This Is What Happens When We Forget History

If This Is Where The Minds Of The Elites Are--This Country Is In Trouble

WaPo Columnist Pens FRIGHTENING Defense Of Marxism: 'It's Time To Give Socialism A Try'

ByBEN SHAPIRO

@benshapiro

March 7, 2018

On Tuesday, The Washington Post ran an op-ed from Elizabeth Bruenig touting the possibilities of a new economic system in the United States: socialism. That’s not a complete surprise, given the mainstream media’s sudden interest in Marxism again – The New York Times has run a series of pieces over the last year praising Marxism from the perspective of women’s rights, “inspiring” Americans, the Harlem Renaissance, even from the perspective of having better sex. Bruenig’s piece, however, is a masterpiece of silliness, a veritable cornucopia of evil ideas repackaged in the mildewed bows of revolutionary optimism.

She begins by complaining that capitalism has hollowed out the “liberal” movement — liberals want to praise capitalism for its benefits, but ignore its downside. Instead, Bruenig suggests, “It’s time to give socialism a try.” Why, pray tell, would we try a system of government interventionism that has ended, every time, in heartbreaking poverty and mass death? (No, Sweden and Denmark aren’t socialist countries — they’re capitalist countries with redistributionist tendencies.) Because, says Bruenig, the ills of our society are almost entirely the result of capitalism. She excoriates Andrew Sullivan of New York Magazine for embracing capitalism while lamenting the rise of nationalism. She complains about Joe Biden, whom she says whines uselessly about America being “better than this.” She says that Americans are “isolated, viciously competitive, suspicious of one another and spiritually shallow; and that we are anxiously looking for some kind of attachment to something real and profound in an age of decreasing trust and regard,” and that all of this is “emblematic of capitalism.” Never mind that America’s social bonds remained strong while capitalism was ascendant; never mind that government interventionism has coincided with a breakdown in social cohesion; never mind that government-enforced conformity has a rude way of destroying “attachment to something real and profound.” No, it’s that we shop around for our products at the local grocery store. That’s the problem, obviously.

It gets worse. According to Bruenig, capitalism “encourages and requires fierce individualism, self-interested disregard for the other, and resentment of arrangements into which one deposits more than he or she withdraws. (As a business-savvy friend once remarked: Nobody gets rich off of bilateral transactions where everybody knows what they’re doing.)”

This is pure nonsense. Of course capitalism promotes individualism. So does liberalism, the root of human rights. And even the most ardent capitalists, like Ayn Rand, forcibly reject the idea that we should resent voluntary economic arrangements — in fact, believers in free markets see such resentment as the root of socialism, not capitalism. Furthermore, everyone gets rich off of bilateral transactions where everybody knows what they’re doing. In fact, that’s the only way to get rich. If you screw someone, you can’t very well have a repeat economic transaction with them. This zero-sum mentality only applies to socialistic misapprehensions about the nature of free and voluntary exchange.

But Bruenig continues:

Capitalism is an ideology that is far more encompassing than it admits, and one that turns every relationship into a calculable exchange. Bodies, time, energy, creativity, love — all become commodities to be priced and sold. Alienation reigns. There is no room for sustained contemplation and little interest in public morality; everything collapses down to the level of the atomized individual.

Now, this is a critique frequently made by social conservatives, who suggest that virtue is a necessity to preserve freedom, and that Judeo-Christian values and communities that spring from those values must be the underpinning of capitalism. But socialism doesn’t resolve those problems. It merely redistributes them: all relationships are now reduced down to numbers, and if those numbers don’t fit, people are made to fit the numbers. If alienation is the product of capitalism, then subjugation is the product of socialism.

Bruenig quickly skips over the totalitarianism of socialism, instead suggesting a “kind of socialism that would be democratic and aimed primarily at decommodifying labor, reducing the vast inequality brought about by capitalism, and breaking capital’s stranglehold over politics and culture.”

