Thursday, August 20, 2020

Some musings over our nations beginning and Communism

 

I guess I’m having to overcome a degree of cognitive dissonance here as I have never given much thought to any influence the socialist or communist ideology may have had on US political leaders in the mid 1800’s.  Considering the time frame of Lincoln’s rise to power in the US and the attempts of communist revolutions in Europe, coupled with Marx and Engle’s little book being published about the same time, I can certainly see how some of the philosophy might spill over into America during that time.  

Collectivism is not a “new” concept in America.  The puritans all signed a charter while still onboard the Mayflower that was basically a primitive form of communist arraignment in the colonies.  They worked on a system of common land tillage, stored their production in a common warehouse and drew from the common storage to survive. 

Interestingly enough, these same New Englanders continued the threat of secession all during the War of 1812 which they called “Mr. Madison’s war.”  When the planters of the South made the same threat in 1861 they suddenly became nationalist again.  Again, as evident throughout history it just depends on who’s economic ox is being gored. 

I’ve read a good deal on these matters since my retirement 13 years ago.  (the instruction I was deprived of as a youth) I’ve been determined to approach these “studies” from the most unbiased position I can as a human.  There are those on both sides of the issues during the period 1861-1865 (and beyond) who are fixed and unmovable in their positions as to what actually happened and were the cause of the war.  I personally have concluded that the cause is the State itself.  I speak of the institution itself, its purpose and nature.  (but that’s for another place and time)  the most obvious direct reason in this case I can find, is the distribution of wealth or rather who was getting the bulk of the production into their pockets.  Slavery was but a single matter which was used effectively to stir passion and action among several factions.  

first, let me say that the State and government are not one in the same.  The State is the land, people and recognition of sovereignty.  The government arises from the state as the political means of administration.  Governments change.  We change it at every election.  Government is composed of the people who wield the power of the State over all citizens.  The less power the State has, the more power the people themselves have and consequently the more power the State has the less power the people have.  Only people have the power to form the State.  The only way ANY State has been formed in history is through one of two ways.  Conquest or confiscation. 

As an example, the king of England claimed ownership of the American Colonies.  The people were HIS citizens.  The colonist rebelled and defeated the King’s army removing them from the land.  They conquered the King and confiscated his land.  The Treaty of Paris codified this and each of the 13 colonies was recognized as sovereign States.  Through Articles of Confederation of the several states representatives were sent to Paris and signed on behalf of all the States.  For 10 years until the Constitution was ratified the nation operated as 13 sovereign States (or nations) in congress with one another.

The Constitution changed things.  Once ratified, it was out with the articles of Confederation and the Declaration of Independence was just a historic document.  There was no thought of “natural rights” or popular sovereignty and the never-ending topic of strong central government vs States rights was begun.  I think it safe to say that Mr. Jefferson on his return from France was not happy with the Constitution.  He envisioned a government that was national in foreign affairs and non-national in domestic affairs.  But it was what it was and he dealt with that the best he could.   

in the 1930’s Jay Nock wrote of the Constitutional Convention;

“The further task therefore, in Madison’s phrase, was to “administration” the constitution into such absolutist modes as would secure economic supremacy, by a free use of the political means, to the groups which made up the first division. (Moneyed and banking interest)

This was accordingly done. For the first ten years of its existence the constitution remained in the
hands of its makers for administration in the directions most favourable to their interests. For an
accurate understanding of the newly- erected system’s economic tendencies, too much stress can
not be laid on the fact that for these ten critical years “the machinery of economic and political
power was mainly directed by the men who had conceived and established it.

Washington, who had been chairman of the convention, was elected President. Nearly half the
Senate was made up of men who had been delegates, and the House of Representatives was
largely made up of men who had to do with the drafting or ratifying of the constitution. Hamilton,
Randolph and Knox, who were active in promoting the document, filled three of the four positions
in the Cabinet; and all the federal judgeships, without a single exception, were filled by men who
had a hand in the business of drafting or of ratification, or both.”

The economic die was cast and the agrarian South was in my opinion odd man out from the beginning. 

Lest we forget that it was a bountiful business in the North for the carriage and sale of slaves imported from the African continent.  Money and financial affairs flowed for many years to banking interest in New York just as it still does today. 

