Archives For Leftism

Parenting in the “Apocalypse”: Why Kids matter more than their Carbon Footprint

October 25, 2021 — Leave a comment

Emily Holleman a writer for The Cut, – part of New York Magazine’s ‘One Great Story’ section – recently condemned bearing children in the age of the “apocalypse,” selfish.

Holleman’s reflection on anxiety and personal loss in a time of uncertainty is the better part of what becomes an environmentalist “sermon”.

An autobiographical piece, the article describes a grieving, displaced woman, who sees her ‘pandemic pregnancy’ as another nail piercing in an unwanted cross. Her self-indulgent rant against parenthood, is bent into a twisted concoction of hope, and hopelessness – life and death.

The illustrative sermon deploys the dogma of the Green social gospel.

“Catastrophic climate change,” drags down an otherwise thought-provoking story of pregnancy, and married life.

For her,

‘Having a child in a developed nation is among the most environmentally unsound decisions you can make — a baby born in the United States adds another 58.6 tons of carbon to the atmosphere per year.’

Presumably, to avoid the charge of racism, it appears that for Holleman, having a child in an undeveloped nation is perfectly acceptable. The hint of contradiction, self-hatred and contempt for her own nation, and its people wafts like a pungent smell from here on out.

Her anti-carbon drivel descends even further, with the proclamation,

‘The decision to have children has always struck me as an essentially selfish one: You choose, out of a desire for fulfillment or self-betterment or curiosity or boredom or baby-mania or peer pressure, to bring a new human into this world. And it has never seemed more selfish than today.’

She rides the pessimistic narrative of falling skies, and “rising temperatures” in a world that worships climate-control.

(A world oblivious to the acclimatisation of air-conditioned comfort, because it’s too focused on self-aggrandising posturing, and panic inducing “climate crisis” headlines.)

If we are faced with “catastrophic climate change” it would be better to ditch fossil fuelled artificial climates in homes, business and transport, not reproduction, families and the life that both carries.

Even here, one has to ask Holleman what she means by Climate Change. Which climate is facing catastrophic decline? Is it temperate, mild, dry, tropical or polar?

Where does the sun and solar activity play a role? Could it be that the sun is a bigger contributor to any warming climate, than the carbon footprint of children, including her own son?

Holleman’s article is a cross between anti-parenting, anti-carbon and anti-people. There is a stark absence of balance, especially given the basics: Carbon is plant food and without it, life on earth ends.

I acknowledge Holleman is writing from hindsight. She’s writing about becoming a mum for the first time, in trying times.

Holleman is in a foreign place. She’s greeted with one bitter disaster after another.

A pregnant woman, facing a difficult childbirth. A grieving sister – and general fish out of water – having relocated from the congested New York to California’s wide-open spaces.

Yet, her situation is compounded by the presence of wild fires, panic on the TV, COVID-19, and (as my wife put it after reading the piece) all the hormonal trimmings attached to having a baby on the way.

A soon to be mother, Holleman argues existence with non-existence with emotional reasoning.

She confesses to feeling selfish. Then supposes that the answer to a “climate catastrophe” is for the people of the developed world to stop having children.

The hope of a better world Holleman finds in the embrace of her new born son, is morbidly smothered by a lament at what a child’s carbon footprint is.

Twistedly Holleman infers children are a great evil, but they’re a useful distraction.

For her, kids are a “blessing” to have around, because they provide ‘small moments of joy.’ A welcome distraction from ‘cataclysmic changes to the climate [and other] inequities it exacerbates.’

Holleman lives in a world which views children as either an accessory, or an inconvenience.

A world that also equates conceiving a child, with contracting an STD.

What’s also striking is the use of eschatological terminology: “End Times.” Indicative of the religious environmentalism – or cultism – which pervades her Green ideological evangelism.

In the broader context of Holleman’s experience, it’s not easy write to this off as rhetorical.

Holleman believes we’re all doomed, stating, ‘we are living in a real way on borrowed time, under the shadow of carbon.’

The takeaway conclusion: “Carbon is the great Satan. Humans are carbon. Ergo, humans are a great evil.”

One thing Holleman can be applauded for is repeatedly referring to her [then] unborn son as a baby, not a “clump of cells”.

Another is the depth to which she writes about the clash between her grief, her beliefs, and the hope beaming from the new life she holds in her hands.

Having kids, Holleman concludes, provides a semblance of comfort and reassurance about the future, and that makes the future worth fighting for.