That’s a lot of buzzwords in a row. There is no way to “democratize” socialism — there is always a boss at the factory, whether it’s a government bureaucrat or an owner who has a stake in the success of the factory. You cannot decommodify labor, because labor is by its nature a commodity — it is a tradeable good to be bought and sold. And capitalism may create inequality, but it also creates prosperity for everyone, including those on the bottom end of the economic spectrum.

Bruenig continues nonetheless:

I don’t think that every problem can be traced back to capitalism: There were calamities and injustices long before capital, and I’ll venture to say there will be after.

Well, yes. Before capitalism, there was feudalism, monarchic tyranny, mercantilism, and bloody war with complete lack of economic progress. So there’s that. But Bruenig concludes:

But it seems to me that it’s time for those who expected to enjoy the end of history to accept that, though they’re linked in certain respects, capitalism seems to be at odds with the harmonious, peaceful, stable liberalism of midcentury dreams. I don’t think we’ve reached the end of history yet, which means we still have the chance to shape the future we want. I suggest we take it.

Bruenig’s path has already been taken. It leads to the gulag, to the prison camp, to the starvation of children. It leads to centralization of power and it leads to destruction of the individual. The fact that Bruenig can repeat the discredited nostrums of Lenin and Mao without even realizing it shows how our capitalist system has failed to educate its beneficiaries about just why they’re able to write garbage editorials for pay in the freest, most prosperous country in world history.

Lack Of Understanding Of The History Of The US And Constitution Will Crash The US

Millennials would rather live in socialist or communist nation than under capitalism: Poll

‘This troubling turn highlights widespread historical illiteracy in American society’

A series of busts of Russia’s rulers, including Vladimir Lenin, second right, and Josef Stalin, third right, are on display in Moscow, Russia, Friday, Sept. 22, 2017. The Russian Military-Historic Society, an organization founded by President Vladimir Putin and led ... more >

 Print

By Bradford Richardson - The Washington Times - Saturday, November 4, 2017

A majority of millennials would prefer to live in a socialist, communist or fascist nation rather than a capitalistic one, according to a new poll.

In the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation’s “Annual Report on US Attitudes toward Socialism,” 58 percent of the up-and-coming generation opted for one of the three systems, compared to 42 percent who said they were in favor of capitalism.

The most popular socioeconomic order was socialism with 44 percent support. Communism and fascism received 7 percent support each.

Marion Smith, executive director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, said the report shows millennials are “increasingly turning away from capitalism and toward socialism and even communism as a viable alternative.”

“This troubling turn highlights widespread historical illiteracy in American society regarding socialism and the systemic failure of our education system to teach students about the genocide, destruction, and misery caused by communism since the Bolshevik Revolution one hundred years ago,” Mr. Smith said in a statement.

Millennials are more likely to prefer socialism and communism than the rest of the country. Fifty-nine percent of all respondents chose capitalism as their prefered arrangement, compared to 34 percent who said socialism, 4 percent fascism and 3 percent communism.

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Some of communism’s luminaries are admired by millennials. Thirty-one percent said they have a favorable view of Che Guevara, 32 percent of Karl Marx, 23 percent of Vladimir Lenin and 19 percent of Mao Zedong. Joseph Stalin is viewed favorably by just 6 percent.

In the poll, only 33 percent of millennials were able to identify the correct definition of socialism. They fared about as well as the rest of the country, which only successfully identified socialism at a 34 percent clip. Gen Z―the generation after millennials―was the most informed group, with 43 percent correctly identifying socialism.

Where millennials struggled compared to other generations was in the identification of capitalism. Just 51 percent correctly said capitalism is the “Economic system based on free markets and the rule of law with legal protections for private ownership.” That was by far the lowest of any age cohort. Americans as a whole correctly identified capitalism 67 percent of the time.

Millennials are also less likely to have a negative view of communism. Just 36 percent said they had a “very unfavorable” impression of the system, and only 44 percent said they would be insulted if described as a communist. As a whole, 56 percent of Americans view communism very unfavorably, and 63 percent would be insulted to be associated with the ideology.