The new nation enjoyed free trade among the several states.  Raw material for factories in the north flowed out of the south.  Agriculture and commerce grew in the south.  It took only 8 years before moneyed interest in the north decided a tariff was a good idea.  The idea was to severely restrict foreign vessels and favor US vessels thereby growing the trade and ship building in New England.   It worked and earnings of the northern shipping interest grew from around $6 million to over $42 million by 1807. 

The war of 1812 hit New England the hardest.  That’s why they threatened secession and referred to it as Mr. Madison’s war.   After the war the British used the port of New York as a dumping ground for products from abroad and nearly bankrupted the area.   Through a clever arraignment of the routing of southern cargo, New York shavers were able to extract about 40 cent of every dollar spent on southern cotton.  During the 1850’s US trade had risen to $318 million dollars and tripled that in the next decade. 

By now, the south accounted for 2/3 of the nation’s exports and cotton alone 60%. 

 --I will continue this discussion in a day or so--

 

Sunday, August 16, 2020

 Can't believe it has been 7 years since I posted anything at this blog.  Not saying it might be another 7 years but I have been too busy to publish anything for a while.  Now with a little extra time on my hands I think I will play with this a bit.  

The format has changed and I will have to learn all the tech stuff all over again so this is a test just to see if I can even get this on a page.  

Stand By World SIDEWINDER IS BACK



Thursday, February 7, 2013

Nano Tech ..... Few limits Really

Not sure what to make of this new product.  First impression is just WOW!  Now the questions.  They of course have it available on the web site.  Just thought I'd pass it along here.




Can be ordered here

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

There's Probably No Way Out For the US Economy

I say that because there is a way out it's just this crowd of spendthrifts haven't the courage to take it.  


Reading Martin Armstrong tonight and he brings up a good observation.  All the debt the US government has created pays interest.  So much that 70% of the current debt is the amount of interest already paid.  If the government created its own money there would be no interest to government.  Instead the FED orders the money the Treasury prints it, gives it to the FED who then sells the debt through their Primary Dealers (banks).  Who purchases the debt.  Well 40% of it is purchased by foreigners and foreign central banks in particular who for the most part “park” the money to be use in international settlements.  When these bonds come due the US government simply pays the interest owed to the foreigners and that money (US Dollars) leave the US.  The flow of capital leaves the country. 

With the interest rates near zero there is not too many foreign purchasers of our current debt creation so for now the FED is playing the role of purchaser of last resort. (Hey, the bonds get sold that’s all the politicians care about because they for sure don’t know what they are doing.)  But, foreigners are still one of the biggest holders of US debt.  There’s been no real beneficiary of all this deficit spending except exporting our capital to foreign bond holders. 
GDP numbers sucked today and the FED chairman indicates that rates will stay near zero as long as it takes.  To what?  ….. Meanwhile the Fed is injecting $85 billion per month into the markets mostly buying up bad real estate bets.  Now, I admit I’m just a lay person and not a big time financier but to me this is just insane. 

I look at Obama’s budget and right off can see that it surpasses smoke and mirrors and leaps right into the category of “pipe dream”  (as in what’ s in that pipe he’s smoking)  Ever since he took office they’ve been using a shade over 4% for an annual growth figure and project that well into 2022 each and every year.  I don’t buy the 2% that gets reported after the ‘shape shifting’ of numbers in mysterious ways.  So, now get this;  they show that tax revenue will be up 100% or so by 2020.  That means they count on the economy growing 100% and if it doesn’t guess what.  They just increase taxes by 100% (that’s the likely scenario if this thing doesn’t explode by 2020, which, I’m confident it will).  Already the additional burden on taxpayers from increases (I know what Obama said but have you looked at your check since the first of the year) in taxes, additional cost of Obama care alone will likely bring the nation to its knees.  Plenty of mid to small size businesses are going to be forced to lay off or cease business altogether and unemployment won’t improve and may begin to eek upward.  That adds to the GDP problem so the economy continues to slowly tank. 

Meanwhile with the FED pumping out billions of dollars per month into the market, they will go up.  But up in what?  Fiat dollars.  The values of the hard assets just remain the same its just the dollars are worth less throughout the world and the market just adjusts the price up without any real gain an perhaps an actual loss of value.  This give the media “green shoots” to tout about how well everything is going while the nation participates in this long slow suicidal debt creation.