I support her positive conclusion, but 80% of what Holleman writes is straight-up tripe.

There’s nothing more selfless than having kids.

You’re constantly giving, serving and saying “no” to yourself, in order to say “yes” to life.

Out of 21 years of fatherhood, there is no greater example who testifies to this than my wife.

She conceived six times. (We miscarried badly on the first.)

With the five who followed I witnessed her battle a war with uncontrollable nausea.

A condition known as Hyperemesis Gravidarum (an extreme, rare form of morning sickness that went on for months).

Over the space of ten years, with pauses in between, she was hospitalised for severe dehydration five times.

After diagnosis, even when offered to abort our children, she refused.

Doing so with the full knowledge that this new pregnancy will likely mean another round of constant vomiting and lengthy stays in bed.

Not only did my wife choose to fight for life, instead of embrace destruction, we did it together.

We often did so without the support of family, church or friends. Many of whom misunderstood her decision, as much as they misunderstood her condition.

Contra to Emily Holleman’s anti-kid “climate change” tirades, there’s nothing more selfless than having kids.

There’s nothing selfish in saying “no” to yourself, in order to care for the young, through the joyful embrace of saying “yes” to life.

To quote the oft quoted, Theodore Roosevelt,

‘The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt.’

(A slightly revised version of this article was first published on Dads 4 Kids, under the title: Our Children are the Answer, Not the Problem to Our Environmental Challenges; also published on Caldron Pool, 22nd October 2021).

©Dads4kids; Rod Lampard, 2021.

In Creation, Parenting, Political Theology , , , , ,
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Yale Academic Claims Christian Home Schooling Is Breeding “White Supremacy”

May 24, 2021 — Leave a comment

Hatred, or more generously put, disdain for Christian homeschoolers rears its pernicious, snarky head every year in one way, or another.

The main combatants are from the Left. They fire vitriolic salvos over the walls of their sheltered cloisters of higher learning into an area of education they view to be harmful.

They view it as harmful because the general curriculum used by most Christian homeschoolers is classically based, which is generally speaking, loathed by the Leftist hegemony.

The essential Christian Homeschooler’s curriculum would include a holistic embrace of subjects across a spectrum of genres that have built, informed, and sustained Western civilisation throughout the good and the bad.

If done right, Christian homeschooling gives students the best of Biblical Theology, antiquity, Shakespearean, Victorian, literary, and Philosophical classics, as well as age-appropriate exposure to multi-ethnic biography, art, community, logic, civics, General science, Math, grammar, English, language, and History.

Of course, not all Christian homeschoolers aim high. Neither do some schools.

This flaw doesn’t warrant vilification, such as Yale University Professor, Phillip Gorski’s claim on Twitter that ‘Christian homeschooling was -and is – often – if not always – a major vector of White Christian Nationalism.’

Gorski, according to a Campus Reform article, accused Christian homeschoolers of advocating a ‘fusion of Christianity with American civic life,’ which he says, ‘carries assumptions about nativism, white supremacy, authoritarianism, patriarchy, and militarism.’

What Gorski means by ‘fusion’ is the belief in American exceptionalism, or ‘manifest destiny.’

His concern is that homeschooled students are being taught that America is a Christian nation, founded by white Europeans, which for better and worse, is one of the greatest Constitutionally Democratic nations to ever have existed.

In other words, they’re being taught the truth, not a revised history ordained by the Critical Theorist Marxists of the New Left.

While Gorski’s concern about ‘manifest destiny’ is to be recognised, it’s not evident that this, errant natural theology doctrine, is the be all and end all of Christian home-schooling curriculum.

I’ve never seen it present in the American Curriculum our family uses, and has used in 11 years of home-schooling.

To be fair, Gorski does admit that ‘not all Christians homeschool, and not all Christian homeschoolers learn Christian nationalism,’ but it’s banal for Gorski to make claims insinuating that ‘manifest destiny’ is the benchmark of Christian home education, when his definition of Christian nationalism is skewed to begin with.

As part of the Leftist academic apparatus, Gorski’s operating from his own assumptions, and learned bias.

To state it simply, for Leftists, Western Civilisation is white supremacism.

This is a fundamental belief among Leftists, evidenced by the irrational MAGA hat hatred in the United States, and here in Australia by loud, Leftist opposition to the Ramsey Centre For Western Civilisation.

Academics are protesting the presence of the Ramsey Centre on University campuses through agitprop op-eds, and a dedicated website, by which they accuse the philanthropic organisation of being narrow, Anglo-centric, Sinophobic, racist and patriarchal.

