A Vast Left-Wing Racket

Politics
#1

Quote:
Arabella Advisors [is] a for-profit consultancy that plays an integral role in Democratic causes, fueled by donations from billionaires including George Soros and Pierre Omidyar. The company, which distributes billions to Democratic pet projects, has established five tax-exempt nonprofit groups that pay Arabella a hefty fee—ostensibly for back-office work—and in turn operate a vast array of left-wing advocacy groups.
Arabella’s funds hauled in a combined $3.3 billion in 2020 and 2021. Its primary political arm, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, doled out $61 million to Democratic Super PACs during the 2020 election cycle, second only to Majority Forward, a dark money group associated with Senate Democrats. The Sixteen Thirty Fund spent so much on politics in 2020 that the Federal Election Commission’s general counsel urged the commission in June 2022 to ‘find reason to believe’ the fund violated federal law by failing to register as a political committee. The FEC, however, went against its attorney’s recommendation and closed the case.

Read more about it here:

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#2

Just amazing how much money goes into a movement that supposedly despises it.
Soros and these other billionares could have funded the worlds biggest charities, and actually helped people. But they put it into social engineering, buying politicians and rigging elections, because they want power.

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#3

Yes. Power to wreck, destroy, impoverish, increase crime, mutilate children, and kill.

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#4

I don’t think the billionaires who fund ‘wokism’ consciously desire to destroy Western civilization (along with temselves). They believe they’re buying off the ‘woke’ Left, which is popular among young people, especially among the sort of younger people who work for them. And they’re not wrong in this: the ‘woke’ Left does not want to nationalize industry, subject the economy to a National Plan and institute equality of wages. They dont have any paticular worked-out ideology. They’re driven by emotion, and ‘identity politics’.

They’re taking advantage of the concept, enshrined in our founding documents, that “all men are created equal”. They interpret this to mean that if certain groups are not succeeding in life, then it must be due to some external factor, not to their own behavior. The main ‘external factor’ they blame is ‘racism’.which has now become an almost meaningless term. Certainly in its original form, ‘racism’ is practically non-existent in the US.

Hollywood has conditoned Americans to believe that big events happen as a result of the struggle between Absolute Good, and Absolute Evil, each of which is represented by a single, or a small number, of individuals.

We must not let Hollywood do our thinking for us. In particular, we must not believe that our Enemy is a group of Evil Individuals – Hilary and Soros and Satan – who sit around cackling and rubbing their hands together as they gleefully watch the decline of the Republic.

Most Democratic politicians are caving in to the pressure of the ‘woke’ crazies, who themselves have been indoctrinated by the education system to have an attitude of general contempt for America. The teacher and professors who have transmitted this poisonous view believe that they are just being honest about America’s failings.

They have a Moralist, instead of a Materialist, view of social reality, namely, that there is an obvious set of Moral Truths – such as, slavery is bad – which, if you don’t agree with it, marks you out as evil. They can’t understand that morality evolves over time. So, perfectly decent people – like the Founders, or almost anyone in Europe prior to the tenth century or so (and almost everyone in the rest of the world prior to a couple of centuries ago), accepted slavery as part of the natural order.

Just as almost everyone until a little more than a century ago, accepted that women should not have the right to vote, just as they assumed that only men could play leading roles in intellectual endeavors (although they admitted the odd exception).

Human society evolves. Conservatives understand that not all proposals to change the existing social order of the time, even proposals put forward by well-meaning people – were necessarily genuine steps forward. And in particular they understood that proposals for a radical reordering of society advanced by intellectuals, were likely to lead to social catastrophe. A step at a time, pausing to see what actually works, cautious advance … that is the attitude of true conservatives.

