Two Things a Liberal Will Never Admit Responsibility

"The great object of my fear is the federal judiciary. That body, like gravity, ever acting, with noiseless foot, and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains, is engulfing insidiously the special governments into the jaws of that which feeds them." — Thomas Jefferson, letter to Judge Spencer Roane, 1821

Progressive-Liberals love to take credit for all the so called “wonderful” achievements of the past century. They will skirt things such as the racism of the Democratic Party and Woodrow Wilson and the Vietnam War started by John Kennedy and escalated under Lyndon Johnson. They will deny the failure of the Great Society. They will harp on the excesses of Joe McCarthy and his Communist witch hunts (some of which were proved to be true after the documents released after the fall of the Soviet Union but never mention the actions of the House Un-American Activities Committee chaired by Martin Dies Jr. (D-TX), and therefore known as the Dies Committee.

There are two things, however, Liberals will never ever talk about or even acknowledge there existence. Those two things are the banning of DDT by the newly created Environmental Protection Agency after Rachel Carson published her book Silent Spring and CBS’s hack journalism by 60 Minutes and Eugenics.

Let’s look at the DDT banning first. Liberals will never take responsibility for all of the anguish and death caused by the banning of DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) At least 50 million people, mainly children died from Malaria, Typhus, and Dengue fever both caused by bites from Aedes mosquitoes. When it was first introduced in World War II, DDT was very effective in reducing malaria morbidity and mortality. The WHO's anti-malaria campaign, which consisted mostly of spraying DDT, was initially very successful as well. For example, in Sri Lanka, the program reduced cases from about one million per year before spraying to just 18 in 1963 and 29 in 1964. Thereafter the program was halted to save money and malaria rebounded to 600,000 cases in 1968 and the first quarter of 1969.

This banning of DDT began in 1962, when the book Silent Spring by American biologist Rachel Carson was published. It catalogued the environmental impacts of indiscriminate DDT spraying in the United States and questioned the logic of releasing large amounts of chemicals into the environment without a sufficient understanding of their effects on ecology or human health. The book claimed that DDT and other pesticides had been shown to cause cancer and that their agricultural use was a threat to wildlife, particularly birds. Its publication was a seminal event for the environmental movement and resulted in a large public outcry that eventually led, in 1972, to a ban on the agricultural use of DDT in the United States.

We recently passed the 50th anniversary of Rachel Carson’s best-selling book, “Silent Spring.” Widely credited with launching the modern environmental movement, it was an emotionally charged but deeply flawed denunciation of the widespread spraying of chemical pesticides for the control of insects. Today, the book is still revered by many, but its legacy is anything but positive.

As detailed by Roger Meiners and Andy Morriss in their scholarly yet very readable analysis, “Silent Spring at 50: Reflections on an Environmental Classic,” Carson exploited her reputation as a well-known nature writer to advocate and legitimatize “positions linked to a darker tradition in American environmental thinking.” Carson “encouraged some of the most destructive strains within environmentalism: alarmism, technophobia, failure to consider the costs and benefits of alternatives, and the discounting of human well-being around the world.” Meiners and Morriss state:

“Carson was a marine biologist whose earlier publications on the oceans and marine life were fine works of nature writing. Her strong reputation built upon these earlier writings led many willing environmentalists to accept the countless distortions in Silent Spring as fact.

In Silent Spring (a title drawn from her assertion that the anti-malaria chemical DDT was causing bird deaths) Carson shifted from documenting nature’s beauty to advocating positions linked to a darker tradition in American environmental activist circles.”

Meiners and Morriss put it bluntly: “above all, Silent Spring is a work of advocacy, weaving anecdotes and carefully selected bits of science into a compelling brief against the use of chemicals that had already saved millions of lives at the time Carson wrote.”

Carson’s proselytizing and advocacy raised substantial anxiety about DDT and led to bans in most of the world and to restrictions on other chemical pesticides. But the fears she raised were based on gross misrepresentations and scholarship so atrocious that, if Carson were an academic, she would be guilty of egregious academic misconduct. Her observations about DDT have been condemned by many scientists. In the words of Professor Robert H. White-Stevens, an agriculturist and biology professor at Rutgers University, “If man were to follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.”

In 1992, San Jose State University entomologist J. Gordon Edwards, a long-time member of the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society and a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, offered a persuasive and comprehensive rebuttal of “Silent Spring.” As he explained in “The Lies of Rachel Carson,” a stunning, point by point refutation, “it simply dawned on me that that Rachel Carson was not interested in the truth about [pesticides] and that I was being duped along with millions of other Americans.” He demolished Carson’s arguments and assertions, calling attention to critical omissions, faulty assumptions, and outright fabrications.Consider, for example, this passage from Edwards’ article: “This implication that DDT is horribly deadly is completely false. Human volunteers have ingested as much as 35 milligrams of it a day for nearly two years and suffered no adverse effects. Millions of people have lived with DDT intimately during the mosquito spray programs and nobody even got sick as a result. The National Academy of Sciences concluded in 1965 that ‘in a little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million [human] deaths that would otherwise have been inevitable.’ The World Health Organization stated that DDT had ‘killed more insects and saved more people than any other substance.’”

Edwards states in his book:

“1962, when Rachel Carson published her book Silent Spring, I was delighted. I belonged to several environmental-type organizations, had no feelings of respect for industry or big business, had one of my own books published by the Sierra Club, and I had written articles for The Indiana Waltonian, Audubon Magazine, and other environmental magazines.

At the time, I had been engaged in field work at the University of Wyoming research station in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for three summers and I worked as biological coordinator for the National Park Service in Glacier National Park. I eagerly read the condensed version of Silent Spring in the New Yorker magazine and bought a copy of the book as soon as I could find it in the stores. As I read the first several chapters I noticed many statements that I realized were false; however, one can overlook such things when they are produced by one’s cohorts, and I did just that.

As I neared the middle of the book, the feeling grew in my mind that Rachel Carson was really playing loose with the facts and was also deliberately wording many sentences in such a way as to make them imply certain things without actually saying them. She was carefully omitting everything that failed to support her thesis that pesticides were bad, that industry was bad, and that any scientists who did not support her views were bad.

I then took notice of her bibliography and realized that it was filled with references from very unscientific sources. Also, each reference was cited separately each time it appeared in the book, thus producing an impressive array of “references” even though not many different sources were actually cited. I began to lose confidence in Rachel Carson, even though I thought that as an environmentalist I really should continue to support her.

I next looked up some of the references that Carson cited and quickly found that they did not support her contentions about the harm caused by pesticides. When leading scientists began to publish harsh criticisms of her methods and her allegations, it slowly dawned on me that Rachel Carson was not interested in the truth about those topics, and that I really was being duped, along with millions of other Americans.

As a result, I went back to the beginning of the book and read it all again, but this time my eyes were open and I was not lulled into believing that her motives were noble and that her statements could be supported by logic and by scientific fact. I wrote my comments down in rough draft style, and gathered together the scientific articles that refuted what Carson had reported the articles indicated. It was a most frustrating experience.

Finally, I began to join the detractors of Silent Spring, and when hearings were held to determine the fate of DDT in various states of this nation, I paid my own way to some of them so that I could testify against the efforts to ban that life-saving insecticide. It was gratifying to find that great numbers of scientists and health officials whom I had always held in high esteem were also testifying at those hearings, in defense of DDT and in opposition to the rising tide of antipesticide propaganda in environmental publications and in the media.

In testifying and speaking in public, I frequently exposed the misleading references Rachel Carson had cited in her book, presenting her statements from Silent Spring and then reading the truth from the actual publications she was purporting to characterize. This revealed to the audiences just how untruthful and misleading the allegations of Silent Spring really were.

Now, nearly 30 years later, the controversy is still boiling about how truthful Rachel Carson was. I recently learned that a movie honoring Rachel Carson and Silent Spring is being made for television. Because I believe such a movie would further misinform the public, the media, and our legislators, I decided to type up my original rough notes from 1962-1963 and make them available. Here they are, page by page, starting with her dedication.”

…

“No matter how deceitful her prose, however, the influence of Carson’s Silent Spring has been very great and it continues 30 years later to shape environmentalist propaganda and fund-raising as well as U.S. policy.”

In addition, DDT was used with dramatic effect to shorten and prevent typhus epidemics during and after WWII when people were dusted with large amounts of it but suffered no ill effects, which is perhaps the most persuasive evidence that the chemical is harmless to humans. The product was such a boon to public health that in 1948 the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Dr. Paul Müller for his discovery of the “contact insecticidal action” of DDT.

