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Progressives are not lazy, irrational murderers

In his columns about liberals and progressives, Dennis Kemp describes us as lazy, irrational murderers.

It is unfortunate that Mr. Kemp is poorly informed. I will address just a couple of his misunderstandings, those on government and on welfare.

Mr. Kemp says that progressives believe that government should control almost every aspect of our lives. As a progressive, I can assure you that I do not want government to dictate most aspects of my life. I dont know any progressive who would say they want government control.

When we think of government, we do not think of dictatorship. We want democracy, where everyone gets to participate in deciding what laws we must live by. Read socialist party websites for yourself.

Many, if not most, socialists are non-conformists. We dont want to dress like everyone else, do the same work as everyone else, or have all of the same possessions as everyone else. We like our individuality. That is a typical socialist view.

As to welfare, specifically, Mr. Kemp claims that progressives think that people should be able to demand public support, without ever having to work. That is untrue. While some people have handicaps that make it difficult for them to hold regular jobs, that is not true of the vast majority of us.

Rather than have healthy people sit around doing nothing, socialists want all people to have jobs. If you dont believe it, go to a socialist party website and see for yourself. Socialists want to work. We dont want handouts for nothing. In fact, socialists promote full-employment policies, which conservatives oppose.

It would be nice if people would educate themselves about the variety of political views that exist in this country. I know that seeking an accurate understanding of the diversity of views is time-consuming. However, it is important that we understand one another. Then, we could have conversations based on what we actually think, rather than based on false distortions of one anothers ideas.

Dr. Jesse Chanley

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Progressives are not lazy, irrational murderers - White Mountain Independent

PHASE I: INFILTRATION

Phase I was the genesis of the modern progressive movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was launched by the cast of characters we covered at the beginning of this book, people such as Teddy Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, Margaret Sanger, Wayne Wheeler, John Dewey, and others. It got especially heated during the 1912 presidential election, when Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson tried to out-progressive each other. Wilson won out, and his administration was the first wave of the progressive movement. It would be followed by three more waves, each of which shared the following goals of the infiltration phase:

Goal 1: Organize groups for control. The collectivization of society began. Instead of focusing on individual rights and freedoms, progressives focused on organizing people into groups that set them apart. Sanger organized around birth control (i.e., eugenics), Wheeler organized around temperance, labor groups organized workers, and so on. This was the genesis of community organizing, and it has changed little from then to the days of Obamaherding people into groups, motivating them with fear.

Goal 2: Infiltrate. Slowly but deliberately, progressives inserted themselves into key American institutions, including the government, the labor movement, academia, the media, the military, and the courts. Progressives not only ran for high office, but they also made a point of inserting their operatives into a permanent government bureaucracy. They took control of the labor movement and of academia, which became a hotbed for progressivism at all levels. The leading race-theory eugenicists came from Americas top universities such as Princeton and Johns Hopkins, the latter of which was designed specifically to bring the German university model to the United States. Progressives such as Dewey influenced the education of the youngest Americans.

Goal 3: Weaken the social fabric. For the collectivization of society to succeed, the natural, organic fibers of our social fabricfaith, tradition, family, heritageneeded to be ripped apart. Progressives systematically drew wedges between different segments of society by collectivizing and organizing them against one another. And all with an unceasing agenda of political correctness to revise history and remove all traces of faith from public life.

Goal 4: Confuse the concept of right and wrong. Sometimes it feels as if were living in a moral house of mirrorsup means down, down means up, and everything is distorted. That is exactly how progressives want it. By preaching moral relativism and shaming us into thinking our traditions are wrong and outdated, by convincing us that our moral compass needs to progress, they can lead us ever closer to the final step of phase I . . .

Goal 5: Bring society to a state of near crisis. At some point, the confusion becomes too great, and those who could stand up to bring some sanity to the public sphere are successfully shamed into silence. The nation is brought to the edge of collapse so that progressives can step in and take power, all in a false-prophet effort to relieve peoples fears and anxieties.

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Glenn Beck Liars - LIARS: How Progressives Exploit Our ...

The San Luis Obispo Tribune

Joe Tarica ignores all the hate coming from 'progressives' The San Luis Obispo Tribune Joetopia asks what has made people so angry that they would make comments like the ones he quoted. But ever the liberal, Joe, you failed to quote some examples of the most offensive statements made by the left. A biased press is a perfect example of ...

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Joe Tarica ignores all the hate coming from 'progressives' - The San Luis Obispo Tribune

The progressive mob that disrupted Charles Murrays appearance last week at Middlebury College was protesting a 1994 book read by few if any of the protesters.

Some of them denounced eugenics, thereby demonstrating an interesting ignorance: Eugenics controlled breeding to improve the heritable traits of human beings was a progressive cause.