One possible explanation for the millennial infatuation with socialism is that 53 percent of the cohort report feeling burdened by the economy. Millennials were the only age group more likely to say America’s economic system “works against me” rather than “works for me.” Gen Z had the most positive impression of the economy, with 66 percent saying it “works for me”―although many of them have yet to enter the workforce.

The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation survey was conducted online from Sept. 28 to Oct. 5 by YouGov. It polled 2,300 members of the general public age 16 and above
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Another Women's March Run By Militants And Terrorists. Wake Up Women, They Are NOT Interested In Your Life Only Destroying America

Meet the terrorist behind the next women’s march

By Kyle Smith

February 25, 2017 | 1:53pm | Updated

Modal Trigger

The Women's March on Washington in January 21st.Getty Images

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Here’s the left’s next great idea for bringing down President Trump: another women’s march. Which means another public instance of Trump haters shouting slogans to one another and mistaking it for constructive politics. What progressives need to defeat Trump is outreach, but all they have is outrage.

On March 8, organizers seem to be aiming for a different vibe than the librarians-in-pussy-hats element that made the first women’s march after Trump’s inauguration so adorable.

Instead of milling around Washington, organizers have in mind a “general strike” called the Day without a Woman. In a manifesto published in The Guardian on Feb. 6, the brains behind the movement are calling for a “new wave of militant feminist struggle.” That’s right: militant, not peaceful.

The document was co-authored by, among others, Rasmea Yousef Odeh, a convicted terrorist. Odeh, a Palestinian, was convicted in Israel in 1970 for her part in two terrorist bombings, one of which killed two students while they were shopping for groceries. She spent 10 years in prison for her crimes. She then managed to become a US citizen in 2004 by lying about her past (great detective work, INS: Next time, use Google) but was subsequently convicted, in 2014, of immigration fraud for the falsehoods. However, she won the right to a new trial (set for this spring) by claiming she had been suffering from PTSD at the time she lied on her application. Oh, and in her time as a citizen, she worked for a while as an ObamaCare navigator.

Rasmea Yousef Odeh spent 10 years in prison for her part in two terrorist bombings.AP

You can see why she’s a hero to the left. Another co-author, Angela Davis, is a Stalinist professor and longtime supporter of the Black Panthers. Davis is best known for being acquitted in a 1972 trial after three guns she bought were used in a courtroom shootout that resulted in the death of a judge. She celebrated by going to Cuba.

A third co-author, Tithi Bhattacharya, praised Maoism in an essay for the International Socialist Review, noting that Maoists are “on the terrorist list of the US State Department, Canada, and the European Union,” which she called an indication that “Maoists are back in the news and by all accounts they are fighting against all the right people.” You know you’re dealing with extremism when someone admits to hating Canada.

–– ADVERTISEMENT ––

The International Women’s Strike is meant to be a grass-roots affair, with womensmarch.com promising more information about how to participate in local protests across the US. Women around the country are being urged to walk off their jobs and join a demonstration near them.

Angela Davis speaks at the Women’s March in Washington DC in January.Getty Images

According to The Guardian piece, women should spend their day “blocking roads, bridges, and squares, abstaining from domestic, care and sex work” and “boycotting” pro-Trump businesses. Also every woman is supposed to wear red in solidarity.

The bristling tone of the manifesto and its call for a “militant” uprising are yet another indicator that liberals are increasingly willing to justify violence in the name of opposing Trump. After the Berkeley campus erupted in flames and violence to protest the planned appearance of Milo Yiannopoulos, many progressive activists took to Twitter to cheer them on. Hollywood stars Debra Messing and Sarah Silverman both tweeted their support, with Messing saying, “RESISTANCE WORKS” and Silverman ranting: “WAKE UP & JOIN THE RESISTANCE. ONCE THE MILITARY IS W US FASCISTS GET OVERTHROWN. MAD KING & HIS HANDLERS GO BYE BYE.”

