Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The Truth Is Really Important in Our Lives
I grew up amid the major threat of Communism being part of American life. It was always only a threat until recent years when it has actually manifested its influence in our daily life. I’ve been trying to understand what we are seeing and how we have arrived here.
Until the last few years, I had recognized Communism as an oppressive governmental approach to organizing society. I had thought the principal tool for regimes to get there was the use of police and military power. Communist propaganda techniques were always part of the discussions but I, not having any expertise in public media or communications, never really understood the important role that plays in capturing the people. The last nine years on Ricochet has been an education in this for me.
We are now in a decisive battle for the preservation of the republic that America’s Founders handed us, documented by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution amended with the Bill of Rights.
The Democrats, Progressives, and Communists, many of whom fit all three of those descriptors, have been working for more than a century towards the end of making America collectivist and part of a venture to establish a global collectivist society. A very big element in this conquest venture is that propaganda activity I mentioned that I didn’t really understand in depth. I think I’m seeing that better now that we are right in the middle of the process.
The lies and deceptions are never-ending. Facts and Truth are absent. Public education, advanced academia, public media, and government all act in concert to spread the message of largely false propaganda. As we witnessed during the Covid pandemic for the medical profession, almost all traditional institutions have been corrupted and no longer present a truthful picture of their represented field. Among these are corporate business, education, banking, housing, energy, healthcare, and it goes on and on with little truthful information being presented.
There are many essays appearing regularly here on Ricochet revealing what is happening in America.
I hope and pray we are attentive and ready to go to work to save America.
Published in General
Central planning with the tax code adds negative value. All of it is communist Rube Goldberg nonsense.
What does wealth and the flag have to do with knowledge? I have an appreciation for one national flag, the Stars and Stripes or Old Glory, as it stands for individual freedom. Most people do like to avoid what we call poverty if that is what you mean about liking wealth.
Many moves facilitating centralization occurred between 1865 and 1910. The 16th and 17th Amendments sealed the deal, the 16th having the worst destructive effect on the original intent of the Constitution.
It is still worth fighting for truth, all the way to the bitter end. If nothing else, I believe hewing to the truth results in a more satisfying life, albeit perhaps a more difficult one. Sadly, all institutions in the West have been corrupted by the kinds of lies Dalrymple identified many years ago. Even my own profession, which once prided itself on the search for truth, has fallen prey to this corruption. It’s gone from “let the chips fall where they may” to “the chips had better fall here or else.”
Most people decidedly do not like truth; they prefer comforting myths and lies. As for the flag, I’m not so sure about that either. Furthermore, most of the flag-waving one sees now is done by the regime as a way to attack or intimidate their political enemies. Witness all the loose talk of “defending our democracy” from the evil right-wingers.
The poet A. E. Housman had the following to say about the truth: “The faintest of all human passions is the love of truth.”
I was thinking it’s more like a quaint fondness for its memory, in principle.
This discussion brings to mind Derb’s insight:
The more I think I know, the more I think I don’t know. So, more and more lately, when the rational doesn’t make any sense, the more I tend to accept the magical, religious, social, and personal as valid.
And maybe in the end this is the cold hard truth.
And come to think of it, this fits with Desmet’s ordering of human thinking, even for the deliberately and devoutly rational.
I saw that when it came out. I’m not sure how I heard about it, probably someone here mentioned it. It was very well done and a surprising condemnation of the NYT.
Some may like this. Most of you will think it’s nuts. lol
https://brownstone.org/articles/fiat-money-and-the-covid-regime-actually-existing-postmodernism/?utm_medium=onesignal&utm_source=push
Moderator Note:
Tone it down, Henry.I find your statement [redacted]
Misthiocracy (is he still active here?) pointed out that the real inspiration for the left’s takeover of almost all our institutions was the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. He proposed that organizing the peasants or factory workers was the wrong approach to creating a Marxist utopia, and argued that the focus should be on taking over what Lenin termed the commanding heights of a culture- the public schools, the universities, the news media, the gov’t bureaucracies and the entertainment business. all of which, excepting some universities like Hillsdale, Fox News, and talk radio, has been accomplished.
As people like Ben Shapiro and Tim Pool attempt to create alternatives to legacy/leftist media, watch those 87k new IRS agents use an expensive, lengthy auditing hell to try and weaken or destroy them.
Another book anticipating and describing the corruption of our universities was 1988’s ‘The Closing of the American Mind’ by Univ. of Pennsylvania Professor Alan Bloom. I gather it described how leftist dogma taught as virtual religion replaced the Enlightenment values of tolerance.
Prof. Camille Paglia, a feminist, lesbian and Bernie Sanders supporter described the consequences in a YT video a couple of years ago “Our universities are a mess. When I meet young people who have recently graduated from elite universities, they don’t know anything, but their heads are full of ideology.”
I wrote a review of, God and Man at Yale. The Closing of the American Mind is just too overwrought and fancy for my taste. The Brother’s Karamazov better describes why intellectuals have so much beef with G-d.
Eh, maybe. But the internet may offer a means to fight back. I’m not a fan, but Joe Rogan’s podcasts have far more viewers, iirc, than most CNN or MSNBC shows.