Souza Quotes

America is the greatest, freest and most decent society in existence. It is an oasis of goodness in a desert of cynicism and barbarism. This country, once an experiment unique in the world, is now the last best hope for the world.

Somehow freedom for religious expression has become freedom from religious expression.

There is a legitimate argument over whether the death penalty effectively deters violent crime, although my personal observation is that not one of the criminals who have been executed over the years has ever killed again.

In philosophy seminars, the choice is usually between good and evil. In the real world, however, the choice is often between a bad guy and a worse guy.

In my view, the pro-life movement at this point should focus on seeking to reduce the number of abortions. At times it will require political education and legal fights, at times it will require education and the establishment of alternatives to abortion, such as adoption centers. Unfortunately, such measures are sometimes opposed by so-called hard-liners in the pro-life movement. These hard-liners are fools. Because they want to outlaw all abortions, they refuse to settle for stopping some abortions; the consequence is that they end up preventing no abortions.

C.S. Lewis said that conscience is nothing more than the voice of God within our souls; the bridge that links the creature to the creator

Christianity enhanced the notion of political and social accountability by providing a new model: that of servant leadership. In ancient Greece and Rome no one would have dreamed of considering political leaders anyone's servants. The job of the leader was to lead. But Christ invented the notion that the way to lead is by serving the needs of others, especially those who are the most needy.

The life of West, Nietzsche said, is based on Christianity. The values of the West are based on Christianity. Some of these values seem to have taken a life of their own, and this gives us the illusion that we can get rid of Christianity and keep the values. This, Nietzsche says, is an illusion...Remove the Christian foundation, and the values must go too.

For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin—real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life. —FR. ALFRED D’SOUZA

...capitalism satisfied the Christian demand for an institution that channels selfish human desire toward the betterment of society. Some critics accuse capitalism of being a selfish system, but the selfishness is not in capitalism - it is in human nature.

Socialism, which dates back to 1917, when Lenin founded the world’s first socialist state, has had a much shorter shelf life. It too collapsed across the world because the people who lived under it considered it to be a form of slavery.

When Life gives you a 100 reasons to Cry , show life that you have 1000 reasons to Smile

He obliterates things, she realized. He shatters them. They think they've won because he's a bit vague and he waffles, but that only goes so far. It's his shell, like a tortoise, if a tortoise was soft on the outside and dangerous on the inside. That's how the Time War ended: he got to the bottom of his patience, and he took two entire civilisations out of the universe and lock them away, and one of them was his own. That's how sharp his sense of obligation is. And he lives like that. He does it all the time.

Today, there are probably more Marxists on the faculty of our elite colleges than there are in all of Russia and Eastern Europe.

The allegation of some progressives that America is an evil empire is not simply wrong—it is obscene.

The American left’s motto comes from the English Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw: “Any government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on Paul’s support.

In short, climate change is the ruse to get the public to go for full socialism.

Combater a corrupção de verdade seria combater a rapina, pela elite do dinheiro, da riqueza social e da capacidade de compra e de poupança de todos nós para proveito dos oligopólios e atravessadores financeiros. O “imbecil perfeito” é criado quando ele, o cidadão espoliado, passa a apoiar a venda subfaturada desses recursos a agentes privados imaginando que assim evita a corrupção estatal.

In this way the socialists hope to win the day, not by convincing a majority of existing Americans but by creating a majority using new Americans who will overpower and subdue the native population.

One reader of an early draft of this chapter complained at this point, saying that by treating the hypothesis of God as just one more scientific hypothesis, to be evaluated by the standards of science in particular and rational thought in general, Dawkins and I are ignoring the very widespread claim by believers in God that their faith is quite beyond reason, not a matter to which such mundane methods of testing applies. It is not just unsympathetic, he claimed, but strictly unwarranted for me simply to assume that the scientific method continues to apply with full force in this domain of truth. Very well, let's consider the objection. I doubt that the defender of religion will find it attractive, once we explore it carefully. The philosopher Ronaldo de Souza once memorably described philosophical theology as "intellectual tennis without a net," and I readily allow that I have indeed been assuming without comment or question up to now that the net of rational judgement was up. But we can lower it if you really want to. It's your serve. Whatever you serve, suppose I return service rudely as follows: "What you say implies that God is a ham sandwich wrapped in tin foil. That's not much of a God to worship!". If you then volley back, demanding to know how I can logically justify my claim that your serve has such a preposterous implication, I will reply: "oh, do you want the net up for my returns, but not for your serves? Either way the net stays up, or it stays down. If the net is down there are no rules and anybody can say anything, a mug's game if there ever was one. I have been giving you the benefit of the assumption that you would not waste your own time or mine by playing with the net down.

Father Alfred D’Souza. D’Souza had written: “For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin—real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.

love all ...but don't allow all to love you..

