Thinking It Through: Under the current repression lies a moral, intellectual abyss
By Richard Reeb
For the Victorville Daily Press
Today the nation’s capital is occupied by 27,000 National Guard troops and the Capitol building is surrounded by a menacing wire fence. The ostensible object of this simultaneous display of military power and abject fear is to protect the people’s legislature from dangerous insurrectionists, like the rag-tag bunch that burst into the chambers of the Senate and House of Representatives on Jan. 6.
To call this an overreaction to a one-time event, however deplorable, is an understatement.
What can account for the unmistakably despotic display of power by those in charge of Washington, D.C. security? That such a move should be taken by the party that has for decades indulged or even encouraged dissent that so often became violent seems counterintuitive.
Thinking It Through: Where is America’s ‘systemic’ racism?
By Richard Reeb
For the Victorville Daily Press
The American people have long been subjected to moral condemnation for the sin of racism, commencing in the civil rights era and reaching a noisy crescendo in the present time. Nothing symbolizes this massive defamation more than the “1619 Project” of the New York Times, which alleges that the true founding of America came in the year that slavery was introduced into the English colonies. The Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution, the end of slavery and even landmark civil rights laws count for nothing, the Times alleges, before that allegedly massive and decisive fact of 1619.