Monday, July 8, 2024

The Stakes Ch. 1-2 Notes: America at the Point of No Return by Michael Anton

 Chapter 1:


“Unquestioning acceptance of authority was a recipe for perpetual tyranny, for the meek acceptance of any injustice”


**Overpopulation is the most transformative and harmful

**transforms once-recognizable neighborhoods into foreign enclaves, many monolingual (but not English), and monocultural (but not American)

**Open collective arms to an unlimited number of newcomers


New paradigm for the private sector is winner-take-all: low pay, long hours, and shriveling benefits for everyone else

Our country will go one way or the other

-political, social, cultural, and economic 

-standard of living incomes, educational attainment, health, and general well-being

-elections matter, but is it just Democrats vs. Republicans, conservative vs. moderate vs. liberal vs. socialist/Marxist extreme vs. capitalist

-politics: voting, ruling and being ruled in turn, compromise, acceptance of the other side’s legitimacy

-American citizenship is on the line

-American principles are on the line


What to fear in America’s possible future:

-be aware of the social and political trends 

-America is being transformed into a left-liberal 

-leads to economically unequal and socially divided in the country

Downfall:

-America is socially divided 

-Middle class are seeing high taxes, higher costs, cratering standards of living, declining services, deteriorating infrastructure, worsening quality of life, and the elite that openly despises them and pushes policies to despoil and dispossess them

-open borders & open trade = pushes down wages 


Progressivism:

-technological innovation, economic futurism, environmental consciousness, social enlightenment, and political progressivism

-gay marriage, medical marijuana, universal health care, immigrant sanctuary, “living”  minimum wage, bicycle-friendly streets, stricter environmental and consumer regulations


Fantasy = False Utopia

-economic growth and job security

-equitable distribution of inherently scarce goods and environmental protection

-fantastic innovation alongside regulation and protects against every contingency

-endless energy without drilling or carbon emissions

-social re-engineering with no erosion of the habits for a strong economy or stable society

-all gain, no pain, all the time


Reality: Brokenness

-rising inequality and neo-feudalism

-widening gap between wealth and political power of the have and have-nots

-demonization and persecution of the dissent or those refusing to celebrate the new order

-Power grid = Go Green imports coal, gas, and uranium

-combination of bad policy decayed infrastructure, and private sector incompetence

-”Green” means that the states do not maintain or modernize electrical grids like power stations, transformers, transmission lines, etc…


“California has lost its appetite for building real, necessary structures and prefers instead of fantasize about space-age trains to nowhere”


Restorative Justice

***Use the law to try to equalize everyone and everything 

-favors babying the violent 

-no longer corrective: commit a crime (steal), penalized (punished-jail)-person’s stolen property returned

-corrective justice seen as racist, sexist, greedy, bloodthirsty, and oppressive by oppression of the past that continues to harm in the present

-distributive justice = those who have long has had less should get more 

-corrective justice needs to be systematically repealed as unfair laws and practice 

***results in injustices, resentments, and inefficiencies 


Social Justice

***Disadvantages is now a social class 

-no longer convict criminals 

-justice of fairness

-genuine equality through redistribution of goods such as powers, wealth, and honors from the “advantaged” (straight white male) to the “disadvantaged” (people of color, gender-diverse, etc..)

-incompatible with original purpose of civil rights removal of barriers to occur

-straight white males will never be removed from the permanently “advantaged” list 

-movement to group rights

-America cannot be redeemed from oppressor and oppressed

-Oppression is the DNA of America

-it is subconscious in the hearts of all “privileged” (white people)

-racialize everything so everything it touches is whites bad and people of color good



Manipulate the Rules

-that’s bad for the environment

-blocking or stopping building projects in the name of insect species

-cynicism that manipulates the rules for private ends

-double standards: environmentalism 

Ex. wind turbines can slaughter birds by the tens of thousands (Wind is Green!)

Ex. wind turbines change the whales' migration so they end up dead (Wind is Green!)