In The Bell Curve, Murray, a social scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, and his co-author, Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein, found worrisome evidence that American society was becoming cognitively stratified, with an increasingly affluent cognitive elite and a deteriorating quality of life for people at the bottom end of the cognitive ability distribution.

They examined the consensus that, controlling for socioeconomic status and possible IQ test bias, cognitive ability is somewhat heritable, that the black/white differential had narrowed, and that millions of blacks have higher IQs than millions of whites.

The authors were resolutely agnostic concerning the roles of genes and the social environment. They said that even if there developed unequivocal evidence that genetics are part of the story, there would be no reason to treat individuals differently or to permit government regulation of procreation.

Middleburys mob was probably as ignorant of this as of the following: Between 1875 and 1925, when eugenics had many advocates, not all advocates were progressives but advocates were disproportionately progressives because eugenics coincided with progressivisms premises and agenda.

Progressives rejected the Founders natural rights doctrine and conception of freedom. Progressives said freedom is not the natural capacity of individuals whose rights pre-exist government.

Rather, freedom is something achieved, at different rates and to different degrees, by different races. Racialism was then seeking scientific validation, and Darwinian science had given rise to social Darwinism belief in the ascendance of the fittest in the ranking of races.

The progressive theologian Walter Rauschenbusch argued that with modern science we can intelligently mold and guide the evolution in which we take part.

Progressivisms concept of freedom as something merely latent, and not equally latent, in human beings dictated rethinking the purpose and scope of government. Princeton University scholar Thomas C. Leonard, in his 2016 book Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics & American Economics in the Progressive Era, says progressives believed that scientific experts should be in societys saddle, determining the human hierarchy and appropriate social policies, including eugenics.

Economist Richard T. Ely, a founder of the American Economic Association and whose students at Johns Hopkins included Woodrow Wilson, said God works through the state, which must be stern and not squeamish.

Charles Van Hise, president of the University of Wisconsin, epicenter of intellectual progressivism, said: We know enough about eugenics so that if that knowledge were applied, the defective classes would disappear within a generation.

Progress, said Ely, then at Wisconsin, depended on recognizing that there are certain human beings who are absolutely unfit, and who should be prevented from a continuation of their kind.

The mentally and physically disabled were deemed defectives.

In 1902, when Wilson became Princetons president, the final volume of his A History of the American People contrasted the sturdy stocks of the north of Europe with southern and eastern Europeans who had neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence.

In 1907, Indiana became the first of more than 30 states to enact forcible sterilization laws. In 1911, now-Gov. Wilson signed New Jerseys, which applied to the hopelessly defective and criminal classes.

In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Virginias law, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes saying that in affirming the law requiring the sterilization of imbeciles he was getting near to the first principle of real reform.

At the urging of Robert Yerkes, president of the American Psychological Association, during World War I the Army did intelligence testing of conscripts so that the nation could inventory its human stock as it does livestock. The Armys findings influenced Congress postwar immigration restrictions and national quotas.

Carl Brigham, a Princeton psychologist, said the Armys data demonstrated the intellectual superiority of our Nordic group over the Mediterranean, Alpine and Negro groups.

Progressives derided the Founders as unscientific for deriving natural rights from what progressives considered the fiction of a fixed human nature.

But they asserted that races had fixed and, importantly, different natures calling for different social policies. Progressives resolved this contradiction when, like most Americans, they eschewed racialism the belief that the races are tidily distinct, each created independent of all others, each with fixed traits and capacities.

Middleburys turbulent progressives should read Leonards book. After they have read Murrays.

George Will is a television personality, author and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist.

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George Will | Eugenics was a progressive cause - TribDem.com

The Organization Man, whom we first met in 1956, is still very much with us. And his eccentric career since that time partly answers a question that mystifies many contemporary conservatives: Given that progressives profess to hate corporations, why are our corporate leaders so progressive? It is easy to understand their taking a self-interested stand against the Trump administration over things such as the H-1B program and visa waivers, which interfere with their access to workers and customers, respectively. But 130 corporate leaders including the CEOs of American Airlines and Bank of America getting together to come down on North Carolina over public-bathroom rules that annoy transgender activists? Together with business leaders who have no presence in North Carolina and nothing to do with the state or its politics?

Is it only cravenness or something more?

In the progressive lexicon, the word corporation is practically a synonym for evil. Corporations, in the progressive view, are so stoned on greed and ripped on ruthlessness that they present an existential threat to democracy as we know it. When the Left flies into a mad rage about . . . whatever, the black-bloc terrorists dont burn down the tax office or the police station: They smash the windows of a Starbucks, never mind CEO Howard Schultzs impeccably lefty credentials.

