Progressivism's Well-Honed Weapons
note: this test has been updated
How brainwashed are you by rhetoric about the benefits of a much bigger government and the evils of conservativism? Take this SHOCKING test and find out by responding “True” or “False” or “Partially True and False” (T, F or P) to the following 28 statements:
1. “Rednecks” are ultra-conservatives prone to violence.
2. The Nazis were conservatives. Today’s conservatives are like Nazis.
3. Fascists were conservatives; Nazis were Fascists and today’s conservatives are like both.
4. Nazism and Fascism are nothing like socialism or communism.
5. They (Republicans and conservatives) put the car (our economy) into the ditch (deep recession).
6. Woodrow Wilson was one of our greatest presidents, certainly #2, 3, or 4 on the all-time list.
7. Warren G. Harding was among the most corrupt and worst of presidents.
8. Herbert Hoover was a conservative.
9. Herbert Hoover did virtually nothing at all just let the ’29 Crash become the Great Depression.
10. FDR saved the country from the Great Depression.
11. Unemployment checks and food stamps really rev up the economy.
12. Communism is a benign philosophy.
13. Mao was a hero and deserves to be on a T-shirt.
14. Che was a hero and deserves to be on a T-shirt.
15. Global warming is mostly unnatural, man-caused.
16. High carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere created by man cause global warming.
17. Carbon-trading (a.k.a. “Cap and Trade") legislation could diminish and control global warming.
18. Green technology will save the planet and create five million jobs here in America.
19. The $787 Billion Obama stimulus saved us from a depression by creating or saving a lot of jobs.
20. DDT was harmful and had to be banned.
21. Cloward and Who? The left-wing progressives are the most concerned among us about the well-being of poor folk.
22. ACORN benefits poor people.
23. Conservatives vote against welfare laws which benefit poor people, ergo conservatives are racists.
24. The federal government creates jobs quite effectively.
25. A little inflation is good for the economy and creates the prime condition for business to boom.
26. Propaganda was invented by the Nazis.
27. Eugenics was an atrocious Nazi invention.
28. Capitalism exploits the poor.
The Answers:
Every wonder why so many people support anti-American laws and candidates election after election? It’s because the Progressives passing the laws have told the Big lie so often and so effectively that the progressives’ Big Lie is now considered today’s truth. The statements above were some well-known examples of BIG LIES told so often (almost a hundred years in some cases) that now virtually all of the uninformed believe them. Every single one of the 28 statements above is 100% false, here’s the truth about the questions above . . . remember . . . .
Every single one of the 28 statements above is 100% false and yet these statements are widely believed by great numbers of the voting populace. Since conservatives haven’t done what it takes to keep the truth before people all the time, the progressives with out any good ideas at all are winning the battle of ideas, a shameless situation.
The “rednecks” were rifle-toting UNION miners who wore bandanas around their necks to minimize the chance they’d shoot each other in confrontations against management during their labor altercations. The liberals and progressives and labor unions “doctored” the term “rednecks” so now they’re implying that "rednecks" are, and always have been, ultra-extreme violent conservatives and implying that progressivism is by default much more reasonable.
The term “Nazi” is short for “National Socialist Workers Party,” one of about thirty such parties that sprang up in Germany after that country lost World War I. Only two lasted for over a decade: the communists and Nazis. Both were left-wing organizations intent upon socializing German life. Besides the two words “socialist” and “workers” which both communism and Nazism revere, both in practice turn into ruthless totalitarian states. No conservativism involved. The Nazi literature claimed their economic system was “neither capitalism nor communism,” but something far better than either. Business didn’t support Hitler until he’d already come to power.
Fascism was created in Italy when the labor unions became so strong they overthrew the management of the corporations, large and small. Then the corporations took over the government and elected Benito Mussolini as leader. No conservativism there.
Nazism and Fascism are almost identical to communism in their ideals (benefits for the workers, curses for the capitalists that create jobs) and in their typical ends: totalitarianism.
They (Republicans and conservatives) put the car (our economy) into the ditch (deep recession) is President Barack^^ Obama's biggest Big Lie. In a nutshell, here's the truth: George Bush saw Obama, Clinton, ACORN, and other progressive groups deliberately pushing the car (the economy) toward a 500-foot cliff (utter financial disaster) dived into the front seat, grabbed the steering wheel and slammed on the brakes creating a controlled skid that put the vehicle into the nearest friendly-looking ditch. But realizing that particular truth is such a long story and so hard for most of you to believe, here's more info you can examine at your leisure: teapartypatriots.org/BlogPostView.aspx?id=55f820a3-5f02-4c92-adaa-59b59f318be7
Woodrow Wilson, was probably, next to Barack Obama, the progressive president who threatened freedom most. He was a racist who showed the D.W. Griffith film “Birth of a Nation” repeatedly in the White House; ended federal hiring of blacks in Washington, D.C.; put Italian and German citizens into concentration camps during World War I; closed down newspapers that he disagreed with; and sought to manipulate the mind of voters to a degree not seen before in history thus inventing “propaganda.”