So, because we will continue to create more massive deficits, increase taxes, less people will spend causing the GDP to go further down which causes more business failures and layoffs which take even more money out of the economy and the death spiral continues.  Especially if they keep idiots like Krugman around and worse if they keep listening to him.  Yeah, I know he’s got a Nobel prize but so does Obama.  

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Luck, Divine Intervention, or Past Experience


A friend asked the following question about the accident I captured via a “dash cam”: “Was it luck, Divine intervention, or your past experience that allowed you to stop so quickly? One more second and you would be headed to a different doctor. My guess it was a combination of the three”

(The video in question is below)

I was already slowing down and I left foot brake (old habit from racing days) so it was just a matter or mashing the pedal a little harder when I sensed him coming over. I have good peripheral vision (Earnhardt use to say "I can see my ears" LOL) and raced back in the day before spotters.  A driver had to clear himself when passing so with a slight turn of the head you can "see" your relationship to the other car on either side.  I really wanted to get two lanes over to the right when we came up on the traffic stopping as that was the best "way out' but the truck was not slowing, I was and I could not have made it over without him hitting me.  Only option was to slow enough to NOT get hit in the rear from my lane and leave enough room between me and the stopped truck to provide a buffer or escape area should the pile up begin behind me. 

It seemed as though everybody was slowing EXCEPT the big truck.  What surprised me was him locking down the brakes.  When he did I could hear it and that's when I got aggressive on the brake and moved left to give him room. If he had gotten OFF the brake and let to truck roll a bit he could have very easily moved into my lane ahead of me and missed the white pickup in front of him and stopped prior to hitting the signal/sign DOT truck.  But, he turned while the brakes were locked down and that jackknifed him.  At that point he's just along for the ride. 

I've seem far worse crashes than this up close on the race track.  Been part of some, but that's with guys in cars with good roll cages, 5 point harness, wrap around seats and helmets. Even then it's pretty violent but the gear protects you.  I don't regard this as a particularly violent crash but without protective gear the damage can be 10 fold to a person.  When I pulled over and got to the big truck the driver was semiconscious.  He looked dazed and did not respond to anyone, just stared at us.  I didn't go to the little pickup that hit the trailer and suspect he got the worst end of the deal just because it looked like the frame rail of the trailer went into the drivers area at the windshield post.  There were several people already out and around so I just told the Highway patrol dispatcher via the phone the location and that there were several injured.   There was no danger of fire (no fuel leaking) plenty of help on the scene so I left at that point to make my doctor appointment. 

Luck, ... without question.  Divine intervention ... I'd like to think I'm a favored son.  Past experience. .... no doubt about it.  As a police officer I took defensive driving courses several times.  Driving race cars didn't hurt.  The biggest factor IMO is that with life experiences as a cop, pilot and part time racer maintaining situation awareness at all times trumps luck and can make Divine Intervention unnecessary. I know that this particular stretch of I-15 produces accidents just like this 15 times every 24 hours.  Hard to believe but those are the statistics.  87% of those occur in the northbound lane.  This happened at about 2 PM and around 6 AM the same morning there was a fatality a couple of exits up the road.  I can not remember driving this route without seeing some kind of traffic accident. Last week returning home from the same appointment at the VA I went through almost the exact same thing but that time it was a previous wreck and the Highway patrol partially blocking the left lane southbound.  I always prefer the far left lane because there's usually another entire lane to the left that's not used.  It's there so emergency vehicles can move during gridlock.  This way if it looks like I'm about to get hit from the rear I can jump into this lane and perhaps escape the wreck.  Well, this time that lane was occupied by the Police car, a truck pulling a trailer and a car that were involved in a prior accident.  I saw this from a half mile away and began to slow tapping the brake to alert the guy behind me.  He slowed and my lane was under control and alert.  The lane to my right (just like this accident) kept moving as though nothing was wrong.  In about 3-4 seconds I could see all 5 lanes slowing ahead and like the train effect it got more severe the closer we got to the scene.  About this time 4 cars in the lane to my right came by bumper to bumper with the noses almost dragging the ground due to heavy braking.  All 4 were locked up and squalling.  The first slid into the pack and the other three plowed into the whole mess.  It wasn't bad because they had all managed to slow quite a bit and their speed was relative to one another. However, I could see some parts flying and hear the collision.  All of them crunched the front and rear as I passed by.  None of them came out of their respective lane, just another fender bender, so another bullet dodged. 

