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Millennial snowflakes want socialism, but most of them cannot even define it

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Millennials love socialism and communism
Millennials love socialism and communism

I like to make fun of millennials on this blog, because in my interactions with them, I find that they have great confidence and self-esteem in their own opinions, even though they have seldom done any study of the issues they’re confident about.

Campus Reform has a good example of millennial ignorance:

More than four-in-ten U.S. millennials would prefer to live under socialism than capitalism, according to a new survey by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

When given the choice to pick a preferred system of government, 44 percent of millennials responded that they would rather live in a socialist country while another seven percent opted for a communist state. Capitalism, on the other hand, was preferred by 42 percent of millennial respondents, with the remaining 14 percent split evenly between fascism and communism.

According to the study, pro-socialist sentiment is much higher among millennials when compared to the rest of the country, noting that 59 percent of Americans say they would rather reside in a capitalist country, with only 35 percent of respondents signaling a preference for a socialist state.

Millennials were also about twice as likely as the general population to say they would prefer living in a fascist or communist country, with about seven percent choosing each option.

“The percentage of Millennials who would prefer socialism to capitalism is a full ten points higher than that of the general population,” the foundation observed in its report. “It seems that the majority of America’s largest generation would prefer to live in a socialist or communist society than in a free enterprise system that respects the rule of law, private property, and limited government.”

The survey also found that millennials, along with most other Americans, “either don’t know the definition of communism or misidentify it.”

[…]Consistent with the other findings, the survey also revealed that millennials are least opposed to communist ideology when compared to other age groups.

Let’s just take one example of this millennial ignorance.

The Daily Signal posted an article about a survey from last year on millennial attitudes towards communism.

Look at this:

The survey also revealed a general lack of historical knowledge, especially among young adults. According to the report, one-third (32 percent) of millennials believed that more people were killed under George W. Bush than under Joseph Stalin.

Bush killed more people than Stalin? First of all, Bush’s war was to liberate Iraq from radical Islam. You can see what happened when we pulled our forces out under Obama. Raped Yazidi sex-slaves, for one thing. Stalin killed people who disagreed with him – like the Ukrainian farmers I blogged about before. The number of war deaths in Iraq numbers in the tens of thousands, and most of those casualties are enemy casualties. I like dead terrorists, so that’s not a liability for me. The number of deaths under Stalin is somewhere around 40 million, most of those were innocent people.

Here are the brilliant millennials saying what they’ve been taught to say so that people will be impressed:

They’re just idiots. I wouldn’t trust them to spit on the pavement.

There is some hope, though, that when millennials start paying taxes they flip their voting to free enterprise policies.

The Charlotte Observer explains:

There is some evidence that this generation’s views on activist government will stick. However, there is more reason to expect that support for their Scandinavian version of socialism may wither as they age, make more money and pay more in taxes.

The expanded social welfare state Sanders thinks the United States should adopt requires everyday people to pay considerably more in taxes. Yet millennials become averse to social welfare spending if they foot the bill. As they reach the threshold of earning $40,000 to $60,000 a year, the majority of millennials come to oppose income redistribution.

Millennials wouldn’t be the first generation to flip-flop. In the 1980s, 52 percent of baby boomers supported bigger government, and so did Generation Xers (53 percent) in the 1990s. Yet, both baby boomers and Gen Xers grew more skeptical of government over time and by about the same magnitude. Today, only 25 percent of boomers and 37 percent of Gen Xers continue to favor larger government.

Yeah, growing up has a way of making people into Republicans. That might be an argument for getting kids out of school and into work sooner, so that they grow up faster, and have grown-up beliefs about economics and taxation. I don’t even consider someone to be a grown-up until they’ve worked 5 years in the private sector. I’m really not sure why millennials think that their opinions are correct given that lack of life experience at grown-up tasks. Going to school and working in the public sector or not-for-profit sector are not grown-up tasks.

News

Texas shooter was an atheist, mocked believers in God

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Richard Dawkins on atheism, morality, free will and human rights
Richard Dawkins on atheism, morality, free will and human rights

I saw some images purportedly taken from his now-deleted Facebook page that showed that he liked a bunch of atheist pages, but I wanted to hold off until we had some actual comments from people who knew him personally.

This is from Daily Wire:

According to former classmates of Devin Patrick Kelley, the 26-year-old man who killed 26 people and injured over 20 others in a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas on Sunday was an avowed atheist who mocked those who believed in God.

DailyMail.com spoke with former classmates who attended New Braunfels High School with Kelley. They all told a similar story: Kelley — who had a history of violence and was given a “bad conduct” discharge from the Air Force — “preached atheism,” acted “creepy” and “weird,” and seemed to hold a “very negative” worldview.

“He had a kid or two, fairly normal, but kinda quiet and lately seemed depressed,” Kelley’s former high school classmate Patrick Boyce told DailyMail.com. “He was the first atheist I met. He went Air Force after high school, got discharged but I don’t know why. I was just shocked [to hear the news].”

Another former classmate, Nina Rose Nava, told the outlet that Kelley “was different in school and creeped me out,” but she added that she “never” would have thought he would do “such a horrific thing.”

