Category Archives: Liberal

Neither of my parents had college degrees, but they worked their entire adult lives to ensure my brothers and I did. It was important to my parents, and it was part of their American Dream, and they achieved it without a single dime from the government.

My parents paid for one of my degrees, and I paid for the other. I paid for it while attending school at night and working a full-time job during the day also without a single dime from the government. It was all accomplished on a salary starting at only $13,000 a year. Im not complaining. That job and that degree was a portion of my American Dream too.

My husband, not quite as fortunate, acquired a student loan to attend college.

I watched him pay that debt for years, and when we were married, I contributed to paying that debt as well. Again, we didnt take a cent from the government in fact, it never occurred to us that anyone else was responsible for his debt. It was an obligation he signed up for an investment. He paid his debt, and he prospered from his investment. So can everyone else.

While attending undergraduate school, I had numerous friends who had heart-breaking stories of growing up in poverty. They had great financial needs. One friend worked three jobs to put herself through school. Like my husband, she saw college as an investment in her future.

Many of my former classmates discussed their student loans. They knew the price of their education, and they knew the debt they would owe after graduation. Obviously, they thought it was worth it.

Several questions arise from these various scenarios that focused on post-secondary education.

One, where is my 90-year-old mothers money for sending me and my two brothers to school?

Where is my allotment for paying for my second college degree?

Where is my money for sending my son to college?

How about my friend who worked three jobs to put herself through college?

Where is her compensation? How is her work to pay for her own education suddenly less valuable than the debt relief.

President Biden is proposing to give to thousands of students today? And additionally, how about the young people who didnt go to college because they didnt have the money and didnt commit to a debt the knew they couldnt pay?

Maybe all the people in favor of using government money to pay off student loans should volunteer their stimulus checks to help settle all those debts.

How much money can America afford to hand out to these former students? Its not like were buying them food to eat.

Were now paying for something they signed up for and agreed to pay back.

What message are we sending to them and to future students? Dont worry about your debts, the government will bail you out.

Show me the money, is no longer the famous line from a movie. Its the battle cry of many American people under the reign of a very liberal administration and youre paying for it.

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Beth Chapman is Alabamas former State Auditor and 51st Secretary of State.

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Column: Liberal battle cry: 'Show me the money' - Cullman Times Online

Leadership, Policy and Metaphor for a Collapsing Empire

When the redacted search warrant, for the National Defense (and other) Information (NDI) top secret documents the Rump Klan stole from the white house in January 2021, identified the Former President of the United States as FPOTUS, I thought we had a new political label for dead meat for the ages.

Within a couple days the long New York Times Magazine feature piece on the Jones Day law firm identified Jones Day partner and former Detroit Emergency Manager Fascist (EMF) Kevyn Orr as a rare liberal in their rightwing dog pen.

Why bother to commentate when the clichd metaphors[i] stand up and spew their own garbage 24/7?

Answer: FPOTUS skipped out on his coup-in-progress with a plan Schedule F to purge hundreds of thousands of government civil service employees, replacing the federal governments nonpartisan official corps with MAGA death cultists.

News flash: Theres at least an even chance POTUS47, whether its Ivanka, Ron DeathSantis, or perhaps a corporate Dem reaching out to their supporters, may implement some kind of linguistically deodorized Schedule F and worse within 3 years. I respectfully conclude thats good enough cause to speak up!

Jones Days token Negro Rare Liberal reportedly drew the ethical line with his own bloodied hands in 2021 on Jones Days lucrative Gleichschaltung practice, transforming the federal government into FPOTUSs weaponized neo-nazi criminal enterprise. Kevyn-the-former-EMF-and-now-RL (QAmok Revolutionary Leader?) supposedly drew this red line at the bright line issue of voter suppression, which he declares is a bridge too far for Jones Days noble throat slitters to take on for billable hours!

Follow up reporting should note voter turnout rates in Detroit before that very same rare liberal EMFd us: voter turnout rates that plummeted almost down to single digits after he turned the restructured urban debt machine over to Mike Thuggin Duggan. Theres more than one scam to do purges, and call attention to the stench repackaged as roses, in their corporatized, racial capitalist world. Jones Day knows how, and is paid very well, to run them all. Every lucrative one.

My point is the Rare Liberals FPOTUS Resistance story in the Burn Pit of climate catastrophe, proxy war in Ukraine & the other ten thousand things in this falling debris is about as credible as the QAmok shaman. People dont vote in Detroit any more because they know the game is rigged. Not an excuse, a reality. Jones Day, FPOTUS & their erstwhile mainstream competitors leading the corporate wing of the Dems out of and back into the political wilderness according to election cycles, are only fooling themselves. Rearrange their faces and give them all another name. (Thanks, Bob) This is a collapsing empire, world, and ecology. They are responsible for this Burn Pit Society. Our responsibility to somehow turn away and lead others toward something better is manifest, literally a matter of survival.

To recap things said and occasionally heard in the last decade or so: All this FPOTUS death cult & Rare Liberal nonsense is just apologia for their failing Burn Pit system. Thats it. The sum and substance underlying all National Defense (& other relevant) Information today. All of it. Their empire is collapsing and theyre trying to cover it up and take out as much loot as possible, before the water & blood rise too high. What should we do?

