So many of us in the business know people who have been overseas to help entertain the troops, and the luckiest among us have actually had the experience ourselves. I’m proud to have moved from Category A to category B this last week, when I was able to spend five days down at Guantanamo Bay.

There’s a lot to talk about. But the thing that struck me hardest was the fact that even though I expected to be blown away by our men and women in uniform, I really had no idea of just how far my high expectations would be exceeded. The competence and discipline I took for granted going in. It was the soldier’s generosity that kept knocking me on my butt.

So here are the remarks I was privileged to have been able to give. I hope that it in some small way captures not just what I feel, but what all we civilians feel, and not just about the men and women stationed at Guantanamo Bay, but rather about every single one of them: past, present and future.

Congress has an approval rating of 21%. And when I heard that Harry Reid is actually discussing plans to sneak single-payer, National Health Care legislation not only past the will of the people, but sneak it past the lower house of Congress by attaching it as a rider to a completely unrelated bill… 

…Well, that is an act of such unremitting and bastardly sinfulness that it simply has to be addressed. 

Click Image to Play

I take a look at the four Senators and twenty-something Representatives currently under ethics investigations of one kind or another, and present to you, the American people, my Modest Proposal to get government back in the hands of the governed. 

I’ll save the details for the video, but suffice it to say that the Whittle Plan, at $935,000,000 is not exactly cheap, but it is definitely a bargain at .0003 of the Federal Budget for 2008. 

I don’t want to spoil the delicious details, but here’s the elevator pitch: 

We already pay farmers not to farm. Why can’t we pay legislators not to legislate?  

It’s bold and it’s foolproof. Congressional greed and mendacity have been allowed for. 

I dare say it is an idea whose time has come.

Thomas Sowell

I mention this because not too long ago I started reading A CONFLICT OF VISIONS by Thomas Sowell, and as I did, I started to get the sense that Sowell may have developed a Grand Unified Theory of politics, because he went (as usual) right to the core of the issue: beyond Republican / Democrat, beyond Conservative / Liberal… all the way down to the brass tacks of why people believe what they believe. — VIDEO BELOW THE FOLD… 

Sowell argues that when it comes to the culture wars, each of us will be drawn to a specific trench not because of policies or parties but rather because of the vision we may hold of human beings and how they are constructed. He names these the Constrained and Unconstrained visions of humanity; Mankind either as constrained by his biology to moral weakness and self-interest, or, on the other hand, a creature unconstrained by his biology and therefore perfectible. 

The kind of society you would construct for each model of the human heart is vastly different; opposite, even. And so I decided to test his theory against history and look for examples. The results are here:

Thomas Sowell is uplifting. He is also terribly depressing, at least to me. Because only when I read a mind like Thomas Sowell’s do I fully realize just what a second-rate thinker I really am.  Still, he gives us something to aim at… no matter how far from the mark we may fall.

The anniversary in the mainstream media will be muted, as always – and we’ll come back to that. And even though three thousand people died that day, I want to concentrate on two – not to exclude the others, but simply to show you that they were not some abstract number but individual lives. 

Kevin Cosgrove

One of the people who died that day, eight years ago, was a businessman working in the World Trade Center. His name was Kevin Cosgrove. Kevin Cosgrove stands out from the other three thousand because he was on the phone to 9/11 when the tower he was in collapsed around him. (Fast forward to about 4:00 if you are pressed for time) And I’m warning you, this is not for the faint hearted. 

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The most telling and poignant thing I felt when I hear the sound of a man, as the floors of his office fell away around him, is simply that this voice – recorded on tape – was only one of thousands of identical screams of terror that went unrecorded in the floors above and below, and in the other tower. I try to imagine what that must have been like, and how repugnant to their memory the entire idea of 9/11 “trutherism” is.   

There’s somebody else I would like to remember today. In the years since that beautiful clear morning, many people have tried to identify the people who leapt to their deaths to escape the flames. The most famous of these doomed people has been called “The Falling Man.”  

A newspaper article, followed by an exceptional documentary called The Falling Man, attempted to identify him and many of the others who took control of their final moments and plunged to their deaths that day. 

Jonathan Briley

The Falling Man was named Jonathan Briley, and I’d like to remember him today as well. To get the essence of who Jonathan was and the consequences of the decision he made, watch from about 3:15 to from about 3:15 to about 5:15 in this clip from the truly remarkable doc, The Falling Man… 

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The media won’t show these images. They say they don’t want to rile up the population. I say we should be riled up. There was talk that the current administration plans to “re-brand” 9/11 into a National Day of Service in order to chill out this nation of children they are trying to create. But I’m not going to calm down and “get over all the anger” of 9/11. I promised myself that morning that I would never forget what I saw that day, and I never will. 