American socialists have introduced a unique element—identity politics—that Marx would have repudiated and other socialists assiduously avoided. Consequently, American socialism deserves its own name, and the name I propose is “identity socialism.

I now want to examine a second major feature of Western civilization that derives from Christianity. This is what philosopher Charles Taylor calls the 'affirmation of ordinary life.' It is the simple idea that ordinary people are fallible, and yet these fallible people matter. In this view, society should organize itself in order to meet their everyday concerns, which are elevated into a kind of spiritual framework. The nuclear family, the idea of limited government, the Western concept of the rule of law, and our culture's high emphasis on the relief of suffering all derive from this basic Christian understanding of the dignity of fallible human beings.

Friendship is a difficult thing to define. Oscar here is my oldest friend. How would you define friendship, Oscar?" Oscar grunts slightly, as though the answer is obvious. "Friendship is about choice and chemistry. It cannot be defined." "But surely there's something more to it than that." "It is a willingness to overlook faults and to accept them. I would let a friend hurt me without striking back," he says, smiling. "But only once." De Souza laughs. "Bravo, Oscar, I can always rely on you to distill an argument down to its purest form. What do you think, Dayel?" The Indian rocks his head from side to side, proud that he has been asked to speak next. "Friendship is different for each person and it changes throughout our lives. At age six it is about holding hands with your best friend. At sixteen it is about the adventure ahead. At sixty it is about reminiscing." He holds up a finger. "You cannot define it with any one word, although honesty is perhaps the closest word-" "No, not honesty," Farhad interrupts. "On the contrary, we often have to protect our friends from what we truly think. It is like an unspoken agreement. We ignore each other's faults and keep our confidences. Friendship isn't about being honest. The truth is too sharp a weapon to wield around someone we trust and respect. Friendship is about self-awareness. We see ourselves through the eyes of our friends. They are like a mirror that allows us to judge how we are traveling." De Souza clears his throat now. I wonder if he is aware of the awe that he inspires in others. I suspect he is too intelligent and too human to do otherwise. "Friendship cannot be defined," he says sternly. "The moment we begin to give reasons for being friends with someone we begin to undermine the magic of the relationship. Nobody wants to know that they are loved for their money or their generosity or their beauty or their wit. Choose one motive and it allows a person to say, 'is that the only reason?'" The others laugh. De Souza joins in with them. This is a performance. He continues: "Trying to explain why we form particular friendships is like trying to tell someone why we like a certain kind of music or a particular food. We just do.

Today courts wrongly interpret separation of church and state to mean that religion has no place in the public arena, or that morality derived from religion should not be permitted to shape our laws. Somehow freedom for religious expression has become freedom from religious expression. Secularists want to empty the public square of religion and religious-based morality so they can monopolize the shared space of society with their own views. In the process they have made religious believers into second-class citizens.

Whenever the government is involved, there is an element of coercion.

No, Krish . . . we’re not playing God. We’re only attempting to set things right.

Leading Democrats founded the Ku Klux Klan in the late nineteenth century and then, after Republicans shut it down, revived it in the early twentieth century.

It is not good to be so much away from one's own people. It is the sort of thing known to make one strange.

Today the left continues with this project of concealment. It doesn’t want people—especially young people—to know the role of the Democrats in protecting slavery and advancing racism.

I mostly believe, deep in my bones, that life is very simply beyond description; regardless of what one makes of it, life always spills over the parameters of how anyone has chosen to define it.

The author urges taking the pulse of the church outside our own neighborhood. More church attending Presbyterians in Ghana than Scotland, and while Western pastors beg to fill seats, some African pastors are asking people only to attend every second or third week to give room for others in packed churches.

So what’s the left’s motive here? The short-term motive is simple: use the illegals to portray Trump and the Republicans as racist or anti-Mexican and also anti-immigrant. The point is to alienate Trump and the GOP not from illegals, who can’t vote, but from legal immigrants and Mexican Americans, who can.

But in Venezuela, as in America, it is quite possible for “public servants” to become very rich. In fact, it is hard to name any prominent figure on the Venezuelan left, as on the American left, who hasn’t profited handsomely from their politics. Apparently they all came to do good and stayed to do very well.

Finally—and this is the seventh familiar theme of Venezuelan socialism—there is getting rich off politics. Once again, that does not occur in Scandinavia. There is not a single politician in Norway, Sweden or Denmark who has gone from zero to $10 million—or $200 million—while largely employed in the public sector.

Cautioning against socialist wealth confiscation schemes, Lincoln told a delegation of workingmen during the Civil War, “Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him labor diligently and build one of his own.”28

Bill Ayers, Frank Marshall Davis, Edward Said, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, and Jeremiah Wright. This is a group I’ve previously called “Obama’s founding fathers.

Freedom is a school of responsibility for human beings.

Father, if it is Your will, take this cup away from Me; nevertheless not My will, but Yours, be done

After the Civil War, Democrats promoted racism as a doctrine of biological inferiority.