Over the years I have witnessed plenty of accidents and near accidents as a result of a prior accident being “worked” by the Highway patrol on I-15 and other freeways around the city.  I have often thought about this phenomena and what might be possible solutions to no avail.  



Download YouTube Video

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Close call with Tractor-Trailer


On I-15 in Las Vegas at Sahara Exit northbound. Nevada Department of Transportation (NDOT) Portable signal truck decided to stop in the left (hammer) lane.

Plenty of traffic moving 65-70MPH with half having nowhere to go. I could see this developing well before the accident and slowed to about 50 when the truck I just passed came flying by me and turned into my lane trying to avoid rear-ending those in front of him. I got on the brakes enough to allow him to clear my front while avoiding getting hit from the rear myself.

He couldn't have missed my front end more than two (2) feet and I'd almost swear the left rear wheel of the trailer went over the top of my right fender. If the guy behind me had hit me and drove me into the trucks path this would have had a very ugly ending for yours truly.


Thursday, December 13, 2012

Keep Christ In Christmas

Last year a buddy wrote a song and couple of them out in Nashville got together and mixed the music for internet play. They did pretty good, getting to a top 10 on reverbnation. So, this year we'd like to see it go to the top or close anyway. These are all good boys and great musicians and music tech folks so if you will click on the link, give the song a spin (it's free) and help give the song a boost. Everyone of them and myself would really appreciate it. You can purchase a download for .99 cents by not necessary to play and listen as often as you want. Thanks

Friday, December 7, 2012

The Origins of Political Correctness Or How Cultural Marxism Deceives Democracies

The Origins of Political Correctness :: Accuracy In Academia:

'via Blog this'


An Accuracy in Academia Address by Bill Lind

Variations of this speech have been delivered to various AIA conferences including the 2000 Consevative University at American University

Where does all this stuff that you’ve heard about this morning – the victim feminism, the gay rights movement, the invented statistics, the rewritten history, the lies, the demands, all the rest of it – where does it come from? For the first time in our history, Americans have to be fearful of what they say, of what they write, and of what they think. They have to be afraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic.

We have seen other countries, particularly in this century, where this has been the case. And we have always regarded them with a mixture of pity, and to be truthful, some amusement, because it has struck us as so strange that people would allow a situation to develop where they would be afraid of what words they used. But we now have this situation in this country. We have it primarily on college campuses, but it is spreading throughout the whole society. Were does it come from? What is it?

We call it “Political Correctness.” The name originated as something of a joke, literally in a comic strip, and we tend still to think of it as only half-serious. In fact, it’s deadly serious. It is the great disease of our century, the disease that has left tens of millions of people dead in Europe, in Russia, in China, indeed around the world. It is the disease of ideology. PC is not funny. PC is deadly serious.

If we look at it analytically, if we look at it historically, we quickly find out exactly what it is. Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the hippies and the peace movement, but back to World War I. If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels are very obvious.

First of all, both are totalitarian ideologies. The totalitarian nature of Political Correctness is revealed nowhere more clearly than on college campuses, many of which at this point are small ivy covered North Koreas, where the student or faculty member who dares to cross any of the lines set up by the gender feminist or the homosexual-rights activists, or the local black or Hispanic group, or any of the other sainted “victims” groups that PC revolves around, quickly find themselves in judicial trouble. Within the small legal system of the college, they face formal charges – some star-chamber proceeding – and punishment. That is a little look into the future that Political Correctness intends for the nation as a whole.

Indeed, all ideologies are totalitarian because the essence of an ideology (I would note that conservatism correctly understood is not an ideology) is to take some philosophy and say on the basis of this philosophy certain things must be true – such as the whole of the history of our culture is the history of the oppression of women. Since reality contradicts that, reality must be forbidden. It must become forbidden to acknowledge the reality of our history. People must be forced to live a lie, and since people are naturally reluctant to live a lie, they naturally use their ears and eyes to look out and say, “Wait a minute. This isn’t true. I can see it isn’t true,” the power of the state must be put behind the demand to live a lie. That is why ideology invariably creates a totalitarian state.