Never mind that they’re tenured positions of privilege only exist because Western Civ. grounded on Biblical Christian evangelical ethics, makes such positions and privilege achievable.

Simply teaching about Western Civilisation and its achievements is, to the majority on the Left, teaching racism, white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia, islamophobia, xenophobia, and the long list of thought cancelling nouns goes on and on.

This includes the assumption that students not being taught from Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, Black Lives Matter, or LGBT programs, within or over-against the ABCs, and 1,2,3, are being taught wrong.

By wrong: Children are being taught at home, not force fed from the Unionised conveyor belts of the predominately Leftist education indoctrination complexes.

Though the Left does influence home education indirectly through the tragic history of the radical Left bludgeoning its way through the 20th Century, they have no control over what those children are taught, which translates into having no control over the adults those children become.

As is displayed by the way the Left farms racism and fear of catastrophic man-made climate change for political profit. Leftists, and some liberals, don’t want citizens, they want subjects.

I’m not advocating that “cancelling” CRT or QT, I’m saying – as I already do – like Islamism, Nazism, and Communism, teach about them, just don’t teach from them.

Teach from the Bible in one hand, the newspaper in the other (Karl Barth).

In the end the contempt for Christian homeschoolers isn’t about people, it’s about politics, sex, and power.

The Left’s blind contempt for Western Civilisation merges with a learned prejudice against Christian homeschoolers.

The hate for Church and State informs the radical Left’s willingness to pervert, then vilify Christian home education on malicious grounds.

This fits in well with recent comments from Gene Veith, who wrote that “President” Joe Biden’s “American Families Plan,” was reminiscent of ‘Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which Government also breeds, reproduces (via in vitro hatcheries), and indoctrinates children in massive “nurseries.”

‘State Conditioning Centres’ took over the mum and dad role of raising children, and the curriculum, said Veith, taught “woke” ‘Elementary Class Consciousness.’

Brave New World analogies may seem overused, but we’d be fools to discount the loudness of its message here because, as Veith states, it ‘sounds disturbingly non-fictional.’

A.W. Tozer once said that ‘the complacency of Christians is the scandal of Christianity.’

If we allow the Leftist hegemony to dictate curriculum, on the sole basis of their own self-serving, misconstrued and false notions of Western Civilisation, we’re not just guilty of contributing to that scandal, (which in Biblical terms is scandalon; sin), we’re, as Tozer also said, ‘lacking in a moral wisdom that future historians will record as an Achilles heel, because though we had the intelligence to create a great civilisation, we lacked the moral wisdom preserve it.’

First published on Caldron Pool, 5th May 2021.

©Rod Lampard, 2021.

In Homeschool, Political Theology, Politics , , , ,
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CRT is Racism

May 13, 2021 — Leave a comment

Seconded.

Critical Race Theory is racism.

—-> https://caldronpool.com/hate-whitey-is-racism/


—-> https://caldronpool.com/critical-race-theory-is-culturally-accepted-racism/

Mum challenges a school who wants to infuse Critical Race Theory’s false doctrines into the curriculum.

She’s right. Black Lives Matter Inc. and the whole CRT, “hate whitey”, money making industry has more in common with the Nation of Islam, and Malcom X, than it does Martin Luther King Jnr.

CRT is a rejection of the early civil rights movement. It does what David Horowitz has accused “Black Power” thugs of doing: keeping African-Americans chained to poverty through as politics of grievance, and bitter sense of entitlement.

Source.

In Politics , ,
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Racist Tender Stopped After Senator Amanda Stoker Confronts Australian Human Rights Commission

May 5, 2021 — Leave a comment

Australian Senator, Amanda Stoker, has, according to reports from The Australian, directly criticised a plan to infuse an antiracism campaign by The Australian Human Rights Commission, with Critical Race Theory.

Linking the two, The Australian said that AHRC has now held back from a committing $140,000 tender to align Critical Race Theory with the “Racism: its stops with me” (RISWM) campaign.

The intention of the “addition” was to move the ‘focus of the campaign beyond the level of interpersonal racism towards a critical look at forms of structural/systemic and institutional racism, as well as unconscious bias.’

The $140,000 ideological alignment tender’s purpose was to ‘increase understanding about these concepts,’ along with ‘mobilise supporters and potential supporters into action to address them.’