Although the use of DDT is not risk-free, there is a vast difference between applying large amounts of it in the environment — as farmers sometimes did before it was banned in the United States — and using it carefully and sparingly to fight mosquitoes and other disease-carrying insects, as it is used in a handful of African and Asian countries even today. It is sprayed or dusted indoors in small amounts to prevent mosquitoes from nesting, so exposures are extremely low. The now well-known problems associated with the thinning of raptor’s eggshells – while always exaggerated – can be completely avoided by using DDT with care exclusively in residential areas, because the chemical remains largely near where it is sprayed. No study has ever linked DDT environmental exposure to harm to human health.

A basic principle of toxicology is that the dose makes the poison, and with modern regimens both environmental and human exposures would be very low. But “Silent Spring” condemned essentially all use of chemical insecticides and rejected the firmly established principle that products with known but small risks can offset far larger risks and provide a net safety benefit.

Carson’s disingenuous proselytizing spurred public pressure to ban DDT in many countries, with disastrous consequences: a lack of effective control of mosquitoes that carry malaria and other diseases. Malaria imposes huge costs on individuals, families and governments. It inflicts a crushing economic burden on malaria-endemic countries and impedes their economic growth. A study by the Harvard University Center for International Development estimated that a high incidence of malaria reduces economic growth by 1.3 percentage points each year. Compounded over the four decades since the first bans of DDT, that lost growth has made some of the world’s poorest countries an astonishing 40 percent poorer than had there been more effective mosquito control.

It is bad enough that the case against DDT was based on anecdote and innuendo, but Carson and Dunn and the regulators who banned DDT failed to consider the inadequacy of alternatives. Because it persists after spraying, DDT works far better than many pesticides now in use, many of which are just as toxic to birds, mammals, fish and other aquatic organisms. And with DDT unavailable, many mosquito-control authorities are depleting their budgets by repeated spraying with expensive, short-acting and marginally effective insecticides.

Another advantage of DDT is that even when mosquitoes become resistant to its killing effects, they are still repelled by it. An occasional dusting of window and door-frames is extremely effective at keeping mosquitoes out of homes, schools, hospitals, and other buildings. When used in this way, the exploitation of DDT’s repellency also exposes people to lower amounts of insecticide than occurs with the only comparably effective alternative, bed nets soaked in various other pesticides. Moreover, limited DDT spraying does its work at a fraction of the cost.

The legacy of Rachel Carson is that tens of millions of human lives — mostly children in poor, tropical countries — have been traded for the possibility of slightly improved fertility in raptors. This remains one of the monumental human tragedies of the last century. It is deplorable that university students are exposed to a science that manifests such ignorance and failure to respect the norms of science.

This story is remarkable in that it demonstrates what happens when junk science is supported by scientists and media with a progressive agenda for the purpose of raising funds to feather their nests and gain political power. Liberals do this on an ongoing basis. Think Global Warming!

The next and even more egregious example of liberal and progressive thought and action is the promotion of Eugenics.

Eugenics, the social movement claiming to improve the genetic features of human populations through selective breeding and sterilization,[1] based on the idea that it is possible to distinguish between superior and inferior elements of society, played a significant role in the history and culture of the United States prior to its involvement in World War II.

Eugenics was practiced in the United States many years before eugenics programs in Nazi Germany and U.S. programs provided much of the inspiration for the latter. Stefan Kühl has documented the consensus between Nazi race policies and those of eugenicists in other countries, including the United States, and points out that eugenicists understood Nazi policies and measures as the realization of their goals and demands.

A hallmark of the Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th century, now generally associated with racist and nativist elements (as the movement was to some extent a reaction to a change in emigration from Europe) rather than scientific genetics, eugenics was considered a method of preserving and improving the dominant groups in the population’

Eugenics, as a modern concept, was originally developed by Francis Galton. It has roots in France, Germany, Great Britain and the United States in the 1860s-1870s

British scientist Francis Galton is perhaps best known for his studies that compared the behavioral differences between dizygotic and monozygotic twins, or perhaps for his statistical innovations including the concepts of chi square, regression, and correlation. What many people don't realize, however, is that Galton was also the creator of the field of eugenics. In an 1869 work, Galton assembled biographical information from obituaries and other sources and constructed pedigrees of leading English families, concluding that superior intelligence and abilities were inherited with an efficiency of 20%. From this work, he coined the term "eugenics," meaning "well born," and theorized that humanity could be improved by encouraging the fittest members of society to have more children.

Galton's ideas soon gained popularity both at home and abroad. In the United States, the eugenics movement hit its stride in the early 1900s, when increased interest in the genetics of animal breeding coincided with rediscovery of Mendel's 1865 work demonstrating the inheritance patterns of certain characteristics in pea plants. Charles Davenport, a chicken breeder and agriculturalist, was one of the first American scientists to embrace Mendelian genetics. Through his studies of large families, Davenport uncovered valuable information regarding the inheritance of conditions such as albinism and neurofibromatosis. However, Davenport's involvement in the eugenics movement would soon overshadow these accomplishments.

It is important to understand the cultural background of the era that created this field of “science.” After the Civil War, there was turbulent economy and an influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. The economy of the US had rapid fluctuations and remained in this tenuous manner until WWI. As the economy became more uncertain, the social inequalities between different segments of society became more visible.

In the same era, the idea of Social Darwinism became popular and was used to explain these social inequalities. Social Darwinism utilizes the concept of natural selection from Charles Darwin and applies it to society. Social Darwinism explains survival of the fittest in terms of the capability of an individual to survive within a competitive environment. This explains social inequalities by explaining that the wealthy are better individuals and therefore better suited to survive in the uncertain economy. In terms of survival of the fittest the wealthy are more likely to survive and produce more offspring than the poor.

However, this was not occurring. The birthrate of the elite was declining while the birthrate of the poor was increasing. Meanwhile governmental social programs and aid were doing little help the increasing poverty. The government utilized the idea of scientific management, known as progressivism. Progressive reformers relied on science to control both nature and human society. This view of science as a method of reform and the newly rediscovered science of genetics gave rise to social engineering — EUGENICS.

Eugenicists believed genetics were the cause of problems for the human gene pool. Eugenics stated that society already had paid enough to support these degenerates and the use of sterilization would save money. The eugenicists used quantitative facts to produce scientific evidence. They believed that charity and welfare only treated the symptoms, eugenic sought to eliminate the disease. The following traits were seen as degenerative to the human gene pool to which the eugenicists were determined to eliminate: poverty, feeble-mindedness-including manic depression, schizophrenia, alcoholism, rebelliousness, criminality, nomadness, and prostitution.

The accuracy of eugenicist methods was severely overrated. Although based on genetics, the eugenic scientists did not document any genetic relationship to some qualities that they studied, such as politeness, bluntness, etc. It is especially amazing that the scientists made such brilliant relationships between genes and behavior at a time when they did not even know that DNA carried genes, causing the researchers to treat complex behavior as though it had a single cause. Other flaws in research included the researchers did not did not take into account the impact that the environment plays into a person’s behavior. They also used culturally based IQ tests on immigrants to determine IQ. Finally, the early eugenicists made up results to give scientific results.

Many of the eugenicist's ideas came from studies of the supposed deterioration of a genetic stock over time. For example, the sociologist Richard Dugdale based his study on “The Jukes,” which is a clan of 700 criminals, prostitutes, and paupers. Dugdale believed that bad environment caused their degeneracy and could be reversed over time. A.H. Estabrook resurveyed the Jukes in 1915 but saw little improvement in the family. He concluded that several traits associated with inadequacy were inherited. However, since the eugenicists did not understand genetics and the methods of inheritance, they formed their method of inheritance. The meant that desired traits could only be spread to children through marriage between two “worthy” families. Undesired traits were always spread between “shiftless” families. A child between a worthy family and a shiftless family would be mostly shiftless but a little desirable.

Before eugenics became internationally recognized in WWII, it was a very popular movement in the United States. In fact the American Eugenics Society set up pavilions and "Fitter Families Contest" to popularize eugenics at state fairs. The average family advocated for the utilization of eugenics while educational systems embraced eugenics, which was presented as science fact by the majority biology texts. In fact, eugenics became so popular that eighteen solutions were explored in a Carnegie-Foundation supported study in 1911, to report the best practical means for eliminating defective genes in the Human Population. Although the eighth of the 18 solutions was euthanasia, the researchers believed it was too early to implement this solution. The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in America was a lethal chamber, or gas chamber. Instead, the main solution was the rapid expansion of forced segregation and sterilization, as well as increased marriage restrictions. However, not everybody was in favor of eugenics, Punnett at the first international congress for Eugenics in 1911 stated, “Except in very few cases, our knowledge of heredity in man at present is far too slight and far too uncertain to base legislation upon.”