Yet after a mass shooting by a white supremacist, Omar does not hesitate to call out white supremacy and seek to pin the blame on Trump and his supporters.

The American Revolution was characterized by three basic freedoms: economic freedom or capitalism, political freedom or constitutional democracy, and freedom of speech and religion. These are the freedoms that, in their original form, American conservatives seek to conserve.

While the Venezuelan people starve, the Chavistas post photographs on Facebook of their European vacations, their lavish parties, their designer outfits, the bouquets of fresh flowers that adorn their homes.

Contrary to what we hear, the great American divide is not a clash between conservatives who advocate liberty versus progressives who oppose liberty. Rather, the two sides each affirm a certain type of liberty. One side, for example, cherishes economic liberty while the other champions liberty in the sexual and social domain. Nor is it a clash between patriots and anti-patriots. Both sides love America, but they love a different type of America. One side loves the America of Columbus and the Fourth of July, of innovation and work and the “animal spirit” of capitalism, of the Boy Scouts and parochial schools, of traditional families and flag-saluting veterans. The other side loves the America of tolerance and social entitlements, of income and wealth redistribution, of affirmative action and abortion, of feminism and gay marriage.

Visiting America in the early nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville observd that 'the sects that exist in the United States are innumerable,' and yet 'all sects preach the same moral law in the name of God.' Tocqueville termed religion the first of America's political institutions, which means that it had a profoundly public effect in regulating morality and mores throughout the society. And he saw Christianity as countering the powerful human instincts of selfishness and ambition by holding out an ideal of charity and devotion to the welfare of others.

Classical liberalism . . . does not wholly define modern American conservatism. There is an added element: a concern with social and civic virtue. The term virtue has become a bad word in some quarters of American life. (It is especially unpopular with the chronically wicked and depraved.) Young people, especially, tend to associate it with finger-wagging and with people who tell you how to live your life. This is a very narrow view of virtue: It applies only to what it is good to do, rather than what it is good to be and what it is good to love. . . . Conservatives recognize, of course, that people frequently fall short of these standards. In their personal conduct, conservatives do not claim to be better than anyone else. . . . But for conservatives, these lapses do not provide an excuse to get rid of the standards. Even hypocrisy--professing one thing but doing another--is in the conservative view preferable to a denial of standards because such denial leads to moral chaos or nihilism.

Michael Moore accumulated a $50 million fortune by making documentaries bashing capitalism. Moore—who wears a trademark baseball cap to communicate that he’s a regular, working-class guy—nevertheless got “outed” in his divorce in which it came to public light that he and his wife owned nine properties in Michigan and New York, including a 10,000-square-foot lakefront home in Traverse City and a Manhattan condo so large that it was once three separate apartments.48

Naturally, the left expects resistance. So the whole race and gender thing is aimed at torpedoing that resistance. The basic idea is to portray whites, males and heterosexuals as evil oppressors, and nonwhites, females and gender benders of all kinds as the most normal, wonderful people in the world. And if you say otherwise, or oppose this view, the left will demonize you as racist, sexist, heterosexist and a “hater.” Then they will try to destroy your career and your life.

Carl Melin, policy director at the Swedish research institute Futurion, says that Swedes built the welfare state for themselves, not for outsiders. He remarks that his country has been cutting back on immigration because of the realization that “people are quite open to showing solidarity for people who are like themselves.

Not only is religion thriving, but it is thriving because it helps people to adapt and survive in the world. In his book Darwin's Cathedral, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson argues that religion provides something that secular society doesn't: a vision of transcendent purpose. Consequently, religious people have a zest for life that is, in a sense, unnatural. They exhibit a hopefulness about the future that may exceed what is warranted by how the world is going. And they forge principles of morality and charity that simply make them more cohesive, adaptive, and successful than groups whose members lack this binding and elevating force.

What’s the goal here? It goes beyond economic confiscation; I believe it is nothing less than to make traditional Americans feel like foreigners in their own country. The identity socialists seek an overturning of norms—a redefinition of the American dream—that would convert foreigners into natives, and natives into foreigners. An old Marxist concept, “alienation,” is quite appropriate here. They seek to create a new form of belonging and, in the process, a way to alienate us from our own society.

MICHELLE, MA BELLE Paul McCartney had been awarded the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song in a ceremony in the East Room. For most of the evening, other artists performed his songs. But for the conclusion, McCartney went onstage to sing some classics. Then he sang “Michelle” to Michelle Obama. I didn’t realize how special the moment was until the next day, when I was talking to the President. What were the odds, he said to me, that an African-American girl from the South Side of Chicago would one day be sitting in the front row of the White House, as the First Lady of the United States, while a member of the Beatles sang her name? Wow, just wow, I thought. June 2, 2010

The empiricist assumes without any evidence or proof that his experiences somehow give him a magical access to reality. So completely does he identify experience and reality that he cannot liberate himself from thinking of the two as one and the same. In equating experience and reality, he is making a huge and unwarranted leap. But this breakdown of reason is not easy for him or us to recognize because our human minds have a built-in disposition toward illusion – the illusion that reality must be exactly the way we experience it. The irony is that many of the people who proceed in this irrational way think of themselves as following strictly along the pathways of reason.

