The Shadow of Selma

The Shadow of Selma

Mar 8, 2015 | Culture, History, News, Politics

King at Selma, courtesy of Bob Adelson

King at Selma, courtesy of Bob Adelson

On the 50th anniversary of the historic violence during a civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, President Barack Obama once again disgraced the nation based on individual rights. He did so by minimizing the history of what happened at Selma 50 years ago, when peaceful Americans were physically assaulted and murdered by the government, reducing its importance, distorting its meaning and telling lies about America.

I say this because, while the first intellectual to publicly name Obama as fundamentally both dishonest and anti-American was Leonard Peikoff, I think that if America is to ultimately survive Obama’s calamitous presidency, Peikoff must become the first of many more.

Amid distorted visions, lies and coded signals for what he really aims to do, as against what he says he wants to do, Obama talked about the need to “roll back poverty” despite six years of failed economic policies and incessant dismantling of capitalism through massive government controls and takeovers of work, banking, business, finance and industry.

The president’s dishonesty worsened, as he railed against voting laws targeting certain types of people while he enacts voting laws targeting certain types of people. By reducing the historic injustice against blacks to the so-called right to vote, he insidiously persuades the passive listener into forgetting that Selma should be remembered for its unjust actions by the state against the individual, clearing a path for Selma to be revised in history as some vague, faceless collective crusade for some vague, generic, automatic government voting mechanism. Never mind the bloodshed at Selma that ought to be remembered as part of a struggle by the individual against the state. Blank out that the so-called “right to vote” is meaningless without the right to live, think, create, make money and pursue happiness or that the politician for “voting rights” is destroying individual rights by dictate or “executive order”.

Obama’s dishonesty climaxed as the speech went on. Referring to claims of race-baiting, he invoked his own administration’s report exonerating a cop in a local police shooting, which the black attorney general admitted found no evidence of wrongdoing by the white policeman who had been accused of racism, manslaughter and murder. Obama distorted the truth of the Justice department’s report—which, crucially, dispels the notion that the person who’d been shot had his hands up—baiting with some discovered racist e-mail messages to discard and evade the fact that police in the incident being investigated acted properly. “We don’t need the Ferguson report to know that [charges of race-baiting are] not true,” Obama said, baiting for race and evading facts. “We just need to open our eyes, and ears, and hearts, to know that this nation’s racial history still casts its long shadow upon us.”

Most Americans should know by now that it is the nation’s current president that casts the shadow of racism. Time and again, whether denouncing a white New England policeman or evading his administration’s exoneration of a white Midwestern policeman, it is Obama, who says he sees his life as based on race, who jumps to judge based on race. It is Obama who prejudges, judges and misjudges based on race. It is Obama who judges, and calls upon Americans to judge, based not on the sum total of a person’s virtues in action—what the Reverend Dr. King, Jr. rightly called the content of one’s character—but based on the color of one’s skin. The shadow of racism, which Ayn Rand rightly called a primitive form of collectivism, is cast by the president of the United States.

It is in this sense that Obama at Selma, having exploited Oprah Winfrey’s mediocre movie Selma, dishonors King at Selma. Barack Obama belongs on the side of Selma’s oppressor, not on the side of Selma’s oppressed.

King in his peaceful crusade sought to enlighten, unite and liberate Americans, to obtain for the wrongly deprived their inalienable individual rights. Obama in his unilaterally powerful government action seeks to confuse, divide and control Americans, forcing those he regards as unfairly privileged to serve those he regards as having been wronged. It should therefore by now be clear that Barack Obama lied when he invoked the great emancipator Abraham Lincoln those nine years ago in Springfield, Illinois. Obama lied yesterday, too, when he told those gathered at Selma:

America is not the project of any one person. Because the single most powerful word in our democracy is the word “We.” We The People. We Shall Overcome. Yes We Can.”

Yes we can…what? On answering this question, contradictory Obama, who is himself the one person who regards America as his project to fix, blanks out.