If nothing else, because it hurts when I laugh and to calm my own severely traumatized nerves let me seek & offer the reader relief in the words of the poet:

The Buddhas Parable of the Burning Building

Guatama the Buddha taughtThe doctrine of greeds wheel to which we are bound, and advisedThat we shed all craving and thusUndesiring enter the nothingness that he called Nirvana.Then one day his pupils asked him:What is it like, this nothingness, Master? Every one of us wouldShed all craving, as you advise, but tell usWhether this nothingness which then we shall enterIs perhaps like being at one with all creation,When you lie in water, your body weightless, at noon,Unthinking almost, lazily lie in the water, or drowseHardly knowing now that you straighten the blanket,Going down fast whether this nothingness, then,Is a happy one of this kind, a pleasant nothingness, orWhether this nothingness of yours is more nothing, cold, senseless and void.Long the Buddha was silent, then said nonchalantly:There is no answer to your question.But in the evening, when they had gone,The Buddha still sat under the bread-fruit tree and to the others,To those who had not asked, addressed this parable:Lately I saw a house. It was burning. The flameLicked at its roof. I went up close and observedThat there were people still inside. I entered the doorway and calledOut to them that the roof was ablaze, so exhorting themTo leave at once. But those peopleSeemed in no hurry. One of them,While the heat was already scorching his eyebrows,Asked me what it was like outside, whether there wasAnother house for them, and more of this kind. Without answeringI went out again. These people here, I thought,Must burn to death before they stop asking questions.And truly friends,Whoever does not yet feel such heat in the floor that hell gladly

Exchange it for any other, rather than stay, to that manI have nothing to say. So Gautama the Buddha.But we too, no longer concerned with the art of submission,Rather with that of non-submission, and offeringVarious proposals of an earthly nature, and beseeching menTo shake off their human tormentors, we too believe that to thoseWho in face of the rising bomber squadrons of Capital go on asking too longHow we propose to do this, and how we envisage that,And what will become of theirsavings and Sunday trousers after a revolutionWe have nothing much to say.

Bertolt Brecht

Notes.

[i] To-wit & e.g., those that lie down with dogs and get fleas; impunity for throat-slitting; power from immense gaseous explosions; useful idiots; evil tools; big lies; alt civil wars; do your research; the storm; & etc.. If Merrick Garland, an old line GOP Independent Counsel, Kirkland & Ellis & however many other giant law firms are needed produce, file & serve a consolidated omnibus federal indictment of FPOTUS on a timely basis to follow up on the Mar-a-Lago NDI search & seizure, Ill report further from the conceptually restructured, upsized & evidence-based neighborhood of Nirvana. Until then, other legal entanglements of FPOTUS seem like what Lao Tzu called straw dogs, whatever that means! Rare liberals?

Read the rest here:

FPOTUS and Rare Liberals Stoking the Schedule F Burn Pit - CounterPunch

Josie Pagani is a commentator on current affairs and a regular contributor to Stuff. She works in geopolitics, aid and development, and governance. She stood once for Labour.

OPINION: Why did Liz Truss cross the road? Because she said she wouldn't. The Tory candidate likely to be British prime minister next week has made more u-turns than a wobbly shopping trolley.

She's a Liberal Democrat who joined the Tories.

A passionate Remainer who mutated into a hardline Brexiteer. After 10 years in Cabinet, she is pitching herself as a fresh face.

READ MORE:* The Queen to swear in new British PM at Balmoral - rather than asking Prince Charles* Diversity in British politics as candidates launch campaign to be next PM* Boris Johnson to remain PM until September, here's how the UK's next leader will be chosen

It would be amusing if liberal democracy weren't under siege, and we didn't need leaders with backbone to meet the moment.

0.3% of the British population paid-up Tory members will choose between Truss and Rishi Sunak. We're retired now, but in our spare time we like to choose the next prime minister, quipped Private Eye magazine of those elderly Tory stalwarts. They've chosen the UK prime minister three consecutive times now.

Note to self allowing party members to pick doesn't seem to produce better or longer-lasting leaders. It does, however, appear to produce leaders who struggle in the job. Anyway, back to the UK.

A minority of voters support Truss. The public prefers Sunak, or Labour leader Keir Starmer. Truss is not even the first choice of Tory MPs or even most of those who will fill her Cabinet. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, she may not have enemies, but she is intensely disliked by her friends.

Frank Augstein/AP

Liz Truss will be the latest new leader not up to the job of defending fundamental ideas of liberal democracy, says Josie Pagani.

Truss will be the latest new leader not up to the job of defending fundamental ideas of liberal democracy equality before the law, and the rules that bind us. It is under attack in the battlefields of Ukraine, where Putin was triggered not by the expansion of Nato, but the expansion of democracy.

It is under attack from Donald Trumps claims that the 2020 US presidential election was stolen, and from Boris Johnson threatening to rip up the Northern Ireland Protocol, a legally binding agreement he negotiated and signed.

Those who break the rules when it suits them are as culpable as those who never believed in them in the first place.

If leaders dont defend democratic institutions, we end up with leaders who are more weather vane than signpost. Politicians who change their views to suit public opinion end up as insipid alternatives to the strong man autocrats who promise to blow the whole system up.

Thirty per cent of British voters equivalent to 14 million people agree that Britain needs a strong leader who can take and implement big decisions quickly without having to consult parliament.

If that doesnt worry you, last year, the world experienced the lowest levels of democracy seen in 30 years.

You and I might have just lived through the end of a brief interlude of liberal democracy. If the rise of democracy and the rejection of colonialism defined the second half of the 20th century, its collapse could be the defining trend of the 21st. Unless we fight back.

Defeating autocracy and cynicism requires us to defeat identity politics, because its the tool through which highly polarised extremes force voters to choose between bad and awful.

Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP

Liz Truss, right, and Rishi Sunak on stage after a Conservative leadership election hustings at Wembley Arena in London. Polls suggest that voters prefer Sunak as the next British prime minister, but Truss seems likely to be her partys choice.

The appeal of populism is the identity it gives people who feel left behind, or sneered at by the elites in universities, media or parliament. Identity pitches people against one another by creating a shared understanding of victimisation. Dehumanising the bad people is a prerequisite.

The Hidden Tribes study, by the UK-based group More in Common, identifies a group on the right, Devoted Conservatives, who see themselves as defenders of traditional values and institutions. On the left it found Progressive Activists who blame power structures and institutions for causing inequality against minorities.

Those groups together make up about 14% of the population, but wield huge influence on political discourse. Its no surprise the Devoted Conservatives were the whitest of all seven groups identified in the study (88% white), but you may be surprised to learn the second whitest were the Progressive Activists (80% white).

The two groups were also the most highly educated and reported the highest annual income. More in common than they think.

Stuff

Josie Pagani: To survive, liberal democracy must own the optimism that things should and will be better.