The main point of the Klan’s orgy of violence was to prevent blacks from voting—voting, that is, for Republicans. Leading Democrats, including at least one president, two Supreme Court justices, and innumerable senators and congressmen, were Klan members.

What’s going on, I want to suggest, is that race and sex have become more than mechanisms to secure group loyalty for the Democratic left. In addition, they have become tactics of intimidation. The socialist left uses these mechanisms to force people to grovel and submit to its worldview. They want to overturn your moral code and replace it with their moral code. The economist John Maynard Keynes once called this “immoralism,” recognizing that it represented a kind of inversion of traditional moral values.

When we consider the major themes of Venezuelan socialism, we can see right away that every one of them parallels the themes of the American left. American leftists are wannabe Maduros pretending to take their cues from Sven. If we continue to move in the direction that the left is taking us, we are going to end up not where the Scandinavians are but where the Venezuelans are. Pack your bags, and make sure you label them correctly. It’s not “Stockholm, here we come” but “Caracas, here we come.” It won’t be pretty.

Did you know about the Democratic president who is the founder of modern progressivism—and also responsible for the revival of the Ku Klux Klan? What about the most popular Democratic president of the twentieth century—who blocked anti-lynching laws and for more than a decade cut deals with racists to exclude blacks from government programs? Then there is the president who is the hero of the Civil Rights laws—the same fellow that called blacks “niggers” and said he wanted to keep them confined to the Democratic plantation.

Drive fast and swerve a lot.

Love does whatever it does, whenever it wants to do it.

I show in a subsequent chapter how the Democrats were the party of slavery, and how the slave-owner mentality continues to shape the policies of Democratic leaders today.

I would rather stand with God against man, than with man against God.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

Every time you think of your dad, you’re resurrecting him. Why shouldn’t he continue to live in this world while resting in the other?

In the battle of love , you only win if she let's you.

don't ruin your present, contemplating about the future, living your past.

Entrepreneurs have a name for luck: they call it risk.

Xenophobia and Paranoia is what A.I and I see, all around us.

Trump is determined to enforce the law. It is only by erasing the distinction between legals and illegals that the left can insist, as it blusteringly does, that “Trump is against immigrants.

So what if people disagree about values? People also disagree about facts. . . . In my view, the great intellectual challenge facing conservatives is to make the case for morality at a time when many in the West have ceased to believe in an external moral order. The decline of belief in such an order is the most important political development of the past two centuries. Indeed, this decline has created the "crisis of the West.

Christianity holds that man, no matter how hard he tries, cannot reach God. Man cannot ascend to God’s level because God’s level is too high. Therefore there is only one remedy: God must come down to man’s level. Scandalous though it may seem, God must, quite literally, become man and assume the burden of man’s sins. Christians believe that this was the great sacrifice performed by Christ. If we accept Christ’s sacrifice on the basis of faith, we will inherit God’s gift of salvation. That’s it. That is the essence of Christianity. To some it may seem ridiculously simple. In this simplicity, however, there is considerable depth and richness.

It is easy to forget the cohesiveness of a free people in times of peace and prosperity. New York is an extreme example of the great pandemonium that results when countless individuals and groups pursue their diverse interests in the normal course of life. In a crisis, however, a national tribe comes together...despite the centrifugal forces that pull us in different directions, there is a deep national unity that holds us together. Unity, however, is not sufficient for the challenges ahead. America also needs the moral self-confidence to meet its adversary...Americans cannot succeed unless they are convinced of fighting on behalf of the good.

The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee, by a group of former Confederate soldiers; its first grand wizard was a Confederate general who was also a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. The Klan soon spread beyond the South to the Midwest and the West and became, in the words of historian Eric Foner, “the domestic terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.” The main point of the Klan’s orgy of violence was to prevent blacks from voting—voting, that is, for Republicans. Leading Democrats, including at least one president, two Supreme Court justices, and innumerable senators and congressmen, were Klan members. The last one, Robert Byrd, died in 2010 and was eulogized by President Obama and former President Bill Clinton. Hillary Clinton called him her “mentor.” The sordid history of the Democratic Party in the early twentieth century is also married to the sordid history of the progressive movement during the same period. Progressives like Margaret Sanger—founder of Planned Parenthood and a role model for Hillary Clinton—supported such causes as eugenics and social Darwinism. While abortion was not an issue in Sanger’s day, she backed forced sterilization for “unfit” people, notably minorities. Sanger’s Negro Project was specifically focused on reducing the black population.