Just a few days ago, British Intelligence interrupted a plan that was days away from fruition, and convicted these three Muslim terrorists on charges of attempting to blow up seven airliners in mid-Atlantic. I said Muslim Terrorists because that’s what they are. Throughout the past eight years they have been foiled time and time again by British and American intelligence agencies – the same nameless heroes the Obama administration now wants to prosecute.  I’m sure that will end well. 

We’re not allowed to be enraged, you see? 

Actually, you know what? That’s not true. We are allowed to be enraged, but only about certain things. You can’t be outraged when America is in the right, but you can be outraged when she is in the wrong: about Abu Graib, for example.  Likewise, you are encouraged by the media to be outraged at corporate transgressors like AIG, but outrage at the politicians who caused this mess is given a “dangerously un-American howling mob rabid pack of animals” dismissal. 

It’s a RAGE RATCHET, and it goes one way only: to the left. Well, I refuse to be controlled by these sons of bitches. If what happened to Kevin Cosgrove and Jonathan Briley doesn’t fill you with outrage and anger, not only are you not my moral superior… but your inability to see right and wrong is an indication of deep-seated, delusional psychosis.   

Never forget what happened that day.

Bill Maher, never one to miss an opportunity to express his contempt for anything not Bill Maher, wrote: “Yes, our so-called President wrote that people in other countries might like their countries better… I was so shocked I nearly dropped the Bible I was using to help me masturbate into my gun.”  

[click image to play video]

People like Maher use this kind of snark to cover the fact that either they have serious issues in comprehension, or, more likely, that they do not care for the lay of the intellectual battlefield and so want to move it to another, slimier, filthier one. 

The question to the President was not whether or not he believed in American Patriotism – that is, the love of one’s country. Of course other people love their countries. But the idea of American Exceptionalism is a specific political construct, much like British Colonialism. I suppose I should have cut both of them more slack, unfamiliar as both hearts are with the feel of patriotism and faced with the clear evidence of lack of intellectual exceptionalism on both their parts. 

Anyway, this has to be responded to: and never were there bigger fish in a smaller barrel. Many of the elements I used to make the case for American Exceptionalism I first used here at Big Hollywood in a piece called The Workshops of Identity. I opened those arguments up considerably, and the great thing about video [click image above to play] is the ability to include a lot of statistics and graphic elements to hammer home the point. (The list of American inventive genius in particular is a great deal of fun.) 

At 15 minutes it’s a little long for the web – I know, you are shocked… Shocked! – but that’s how much data is in there. And you really can’t end a piece like this without pining for the days when a common citizen didn’t have to explain the idea of American Exceptionalism to the President of the United States, but rather the other way around.  Hearing those words from a President who loved his country as much – if not more – than the rest of us certainly highlights just how far we have fallen and how much work remains for all of us to do.

Here’s a better question: If Kenneth Gladney — a black American who was beaten when he went to protest ObamaCare — had been there instead to support President Obama and had been beaten up and called a nigger by Anti-Obama town hall protesters… [click image below to play video]

…Well, does anyone doubt he would have been as famous as Rodney King? Why is Kenneth Gladney ignored? And why did a black patriot who showed up in opposition to ObamaCare with an AR-15 have his face and hands edited out of the video that MSNBC used to create the belief that wild white mobs, enraged at the very idea of a black man in the White House, were waiting outside to lynch the “President of Color?” 

The example of these two black patriots flies dead in the face of The Narrative. Well, what is “the Narrative?” 

Andrew Breitbart has been championing this idea for years – he covers it in Hollywood, Interrupted and every time I see that soldier of ours he’s out there again fearlessly hammering home the double standard the Left has used, time and again, to control the language and the official cultural storyline that he and I refer to as The Narrative. 

All I have done is look into the historical roots of Political Correctness, and tried to tie the work of The Frankfurt School into the present-day landscape. 

This is something you should know about. It really is important. 

And if you come out of this as shocked as I was when I first got a glimpse of The Institute for Social Research, then you really should follow up with this remarkable look at the history of the Frankfurt School and their effect on American life today: 

THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS 

Knowledge and information is our friend, not theirs! Ammo up!