Part of the appeal of populism and activism is they promote transformative change, and provide optimism that things should and will be better.

Liberal democracy used to own that optimism. To survive, it must do so again.

Liz Truss will not be one of those leaders who can make a passionate defence of liberal values or understand the seriousness of this moment. She will feint in the direction of right-wing identity and bait the left. They will respond in kind. Polarisation will increase.

But courage to resist can emerge in unlikely places. Republican Liz Cheney, with an unmatched right-wing pedigree, chose to blow up her political future to try to stop Trump re-entering the White House.

Why did Liz Cheney cross the road? Because she decided that defending liberal democracy was more important than her own career.

We need more of these signpost politicians.

Read this article:

Josie Pagani: Liz Truss isn't the leader the world needs right now - Stuff

A look back on what internal Liberal polling appeared to be saying ahead of the May election, and the related matter of the Katherine Deves controversy.

Last week I took a big picture look at how the main public pollsters performed in their immediate pre-election polling. Today I offer a necessarily incomplete account of the only partly knowable subject of internal party polling specifically that of the Liberal Party, and how it played out against the backdrop of bitter conflict over its strategy of the campaign of pursuing culturally conservative constituencies at a time when those under threat from the teal independents needed every socially liberal vote they could get.

Much of this story relates to the controversy surrounding Warringah candidate Katherine Deves, which Scott Morrison appeared to consider the key to unlocking enough Labor-held seats in the outer suburbs and regions to balance defeats in inner metropolitan seats, at least to the extent of allowing him to hold on to power in a minority government. The notion that this strategy might have been hitting its mark was not the exclusive preserve of Liberal Party optimists. Shortly after the controversy first emerged early in the campaign, Phillip Coorey of the Financial Review wrote that in the suburbs, the regions and the religious communities, the government and Labor believes the Deves issue is going gangbusters in Scott Morrisons favour, messy as it may be. A week later, Chris Uhlmann cited a Labor strategist in the Age/Herald who believed the issue was playing 90/10 in Deves favour in the suburbs and the regions. Cameron Milner, a former Queensland Labor state secretary now all too comfortable in a new perch on The Australians op-ed page, described the Liberals exploitation of the controversy as brilliant foghorn politics that would yield a bumper crop of Hanson and Palmer preferences.

When Deves recanted her initial apology for her comments a fortnight out from the election, Niki Savva in the Age/Herald cited a Liberal source saying this had been set up deliberately to resuscitate the issue. Complicating the notion of a divide between what Uhlmann called the inner-city bubble and mainstream opinion further afield, Lanai Scarr of The West Australian that some were even tipping Deves could pull off her own miracle win and insulate other conservative electorates nationally in the process, potentially saving the Liberals in such difficult contests as the Perth seat of Swan.

Needless to say, none of this looks terribly prescient now that the elections unknowns are known. The possibility that the Liberals were acting on faulty intelligence is intriguingly raised by a report from Peter van Onselen on Ten News four days out from the election, which related that Liberal polling had Katherine Deves trailing Zali Steggall by only 53-47 quite a lot closer than Steggalls eventual winning margin of 61-39. Lest it be thought that this was some kind of Liberal Party psyop, it formed part of a batch of polling that was otherwise disastrous for the Liberals, with two-party preferred scores inclusive of an uncommitted component showing them trailing 50-43 in Bennelong and 50-41 in Parramatta (worse than their actual losing margins) and 49-48 in Reid (better), with particularly large deficits among women.

This happened to be the second batch of Liberal seat polling that van Onselen had been able to report late in the campaign, the first of which emerged as a bone of contention post-election in the partys deepening culture war over the teal independent seats and whether they should be cut loose in favour of a more populist approach that took its cues from Donald Trump. This batch of polling had the Liberal primary vote at 43% in Kooyong, 37% in Goldstein and 44% in Higgins, which bore up quite well against respective final results of 42.7%, 40.4% and 40.7%. Shortly after the election, Sharri Markson of The Australian recorded the following reaction to the leak inside the Liberal camp:

Senior Liberal figures scratched their heads, wondering where it had originated. The precise numbers did not reflect what was emanating from the partys official poster, Crosby Textor. An internal probe discovered that Bragg had submitted expenses to the NSW Liberal division of about $35,000 to $40,000 to conduct his own alternative polling in many NSW seats. There is no suggestion that Bragg leaked the polling to van Onselen, which he denies. It was not in his interest to depress the prospects of candidates he was fighting hard to help win. Its not even clear whether the polling Bragg commissioned was the same polling broadcast on Ten. However, Morrisons team believed it was.

Bragg had circulated the polling he commissioned to many Liberals an action one source described as sloppy and the suggestion is a recipient subsequently leaked it to the media. Questioned about the research for this article, Bragg admits he commissioned alternate polling and is scathing about the way Liberal headquarters and Crosby Textor treat Liberal candidates, who he says are kept in the dark about how they are faring.

The Liberal Party and Crosby Textor treat the candidates like absolute shit and dont give them the information they need, Bragg says. The candidates, who are often members of parliament, all they are given is a phone briefing and if theyre lucky they might get a piece of paper. Crosby Textor omit key things like the favourability of the leader because theyre worried that will leak to the media. If you know the party leader is massively unpopular youll differentiate so you can hang onto the seat. But if youre not told that how are you supposed to know? Its conflicts galore.

Echoes of Braggs criticism were to be heard outside the tent from Kos Samaras, who as one of the principals of the Redbridge Group had provided polling and strategic advice to Climate 200 (with which, as per the disclosure notice at the bottom of this sites sidebar, I was involved myself):

Why did the teals win? Many reasons. But at the centre of the campaign was an absolute commitment to the data. There were no games with what the internal polling said. There were no favourites shown, whereby resources are sent into a seat, even though the polling painted a different picture (The Liberals) poured resouces into one seat, Kooyong, at the expense of others, even though their data was indeed showing a grim picture. That picture of course was never told, as the constant backgrounding into the media was akin to a story-telling session, skunk drunk, at a pub. The Liberal decision-making was riddled with bias and subjectivity, fuelled by an internal factional structure that made it impossible for data to be utilised correctly.