Second, the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness, like economic Marxism, has a single factor explanation of history. Economic Marxism says that all of history is determined by ownership of means of production. Cultural Marxism, or Political Correctness, says that all history is determined by power, by which groups defined in terms of race, sex, etc., have power over which other groups. Nothing else matters. All literature, indeed, is about that. Everything in the past is about that one thing.

Third, just as in classical economic Marxism certain groups, i.e. workers and peasants, are a priori good, and other groups, i.e., the bourgeoisie and capital owners, are evil. In the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness certain groups are good – feminist women, (only feminist women, non-feminist women are deemed not to exist) blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals. These groups are determined to be “victims,” and therefore automatically good regardless of what any of them do. Similarly, white males are determined automatically to be evil, thereby becoming the equivalent of the bourgeoisie in economic Marxism.
Fourth, both economic and cultural Marxism rely on expropriation. When the classical Marxists, the communists, took over a country like Russia, they expropriated the bourgeoisie, they took away their property. Similarly, when the cultural Marxists take over a university campus, they expropriate through things like quotas for admissions. When a white student with superior qualifications is denied admittance to a college in favor of a black or Hispanic who isn’t as well qualified, the white student is expropriated. And indeed, affirmative action, in our whole society today, is a system of expropriation. White owned companies don’t get a contract because the contract is reserved for a company owned by, say, Hispanics or women. So expropriation is a principle tool for both forms of Marxism.

And finally, both have a method of analysis that automatically gives the answers they want. For the classical Marxist, it’s Marxist economics. For the cultural Marxist, it’s deconstruction. Deconstruction essentially takes any text, removes all meaning from it and re-inserts any meaning desired. So we find, for example, that all of Shakespeare is about the suppression of women, or the Bible is really about race and gender. All of these texts simply become grist for the mill, which proves that “all history is about which groups have power over which other groups.” So the parallels are very evident between the classical Marxism that we’re familiar with in the old Soviet Union and the cultural Marxism that we see today as Political Correctness.

But the parallels are not accidents. The parallels did not come from nothing. The fact of the matter is that Political Correctness has a history, a history that is much longer than many people are aware of outside a small group of academics who have studied this. And the history goes back, as I said, to World War I, as do so many of the pathologies that are today bringing our society, and indeed our culture, down.
Marxist theory said that when the general European war came (as it did come in Europe in 1914), the working class throughout Europe would rise up and overthrow their governments – the bourgeois governments – because the workers had more in common with each other across the national boundaries than they had in common with the bourgeoisie and the ruling class in their own country. Well, 1914 came and it didn’t happen. Throughout Europe, workers rallied to their flag and happily marched off to fight each other. The Kaiser shook hands with the leaders of the Marxist Social Democratic Party in Germany and said there are no parties now, there are only Germans. And this happened in every country in Europe. So something was wrong.

Marxists knew by definition it couldn’t be the theory. In 1917, they finally got a Marxist coup in Russia and it looked like the theory was working, but it stalled again. It didn’t spread and when attempts were made to spread immediately after the war, with the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, with the Bela Kun government in Hungary, with the Munich Soviet, the workers didn’t support them.

So the Marxists’ had a problem. And two Marxist theorists went to work on it: Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary. Gramsci said the workers will never see their true class interests, as defined by Marxism, until they are freed from Western culture, and particularly from the Christian religion – that they are blinded by culture and religion to their true class interests. Lukacs, who was considered the most brilliant Marxist theorist since Marx himself, said in 1919, “Who will save us from Western Civilization?” He also theorized that the great obstacle to the creation of a Marxist paradise was the culture: Western civilization itself.

Lukacs gets a chance to put his ideas into practice, because when the home grown Bolshevik Bela Kun government is established in Hungary in 1919, he becomes deputy commissar for culture, and the first thing he did was introduce sex education into the Hungarian schools. This ensured that the workers would not support the Bela Kun government, because the Hungarian people looked at this aghast, workers as well as everyone else. But he had already made the connection that today many of us are still surprised by, that we would consider the “latest thing.”

