We are fortunate to be ruled by a crook and an idiot.
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The American citizen today
I invite you to enroll an eight-lecture course that I prepared with the help and under the auspices of Hillsdale College. It is called “American Citizenship and Its Decline,” and the online course is based on my book, The Dying Citizen.
Like the book, the course describes the current crises in America as symptoms of a far larger problem: the steady decline of the autonomy and political influence of the citizen.
The class describes the origins and history of citizenship in the West, reminding us that it is a rare phenomenon both in the past and the present—given the enormous responsibility placed on citizens to create and control their own government.
Citizenship then requires a large and self-reliant middle class—currently shrinking under enormous economic strains. Clearly defined and enforced borders are also essential to ensure a civic space in which citizens can nurture common customs, sustain traditions, and honor their own shared past.
Yet borders are now increasingly fluid as mere residence and citizenship seem often indistinguishable. Pre-civilizational tribalism—identifying by superficial appearance rather than through shared culture and values—is returning to America as so often the salad bowl replaces the melting pot.
These organic, bottom-up challenges are often matched by top-down stresses such as the growth of a huge, permanent, but unelected, government of bureaucrats and administrators who combine judicial, executive, and legislative powers that overwhelm the citizen.
In addition, revisionists in law, the media, and politics seek to change the Constitution, long-held customs of governance, and political traditions for short-term partisan agendas, on the theory that a new, changing, and fluid Constitution must match an always evolving human nature.
Globalism is an ancient challenge to the sovereignty of the nation-state. But in the age of instant communications and unprecedented concentrations of globalized wealth, so often elites seek to supplant American laws and independence with international organizations and often without the consent of the legislative branch or the assent of the governed.
The course ends, however, on an optimistic note that citizens still have it within their power to restore our traditions of empowered citizenship and return government to the control of citizens.
“American Citizenship and Its Decline” is free to enroll in, and you can begin the course today by clicking on the secure link below.
https://online.hillsdale.edu/register/american-citizenship-and-its-decline
Best wishes,
Victor Davis Hanson
Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History
Hillsdale College
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More efforts by left to cause voter uncertainty.+++
Dick:
Have you heard of Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV)?
It’s the latest vogue paraded by the elite left – masked as a non-partisan effort – that seeks to fundamentally change the way we, Americans, have always voted.
You and I have always voted under the “one-person, one-vote” system. We pick a specific candidate and cast our vote for that person. Then, the votes are counted, and the candidate with the highest number of votes wins.
Simple, right?
Well, if the elite left has its say, our simple way of voting would be no more.
If leftists have their way, rather than going to the polls and casting our one vote for one candidate, we would “rank” our preference for all candidates.
If no candidate receives a majority of first-choice votes, the last-place candidate is eliminated, and his/her votes are distributed to the voters’ second-choice candidates. The process repeats until one of the candidates collects more than half the votes.
In addition to being awfully complicated, this means that your vote could potentially go toward a candidate you do not want elected.
Vulnerable voters – such as the elderly, those in long-term residential facilities, and those with learning difficulties – have communicated to the American Constitutional Rights Union that this system is complicated. With RCV, already low confidence in our voting system will be further diminished.
Our vulnerable voting populations will be disenfranchised.
Make no mistake about it. RCV will undermine our voting system.
Unfortunately, the elite left has been successfully pushing RCV in cities across the country, including New York, San Francisco, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Get ready: the elite left plans to push RCV in your town as well.
You can make a difference before it is too late.
Just as we helped a brave group of patriots in Collier County (FL) successfully make Collier County a Bill of Rights Sanctuary County, with your help, we can stop any attempts of RCV being enacted in your town.
Are you willing to join a group of patriots who will stand up to keep our Republic?
Unlike federal legislation, where citizens’ concerns often fall on deaf ears, you CAN make a difference in your city and county. When initiatives like this are often decided by just a handful of votes, every committed citizen matters.
Please join your neighbors and help us send the elite Left a message that we will no longer tolerate them trampling on our rights.
LEARN MORE ABOUT RANKED-CHOICE VOTING AND TAKE ACTION HERE
Let us continue to work on making it easy to vote and hard to cheat!
Steadfast and Loyal.