The noble vow that “We shall overcome” refers to rising above the actions of an unjust government. America’s founders made reference to “We the people” …in order to form a more perfect union based on man’s rights. Obama’s Yes We Can serves only to negate and destroy: Yes We Can nationalize the medical profession. Yes We Can indiscriminately spy on Americans. Yes We Can destroy capitalism. Yes We Can refuse to wage war on states that sponsor Islamic terrorism. Yes We Can dictate what you eat, whether you travel, whether you use and what you say on the Internet. Yes We Can means No You Can’t do anything without the permission of the U.S. government.

“Two hundred and thirty-nine years after this nation’s founding, our union is not yet perfect,” Barack Obama said yesterday at Selma. This in practice means that Obama’s damage is not yet done; Obama the destroyer is bent on total destruction of the United States of America, its founding ideals and its highest laws. At its core, his Yes We Can means that Obama’s unthinking worshippers (“We”) can destroy America. With ObamaCare, the NSA, TSA and a gauntlet of government controls, and an unnamed Islamic enemy unchallenged across the world and appeased and encouraged to make catastrophic weapons, America’s end is closer than ever.

Obama closed his speech at Selma with another lie—a false profession of faith—that all Americans “believe in the power of an awesome God.” As usual, the president of the United States is 100 percent wrong and the opposite of what he says is true. All Americans do not believe in God, let alone in “the power of an awesome God”, though Obama acts as if he wants Americans to believe that he possesses the power of an awesome God.

America is not a collective. America consists of Americans who are individuals. Some are believers. Some are atheists. All are considered to be infidels by America’s enemies, which is why all Americans should hold individual rights—including the right to not believe in a supernatural being—above all. While America’s Islamic enemies unite around what Benjamin Netanyahu rightly calls death, tyranny and the pursuit of jihad, Americans must reject Obama’s conflation of the injustice of the past with a future of total government control and instead unite around the truth that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are protected by individual rights.

To do so, Americans must step out of the shadow of America’s dark past—far away from the legacy of our dishonest, dishonorable American president—and into a new, reunified enlightenment as a nation of united individuals marching toward the future once so bravely envisioned by the man who stood on the mountaintop.

Reference Link

Read Obama’s speech

Year in Review: 2013

Dec 31, 2013 | Culture, News, Philosophy, Television

American whistleblower Edward Snowden courtesy of The GuardianThis year gave us two types of men: Edward Snowden and Phil Robertson, or, the man of reason and the man of faith. The young man represents the spirit of youth; Snowden is an idealist who fled his own country for Hong Kong this summer, told the world about indiscriminate government surveillance on the entire population of the U.S. and made thoughtful arguments against government control over people’s lives. He was praised here first before many others even addressed what he did. He was called a hero by Ayn Rand’s heir. He was passionately defended by a prominent conservative intellectual who reported that Snowden had been moved to act by a foreign film about Communist surveillance.

Yet Snowden was roundly denounced for his whistleblowing act of heroism by leftists, conservatives and others, especially those from the Clinton/Bush/Obama administrations, and attacked by government. Tea Party types who made a movement based on opposing government control, challenging the welfare state and demanding new, radical solutions to U.S. problems were split on Snowden’s status as a hero.

They shouldn’t be. Edward Snowden is in every sense the best news of 2013, if America is to remain even partially free. Stating that he does not trust the Obama administration, he brought forth bold new evidence at enormous risk to his own life. From his efforts, we know that the government tracks the American people with the latest technology and captures detailed information about every individual without regard to the law. We know that the government lied about doing this. We know that not a single enemy attack or terrorist siege has been prevented, not that it would make mass surveillance right if it had. We know that the ways and means of government surveillance of Americans is enormous, alarming and unchecked. A federal judge challenged the constitutionality and rightly compared the statism to George Orwell’s novel 1984.

All of this is thanks to Edward Snowden.