Amanda Stoker is quoted as saying that after learning of the project, she ‘immediately called AHRC president to express concern that it was fostering racial division.’ Racism, Stoker said, ‘is completely unacceptable in modern Australia, but ideas like Critical Race Theory, only lead to greater racial division.’

AHRC president, Rosalind Croucher, said that the call with Amanda took place, but denied that Stoker’s criticism had any influence on the decision to put the project on the back-burner.

Defending the $140,000 tender, Croucher said, crucially, it was an idea that sought to include CRT, ‘not replace the current focus on individual behaviour and building social cohesion.’

The Australian said that Croucher rebuked Stoker, telling her that ‘while open communication is valuable, it is not for an assistant attorney to give direction to an independent agency head.’

IPA director, Bella d’Abrera backed Amanda Stoker, ‘accusing the AHRC of using radical race theory to divide Australians, while notorious Twitter race baiter, Greens Senator, Mehreen Faruqi backed the AHRC infusing CRT into its RISWM campaign.

The debate over CRT as a basis for education is raging in the United States. Donald Trump restrained CRT because of its far-left wing toxicity, but Joe Biden backs it.

Some States, however, are following the Trump lead, and seeking to limit the radical Left-wing ideology’s reach, by banning the teaching of CRT in schools.

In other words, these states are seeking to restrain maddening radical left-wing dogmas such as: ‘systemic racism, white privilege, “whiteness”, and gender bias issues.’

Stoker’s concerns are valid.        

The minute the Australian Human Rights Commission starts preaching from the “woke gospel” of Critical Race Theory, and it’s sibling, Queer theory, it’s no longer an organisation advocating human rights, but reinforcing the protection of an emerging oppressive political class, and its false doctrines.

Ex-hard-line Communist, and veteran of the New Left, David Horowitz, in ‘Hating Whitey & Other Progressive Causes’ described what we now know to be Critical Race Theory, as an academic movement of ‘radical left anti-white hatred’, calling it ‘a by-product of anti-Americanism.’

Horowitz, once an avid supporter of the Black Panthers, noted,

“Ideological hatred of whites is now an expanding industry. [See] Noel Ignatiev’s “Whiteness Studies,” an academic field promoting the idea that “whiteness” is a “social construct” that is oppressive and must be “abolished.” [Also] The magazine Race Traitor, the theoretical organ of this academic cult, emblazoned with the motto: “Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity.”

He wrote this in 1999.

His comments pre-date – and perhaps predict – the rise of Black Lives Matter, popularity of CRT, Democrat race baiting, and the “all white people are racist” stereotyping.

Horowitz, an agnostic, is hated by the Left.

It’s easy to see why Amanda Stocker is now on their ridiculous “religious right-wing” watch – them because we hate them – list.

Thankfully, Amanda isn’t alone.

Recall what Kemi Badenoch, a Conservative MP from the U.K., said in October last year:

CRT as an “an ideology that sees blackness as victimhood and whiteness as oppression. We do not want to see teachers teaching their white pupils about white privilege and inherited racial guilt…What we are against is the teaching of contested political ideas as if they are accepted facts.”

If the AHRC is as passionate about antiracism as they claim, surely the AHRC’s hierarchy will recognise this, and look to a broader range of voices, than those identified by Horowitz.

Critical Theory praxis is designed to discredit. CRT and Queer theory are its weapons. Manipulative thought cancelling platforms used to censure a person based on the lightness of their melanin, convictions about biology, faith, and the man for woman, woman for man, union.

Critical Theory, and its offshoots, Critical Race Theory and Queer Theory, are not what they appear to be.

In the end, Rosalind Croucher, the AHRC president, is to be commended for halting the $140,000 tender, for the simple fact that ultimately, ‘Critical Race Theory is culturally accepted racism.’ – Virgil Walker

First published on Caldron Pool, 30th April 2021.

©Rod Lampard, 2021.

In Australia, Australian History, Politics , , , , , , ,
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Review: Cancel Culture and the Left’s Long March

April 29, 2021 — Leave a comment

Dr. Kevin Donnelly’s Wilkinson Publishing new release, ‘Cancel Culture & The Left’s Long March,’ is an Australian first.

Aussie academics have teamed up to produce a long overdue scholarly rebuttal of the influential Radical Left’s Maoist inspired Culture War (p.62).

Connelly’s authors aren’t numb to the stresses of everyday life, or ignorant of the chasm between the non-fiction of real life, and fiction over facts life of social media netizens. Its content isn’t long-winded, verbose, nor does it come from a group of high-minded ivory tower theorists.