The world thought Hitler was mad, but the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race was not Adolf Hitler’s. The idea was created in the United States at least two decades before Hitler came to power. In fact, in 1924, when Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, he frequently quoted American eugenics and displayed a thorough knowledge. “There is today one state, Hitler wrote, in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States." Hitler told his fellow Nazis that he closely followed American eugenic legislation. “I have studied with great interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.”

During the beginning of the third Reich, eugenicists across America welcomed Hitler’s plans as the logical implementation of their own research. Ten years after Virginia passed its 1924 sterilization act, Joseph DeJarnette, superintendent of Virginias Western State Hospital, complained in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, “The Germans are beating us at our own game.”

In 1934, the number of sterilizations in Germany was accelerating beyond 5,000 per month. Beginning in 1940, thousands of Germans were taken from homes for the elderly, mental institutions and other state ran institutions and was systematically gassed. In all, between 50,000 and 100,000 were killed.

Number of sterilized from each condition

• Hereditary feeble-mindedness: 200,000
• Schizophrenia: 80,000
• Epilepsy: 60,000
• Manic-depressive psychosis: 20,000
• Serious physical deformities: 20,000
• Hereditary deafness: 16,000
• Hereditary alcoholism: 10,000
• Hereditary blindness: 4,000
• Huntington's chorea: 600

TOTAL: 410,600

Hitler believed that Jews were racially inferior. They played a decisive role in social degeneracy, such as prostitution, pornography, modern art, financial crimes, and the narcotics trade. Jewish people possessed no ethics or morality and that they had been engaged in a 4,000-year-old conspiracy to dominate the world pursuant to their view of themselves as the chosen people. Just like other eugenicists, Hitler believed that these characteristics and values were in the genes of the Jewish people, and therefore are able to be eradicated from the general population Hitler’s threat to exterminate European Jewry was made to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939: “In the course of my life I have often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it. If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevisation of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation [Vernichtung] of the Jewish race in Europe”

Hitler attempted to succeed in this goal by annihilating hundreds of thousands of the Jewish population in concentration camps using the American favored method of extermination of the gas chambers. There were also rumors that Hitler made Lebensborn a "stud farms" where SS men and suitable young women were mated to breed a master race. However this is nothing more than a myth. Lebensborn was in fact a conservative institution with a conservative sexual code, attempting to maintain middle-class respectability.

The connection between the American Eugenics movement and the Nazi eugenic movement was further solidified in the Nuremburg trials that judged the crimes committed by the Nazis during the war. In their defense the Nazis quoted Oliver Wendell Holmes from the infamous 1927 Buck v. Bell trial. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

The American elite’s pre-World War II commitment to breeding out the “unfit” — defined variously as racial minorities, low-I.Q. whites, the mentally and physically handicapped, and the criminally inclined — is a story that defies easy stereotypes about progress and enlightenment. On the one hand, these American eugenicists tended to be WASP grandees — ivory-tower dwellers and privileged with an obvious incentive to invent spurious theories to justify their own position.

But these same eugenicists were often political and social liberals — advocates of social reform, partisans of science, critics of stasis and reaction. “They weren’t sinister characters out of some darkly lighted noir film about Nazi sympathizers, but environmentalists, peace activists, fitness buffs, healthy-living enthusiasts, inventors and family men.” From Teddy Roosevelt to the Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, fears about “race suicide” and “human weeds” were common among self-conscious progressives, who saw the quest for a better gene pool as of a piece with their broader dream of human advancement.

This progressive fascination with eugenics largely ended with World War II and the horrors wrought by National Socialism. But while the West has discarded the theory of the eugenics era, the practice urged by Fisher and others — the elimination or pre-emption, through careful reproductive planning, of the weaker members of the human species — has become a more realistic possibility than it ever was in the 1920s and ’30s.

The eugenicists had very general ideas about genetics and heredity, very crude ideas about intelligence, and deeply poisonous ideas about racial hierarchies. They did not have, as we do, access to the genetic blueprints of individuals — including, most important, human beings still developing in utero, whose development can be legally interrupted by the intervention of an abortionist.

Eugenics in the United States were championed by Universities such as Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and the University of Indiana. Foundations such as the Carnegie Institute and Rockefeller Foundation funded research at the Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory. It was at Cold Springs Between 1910 and 1939, the laboratory was the base of the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) of biologist Charles B. Davenport and his assistant Harry H. Laughlin, two prominent American eugenicists of the period. Davenport was director of the Carnegie Station from its inception until his retirement in 1934. In 1935 the Carnegie Institution sent a team to review the ERO's work, and as a result the ERO was ordered to stop all work. In 1939 the Institution withdrew funding for the ERO entirely, leading to its closure. The ERO's reports, articles, charts, and pedigrees were considered scientific facts in their day, but have since been discredited. However, its closure came 15 years after its findings were incorporated into the National Origins Act (Immigration Act of 1924), which severely reduced the number of immigrants to America from southern and Eastern Europe who, Harry Laughlin testified, were racially inferior to the Nordic immigrants from England and Germany. Charles Davenport was also the founder and the first director of the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations in 1925.

The Rockefeller Foundation funded eugenics research in German until 1939, the eve of WWII. This funding was carried on even after the atrocities at Hartheim Castle euthanasia was carried out on the undesirables and degenerates” in gas chambers and busses were carbon monoxide was funneled into the sealed interior. It was also during this period Germans were build concentration camps in Germany with plans to expand the program after the invasion and occupation of Poland.

Who were the most famous advocates of Eugenics in the United States? To name a few of the more notable they were:

Margaret Sanger – the Founder of today’s Planned Parenthood

H.G. Wells - author

Luther Burbank- botanist

George Bernard Shaw - author

Theodore Roosevelt- President of the United States

Woodrow Wilson – President of the United States

Oliver Wendell Holmes – Associate and Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court

Hugo Black – Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

Alexander Graham Bell – American inventor of the telephone

David Starr Jordan. – Stanford professor and founder of Eugenics Committee of the American Breeders Association and ERO at Cold Springs.

John Harvey Kellogg – Corn Flakes king

Henry Ford – Industrialist

Thomas Edison – inventor

John Maynard Keynes – economist

Bertrand Russell – philosopher

In 1935, the Los Angeles Times published a long defense of Germany's sterilization policies, in which the author noted that the Nazis "had to resort to the teachings of eugenic science" because Germany had been "deprived of her colonies, blessed with many hundreds of defective racial hybrids as a lasting memory of the colored army of occupation, and dismembered all around." Not only did California eugenicists know about Nazi efforts to use sterilization as a method of "race hygiene" — targeted primarily at Jews — they also approved efforts to stop "race-mixing" and increase the birth rate of the "Northern European type of family." The chilling words of Progressive reformer John Randolph Haynes anticipated the Nazi regime's murder of 100,000 mentally ill patients: "There are thousands of hopelessly insane in California, the condition of those minds is such that death would be a merciful release. How long will it be before society will see the criminality of using its efforts to keep alive these idiots, hopelessly insane, and murderous degenerates. Of course the passing of these people should be painless and without warning. They should go to sleep at night without any intimation of what was coming and never awake."

At the height of the movement, 30 states had adopted legislation that legalized the sterilization of individuals deemed unfit for reproduction. In most states, that meant the mentally ill or mentally deficient. By the time all was said and done, somewhere in the neighborhood of 60,000 people had been forcefully sterilized in state-sanctioned procedures. In some states, such as California, sterilization records are incomplete or often altered, making it impossible to truly know how many people were subjected to the procedures. It was done to men and women, Caucasians as well as individual from other and mixed races. State laws in California included permissions for those who were in prisons to be eligible for sterilization, as well as those found to have any chance of carrying hereditary dementia or insanity. The laws also removed the patients’ rights to contest the procedure, although it was still necessary for parents to consent to the sterilization of their minor children. In the years between 1921 and 1950, roughly 450 people were sterilized in California each year. California still practices forced sterilization of women in prison.

After World War Two and the horrors of the Nazi extermination camps became common public knowledge you could not find one supporter of Eugenics in the United States. They were all like Sgt. Schultz of the “Hogan’s Heroes” TV show — Ï saw nothing, I heard nothing, I know nothing.” Biographers of these men in most part made little mention of their participation in Eugenics or ignored it completely. In 2009 Hillary Clinton accepted the Margaret Sanger Award from Planned Parenthood — the organization founded by Margaret Sanger. During the event, Clinton said that emphasizing and promoting abortion is a key issue in President Barack Obama’s foreign policy. She said she felt honored. Yes honored to be connected with an organization that believed in the sterilization of Negro women and “undesirables” for the purification of the gene pool.

From a rigorously pro-choice perspective, the in utero phase is a space in human development where disease and disability can be eradicated, and our impulse toward perfection given ever-freer rein, without necessarily doing any violence to human dignity and human rights.

But this is a convenient liberal progressive perspective for our civilization to take. Having left behind pseudoscientific racial theories, it’s easy for us to look back and pass judgment on yesterday’s eugenicists. It’s harder to acknowledge what we have in common with them.