Snowden brought Americans together in a way that opposing ObamaCare never could, even paving the way for a more unified, principled opposition to that unconstitutional act of fascism. He did so by thinking, speaking and acting on his own judgment, something few Americans do by my observation. He singularly enlightened the West and changed the world and he did it going by reason, of course, not taking Big Government on faith.

Most Americans do the opposite, as we saw in abundance by their rallying to the defense of an archaic old man who thinks, looks and talks like the mass murdering religious terrorist who destroyed the Twin Towers. He goes by faith, not by reason. He is primitive, not cognitive. His name is Phil Robertson. He leads the religious clan at the center of America’s most watched cable TV program.

DuckDynastyoldmanCourtesyofCrossmapDuring an interview with GQ, Robertson said blacks he observed were fine before civil rights laws were passed and gays, drunks and adulterers among others are going to hell. Robertson, a fundamentalist Christian, has previously made similarly ignorant statements, such as promoting the marrying of females as children, and the cable network suspended him when his new comments were widely broadcast. They did so on the grounds that his views are repugnant to their business ethics. When conservatives, including religious conservative Sen. Ted Cruz, erupted in a fury to defend Robertson on improper grounds, i.e., free speech – ignoring that the suspension does not violate the First Amendment – the network buckled to pressure and restored Robertson to the airwaves.

The man of faith triumphed. That he did so at the expense of another group that touts faith (belief without evidence) in dogma, GLAAD, an irrational gay activist group, is irrelevant to what matters. Robertson brought forth vile and repulsive views, in crude expressions reducing sex to the use of orifices, spreading irrationalism to a wider audience. He singularly darkened the West and changed the world. His dark, malevolent beliefs were defended, sanctioned and accepted based on faith, i.e., in conservatism, in false views of what constitutes free speech, and above all in God, tradition and religion.

Robertson is the opposite of Snowden.

Robertson’s mob is emboldened and they are gathering. What we witnessed in 2013 in the Duck Dynasty media backlash, as with other cultural shifts toward irrationalism, is the mainstreaming of religious fundamentalism. The left’s faith in the welfare state was legitimized long ago by conservatives – the right accepts the left’s morality of altruism – and now the right’s faith in the religious state is being legitimized by the left, and also by secular rightists and libertarians such as Camille Paglia, in return. It’s the convergence of left and right in the name of faith, not reason.

We’ll suffer the consequences soon enough. Phil Robertson’s martyrdom has already paved the way for the emergence of another faith-based media celebrity: former quarterback Tim Tebow, who has been hired as a college football analyst by Disney’s ESPN for college football’s SEC Network in 2014. On Monday, Jan. 6, the athlete made famous more for his prayer than for his ability will make his first appearance as an ESPN analyst. “Tim is a SEC icon with a national fan base and broad appeal,” said ESPN programming executive Justin Connolly.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with a devoutly religious person being popular in the culture. What the Robertson/Tebow broadcasting victories represent is a triumph of ignorance over knowledge, humility over ability, and, in Robertson’s case, depravity over dignity. Anyone who read what Robertson said knows what I mean. It’s bad enough that a publication that once heralded the civilization of man is cashing in on an old bigot’s popularity – and Robertson’s disgusting GQ interview is another instance of the coarsening of the culture which in turn feeds the rise of the religionists – and providing a platform for condemnation of gays, alcoholics and those who have sex outside of marriage, let alone marriage of children and Robertson’s other repugnant views and we should not be surprised if the rise of the Robertsons nets new primitives getting their own shows with high ratings, followings and streams of newly disgusting commentary. Nor will those inclined to denounce such primitives find speaking out easier in the wake of the Robertsons’ rising again.

All it takes to counter the rising tide of the irrational is one voice of reason to object. Like the child in the tale of The Emperor’s New Clothes, Edward Snowden pointed and named the reality of Big Government and gave America cause to rally for justice. His heroic example may lead to new, bold acts by radicals for a society based on reason and rights, though there will undoubtedly be new, bold acts, such as the continuing faith-based death spiral ObamaCare, by those in the opposite camp. 2013 delivered in two men powerful evidence of both.