If early indications are anything to go by, the tension between the Liberal Partys determination to tack to the right on cultural issues and electoral imperatives to win the favour of more liberally minded voters could be set to play out again at the Victorian state election in November. Stay tuned.

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.View all posts by William Bowe

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Liberal with the truth The Poll Bludger - The Poll Bludger

In 2010, I knelt beside a family member as they cradled my laptop in their hands.

Wed just spent 17 agonizing minutes watching the WikiLeaks Collateral Murder video, which contained footage of the 2007 Baghdad airstrike during which US troops killed at least a dozen civilians, including two Reuters journalists, jeering as they opened fire.

Tears welled in the corner of their eyes. The horror of watching US armed forces fire upon innocent people, laughing even as they injured children in the process, struck hard.

For many, the Collateral Murder Video was a wake-up call. For others, like the person sitting next to me, it did the opposite.

Its not real, they said.

The words hit me like a slap.

It cant be real. I just I dont believe it.

Id brought up the video in a last-ditch effort to repair yet another relationship fractured by political differences. Instead of building a bridge, however, it highlighted the widening divide between my past and present.

I grew up in rural Indiana in a predominantly white, conservative bubble. I went to church three times a week and led prayer groups around my public school flagpole. I was desperately proud of my country, cheered when George W Bush won the 2000 election after voting for him in the middle school mock election, and viciously argued in his defense four years later when a classmate dared to criticize a sitting president.

In a high school bracketed with cows and cornfields, I found belonging in my beliefs. This is what I knew what my parents knew, what my friends knew, what my church knew and nothing could convince me otherwise.

It took attending a private Christian university less than an hour away to change everything. As a freshman, I eagerly signed the schools community life agreement, pledging to abstain from all vices (sex, gambling, alcohol) until after graduation. I agreed to a campus-wide ban on R-rated movies and non-choreographed dancing. I attended mandatory chapel twice a week, went to a local church on Sundays and, instead of chafing in the sheltered environment, I thrived.

Everything shouldve stayed the same, and for countless students it did. But after my first year, while my fellow students kept on finding answers, I started to find questions.

I had a British academic adviser who taught outside of the American perspective, and whose classes challenged the gleaming American idealism I held so dear. I learned about how the US carpet-bombed Cambodia during the Vietnam war, dropping over 2.7m tons of bombs on the country over an eight-year period, and was shocked to learn this paled in comparison to the combined 2m tons of bombs the Allies dropped during the second world war, even when factoring in the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Next, I learned about the My Lai massacre, in which US soldiers raped, tortured and killed hundreds of innocent Vietnamese people while several orders to stop the killings were systematically ignored.

The more I learned, the more I realized that my Christian beliefs didnt line up with the so-called Christian nation in which I was raised. The Bible told me to care for the sick, hungry and poor, while my fellow Republicans raged against universal healthcare, food stamps, and argued poverty was the result of laziness. As the veil slipped away, I realized American exceptionalism wasnt some God-given duty to protect democracy around the world, but a delusion sold to the American people which fueled our military-industrial complex. And we were falling for it hook, line and sinker.

The more I tried to share what Id learned with my friends and family, the more they wrote me off as a lost cause. My parents joked that I had turned liberal, and couldnt wait for me to leave my conservative Christian college so things could go back to normal.

In person, the conversations I tried to have about religion and politics were stilted and brief. Online, they were vicious. Social media was particularly brutal, and the older members of my church were among the most bloodthirsty. No matter how delicately I tried to broach a conversation, share sources or ask questions our conversation ended in a bloodbath. Once the personal attacks started led by friends, church members and even the occasional family member I gave up.

After finishing my degree and moving to the UK to pursue a masters degree in history, I realized I couldnt keep the US on the pedestal Id placed it. Life in England solidified my changing perspectives. Not only were the people wildly different than the ones Id grown up with my friend group included both socialists and blue bloods running in the same circles even the Christians I met surprised me. Gone were the puritanical attitudes obsessed with the battle between sin and virtue, and in its place were some of the most welcoming and warm-hearted people Id ever met.

Returning to the US in late 2012 was a culture shock. I moved back in with my parents while applying for jobs only to realize that my idyllic home town didnt feel quite as safe as before. The open-mindedness Id encountered at university was replaced with vicious political discourse, where even a kind neighbor warned me to be the good kind of journalist, leaving me to realize that if I wasnt careful Id be labeled as the enemy.

It didnt matter that I grew up in the same zip code, attended the same schools, went to the same churches. A simple difference in opinion was enough to place a target on my back, and I knew I needed to get out. I took a job in marketing that moved me out of state and headed to Nashville, finding a tiny liberal pocket in the Bible belt, where I met countless others who shared a similar experience.

One woman, Marie*, reached out to me after reading a lengthy conversation I had with another Republican on Facebook. A pastors wife in a moderately sized congregation in a conservative state and a lifelong Republican, she felt shocked by the growing support for Donald Trump.

I feel like Trump is using Evangelical Christians, she wrote in her initial message. [But] I dont understand how a human can think these things are ok.

We reconnected recently, and she told me how she watched in shock as more and more people around her began to follow Trump with what she described as cultish fervor, with some going so far as to believe that only Republicans could be considered Christians. While she and her husband refused to express overtly political opinions from the pulpit, she described the anger she saw in some people as proof that something wasnt right.

With family, it was a whole lot harder cause we were all raised strongly Republican, she explained. So for any of us to break away from not totally agreeing 100% with a candidate, it was like I had gone to the other side.

In the end, she found herself asking many of the same questions I had, especially as she watched those closest to her, including her siblings and daughter, begin to espouse radically different ideas. It was heartbreaking to watch, she told me, and while she tried to remain optimistic, she said it felt as if the whole world was changing around her, and nothing made sense.

I was like, Where are these crazy comments coming from? This is not foundational, this is not Christian, she said. Why are people following Trump so blindly? What am I missing?

For casual observers like Marie and myself, it can be mind-boggling to watch someone disregard what you perceive as concrete evidence. Unfortunately, logic has little to do with it.