[click image to play]

…Well, you put all of those forces in harness and you, sir, will attain 53% of the vote!

Just think about that for a second. Think about how many things have to go perfectly for Liberals to eke out a bare majority.

This leads me to think that their entire edifice doesn’t need a whole lot of demolition to swing the tide. One or two planks ought to do nicely and then the rest of it will collapse under its own weight. 

One of those planks is marketing and packaging. The Obama example is a case of horrible content beautifully packaged. Conservatism, on the other hand, is a beautiful message horribly packaged, and if we ever hope to win again we’d better get in this game and right quick.

If you can spare eight minutes, you might this look into how the Democrats use the power of marketing and especially iconography to great effect.

BIG HOLLYWOOD is read by Conservatives who know how to do this. So much is made of high-level celebrities coming out in favor of the Conservative message, and God knows that helps. But I think it is much more important for those of you who can write, direct, design and edit to get in this game.

The events of the last few years have shown me that if the Democrats ran unopposed, they would lose. The ultimate question will be whether or not the GOP leadership needs another two years of pain, or four, or eight, to fully get what the Dems have understood for a generation: packaging counts.

I hope it wakes you up. More than that, I hope it motivates you to bring your skills to the table and join the Resistance.

(Viva El Britbarto!)

Now I haven’t opened an issue of Newsweek in years, although I have to admit that Evan Thomas is a valuable – actually, essential – addition to society. He forgets to speak his true mind only among his friends, you see, and that gives us a little insight into what these media elites actually believe. He recently said that Barack Obama looked to him like a god, a man above petty things like “America.” 

Click to play

It was Evan Thomas who in 2004 admitted that liberal media bias was good for fifteen points at the polls. (That was for John Kerry. If you take away Obama’s 15 points of bias – I suspect is was much more — he would have won Vermont and the District of Columbia and that’s all he would have won – but I digress.) 

Anyway, the Newsweek cover showed the outline of the Enterprise – without the nacelle caps. Whoever made the model for the cover forgot to put them on. It was obvious to me from across the room, but then, that’s the kind of accuracy I have come to expect from Newsweek. And I digress yet again. 

Inside was a “Star Trek” / Obama administration comparison chart, written by Maureen Dowd. Obama was Spock. Rush Limbaugh was a Klingon commander. Rahm Immanuel – RAHM IMMANUEL! – was Captain Kirk. The Un-American. Bastards. 

This got me angry enough to do some poking around. All around the web, we are seeing comparisons of Barack Obama to Mr. Spock. Maureen Dowd, who is without question the dimmest bulb in the burned-out chandelier of the once-glorious New York Times, wrote a piece in the Times comparing Spock to Obama and ended the piece with the line, “Kirk out.” 

When I regained consciousness I was in the ambulance. 

So here is the result. It examines the terrible danger of putting intellectuals in charge. Not that I think Barack Obama is an intellectual. He, like Larry Fine, simply looks like one standing next to Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Joe Biden. But I granted the premise and tried to show why intellectuals are so dangerous and so spectacularly and consistently wrong when they try their hand at politics. 

Not my deepest work ever, but it was a blast to make. Two desires in life hold monumental power over me: 

1) to wear a custom-fitted gold velour jersey.

2) to work with my friend Maurice LaMarche. He was the voice of The Brain in Pinky and the Brain, plays Morbo, Calculon and Kip on Futurama, and who is the go-to guy for William Shatner impressions. As a matter of fact, he can teach you – yes, YOU! – to Talk Like William Shatner by going here.  

So without further ado, here’s “The Dowd Conundrum.” I hope you like watching it as much as I enjoyed making it.

Click pic for video.

Step back with me for a minute. Back out of Hollywood, out of America, out of the Western Tradition. Sit in the middle of a darkened crater at the south pole of the Moon. Sit back, look down and back into time, and watch the rise and fall of Civilizations on the Big Blue Ball.

If you could see human activity and genius, if you could watch poetry and medicine as points of golden light in the darkness of fear and superstition, you would soon detect a rhythm: a pulse, a heartbeat – the Heartbeat of Civilization.

It would begin in the Land Between the Rivers – a place known only in the last instant by the inhabitants down there as “Iraq,” but for almost the entire beating EKG before that it was called “Babylon” and then “Mesopotamia.”