In 1923 in Germany, a think-tank is established that takes on the role of translating Marxism from economic into cultural terms, that creates Political Correctness as we know it today, and essentially it has created the basis for it by the end of the 1930s. This comes about because the very wealthy young son of a millionaire German trader by the name of Felix Weil has become a Marxist and has lots of money to spend. He is disturbed by the divisions among the Marxists, so he sponsors something called the First Marxist Work Week, where he brings Lukacs and many of the key German thinkers together for a week, working on the differences of Marxism.

And he says, “What we need is a think-tank.” Washington is full of think tanks and we think of them as very modern. In fact they go back quite a ways. He endows an institute, associated with Frankfurt University, established in 1923, that was originally supposed to be known as the Institute for Marxism. But the people behind it decided at the beginning that it was not to their advantage to be openly identified as Marxist. The last thing Political Correctness wants is for people to figure out it’s a form of Marxism. So instead they decide to name it the Institute for Social Research.

Weil is very clear about his goals. In 1971, he wrote to Martin Jay the author of a principle book on the Frankfurt School, as the Institute for Social Research soon becomes known informally, and he said, “I wanted the institute to become known, perhaps famous, due to its contributions to Marxism.” Well, he was successful. The first director of the Institute, Carl Grunberg, an Austrian economist, concluded his opening address, according to Martin Jay, “by clearly stating his personal allegiance to Marxism as a scientific methodology.” Marxism, he said, would be the ruling principle at the Institute, and that never changed.

The initial work at the Institute was rather conventional, but in 1930 it acquired a new director named Max Horkheimer, and Horkheimer’s views were very different. He was very much a Marxist renegade. The people who create and form the Frankfurt School are renegade Marxists. They’re still very much Marxist in their thinking, but they’re effectively run out of the party. Moscow looks at what they are doing and says, “Hey, this isn’t us, and we’re not going to bless this.”

Horkheimer’s initial heresy is that he is very interested in Freud, and the key to making the translation of Marxism from economic into cultural terms is essentially that he combined it with Freudism. Again, Martin Jay writes, “If it can be said that in the early years of its history, the Institute concerned itself primarily with an analysis of bourgeois society’s socio-economic sub-structure,” – and I point out that Jay is very sympathetic to the Frankfurt School, I’m not reading from a critic here – “in the years after 1930 its primary interests lay in its cultural superstructure. Indeed the traditional Marxist formula regarding the relationship between the two was brought into question by Critical Theory.”

The stuff we’ve been hearing about this morning – the radical feminism, the women’s studies departments, the gay studies departments, the black studies departments – all these things are branches of Critical Theory. What the Frankfurt School essentially does is draw on both Marx and Freud in the 1930s to create this theory called Critical Theory. The term is ingenious because you’re tempted to ask, “What is the theory?” The theory is to criticize. The theory is that the way to bring down Western culture and the capitalist order is not to lay down an alternative. They explicitly refuse to do that. They say it can’t be done, that we can’t imagine what a free society would look like (their definition of a free society). As long as we’re living under repression – the repression of a capitalistic economic order which creates (in their theory) the Freudian condition, the conditions that Freud describes in individuals of repression – we can’t even imagine it. What Critical Theory is about is simply criticizing. It calls for the most destructive criticism possible, in every possible way, designed to bring the current order down. And, of course, when we hear from the feminists that the whole of society is just out to get women and so on, that kind of criticism is a derivative of Critical Theory. It is all coming from the 1930s, not the 1960s.
Other key members who join up around this time are Theodore Adorno, and, most importantly, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Fromm and Marcuse introduce an element which is central to Political Correctness, and that’s the sexual element. And particularly Marcuse, who in his own writings calls for a society of “polymorphous perversity,” that is his definition of the future of the world that they want to create. Marcuse in particular by the 1930s is writing some very extreme stuff on the need for sexual liberation, but this runs through the whole Institute. So do most of the themes we see in Political Correctness, again in the early 30s. In Fromm’s view, masculinity and femininity were not reflections of ‘essential’ sexual differences, as the Romantics had thought. They were derived instead from differences in life functions, which were in part socially determined.” Sex is a construct; sexual differences are a construct.