Most people assume that deeply held beliefs are held because they are logical, and that is often the assumptive flaw. Deeply held beliefs are often held for other reasons entirely, explains psychologist Julie Gurner. Things like strong emotional attachments, social or personal reasons, and group membership make people particularly resilient to changing beliefs.

A lot of this boils down to cognitive biases, the subconscious tendencies in human thinking and reasoning that influence our judgment, decision-making and even our behavior. Confirmation bias, for instance, is one of the heaviest hitters: our brains tend to seek information that supports our existing beliefs and ignore information that challenges them.

The internet made this phenomenon worse, something I watched first-hand as my friends and family members began using Facebook as a source of news. I tried serving as a friendly factchecker at first, happy to put my history degrees to work. Most people ignored me; the burden of proof seemed to disappear. If something got enough likes and sounded correct, it was all-too-easy to hit share.

Kristina Lerman, principal scientist at the University of Southern Californias Information Sciences Institute, says her research has identified what she calls a majority illusion which is what happens when social media distorts our observations of what people believe until we start to overestimate the popularity of information. In some conditions, this can even lead people to believe things are far more believed and accepted than they actually are.

This is what happened with my friends and family. I didnt own a television before last year, so I never watched mainstream or cable news networks, while my parents tuned into Fox News. As a millennial, I lived by the warning drilled into us from a young age dont believe everything you read online and grew frustrated when others seemed to ignore that same advice. I tried my best to receive most of my news from following local and international journalists on Twitter, but even that was tinted with bias. The more my social network grew and the more active it became the easier it was to get trapped in an echo chamber.

Its something Im still wary of, especially given the ever-increasing political divide. Misinformation rages on, and I dont want to fall into the same trap that Ive seen claim so many others.

I dont go to church any more, but I still lead every conversation with a conservative Christian with, I grew up in the church. Its a trick Ive learned over the years that reminds people that were not so very different while making it easier for the dialogue to progress from there. Ive slowly rebuilt my relationship with my parents although Im admittedly terrified of them reading this article and Im working up the courage to reach out to my brother after a particularly brutal argument about politics on Facebook disintegrated our relationship years ago.

I havent given up on nudging all of them back toward the centrist beliefs they used to hold. We still talk about politics from time to time, and I try to start every conversation with empathy. Instead of railing against the things that I think theyre doing or saying or believing, I take a deep breath and think about why.

Why do they hold this position? Why do they feel this way? Why are my beliefs different?

I remind myself that beliefs are heavily influenced by emotions, not just facts, and I try to connect the dots.

My relationship with my family is still rocky, but thanks to time and therapy its one Ive come to terms with. Ive learned to surround myself with my chosen family, people who share my beliefs while challenging me to stretch beyond my limits and grow, and this has made it easier for me to connect with my friends and relatives back home on my terms.

We might not have the same relationship we had before, and that relationship might not look the way either of us wish it did, but thats OK. Either way, I feel better knowing that Im still trying.

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The heartbreak of becoming a liberal in a conservative family - The Guardian

During a very interesting conversation I took part in at the recent Times Higher Education Forum on the Liberal Arts in Asia, Leonard K. Cheng, the president of Lingnan University Hong Kong, made the striking argument that liberal arts education must go beyond its traditional rootedness in Western liberal democracy. Non-Western models, particularly when relevant to local contexts, must blaze new trails, he suggested.

Lingnan University has taken a liberal arts approach since the 1990s, and, according to Godwins Global Liberal Education Inventory, Asia accounts for 37 per cent of liberal education initiatives outside the US, of which three-quarters are in China, India and Japan. Yuanpei College at Peking University, launched in 2001, is another example, as is Taiwans Tunghai University. But Chengs examples were Effat University in the United Arab Emirates, which models its vision on Arabic principles of reading and writing, and Soka University, which, although located in California, draws its inspiration from Japanese Buddhism.

Indeed, while for most people, the phrase liberal arts education invokes an American model, it is arguable that liberal arts long predates the establishment of the US. A 2016 article by Boston Colleges Kara Godwin and Philip Altbach cites three examples. One is Chinas Confucian tradition, which sought broad education in the making of a whole person. Another is the ancient Nalanda University, which used both Hindu and Buddhist traditions to nurture self-realisation in India. And a third is Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the oldest continuously operating university in the world, which drew not only on Islamic theology and sharia law, but philosophy, mathematics, astronomy and, from the 1870s , natural sciences, on the grounds that an educated individual needed a comprehensive range of knowledge.

China was also a modern pioneer. In the late 1990s, its government turned away from its specialised, Soviet-style system, particularly devoted to professional training in engineering and medicine, towards cultural quality education, or whole-person development. A large number of specialised colleges were developed into comprehensive universities with broad programmes incorporating previously ignored soft disciplines.

In response to Chengs argument about the need for non-Western sources of liberal education, however, I could not help but ask him about the dangers of ethnic chauvinism. My question arose out of my own experience of consulting on the liberal arts with the committee of Indias new National Education Policy, which also articulates a strategic vision to transform colleges of specialised training into multidisciplinary universities.

The policy, unveiled in 2020, is a vast and ambitious mixture of various sometimes contradictory aspirations. But as someone who primarily focuses on the liberal arts, it was startling to see the policy imagine an American model of multidisciplinary liberal education through what is unmistakably a rhetoric of Hindu nationalism.

Ancient Indian literary works, the policy states, such as Banabhattas Kadambari described a good education as knowledge of the 64 Kalaas or arts; and among these 64 arts were not only subjects, such as singing and painting, but also scientific fields, such as chemistry and mathematics, vocational fields, such as carpentry and clothes-making, professional fields, such as medicine and engineering, as well as soft skills such as communication, discussion, and debate. But the policys repeated invocation of ancient India cannot but be a refusal to acknowledge the countrys medieval period of Muslim rule, from around the end of the first millennium to the advent of British rule in the 18thcentury, which included periods of great prosperity, development and relative communal harmony.