Warren G. Harding, who died in office, was one of the most effective and honest presidents ever. He inherited Woodrow Wilson’s “depression” as he came to office in 1921. It’s mostly been lost to history or been known as the “Invisible Depression” because within fifteen months Harding had brought it under control and returned the country to prosperity by cutting taxes 49%; cutting government spending 48%; and paying down the national debt roughly 31%. After his death a scandal associated with one of his cabinet members was dropped into his lap by progressive historians revising the truth; but Harding had no part in the Teapot Dome scandal. Calvin Coolidge, Harding’s vice president, replaced him at Harding’s death and continued the policies of Harding giving the country the most prosperous decade in its history: “The Roaring Twenties.” Herbert Hoover was placed onto Harding’s cabinet as Secretary of Commerce to appease some of Harding’s supporters. Hoover was a “tinkerer” and a progressive. When the Harding administration assumed power, Hoover advised Harding to make several major changes to combat the Wilson depression. But Harding ignored him. When Hoover became president in 1929 he immediately started “fixing” what wasn’t broken and put us into a huge fiscal debacle.
Herbert Hoover’s raising of taxes and dramatic increasing of tariffs ushered in hard times, job losses, Wall Street panic and a recession. He then created more government agencies than ever before seen to try to combat the problem but only made it worse. FDR and his vice president Garner campaigned against Hoover calling him a “socialist” and vowing to cut taxes and cut government spending (like Harding) but when FDR came into office he not only did not cut taxes or spending; and continued most of Hoover’s programs just giving them a different name; but expanded government to levels never before seen.
FDR tried to use government to create jobs and instead turned a little ‘d’ depression into the Great Depression. The Great Depression lasted until the country entered World War II. Whereas Harding eliminated a depression in 15 months, Hoover and Roosevelt extended theirs to 12.5 years.
Nancy Pelosi told us that every dollar spent on food stamps and unemployment checks is worth $1.79 in benefits to the economy and nothing revs up job creation like those two programs. Governments cannot create jobs** or create wealth. Government can only redistribute it. Pelosi can certainly not prove her statement. Yes, it’s very likely that food stamp and welfare money will be spent almost immediately and that’s likely to give apparent benefit. What Pelosi is not pointing out is that the money in the hands of the taxpayers is not diluted by passing through the hands of the IRS and scads of other bureaucrats and paying for all the employees, electricity and buildings and paper involved, etc. but that it goes directly into the economy even faster since it does not need to make a detour to Washington and then another detour to the state jobs offices or state welfare offices.
Communism, or ultra-socialism, is a philosophy particularly appropriate for dictators and totalitarian governments. But freedom is definitely not the only casualty under communism. The people suffer through deprivations and the government tends to kill them by starvation; brutal imprisonment; or more directly. In the 20th Century totalitarian communist regimes in Red China, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, etc. etc. killed roughly 122 million of their own people. A new word had to be created to describe this phenomenon: "democide" (regimes killing their own people). Mao killed roughly 60 million in peace time, many by willful starvation by insisting that state programs be continued when obviously they were not working and people were starving to death. The Soviet Union spread its killings out across war and peace. Deliberate starvation of the Ukrainians killed seven million in peace time.
Mao killed 60 million Chinese.
Che was a sadist who reportedly said he lost count somewhere after the 187th prisoner he’d personally killed with his bare hands after he and Fidel Castro came to power.
The term “Global warming” as the environmental extremists use it is a lie. It’s relatively impossible to look at any five hundred year period in recent earth history without finding plenty of evidence of shifting climate. The global warming statisticians conveniently left out the 300 year “Medieval Optimum” (a very warm period in which Greenland and Iceland were relatively ice-free and the Vikings settled there and even discovered North America) when calculating global climate shifts. So the present day is compared almost directly to the so-called “Little Ice Age” which ended around 1850. See the History Channel DVD “Little Ice Age, Big Chill” for more information on that period. Of course while Europe and the rest of the world have covered the falsification of the data by Climate alarmists, the story has never run here in the United States in the mainstream liberal media.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936289.ece
http://www.prisonplanet.com/medieval-warm-period-rediscovered.html
High Carbon Dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere actually make the earth cooler by reflecting heat back into space and by encouraging plant life. Back in 1972 our present “Science Czar” John Holdren wrote a book about how the coming ice age was caused by man’s interferences and pollutants. Time magazine showed a cover with a frozen earth to herald his predictions. Climate alarmism is about putting the federal government in control of more and more of our lives and has zero-basis in fact.
