America at the Crossroads

This Independence Day, America is rudderless and leaderless adrift in a morass of liberal orthodoxy that doesn’t work.  Folks are being indoctrinated in our primary and secondary schools.  Universities have been taken over by the extreme left under the guise of “academic freedom” which is anything but.  Try finding a Republican or a conservative tenured professor or a center right commencement speaker.  The media is crawling with the spawn of 1960’s hippies who have dropped principles of freedom and individualism for the collective and a cult of personality.   The melting pot of my immigrant grandparents has become a “celebration of diversity” which harbors the threat of tearing this nation apart in the future.  “From many, one,” has become “from many, many.”  The founding fathers have been relegated to the trash can of irrelevancy; a bunch of old white men who promoted the slave trade.  Our leaders seem ready to sacrifice our country on the altar of internationalism cutting out the country’s heart using the knife of sacred environmentalism to “redistribute” wealth not to our citizens, but other countries.  America should pay for its sins.

Our nation has been turned upside down. Kids lemonade stands are closed down.  Men are expendable.  The government is watching every key stroke we make on the computer, including mine typing this essay.  Our phone calls and emails are being gathered in the name of “national security”.  The IRS has become a political enforcement agency.  The thought police are looking for every non-politically correct utterance we make notwithstanding how long ago (consider Paula Deen’s problems).  Monitoring cameras, both private and government, are everywhere.  Now the government is turning government worker against government worker through an Obama executive order advising federal employees to report on co-workers who might be experiencing stress, or marital difficulties or financial difficulties or have expressed “discontent.”  Even in schools students have been asked to report on parental activities which might seem strange.  This is the stuff of totalitarian governments.

What is more disturbing is the arrogance of those doing these things.  The Obama administration has stonewalled Congress, the people’s house, in investigations relating to the Mexican gun running operation Fast and Furious, the investigation of the Benghazi fiasco, the IRS scandal, the Associated Press scandal,  the NSA matter.  This includes non-operative department heads lying to Congress and an Attorney General who has been held in contempt of Congress with no consequences.   Add to the current of the IRS who provided a redacted report which said nothing, a combative Hillary “what difference make it now” Clinton, two IRS acting heads who pleaded the Fifth and went on Easter Egg hunts in the White House.

The result of all of this is a public who distrusts and fears the government, a press that is afraid to report the news, whistleblowers going into hiding, and a world community that for all intents and purposes is laughing its ass off at American impotency.

This Independence Day, it’s time for America to press the reset button on ourselves.  It’s time to re-examine the principles on which this nation was founded.  The Bill of Rights needs to be dusted off and moved to the front of the room.  America is in trouble.  There is apparently not a leader in sight to take this nation into the future.  People need to get their nose out of the computers and tablets and cell phones and pay attention to the real world. 

This is America’s crossroads.  The Barbarians are at the gate, and they are us.  No on needs to take away freedom that Americans are now willing to give it away to an omnipresent government.  If it is not fixed, the Independence Days of the future will be hollowed out celebrations with no substance…only fear.  

Don't Forget Free Speech at Universities

In the midst of the Obama scandals and the assault on political freedom by the Internal Revenue Service and the NSA, the Obama administration has also been active on college campuses making sure we are all politically correct. In a directive that is applicable to all universities that receive federal funding, the Departments of Justice and Education have issued new guidelines on what constitutes sexual harassment. It now must be defined as “any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature” including “verbal conduct.”

On its face, it seems innocent enough. On the mild side, if someone tells another a dirty joke and someone overhears it and is offended…that is sexual misconduct. If there is a debate on the morality of homosexuality, that is sexual misconduct. If the school reads or performs The Vagina Chronicles, that is sexual harassment. It has also been used to stop pro-live groups from certain activities on campus because it made some students “uncomfortable.”

This overturns a previous policy defined in 2003 which stated sexual harassment must “include something beyond the mere expression of views, words, symbols, or thoughts that some person finds offensive.”

The new policy guidelines were issued in an advisory letter to University of Montana co-opting requirements under the Administrative Procedure Act for notice posting and public comment on all such regulations. Once again the Obama administrative is playing fast and loose with the law to get what it wants be executive decree.

The response from universities has been tepid. Already mired in “hate speech” codes, the associate counsel for the State University of New York (SUNY) stated:

“The Education Department and higher education administrators are well aware of the First Amendment and academic freedom. Encouraging the campus community to report instances of sexual harassment and leaving the evaluation of such reports to designated experts is appropriate and lawful”.

In other words, you can trust the university to make the decision as to whether or not there are free speech violations. Just like the NSA is telling Verizon customers to trust them not to use the mass of information being collected by them to be used inappropriately and only for “national defense.”

A case in point re: trusting university administrations occurred at the SUNY Oswego campus:

“In October 2012, exchange student Alexander Myers was suspended and ordered to vacate his campus residence after emails he sent were alleged to "defame, harass, intimidate, or threaten another individual or group." Myers had contacted three area hockey coaches as research for a class assignment he was writing on SUNY Oswego men's hockey coach Ed Gosek, explaining that "what you say about Mr Gosek does not have to be positive." The next day, Myers received a letter from President Deborah F. Stanley, which placed him on interim suspension and charged with "disruptive behavior," on the grounds that SUNY Oswego policy prohibited emails that "defame, harass, intimidate, or threaten another individual or group." FIRE wrote to Stanley on October 26, 2012, arguing that the charges were blatantly unconstitutional. In response, SUNY dropped the "disruptive behavior" charge, though it found him guilty of "dishonesty" and ordered him to write apology letters to the hockey coaches.” (from article posted on the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education web site.)

SUNY was publicly chastised by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and backed down from its position dropping all charges. Nevertheless, America…wake up to what these fascists and thought control people are doing to this country.

Does anyone see a pattern here?

(THE ABOVE IS BASED ON ARTICLES APPEARING ON THE WEBSITE OF FOUNDATION FOR INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS IN EDUCATION AND WASHINGTON FREE BEACON)