[…]”[I]n complete shock! I legit just deleted him off my [Facebook] cause I couldn’t stand his post,” wrote Nava. “He was always talking about how people who believe in God [were] stupid and trying to preach his atheism.”

Nava’s impression of Kelley’s posts were echoed by Christopher Leo Longoria, who said he “removed him off [Facebook] for those same reasons!” Longoria described Kelley as being “super negative all the time.”

Michael Goff agreed with Nava’s opinion of Kelley, replying, “He was weird but never that damn weird, always posting his atheist sh** like Nina wrote, but damn he always posted pics of him and his baby — crazy.”

He was only able to buy weapons because of two mistakes made by the Air Force, his former employer.

The NY Daily News explains:

The Air Force blundered by not submitting Devin Kelley’s criminal history to the FBI database used for gun background checks, as required, officials said Monday night.

Kelley appears to have both lied and taken advantage of a loophole in federal firearms laws to purchase his weapons despite serving time in military prison for domestic violence.

[…]Kelley, 26, was pushed out of the military in 2014 after serving a year in the brig at Miramar Air Force Base in California.

He was convicted in military court in 2012 of beating up his first wife and fracturing the skull of their young son, while assigned to Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. She divorced him that same year.

[…]Based on his plea under 18 U.S. Code section 922, Christensen said it would have been illegal for Kelley to possess or purchase a firearm.

“It’s also illegal because he was convicted of a domestic violence charge. So, for two reasons, he should not have had a gun.”

So, this is a case where government failed to do its job, and keep weapons out of the hands of a crazy atheist who hated Christians.

If there is a silver lining to Kelley’s shocking evil, it’s the story about the man who shot the atheist murderer. He is a Christian man, a marksman, a former NRA instructor, and the owner of a legal firearm.

The Washington Times explains:

A former National Rifle Association instructor has come forward as the “good Samaritan” who shot and wounded the gunman who attacked the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas.

Stephen Willeford, 55, has been hailed as a hero for confronting the shooter and forcing him to flee, but he insisted in an interview Monday that “I’m no hero.”

“I think my God, my Lord protected me and gave me the skills to do what needed to be done, and I just wish I could have gotten there faster,” said Mr. Willeford told 40/29 News in Fort Smith-Fayetteville.

[…]Mr. Willeford, 55, said his daughter alerted him to the gunshots, after which he removed his rifle from its safe, loaded his magazine, and ran across the street to the church. He didn’t even pause to put on his shoes.

“He saw me and I saw him,” said Mr. Willeford, adding that he stood behind a pickup truck for cover.

Authorities said at a Monday evening press conference that the suspect, 26-year-old Devin Patrick Kelley, was hit twice in the confrontation.

I doubt that will be reported in the mainstream media – defensive use of guns by legal owners of guns is not popular with the progressive mainstream media. I’m sure we’ll get lots of stories demonizing the NRA, though. But I didn’t see any Hollywood elites or progressive journalists defending the people in that church.

Objective morality on atheism?

Let’s review what objective morality (moral realism) really means in practice for atheists. Does atheism provide a rational foundation for human rights and moral duties?

Let’s see what Kelley says:

In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

(Richard Dawkins, “God’s Utility Function,” Scientific American, November, 1995, p. 85)

Oh wait, that’s not Kelley, that’s Richard Dawkins. Atheists like Richard Dawkins think that morality is make-believe, and if they can get away with being immoral, (think Harvey Weinstein), then they will. Survival of the fittest. The strong abuse and kill the weak. It’s “natural selection”. That’s what was printed on the t-shirt of another atheist mass murderer when he engaged in some love-your-neighbor (atheist style) at Columbine High School a while ago. Not every atheist is a crazy mass murderer, of course. But it’s important for atheists to think seriously about whether they willing to take atheism seriously when it comes to morality. In a recent debate, Matt Dillahunty, who claims to be an atheist, wouldn’t even condemn the Holocaust as evil. Why not? Because he takes Dawkins seriously about what morality is on atheism. It’s make-believe.

It’s very important for atheists to think through what sort of objective morality is possible in an accidental universe where there is no free will (to make moral choices), no life after death (where those who escape justice in this life face it in the next), no human rights or human dignity (because we’re just randomly evolved meat machines), and no objective moral lawgiver to impose moral duties on us. Obviously, atheists living in the United States of America are going to inherit the Judeo-Christian values that were present when the country was formed. They’re going to act better than their worldview in most cases. My worry is how will atheists act when push comes to shove and their self-interest comes up against moral intuitions that – on their own view – are just illusory?

Atheists, come over to the light side. We have cookies. And objective moral values and duties. You ought to want that! Don’t be a Dick Dawkins.

News

Obama administration hid 470,000 Osama Bin Laden compound documents from the public

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Is Barack Obama focused on protecting the American people?
Was Barack Obama focused on protecting the American people?

Stephen Hayes writes for The Weekly Standard primarily on foreign policy issues. His latest article explains what we’ve learned from the CIA’s decision to release 470,000 documents captured in the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound. Although the Obama adminstration claimed to have released all the documents, they only released 571 documents. Why would Barack Obama hide the other documents from the public? And what caused them to pick the 571 documents that they did release?