His compilation of essays comes from a broad spectrum of professionals who’ve directly felt the impact of Cancel Culture in their respective fields.

Some of whom have lived some of their professional life staring down the barrel of Cancel Culture’s fully locked, and loaded “fall in, line up, goosestep in unison, or else!” gun.

With contributions from the more well-known personalities such as Geologist Ian Plimer, Former Prime Ministe Tony Abbott, Sky News host Peta Credlin, and Independent scholar Dr. Stephen Chavura, the book introduces other ‘culture war warriors’ Kevin Donnelly, Gary Marks, Jennifer Oriel, John Steenhof, Anthony Dillon, Patrick Byrne, Dr. Fiona Mueller, and Kristian Jenkins.

For all that ‘Cancel Culture & The Left’s Long March’ teaches, it is a well-informed push-back, as much as it is a group of concerned academics drawing a powerful line in the sand.

The book has left me somewhere between anger at Western apathy, disappointment with society’s quick surrender, and being buoyed by its impassioned intellectual plea to step up the fight in a war no one wanted, but were forced onto fighting because the Radical Left will not tolerate an opposing viewpoint, or any viewpoint that doesn’t enhance, deify, or support their own.

What this means is actuating a firm “no” to the totalitarian Left’s imposition of new cultural law; laws that are designed to cancel out civil liberties, the family unit, science, and Biblically Christian based constitutional democracy.

As such, my overall response to ‘Cancel Culture & The Left’s Long March’ is this: every discerning voter needs to read this book as soon as they can.

At the centre of Cancel Culture’s black heart is a manufactured reset of society, that’s part of a broader new paradigm which measures good and evil by the yardstick of ‘safe versus dangerous, instead of true versus false.”

It’s why ‘those who value Western Civilisation must be vigorously opposed to the never sleeping militant left’s totalitarian agenda’ (p.30).

One of the significant features of Donnelly’s work is the depth of knowledge its authors have about their subject matter.

Gary Marks, for instance gives a strong overview of the New Left’s, Marxist Frankfurt School, its origin, mandate, and founders.

Donnelly runs through the tactics of infiltration used not for the purpose of educating children in Australia, but re-educating them.

For example, he says, ‘instead of being an impartial and balanced pursuit of knowledge, wisdom and truth’, education curriculums emphasise ‘politically correct language, ideology and group think.’

He grimly adds, ‘where English once involved teaching clear thinking and the importance of logic and reason when evaluating arguments and differing points of view as a result of [Marxist/New Left] critical theory and post-modernism, students now judge arguments according to how they feel’ (p.35).

Similarly, ‘beauty’, writes Jennifer Oriel, ‘is replaced by a simulation that is culturally impotent.’ University ‘leaders have so diminished freedoms that the miseducated are taking the uneducated into a realm of darkness’ (p.51).

Her examples include the cancelling of non-leftist speakers on campuses, to booting academics for expressing leftist wrong-think with whip statement terms like the ‘thought-terminating cliché Islamophobia’; manufactured for the ‘purpose of beating down critics’ (p.59).

As Oriel writes, the New Left’s ‘neo-Marxist colonisation of the university’ replaced ‘the pursuit of objective truth and classical liberal education with revolutionary education that taught students what to think’ (p.57).

Dr. Fiona Mueller concurred calling the new cultural-left’s triumph over our education institutions, and the ‘ideological intimidation epitomised by cancel culture’ (p.75), the ‘closing of the Australian mind’ (p.67).

 ‘Cancel Culture & The Left’s Long March’ indicates a significant cultural shift; it’s a watershed proclaiming the counter-culture, though forced underground by radical leftist jihadism and its Cancel Culture crusaders, is a thriving community, determined in their resistance to stop a resurgence of bloodthirsty 20th Century authoritarianism.

As Daintree said, while noting that this takeover of the masses was a consequence of post-modernism’s rejection of objectivity, there are ‘signs things will improve.’

The emergence of ‘small liberal arts institutions like Sydney’s Campion college’, for instance, as well as ‘the Ramsey foundation’, and intellectuals in the same calibre as Sir Roger Scruton, and Jordan Peterson, encourage us to ‘reverse the darkening influence’ of those who fixate on identity, gender, and sexual preference (pp.93 & 94)

Speaking of the COVID-19 response, Tony Abbott adds ‘it’s vandalism to demolish anything when there’s nothing better to replace it with’; society has ‘gone beyond accommodating people’s fears to the point of playing on them’ (pp.102 & 104).