This was best articulated by the fellow who has a good claim to be called the ‘Father of Conservatism’, Edmund Burke. If anyone reading this is not familiar with this man, do yourself a favor and at least read the Wiki article about him:
[ Edmund Burke - Wikipedia ]

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#5

You take a kindly view of people who do evil - probably because you are yourself a kindly person. You attribute innocent motives to wicked people. I would look to you if ever I needed to find a spot of gold in the heart of Stalin or Mao - or a Biden, or a ruling Iranian Ayatollah, or a Hamas rapist-torturer-killer.

But you are not right.

Hillary and Soros are evil.

Can you excuse Hillary’s Russia hoax to try to destroy Trump? Not be outraged about the millions of helpless people killed or displaced in and from the Middle East as a result of her appalling policies as Secretary of State?

And Soros? He sold his fellow Jews to the Nazis. That was when he was very young. He has continued all his life to do as much harm as he can.

If you want to make excuses for Satan, I’ll listen to you. It must be easier to make a case for him than for Hillary or Soros.

You seem to believe in an evolutionary process of continuous betterment. But no, no, no. The glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome faded away and were followed by a thousand years of darkness in the west; stultification until the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. And we must not forget that all races and nations are the same age, but only some have been inventive, have learned how to preserve and lengthen lives, how to experiment and how to explore our universe. As the peoples of the West - especially the Anglophones - have done. But now our civilization is decaying.

I have never come across a conservative like the “true” kind you describe. Unless you are describing yourself, in which case you are a rare if not a unique person.

Burke was a good conservative. Well worth reading of course. But a firm believer in the Christian trinitarian deity so not our guy in that respect.

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#6

So the billionares who fund wokism and the politicians who cave to the woke are not consciously trying to destroy Western civilization, and the woke themselves are indoctrinated by teachers who think they are just “being honest about Americas failings”?
Yes, the poisonous indoctrination is real, but it doesn’t just happen randomly or evolve organically.
Somewhere along the line the poison is being deliberately injected into the system. Some actual people are intentionally pushing the propaganda.
People who are motivated by greed and a desire for power and control, and who do, consciously, want to cause the decline of our Republic in order to replace it with a “New World Order” of global communism, with themselves, the globalist elites, in control.
I’d say that qualifies as “a group of evil individuals”!

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#7

I don’t believe in some mystical process of continual human improvement. There certainly has been dramatic human improvement over the last few hundred years, but it has had material causes.Since the triumph of capitalism, the secular trend has been upward, albeit with pauses and jerks backward. We can thank the bourgeoisie for this, as Karl Marx does in the Communist Manifesto.

Don’t confuse evil results, with evil intentions. Hilary is a Democratic hack. Soros had good intentions – spreading democracy to authoritarian regimes, but … he is around 90 years old. I suspect that he has been ‘captured’ by ‘woke’ employees, as Bertrand Russell was 60 years ago.

When i was young … and for the first twenty years of my adult life – I was a committed Leninist, keen to promote the socialist revolution everywhere. Was I ‘evil’ then, but became ‘kindly’ now?

I know several dozen people like me – who were in the same organization I was. Some still are. Some have become conservatives. Their personalities haven’t changed. We all believed that genuine socialism – not the Stalinist version – would be far more democratic than anything possible under capitalism. We were naive, misguided, stupid perhaps … but not evil… We made great personal sacrifices for our beliefs. I risked my life during Freedom Summer (1964) to register Blacks to vote in Fayette County, Tennesse (just over the Mississippi line) – and got chased down a dark road by white racists (but escaped). I spent six months in mlitary prison. Did I do it to promote evil? Again, don’t confuse objective results with subjective intentions.

It’s a Hollywood view of the world, and … pardon me …one shared with religious fanatics as well. The worst thing about it is that it gets in the way of fighting the Left.

We can win over people who are now on the Left, via political arguments and doing things like engaging in joint activity in fighting for things that some people on the Left still believe in, like Free Speech, and against the sexualization of children. But not if we believe people who differ with us politically are necessarily ‘evil’.

