Month: February 2016

How to break free from PC groupthink

By Cathy Keim

“It is simply a question of organizing and manipulating collective feelings in the proper way. If one can isolate the mass, allow no free thinking, no free exchange, no outside correction and can hypnotize the group daily with noises, with press and radio and television, with fear and pseudo-enthusiasms, any delusion can be instilled.”

Joost A. M. Meerloo, MD

I was able to attend the Educational Policy Conference in St. Louis, Missouri, this past weekend. I will be writing up some of the excellent presentations over the next few weeks.

I want to start with Stella Morabito’s important lecture, Countering Propaganda. Her biography at the conference stated that she had worked as an intelligence analyst, where she focused on various aspects of Russian and Soviet politics, including Communist media and propaganda.

Currently, Stella is more concerned with how our elites are using propaganda to control us. She pointed out that a few years ago we would have laughed if we had been told that kindergarteners were being taught transgender ideas in school, but here we are! How could this happen in America?

Morabito used the Ingrid Bergman movie, Gaslight, to illustrate her point. Ingrid’s character is isolated by her manipulative husband and disoriented by acts he orchestrates like making the gaslights flicker while he tells her that they are not flickering. Due to her isolation, she is not able to check her observations with someone else to verify the reality of what she is seeing. Her husband convinces her that she is delusional. The spell is broken when a police inspector verifies that the lights are flickering.

The American public is being gaslighted by the elites who are manipulating the agenda to push us ever further from reality. Now we are to the point that our children are being taught that gender is a construct of our mind, not of the physical differences that are clearly evident.

This change in the public mindset came on the heels of the mainstreaming of homosexuality and its subsequent push for gay marriage. It will continue with a “singles’ rights” movement that promises to end legal recognition of all marriage. Nor does it stop at marriage: on the horizon there is transhumanism, “which includes a push to end ‘fleshism’ by enacting laws that protect non-biological entities from discrimination.”

Political correctness (PC) is the tool that is being used so effectively against traditionalists in their quest to protect our Judeo-Christian values. PC uses the fear of social rejection to isolate and disorient people so that they self-censor their speech.

The media, Hollywood, and academia inject ideas that are made plausible by repetition. We are conditioned to accept these ideas by the constant barrage from all sides repeating that the idea is real and our old-fashioned, outdated beliefs are ridiculous.

All people are born with a desire for human connection as is shown by the mother-child bond. We are hardwired to need social contact. Stella pointed out that the purpose of destroying all our buffer zones of family, church, and friends is necessary to achieve the goal of control. If we can honestly check our feelings and observations with others, then we cannot be gaslighted completely – thus the intense war on the family, church, and freedom of expression and religion. Isolation is the way the elites maintain power and power is what this is all about.

Propaganda is sorcery, but like Toto pulling back the curtain and exposing the Wizard of Oz, the spell can be broken by strong human relationships. Good comedy and satire are two of the most powerful weapons available. Once people are aware of propaganda, they can defuse its power over them.

Stella says to never underestimate the power of one person speaking to others, because we can rebuild our civil society with good will and good cheer. Put a human face on what you believe: your face.

When you share your ideas and opinions with someone in a confident, cheerful manner, you have the opportunity to: embolden the like minded, encourage a fence-sitter, or break down the caricature or stereotype that the “true believer” has embedded in his mind. You may not convert a “true believer” to your viewpoint, but he will at least be confronted with a cheerful, smiling person which may be the first step to breaking down his picture of a slavering bigoted non-person conservative.

It is up to us to understand the art of infiltration that the elites are using to undermine our families, churches, and organizations. Counteract this by spreading the knowledge of the vulnerability of groupthink. The spell can be broken by exposing it.

Stella concluded with this thought: Pessimism is not affordable. Submission is futile, resistance is not! Develop relationships and be of good cheer.

If you would like to read more by Stella Morabito, she is a senior contributor at The Federalist, and she blogs at www.stellamorabito.net.

For additional reading, Stella recommended: The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing by Joost A. M. Meerloo, M.D.

A hidden perk

By Cathy Keim

Editor’s note: Cathy will be delivering the content this weekend while I take a little personal time off. By the way, Sunday will be her first anniversary as a co-author.

I received a “Help Save Maryland” newsletter from Brad Botwin the other day. I read through it and one comment about the illegal immigrant population caught my eye. Most people that worry about voter integrity are concerned that illegal immigrants are voting in our elections. But what if the illegal immigrant population decides the next presidential election without even casting individual votes?

