Dear Patriots,
As a long summer weekend approaches, we are sharing some more in-depth pieces for your leisure reading.
Sometimes it is wise to take time to think deeper on issues. We have been trained to read headlines, which does not provide the foundation for more complex understanding.
It is in that understanding that we begin the process of actually solving problems, instead of just talking about them.
We are providing snippets from the longer piece. If you have time, click the link to read it all.
1- Some are reading the 27 year old, 35,000 word manifesto of Harvard educated Ted Kaczynski and are surprised by the tone it strikes in current times.
Steven F. Hayward at The Pipeline Substack
The Ghost of the Unabomber Lives On
QUOTE: A conservative comedian of my acquaintance remarked to me recently, “I see New York Times editorial writer Ted Kaczynski has passed away.”
This is a callback to one of the earliest reactions to the Unabomber’s famous manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” that led to his capture in 1996. The late Tony Snow of Fox News was the first to notice a number of striking—and embarrassing—similarities between the language of Kaczynski’s manifesto and Al Gore’s pretentious and cliché-ridden Earth in the Balance.A careful reading of Kaczynski’s entire 35,000-word manifesto presents a more complicated picture, however, and one that in the end is more disturbing for what is missing from it, and hence the conclusions that should be drawn about him. And far from being a violent outlier, we ought to be concerned that the conditions that helped generate Kaczynski’s homicidal rage are more prevalent today than when Kaczynski formed his dark view of the world in the 1960s and 1970s.
It turns out that not very many people actually read the manifesto completely or carefully when it came out, and certain aspects of it read with prescience in the aftermath of Covid and the rising concerns about artificial intelligence and data privacy. Younger people who weren’t alive during the time of Kaczynski’s bombings today are coming to the manifesto with fresh eyes and discovering things they like about it. Suddenly there is a new chorus—including among some conservatives—who speak approvingly of being “Ted-pilled.”
It is startling to discover that Kaczynski’s strongest ire—aside for his primal hatred of industrial society—is for the left. His critique of and contempt for the left and especially the academic left, read in isolation, is one that easily matches any current conservative critic of wokeness and identity politics. Consider this passages from early in the manifesto:
Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.
2- Here is an interesting approach for Republicans to overcome the Democrats massive voting fraud.
2024: How to Out-Compute the Left
QUOTE: In 2024 Republicans cannot “out-fraud” the left, cannot “out-ballot-harvest” them, cannot “out-lawfare” them, cannot “out-media” them, cannot “out–contribution mule” them, cannot “out–Justice Department” them…but sure as hell can out-compute them — and that may do it.
The left owns the election apparatus — voting equipment, ballot-manufacturing, vagrant habitats, election commissions, media intimidation of judges not to look at election fraud and driving out any lawyer who raises a valid case.
Electioneering, by both sides, currently runs 1970s technology.
Leftists make good use of obsolete relational tech; Republicans, not so much.In 2024, there is an opportunity to out-compute the left. Here’s what it may look like.
Ninety percent of current election fraud comes in two buckets: election commissions jacking with voter rolls like Arizona and Wisconsin and mail-in ballots collected and illegally voted like everywhere.
Neither fraud bucket is thwarted by organizational solutions — both can be stopped with real-time compute power.
3- A good idea put into action has helped thousands of parents make better education choices for their children,
Birth of a Revolution
QUOTE: Thank the Children’s Scholarship Fund for the national growth of parental choice in education.
This year, lawmakers in seven states followed West Virginia and Arizona in creating broadly available education-choice programs. Millions of parents will soon be able to use state funds to send their child to a school of their choice or to access an education savings account to customize their education. These historic changes are the culmination of a national movement that began a quarter-century ago, with the creation of the Children’s Scholarship Fund (CSF).
On June 9, 1998, philanthropists Theodore Forstmann and John Walton pledged to donate $100 million to provide scholarships for thousands of disadvantaged kids to enroll in private school. The fund attracted additional contributions from other generous donors. Andrew Young, Martin Luther King III, and Dorothy Height joined the fund’s board, along with other national leaders, politicians, and entrepreneurs. By the following spring, the Children’s Scholarship Fund had raised nearly $200 million for scholarships, enough to provide partial scholarships for 40,000 children. Altogether, more than 1.25 million children applied.
Since 1998, CSF and its partner organizations have awarded tuition scholarships to more than 200,000 children.
The Children’s Scholarship Fund helped launch a national movement. “The classical liberal tradition in America has fostered three major movements of empowerment, and is poised for a fourth,” John Walton explained at the scholarship awards ceremony in 1999. “The labor movement empowered workers to achieve fair wages and working conditions. The suffrage movement empowered women to achieve political equality. And the civil rights movement empowered minorities to achieve social equality.” The new movement, said Walton, would be to “empower low-income parents to achieve a better education for their children.”
4- At Defending The Republic, we have made it a mission of this newsletter to help people find information that is an alternative to what the government is spilling out.
This is a battle and a search for truth. And it is why we are constantly nagging you to share this information with others who may not have the time or inclination to seek out alternative ideas.
David Thunder at Brownstone Institute
Informational No Man’s Land
QUOTE: One of the remarkable features of these Covid years is the amount of misleading and downright false information emitted by “official” sources, most notably public health authorities, government-appointed regulators, and mainstream media. A part of me hankers after the times when I could trust my government and media in a time of crisis. But if I am honest with myself, I have to admit that I’d prefer to live uncomfortably in the truth than comfortably in a fantasy built for me by someone who does not have my best interests at heart.
We have been betrayed by the people charged with sharing the best available data and information with us in a time of crisis. We have been lied to and deceived about matters of life and death, such as the risk-benefit tradeoffs of the Covid vaccines, not only by the pharmaceutical industry, but by the people who occupy leading positions of public authority in our society.
Our politicians have sold us “solutions” to Covid that were far, far worse than the disease, and have generally refused to admit to their mistakes, even when they saw the comparative success of regimes like Sweden and Florida that went a very different direction.
Thoughtful citizens who notice these betrayals now have strong grounds for distrusting “official” sources to tell them the truth, or present the facts in a non-manipulative, impartial manner. For me, and many others, the old idea that you could depend on your government to inform you of the latest science or tell you the threat level of a disease is now dead in the water.
Put simply, we now live in an informational No Man’s Land, in which every man must fend for himself, to the best of his ability, without the backing of an impressive Official Source to do his thinking for him.
We each have to scrape together whatever information we can from unofficial sources that have gotten important things right and are not defending the indefensible: coerced vaccination, vaccine-based segregation, involuntary population-wide lockdowns, etc.
The painful truth is that official “experts” and government ministers have played god with our lives and repeatedly given dangerous and scientifically baseless advice.
Under these circumstances, those who do their own independent research, rather than uncritically swallowing whatever “official authorities” tell them, are not the “cranks” and “conspiracy theorists” they are being made out to be, but citizens who actually understand the predicament they find themselves in, and have the courage to think for themselves, even when it draws down ridicule, censorship, and alienation from “respectable” society.
READ. SEEK TRUTH, SHARE TRUTH. PRAY THAT TRUTH BE REVEALED.
Hold Fast,
Defending The Republic
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