One might say that the narrative of majority religion is primarily a rhetorical gloss on what is essentially modern, interdisciplinary liberal arts education. But the omission from the narrative of educational practices rooted in other cultural traditions not just Islam and Christianity, but also tribal and indigenous practices remains glaring to anyone who imagines India not as a Hindu nation but as one made by multiple traditions.

It may be hard to admit it, but the openness and flexibility of liberal arts practices get rather easily limited by various forms of parochialism and provincialism. I have experienced this, too, through my years of studying and teaching in the US, where the cultural canon at the heart of liberal arts curricula has petrified over the decades through the severe constrictions of white parochialism. And even while calls to decolonise the curriculum familiar to scholars of colonial and minority cultures since the 1960s become ever louder, ethnic and nationalistic chauvinism remains undefeated.

As shown by Asias pre-modern centres of religious education, such as Nalanda and Al-Azhar, the values we associate with a liberal arts education freedom, tolerance, plurality, openness are not exclusively rooted in Western liberal democracies or the European Enlightenment. And there is no doubt that institutions of liberal arts education must draw from models beyond the easily available American one. But as higher education policy in contemporary India makes equally clear, it is undeniable that the political ideology of governments will determine the manner in which local or indigenous models of liberal arts will be adopted.

In the end, what matters more than history is historiography: our documentation and presentation of history. And, whether we like it or not, educational policy will always try to foreground certain political and ideological interests.

Saikat Majumdar is professor of English and creative writing at Ashoka University. He thanks Harshita Tripathi for research assistance.

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Indigenous models of liberal arts should beware of ethnic chauvinism - Times Higher Education

Dont get it twisted, in terms of the progressive silence on the new Cold War. For nearly a century, commentators have closely associated liberalism with progressivism. For instance, in a 1931 piece in The New Republic, Edmund Wilson identifies the latter as that which which has generally become known as liberalism to contemporaries. Liberal philosophy also contains what its supporters would consider a benevolent nationalism, that is, a system to both export self-determination to indigenous peoples and produce abundance at home. This abundance would be spread out benignly enough, thanks to an American spirit strong enough to compel Capitalism to restrain itself. Of necessity, then, the liberal makes the moral assumption of an underlying harmony of interests, in which, in the phrase of C. Wright Mills, greed and ruthlessness are reconciled with justice and progress.

On the other hand, journalist Gerard Colby-Zilgalso identifying progressivism with corporate liberalismdefines the first as an instrument of conservatism, in the sense that it is the rationalization of the old order to meet the needs of the new monopolistic order. This radical view presupposes a psychological derivation of the idea of progress in terms of political ideology, as in Karl Polanyi: Hopethe vision of perfectibilitywas distilled out of the nightmare of population and wage laws, and was embodied in a concept of progress so inspiring that it appeared to justify the vast and painful dislocations to come. This interpretation locates a cynicism at the heart of the modern liberal project, a dark twin to its much-vaunted idealism, and would therefore read the original progressive rhetoric for empire as textbook delusions of grandeur. These delusions would be leveraged to crush indigenous initiatives toward self-sufficiency around the world while hiding behind platitudes of support for the self-determination of all peoples.

Consider that the archetypal elements of American Third World thuggery emerge fully formedlike Athena from the head of Zeusin the period 1898-1901, between the dust-up to the Spanish-American War and the defeat of the Filipino insurrection:

* The inevitably debunked pretext for a declaration of war

* American dismissal of natives capacity for self-governance

* Hints of treason against dissenters over American war dead

* The rhetoric of disinterested dedication to the regeneration of humanity

This last is suddenly flipped into barbaric atrocities once met with native resistance, which presumably does not feel the need to be regenerated. Thus, resonating across a whole century is the U.S. Senate Investigating Committee on the Philippiness conclusion on Aug 29, 1902 that the destruction of Filipino life during the war has been so frightful that it cannot be explained as the result of ordinary civilized warfare. Let us find other explanations, then.

The unexamined gargoyles that lay between what Henry Cabot Lodge called the world-redeeming work of our imperial race and his anticipation of a vast future trade and wealth and power through Chinas illimitable markets, lead us off the psychological grid, and here, rusticating, lurk those primordial American delusions of grandeur. Sen. Albert Beveridge, in an iconic speech on the Senate floor in 1900, reveals the basis for the expansionists rhetoric of historical mission:

It is racial. God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation. He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction. He has made us adepts at government that we may administer government among savage peoples. He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America.

The delusions of grandeur at the root of the progressive campaign for an overseas empire presume an unquestioned morality of war which, of necessity, refuses to acknowledge a legitimate basis for dissent; a built-in, hermetically-sealed intolerance prefiguring the paranoia that would drive the moral repugnance of both the war hysteria and the Red Scare a generation later, and the Cold War beyond. In his speech, Beveridge draws the association, with subtle misdirection, between dissent and treason: The Filipinos do not understand free speech, he begins, explaining that when the anti- expansionist critique was revealed to the natives, their takeaway was that our President is in the minority or he would not permit what appears to them such treasonable [emphasis added] criticism.

The presumptionand, eventually, the paranoiaof a conspiracy lurking behind dissent, sinister and beholden to alien interests, is mere psychological projection. What is it that supporters of the wars of empire cant bear to hear? At the heart of the civilizing mission lies the necessity for the dispossession of others, a job made easier through the psychological mechanism of dehumanization. A grotesque distortion of the humanity of others. Those seeking to unmask the hypocrisy behind the platitudes mustanother necessitybe simply unhung traitors, as TR referred to the anti-imperialists of his day.

The disproportionate revenge meted out against Filipinos in the Balangiga Massacre of 1901, in which Gen. Jacoby Smith declared that he would accept no prisoners, like the gay moral imbecility of indiscriminate napalming of Koreans later documented by I.F. Stone, and, most famously, the atrocities at My Lai, for which, as Noam Chomsky reports, charges were dismissed on the grounds that this was merely a normal operation in which a village was destroyed and its population murderedthese supposedly rogue, yet persistent, atrocities suggest an inscrutable linkage between hypocrisy and slaughter.

