Posted on 12/07/2023 8:35:50 AM PST by george76
True Leadership Stops It..
People talk about the Weimar Republic that gave rise to Adolph Hitler but very few understand what the Weimar was all about.
...
from deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia..
The Germany of the late 1920s and early 1930s was a world leader in most fields of art, science and intellect.
...
Berlin had three opera houses, and Germany as a whole no less than eighty. Every middle-sized city had its own orchestra
...
And in science, of course, the Germans were preeminent….
The Germany of 1920 had a significantly higher per capita educational level than most of the Western countries. Berlin was a great place to be in the 20s if you were an intellectual.
...
America was not founded on some loose principles. The principles were bedrock and based on Judeo-Christian values combined with the interpretations of those same values by people from the Scottish Enlightenment. The Founders were learned in the fundamentals of Classical Western Civilization and had seen where the Greeks and Romans screwed up. They had seen how monarchy didn’t work for the common man.
...
The Founders created a system of laws that were blind to your station in life. They created opportunity. The American Dream isn’t some legend or figment of your imagination. It is deliberate. It still exists if you seek it out. They wanted competition because they knew that competition makes you better, and creates better outcomes for people.
There are plenty in America that were born on our soil and educated in our government-run and funded educational systems that seek to destroy what the Founders created. They will stop at nothing to destroy it.
...
George Santos was unqualified to be in Congress but is he any worse than the Congressman who pulled the fire alarm to disrupt a vote? What was the difference between them?
...
Our government, our elite credentialed institutions, and our elite non-profit Civic organizations in America are disgustingly sick. They are prejudiced and anti-American. They do not believe in the founding of America, nor the Bill of Rights attached to our democratic republic. They will use the power of government, the power of social media, or the power of personal gossip to discriminate against people who don’t fall in line with them. Conversely, there are those that think similarly to me and hold their silence for fear of being discriminated against and losing opportunity or their way of life.
I want to be very clear about this. It is not just elite Ivy League institutions that testified before Congress yesterday. It’s all Ivy League institutions. The rot doesn’t stop there. This culture is at most educational institutions from K-post doc in America. This culture exists in our civic organizations, like the Economic Club of Chicago, across the entirety of America. It exists in our non-profit charity organizations.
Leaders of those organizations might pay lip service to the opposite but watch their actions. See who is invited to speak. See what the topics are. See who they parcel out leadership roles to. The University of Chicago is supposed to be famously on the side of free speech but who leads their school of political policy? Who’s invited to speak? Who’s speeches are shut down by activist students and those actions are tolerated by the leadership of the school. Again, I don’t want to single out U of C. Stanford is worse. Like Savoir Faire, it’s everywhere.
I have experienced it and witnessed it firsthand.
First up, Senator Josh Hawley and FBI Director Christopher Wray. The Biden Administration has used the power of the FBI and the power of the DOJ to target political enemies. In case you don’t understand, that is fascism.
...
This hearing didn’t get a lot of play because of the other bombshells. But, rest assured if there is a Republican majority in the Senate, and in the House, more of these kinds of things will continue to be uncovered. Not that Republicans are immune, see Thomas Massey’s record yesterday. But, the Democratic Party has institutionalized the rot and is the primary driver behind it.
Next, women who compete in athletics ought to lie back and take it when losing to men. Fatima Goss Graves said that men should have the right to compete against women. For what it’s worth, her husband is leading the prosecution of the J6 political prisoners who marched on the Capitol in January of 2021. Now that all the tape is out, anyone can see that the march was far more peaceful than any Black Lives Matter riot during Covid.
Also in the hearing, swimmer Riley Gaines confronted Pennsylvania Democratic Congresswoman Lee and exposed her for what she is. It was a brilliant exchange and the Congresswoman came off so poorly she wanted it stricken from the record. The people advocating for men to compete with women are misogynists. They are sick.
The real fireworks happened between Congresswoman Elise Stefanik and the female Presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT. If you haven’t seen it, watch it. These are the leaders of credentialed, sterling, and elite institutions setting the pace for education and research across the world. Their institutions are private, but they accept government money and subsidies for all kinds of things. Their endowments are not taxed.
...
I will agree that we have to be very tolerant of free speech. I might not like what you say, or the way you phrase what you are saying. Freedom isn’t free everyone is fond of spouting. But, freedom also has a couple of sisters. They are called consequence and responsibility.
The leaders, the department heads at these elite institutions, and many of the professors have abdicated their responsibility to lead. They allow children to have “freedom”, without a shred of consequence.
...
Gavin Newsome, abdicated his responsibility of leadership again yesterday when he caved to pro-Palestinian protestors and decided not to light a Christmas tree in the state of California. He has no spine. Leaders have spines.
Leaders are not afraid to be singular. They are not afraid to face the herd. They are not afraid of voicing an unpopular opinion if that opinion is rooted in objective logic.
To lead, you must first learn to follow. It’s why the service academies used to be so good at teaching and molding leaders. Today, those same academies are off the rails and have gone woke. Like other institutions in our society, they wear the skin over a hollowed-out body.
When something is right in front of your face and obvious, you need to at least acknowledge it because then you form a constructive argument to debunk it.
When you see something truly evil, you must call it out by name. Isolate it. Identify it. Kill it. We have a lot of evil in America today but they spell it Amerikka.
Our current predicament has other parallels to Weimar. Runaway deficits. Big government people that advocate for taxing the wealth of people even when they don’t earn income from that wealth. We have an uncontrollable unelected centralized bureaucracy that has usurped power from people, and Congress. There are others.
We must have high objective standards. Expectations are worthless because you never are satisfied with them. They are wishy-washy. When 80% of the grades at Yale are “A’s”, there are no standards. We have seen the go-along get-along society define standards lower and lower for more than two decades. That has to end.
We have time to fix it. It’s going to take level-headed leadership that has a moral compass.
Lot of missed history chatter over 1850s to 1914 for Germany. Industry, technology development, wellness/casino tourism, etc.
WW I wrecked the stability angle, ceased the wellness/casino tourism income, and the six-year period of inflation upset the German market.
To arrange for reparations (from the peace treaty)...it wasn’t until 1925 that the NY banks stepped in and got a 30-year loan done with the Weimar Republic. When 1929 came and wrecked the NY banks...they wanted additional guarantees. That destroyed the balance of economic power and brought the Nazi Party to the level (1930 election) that they could produce 18-percent of the national vote and be part of the national coalition gov’t. From that point on...it was downhill.
If an analogy with the Weimar republic is sought, that is the place to start. Contrary to the conventional view of the Nazis as undermining a properly functional nation, Weimar was in deep trouble because of internal economic sabotage and subversion from the Left, especially communists supported by the USSR.
Nevertheless, any larger historical parallel between the US and Weimar Germany fails because the contexts are so profoundly different. That means that Trump and MAGA are in line with numerous prior populist movements in America that sought reform and to return America to its true principles. Otherwise, references to Weimar Germany tend to support the view that Trump and MAGA are crypto Nazi extreme nationalists intent on dictatorship.
Effete
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.