First, a relentless desire for mastery and control, not only over our own lives but over the very marrow and sinew of generations yet unborn. And second, a belief in our own fundamental goodness, no matter to what ends our mastery is turned.

Did Dr. Gosnell Help The Pro-Life Movement

“I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone. I will give no deadly medicine to any one if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and similarly I will not give a woman a pessary to cause an abortion. But I will preserve the purity of my life and my arts. — Hippocratic Oath.

One of the big reasons the mainstream media studiously avoided covering the trial of Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell is that it doesn't like talking about the late-term abortion industry. It's a topic the media, which is heavily pro-abortion, doesn't want the public to think about. Abortion is supposed to be a quick, clean outpatient procedure, little different from having a minor skin irritation removed. The idea that more than one person is involved in this procedure is suppressed.

But it's hard to avoid that dangerous idea when discussing six-month late-term abortions, in which there is a chance the baby might emerge from the womb and survive. New videos from the pro-life undercover filmmakers at Live Action show abortion clinic doctors and staffers callously discussing ways to dispose of inconvenient born-alive infants — ranging from standing idly by and watching them die, to drowning them in jars of toxic solution, or even flushing them down toilets.

It's all so horribly dehumanizing. However divided national opinion might be on the topic of abortion, we should all be able to agree that babies born alive deserve medical assistance, and their status as people should be recognized. But then our moral calculations might begin flowing backward from that recognition, and we may wonder how the humanity of a child is completely erased simply because he rests a few inches further inside the womb. And babies much younger than 24 weeks look fully human in sonograms don't they? That's one of the reasons public opinion on abortion remains in flux, decades after a notorious Supreme Court decision that was supposed to settle the matter once and for all.

The trial of Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, facing the death penalty for the deaths of four infants and one woman in his clinic, is over. America has moved on. It's exactly what the pro-abortion contingent wants. They want Gosnell out of the news because they want abortion out of the news. Ongoing discussion provokes thought about the status quo. And pro-aborts want to keep things as they are. And, they have reason to be confident.

Our president, whom no one can accuse of not being politically astute, showed up this week, despite the Gosnell story, as the first sitting president ever to address Planned Parenthood, the nation's largest abortion provider.

When Kirsten Powers brought attention to Gosnell, with her USA Today column, she said it wasn't about abortion. "This is not about being pro-choice or pro-life," she wrote. "It is about human rights." For Powers, the story was about lack of supervision. And, of course, where abortions are carried out legally, clinics should be supervised and inspected.

But to leave the story there is to be content with the tip of the iceberg. And the whole iceberg is a huge story that all of America should be looking at. The whole iceberg is bigger than abortion itself. It is about how profoundly America has changed since Roe v Wade, in 1973, made abortion an accepted part of American life.

Let's be clear that pro-aborts and pro-lifers differ on far more than technicalities about when life begins. They differ about what life is.

In the state of Pennsylvania, where Gosnell was doing his dirty business, abortion is legal until the developing child is 24 weeks — 6 months — old. Among Gosnell's many transgressions was performing abortions after 24 weeks. But Planned Parenthood, and their guest speaker, our president, oppose that 24-week limit. They believe abortion should be legal until the child is born

It should also be pointed out that in the Keystone State a 14-year old girl can walk into a Planned Parenthood abortion mill and get an abortion sans parental consent or knowledge. This same 14-year old girl would need parental consent to visit a nail salon for a manicure.

Tom Ridge, the once progressive liberal governor of Pennsylvania, signed legislation reducing the state’s inspections and regulations on abortion clinics for fear of causing higher costs to doing abortions and thus driving some of the marginal abortion clinics, like DR. Gosnell’s, out of business thus reducing the access to cheap abortions. Tom Ridge has remained silent on the Gosnell trail for obvious reasons.

In 2007, shortly after the US Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, which banned a brutal abortion procedure most commonly used to destroy infants from 15 to 26 weeks old, then-Senator Obama spoke at a Planned Parenthood event and decried the decision. He called it part of a "concerted effort to steadily roll back" access to abortion.

Justice Kennedy, who wrote the decision, included a description of one of these procedures on a 26-week-old infant. It takes a certain deadening of the heart, of the soul to read the description of the little baby clasping his fingers and toes as the doctor jams his scissors into his skull, and still believe this should be permitted.

Since Roe v Wade, we've given birth to a new materialistic culture of narcissism where reverence for life itself is gone. Life has become a commodity and people use each other as cavalierly as they destroy innocent young life. As our reverence for life has diminished, so has our reverence for the institutions that surround and support it.

Scholars at the Brookings Institution observed in 1996 that Roe v Wade contributed to the collapse of marriage and the dramatic increase in out-of-wedlock births. The idea that children were part of a sacred institution called marriage started disappearing. The sense of honor, the sense of shame disappears in this culture of self.

In 1965, seven years before Roe v Wade, less than 10 percent of American babies were born to unwed mothers — 24 percent to unwed black women and 3.1 percent to unwed white women. As of 2010, this was up to 41 percent of our babies born to unwed mothers — 73 percent to black women and 29 percent to white women. Sixty percent of our out-of-wedlock births are to women in their 20's.

President Obama became the first sitting president to address Planned Parenthood on Friday. Not surprisingly, he didn’t have anything to say about Kermit Gosnell, or the wave of medical emergencies at abortion clinics, or the sex-selection abortions Live Action discovered at Planned Parenthood. Obama didn’t even use the word “abortion” in his speech. Abortion is so wonderful that even the most strident abortion radical ever elected to the White House can’t bring himself to say the word.

At a time when the headline of the day is a story about the bloody massacres of babies born alive in Kermit Gosnell's clinic, the almost bone-jarring contrast of Obama's speech at Planned Parenthood freezes every normal sense of credulity in unbelief.

The story of one baby born alive in the Pennsylvania Gosnell horror mill is that the child was swimming in a toilet, trying to get out. It was pulled from the toilet only to have its spinal cord snipped while the mother was still in the room.

If the abortion industry didn’t enjoy the nearly religious devotion of the Left, it would be Occupy Wall Street’s favorite example of a big business that pays big bucks for political influence, so it can operate with ridiculously lax oversight, weak safety standards, and lavish subsidies. Kermit Gosnell preyed relentlessly upon poor black women, while treating his assistants like sweat shop labor. The excuses offered by Planned Parenthood when its staff is caught flaunting the law on undercover video are reminiscent of tobacco company executives trying to claim that smoking isn’t bad for you. The Democrat Party has expressed a willingness to shut down the entire government to protect Planned Parenthood subsidies. When a prominent charity, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, tried to decouple from Planned Parenthood, the response was straight out of “The Sopranos.” You are required to fund this organization, and you are not allowed to stop. They’ve got a lot of money, political clout, and media influence available to enforce that directive.

“Planned Parenthood is not going anywhere,” Obama declared in his speech. ”It’s not going anywhere today, it’s not going anywhere tomorrow.” Well, of course not. It’s a billion-dollar corporation with $90 million annual profits that gets over $540 million in taxpayer funding that spent $12 million on highly effective political action during the last election. And really, as long as it’s a properly supervised business selling legal goods and services, there’s no reason it should “go anywhere.” It just shouldn’t be propped up with funds extracted by the government from people who don’t support its activities, especially since much of the dissenters’ money is recycled into political activity against them.

The abortion industry thrives politically by associating its politics with human identity. Opposition to Planned Parenthood is caricatured as hatred of women, even when the corporation’s critics are themselves women. That’s a neat trick, if you can pull it off: equating dissent with hatred. It’s not easy to lose a debate, if you can establish those ground rules.

And yet, the abortion lobby seems increasingly worried that they might be losing the national debate. Some of the panic is artificial, and profitable, folding neatly into the “progressive” narrative favored by the liberals who have been taking America over the edge of a cliff. ”The fact is, after decades of progress, there’s still those who want to turn back the clock to policies more suited to the 1950s than the 21st century,” warned Obama. Haven’t liberals lately been telling us that we should return to the tax policies of the Fifties, because they were prosperous despite the high nominal tax rates that nobody actually paid? Isn’t Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, relentlessly determined to ensure the 21st century remains saddled with the voter identification systems of the 1950s?

But with those little spurts of nostalgia out of the way, we’re back to the “progressive” ideology that insists the failed economic policies and social degeneration of the Left are inevitable and irreversible, so any attempt to change course is “turning back the clock.” There is no reason to take this idea seriously. ”Change” can move in many different directions, including the rediscovery of ideas we might realize were abandoned in error. The modern era could be right about some things, wrong about others, and the same can be said of previous decades. Why does anyone accept the notion that the only alternative to embracing every single “progressive” failure is hopping into a time machine and returning to the days of Ozzie and Harriet? Let’s allow for the possibility that the past sixty years saw both triumphs and mistakes. We are not cursed to live with the mistakes for eternity.