For the Obamas, no money-making scheme is too petty; Michelle rakes in the bucks by charging even nonprofit groups $225,000 to speak and sells 25 different items of merchandise—mugs, shirts and candles—on the speaking circuit.

When Kenya became independent in the early 1960s, it was at the same economic level as South Korea. But Kenya took the socialist road and South Korea took the capitalist road. Today South Korea is many times richer than Kenya. Sure, there are important cultural differences between the two countries. But we can also verify the superiority of capitalism to socialism by comparing South Korea with North Korea. Same people, same culture. Yet North Korea remains desperately poor while South Korea is a comparatively rich country. India suffered the same fate as other socialist nations—it had a stagnant economy, and indeed for nearly half a century India was symbolized by the “begging bowl.

They docked at Buenos Aires. Cunégonde, Captain Candide, and the old woman went to call on the Governor, Don Fernando d'Ibaraa y Figueora y Mascarenes y Lampourdos y Souza. This grandee had a pride to match his many names. He spoke to people with the most noble disdain, sticking his nose so far in the air, speaking in such a mercilessly loud voice, adopting so high and mighty a tone, and affecting so haughty a gait, that all who greeted him were also tempted to hit him.

Fascism is an Italian term that means “groupism” or “collectivism.” The fasci in Italy were groups of political activists who got their name from the fasces of ancient Rome—the bundles of rods carried by the lictors to symbolize the unified strength of the Romans. The core meaning of the term fascism is that people are stronger in groups than they are as individuals.

By now you are probably getting the idea that the whole Green New Deal is a scam, a massive exercise in globaloney, a transparent excuse to replace capitalism with socialism. The rhetoric of the activists certainly supports this. “The climate crisis,” Natasha Fernández-Silber writes in Jacobin, “is quite simply a crisis of capitalism.… We must either replace capitalism with a more sustainable economic system—or face barbarism and extinction.”30 Extinction or socialism: you get to choose!

The scheme works like this. Progressives supply the basic needs of poor blacks, creating for them a new plantation called the inner city. There blacks are provided with food, subsidized housing, medical care, and so on. In this regard, the new plantation functions pretty much like the old one, with a few modifications. Under slavery, this was rural paternalism; now it is urban paternalism. The slave master is replaced by the government; i.e. the Big House of slavery is now replaced by the White House.

American socialists and leftists were some of the most ardent devotees of Stalinist and Maoist socialism. They also embraced German national socialism, Italian national socialism, Cuban socialism, North Korean socialism and now Venezuelan socialism. We can see this devotion in contemporary progressives and socialists from Bill de Blasio to Bernie Sanders. We also see it in leading progressives and socialists of the past: Charles Beard, Herbert Croly, Corliss Lamont, W. E. B. Du Bois, Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal “brain trust.

One of the tactics we have already discussed: the left routinely practices the politics of division, not only rich versus poor but also white versus black, male versus female, heterosexual versus homosexual, legal versus illegal. This politics of perpetual turmoil, of pitting Americans against each other, is a tactic aimed at assembling a democratic majority of aggrieved so-called victims. While it takes new forms today, the division formula itself goes back to Marx and is intrinsic to socialism. Therefore, I have dealt with it separately.

The key to understanding Scandinavian socialism is that it is “unification socialism,” very different from the “division socialism” that is characteristic of the American left. Unification socialism is the socialism of the tribe, and its distinguishing features are tribal homogeneity and tribal solidarity. The whole point is to gather the society into a single unit. The motto of unification socialism is that we are one people; we are in this together. The burdens of survival, and the fruits of prosperity, must be broadly shared by the whole society.

We convince ourselves that life will be better after we get married, have a baby, then another. Then we are frustrated that the kids aren't old enough and we'll be more content when they are. After that we're frustrated that we have teenagers to deal with. We will certainly be happy when they are out of that stage. We tell ourselves that our life will be complete when our spouse gets his or her act together, when we get a nicer car, are able to go on a nice vacation, when we retire. The truth is, there's no better time to be happy than right now. Your life will always be filled with challenges. It's best to admit this to yourself and decide to be happy anyway. One of my favorite quotes comes from Alfred D Souza. He said, "For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life." This perspective has helped me to see that there is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way. So, treasure every moment that you have. Stop waiting until you finish school, until you go back to school, until you lose ten pounds, until you gain ten pounds, until you have kids, until your kids leave the house, until you start work, until you retire, until you get married, until you get divorced, until Friday night, until Sunday morning, until you get a new car or home, until your car or home is paid off, until spring, until summer, until fall, until winter, until you are off welfare, until the first or fifteenth, until your song comes on, until you've had a drink, until you've sobered up, until you die, until you are born again to decide that there is no better time than right now to be happy.

