Soaking up Pearls

Hopefully, always feasting on knowledge, wisdom, truth, and chocolate! Retweets are not necessarily my opinion.

[Soaking up Pearls @soakinguppearls]

"If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed." Thomas Jefferson

[By The Well 🍊 @ByTheWell4God]

@MZHemingway @SecDuffy the airports should not be staffed with foreigners. The official language is English and if they don’t speak it fluently, they should work in a capacity that serves the public.

[Jeff Clark @JeffClarkUS]

What are we doing America?

Why are we letting Chinese firms get involved with voter rolls and critical infrastructure?

[Lara Logan @laralogan]

The Club of Rome, the Fabian Society & the Franklin school. All part of the globalist/marxist machine.

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

The Club of Rome – They Decided You Were the Problem

The Club of Rome was founded in 1968 – the same year as May 1968, when the Frankfurt School’s student generation took to the streets. The timing was not coincidental. The project was similar. The method was different.

Where the Frankfurt School attacked culture and the Fabian Society infiltrated institutions, the Club of Rome attacked something more fundamental: the idea of the future itself.

1. Founded in Rome at a meeting of thirty scientists, economists, and industrialists. Not street activists or academics playing with ideas. These were people who sat on boards, advised governments, and had the ear of the powerful. From the beginning, the Club of Rome operated at the elite level, producing ideas that would filter into policy, regulation, and eventually common assumptions.

2. Their founding document was The Limits to Growth (1972), commissioned from MIT and backed by the Volkswagen Foundation and the Rockefeller family. It modeled population growth, resource consumption, and industrial output, reaching a conclusion it had perhaps decided before running the models: the world was running out of everything, growth was the enemy, and civilization was heading for collapse. Malthus had said the same in 1798. He was wrong. The Club of Rome said it again with better graphics and a Rockefeller grant. They forgot the variable that changes everything: human intelligence applied to technology.

3. Here is the thing about being wrong with sufficient institutional support: the policy infrastructure outlasts the wrongness. The Limits to Growth was challenged within a decade. Nobody dismantled what was built around it. Carbon credits, degrowth, ESG scores, renewable-energy mandates, and the precautionary principle all reflect assumptions the document embedded in elite thinking in 1972.

4. The Club of Rome did not hide its conclusions. In 1991, The First Global Revolution report stated: "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill." The passage concludes: "The real enemy, then, is humanity itself." And this was not a new theme. Their 1974 report Mankind at the Turning Point contained the notorious formulation: "The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man."
This was not fringe rhetoric. It came from the people building the institutional infrastructure of the global environmental movement.
Humanity became the problem that civilization itself had to manage.

5. In 1974, Mankind at the Turning Point argued that nation-states were obstacles to solving global problems and should cede sovereignty to supranational management. Sovereignty transferred upward. Democratic accountability gave way to technical management by experts. Spinelli’s 1941 program, arriving through the environmental door.

6. The population collapse we are living through is not an accident. It is the downstream consequence of decades of policy built around the assumption that fewer human beings is better. The civilizational pessimism, the environmental messaging that frames new human beings as threats rather than inheritors, all have institutional origins. The Club of Rome built the framework. The WEF deployed it. The EU regulated it. Schools taught it. A generation concluded, logically enough within that worldview, that the future was not worth bringing children into.

7. They were wrong about the resources. They were right that the idea would spread. The cancer metaphor was always the tell: the thing they wanted to treat was the same thing that built the Sistine Chapel, composed the Requiem, went to the moon, and is capable of solving the problems they claimed to fear.

Human intelligence is not the cancer.
It is the only cure that has ever worked.

And the civilization that remembers this — that treats the next generation as an asset rather than a threat — is the civilization that survives.

[Steve Eaton, PhD @SteveEaton39415]

This exemplifies the backwards thinking in this case.
Arday was offered a professorship. Understandably, he took it.
So who, exactly, placed 'impossible standards' on him?
He could have turned the professorship down if he thought the standards were too high. He chose not to.
What happened to accountability?
The more you frame people as helpless the less credit you give them.

[Lara Logan @laralogan]

Rational.Reasinable. Honest. Common sense. Courage.

[NEWSMAX @NEWSMAX]

COMER PRESSES BECERRA: House Oversight & Government Reform Committee Chair James Comer wants former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra to explain why he withheld Dr. Anthony Fauci's diary and phone from a select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic.

[Hans Mahncke @HansMahncke]

One of the more revealing developments of the Trump era is that Democrats spent years mainlining TDS as their political fuel. It powered everything they did. But after a decade, the drug is losing its kick, and simply increasing the dosage will not recreate the old high. So now they need something stronger, and they are throwing communism into the cocktail.

[Natalie Winters @nataliegwinters]

DSA Senate candidate Angie Nixon wants a “National Rent Freeze and Moratorium on Evictions.”

She's literally a landlord collecting tens of thousands in rent from tenants.

🤡

[Greg Price @greg_price11]

Flashback to her very first day as Governor of Virginia when Spanberger rescinded Glenn Youngkin's executive order that mandated Virginia police cooperate with immigration enforcement.

[Stephen Miller @StephenM]

A political party that ushers this evil across our border and into our homes is a party that must never be allowed any future power.

[Ken Cuccinelli II @KenCuccinelli]

Yeah, that thing that never happens? It seems that it has happened quite a lot.