Weird thing, though: With the exception of a few big shiny targets such as Koch Industries (the nations second-largest privately held concern, behind Cargill) and Walmart (the nations largest private employer), the Lefts corporate enemies list is dominated by relatively modest concerns: Chick-fil-A, which, in spite of its recent growth spurt, is only a fraction of the size of McDonalds or YUM Brands; Hobby Lobby, which is not even numbered among the hundred largest private U.S. companies; Waffle House, a regional purveyor of mediocre grits and a benefactor of Georgia Republicans. Carls Jr. was founded by a daily communicant and Knight of Malta, a man who had some not-very-progressive opinions about gay rights. But even in its new role as part of a larger corporate enterprise (the former CEO of which, Andrew Puzder, has been nominated for secretary of labor), the poor mans answer to In-N-Out is not exactly in a position to inflict ultramontane Catholicism on the world at large, though the idea of a California Classic Double Inquisition with Cheese is not without charm.

Far from being agents of reaction, our corporate giants have for decades been giving progressives a great deal to celebrate. Disney, despite its popular reputation for hidebound wholesomeness, has long been a leader on gay rights, much to the dismay of a certain stripe of conservative. Walmart, one of the Lefts great corporate villains, has barred Confederate-flag merchandise from its stores in a sop to progressive critics, and its much-publicized sustainability agenda is more than sentiment: Among other things, it has invested $100 million in economic-mobility programs and doubled the fuel efficiency of its vehicle fleet over ten years. Individual members of the Walton clan engage in philanthropy of a distinctly progressive bent.

In fact, just going down the list of largest U.S. companies (by market capitalization) and considering each firms public political activism does a great deal to demolish the myth of the conservative corporate agenda. Top ten: 1) Apples CEO, Tim Cook, is an up-and-down-the-line progressive who has been a vociferous critic of religious-liberty laws in Indiana and elsewhere that many like-minded people consider a back door to anti-gay discrimination. 2) When protesters descended on SFO to protest President Donald Trumps executive order on immigration, one of the well-heeled gentlemen leading them was Google founder Sergey Brin, and Google employees were the second-largest corporate donor bloc to President Barack Obamas reelection campaign. 3) Microsoft founder Bill Gates is a generous funder of programs dedicated to what is euphemistically known as family planning. 4) Berkshire Hathaways principal, Warren Buffett, is a close associate of Barack Obamas and an energetic advocate of redistributive tax increases on high-income taxpayers. 5) Amazons Jeff Bezos put up $2.5 million of his own money for a Washington State gay-marriage initiative. 6) Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg has pushed for liberal immigration-reform measures, while Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz pledged $20 million to support Hillary Rodham Clinton and other Democrats in 2016. 7) Exxon, as an oil company, may be something of a hate totem among progressives, but it has spent big billions big on renewables and global social programs. 8) Johnson & Johnsons health-care policy shop is run by Liz Fowler, one of the architects of Obamacare and a former special assistant to President Obama. 9) The two largest recipients of JPMorgan cash in 2016 were Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, and the banks billionaire chairman, Jamie Dimon, is a high-profile supporter of Democratic politicians including Barack Obama and reportedly rejected an offer from President Trump to serve as Treasury secretary. 10) Wells Fargo employees followed JPMorgans example and donated $7.36 to Mrs. Clinton for every $1 they gave to Trump, and the recently troubled bank has sponsored events for the Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD, and other gay-rights groups, as well as donated to local Planned Parenthood franchises.

Even the hated Koch brothers are pro-choice, pro-gay, and pro-amnesty.

You may see the occasional Tom Monaghan or Phil Anschutz, but, on balance, U.S. corporate activism is overwhelmingly progressive. Why?

For one thing, conservatives are cheap dates. You do not have to convince the readers of National Review or Republicans in Valparaiso that American business is in general a force for good in the world. But if you are, e.g., Exxon, you might feel the need to convince certain people, young and idealistic and maybe a little stupid in spite of their expensive educations, that you are not so bad after all, and that you are spending mucho shmundo turning algae into biofuel, in the words of one Exxon advertisement, and combating malaria and doing other nice things. All of that is true, and Exxon makes sure people know it. The professional activists may sneer and scoff, but they are not the audience.

Even if it were only or mainly a matter of publicity (and it isnt Shell, among other oil majors, is putting real money into renewables and alternative energy), big companies such as Exxon and Apple would still have a very strong incentive to engage in progressive activism rather than conservative activism.

For one thing, there is a kind of moral asymmetry at work: Conservatives may roll their eyes a little bit at promises to build windmills so efficient that well cease needing coal and oil, but progressives (at least a fair portion of them) believe that using fossil fuels may very well end human civilization. The nations F-150 drivers are not going to organize a march on Chevrons headquarters if it puts a billion bucks into biofuels, but the nations Subaru drivers might very well do so if it doesnt.