Even before the outbreak of the First World War, the Nationalist Progressives at the New Republic viewed war as a regenerative crusade, and put indecisiveness or pacifism down to an abject moral failure, writes Randolph Bourne. Historian Jackson Lears observes that they considered the conflagration to be a great lab for social engineering; the ultimate marriage of management and morality. As he concludes, War permitted the realization of the management dream: an administrative state that would supervise and cooperate with Big Business.

Since World War I, modern liberals have displayed a natural ability to transpose universal moral ideals onto arguments that align unquestioningly with the war aims of the American empire. In 1917 Bourne remarks that these youngish war liberals acquiesced so naturally that it seemed as if the war and these men had been waiting for each other. In fact, they carried themselves with conspicuous unease when outside the patina of powerEdmund Wilson remarks that in the extreme illiberalism of the 1920s liberals felt increasingly conscious that no one was paying any attention to them.

Bourne was the first critic to note the moral squishiness of modern liberals. He perceived in real time the well-appointed critical abilities of liberals like Herbert Croly at TNR and eminent philosopher John Dewey vaporize in the face of the rising War Hysteria. Bournes disenchantment with the eminent liberals of his day crystallized into radical misgivings about the warp-speed mobilization of the American war machine not least because he was documenting the freshly-sprouted tentacles of the modern surveillance state.

A generation later TNR exhibited no hesitation whatever in differentiating between the airborne terror of the Allies and the Germans, its editors glibly announcing that the robot bomb [used by the Nazis to terrorize Britain] is far more savage than our saturation bombing of German cities. And according to historian Richard Pells, in The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age, already by World War II the liberals at TNR were prepared to inflate even the most questionable operator [like Chiang Kai-shek] into a visionary leader as long as he attached himself to the Allies.

Subsequent wars, like those in Korea and Vietnam, contained important motifs directly related to the ambiguity between Americas moral conceits and her actual material ambitions. The liberal establishment was instrumental in developing, shaping, presenting and defending these war policies and somehow their cynicism and ambiguity managed to go over for a few generations as cold-blooded expertise.

The maintenance of tension was a prime objective of Trumans foreign policy, writes I.F. Stone, in The Hidden History of the Korean War. The peace talks were regarded by these leaders as a kind of diabolic plot against rearmament. The Establishment dreaded the consequences that peace would have on the economy, namely shutting off its inflationary narcotic. Essentially Truman wished to perpetuate a climate of fear in order to maintain rearmament and thus full employment by a pose of brinksmanship that would nevertheless try, as Stone describes it, to halt at measures short of [nuclear] war.

Stone reveals another aspect of the presidents indecision: Just as Truman opposed war but wasnt quite sure he wanted peace, so while crusading for democracy he wasnt quite sure he wanted to take the risk of permitting free elections if peace came. The palpable fear that the communists would win the elections led Truman to support the program of a man he ought to have despised, Syngman Rhee. This plan was based upon a naked gerrymandering that would have allowed the Southern regime to supervise the election, bringing the North under its jurisdiction. Subsequently, U.S. unwillingness to tolerate free elections would become widely recognized, infamously in Vietnam and literally all across Latin America.

When OnContact host Chris Hedges interviewed Professor of International Law Richard Falk regarding his experience with the power elite in the early days of the Vietnam War, Falk recalls that since it was important to the liberal sensibility of the day to reconcile foreign policy with international law, it became necessary for policymakers to stretch and manipulate its interpretation rather than to acknowledge that their geopolitical strategies transcended law. Dr. Falk goes on to comment that it was customary among his liberal Ivy League colleagues to sell their souls to centers of power, and he emphasizes their inability to resist being useful in these circles by remarking that they were waiting for the phone to ring.

***

In 1957, I.F. Stone castigated American liberals for having abdicated their responsibility in dealing with military spending. A report by liberals in response to Eisenhowers proposed budget had treated the Pentagon as a sacred cow and produced statistics arguing that real military spending as a percentage of total national production had fallen by 31 percent. The report concluded by asking, wink-wink, whether we are risking our lives by these slashes. Stone concludes: It is a melancholy day for American liberalism when its leading spokesmen act as a sounding board for the military budget makers. Yet there they were. Today, we recognize the penchant of liberals to give more to presidents for defense budgets than they actually request as a ritual de lo habitual.

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Liberalism and the Morality of War - CounterPunch.org - CounterPunch

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If there is one thing Treasurer Jim Chalmers hates, its neoliberalism. Which is why it might come as a surprise to some that in his economic statement to parliament this week, he showed signs of developing into the type of treasurer the Australian Liberal Party has yearned to produce since Peter Costello.

Naturally, nobody pays too much attention to what politicians say while theyre in opposition. Communiques from exile are, of necessity, chiefly directed at colleagues. But these notes from the political underground can reveal a lot about what is going to happen once the pale creatures of the shadow ministries unfurl as they assume power.

Labor treasurer Jim Chalmers. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

During the bitter years, Chalmers laid out the ideas that would inform his current role. Neoliberalism is broken, he told the progressive Australia Institute. But the answer to neoliberalism is not permanent big-state socialism, he argued in The Write Stuff, a 2020 book of essays penned by voices of unity on Labors future.

There are few Coalition politicians who would disagree with either of those statements. Conservatism has been moving away from neoliberalism because its ultimate logic led away from community and tradition, removed the borders of the nation state, and sent the individual into the competitive world, naked and loveless. Brexit and other right-wing populist movements were the reaction of the right against the doctrinaire ism which came to summarise laissez-faire excesses.

But, like Chalmers, most conservatives dont see the answer to neoliberalism in yet another ism the socialism of the big state. That is not just a philosophical stance; a good chunk of the conservative/liberal drift away from the former government at the last election was a result of the perception that prime minister Scott Morrison and treasurer Josh Frydenberg had become addicted to bribing the electorate with handouts and expanding government.

While Chalmers had no choice but to go along with the handouts in the lead-up to the election, lest the Australian public vote to remain attached to the taxpayer teat, he signalled then, as he is signalling strongly now, that a weaning is imminent.

