by Bob Barr | Jun 24, 2020 | Uncategorized |
Townhall.comVirtue signaling in corporate America has become as much of a marketing strategy as television commercials and magazine ads. Most recently, the “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) demonstrations have provided ample opportunity for corporations to demonstrate how “woke” they are, by donating money to BLM and issuing self-serving tweets trumpeting their generosity and “wokeness.” The ease with which groups like BLM are able to successfully pressure corporate leaders to bow to their demands may surprise some observers, but it is in fact nothing new. Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton honed the strategy to near perfection years ago. At its core, such corporate capitulation reflects a deep, if unexplainable corporate sense of racial guilt that can be triggered by outside groups pressing the right buttons. The strategy appears often to work even though the true goals of those exerting the pressure may have little, if anything to do with racial justice, and everything to do with funding an anti-capitalist movement designed to destroy these very corporations in the name of “social progress.”BLM’s leaders do not even feel the need to hide their true goals from their corporate victims. In a recent interview, BLM founder Patrisse Cullors identifies herself and fellow co-founder Alicia Garza as “trained Marxists.” This is no slip of the tongue. Such language reflects the Movement’s philosophical underpinnings and goals — the dismantling of America’s capitalist economic system as a “racist tool.”As with so many other contemporary “progressive” movements, such as “Fight for 15,” “Extinction Rebellion,” and “Occupy,” BLM starts with a superficially worthy niche to gain quick publicity and support. Many of the protestors who came out to support...
by Bob Barr | Jun 22, 2020 | Uncategorized |
As the Supreme Court nears the end of its 2019-2020 term, it is becoming increasingly questionable whether the “conservative majority” that Trump appointees Gorsuch and Kavanaugh were supposed to have ushered in actually exists.Ever since his legally convoluted majority opinion upholding Obamacare against serious constitutional challenge eight years ago, Chief Justice John Roberts has provided conservatives plenty of reason to suspect he is not the “conservative” jurist in whom many had pinned hopes. However, a handful of decisions by the Court in the past two months have raised new red flags that the problems with the “conservative” majority run deeper than a single jurist.An additional concern is that recent public threats by leading Democrat senators directed against the Court’s Republican-appointed justices might well have intimidated some of them into tempering their views.The refusal in late April by a majority of the nine justices to decide a Second Amendment case out of New York City that was ripe for such action was the first of these red flags. It came as no surprise that Roberts joined the majority in refusing to decide the case. What was surprising, however, is that Brett Kavanaugh, the most recent Associate Justice, joined Roberts and the four “liberal” justices in punting the New York gun case. It was Kavanaugh who was the victim of an especially vicious confirmation battle in 2018, and who was specifically and publicly threatened by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in March.Just weeks later, the Court declined to accept another case that was ripe for decision. On June15, the Court refused to hear a challenge by the Trump administration to...
by Bob Barr | Jun 19, 2020 | Uncategorized |
American Action NewsThe violent upheavals we have witnessed over the past three weeks in cities across America, coupled with the clamoring for “racial justice,” has elicited comparisons with events in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Similarities exist certainly, but our country is a far different place than it was 52 years ago. Where we wind up when the dust settles after the votes are cast on November 3rd, will be far different from where we found ourselves on Wednesday, November 6, 1968, or, four years later the day after Richard Nixon was reelected.The violence in America in 1968 and continuing for several years thereafter, was precipitated initially by opposition to the war in Vietnam but was seriously exacerbated by domestic events, notably the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy that Spring and Summer. King’s assassination in particular provided the other catalyst for the wave of violence – racial tension.Today, while there is no discernible relationship between U.S. foreign policy and the turmoil rocking cities from Seattle to Atlanta, there clearly is a strong underpinning of racial animosity; more so than was the case a half-century ago.Another common element between the political upheavals evident in these two eras is deep-seated personal animosity toward a national leader – Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972, and Donald Trump today. In that first election, Nixon tapped into a profound sense of unease among middle-class voters, focused first on the antiwar demonstrations and later the violence following King’s assassination. In declaring himself the “law and order” candidate running against an entrenched establishment Democrat — Hubert Humphrey — who appeared to be...