There is reason for Planned Parenthood to worry about all that lovely government money drying up, as the bills come due for decades of absurd government spending. They’ll soon find themselves in a bitter war with other politically-connected dependents of a tapped-out Uncle Sam, and then all of them will be crushed together under the weight of mandatory entitlement and debt spending, which on our current course will leave nothing for either Planned Parenthood or the Pentagon within a few decades. Planned Parenthood will need all of its political weapons oiled and loaded to prevail in the arena of insolvency so this is not a good time for them to see polls that Americans are souring on abortion. They don’t seem to be in any mood to outlaw the procedure entirely — perhaps they never will be — but they’re growing uncomfortable with those late-term spinal-cord snips. They had no idea how bad things have gotten. That’s why the media thought it was so important to keep the Gosnell trial off the front pages and nightly newscasts. The really dangerous question — the one our media gatekeepers don’t want American voters asking – is: “How did this happen?” Followed inevitably by: “How often does this happen?”

Pro-lifers often wonder about the sociological damage inflicted by decades of abortion. The word “hope” gets thrown around a lot by politicians — it’s a trademark of President Obama’s — but what is more hopeless than the termination of a child’s life? How much despair can any society be expected to swallow without growing ill?

This brings me to the effect the Gosnell trial will have on the public, even with its limited media coverage.

J.D. Mullane, a reporter for the Buck’s County Courier Times has been covering the Gosnell trail since it began and written about the testimony he has heard and the lack of coverage by the media. Some of the following may be very disturbing but it makes my point. For many years people either pro-abortion or ambivalent to the issue have sat around their coffee tables sipping a glass of chardonnay or merlot talking about the benefits of abortion and the right of women to choose. Even when those pollsters call and ask you questions about abortion they are very academic in the questions. They certainly don’t ask if you are in favor of seeing the spine of 24-week old baby being cut with a pair of scissors or having its skull crashed and flushed down a toilet. If they did I am sure the polls would show a much different result for those who favor this barbaric procedure. Gosnell has brought the ugly and inhumane details of abortion to those who have closed their eyes to what happens when a woman or young girl walks into an abortion clinic.

It matters not whether Gosnell gets the death penalty or not. He is 76-years old and will spend the rest of his life behind bars and probably would die before an execution would be carried out with the appeal process as it is.

Here are a few of Mullane’s observations posted: Monday, April 15, 2013:

“It is hard to decide the most appalling images to emerge Thursday at the murder trial of Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell. What happened in his abortion clinic is beyond any morbid Hollywood horror.

Tiny severed feet and hands stored in jars over a sink in the “procedure” room.

Digitalis injected into the stomachs of pregnant women to stop the beating hearts of their unborn babies so that they would be born dead.

Survivor babies whose spinal cords were severed, whose brains were removed with suction, whose tiny bodies were placed in a waste bin for disposal.

Then there is commonwealth exhibit C-147, depicting a large baby balled in the fetal position, bloody, stuffed in a bin. “Big enough to walk me home,” joked Gosnell when he saw the child’s remains, testified Ashly Baldwin, a clinic employee.

Gosnell, 72, is charged with killing seven born-alive babies and causing the death of Karnamaya Mongar, 41, an immigrant from Nepal who had sought an abortion at his West Philadelphia clinic. The clinic was busy, doing brisk cash business, catering not only to local women in West Philadelphia, but also women from the affluent surrounding suburbs of Bucks and Montgomery counties. Gosnell’s reputation for no-wait abortions was so well known, women would fly in from other states.

The prosecution alleges that Gosnell’s clinic regularly delivered live babies in the third trimester and killed them by severing their spinal cords or a “snip,” which according to testimony is what Gosnell called the procedure.

On Thursday, when I was there, Ashly Baldwin, 22, testified that she began working at the clinic when she was 15. Though unqualified and unlicensed as a medical technician, she began medicating women, even administering injections with a butterfly needle, under Gosnell’s instructions.

She testified that she saw digitalis injected, and explained that its purpose in abortions is to kill the unborn child so “it would come out dead.”

But in some of the most horrifying testimony of the day, Baldwin described how she saw babies born alive, with hearts beating rapidly, some of them moving and “flinching,” and some making baby sounds or “screeching.”

Until the FBI raided his clinic in 2010, he had operated for 30 years at 3801 Lancaster Ave., in the clinic he called the “Women’s Health Society.”

There was little healthy about it. Bloody floors, dirty equipment. The filthy gynecological bed with stirrups on which Karnamaya Mongar went into cardiac arrest from a drug reaction, and later died, sat in the middle of the courtroom, in front of the jury.

Tina Baldwin testified that Gosnell treated women differently, based on their race. White women “with money” were taken to an “immaculate” upstairs room where Gosnell treated them personally. Poor black, Latino and other women were kept in the clinic’s dingy, dirty downstairs rooms, and were usually treated by medically unqualified staff.”

Mullane then shifted his reporting to the absence of media coverage of the trial:

“Thursday’s testimony had sensational details. The court staff, convinced it would attract journalists from around the nation, has set aside three rows of seats to accommodate up to 40 reporters. But all Thursday morning, as Ashly Baldwin testified to horror after horror, only one reporter was in the reserved seating — me.

Several local news outlets were there, scattered about the mostly empty courtroom. The Philadelphia Inquirer had a reporter there. NBC10 sent a blogger for its website. The AP stopped in, but the reporter told me that resources are thin and trial coverage is not gavel to gavel.

An hour into afternoon testimony, Jon Hurdle of The New York Times showed up, and a few minutes later was gone.

The lack of daily media coverage for the most sensational abortion trial angers pro-lifers who said there is a “media black out” on the Gosnell trial.

I asked one of the court staff why so few are interested.

“If you’re pro-choice, do you really want anybody to know about this,” he said, motioning to the filthy medical equipment set up in the courtroom.

It’s a good point. As saturation coverage of the Sandy Hook elementary school coverage has caused Americans to reconsider the limits of the Second Amendment, saturation coverage of Kermit Gosnell’s clinic would likely cause the same reconsideration of abortion rights.

The details are that horrifying.”

On Sunday I saw an interview with Mr. Mullane on the Fox News’ Huckabee show. He did not go into the graphic details of the trial, I had to find those on my own, However, he did talk about the lack of coverage and the effects on those reporters who did cover the trial.

He mentioned one instance where he was talking to, in his opinion a “very liberal” reporter who was pro-abortion and had written to this effect. Mullane said that after one day of watch the trial the reporter told him he had changed his mind by 180 degrees and was now definitely against abortion of any sorts. This is what a splash of the real world can do to someone — even a liberal. It’s easy to talk about things that don’t directly affect you — it’s another thing to witness those things.

How about those jurors and court officials who heard days of testimony? How will they react when the trial is over? Will they tell their family and friends what abortion really is? I think they will need too or suffer nightmares the rest of their lives. They probably will need some help to mitigate the effects of PTSD or PTSS. If a soldier seeing the brutality of the battlefield in Afghanistan or the first responders at Sandy Hook need help I pray the court will furnish the jurors the same medical help.

Now that the trial is over here are a few of the closing arguments. According to The Blaze:

“For more than two hours, the doctor’s lawyer, Jack McMahon, delivered compelling remarks directly to the jury, appealing for its members to be fair and judicious while considering the very-serious charges against his client. While McMahon painted Gosnell out to be a victim of a government witch-hunt of sorts, Assistant District Attorney Edward Cameron’s remarks framed him as a dangerous and murderous doctor with little compassion for those he purportedly harmed.

McMahon offered a fiery diatribe, defending his client against the first degree murder charges for four infants allegedly killed after birth and a third-degree charge for the death of Karnamaya Mongar, an immigrant who died following an abortion. While admitting that the clinic, the Women’s Medical Society, wasn’t perfect, the lawyer launched into a major defensive, railing against the notion that it was a bloody “house of horrors,” as prosecutors, pro-life advocates and the media have maintained.

He defended Gosnell as an asset to the community who provided low-cost health care and an opportunity for young females in the neighborhood to learn. Rather than rooting its arguments in fairness, the attorney accused the prosecution of prejudice; he called the case against Gosnell “elitist” and “racist” and said that the charges and claims have been blown out of proportion.

“This isn’t a perfect place by any stretch of the imagination — but it’s not what they say it is,” McMahon continued, going on to claim that Gosnell was singled-out because he is an African American.

Of particular frustration to McMahon was the use of the aforementioned term — “house of horrors.” While he noted that it “sounds good” and “makes for good press,” he rejected the label and said that it has been manufactured to convince people to come alongside the prosecution’s concocted vision of what unfolded.