Allen West
Executive Director
American Constitutional Rights Union
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Israel has no formal constitution. However, The Knesseth has passed basic laws, one of which, may be challenged by their Supreme Court. This has never been done before. BIBI's government considers the unelected members of the Israeli Supreme Court have too much power and they should not be allowed to rule on and knock down basic laws that the people's legislature, who are elected, pass.
Time will tell whether there will be a compromise or a crisis.
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The beauty of St John's College, on whose board I served for 8 years, is it exposes students to learn how to reason.
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Indoctrination Has No Place in Education
The way to make good democratic citizens is to teach students to think for themselves.
By William A. Galston
My column on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s approach to higher education, published two weeks ago, elicited a range of responses. The most thoughtful was from Christopher F. Rufo, who has led the national opposition to critical race theory. In my column, I quoted Mr. Rufo as saying that “education is at heart a political question” and that “the goal of the university isn’t free inquiry.” In a letter to the editor, he defended both of these propositions. I want to clarify our differences.
Education is in part a political question. The right to found private educational institutions largely exempt from government control rests on a political decision backed by law. And as Mr. Rufo states, the decision to establish and fund public universities is made by the people’s elected representatives and executive authorities, who also create structures of governance for those institutions. Through these instruments, the people decide what the level of funding should be and how it should be apportioned. The people may choose to reduce funding for instruction in certain subjects and increase it in others.
Thus far, we agree. But a question that divides us: Can the government rightly restrict the content of instruction in higher education?
Totalitarian societies have had no trouble answering this question in the affirmative. The Nazis distinguished between “Jewish” and “Aryan” physics and worked to purge alleged advocates of the former from their university positions. When Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union, an agronomist, Trofim Lysenko, became director of the Institute of Genetics within the U.S.S.R.’s Academy of Sciences and purged the supporters of Mendelian genetics from their posts in universities and research centers.
I assume that Mr. Rufo shares my rejection of these practices. But he suggests that civic education is different. Quoting Aristotle, he insists that young people must be educated to embrace the beliefs and traits of character needed to sustain the form of government in which they live.
The question isn’t whether civic education is necessary, but whether regime-specific instruction should be the task of higher education. One thing is clear: Aristotle didn’t think so. His famous Lyceum was a center of what we now call liberal education, in which important questions in all subjects were freely debated and in which students were asked to conduct research that added to the store of human knowledge in subjects ranging from biology to political science.
Free inquiry of this nature isn’t the sole function of the modern university in free societies. For example, technical education provides the knowledge and skills students need to succeed in specific professions. But contrary to what Mr. Rufo suggests, free inquiry is still the most important function.
The kind of civic education I received during my years as an undergraduate and graduate student is appropriate to the university. I read the classics of political philosophy—Locke, Montesquieu and others—that underpin liberal democracy, along with critics of liberal democracy such as Rousseau and Nietzsche. I learned American history, along with the history of Greece and Rome. I read the Federalist Papers—and the writings of leading Anti-Federalists. I studied the Constitution and James Madison’s notes from the Constitutional Convention of 1787, along with critics of the document, from the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to Frederick Douglass, whose speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” every American citizen should read. I received, in short, a civic education that helped me think for myself about the strengths and weaknesses of the form of government into which I was born.
This is the antithesis of indoctrination, which I oppose in all forms. Brian Soucek, a leading defender of diversity, equity and inclusion policies in higher education, recently said that “it’s our job to make sure people of all identities flourish here. It isn’t our job to make sure that all viewpoints flourish.” This kind of thinking results in faculty members and job applicants signing mandatory diversity pledges, and it narrows the range of arguments to which university students are exposed.
John Stuart Mill once said that “he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.” And too often in today’s higher education, the absence of viewpoint diversity tends to produce ignorance.
A decade ago, the University of Chicago issued a landmark report on freedom of expression, which declared that the university guarantees to all members of the community the “broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn.” It is not the proper role of the university to “shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive,” and open discussion of such ideas may not be suppressed because a majority of the university community considers them to be unwise or even immoral.
The right response to campus-based indoctrination you don’t like isn’t to replace it with indoctrination you do like. It is to reject enforced orthodoxy in all forms and defend freedom of speech and thought against attacks from all quarters.
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