That went well," Christina murmured to him. "Pffaww," he agreed. "They're a pair! They don't like anything. They don't even like the dachshund. Who doesn't like dachshunds? They're little parcels of dog-shaped goodness. I've known Jalabite Hegemon ships give up conquest and start little farmsteads just so they can have happy dachshunds. Everyone likes dachshunds, everywhere in the universe. Well, except on Bithomorency. People there got into a war with a refugee column of evolutionarily advanced dachshund supersoldiers fleeing the destruction of their homeworld. The wire-haired marines took out an entire town - two hundred thousand dead. And it was a tragic misunderstanding. The dachshunds only stopped to ask for some biscuits, automated defence systems fired on them. There's a lesson: never give control of your space weapons to an unsupervised machine." He shrugged, and she found herself nodding: schoolboy error.

Here we have the central moral claim of American socialism: collective ownership. At least in principle, nothing is yours, nothing is mine, everything is ours. The people—that is to say, the democratic majority—control everything. They have final say. They have the right, and the power, to treat the wealth and earnings of the country as a common pool to be tapped by the state and dispersed through the democratic process. The majority also has the right to other forms of control: for example, subsidizing some lifestyles over others, limiting or confiscating guns and restricting citizens from exercising “hate speech.

Progressive racism is dedicated to uplifting poor blacks to a certain point and then keeping them there. The proof is that poor blacks today are about as poorly off as they were a half-century ago, when the progressive schemes of black uplift went into place. Every other ethnic group in America has dramatically improved its life except this one. Blacks have delivered for progressives, but they haven’t progressed very much themselves. This, I suggest, is by design.

This is how Hillary conducts government policy. She is ruthless, she is grasping, she appears to have little empathy or concern for people. She is old, and mean, and even her laugh is a witch’s cackle. There is almost nothing appealing about her. How, then, could she be the first choice of progressive Democrats and the apparent frontrunner for winning the presidency in November 2016?

If we step back from the progressive argument and put it in any other context, its absurdity immediately becomes apparent. Imagine if I were to say to my daughter, who got a high score on the SAT, “You don’t deserve your scores at all. You didn’t build that. After all, young lady, you had teachers who helped you with vocabulary and math. Moreover, you took the public roads to the test. Had your car been held up along the way or caught fire, you would count on the services of the police and the fire department. So society deserves a large part of the credit for those scores. They don’t reflect your accomplishment but society’s accomplishment.” If I said this I am sure my daughter would think I was talking like an insane person. In fact, of course, I would be talking like a progressive.

Certainly we have whole groups of people today—in academia, in media, in the legal and nonprofit sector—who produce nothing but words. I guess I have to admit that I’m in this group. But I’m not a typical member, in that I don’t share the group’s prejudices and resentments. What are these? Well, the people of words often do pretty well, but in their view they don’t do well enough. They want to be the ruling class. Viewing themselves as smart—the smartest people in society—they feel entitled to be the ones who exercise power, who tell others what to do. And they view with dismay an American Revolution and an American system that brings the entrepreneur to center stage, disburses to him the greatest rewards and places intellectuals and “courtiers” of every stripe in an ancillary, even subservient, role.

Frank Marshall Davis, the former Communist who was Obama’s mentor in Hawaii, was so radical that he opposed President Truman’s Marshall Plan as a “device” for maintaining “white imperialism.” Truman and Marshall, he wrote, were using “billions of U.S. dollars to bolster the tottering empires of England, France, Belgium, Holland and the other western exploiters of teeming millions.” Indeed the objective of America after World War II was “to re-enslave the yellow and brown and black peoples of the world.” While Davis spurned America he praised “Red Russia” as “my friend.”3 Young Obama—sitting in Davis’s hut in Hawaii week after week for several years—took it all in. This portrait of devoted young Obama imbibing the ravings of a pot-smoking former Communist is the progressive version of a Norman Rockwell painting.

One could raise a similar set of objections regarding America’s alleged theft of Mexican land. Texas used to be part of Mexico but broke off because of tyrannical laws imposed by a Mexican dictator. Texas then opted to join the United States. The Mexican War arose over a border dispute between Texas and Mexico. Mexico lost the war, and ceded the disputed land in a treaty in which the United States paid money and wrote off Mexican debts.

Lack of accomplishment is one thing; deceit is quite another. Everyone who has followed her career knows that Hillary is dishonest to the core, a “congenital liar” as columnist William Safire once put it. The writer Christopher Hitchens titled his book about the Clintons No One Left to Lie To. Even Hollywood mogul David Geffen, an avid progressive, said a few years ago of the Clintons, “Everybody in politics lies but they do it with such ease, it’s troubling.”3

The bad guys—the Democrats—put up a great fight but the Republicans won in the end. It was Republicans who made possible the Civil Rights laws that finally and belatedly secured equal rights for blacks and other minorities. Democrats are the ones who bitterly resisted the Civil Rights Movement, and had the Democrats been the only party in America at the time, none of these laws, from the Civil Rights Act to the Voting Rights Act to the Fair Housing Bill, would have passed.