It’s this well-ordered, plainly stated insight that allows ‘Cancel Culture & The Left’s Long March’ to take its author’s much needed objective message beyond the corridors of the academy into the colossal subjective Thunderdome of post-modern society.

Cancel Culture is the culture of death equivalent of “life unworthy of life.” The same issuing of demands for ideological conformity under both Nazism and Communism, which forged a legal wall of silence around Stalin’s Gulags, and purges; and euthanized contemporary criticism of Auschwitz, Dachau, Ravensbruck and Buchenwald (among others).

As John Steenhof points out ‘Australian laws are being weaponised to silence religious voices, and to cancel religious Australians who express ideas that are discordant with the atheistically secular ideological fashions’ (p.109).

Israel Folau being the primary example of how weaponised ‘vilification laws are abused.’ Dr. Jereth Kok a Victorian G.P. is another.

Jereth was ‘suspended from practicing medicine after an anonymous complaint from an activist triggered the Medical Board to suspend his licence, alleging that his conservative Christian political views made him a menace to his patients. Despite his patients ‘never complaining about his professionalism’ (pp.114 & 115).

This should send a chill up and down the proverbial spine of Western society. The same callous hands which gripped Europe in the 20th Century, are wrapping its cold, dead, bony fingers round the necks of Western society.

Perhaps the greatest outworking of this cultural-leftist toxin is the Left’s vile misuse of Aboriginal Australia, where ‘fuzzy sounding and emotive words or phrases – like “first nations people”, “connecting with country”, “institutional racism” – that have no precise meaning, are used to bolster an argument to make an opponent look sinister, or make the one using the rhetoric sound intelligent and morally superior.” (p.126)

Anthony Dillon writes, ‘such [CRT] rhetoric is a smokescreen’ used by “whinger ninjas” [sic.]. They turn attention away from the ‘fact that very often the worst offenders in treating Aboriginal people badly are other Aboriginal people’ (p.129).

Critical Race Theory [CRT] and Queer theory share the same genetic origins in New Left Critical Theory, formed by the reduction of society into an oppressor and oppressed class, with related post-modern, historical revisionism to justify it.

Queer theory, says Patrick Byrne, opposes the ‘biological worldview.’ It cancels criticism on the false moral relativist view that biology is a social construct.

Byrne compares gender dysphoria to anorexia, where the ‘anorexic female’s perception of her body as obese is in conflict with the reality.’ If we’re forced to affirm gender dysphoria, because not to do so is labelled “transphobic”, will they also ‘insist on supporting a person with anorexia nervosa’ to ignore their biological fact for subjective fiction? (p.143).

Ian Plimer and Stephen Chavura conclude the book.

Plimer impressively argues it’s the ‘sun that drives the surface temperature of the planet’, not carbon dioxide. Writing, ‘it has never been shown that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming’ (p.162)

He also explains how the ‘Climate cult’ has manufactured the “Climate Crisis;” Stating that ‘science is tribal, is politicised, and because science is government funded, has a tendency to follow the party-line.’

Adding, this ‘Climate change cult is part of the ‘cancel culture community masquerading as science.’ We know this because basic questions such as “how do we know what we know?’ is considered a seditious and offensive question (p.164).

Cancel Culture’s biggest tool says, Chavura, is Social media. It’s ‘virtual mobs’ are unlike anything seen in history; and the ‘only speech they tolerate is that which conforms to the leftist social agenda.’

He writes, ‘at the end of the day cancel culture thrives on timidity, and codes of free speech,’ as opposed to Cancel Culture’s obsession with arbitrary, and ambiguous “hate speech” rubrics, that often are used to silence speech the Left hates.

The power of Cancel culture’s effectiveness is limited by the attention we feed it.

‘Cancel Culture & The Left’s Long March’ a book of criticisms, and observations.

I’m confident in saying that it is one of the most important books I’ve read in a while.

Donnelly’s well put together compilation isn’t a manifesto, it’s a response to, and exposition of demonic false doctrines, deceptively emerging from the hegemonic leftist swamp as a liberating, benevolent force.

May we see more academics follow these courageous few.

First published on Caldron Pool, 24th April, 2021.

©Rod Lampard, 2021.

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Cancel Culture can only be Stopped by Courage Culture

April 28, 2021 — Leave a comment

Australian academic, author and public speaker, Dr. Stephen Chavura has given his strongest message to date on the dangers of apathy in the face of virulent cancel culture.