From showing images of a clinic that was clean and well-organized (to contradict the prosecution’s claims that the Women’s Medical Society was a dirty and disease-ridden establishment) to continuously berating the prosecution over its tactics and purportedly untrue statements, McMahon was candid.

“That, ladies and gentleman, is not a house of horrors,” he said, after showing the jury images of a clean and organized clinic environment.”

The state was much more graphic in its closing remarks

“The prosecution delivered an equally compelling case, going through, one-by-one, all 54 witness testimonies to paint Gosnell as disorganized and murderous. Going into gruesome detail, the prosecution outlined the notion that the doctor slit babies’ spinal cords and essentially forced women to go through delivery, later terminating the children after birth.

Assistant District Attorney Edward Cameron wasted little time in responding to many of McMahon’s counterpoints, painting Gosnell out to be a doctor who kept poor records, who used untrained staff and, through witness testimony, a medical professional who put his patients at risk.

The assistant district attorney also appealed to the jury, noting that this case has been a turning point — one in which people will likely think twice before merely trusting their doctors’ qualifications and policies. Seeing as many of Gosnell’s patients were unaware of what was allegedly going on, Cameron attempted to use the case as a call for the jury to be more aware of whom they trust with their medical care (especially considering the charges against Eileen O’Neill, a clinic staffer who is also on trial for allegedly pretending to be a doctor).

“This case is not about abortion, he stressed, noting that the procedure is legal so long as it is conducted before 24 weeks and in a safe location.

“This case is not about racism or elitism. It’s not about a rush to judgment. It was conducted, held before a grand jury,” Cameron continued, replying directly to the charges that McMahon had waged against the prosecution during his closing arguments.

Cameron’s diatribe followed a similar layout. He noted the importance of having basic standards for clinics, regardless of whether they are in urban, suburban or rural areas. Citing Steven Massof’s testimony (another unlicensed doctor who worked in the clinic), he noted that the office was purportedly flea ridden and dirty.

Cameron’s diatribe followed a similar layout. He noted the importance of having basic standards for clinics, regardless of whether they are in urban, suburban or rural areas. Citing Steven Massof’s testimony (another unlicensed doctor who worked in the clinic), he noted that the office was purportedly flea ridden and dirty.

The district attorney added that the women who saw Gosnell trusted him and that, by the prosecution’s assessment, the doctor failed to live up to the Hippocratic Oath – and to his responsibility to patients. Then, he proceeded to go through the testimony of all 54 individuals, using their words to highlight the prosecution’s belief that Gosnell killed babies after birth and that his clinic was, indeed, a “house of horrors.”

In addition to allegedly killing the four babies after birth, Cameron accused Gosnell of hitting patients during procedures. Of Baby A, who he said would have had a 70 to 80 percent chance of survival (the prosecution estimates that he was killed at 29.5 weeks), he said that, “It had scissors jabbed into its beck and it slowly suffocated to death”

Cameron also argued that, at the least, it was Gosnell’s responsibility to keep the babies comfortable. He said, “Whether that baby’s going to live or not, you’ve got to make them comfortable,” claiming that, in the cases of these children, that simply didn’t happen.”

Cameron’s final remark was:

“A baby making a noise has to have air, has to be alive,” said Cameron.

Later, while closing, Cameron turned to Gosnell, pointed and asked, “Are you human?” For those angry over the charges against the doctor, this statement will certainly resonate. But for those who agree with McMahon and believe that this entire scenario has been a witch-hunt, Cameron’s accusatory words will surely be met with disdain.”

I am sure the left-wing media, those who were not at the trial and the ones sipping their merlot will try to spin this as one-of-a kind witch hunt. Planned Parenthood will spend millions on a new public relations effort to restore the tarnished image of abortion. But I think the genie is out of the bottle and Gosnell will make that difficult. All of the protests and marches by the forces of pro-life for the past 40 years could not have had the impact that this one quack doctor has. We still talk about Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin when it comes to genocide. We still mention the name of Dr. Mengele when it comes to in human medical experiments. Now we can mention Dr. Kermit Gosnell in the same context when we talk about abortion.

The mainstream media reported that Obama delayed his now-famous (or infamous) speech at Planned Parenthood so he could visit and console the families of those who lost loved ones in the West, Texas fertilizer plant explosion.

It seemed for a moment that the president had a heart, and perhaps he could put some priorities in order. That is called PR -- or in a far more honest vein, it is pure propaganda.

After hearing of the horrors and murders in Pennsylvania under Dr. Gosnell, we may be better-served to see the president skip both visits and instead visit the Gosnell clinic for a pause and a prayer — if the ghosts of those murdered there would allow it.

Had he visited the clinic on the day the baby was swimming in the toilet, would he have pulled it out and demanded its life be preserved? Would he in a moment of honest conscience stood with the helpless?

Mr. Obama has already answered that question. In the speech made at Planned Parenthood he clearly stated where he would stand. He said "You've also got a president who's going to be right there with you, fighting every step of the way."

Mr. Obama sees himself as leading the nation into the 21st century, and he justifies his abortion stand as protecting women's health. We can only wonder if he skipped every biology class ever offered in high school and college. Being pregnant is not a health problem, and living, perfectly viable unborn human beings, in or out of the mother's womb, don't have any health problems, unless the will to live is now considered unhealthy.

Soon, as our resources diminish to care for our growing aging population, we will start dealing with our elderly as we do our unborn.

But if everything is meaningless, who cares? The people who are aware of the 50 million aborted babies since the Roe v. Wade decision care.

The Cultural Totalitarianism Of The Left

“Society is endangered not by the great profligacy of a few, but by the laxity of morals amongst all.” — Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Totalitarianism is usually associated with an omnipresent state which enchains the individual with iron manacles of edicts, orders, and regulations. The voracious appetite of government and its eager use of coercive power make citizens into slaves whose lives are the property of those who rule rather than serve the people.

This is a grim reality in most of the world. Government power is like gravity in a black hole: it relentlessly and mindlessly accumulates more and more mass over time. Moreover, because the rationale for this power is to protect the people -- and if people were doing well, that rationale would vanish -- totalitarian government makes sure that nothing it does really makes life better. So while public education is touted as a panacea for social ills, state education administrators and politicians in their pocket resist reforms which would make schools work and insist that more money and authority over the lives of our children is the policy allowed.

There is, however, another incarnation of totalitarianism, cultural totalitarianism, which is just as dangerous as government totalitarianism. We see cultural totalitarianism all the time, although it is harder for us to grasp because we assume that those cultural totalitarians are rational participants in the marketplace of goods and services. But this is not so.

A major factor of the left’s domination of the narrative is to control the culture through the media and our education systems. This all began with John Dewey, the acknowledged father of today’s progressive education industry. Dewey, like other progressive academicians of his time were followers of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel whose historicist and idealist account of reality revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism. His ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology — moral relevance. He was a major representative of progressive education and liberalism.

In his advocacy of democracy, Dewey considered two fundamental elements — schools and civil society — as being major topics needing attention and reconstruction to encourage experimental intelligence and plurality. Dewey asserted that complete democracy was to be obtained not just by extending voting rights but also by ensuring that there exists a fully formed public opinion, accomplished by effective communication among citizens, experts, and politicians, with the latter being accountable for the policies they adopt.

While all of this may sound very utopian Dewey’s ideas when adopted by the academy resulted more in progressive indoctrination than in critical thinking — something our institutions of higher learning are dedicated to today.

In the 1930’s Dewey’s philosophy was further advanced with the influence of the Frankfurt School a Marxist think tank dedicated to a neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory. The school initially consisted of dissident Marxists who believed that some of Marx's followers had come to parrot a narrow selection of Marx's ideas, usually in defense of orthodox Communist parties. Meanwhile, many of these theorists believed that traditional Marxist theory could not adequately explain the turbulent and unexpected development of capitalist societies in the twentieth century. Critical of capitalism and Soviet socialism, their writings pointed to the possibility of an alternative path to social development.

Once again many members of the academy in the United States were and still are devotees of these schools believing in a socialist-based civil society and not ion the free market system. This has been the roots of the current tyranny imposed by the statist progressive-based education pervading throughout our education system today. If challenges these educators or their cronies in the media you will be labeled a troglodyte unworthy of recognition. As the great conservative writer William F. Buckley, Jr. once proclaimed:

“Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.”

Two recent examples of this are from a university and a middle school. The example from the university is from a professor at the prestigious University of Southern California where a professor boldly indoctrinates his class on the evils of Conservatism and Republicans.