Let’s go back to a quick review of the Electoral College. The Electoral College was put into place to keep the more heavily populated areas in the country from dominating the more rural areas.

Each state receives their number of electoral votes based on their representation in Congress; thus, every state receives two electoral votes for their two Senators. The remainder of their electoral votes are determined by the number of Congressmen they have, which means the minimum number of electoral votes that a state receives is three: two for its Senators and at least one for its Congressman. Being a small state, our neighbors to the north in Delaware only have one at-large Congressman so they get three votes.

Additionally, the District of Columbia is guaranteed the same number as the least populous state (Wyoming in the 2010 census) so the District gets three electoral votes, too.

Every state has two Senators for 100 electoral votes and the District of Columbia receives three electoral votes, so the remaining 435 electoral votes are based on Congressional seats. Every ten years after the census, the Congressional seats are apportioned according to population; however, this is not based on legal population or citizens’ population. The census counts everybody.

So illegal immigrants are counted in the census and their population is then used to apportion Congressional seats. Those Congressional seats each come with one Electoral College vote.

The 435 Congressional districts plus 100 Senators plus three for DC equals the 538 total electoral votes which will decide our next President. The winner will need a majority, or 270 Electoral College votes.

Because of the way the census is conducted, the states with larger numbers of illegal immigrants gain extra seats in Congress at the expense of the states with fewer illegal immigrants. If you were to remove the illegal immigrants from the census and only count citizens, then states like California would lose congressional seats and those seats would be reapportioned to other states. Paul Goldman and Mark J. Rozell noted this last year in Politico:

This math gives strongly Democratic states an unfair edge in the Electoral College. Using citizen-only population statistics, American University scholar Leonard Steinhorn projects California would lose five House seats and therefore five electoral votes. New York and Washington would lose one seat, and thus one electoral vote apiece. These three states, which have voted overwhelmingly for Democrats over the latest six presidential elections, would lose seven electoral votes altogether. The GOP’s path to victory, by contrast, depends on states that would lose a mere three electoral votes in total. Republican stronghold Texas would lose two House seats and therefore two electoral votes. Florida, which Republicans must win to reclaim the presidency, loses one seat and thus one electoral vote.

But that leaves the electoral math only half done. The 10 House seats taken away from these states would then need to be reallocated to states with relatively small numbers of noncitizens. The following ten states, the bulk of which lean Republican, would likely gain one House seat and thus one additional electoral vote: Iowa, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania.

Once all the accounting is done, the authors state that the GOP would gain a net four electoral votes if the illegal immigrants were not counted in the census. Remember that Al Gore lost the presidency in 2000 by only three electoral votes despite having the most votes.

The Politico article goes on to consider whether getting rid of the Electoral College is the remedy for this problem, although that could not be done before the election this year. Perhaps a better solution would be to not have millions of illegal immigrants residing in the USA.

The fact that we do have millions of illegal immigrants here points to the fact that our government has chosen to allow this for reasons which they decline to reveal to the American citizen. We can deduce that cheap labor is one of the obvious reasons. Another could be that there is always a push to legalize them and then they would be added onto the voting rolls and mostly on the Democrat side. Even if they never achieve citizenship, their children which are born here are citizens and they have also been shown to predominately lean Democrat.

You might say that the Electoral College advantage is just one more built in perk to a corrupted immigration system that favors the Democrat Party.

A trio of events

Before I step aside for a few days, there are some things I’ve been meaning to push. I’ll do these in chronological order of occurrence.

I had wondered when the First District challenger would have an event in Salisbury, but he has the uncharacteristic bad luck of picking the weekend I’m away (this Saturday) to do a combination townhall and fundraiser at two popular downtown venues. So I will just pass this on without additional comment, except for noting that the Roadie Joe’s event is $40 (or $30 if you’re wearing camo or hunter orange.)

Another would-be challenger is bringing one of the last stops on his three-day announcement tour to Salisbury University next Wednesday. SU is the penultimate stop on the tour for U.S. Senate candidate Dave Wallace, who will stop at Holloway Hall next Wednesday, February 10th, around 4 p.m. (His day will wrap up in Easton before returning the vehicle to the Western Shore.)