Progressives want to take over all the major industries, from education to health care to energy to automobiles to investment banking to real estate. From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, they want, as my fellow inmates like to say, “the whole enchilada.” This is not to say that progressives intend to seize all that wealth, but they do want to control it. Progressives generally can’t create wealth, so they seek to take it over once it has been created by someone else. They do this through the various agencies of government, such as the IRS, the FBI, the EPA, the FCC, the FDA, the BLM, and HHS. Certainly progressive leaders intend to become fantastically rich while pretending to serve the public good—look at the way the Obamas and the Clintons live—but their ultimate goal isn’t just money: it is also power. Progressives like Obama and Hillary want to wrest control of the levers of society so that they can run things for their own benefit, and do what they want without restraint, above the law.

The godfather’s name is Saul Alinsky. His most famous students are Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Hardly anyone recognizes this, but Alinsky and the Alinsky method is the hidden force behind the 2008 economic meltdown. The meltdown was the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression; it was the main cause of median wealth in the United States in the subsequent three years declining nearly 40 percent. While the meltdown is routinely attributed to Wall Street “greed,” its real cause was government and activist pressure on banks and banking agencies—like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—to change their lending and loan guarantee practices. Yes, the 2008 crash was actually the result of an Alinskyite scam—actually a series of Alinskyite scams, carried out over many years. Basically the Alinskyites were trying to steal money from the banks and, in the process, force the banks to make loans to people that they had no intention of making loans to. The banks acquiesced, and eventually the whole scheme came crashing down. It was toppled not by greed but by the sober reality that when you loan money to millions of people who cannot afford to pay, those people are very likely to default on those loans. That’s how Alinskyites almost destroyed the U.S. economy a few years ago. If Alinsky had never lived, none of this would have happened.

In this chapter, I want to focus on the really big crimes that have been committed by atheist groups and governments. In the past hundred years or so, the most powerful atheist regimes—Communist Russia, Communist China, and Nazi Germany—have wiped out people in astronomical numbers. Stalin was responsible for around twenty million deaths, produced through mass slayings, forced labor camps, show trials followed by firing squads, population relocation and starvation, and so on. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s authoritative recent study Mao: The Unknown Story attributes to Mao Zedong’s regime a staggering seventy million deaths.4 Some China scholars think Chang and Halliday’s numbers are a bit high, but the authors present convincing evidence that Mao’s atheist regime was the most murderous in world history. Stalin’s and Mao’s killings—unlike those of, say, the Crusades or the Thirty Years’ War—were done in peacetime and were performed on their fellow countrymen. Hitler comes in a distant third with around ten million murders, six million of them Jews. So far, I haven’t even counted the assassinations and slayings ordered by other Soviet dictators like Lenin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and so on. Nor have I included a host of “lesser” atheist tyrants: Pol Pot, Enver Hoxha, Nicolae Ceaus̹escu, Fidel Castro, Kim Jong-il. Even these “minor league” despots killed a lot of people. Consider Pol Pot, who was the leader of the Khmer Rouge, the Communist Party faction that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Within this four-year period Pol Pot and his revolutionary ideologues engaged in systematic mass relocations and killings that eliminated approximately one-fifth of the Cambodian population, an estimated 1.5 million to 2 million people. In fact, Pol Pot killed a larger percentage of his countrymen than Stalin and Mao killed of theirs.5 Even so, focusing only on the big three—Stalin, Hitler, and Mao—we have to recognize that atheist regimes have in a single century murdered more than one hundred million people.

Second, America is drowning in debt. While China is the world’s largest creditor nation, America is the world’s largest debtor nation. At $17 trillion, the national debt is now bigger than the annual gross domestic product—in other words, it is bigger than the total sum of goods and services that America produces in a year. Nearly half of this debt has been accumulated during the Obama years, at the average rate of a trillion dollars a year. At this pace, Obama will more than double the deficit in two terms. Since a substantial portion of America’s debt is owed to foreign countries, such as China and the Arab nations, debt produces a transfer of wealth away from America and toward the rest of the world. Today, instead of America owning the world, the world increasingly owns America.