That culture grew brighter, flourished and then suddenly winked out. Then, a little to the west, the Nile delta slowly blossomed, peaked, and fell. Then Greece, a brief, brilliant burst like a strobe in a dark room, blinding you long after its sudden extinction. Rome. Constantinople. Arabia. Italy. Spain. France. Britain – and with Britain, that spark of medicine and architecture and government married to science and steam literally remade the world.

And from your perch on the frozen, bone-dry lunar sand you would see the same pattern, the same pulse, the same heartbeat: a slow, steady rise, followed by a precipitous, shockingly quick fall… and then centuries, or even millennia of darkness, fear, superstition, disease and ignorance before the spark took hold again elsewhere.

One thing in common these patterns bear: the rise slow, the fall seemingly precipitous, and in every case we find the loss of nerve and strength and will comes not from the bottom, not from the common people at all, but from the rulers, the philosophers, the most affluent and educated who, in their comfort and Narcissism, abandon duty for self-absorption and self-gratification and who in boredom or self-loathing decide to fling open the gates of the city to the barbarians beyond, while the common man still stands at the walls prepared to die for the people in his charge.

And now here stands America, inheritor of that great tradition, astride that same cycle in its most dangerous and dire moment. And by any measure America is by far the most brilliant light the world has ever seen. And I can prove it, too.

Sean Penn recently wrote a piece for the Huffington Post in which he described America as a country much like any other, without any special claim to glory and indeed with an overabundance of sin to repent. Having visited Cuba and Venezuela, and having been enlightened by deep-thinking humanitarians such as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, he implores his countrymen to give socialism a try and take its rightful place as simply one of the 200 or so other members of the great family of nations. “Viva USA!” writes Penn. Ironically, he says this unironically.

Reading his remarkable and lengthy article I was, at the close of it, reminded instantly of Lincoln, who once wrote, “He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.” But Sean Penn is not only perhaps the most gifted actor of my generation… he also has the courage to come out and openly say what so many in Hollywood really and truly do believe.

And there’s the problem. Because like Sean Penn, almost all of this industry is composed of people whose intellectual, reasoning and analytical skills are fifty miles wide and a quarter-inch deep. Hollywood’s Chattering Classes despise their Uncle Sam, but they are deeply, deeply in love with Auntie America.

But Hollywood’s Chattering Classes are thoroughly, completely and spectacularly wrong. And therein lies the source of a looming tragedy so great it would take a thousand movies to simply sketch it out… were it not for the fact that if Hollywood as it now exists continues to do what it is doing unopposed, there will be no more movies because there will be no more electricity.

II. The Reactor:

America is the greatest nation in the history of the world.

This sentence – verifiably true as we are about to see – fills me with a burning pride so great I cannot get through the National Anthem at Dodger Stadium without getting misty at the awe-inspiring scope and the terrible cost of it.

Consider this:

Militarily, the United States is not only unmatched on the world stage, but its relative strength is unmatched in history. And without question, this juggernaut is the most benign dominant military force the world has ever seen – and by a very large margin.

Consider modern history, which many consider the time since the end of World War II. At the end of 1945, the only military force of any real substance remaining in the world was that of the Soviet Union, and while they had large numbers of troops and tanks, they had no navy and no strategic air force to speak of. The United States possessed, intact, the most awe-inspiring, battle-hardened navy the world had ever seen. It possessed sky-darkening clouds of B-29 strategic bombers. And it possessed, alone, the atomic bomb and the will to use it.

Betty Davis at the Hollywood Canteen

The United States of America could have planted its flag anywhere it wanted and no one would have been able to do a thing about it.

And what did we do with this arsenal? We scrapped the ships, drove steel bars through the wings of the priceless bombers, and began the largest de-militarization in the history of the world.

And in all of the years since then, despite what Michael Moore may want you to believe from the comfort of his editing room, the United States has deployed in response to aggression – not to cause it. Berlin, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland – all of it Soviet — that is to say Communist – Leftist – aggression. Ask a 17 year old indoctrinated with Hollywood’s portrayal of America as a world-striding bully who started the War in Korea, or Vietnam, or Nicaragua or any of these places, and I will bet you a Xbox 360 Elite that they will not reply that it was in fact worldwide socialism, but rather America. Tell them that communists started Korea and Vietnam and pretty much everything else and they will likely ask “what is a communist?” Actually, come to think of it, they probably do not even care enough to ask.

And for those who feel that such a once-noble America is dead and gone, let’s talk about the last time we heard about “Imperialism” and “a war for oil.” In 1991, after destroying the army that Saddam Hussein sent into Kuwait to steal, rape and murder, the United States sat alone and unchallenged on top of the richest oil field on the planet. What did it do? It put out the fires and went home.