The same asymmetry characterizes the so-called social issues. The Left will see to it that Brendan Eich is driven out of his position at Mozilla for donating to an organization opposed to gay marriage, but the Right will not see to it that Tim Cook is driven out of his position for supporting gay marriage. For the Right, the question of gay marriage is an important moral and political disagreement, but for the Left the exclusion of homosexual couples from the legal institution of marriage was something akin to Jim Crow, and support for it isnt erroneous, it is wicked. Even those on the right who proclaim that they regard the question of homosexual relationships as a national moral emergency do not behave as though they really believe it: Remember that boycott of Disney theme parks launched with great fanfare by the American Family Association, Focus on the Family, and the Southern Baptist Convention back in 1996? Nothing happened, because conservative parents are not telling their toddlers that they cannot go to Disney World because the people who run the park are too nice to that funny blonde lady who has the talk show and dances in the aisles with her audience.

The issues that conservatives tend to see as life-and-death issues are actual life-and-death issues, abortion prominent among them. But even among right-leaning corporate types, pro-life social conservatism is a distinctly minority inclination.

And that is significant, because a great deal of corporate activism is CEO-driven rather than shareholder-driven or directly rooted in the business interests of the firm. Like Wall Street bankers, who may not like their tax bills or Dodd-Frank but who tend in the main to be socially liberal Democrats, the CEOs of major U.S. corporations are, among other things, members of a discrete class. The graduates of ten colleges accounted for nearly half of the Fortune 500 CEOs in 2012; one in seven of them went to one school: Harvard. A handful of metros in California, Texas, and New York account for a third of Fortune 1000 headquarters and there are 17 Fortune 1000 companies in one zip code in Houston. Unsurprisingly, people with similar backgrounds, similar experiences, and similar occupations tend to see the world in a similar way. A new breed of chief executive is emerging the CEO activist, wrote Leslie Gaines-Ross, of Weber Shandwick, a global PR giant that advises Microsoft and had the unenviable task of working with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on the ACA rollout. A handful of CEOs are standing up and standing out on some of the most polarizing issues of the day, from climate change and gun control, to race relations and same-sex marriage. Hence chief executives joining en masse the great choir of hysteria on the question of toilet law in the Tar Heel State.

Whereas the ancient corporate practice was to decline to take a public position on anything not related to their businesses, contemporary CEOs feel obliged to act as public intellectuals as well as business managers. Many of them are genuine intellectuals: Gates, PepsiCos Indra Nooyi, Goldman Sachss Lloyd Blankfein. And, like Hollywood celebrities, almost all of them are effectively above money.

Some of them are rock-star entrepreneurs. But most of them are variations on the Organization Man, veterans of MBA programs, management consultancies, financial firms,

and 10,000 corporate-strategy meetings. If you have not read it, spare a moment for William H. Whytes Cold War classic. In the 1950s, Whyte, a writer for Fortune, interviewed dozens of important CEOs and found that they mostly rejected the ethos of rugged individualism in favor of a more collectivist view of the world. The capitalists were not much interested in defending the culture of capitalism. What he found was that the psychological and operational mechanics of large corporations were much like those of other large organizations, including government agencies, and that American CEOs believed, as they had believed since at least the time of Frederick Winslow Taylor and his 19th-century cult of scientific management, that expertise deployed through bureaucracy could impose rationality on such unruly social entities as free markets, culture, family, and sexuality. The supplanting of spontaneous order with political discipline is the essence of progressivism, then and now.

It is hardly a new idea. The old robber barons were far from being free-enterprise men: J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie, like many businessmen of their generation, believed strongly in state-directed collusion among firms (theyd have said coordination) to avoid destructive competition. You can draw a straight intellectual line from their thinking to Barack Obamas views about state-directed investments in alternative energy or medical research.

It is not difficult to see the temptations of that approach from the point of view of a Bill Gates or a Warren Buffett: The decisions they have made for themselves have turned out well, so why not empower them, or men like them, to make decisions for other people, too? They may even be nave or arrogant enough to believe that their elevated stations in life have liberated them from self-interest.

Populists of the Trump variety and the Sanders variety (who are not in fact as different as they seem) are not wrong to see these corporate cosmopolitans as members of a separate, distinct, and thriving class with economic and social interests of its own. Those interests overlap only incidentally and occasionally with those of movement conservatives and overlap even less as the new nationalist-populist strain in the Republican party comes to dominate the debate on questions such as trade and immigration. Under attack from both the right and the left, free enterprise and free trade increasingly are ideas without a party. As William H. Whyte discovered back in 1956, the capitalists are not prepared to offer an intellectual defense of capitalism or of classical liberalism. They believe in something else: the managers dream of command and control.

Kevin D. Williamson is National Reviews roving correspondent.

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Why Corporate Leaders Became Progressive Activists - National Review