-rules decided by unelected bureaucrats, boards, and commissions

-policy always continues to move in the correct, leftward direction

-administrative state acts as cops, prosecutors, and judges 


Law & Justice

-civil and criminal laws enforced unequally

-illegals on the road are never insured and never face any consequences

-justice ain’t blind-she has 20/20 vision

-can’t tell the good guy from the bad guy

-equal treatment before the law is merely “formal” equality

-genuine equality requires equal outcomes (not possible)

-left prefers redistribution justice as vengeance over the “privileged”



Theocratic

-regulation, two-track enforcement, and imposing stultifying conformity

-public humiliation and ostracism for those who don’t fall in line (Canceled!)

-profess things you don’t believe (ex. The world will end in 12 years because of climate change)

-insistence that you deny reality (ex. Affirm that a man is really a woman)

-religious intolerance

-outward conformity



Altruistic

“The purpose of government is to serve ourselves and our posterity.”

Pathological Altruism = its eagerness to reward any selfish insanity at its own citizens’ expense


-extort, humiliate, and harass its actual citizens especially the law-abiding, tax-paying, productive ones

-no reality of homelessness: mentally ill, petty criminals, or the drug addicted 

-it’s a lot easier to be poor and/or homeless basking in the sun with no worries

-overpopulation drives up housing costs

-overpopulation drives down wages

-many workers aren’t legally authorized to work in the country-paid under the table-don’t pay into the tax system

-state authorities’ absolute refusal to enforce any law aimed at maintaining public order

Ex. No criminalizing homelessness so they get away with virtually anything

-Illegals receive state benefits (electronic benefit transfer(welfare) card)

-public education stressed by illegal immigration

-cost of bilingual education

Illegal immigrants overstressed the mandates of welfare for the masses 


***If the Federal Government does not control the border then it becomes the state's problem

***receive state benefits welfare mandate to get voter ID cards and Driver's License and Sanctuary Cities 


Chapter 2:


Paradise of the Woke:

4 overlapping causes

-influx of poor immigrants 

***Feds insisted that only they had the power to secure the border and then refused to do so

-woke anti-assimilation

***demonization of the “melting pot” replaced with “salad bowl”

-infusion of more money to the elite & wealthy exempt from real world ramifications

(advocate for illegal immigration as a show)

(For thee not for me-Politicians keep getting richer)

Ex. deteriorating public schools, but send their kids to private schools

Ex. say no to borders but live in security covered gated communities where only the top elite are welcomed while employing poor as gardeners, nannies, cooks, and maids 

-Radicalizing Politicians and Ballot Initiatives (erase America)

***voted in high taxes, costly homes, terrible schools, indifferent law enforcement, smothering re tape, lousy services, and broken infrastructure

***Vindictive Utopia


Manipulate the Votes to Reign

-money controls the policies

-complete control of all avenues of information

-policies made to increase oligarchic wealth

-rhetorical power to whitewash and lionize the oligarchs

-money controls the discourse

-massive demographic change in the plan

-corporations exempt themselves from mandates from the governments (cut out middle men/women, small business, etc…Middle class altogether)

Ex. Apple’s factories are in China-cheap labor


Redefine our Nation

-deliberately reengineer to resemble our nation as little as possible

-Dub America as: racist, sexist, Bible-thumping, gun toting, etc..

***Scrap the Constitution and remove all amendment rights 

***Rewrite history so the generation hates American heritage, founding fathers, etc..

-Use the Declaration of Independence “all men are created equal” as a device to allege our founding fathers spread “toxic masculinity” 


***Removing teaching inequality of talent or virtue has no bearing on equality of rights. This is the greatest specimen of human virtue 


-today, inequality of rank is part of nature (our founders rejected this in America’s government)

-remove government’s legitimate power that should be derived from free people (we the people)

-remove the expectation that the core function of the government in securing rights of its citizens

-government’s new role is to promote collective happiness and well-being

-used to rig elections, suppress wages, feed the welfare state, and strengthen the hand of leftist anti-Americanism


***The founders limited American government’s powers to fit the limited nature of it role


Civic Nationalism

-shared commitment to a common citizenship

-includes principles, ideals, goals, and body of laws

-excludes, kinship, ethnicity, language, religion, or tradition

Can human beings look beyond differences to come together to work toward a shared goal?