As his campaign’s advance person pointed out:

If you have owned or operated a business on the Eastern Shore, you know how hard it has been to work with all the new laws, regulations, fees and taxes. When did Senator Barbara Mikulski, our Democrat US Senator for 30 years, decide to work with Safran Labinal, one of Wicomico County’s largest companies, with more than 650 workers?  When they announced they were moving to Denton, Texas – a bit too late, don’t you think?  Have you wondered why Perdue AgriBusiness is planning to build their corporate offices in Delmar, DE? Could it be that Delaware is more business friendly?

Wallace will be the second candidate to announce in Salisbury, as Kathy Szeliga made a swing through town in November.

Finally, I took advantage of a rare weekday off to attend yesterday’s Republican Women of Wicomico monthly meeting. (Yes, there were three guys there, including speaker Muir Boda.) But they wanted me to pass along word of their Paint Night fundraiser on Thursday, February 11 at Brew River. It goes from 6 to 8 p.m. and the cost is $40. Men are invited and encouraged to both attend the fundraiser and be associate members of the group, said RWOW president Julie Brewington. (Associate membership is only $15, if I recall correctly, and they run a pretty good meeting.)

This should fill the political calendar pretty well.

So who will be the “none at all?”

To be quite honest I didn’t see the withdrawal of Rand Paul to be quite this soon, but the other day I noted in passing that Paul was among the bottom-feeders in both New Hampshire and South Carolina so once he performed poorly in Iowa there was really no need to move forward. His idea of trying to get 10,000 Iowa college students to caucus for him failed to the extent that he had a total of just 8,481 votes, drawing just 4.5% of the vote for a fifth-place finish (and one delegate.) And considering New Hampshire is the ground zero for the Free State Project – a group of libertarians who have vowed to move there to further their political activity in the state they determined was most conducive to their interests – you would have thought Paul, the most libertarian-leaning of the GOP candidates, would poll better than the measly 2 to 5 percent he was receiving in New Hampshire.  But he wasn’t, and his high-water mark there last summer was only in the 6% range.

(By the way, speaking of the Free State Project, they announced this morning that they have met their goal of 20,000 who pledge to move to the state, triggering a five-year clock for those who pledged to relocate. We’ll see how that does in the next half-decade.)

Meanwhile, Paul has a Democratic challenger for his Senate seat so he was surely getting pressure to abandon what was seeming to be a more and more futile quest for the Oval Office to protect a Republican Senate seat. (In the hopes his Presidential campaign would catch fire, Paul also managed to get Kentucky to have a Republican caucus in order to avoid having an issue with being on the ballot for two different offices, which is against state law.) His situation was different than the other Senators who are running (or have run): Ted Cruz isn’t up until 2018, Lindsey Graham was safe until 2020, and Marco Rubio declined re-election to the Senate to pursue his Presidential bid. (Among the names mentioned to replace Rubio was former Marylander Dan Bongino, who now lives in Florida.)

Yet there is a small but sufficient portion of the GOP that had as its motto, “Paul or none at all.” There was no other candidate they liked, so it remains to be seen how many will hold their nose and vote for the eventual GOP nominee, how many will migrate to the Libertarian candidate (odds are it will be former Republican aspirant Gary Johnson, who dropped out of the 2012 GOP field and became the Libertarian nominee later that year), and how many will just stay home. If the latter two numbers are too great, it obviously affects the Republicans’ hopes of getting back in the White House, but if the last number is high that could make Republican prospects of holding the Senate more unlikely as well.

Truth be told, I really liked Rand Paul as a candidate although I had a few reservations about his foreign policy. (On the domestic front he was nearly unbeatable.) Perhaps this is a good time for a reminder of my own level of support for these guys and how the field has shaken out since the process started last summer. Back at the end of September when I made my initial endorsement, the 17-person field had already lost Rick Perry and Scott Walker. Based on my level of support, this is how the race has elapsed:

  • Bottom tier: George Pataki, Donald Trump
  • Fourth tier: Chris Christie, John Kasich, Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina
  • Third tier: Rick Santorum, Jim Gilmore, Ben Carson
  • Second tier: Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee, Lindsey Graham
  • Top tier (and these guys were miles ahead of the rest): Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Bobby Jindal

Walker was being a disappointment and was trending toward the third or fourth tier, on the other hand Perry may have landed in my top five.