Unlike today’s screenwriters who credit themselves as intellectual and creative giants, some of us remain humble enough to not only read history, but to actually understand it on some fundamental level. And those of us who actually know people in the military, who research weapons and tactics, supply and strategy, can tell you that a war for oil consists of placing an armored cordon around the remote oil fields, providing overwhelming air cover for armed convoys direct to port facilities, and then shipment via US tankers escorted by naval assets until out of the region.

None of this is happening, of course. What has happened is that we have spent 4000 and more lives building schools and hospitals and protecting a people against fellow Muslims who show day in and day out that they will kill as many children as they need to in order to terrorize their own people into submission.

That story, apparently, holds no interest for today’s Hollywood.

Economically, the United States is – and remains – the engine of the world. Much has been made of the recent meltdown, but any impartial look at the rest of the world shows their economies took a proportionally greater hit than we did, and if history is any guide – and it’s the only guide we have – we will recover faster, too. In the last twenty years almost half of the world’s population – India and China – have been lifted from the darkness of stone-age, grinding poverty into almost the same sort of light taken for granted by those who live in Malibu and Pacific Palisades. This was not the result of massive government programs; on the contrary – those had and continue to keep entire populations in a state of mental slavery and dependence. No, this most remarkable advance in the quality of human life on earth was simply due to America channeling some of its stunning wealth into phone banks in India and factories in China.

Much is made on the left about how five percent of the population consumes twenty-five percent of the world’s resources. But that same five percent has produced almost fifty percent of the world’s wealth and prosperity in the years after World War II, and the decline in that percentage is simply a reflection of the economic growth and prosperity of our former enemies and allies, who can now afford a few decades of socialism because they do not have to pay for their own defense.

And yet is it businessmen, and “corporations,” that are endlessly cast as villains and murderers when all they have done is transformed the world from poverty to relative health and prosperity. You don’t have to take my word for this. Statistics on life expectancy, death by disease, and infant mortality do not lie. Free Trade and Free Enterprise – championed by the United States – has brought to billions some small and growing taste of the kind of life enjoyed by Hollywood liberals so blinded by mental cataracts that in the remake of The Manchurian Candidate the villain was remade from being Chinese Communists into The Manchurian Corporation. How unimaginative. How pathetic. How deep in denial.

Scientifically, technologically and medically the remarkable ownership of world-changing ideas produced by the United States is simply astonishing. That five percent of the world population could produce such staggering advances in knowledge, medicine, agriculture, instrumentation and basic research simply boggles any mind open enough to read a page.

Which narrows down the numbers of minds quite a bit.

Each year, scientists all around the world write research papers. These papers produce scientific citations. It’s fair to call these citations “units” of science, that is, a measure of how much ground-breaking science is being performed.

Listed by countries, China comes in sixth, preceeded by France, England, Germany and Japan, which produced, at number 2 on the list, 6,612,826 citations in a ten year period. During that time the United States produced 39,027,838 – more than six times as many as the runner-up.

All of those images of the deep structure of galaxies and nebulae are provided to the world at the expense of the American taxpayer and through the American genius that produced the Hubble and Chandra space telescopes. Every image of the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune was sent to the world by American grad students at Cal Tech. The American university system is the envy of the world. Nowhere is there better science being done, and no where is there anything like the numbers of people receiving advanced scientific and engineering degrees.

But that is not all they are receiving. They are also receiving lethal doses of anti-Americanism and anti-Capitalism, main-lined directly and administered by morally blind charlatans like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky – men who repeatedly acknowledge the “relativity of truth” and who distort and select facts so frequently and shamelessly that I will paraphrase Mark Twain by saying that the omission of the works of Chomsky and Zinn would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.

And finally, Culturally it is America that the world watches, that the world listens to, that the world emulates and copies to the degree that suicide bombers wear Lakers t-shirts and the most virulent anti-American Euro kids look and dress and act and talk like kids from Compton or Detroit.

There was a time when America broadcast its virtues to the world. Films like It’s a Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, even Star Wars and Spider-man, were films about common, decent people – Americans, obviously, for we all know that even Luke Skywalker was an Iowa farm boy – who find themselves in dangerous and evil places and whose fundamental decency corrected this wrong in the world and restored a sense of hope and optimism, a sense that we are masters of our own destiny. It is an idea so powerful that even French intellectuals, who seemed then and seem today to be incapable of a single positive or upbeat thought, could watch in wonder and contempt as legions of their countrymen flocked to see them.