What binds the American people together?

-to forge a new common political identity then ethnicity or ancestry alone would not do


***Declaration of the United States

“One people” distinct from from others

-becoming separate and distinct from the “powers of the earth”

-being entitled by “Nature and Nature’s God”

-being “separate but equal in station” from one another

-newcomers expectation is need to assimilate and not take over the country

-founders not hostile or indifferent to religion

Why Open border do not work:

-the larger the influx, the more difficult it is to require assimilation

-numbers large enough overwhelmed by sheer demographic weight


Liberalism:

-damages tradition and religion

-goal to liberate men from ancient constraints

-removal of divine providence = free exercise of religion and conscience

-there is no creator 

-faith is some sort of impersonal, inactive God

-twist truth-founders were not anti-religious hyper-rationalists



***There is no inherent contradictions between reason and tradition or reason and religion


History of the Democratic Party:

-as new states were developing, the pro-slavery party knew slavery dies if not expanded into the newly formed states

-southern smaller populations and poorer economies didn’t want slavery but outnumbered

-outnumbered by southern politicians who managed to protect slavery even against the popular opposition

-Majority against slavery-minority of south pro-slavery 

-Slave holders (the money) rejected even what was lawfully enacted by the majority of voters


Today

-We are refighting the Civil War where the Slave holders (the money) reject the majority of votes 

-similarities between slavery and mass immigration 

-both serve the same fundamental purpose: to provide cheap labor to squeeze working-class citizens and enrich a few 


Progressives (Progressive Elites is the 4th branch of government)

-look at honoring the past as backward, non-essential, so only focus is on the future 

-the future is inevitable superior, mor moral, more diversely inclusive, equitable, tolerant, and more left-wing

-dismiss the natural rights philosophy of the founder in favor of one allegedly based on historical and scientific progress

-there is no fixed human nature

-human situation is always fundamentally changing 

-present is always superior to the past 

-present knowledge is superior to the thoughts of the past

-rejects American Founding Fathers political philosophy

-rejects the terms that defines what government cannot do

-belief government restrictions deprives a person of life, liberty, or property

-affirms positive rights and liberties that people are owed

-freedom of speech & worship are negatives

-freedom from want and fear are positives 

-rejects limited government

-expansion of government’s power to cope with an increasingly complex world is good 

****we are not smart enough to discern our own good and even vote correctly

***voters can be unwise, hidebound, and prejudices

-progressives are good discerners fo people’s true interests 

***elites tell you what to feel, think, do, and vote 

***progressives prefer to correct voter mistakes through more voting 


Social Compact Theory

-Come to American redirect American government to the standard of their own government

-non-citizen foreigners enter America bringing their caste system with them to implement in America

-Civil Rights no longer distinguish among the classes of citizens (Title IV transgender inclusive overriding the Women’s rights)

-no need for government protection over our natural rights given by God

-Equal Employment Opportunity replaced with Oppressed Employment Opportunity


Contradictory Color Blind (no longer Dr. Martin Luther’s dream)

***Not taking race into account is now insisted to be “racist”

***”colorblindness is identified as the worst “socially acceptable” form of “white supremacy”

***which races do you favor and which do you target?

-color groups receive certain benefits

-only on group not a protected class = white Christian males

-moral narrative of civil rights must have a villain =white Christian males

-try to reconcile this obvious contradiction is to assert that no one is being harmed by unequal treatment

-this is structural racism = unjustly accumulated privilege where God is omnipresent oppressor

-systemic racism = those deemed as privileged will forever be deemed that, so those deemed as oppressed will never be deemed privileged (ex. Blacks will always be oppressed even if they have built great success. Michelle Obama still professes she is and will always be oppressed)