@ETI_now
@Heritage_Action

[Nick Freitas @NickJFreitas]

Unfortunately, he is in Fairfax, and the Commonwealth's attorney there isn't keen on prosecuting criminals.

[Let’s be Frank @FKooser007]

@Kristof_Poland Unfortunate that some thinkers just want to tear down…. Fortunately there are still entrepreneurs (thinkers as well), that want to build and improve life. We need more of the latter, less of the former.

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

The Most Destructive Intellectual Project of the Twentieth Century.

The Frankfurt School. You should know what it was, what it built, and why you are still living inside it.

1. The Institute for Social Research was founded in Frankfurt in 1923 and relocated to Columbia University in 1934 when Hitler came to power. The civilization they had decided to dismantle gave them refuge when another tried to kill them. They spent the next five decades producing the theoretical infrastructure for that dismantling. Western civilization itself was the problem: reason, the Enlightenment, the family, tradition, authority. Not reformed. Dismantled.

2. They called it Critical Theory – and the name is the program. Everything is to be criticized; nothing is to be built. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Adorno and Horkheimer argued that Western reason — the reason that produced Newton and the rule of law — contained the seeds of Auschwitz. Not that reason had been misused, but that reason itself, taken to its conclusion, produces the death camp. This was not a critique of institutions. It was an indictment of the civilization itself.

3. Adorno gave them the psychological weapon. The Authoritarian Personality (1950) classified conservatism, religious faith, patriotism, and the traditional family not as political positions but as symptoms of a proto-fascist personality. If you believe in the nation or the father’s authority, you are pre-fascist. The opponent was no longer wrong – he was sick. You don’t argue with a pathology. You treat it.
This made dialogue impossible. You don’t persuade someone who is wrong; you diagnose someone who is sick. Politics becomes therapy, and disagreement becomes pathology.

4. Marcuse gave them the political weapon. Repressive Tolerance (1965) argued that tolerating wrong ideas is itself oppression. True tolerance therefore requires suppressing intolerant ideas. The left decides which ideas are intolerant. Everyone else is silenced – not despite tolerance, but "in its name." Censorship dressed in the vocabulary of liberation.

5. The generation that read Marcuse at Columbia, Berkeley, and Yale went on to run universities, media, foundations, NGOs, content moderation departments, and the EU regulatory apparatus. They implemented the argument sincerely because they had been taught it as philosophy. This was the Frankfurt School’s greatest achievement: it produced true believers.

6. French Theory picked up the tools and made them aesthetic. Foucault made the critique of power literary. Derrida made the critique of meaning philosophical. Deleuze made the critique of identity elegant. A political program became a cultural sensibility. You can argue with a program. A sensibility is in the air you breathe. By the time these ideas reached the American campus through the French conduit, they were no longer ideology. They were the water. The fish did not know they were wet.

7. A civilization stands on three pillars: truth exists and is accessible to reason; good is distinguishable from evil; and there is an inheritance worth transmitting. The Frankfurt School attacked all three – systematically and with considerable intellectual sophistication. It produced a generation that knows how to deconstruct and has forgotten how to build. That sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere.
The ultimate achievement was to make destruction feel like progress. Every inherited institution became suspect; every constraint became oppression; every act of preservation became reactionary. Deconstruction became the default, while construction became something that needed to justify itself.

The answer is not another theory.
It is the thing the Frankfurt School most feared: the builder who simply builds, the scientist who follows the evidence, the father who transmits what was transmitted to him.

The deconstruction machine runs on the assumption that nothing is worth building.

Prove it wrong.
Tell the truth, have courage, and build.

[Mike Collins @MikeCollinsGA]

Jon Ossoff reduces to sleazy personal attacks and intimidation because he has no record, no results, and no spine.

He’s more interested in political theater and going viral on social media, so he doesn’t have to talk about how he will raise your taxes, open the border, and sell us out to his New York donors.

We’re taking Georgia back from this disaster.

[Lyceum Now @LyceumNow]

OP-ED: We still like distinctions. We still love honor. We still strive for a version of greatness, however confused. The problem is that no one is educating for it anymore. David Bahr explains: https://t.co/MW2zf4rbmY

[Scott Rasmussen @ScottWRasmussen]

After I finished high school, my father and I worked closely together for a few years in the late 1970s and early '80s. I will never forget the car ride on August 16, 1978 and am still amazed at what it helped create.

My most cherished memory of my father was at about 6 pm on September 7, 1979-- one hour before @ESPN went on the air. We snuck around the back of the building and had a moment alone to reflect on all that had happened since that car ride. Later, our journeys through life took different paths, but I am grateful we had that brief moment together and am proud of what we accomplished.

[David Brody @DBrodyReports]

The far left does NOT have a monopoly on antisemitism.
It’s time conservatives confront the Jew hatred spreading on the FAR RIGHT.
Calling a Jewish congressman a “fat Jew.” Devil horns. “Jewish supremacy.” Holocaust conspiracies. And even invoking HITLER.
This isn’t “America First.”
This isn’t legitimate criticism of Israel. IT’S ANTISEMITISM. FULL STOP.
Where are the so-called big America First influencers on this? They need to call this vile hate out just as forcefully when it comes from their own side.
My latest on the grotesque campaign against Rep. Randy Fine:
https://t.co/uBiRGNXk1G @RepFine @DanBilzerian

[Soaking up Pearls @soakinguppearls]

@jsolomonReports I guess we have a new Executive branch: the Judiciary.