By their own admission, the leaders of the Cap and Trade argument tell us that unless they put us back to about 1903’s technology, the global warming they say exists cannot be reversed. If it were true, mankind creates about 2% of the world’s carbon emissions the rest is natural so man cannot be blamed for the problem anyway. Despite this, President Obama told a San Francisco newspaper that his energy policies will “bankrupt the coal industry" and “must necessarily drive the cost of electricity sky-high.”
A Spanish study (of the green-tech experiment that took that country from the #1 job producer in the European Union in 1997 to 21% unemployment today) concluded that each green tech job subsidized by the Spanish government cost 2.2 jobs. Translated to American shores that means that President Obama’s promise to create five million green jobs would cost 11 million real jobs in the real economy. Not only that, but the Spanish study showed that once subsidies were removed or the individual programs expired, most green jobs disappeared also. Only about 10% of green jobs proved permanent . . . so only 500,000 of Mr. Obama’s jobs can be expected to be permanent (and the Spanish study showed that the wages were relatively low as well) at a cost of 11 million real permanent jobs in the real economy a 22/1 ratio that created the disaster in Spain (each job cost $677,000 to create). By the way, it reportedly took Edison 10,000 experiments to invent a workable light bulb . . . have you seen any indication that any green tech other than windmills is even close to "shovel-ready" for the whole country's use?
The $787 Billion Obama stimulus made the economy much worse. Jobs “created or saved” is a bogus statistic. You just count the number of jobs in the economy and see if the number rises or falls – that’s the only valid statistic. Much like the Spanish study, governments really fudge when they talk about job creation. For example in one study 34 jobs were created at only about $36,000 each by the Obama stimulus. WOW! However, closer study shows that the people were working in a meat industry for precisely ONE WEEK and each of their jobs got counted as a full-time permanent job???? So how much of the $36,000 was just a political payoff? You’ll never know.
Rachel Carson wrote a book called “Silent Spring” in the early 60’s. No actual science was involved in the creation of the book. Ms. Carson’s claims about the ills of DDT were never actually researched and DDT was taken off the market and eventually banned worldwide by the United Nations. In 1972 malaria deaths around the earth were roughly 42,000. Today more than two million people die from malaria every year not to mention all those who live with the disease for their whole lives. Ms. Carson killed 60 million people by getting a pesticide that can be drunk safely or used for salad dressing banned. Today many African and Asian nations are beginning to ignore the DDT ban.
The progressives would have you believe that only they are tolerant and only they are concerned about the poor. Leaving aside the fact that anyone who doesn’t adopt the “politically-correct” stance progressives approve of is called a “racist,” “stupid,” and “extremist bigot,” what are the facts? Anti-capitalists Richard Cloward and Frances Piven (infamous for the “Cloward-Piven Strategy”) joined with militant George Wiley in 1967 to create the NWRO to use the poor as “storm troopers” to assail the Welfare offices of the nation and swell the welfare rolls. Eventually they bankrupted New York City (1975) and came within a whisker of bankrupting New York State (NYC had to be bailed out by the federal government). The long-term result? The welfare moms that the National Welfare Rights Organization spawned totally changed the culture and lifestyle of the urban poor into a world of abject dependency and hopelessness. Single-mother families are now the norm and higher crime, unwed motherhood, school dropoutism, utter lack of upward mobility; and, in one part of the inner-city culture(the Black community) marriage and family is disappearing from the landscape as fatherhood is no longer an honored institution. Everywhere the dominant culture is the culture of “victimization” and hopelessness. Even though Cloward, Piven and Wiley failed to create the guaranteed national income they hoped for, they bragged in public and in print about their great deed in bankrupting NYC. Apparently they really care for the poor.
ACORN like the NWRO uses poor people as storm troopers. In the case of ACORN putting poor people into homes they couldn’t afford was considered a good thing. In the resulting recession, the poor people were the ones who suffered the most.
Conservatives vote against welfare laws which encourage dependency and ultimately trap poor people in poverty forever. Conservatives believe that first completing one’s education and then starting out in low-paying service jobs if necessary is training for the future, not humiliation.