Progs are equally enthusiastic about the idea that it’s OK to punch people as long as you hate them: “Stranger Things” star David Harbour said at the Screen Actors Guild awards, “We will, as per Chief Jim Hopper [the character he played on the show], punch some people in the face when they seek to destroy the weak and the disenfranchised and the marginalized.” Nice liberal Democrats should be aware that this newer, angrier cohort is just as hostile to their own party. “I have problems with the Democratic Party that is just as linked to the corporate capitalist structure as the Republican party,” Davis said at a rally last year.

Anti-Trump activism seems to have little to do with the political arts required to win elections — finding common ground, forging alliances, making friends. Instead all of these demonstrations are about denouncing enemies, and making yourself feel better about the November defeat by gathering publicly with those who share your rage. This sort of thinking leads to such self-defeating acts as interrupting traffic in places like New York City (where Trump got 18 percent of the vote) or San Francisco (9 percent).

If you want to persuade working-class Trump voters in Wisconsin to join your cause, annoying rich liberal Democrats trying to get to work a thousand miles away is a strange way to go about it.

Is A New Mao Revolution Starting On Campuses

The Cultural Revolution Comes to America’s Campuses

by Roger L Simon

NOVEMBER 13, 2015 - 5:10 AM

(2.1k)(155)

Today’s undergraduates probably know little, if anything, about the cataclysmic movement in China known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. It began in 1966 before all of them (and even a great number of their professors) were born. This massive national crusade, instigated by Chairman Mao Zedong, was intended to create a pure communist man and woman, devoid of the constraints of materialism and personal ambition.

It started with the closing of the schools and the re-education of intellectuals and the bourgeoisie and ended up with years of incredible violence, taking millions of lives. The actual statistics are still a state secret, but a recent biography of Mao states “at least 3 million people died violent deaths and post-Mao leaders acknowledged that 100 million people, one-ninth of the entire population, suffered in one way or another.”

I got a personal look at the remnants of the Cultural Revolution in 1979 when on an “activist’s” tour of China. The country was still extraordinarily impoverished and primitive. Propagandistic thought control was everywhere, broadcast on loudspeakers and splayed out on ubiquitous billboards urging the masses to “Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius” (Lin Biao was a former ally, then competitor, of Mao’s who died in a mysterious plane crash) or “Smash the Gang of Four,” one of whom was Mao’s wife, then in disrepute. Whenever you asked a question of your interpreters, even a bland one, you got a rote response. Everyone was too timid to say anything the slightest bit controversial. Newspeak reigned. It was like living in Orwell’s 1984 five years early.

So you will excuse me if, from the outset, when I heard how our college campuses were being overtaken with these new-fangled “trigger warnings” and “microagressions,” perfect Maoist terminology for our computerized times, it immediately gave me the heebie-jeebies. Thought control, via political correctness, had come to America in the very spot it had begun in China — the schools.

Recent events at the University of Missouri and Yale (where I attended graduate school), plus now other institutions, have only increased my apprehension. It’s not  at the level of the Cultural Revolution — professors haven’t been asked to wear dunce caps yet and no one (to my knowledge) has been killed — but the portents are not reassuring.

Mob rule, not anything close to democracy, is at play. The so-called SJWs (Social Justice Warriors) seem to be functioning as early avatars of the infamous Red Guard, bullying and then threatening violence to anyone whose thoughts run outside what is deemed to be correct.

College professors and administrators quiver in their path. In the case of Mizzou, the president resignedbefore any concrete evidence of racism was made manifest. It still hasn’t been days later. At dear old Yale, it’s even more bizarre because there were no imputations of racism in the first place, only that there might have been or might be. Forget Bull Connor and the KKK, inappropriate Halloween costumes were the new danger. It was all about having a “safe space” so  feelings wouldn’t be hurt, as if the world could be perfect and the human species remade for an extraordinarily fragile generation of coddled students.

Some people ridicule these students as “snowflakes” unable to stand up to the slightest discomfiting words or images. But it is far worse than that. These so-called “snowflakes” are the potential shock troops of the aforementioned Red Guard, American style. There is a fine line between the extreme entitlement that demands to be warned before reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses (as happened recently at Columbia) and a kind of narcissistic rage acting out against any presumed enemy in its path. How do you think the CR actually happened in China? Yes, the country was significantly poorer, but the psychological evolution was strikingly similar.

