaves were brought to the North American continent roughly 50 years before 1619 and many years before the Virginia Colony was established.

Surely, the story of the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans can be effectively told without revising history to increase the negative impact of the story, and unjustifiably dishonor the nation. 

The 1776 Commission was started by former President Donald Trump on November 2, 2020, by Executive Order 13958. Trump took this step to counter attacks on America’s founding. The EO cites “our country's valiant and successful effort to shake off the curse of slavery and to use the lessons of that struggle to guide our work toward equal rights for all citizens in the present.”

It continues: “Viewing America as an irredeemably and systemically racist country cannot account for the extraordinary role of the great heroes of the American movement against slavery and for civil rights — a great moral endeavor that, from Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King, Jr., was marked by religious fellowship, good will, generosity of heart, an emphasis on our shared principles, and an inclusive vision for the future.

Section 2. (a) of the EO states: “Within 120 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Education shall establish in the Department of Education the President's Advisory 1776 Commission ("the 1776 Commission") to better enable a rising generation to understand the history and 4 principles of the founding of the United States in 1776 and to strive to form a more perfect Union.”

This effort to counter the vile, anti-American aims of CRT was cancelled by President Biden on his first day in office.

America was not perfect on its first day of existence 240-plus years ago, and it is not perfect today. No nation is or ever was perfect. Our country will not be made more perfect by indoctrinating generations of young people with misinformation such as this. In fact, indoctrination goes against the founding principles of America.