Click here to view the video

This is just one example of millions where the elite masterminds of academia indoctrinate the young minds paying thousands of dollars for a university education that in many cases will prove virtually worthless and not allowing any form of rebuttal their progressive rants. (The tuition at USC is about $45,000 per year)

The other example is more insidious and perhaps worse as it affects younger and more malleable minds in middle school in Racine, Wisconsin where an 8^th grade crossword puzzle assignment claimed that said conservatism is for ‘restricting personal freedoms’. The Blaze reported:

“Tamra Varebrook, a Republican activist in Racine, Wis., told The Blaze on Thursday that her eighth-grade daughter showed her the crossword-style vocabulary sheet assigned to her at Union Grove Elementary School. Varebrook described the assignment as “indoctrination.”

In another example the father of a 4^th grader found a hand-written note in his son’s backpack in response to a lesson on the Constitution that stated: “I am willing to give up some of my constitutional rights in order to be safer or more secure.” Once again a report in The Blaze stated:

“They’re the words that Florida father Aaron Harvey was stunned to find his fourth-grade son had written, after a lesson in school about the Constitution.

Harvey’s son attends Cedar Hills Elementary in Jacksonville, Fla. Back in January, a local attorney came in to teach the students about the Bill of Rights. But after the attorney left, fourth-grade teacher Cheryl Sabb dictated the sentence to part of the class and had them copy it down, he said.

The paper sat unnoticed in Harvey’s son’s backpack for several months until last week, when his son’s mother almost threw it away. The words caught her eye in the trash, and she showed it to Harvey, who said he was at a loss for words. He asked his son, who said Sabb had spoken the sentence out loud and told them to write it down. Harvey said he asked some of his son’s classmates and got a similar answer.”

I would remind Ms. Sabb of the words of Benjamin Franklin, whom she obviously is not familiar with, when he said: “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

These examples are just a few of thousands that occur each month in the nation’s universities and K-12 public schools. This stuff goes on and on, usually without the knowledge of parents or parents who just don’t give a damn as long as the K-12 schools serve their function as a free babysitting service. This may be the plight of the low information voter.

As for the media, politicians, and government officials here are a few recent examples of the cultural intolerance of the progressive left when it comes to the Bill of Rights, especially the First Amendment:

• AP, ESPN, and FOX refuse to mention ‘NRA 500′ by official name.
• New York town removes veterans’ Gadsden flag for being an offensive Tea Party symbol.
• Students asked to ‘argue that Jews are evil’ and prove Nazi loyalty in assignment linked to Common Core.
• The Breathitt County School District in Kentucky has removed long-standing Ten Commandments displays in local public schools due to pressure from Atheist group.
• Conn. Senator urges FOX not to air NASCAR race because the NRA is sponsoring it.
• Media Working Hand in Glove with Democrats on Gun Legislation.
• The Rehabilitation of the New Left’s terrorists.
• AP refuses to use tags ‘Abortion’ and ‘Reproductive Rights” in Gosnell's murder trial.
• Bill Maher calls ‘The Second Amendment Is Bulls—t!’

These examples were added on April 14, 2013 to demonstrate a few of the issues I am talking about.

Many parents, with the exception of the homeschoolers, are giving up their children to a K-12 education totally imbedded with a progressive, and even socialist, agenda. Many public schools no longer teach moral or Constitutional values. They disdain any semblance of patriotism or love of county. They no longer say the Pledge of Allegiance or recite the Preamble to the Constitution as we did when I was in school back in the day. Children are not expected to excel and they are given good grades for participation rather than excellence. Of course this does not apply to all K-12 schools, but is certainly applies to many across the land. This all part of a foundation laid down years ago by the likes of John Dewey and the teachings of the Frankfurt School.

The latest example of this is the recent rant by MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry when she proclaimed that parents did not have the exclusive right to raise and educate their children — this right belonged to the community, i.e. the state. In a recent promo, MSNBC claims that investing billions more than many other industrialized nations hasn’t produced any real results because we aren’t viewing our children as community property.

In an ad on MSNBC, Harris-Perry calls for "breaking through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents." Instead, she says, we should "recognize that kids belong to whole communities."

Once upon a time, people were treated like people. Businesses didn’t have “Human Resources” departments; they had “Personnel” departments. People aren’t a resource, they’re human beings. A tree is a resource. Coal is a resource. Oil is a resource. People are individuals who have a right to be treated like people.

Apparently, MSNBC and Harris-Parry don’t believe that. They believe that children are somehow the property of the community.

“We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children. Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility,” the promo says, going on to add, “We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”

Clearly, we are entering a new phase in family breakdown. In the earlier phases, leftist policies cultivated unrestrained sexual license, abortion and single parenting. Those policies set the stage for new forms of child poverty as well as heightened social divisions along lines of race, class and sex. Their proponents, however, refrained from openly attacking the family in mass media.

Collectivists ignore a huge truth: Any child whose mother and father have committed to rearing that child together with a moral compass has already won the "lottery of birth." Those are intangibles that serve to defy poverty. Those intangibles always tend to trump material circumstances because they don't depend upon material wealth for their existence.

The left has long worked to collapse the family. This is a fact we must face. The obliteration of family influences on kids is essential to the collectivist vision of communitarianism espoused by the left.

The family serves as a buffer zone that shields individuals — particularly children — from the tentacles of its collectivist vision of centralized state power. Harris-Perry's vision is very likely in line with the agenda of Bill Ayers, founder of the Weather Underground and old colleague of President Obama's. For decades Ayres' career focus has been the transformation of K-12 education, especially early childhood education. His wife Bernadine Dohrn has specialized in family law with a strong focus on children.

This ideology has been expressed before by Hitler, Lenin, Mussolini, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Kim Il-sung, and the Jesuits.

Another aspect of the Culture Totalitarianism of the Left can be found in the entertainment and news media industries. Consider one of the most odious facilitators of cultural totalitarianism in American life: the news media. The owners and operators of these private businesses, if they acted from enlightened self-interest, the animating principle of the marketplace, ought to induce the various news corporations to compete with each other. They would seek niches of readers and audiences not served by their competitors. This would also mean exposing the blatant bias of notional rivals and offering a better "product" — that is, more reliable and objective news.

Instead, media outlets like the New York Times behave like cadres of Orwell's Inner Party in 1984, ignoring the failures of its news competitors as long as the competitors do not present genuine competition of ideas. When giant corporations behave as if they were one, then those on the left scream collusion and monopoly, but in the case of the news media, the stupefying fact that tens of millions of Americans literally never hear the different sides of social and political issues does not bother the left at all.

Perhaps more dangerous are the monopolistic practices of the left in the area of entertainment and recreation. Watch contemporary television programs or a new film or the pathetic meanderings of an establishment comic, and what do we see? There is a dull sameness to it all. The same groups who are safely mocked and the same groups made noble victims. The themes never vary, though often they are presented as revolutionary or radical or new.

In TV shows and theatrical films the bad guys are the corporations and Christian groups. On crime shows when there is a murder at an abortion clinic it is always done by some “radical” Christian group that is opposed to abortion. It’s as tough every person committed to the Constitution is a Timothy McVeigh and every person opposed to abortion is an Eric Rudolph.

A part of the Cloward-Piven Strategy is to control the narrative and dialog of the debate by constantly brining up issues that are anathema to conservatives and by using political correct terms to silence their opposition. If you are for traditional marriage between a man and a woman you are labeled as a homophobe. If you do not agree with the policies of a Black president you are called a racist. If you are pro-life you are considered anti-woman and a part of the war against women and wanting to control their bodies. If you are for the Second Amendment and against more gun control you are insensitive to killings in Tucson, Aurora, Virginia Tech, and Sandy Hook. If you are against illegal and uncontrolled immigration you are a xenophobe. And if you are against the welfare state you are a greedy person who does not care about his or her fellow man.

Frédéric Bastiat, French Economist said it best in his 1850 essay The Law when he stated:

"Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain."

Bastiat saw arguments based on political correctness 163 years ago and predicted the damage it would cause a civil society.

To make the Cloward-Piven Strategy work the progressives needed Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. Saul Alinsky helped to establish the confrontational political tactics that characterized the 1960s and have remained central to all subsequent revolutionary movements in the United States. Obama never met Alinsky personally; the latter died when Obama was a young boy. But Obama was trained by the Alinsky-founded Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in Chicago and worked for an affiliate of the Gamaliel Foundation, whose modus operandi for the creation of “a more just and democratic society” is rooted firmly in the Alinsky method.

In the Alinsky model, "organizing" is a euphemism for "revolution" — a wholesale revolution whose ultimate objective is the systematic acquisition of power by a purportedly oppressed segment of the population, and the radical transformation of America's social and economic structure. The goal is to foment enough public discontent, moral confusion, and outright chaos to spark the social upheaval that Marx, Engels, and Lenin predicted — a revolution whose foot soldiers view the status quo as fatally flawed and wholly unworthy of salvation. Thus, the theory goes, the people will settle for nothing less than that status quo's complete collapse — to be followed by the erection of an entirely new system upon its ruins. Toward that end, they will be apt to follow the lead of charismatic radical organizers who project an aura of confidence and vision, and who profess to clearly understand what types of societal "changes" are needed.