So think twice if you don’t think it could happen here. Who would have thought the president of one of our great public universities would lose his job in part because someone said he saw a swastika written in feces on one of the bathroom walls, which now, suddenly, no one can find and might have been a photograph in the first place, if it ever existed?

As we say in Hollywood, it’s “The Crucible Meets Animal Farm,” the Salem witch trials meets four legs good, two legs bad.  But the professors who teach those anti-fascist masterworks aren’t doing anything to defend against it. Lobotomized by political correctness they attempt to be even-handed, in the way many did with Mao and Stalin.  The same results await them.

And we citizens sit outside our great universities and watch the conflagration.  It’s only just begun.

Is China in 1950 Like America In 2014? There Are Some Very Concerning Similarities.

URL and to post comments: http://dollarvigilante.com/blog/2014/3/18/barack-obamas-usa-is-starting-to-look-like-early-days-of-mao.html Tuesday,March 18, 2014 [The following post is by TDV editor-in-chief, Jeff Berwick.] Many like to watch movies or read fiction novels as a way to relax and get away from work and other stresses of day-to-day life.  I, on the other hand, find non-fiction to be much more interesting than almost anything dreamed up by a fiction writer.  So, when I want to relax and get away from things I like to read and watch non-fiction books and documentaries. Given what is going on in China lately I have been nearly obsessed learning about China's history.  It is easily one of the most interesting cultures on Earth with thousands of years of dynasties, warlords, communism, capitalism, wars and atrocities. Of all the atrocities the worst, by far, was committed during Mao's Communist China revolution and the typically Orwellian named, "The Great Leap Forward". That leap eventually ended up with the deaths and starvation of somewhere between 20 and 45 million people. Despite this devastation, American oligarch David Rockefeller said this of the period: "Whatever the price of the Chinese revolution, it has obviously succeeded not only in producing more efficient and dedicated administration, but also in fostering high morale and community of purpose. The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao's leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history." As I watched a recent documentary on this period it struck me how eerily similar the early years of Mao, leading to those deaths, were to today's USA and Obama. THE SIMILARITIES Hope and Change.  As with Obama, Mao was swept into power under great fanfare as a savior by a society of people who had been so impoverished and war torn to put their faith in this man with his ideas.  As with Obama the first few years didn't go too terribly giving some people hope.  But, soon after taking power, in 1950, he quickly got China involved in the Korean War. Land Reform.  During that same period Mao went to work on taking away land from landowners and "giving it to the people".  Done differently, but with the same end goal, the US has been decimating small farm owners through regulations, taxes and even armed raids ending up with large corporations owning more and more of the productive land.  The large corporations, through the US blend of fascism and socialism, end up owning more and more of the land.  According to the US Department of Agriculture, the number of farms in the United States has fallen from about 6.8 million in 1935 to only about 2 million today.  According to Farm Aid, every week approximately 330 farmers leave their land for good.  This isn't done as overtly as it was during Mao's time of just killing landowners as the US government has perfected propaganda but the end result is essentially the same. Suicides.  In Shanghai during this time, suicide by jumping from tall buildings became so commonplace that residents avoided walking on the pavement near skyscrapers for fear that suicides might land on them.  In the US today, even the New Yorker writes about the "suicide epidemic".  Between 1999 and 2010 the number of Americans between the ages of thirty-five and sixty-four who took their own lives rose by almost thirty per cent. Among young people in the US, suicide is the third most common cause of death; among all Americans, suicide claims more lives than car accidents, which were previously the leading cause of injury-related death. Media Suppression and Targeting.  Mao launched the "Hundred Flowers Campaign" urging all those with different opinions to express themselves.  It was a ruse, however, and he used this to target opponents eventually killing 500,000 landowners.  In the US it is done differently but groups, like the Tea Party, have been targetted by the IRS for having opposing views.  And it is well known in the mainstream media that you cannot speak out against the current regime.  Journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye was imprisoned under Obama's orders for speaking out about US involvement in the Middle East.  And, currently, according to Reporters Without Borders, the US stands at #46 on the World Press Freedom Index just after Romania and one ahead of Haiti. Only Those In Government Prospered.  During Mao's time it was said that only those in government and those in the capital cities connected to the government prospered.  This is very similar to what is happening today in the US.  Government workers currently get paid 45% more than their counterparts in the private market.  And, while most of the country languishes in depression level conditions, Washington D.C. is flourishing.  