In his essay from Kevin Donnelly’s ‘Cancel Culture and the Left’s Long March’, abridged by The Australian, Chavura argued for what he calls, ‘courage culture’ to meet and ‘remedy cancel culture.’

Central to cancel culture, writes Chavura, ‘is an emerging therapeutic totalitarianism, which seeks to outlaw speech and practices deemed “unsafe” or “harmful.”

This is evidenced by the emerging police state in the West, which from behind a wall of fearmongering narratives, ambiguous legislation, and EULA’s headlined as regulating “hate speech,” the Left arbitrarily polices thought and speech that it hates.

By extension, we also see the cancelling of livelihoods, personalities, places, and conservative platforms the Left hates, which are now becoming too numerous to mention.

For instance, cancel culture’s ‘woketivists’ have seen to the ‘termination of careers and punishment of free speech of ordinary Australians working in education, health, the public service, and private corporations. In Australia the Human Rights Law Alliance represents dozens whose religious views – particularly regarding sexuality and gender – have resulted in them losing their jobs or being disciplined in their workplaces.’

The upside to this, says Chavura is that there are a growing number of people, corporations, and institutions who recognise that Cancel culture is fascism proper. That it’s a direct domestic threat to civil liberties, and constitutional democracies.

In thanking them for their courage, Chavura acknowledges the limitations these groups face in the struggle to be heard within the Leftist echo chamber that violently opposes opposing viewpoints, with often manipulative lawfare, and intimidation through false claims on the moral high ground, and a consensus from the majority.

These groups see Cancel Culture’s inherent negation of life, its hypocrisy, and absolute hatred of anything its “feelings first” yardstick renders as life unworthy of life.

What’s needed, said Chavaru, are ‘more organisations defending freedom of speech and other liberal rights [to] emerge to fight back against cancel culture.’

If so, then ‘more brave individuals will stand tall when the cancel mob comes for them.’

Along with this community uprising will come support for those holding the line against the fire on the horizon, stoked as it is by the darkness of another world-shattering gathering storm.

He writes, ‘Cancel culture is itself a test of how committed citizens in comfortable and prosperous liberal democracies are to their freedoms of speech, religion, and, conscience.’

This storm can be stopped, ‘but only by courage culture.’

If, he adds, ‘our freedoms are cancelled because of our apathy and fear, then we’ll only have proven that we forfeited our right to those hard-won freedoms long ago.’

Closer to home, Chavura has long held the view that the Church in the West faces a Kairos moment; built for a time such as this, a time for choosing, of risking, of meeting the task handed to it as Christ’s hands, and feet on earth.

This is a time for defending society where freedom is governed by objective morality, against a phantasmagorian utopia governed by nothing other than what has been prescribed for us by mob rule, an unelected bureaucratic elite, and the nihilistic abandonment of individual responsibility, God and the obligation of reciprocity His grace commands of us.

Those who deny the existence of Cancel Culture are usually part of the “resistance” pushing Cancel Culture.

These groups are all too ready to throw other Christians under the bus for personal gain.

Buying permission to speak into politics, they purchase privilege with the blood of saints they’ve slain on the altar of their own self-righteousness.

It’s a political play for influence, power and an audience. It has nothing to do with building up the body of Christ; and everything to do with maintaining the Left’s hold on the body of Christ. Man’s lordship over against Christ-as-Lord.

Its therefore not hard to see why these goats are quick to attack others for calling a spade a spade.

Cancel Culture represses free speech, demands heart allegiance, and imposes new cultural laws in order to pursue the erasure of civil liberties.

The goal is to replace Classical Liberal societies, and their Biblical foundations, with Marxist Promethean wokeness (my definition for Cultural Marxism.)

Chuck Colson called barbarism, ‘inhumanity done in the name of humanity; the killing of people for their own good.’

Cancel culture is fascism proper. It’s barbaric, and this barbarianism is punching its way through the gates.

Flawed, anti-Nazi theologian, Karl Barth, saw this first hand. His faith in Jesus Christ led him to reject the deification of the state, and its sycophants in the German Church. As a result, he was booted out of Germany by Hitler.

His resistance is summed up with one sentence:

‘Christianity is the protest against all the high places which human beings build for themselves’ (C.D IV/II p.524).

It’s why the Barmen Declaration that he helped forge was a founding document of the Confessing Church.