It’s actually the same world view that the ‘woke’ idiots have. From their point of view, if you oppose the minimum wage, you must want people to work for slave-labor wages so that the wealthy can enrich themselves even more.

It’s the Hollywood view of the world, and we shouldn’t fall for it. It’s also lazy thinking.

William Buckley went out of his way to bring ex-Marxists into the core leadership of National Review. Were these ‘evil’ people who had somehow become non-evil?

The reality is, we are tail-less, hairless apes, capable of terrible violence against each other. Usually, this occurs in the context of inter-tribal conflict: wars between tribes or countries. Ordinary people commit evil acts, because their tribe or nation is fighitng another tribe or nation.

For an in-depth study of this, see the book Ordinary Men:

[ https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution/dp/0062303023/ ]

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland – February 28, 2017 by Christopher R. Browning
[ https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution/dp/0062303023/ ]

“A remarkable—and singularly chilling—glimpse of human behavior. . .This meticulously researched book…represents a major contribution to the literature of the Holocaust."—Newsweek

Publisher’s blurb:

"Christopher R. Browning’s shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews—now with a new afterword and additional photographs.

Ordinary Men is the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass shootings as well as round-ups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. Browning argues that most of the men of RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions. Very quickly three groups emerged within the battalion: a core of eager killers, a plurality who carried out their duties reliably but without initiative, and a small minority who evaded participation in the acts of killing without diminishing the murderous efficiency of the battalion whatsoever.

*While this book discusses a specific Reserve Unit during WWII, the general argument Browning makes is that most people succumb to the pressures of a group setting and commit actions they would never do of their own volition. *

Ordinary Men is a powerful, chilling, and important work with themes and arguments that continue to resonate today. "

Even people who have been deeply involved in evil acts can change. The best example of this is one Thomas Tarrants, the KKK’s chief bomb-maker. [ I Was a Violent Klansman Who Deserved to Die | Christianity Today ]

(For another example of an ‘Old Leftist’ who is beginning to wake up, see here:
[ The Case for Forcing the Mentally Ill Into Treatment ] )

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#8

Are you an atheist, Doug?

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#9

It doesn’t matter if you are not an atheist. We have several conservative members who are not. We also have some atheist members who are libertarian more than conservative.

I think you are the only member who likes, or respects, or agrees - if only in part - with George Soros. I would have thought that opinion of yours would cancel out any conservative views you have.

What are your conservative views?

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#10

You are not a free marketeer. You are not against taxation. You do not want small government.

But you are for the rule of law? For equality under the law? For strong military defense?

For individual freedom?

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#11

Freedom of speech, assembly, the press?

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#12

Of course leftists can and, thankfully, do change and become conservatives. David Horowitz is a great example, yourself, and many others.
But to say that George Soros ever had "good intentions " is a stretch.
Is it “good intentions” to spend billions of dollars to meddle in U.S. politics to make sure that DAs are elected who allow crime to skyrocket all over the country? He may be senile now but he’s been doing that for years, and had plenty of time to notice that it didn’t turn out well, and stop doing it.
Unless destroying the rule of law WAS his intention.
That’s evil.

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#13

A very good example of his evildoing, Liz!

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#14

Yes, I am for the rule of law, for a strong military defense (which requires serious taxation, of course, and contradicts a fundamentalist adherence to small government. Or do you want it all done by private contractors?

As for being a ‘free marketeer’, I am for a lightly-regulated free market, such as we have in all the advanced countries. I am not ‘against taxation’ – being against all taxation is a ridiculous position, since there is no other way to finance government. (Even a government-sponsored lottery increases the size and power of government.)

What I’m not is a Randite. My beliefs are the beliefs of the overwhelming majority of conservatives everywhere.

And what I’m not is an ideologue, either of the near-anarchist ‘Free Market’ type, or of the Marxist type.