But Alinsky's brand of revolution was not characterized by dramatic, sweeping, overnight transformations of social institutions. As Richard Poe puts it in his book The Shadow Party, "Alinsky viewed revolution as a slow, patient process as did the Fabians. The trick was to penetrate existing institutions such as churches, unions and political parties." Alinsky advised organizers and their disciples to quietly, subtly gain influence within the decision-making ranks of these institutions, and to introduce changes from that platform. It should be noted that for several years Obama himself taught workshops on the Alinsky method.

It is Alinsky’s Rule No. 12 that is used most by the progressive left: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.” (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.) Demonization of the opposition is used almost daily in the media. Rule No. 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions works well too.

The final point of the cultural totalitarianism of the Left is the issue of abortion. No issue has torn this nation apart more in the last 40 years than the Supreme Court’s decision to restrict states from passing laws restricting abortion. Roe v. Wade has been captured by the Left as a primary issue in elections where those opposed to any form of abortion are demonized as perpetrating a war on the rights of women. Children as young as 14-years old can get an abortion at a Planned Parenthood abortion mill without their parent’s consent and in some states even notification of the parent.

The progressive left has used this issue for litmus tests on political candidates. If a candidate like Rick Santorum stands against abortion his political capital immediately drops as the media, women’s groups, teachers unions and academia begins to demonize him for his war on women. This is pure Alinsky. Even our current Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, the former Governor of Kansas, protected the abortionist Dr. George Tiller, known as "Tiller the Baby Killer", while he was performing late term abortions.

Consider the current trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell taking place in a Philadelphia courtroom where Gosnell is on trial for murder for killing live-born babies. I take the trial excerpts from the Philadelphia Inquirer rather than Hot Air so as not to be accused of using a conservative blog site. The Philadelphia Inquirer is far from a right-leaning newspaper. The PI reports:

“Ashley Baldwin, a 15-year-old sophomore at University City High School who was thinking of becoming a doctor, got a job at one of the busiest clinics in West Philadelphia. She was paid, and in no time went from answering phones to doing ultrasounds, administering intravenous medicine, and, ultimately, assisting in abortions performed by her mentor, Kermit Gosnell.

Now 22 and the mother of a 2-year-old son, Baldwin on Thursday told a Philadelphia Common Pleas Court jury hearing Gosnell's murder trial of her unusual hands-on medical apprenticeship.

Baldwin also told the jury about seeing at least five aborted babies moving, breathing, and, in one case, "screeching" after late-term procedures at the clinic at 3801 Lancaster Ave.

In Pennsylvania, abortions are legal up to 24 weeks of pregnancy. After that, medical experts say, a fetus is capable of living outside the womb.

"They looked just like regular babies," Baldwin said.

Baldwin said one baby was so big that Gosnell joked that "this baby is going to walk me home."

She said the joke bothered her and she talked to her mother about it. Baldwin's mother, however, was also a Gosnell employee. Tina Baldwin had worked there since 2001.

Ashley Baldwin said she assisted Gosnell in abortions, applying pressure to the mother's abdomen, handing the doctor instruments and equipment.

She said she also saw Gosnell use scissors to "snip" the neck of newborns who were moving after the procedure.

Although she sometimes felt uneasy about what she saw, Baldwin said, Gosnell always had an explanation: "He told me that's how it was supposed to go."

Baldwin's tale of her teenage years in an abortion clinic was received calmly by the jury of seven women and five men who have already heard a four-week parade of horrible testimony.

Gosnell, 72, is charged with seven counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of seven infants born alive during abortions and killed by cutting their spinal cords with scissors. If the jury finds him guilty, Gosnell could be sentenced to death.

Gosnell lawyer Jack McMahon has argued that none of the infants was killed, that they were in death throes from the abortion drug Digoxin that Gosnell administered earlier.

Baldwin's testimony ended the fourth week of the trial. Testimony resumes Monday before Judge Jeffrey P. Minehart. The lawyers and witnesses are under a strict gag order.

Like other Gosnell workers, Baldwin testified that Gosnell taught her the rudiments of using an ultrasound, administering IV medicine, and some lab work. She said he told her she was working legally because, as a doctor, he had "grandfathered her in."

"We talked a lot," Baldwin said, and Gosnell gave her medical books so she could read more about what she was doing.

When it came to learning how to start an intravenous line, Baldwin said, Gosnell got a bag of saline solution and a "butterfly needle," rolled up a sleeve, and let her practice on him.

"How much training did you get?" asked Assistant District Attorney Joanne Pescatore.

"Not much, just a little time," replied Baldwin, who described many of the procedures as "not that hard."

Baldwin said she could not remember how much she was paid. Other Gosnell workers have testified that workers were paid, under the table, $10 an hour, and $20 an hour on nights they assisted in late-term abortions.

By the time authorities raided the Women's Medical Society clinic in February 2010, Baldwin said, she had been there almost four years, and was going to school and working up to 50 hours a week, sometimes to 1 or 2 a.m.

Once, when it neared midnight, Baldwin said she told Gosnell she wanted to go home.

"It was a time when other people were leaving and he said he needed me to stay," Baldwin said.

Ashley Baldwin has not been charged with any crime. Tina Baldwin, 47, has pleaded guilty to racketeering, conspiracy, and corrupting a minor — her daughter.

Tina Baldwin also testified Thursday about working the clinic's reception desk.

Baldwin said her daughter's job was not unusual, because Gosnell often hired West Philadelphia high school students and students from his alma mater, Thomas Jefferson University.

Tina Baldwin was not asked about why she let her daughter work at the clinic. Ashley Baldwin said her mother was concerned by her late hours but deferred to her own judgment about the job's demands.

Gosnell also is charged with corrupting a minor, Ashley Baldwin, and with one count of third-degree murder in the Nov. 19, 2009, death of Karnamaya Mongar, 41, a Virginia woman allegedly killed by an overdose of Demerol by Gosnell's untrained staff.

Ashley Baldwin said she was in the clinic on the night Mongar went into cardiac arrest. She said Gosnell was pumping on Mongar's chest and called to her to plug in a defibrillator.

"I got a small shock when I plugged it in," Baldwin added. "It didn't work."

I think by now any human being reading this account of one day at this trial will be thoroughly disgusted. I can’t imagine what it is for the jurors hearing weeks of this stuff. But, that’s the problem. This goes on every day at Planned Parenthood abortion mills across the land every day and it has become so commonplace it is hardly reported. If it is reported as those young investigative reporters working with the late Andrew Breitbart did it is the reporters who are demonized or ignored by the mainstream media and the progressive lefty celebrities in Hollywood and New York.

Michael Vic received way more coverage for his dog fighting trail and PETA gets more support for their defense of catching harmless fish. Can you imagine the coverage if it were dogs? Had Kermit Gosnell killed dogs, HLN would be giving it wall to wall coverage as they do all sorts of sensational trials. Nancy Grace would be in full outrage mode every night. But this is not the case as Erick Erickson writes in Red States:

“In churches, local restaurants, and small town hair salons a lot of people across the country are talking about the terrible trial of Kermit Gosnell in Pennsylvania. It’s just not the people who interact with those who produce the news in New York City.”

It’s sad that a man who engaged in horrific acts of barbarism will never be as known to the public as Casey Anthony or George Zimmerman because Gosnell’s crime is viewed as less than a crime by the vast majority of the producers of American news and the progressive left.

It must be noted here that Kirsten Powers, a liberal contributor to Fox News stated in her column for USA Today:

“A Lexis-Nexis search shows none of the news shows on the three major national television networks has mentioned the Gosnell trial in the last three months. The exception is when Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan hijacked a segment on Meet the Press meant to foment outrage over an anti-abortion rights law in some backward red state.

The Washington Post has not published original reporting on this during the trial and The New York Times saw fit to run one original story on A-17 on the trial’s first day. They’ve been silent ever since, despite headline-worthy testimony.”

And yet, media mentions of the ongoing trial have been conspicuously few and far between. Could it be that the otherwise highly sensational story sheds just a little too much inconveniently negative light on a preferred narrative of theirs? Charles Krauthammer calls it out:

The progressive left does not want to give coverage to anything that might damage their narrative and agenda. This is the way it has been for the past 40 years and why the Cloward-Piven Strategy is working and why our progressive politicians are slowly changing the culture of the nation and destroying our Bill or Rights. Only the Third Amendment has yet to be tampered with. And when it came to academia and its progressive leanings William F. Buckley Jr. had this to say:

“I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”