Only 571 documents released by Obama:

On the penultimate day of the Obama administration, less than 24 hours before the president would vacate the White House, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a press release meant to put to rest what had been a pesky issue for his office. “Closing the Book on Bin Laden: Intelligence Community Releases Final Abbottabad Documents,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) announced. “Today marks the end of a two-and-a-half-year effort to declassify several hundred documents recovered in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad, Pakistan, compound in May 2011.” Accompanying the press release were 49 documents captured during the raid, bringing the total number of documents made public to 571.

Why not 470,571 – why only 571?

In the weeks following the bin Laden raid, the documents went through an immediate interagency triage for actionable intelligence. That initial scrub yielded valuable information that led to the capture and killing of key al Qaeda associates. But then the documents sat, largely untouched, for months at a time. From that point on, the Obama administration’s interest in the Abbottabad documents didn’t extend much beyond their public relations implications. Simply put, a fuller release of the cache would have fatally undermined the message that al Qaeda had been decimated and that the war on terror was being reduced to a few mopping-up exercises.

[…]After Obama’s reelection, the administration repeatedly shut down requests from Republican lawmakers, led by Rep. Devin Nunes, for access to the documents. Then the 2014 Intelligence Authorization Act turned those requests into a demand backed by law. That’s the only reason the 571 documents were released. And that’s where matters stood through the early months of the Trump administration.

The Trump administration has finally released ALL the documents.

What’s in the documents?

As Thomas Joscelyn details elsewhere in these pages, among them can be found documents describing al Qaeda’s relationship with the Afghan Taliban; videos and photographs of senior al Qaeda operatives, including those running the terror network and its affiliates today; letters with new information on al Qaeda’s web of relationships inside Pakistan; documents explaining the ways in which al Qaeda was adapting to U.S. targeting of its leaders; and the 228-page handwritten journal of the jihad kept by Osama bin Laden himself.

The Thomas Jocelyn piece is here, but I can’t cover that, because I want to talk about the Iran – Al Qaeda connection.

It’s not just the number of documents that’s interesting, it’s the fact that the Obama administration lied to the American public by trying to separate Al Qaeda from Iran.

This is important:

The new materials make clear that ODNI sought to mislead the country not only about the size of the collection but about its contents, too. The January ODNI press statement claimed that the batch of 49 documents it was then making public “mirrors the themes in previous releases,” chief among them Osama bin Laden’s “hatred, suspicion of Iran.” It was true that this was what previous ODNI releases claimed. But it is misleading in the extreme to pretend that the story of Iran and al Qaeda told through the captured bin Laden documents is solely one of hostility.

Bin Laden had described Iran as the “main artery” for al Qaeda in one of the previously released letters recovered in Abbottabad. The details on Iran’s support for al Qaeda, some of them buried until now, led to terrorist designations by the Treasury Department and even caused some intelligence analysts to revisit the assumption that the Shiite radicals in Iran wouldn’t back the Sunni al Qaeda. In a 2011 interview, David S. Cohen, a senior Treasury Department official who went on to become deputy director of the CIA, described the intelligence, which detailed a network of financial support for al Qaeda that operated out of Iran: “There is an agreement between the Iranian government and al Qaeda to allow this network to operate,” Cohen said. “There’s no dispute in the intelligence community on this.” Iran was providing a “core pipeline” of support that included safe haven for al Qaeda members and the facilitation of travel and the flow of money and weapons.

Al Qaeda accepted this help warily, it is true, and the al Qaeda-Iran relationship is based on mutual interest rather than ideological or doctrinal affinity. But to ignore the secret agreement altogether—to set aside the years of collaboration and to elide bin Laden’s own description of Iran as the “main artery” for al Qaeda, all in order to downplay the threat such an alliance presents—is a textbook case of cherry-picking.

 

The Obama administration covered up the Iran – AQ link so that they could make a deal to allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons. And give them $400 million of unmarked cash on pallets to help them along in their sponsorship of terrorism in the Middle East. This was the foreign policy of the last eight years under Barack Obama. And when you see people being raped and murdered by radical Islamic terrorists in the Middle East, you need to understand that this is what Democrat voters voted for. They wanted this to happen, and they voted for Obama to make it happen. It’s very important that voters inform themselves carefully about national security and foreign policy matters, because how we vote affects so much of what happens in the world. We can’t just be clowning around with ignorant liberal comedians on the Comedy Channel. We have to be more serious than that. This is America.

One of the reasons why the Trump victory in 2016 was so significant is that it did allow us to finally get the whole story on so many scandals that the Obama administration was covering up. We all know about the familiar scandals that were ignored by the far-left mainstream media: IRS persecution of conservative groups to help Obama get re-elected, running assault weapons to Mexican drug cartels to push a gun confiscation narrative, blaming the Benghazi terrorist attack on a YouTube video, etc. There was no lie too big for an administration run by leftist college students with no real-world experience. But just think of how close we came to never finding out the answers about all of these scandals.