It sought to stop opportunistic clergy, and their congregations, from subsuming Christian theology into the service of Nazism, boldly proclaiming:

‘We reject the false doctrine, as though there were areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ, but to other lords–areas in which we would not need justification and sanctification through him.’ (Barth, 8.15 second thesis, Barmen Declaration 1934).

Heed Chavura’s call, because he’s right: ‘Courage is the only way forward.’

In the spirit of the movement supporting cancelled Star Wars actress, Gina Carano, of The Mandalorian, ‘Welcome to the Rebellion!’

First published on Caldron Pool, 9th April 2021.

©Rod Lampard, 2021.

In Australian History, Church history, Karl Barth, Political Theology, Politics , , ,
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Big Tech’s Iron Curtain Guillotine Comes for Rebel News & Project Veritas

April 24, 2021 — Leave a comment

Despite Big Tech’s efforts to present themselves as platforms for freedom of speech, they seem bullheadedly determined to build an iron curtain of silence around critics not aligned with their preferred ideological paradigm, or political party.

Following on from Silicon Valley’s ongoing wall-to-wall de-platforming of President Donald Trump, including pulling the kill-switch on competing social media platforms such as Parler, and Gab, the monolithic golden gods of the information age are engaging in Soviet-Maoist tactics in the way they gag dissent, and cancel unapproved opposition.

Big Tech’s reassuring words which attempt to calm increasing concerns over their new collaborative monopoly that decides what news gets shared, and who gets to share it, when matched against their praxis, suggest that these reassurances are nothing more than the soothing platitudes of empty rhetoric.

Put simply, they aren’t delivering on what they promise.

Actions speak louder than words.

For example, Rebel News reported yesterday that YouTube has suspended them for a video talking (ironically) about Big Tech censorship and cancel culture.

This means that Rebel News cannot upload, or post any of its news content on YouTube for one week.

The suspension, according Editor-in-Chief Ezra Levant, also came with a warning from YouTube stating that the next breach of the “rules” will be met with a longer suspension, followed by the deletion of the Rebel News account.

RN pointed out that the double-standard by reminding people that while Big Tech bans, blocks or boots those not aligned with Leftism or the current political narrative of Globalists etc, ‘accounts for Nicolas Maduro, the Communist dictator of Venezuela, or Ayatollah Khamenei, the theocratic ruler of Iran, or numerous Chinese Communist regime propagandists are permitted to remain.’

YT’s suspension of RN, was trailed by Twitter locking out Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe for what Ben Shapiro said was a violation of Twitter’s rules regarding “spam.”

The most probable reason for their censoring of O’Keefe is connected to him reporting the truth about CNN’s anti-Trump electioneering propaganda, where he revealed CNN’s vicious, utter contempt for their viewers.

Shapiro agreed, writing in response, ‘I’m sure this has nothing to do with O’Keefe’s latest investigation, in which he utterly humiliated CNN by exposing its rank bias. The timing is probably just a coincidence!’

He’s right. The timing is too convenient.

Shapiro was also right to state that ‘this should concern everyone – left, right, and center. It is becoming easier and easier for Big Tech to silence people they view as “problematic.” This problem is going to get worse before it gets better.’

As ex-New Left foot soldier, David Horowitz has noted in his somewhat informal confession ‘The Black Book of the American Left (2013)’, anyone aligned, or appearing to be aligned with the leftist ideological hegemony is beyond reproach, those deemed unworthy of life, however, are easy prey, targeted with ‘defamation and then quarantine.’

Progressives, he said, ‘disconnect from reality in the service of a destructive illusion, and are blind to the human consequences of their ideas and actions.’

Thus, with one hand Silicon Valley can say they stand for civil liberties, while with other they denounce, then guillotine anyone considered to be a threat to their increasingly centralised power base.

This is, as Horowitz explained, ‘the common tack’ of the Leftist regime. Revisionism, and an ‘inability to face up to the past, a penchant for rewriting it, resistance to historical truth, and the deliberate suppression of facts or inversion of facts in the service of a political cause.’

Big tech’s behaviour personifies the culture war. That battle, as this new iron curtain proves, isn’t left vs. right, black vs. right, it’s truth vs. falsehood.

Those would benefit from hiding the truth, profit from lies. Which is why there’s no room for self-reflection in a room full of self-righteous romantic revolutionaries.

Beware the auctioneers.

First published on Caldron Pool, 16th April 2021.

©Rod Lampard, 2021.

In Social media , , , , ,
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