As you can see, I’m perilously close to holding my nose because the only one of my top five remaining is Ted Cruz. Yet those who support Paul don’t tend to like Cruz because they’re occasionally been rivals in the Senate and Cruz also has ties (both through his wife and financially) to Goldman Sachs – a bank libertarians love to hate. There are also those who question the whole “natural born citizen” aspect of Cruz’s (and Marco Rubio’s) candidacy, although that charge has been led mostly by supporters of Donald Trump.

Sadly, I suspect there really is a great number of Rand Paul supporters who will be the “none at all” contingent when it comes to November. When you have to pin your hopes on the equal disillusionment of Bernie Sanders supporters (who are bound to be hosed by the Clinton machine) it is worth wondering about the direction of this republic.

Update: As I was writing this, word came out that Rick Santorum is also suspending his campaign. Scratch another off the list.

So long to MOM and Huck

The lack of results in the Iowa caucuses have seen two candidates for President exit the race.

On the Democratic side, the rest of America found out what Marylanders already knew: in a race of any significance without Bob Ehrlich to beat up on, Martin O’Malley is a terrible candidate. Now the audition for being a running mate begins for O’Malley, who never had traction in the polls – the question is just who does he audition to?

So the good people of Iowa did the job Marylanders wouldn’t do and eliminated O’Malley from contention, just in time for him to strap the guitar back on for “O’Malley’s March” or whatever he calls that band.

Oddly enough, maybe bass player Mike Huckabee can call MOM up for a jam session since he no longer has a race to run either. While Huckabee had a great campaign in 2008, his “sell by” date obviously passed and the religious Right decided Ted Cruz and Ben Carson were more their style.

I said a few days ago that the bottom five in Iowa as polled were Rick Santorum, Carly Fiorina, Chris Christie, Huckabee, and John Kasich. The polls pegged them as the also-rans correctly, but I didn’t count Jim Gilmore, who “won” bigtime by getting 12 votes in a state he didn’t campaign in. As of the time I’m writing this, Rick Santorum is staying in by placing his hopes on South Carolina while Fiorina will doggedly continue in New Hampshire – a state where Christie and Kasich are expected to do far better than they did in Iowa.

So we will re-convene in New Hampshire next Tuesday and see how the field reacts. The question is whether Cruz or Marco Rubio can dent Donald Trump’s lead there now that we know The Donald is no longer invincible.

Opportunities and training wheels

You may think this an unusual title for a post, but there were two things upcoming that I wanted to write about and after I thought about it I realized that in both cases there were rhetorical training wheels coming off.

First of all in the more immediate timeframe I am going to take Cathy Keim’s training wheels off and she’s going to be in charge of content this weekend. I’m going away for a personal mission (of sorts) so she is going to cover for me Friday through Sunday. Given some of the places she’s telling me she’s going and has been, there should be stuff so good you’ll hardly miss me.

But once I return I have a homework assignment: I have to review an upcoming book.

You probably know him as the former editor for RedState who now has his own site called The Resurgent, but Erick Erickson is moving back into the world of publishing with his second book, You Will Be Made To Care: The War On Faith, Family, And Your Freedom To Believe. I was one of a select few who get an advance copy to sneak a peek at (and yes, there was competition involved – only about 1 in 4 who applied were picked.)

In his life, Erickson has evolved from being a lawyer to local politician to blogger to radio host, but along the way followed his faith into studying for the ministry, and it’s that perspective taken from the intersection of religion and politics which interested me in reviewing this book. He’s taking the training wheels off this newfound (or perhaps rekindled) passion of his.

It’s been awhile since Erick turned the phrase that became the title of the book, but it rings more and more true as the secular nation intrudes more and more onto the religious community. Once upon a time the church was sacrosanct, with small towns around the nation coming to a halt on Sundays as people flocked to the local Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Catholic churches. Local clergy were respected members of the social circle of each of these communities.

This began to change in the latter half of the last century, not only with a decline in church membership and attendance but also the coarsening of culture, or to borrow a term from the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “defining deviancy down.” Now churches and their believers are becoming the outcasts of society, with some denominations yielding more readily to the reality they perceive is out there than others.

Regardless, I look forward to spending a little time reading the advance copy and gathering my thoughts on Erickson’s points. But I’m going to adapt a saying I use for my music reviews and tell you to read for yourself – all you need to do is follow these steps and pre-order it.

If it’s as well-done as his new website is (spoken from the perspective of a guy who really hates all the clickbait out there, Erick’s new site is a refreshing change) this book deserves to be a million-seller. Looks like I’m going to find out!