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Chalmers challenge since the election has been to prepare Australia for the fiscal restraint he knows is necessary in a way that wont leave Labor voters with buyers remorse. Upholding tradition, he has discovered a fiscal black hole. New governments always find these and they are always used to explain why election commitments will have to be modified or delayed. But in Chalmers case there really is one.

It is moot that the Liberals trillion dollars of debt was run up with the support of Labor during the pandemic the truth is it exists and Chalmers is the kind of guy who believes its a problem. So he has committed to addressing waste and rorts (hint: these are endemic to governments and unlikely to yield the dividends he will ultimately claim they have) and, more importantly, he is being upfront with the Australian people.

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Chalmers, the kind of treasurer the Liberals longed for - Sydney Morning Herald

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On November 8, 2017, I spent the day caring formy husband Kentucky Sen. Rand Paulas he struggled to breathe.Rand had been brutally assaulted by a Trump-hating former neighbor while he was doing yard work on our property. He was wearing noise-canceling headphones and never saw or heard the man coming. His six broken ribs, three displaced and shattered at the ends, tortured him with each inhale.He had developed the first of two pneumonias that damaged his lung, eventually requiring surgery. It was excruciating to see him in such terrible pain.

As I prayed, cried and tried to help him recover, a friend sent me the vicious, hateful headline from the days Courier-Journal: "Rand Paul a less than perfect neighbor..."This tells you everything you need to know about the bias and motivations of the Courier-Journal.Even now, more than four years later, I cannot write this without shaking in anger.

Kelley Paul and her husband Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul

It has been a year of violent political attacks by left-wing extremists such as the shooting at mayoral candidate Craig Greenberg by former Courier-Journal writer Quintez Brown, the brutal assault on Louisville Mayor Greg Fisher at a parade, the attempted assassination ofSupreme CourtJusticeBrettKavanagh, ongoing terrorizing of conservative Supreme Court Justices at their homes, and the attempted stabbing justlast weekofNew York Republican gubernatorialcandidateRep.Lee Zeldin at a political rally.

CALIFORNIA MAN INDICTED FOR ATTEMPTING TO ASSASSINATE SUPREME COURT JUSTICE KAVANAUGH

Just last week, the liberal media came after my husband again. That sameKentuckynewspaper chose to prominently feature an op-ed that continues to blame Rand for the blindside attackby the felonfound guilty in both civil and criminal courts, a man who admitted under oath that he had not communicated with Rand in over a decade, nor had ever had an unkind word or filed a complaint against him.(Not that it should matter, unless like the Courier-Journal and its op-ed writers, you seek to justify violent attacks in the case of disagreements.)

The man who attacked Rand in 2017, however, had violent and graphic anti-Trump posts on his social media. The liberal newspapers op-ed writers omitted all of those facts, of course, in order to frame Rand as a human being somehow deserving of pain and suffering.

LEE ZELDIN ATTACK SUSPECT ARRESTED ON FEDERAL ASSAULT CHARGE

The writers of the op-ed not only lied about and justified Rands assault, but claimed that our mob attack in Washington, D.C.in 2020was the equivalent of being "yelled at."

There are over nine minutes of live-streamed video ofthe two of usbeing literally held hostage behind only two brave police officers as we were surrounded, spit on, threatened, pushed and splattered with liquidsfollowing President Trumps speech at the Republican National Convention.We were completely immobile, unable to move out of the maelstrom of hatred and threats.

FLASHBACK: SEN. RAND PAUL: MY WIFE AND I WERE ATTACKED BY A MOB DEMS WOULD WORSEN PROBLEM BY BOWING TO RIOTERS

The police desperately radioed for reinforcement and it was only after four more officers arrived to forcibly push back the mob with bikes that we were finally able to move within their protective phalanx to safety.

Thisencounterhas been shown on video worldwide. Yet the liberal media continues tospread demonstrablyprovable falsehoods in its ongoing effort to discredit people like my husband and other conservatives who dont toe the liberal line.

So many of the liberal media outlets are everything they purport to despise.They foment rage-politics and refuse toallowa civilized airing of both sides of a debate.

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They encourage juicy, false narratives of conflict that in turn stoke violence of the kind that has resulted in Rand being shot at by a far-left lunatic; weekly death threats to his office; and terrorist tactics such as fake anthrax powder and death letters sent to our home.

FILE -- Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul appears on "Hannity" on October 5, 2021 (Fox News)

Even once reputable news sources likethe Associated Press (AP)have lowered their journalistic standards to accommodate the woke mob, trading objectivity for partisan minimization.

AfterRand and I were mobbed outside the RNC, the AP headline was: "Rand Paul claims, without evidence, that he was mobbed in DC." Despite literal video evidence, theAP felt compelled to write such a lie in order to minimize violence againstconservatives. Responding to the video images of a police officer nearly knocked to his feet as he pressed back against the mob, the AP described the police officer as being merely "jostled." Downstreammediaoutlets then repeated the lie.

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The Democrats are cultivating a dangerous political environment by waging their culture war through once trusted staples of American media. Local news used to be an institution Americans trusted, but too many outlets in Democrat-run cities and elsewhere have abdicated their duty to responsible journalism and eroded that faith."

Liberal media outlets that continue to traffic in hatred and misinformation endanger my husband, my family, and countless other peoplewho serve in public office. And that should alarm every American.

Kelley Paul and her husband, Senator Rand Paul reside in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where they are members of Broadway United Methodist Church. She and Rand were married in 1990 and are the parents of three sons. In April 2015, Kelley published "True and Constant Friends." In her book, Kelley celebrates the inspiration and love we receive from the women in our lives through essays about her lifelong friendships, her mother, and her grandmother, who immigrated to America from Ireland in 1929.

Kelley was the co-author of Rands 2019 best-selling book, "The Case Against Socialism." On their national book tour, Kelley and Rand gave joint presentations about the book both in the national media and to audiences across the country, including such diverse venues as The Reagan Library and Columbia University.

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Our liberal media love rage politics and endanger my husband and others who won't back their woke agenda - Fox News