Another example is the emphasis we now see on environmentalism. “Materialism as far back as Hobbes had led to a manipulative dominating attitude toward nature.” That was Horkhemier writing in 1933 in Materialismus und Moral. “The theme of man’s domination of nature,” according to Jay, ” was to become a central concern of the Frankfurt School in subsequent years.” “Horkheimer’s antagonism to the fetishization of labor, (here’s were they’re obviously departing from Marxist orthodoxy) expressed another dimension of his materialism, the demand for human, sensual happiness.” In one of his most trenchant essays, Egoism and the Movement for Emancipation, written in 1936, Horkeimer “discussed the hostility to personal gratification inherent in bourgeois culture.” And he specifically referred to the Marquis de Sade, favorably, for his “protest…against asceticism in the name of a higher morality.”

How does all of this stuff flood in here? How does it flood into our universities, and indeed into our lives today? The members of the Frankfurt School are Marxist, they are also, to a man, Jewish. In 1933 the Nazis came to power in Germany, and not surprisingly they shut down the Institute for Social Research. And its members fled. They fled to New York City, and the Institute was reestablished there in 1933 with help from Columbia University. And the members of the Institute, gradually through the 1930s, though many of them remained writing in German, shift their focus from Critical Theory about German society, destructive criticism about every aspect of that society, to Critical Theory directed toward American society. There is another very important transition when the war comes. Some of them go to work for the government, including Herbert Marcuse, who became a key figure in the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA), and some, including Horkheimer and Adorno, move to Hollywood.

These origins of Political Correctness would probably not mean too much to us today except for two subsequent events. The first was the student rebellion in the mid-1960s, which was driven largely by resistance to the draft and the Vietnam War. But the student rebels needed theory of some sort. They couldn’t just get out there and say, “Hell no we won’t go,” they had to have some theoretical explanation behind it. Very few of them were interested in wading through Das Kapital. Classical, economic Marxism is not light, and most of the radicals of the 60s were not deep. Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for our country today, and not just in the university, Herbert Marcuse remained in America when the Frankfurt School relocated back to Frankfurt after the war. And whereas Mr. Adorno in Germany is appalled by the student rebellion when it breaks out there – when the student rebels come into Adorno’s classroom, he calls the police and has them arrested – Herbert Marcuse, who remained here, saw the 60s student rebellion as the great chance. He saw the opportunity to take the work of the Frankfurt School and make it the theory of the New Left in the United States.

One of Marcuse’s books was the key book. It virtually became the bible of the SDS and the student rebels of the 60s. That book was Eros and Civilization. Marcuse argues that under a capitalistic order (he downplays the Marxism very strongly here, it is subtitled, A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, but the framework is Marxist), repression is the essence of that order and that gives us the person Freud describes – the person with all the hang-ups, the neuroses, because his sexual instincts are repressed. We can envision a future, if we can only destroy this existing oppressive order, in which we liberate eros, we liberate libido, in which we have a world of “polymorphous perversity,” in which you can “do you own thing.” And by the way, in that world there will no longer be work, only play. What a wonderful message for the radicals of the mid-60s! They’re students, they’re baby-boomers, and they’ve grown up never having to worry about anything except eventually having to get a job. And here is a guy writing in a way they can easily follow. He doesn’t require them to read a lot of heavy Marxism and tells them everything they want to hear which is essentially, “Do your own thing,” “If it feels good do it,” and “You never have to go to work.” By the way, Marcuse is also the man who creates the phrase, “Make love, not war.” Coming back to the situation people face on campus, Marcuse defines “liberating tolerance” as intolerance for anything coming from the Right and tolerance for anything coming from the Left. 

Marcuse joined the Frankfurt School, in 1932 (if I remember right). So, all of this goes back to the 1930s.
In conclusion, America today is in the throes of the greatest and direst transformation in its history. We are becoming an ideological state, a country with an official state ideology enforced by the power of the state. In “hate crimes” we now have people serving jail sentences for political thoughts. And the Congress is now moving to expand that category ever further. Affirmative action is part of it. The terror against anyone who dissents from Political Correctness on campus is part of it. It’s exactly what we have seen happen in Russia, in Germany, in Italy, in China, and now it’s coming here. And we don’t recognize it because we call it Political Correctness and laugh it off. My message today is that it’s not funny, it’s here, it’s growing and it will eventually destroy, as it seeks to destroy, everything that we have ever defined as our freedom and our culture.