The Washington metro area includes a whopping six of the 10 most affluent counties in the nation. Lies And Statistics.  As things got worse in Mao's China the government took to overtly lying about nearly every statistic.  They lied egregiously about crop production and the amount of deaths by starvation.  Doctors were not allowed to list "starvation" as a cause of death.  In the US it is similar in that nearly all government statistics are heavily manipulated to paint a better picture of what is really going on.  Unemployment figures, for one, are adjusted so that if people give up looking for work they are not counted as being "unemployed" anymore.  The US government currently says that the current rate of unemployment is 7.3%.  However, the percentage of the population which is employed is at lows not seen in 40 years.  And, just by computing the unemployment numbers the way they were computed prior to 1994 (before they took out "long term discouraged workers" from the figures) as computed by  Shadowstats.com, shows an unemployment rate of 23%. Famine and Starvation.  As things got worse, by the end of the 1950s, tens of millions of Chinese died of starvation.  The US has much more past wealth to live upon and still has the printing of the US dollar to keep things more afloat temporarily but even with these advantages there are now 1 in 6 Americans on food stamps... and 1 in 4 children in the US on food stamps.  In other words, already, a very large percentage of the population cannot even afford food to eat without assistance. Without government assistance, they would starve.  THE DIFFERENCES It should be said that China in the mid 20th century and the US in the early 21st century are two very different places.  China, at that time, was a very poor and backward place.  Whereas the US, due to semi-free markets for past centuries, is incredibly advanced and has built up a lot of wealth. As well, communication technologies such as the internet do not allow most government's today to wholesale slaughter people.  In the US today these same goals are undertaken through fines, taxation, regulation, inflation and criminalizing nearly every human activity.  Nearly half of all people under the age of 23 in the US today have been arrested and the US has the world's largest prison population with 25% of the prisoners with only 5% of the world population.  Through these means the US government can look to be less heinous than outright murdering thousands or millions of people but essentially with the same results. Because of these differences we should not expect to see the US follow the exact same path of Mao's China.  But the similarities of the two times are striking. We have published this cartoon from the Chicago Tribune in 1934 on numerous occasions because it so perfectly explains what is going on in the US today. Spend! Spend! Spend!  The US government has been spending and going into deficits at rates that would have shocked people even 15 years ago.  The debt of the US government has increased $6.666 trillion since President Barack Obama took office.  When Obama was first inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2009, the debt of the U.S. government was $10,626,877,048,913.08, according to the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Public Debt. As of Jan. 31, 2014, the latest day reported, the debt was $17,293,019,654,983.61—an increase of $6,666,142,606,070.53.  The total debt of the United States did not exceed $6.666 trillion until July 2003. In the little more than five years of the Obama presidency, the U.S. has accumulated as much new debt as it did in it’s first 227 years. Blame The Capitalists.  Fomenting a class war the heavily socialist indoctrinated youth and poor are constantly told it is "greedy corporations" causing their problems.  This can be seen clearly in all the recent "minimum wage" rhetoric.  Junk The Constitution.  The Constitution and the Bill of Rights have been all but ransacked in recent years... specifically since 9/11 and the Patriot Act.  People collecting rain water or building a pond on their own property or living sustainably off the grid have been deluged by federal agencies threatening them with massive fines or jail time.  And, the rising police state and the endless accounts of police brutality is just another example of this. Declare a Dictatorship.  Barack Obama continues to wage wars without approval from Congress, issue Executive Order edicts, create kill lists and in his most recent State of the Union address even went so far as to say that he was going to go around Congress to get things done... all to wild applause.  That is a dictatorship. THE FALL OF AMERICA Those plans, as laid out in the Chicago Tribune cartoon from 1934 are falling exactly into place.  That, combined with the fact that Barack Obama's US is following a very similar path to Mao's China should be enough to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Unfortunately, it only keeps getting worse.  Capital controls are coming into effect in July of 2014, under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) and so if you don't have yourself or your wealth well outside of the US by this point your time is running out. For this reason we have again set-up an urgent conference called the Crisis Conference this time scheduled for April 30th-May 4th in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.  If you still have significant assets inside the US I urge you to seriously considering attending. The US is currently similar to the early days of Mao.  How it ends up is anyone's guess but it isn't going to be pretty.