And yes, anyone who knows anything about George Soros knows that he helped significantly in the breakup of communism. Yes, he’s also a liberal. The world is full of contradictions. Any intelligent strategist in a fight knows that we must make alliances, sometimes with lesser evils (at the time) against greater evils. Or were you for remaining neutral when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union?

More about Soros here: George Soros - Wikipedia

If I’m not a conservative, then neither is Mr Trump. If someone proposed to him that he come out for doing away with Social Security, workmen’s compensation, all taxes … I’d love to see his reaction. And although there are probably enemy infiltrators in his entourage, none of them would be stupid enough to propose such an insane policy.

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#15

Soros funds (inter alia) BLM, Antifa, the anti-police movement, pro-crime officials, and Hamas. He is deeply evil.

Never mind what Wiki says. Wiki is full of Leftist tosh.

I was a child when Hitler invaded the USSR. I knew little about Communism - all adults seemed to favor it - but I did know about the persecution and attempted genocide of the Jews by Hitler. As I have tried to remind you, Soros sold his fellow Jews to the Nazis. Soros is not a “liberal”; he is a would-be destroyer of our constitutional republic, of the rule of law, of the Western world, of humankind. He is evil incarnate.

President Trump is not to be judged as other people are. He is one of the great figures of history, a giant of politics, a natural leader, a hero.

Please explain what you have against Ayn Rand.

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#16

Read most of the Wikipedia on Soros.
If this description of him is true, how ironic that a guy who has spent billions on what he thinks is preventing communism, is unknowingly facilitating the rise of the worst totalitarian globalist communism in history.
This would make him the world’s biggest “Useful Idiot”. And this, at his age, after having an entire lifetime to witness the devastating “unintended” consequences of his “philanthropy” on the world.
Can anyone really be THAT stupid?
In the end, I guess it doesn’t really matter if the Conductor of the train that’s headed off the cliff is “evil”, insane, or just plain stupid - it’s still doomed.

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#17

Late reply: I think something similar happened to Bertrand Russell, who, in his dotage, got taken over by a leftist subordinate.

But more generally: the world is complex. Hollywood – like all story-tellers since the dawn of time – presents us with a world divided into Good and Evil. That’s how you entertain people. But it’s not how you educate people, because the world is much more cmplex than that.

Atheists, above all others, should understand that. There is no supernatural Good Force, nor an Evil Force. There are just clever hairless tail-less chimpanzees – homo sapiens – with a complex of biological drives, including powerful ones for self-survival and reproduction of one’s DNA, which leads individuals, and their kinship groups, often to be in conflict with each other.

At the same time, these intelligent chimpanzees have developed the ability to think, to construct the world in symbols, and to develop sets of ideas – religions, ideologies, moralities – which can be in tension with our brute biological drives.

A particular refinement of this, is the recognition that the world is not always divided into Friends and Enemies. In our struggles, we find that some of our enemies have other enemines. The old saying, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is of course, on the face of it, often flatly wrong. But the enemy of my enemy can be, in some circumstances, my ally.

Of course, if your view of the world has been sculpted by Hollywood – evreyone else is either Good or Evil – then recognizing this is uncomfortable, perhaps not even possible, But if you want to win the struggles you’re in, it’s vital to understand this.

#18

Yes, the world is complex, we evolved from apes, and Hollywood oversimplifies, but that doesn’t mean there is no good or evil.
As you point out, our basic needs are to survive and to reproduce. Over the centuries, as humanity’s intelligence and reasoning power grew, we developed better ways to accomplish both, for the maximum benefit to humanity, creating civilization.
The Golden Rule, and the laws derived from it, were arrived at in early civilizations and have remained constant - proving their validity, even without a Divinity still around to enforce them.
Whatever promotes and protects life, and the liberty of the individual to pursue it, is good; whatever destroys it is evil.
That’s what makes our Constitution good, and anything that seeks to destroy it, such as Marxism, evil.

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#19

Brilliant reply! Thank you, Liz!

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