Those days have gone. No longer does Hollywood broadcast America’s mythic virtues to the world. No, the flow is reversed now. Now the great creative driving force of Hollywood is to present to America the anti-American hatred of the intellectuals watching in impotent fury out in the rest of the world.

Of the six or seven war movies made during the last few years, all – save one – were spectacular failures. Many were the reasons given for this, but perhaps, someday, while sitting in a hammock in the Cayman Islands, even a studio executive might be just intellectually aware enough to catch a flash of what is obvious to a pharmacist in Des Moines: that maybe, just perhaps, these films failed not because of war weariness or denial or rank stupidity on the part of the American people, but rather – are you sitting down? – that most of the country, unlike Hollywood, has sons and daughters and fathers and brothers in the military and know for first-hand fact that they are not rapists or murderers, hicks, dullards, losers, or broken and victimized children but rather the bravest, the most capable, the most decent and honorable and just plain competent people we have.

And perhaps, just perhaps, it might enter that navel-gazing, self-centered, dim little brain to reflect that the one war movie that did out-of-the-park business was the one that showed the Marines as the good guys, winning on the battlefield, defending their people and their culture against long odds and full of the heroism and sacrifice that used to be so commonplace in this city… even if the Marines in question wore loincloths and funny helmets and advanced with spears and round shields.

If America simply led the world military to the degree that it does today, well, that would simply be historical. That it should have both economic and military might, and use them so much more often for good than for ill, would unique and awe-inspiring. That it could couple military and economic strength with such leadership in science and medicine is simply unheard of in the annals of history, and for it to be the military, economic, scientific and cultural beacon that is is not only unheard of, it simply almost defies imagining – would, in fact, defy imagining to anyone who had not grown up in it, as we have, and seen it with their own eyes.

I have said all of that simply to say this: I know my people and I study our history. The single thing that makes America so exceptional is the belief of its people in American exceptionalism. It is a simple cause and effect relationship, easy to understand from using your own common sense and the examples in your own life. The confident and the bold do bold and confident things. The shameful and self-loathing? Not so much. And Hollywood as it exists today is using all of its vast talent to turn us from the former into the latter.

America is not just a cauldron, but a reactor. From all over the earth, men and women have risked their lives to immerse themselves in this great experiment in freedom and individuality, and the results, by any measure, have produced more goodness, more security, more prosperity and more raw happiness than society or combination of societies in history.

Stars, like our sun, are reactors too: the tremendous, monumental energies and pressures they generate would blow them to pieces in a millisecond, but for one thing… the immense gravity that holds these fiery atoms together and strikes the balance of force and pressure that creates all the light and life in the universe.

The American reactor of individuality and freedom of expression would also fly apart too, but for one thing: the deep love of country that has bound it together and liberated the best of the human spirit. Destroy that love of country and the idea of America – for that is what she is, in the end… simply an idea of freedom and the pursuit of happiness – eliminate that binding love and the reactor will explode. And when it does, there will be no more light – no more medicine, no more art and poetry, no more iPhones and MRI scanners and jet travel, no more Fifth and First Amendment rights, no more security and peace… in fact, no more hot running water.

Cut those cords of love of and pride in country – as the elites have cut them in every civilization before us – and from your seat on the moon you will see the brightest light in history wink out. The rest of the world will soon follow.

You think I exaggerate? When has this not happened in the heartbeat of civilization? We once stood among a family of nations dedicated to fighting oppression in the form of fascism and communism. Now, we and one or two others, but for all intents and purposes we – America alone – stands against the tide of 7th Century repression and submission. Civilizations rise and fall. Barbarism is eternal. If you think the threat is not an existential one you have some reading to catch up on.

How long will the next darkness last? A few centuries? All of the readily available tools to build a new civilization – the ores, the coal and oil – all these are gone. Monks in stone cloisters cannot build photovoltaic cells. If this civilization falls, as have all others – from a lack of belief in itself – then civilization and medicine and science may very well never return.

Those are the stakes.

And how – pardon the profanity – how ironic is it that those libertines, those most determined to be able to do whatever they want, whenever they want, and at no cost to themselves… how ironic, how pathetic, how tragic, how infuriating and indeed, how insane is it that they – they alone – now control the mythology and the message of the workshop of our identity?