Anarcho-Capitalist.  Libertarian.  Freedom fighter against mankind’s two biggest enemies, the State and the Central Banks.  Jeff Berwick is the founder of The Dollar Vigilante, CEO of TDV Media & Services and host of the popular video podcast,Anarchast.  Jeff is a prominent speaker at many of the world’s freedom, investment and gold conferences as well as regularly in the media including CNBC, CNN and Fox Business

Americans Are Stupid!

Somehow Americans have been cohersed into thinking that gun background checks are good even though nearly 50% think that it will lead to gun confiscation. Don't they know that when the government confiscates weapons, you lose your rights?

Every nation that went onto kill millions of their citizens, ALWAYS has started with gun confiscation. Look at Russia under Stalin and China under Mao as two great examples. If we let this go on, the United States will follow that ugly tradition.

Conservative Tom

Gun poll: Most say background checks may bring confiscation

By Jonathan Easley - 04/04/13 07:47 AM ET

  

A plurality of Americans believe the federal government could use information gleaned from expanded background checks to confiscate legally-owned firearms, according to a Quinnipiac survey released Thursday.

But the poll also showed support for background checks remains nearly universal.

According to the survey, 48 percent said they believed the government could use background check records to  guns, while 38 said the government could not.  Ninety-one percent favored background checks anyway, and only 8 percent are opposed.

“In every Quinnipiac University poll since the Newtown massacre, nationally and in six states, we find overwhelming support, including among gun owners, for universal background checks,” Quinnipiac University Polling Institute director Peter A. Brown said in a statement. 

“American voters agree with the National Rifle Association, however, that these background checks could lead someday to confiscation of legally-owned guns.”

President Obama on Wednesday was in Denver seeking to build public support for expanded background checks, arguing it’s a common-sense approach to reducing gun violence in the country.

Obama blasted the National Rifle Association for opposing the measure, which is among the key elements in a bill Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) plans to bring to the floor next month. The NRA says universal background checks are the first step toward a national gun registry.

“We’re not proposing a gun registration system, we’re proposing background checks for criminals,” Obama said, urging gun owners to “get the facts.”

“The opponents of some of these common sense [gun] laws have ginned up fears among gun owners,” the president added, alluding to the notion the government would use the registry to confiscate guns.

Background checks, once called the “sweet spot” for gun control reform by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), have faced roadblocks in Congress, as Republicans argue existing laws aren’t enforced and that the record keeping requirements it would entail are akin to a federal registry.

Some conservatives have argued that the registry could lead to the government confiscating legally-owned guns. 

When the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the universal background checks bill along party lines last month, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said he opposed the legislation because it could lead to “confiscation.”

Democrats say this argument is conspiratorial, and Schumer accused Grassley of “cheapening” the debate by bringing up confiscation.

When broken down along party lines, 61 percent of Republicans say background checks could lead to confiscation, against 25 percent say they could not. A majority of independents also believe this – 51 to 36. Among Democrats, only 32 percent said universal background checks could lead to confiscation.

The Quinnipiac University poll of 1,711registered voters was conducted between March 26 and April 1 and has a 2.4 percentage point margin of error.

Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/291789-poll-most-say-background-checks-could-lead-to-gun-confiscation#ixzz2PVBxmPUG 
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