Hitler and Mussolini were indeed authoritarians, but it doesn’t follow that authoritarianism equals fascism or Nazism. Lenin and Stalin were authoritarian, but neither was a fascist. Many dictators—Franco in Spain, Pinochet in Chile, Perón in Argentina, Amin in Uganda—were authoritarian without being fascists or Nazis. Trump admittedly has a bossy style that he gets from, well, being a boss. He has been a corporate boss all his life, and he also played a boss on TV. Republicans elected Trump because they needed a tough guy to take on Hillary; previously they tried bland, harmless candidates like Romney, and look where that got them. That being said, Trump has done nothing to subvert the democratic process. While progressives continue to allege a plot between Trump and the Russians to rig the election, the only evidence for actual rigging comes from the Democratic National Committee’s attempt to rig the 2016 primary in favor of Hillary over Bernie. This rigging evoked virtually no dissent from Democratic officials or from the media, suggesting the support, or at least acquiescence, of the whole progressive movement and most of the party itself. Trump fired his FBI director, provoking dark ruminations in the Washington Post about Trump’s “respect for the rule of law,” yet Trump’s action was entirely lawful.18 He has criticized judges, sometimes in derisive terms, but contrary to Timothy Snyder there is nothing undemocratic about this. Lincoln blasted Justice Taney over the Dred Scott decision, and FDR was virtually apoplectic when the Supreme Court blocked his New Deal initiatives. Criticizing the media isn’t undemocratic either. The First Amendment isn’t just a press prerogative; the president too has the right to free speech.

Progressives today are quick to fault “America” for slavery and a host of other outrages. America did this, America did that. As we will see in this book, America didn’t do those things, the Democrats did. So the Democrats have cleverly foisted their sins on America, and then presented themselves as the messiahs offering redemption for those sins. It’s crazy, but it’s also ingenious. We have to give them credit for ingenuity. The second whitewash is to portray the Civil War entirely in terms of the North versus the South. The North is supposedly the anti-slavery side and the South is the pro-slavery side. A recent example is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article about the Confederate battle flag in The Atlantic.3 Now of course there is an element of truth in this, in that the Civil War was fought between northern states and southern states. But this neat and convenient division ignores several important details. First, the defenders of the Confederate cause were, almost without exception, Democrats. Coates cites many malefactors from Senator Jefferson Davis to Senator James Henry Hammond to Georgia Governor Joseph Brown. Yet while identifying these men as southerners and Confederates, Coates omits to identify them as Democrats. Second, Coates and other progressives conveniently ignore the fact that northern Democrats were also protectors of slavery. We will see in this chapter how Stephen Douglas and other northern Democrats fought to protect slavery in the South and in the new territories. Moreover, the southerners who fought for the Confederacy cannot be said to have fought merely to protect slavery on their plantations. Indeed, fewer than one-third of white families in the South on the eve of the Civil War had slaves. Thus the rigid North-South interpretation of the Civil War conceals—and is intended to conceal—the active complicity of Democrats across the country to save, protect, and even extend the “peculiar institution.” As the Charleston Mercury editorialized during the secession debate, the duty of the South was to “rally under the banner of the Democratic Party which has recognized and supported . . . the rights of the South.”4 The real divide was between the Democratic Party as the upholder of slavery and the Republican Party as the adversary of slavery. All the figures who upheld and defended American slavery—Senators John C. Calhoun and Stephen Douglas, President James Buchanan, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, architect of the Dred Scott decision, and the main leaders of the Confederacy—were Democrats. All the heroes of black emancipation—from the black abolitionists Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, to the woman who organized the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman, to the leader whose actions finally destroyed American slavery, Abraham Lincoln—were Republicans. It is of the utmost importance to progressive propagandists to conceal or at least ignore this essential historical truth.

We are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly-spawning class of human beings who should never have been born at all.1 —Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization In 2009, Hillary Clinton came to Houston, Texas, to receive the Margaret Sanger award from Planned Parenthood. Sanger was the founder of Planned Parenthood and the award is its highest prize. In receiving the award, Hillary said of Sanger, “I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision. I am really in awe of her. There are a lot of lessons we can learn from her life and the cause she launched and fought for and sacrificed so greatly.”2 What was Margaret Sanger’s vision? What was the cause to which she devoted her life? Sanger is known as a champion of birth control, of providing women with the means to avoid unwanted pregnancies. But the real Margaret Sanger was very different from how she’s portrayed in Planned Parenthood brochures. The real Margaret Sanger did not want women in general to limit their pregnancies. She wanted white, wealthy, educated women to have more children, and poor, uneducated, black women to have none. “Unwanted” for Sanger didn’t mean unwanted by the mother—it meant unwanted by Sanger. Sanger’s influence contributed to the infamous Tuskegee experiments in which poor blacks were deliberately injected with syphilis without their knowledge. Today the Tuskegee Project is falsely portrayed as an example of southern backwardness and American bigotry; in fact, it was a progressive scheme carried out with the very eugenic goals that Margaret Sanger herself championed. In 1926, Sanger spoke to a Women’s Chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey about her solution for reducing the black birthrate. She also sponsored a Negro Project specifically designed, in her vocabulary, to get rid of “human beings who should never have been born.” In one of her letters Sanger said, “We do not want word to get out that we are trying to exterminate the Negro population.”3 The racists loved it; other KKK speaking invitations followed. Now it may seem odd that a woman with such views would be embraced by Planned Parenthood—even odder that she would be a role model for Hillary Clinton. Why would they celebrate Sanger given her racist philosophy? In