The federal government creates meaningful jobs as effectively as newborns do calculus. By taxing away the resources of the private sector, government kills jobs.
Inflation is the main economic tool of progressives in democracies. It allows them to promise anything and everything (with the bills never coming due) to bribe the electorate into giving them their votes and power. From 1913 when the Federal Reserve Banking System was created to today, the American paper dollar has lost 98% of its buying power. Not only that, but the nation has a $14 TRillion National debt and faces $109 TRillion in unfunded liabilities (Social Security; Medicare; and the federal side of Medicaid services which have been promised to our citizens). This is the cost of voting for progressives who make big promises.
Propaganda was invented by the Woodrow Wilson regime and both Goebbels and Hitler referred gratefully to what they’d learned from the great American founders of this new science.
Eugenics was the subject of many intelligent discussions by the Fabian Socialists of England. Elites like H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw thought it was a necessary part of the necessary and gradual shift toward socialism they espoused. American progressivism is one offspring of the Fabians. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and other American elite believed eugenics was vital. Later the Nazis liked the idea too and put them into action with their gas chambers.
Socialism, not capitalism, exploits the poor. Using legislative handouts to enslave the poor in exchange for their votes, Socialism cuts the standard of living for everyone. The poor in America have it so horribly bad that they’re better off than 94% of the world’s peoples. Instead of bringing everyone down to the level of the poor, capitalism says “a rising tide lifts all boats” so let’s bring greater prosperity to everyone so the poor are elevated well above their present standard of living.
Ya’ll live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
** did you catch the apparent “contradiction” between item #9 and #10? We said the federal government cannot create wealth or jobs in #10 after talking about how World War II finally pulled the country out of the Great Depression. Is there a contradiction? Isn’t the federal government creating jobs (and by extension wealth) when it makes a bigger army or navy? Think about it . . . . If you can’t figure it out Rajjpuut recommends Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics in One Lesson” with particular attention to three short chapters called “The Broken Window,” The Blessings of Destruction” and “Disbanding Troops and Bureaucrats.”
Ya’ll live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
^^ Barack Obama worked over two years as an ACORN lawyer in Chicago brow-beating and shaking-down mortgage lenders to force them to make thousands of knowingly bad loans to people who could never repay their mortgages without first winning the lottery.
^^ We called #4 the biggest of his Big Lies for Barack Obama because he worked more than two years for ACORN as a lawyer browbeating and shaking-down unwilling mortgage lenders to make them comply with CRA legislation and force them to make knowingly unsound loans to people who in many cases could only hope to pay off their mortgages by winning the lottery or holding up a bank.
** Did you catch the apparent “contradiction” between item #9 and #10? We said the federal government cannot create wealth or jobs in #10 after talking about how World War II finally pulled the country out of the Great Depression. Is there a contradiction? Isn’t the federal government creating jobs (and by extension wealth) when it makes a bigger army or navy? Think about it . . . . If you can’t figure it out Rajjpuut recommends Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics in One Lesson” with particular attention to the short chapters called “The Broken Window,” The Blessings of Destruction” and “Disbanding Troops and Bureaucrats.”
round of Marxist palaver. Don't bother to come back with the “tax the rich” scheme. If you took every asset of all of the top 3% of the richest Americans, most of whom are democrats, you would affect the national debt by less than 1%. And taxing small business owners who declare more than $250K annual income will break the back of an Obama weakened economy and drive the nation to ruin quicker.
Robert Byrd, the conscience of the Democratic Party and a former KKK leader, who on Fox News national broadcast, threw around the "N" word, like it was nothing. This, by the way, was not a baited interview. I saw the interview live and the tossing around of the "White N" and "Black N" phrases were in no way related to the conversation. The passages were a complete non-sequitur. What does that tell us about his hidden thoughts?
Conversely, the guy living across the street, well, he was a drunk and lazy. He chose to pursue happiness in his way ... the bottle and sloth. He is free to pursue that happiness. And when he fails, and his relatives have to adopt his children, take care of his wife, and he is alone in his whiskey clouded world, he will have accomplished his pursuit. Perhaps then, and only then, can he make a choice to pursue happiness in another way.
Similar programs could be conducted for illegal aliens. Just like the girl scouts, who ask, “How many boxes of cookies do you want this year?” the government can ask, “How many illegals will you take this year, Mr. Liberal? As you know, we now have 20 million of them, and only you can help us reach our goal of placing every one of them in their very own home!”
