Dakota Beacon

This book explains how identity politics have been progressively employed throughout the last century, culminating in the last decade's stampede to cancel traditional American culture. A culture that believes in natural rights (from God and nature) and values the work ethic, individualism, and individual property ownership of free market capitalism. A culture resulting from a constitution and bill of rights that has been a model for the world around us.

The brainwashing of college students by socialist/communists in higher education during the last century has resulted in the continual erosion of American culture, replacing ethics and morality learned from parents and houses of worship with atheism (the ultimate spiritual vacuum) and its fellow travelers, class envy, greed, gluttony, perversion, fear, laziness, substance abuse, self-loathing, and the ultimate wages of unrepentant sin... eternal death.

The CCP Virus presented an opportunity for unethical politicians, a compliant, but now censoring media and academia (colleges and universities, public & private), global monopolists (seeking to eliminate competition) in business and entertainment, and organized criminal influences (union leaders, computer hackers, etc.) to clumsily affect the demise of America's bulwark of freedom, “free and fair elections”. Only history (hopefully within coming days) will tell the full story and whether election cheating skewed actual outcomes for “re-election obsessed” politicians. The virus was, of course, a two-edged sword… it punished mob violence (in close quarters), gluttony, substance abuse, promiscuity, and “group think” (resistance to logic and common sense) while rewarding individual resourcefulness, independence and self-determination.

Let's now briefly examine the roots of identity politics as outlined in this excellent book.

George Washington

George Washington, in his August 21, 1790, letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, assures them that the United States is a nation that protects freedom of conscience (i.e. religious liberty) for all its citizens:

“All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support… May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

Washington was expressing his believe that when an individual exercises their inherent natural rights (those received by God or nature), that same individual must assume also the responsibility to be a good citizen in support of a government that protects all of its citizens from bigotry, persecution and other evils. Those who commit evil acts would love the rest of us to be tolerant of their acts, especially as they promote those acts as normal, even benevolent. In the face of evil, we must remember that tolerance is not necessary in the absence of sin and in an abundance of peace.

John Quincy Adams

In 1819, John Quincy Adams, while serving as secretary of state, made clear that America was based not on privilege but on equal rights. In a letter to a German considering immigrating, he wrote:

“There is one principle which pervades all the institutions of this country, and which must always operate as an obstacle to the granting of favors to new comers. This is a land, not of privileges, but of equal rights… Emigrants from Germany, therefore, or from elsewhere, coming here, are not to expect favors from the governments. They are to expect, if they choose to become citizens, equal rights with those of the natives of the country.”

No reasonable person believes that Adams expected equal outcomes because each of us has special gifts from God that it is our obligation to harness for the general good. Equal opportunity, however, is something that we all must continually strive to promote and nurture.

The founders were not ignorant; they understood that slavery, an evil business practice of the day, was unjust. It would take a special man, Abraham Lincoln and the new Republican Party, to lead America beyond slavery and another hundred years for civil rights legislation passed by those same Republicans (with opposition from southern Democrats) to begin a new era for the descendents of slaves.

Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx

The German philosopher, historian, political scientist and revolutionary socialist, Friedrich Engels (28 November 1820 – 5 August 1895), was also a businessman, journalist and political activist whose father was an owner of large textile factories in England and Prussia (now Germany). Like many adherents of Marxism since, Engels was a wealthy elite – one of the enduring ironies of the left's obsession with “oppression”.

Engels bankrolled Karl Heinrich Marx, the German philosopher, historian, economist, political theorist, sociologist, journalist, and socialist revolutionary, born in Trier, Germany on May 5, 1818. Due to his radical political publications, Marx became stateless and lived in exile with his wife (Jenny von Westhalen) and children in London for decades, researching in the reading room of the British Museum, until his death on Mar 14, 1883.

In 1884 London, Engels wrote Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. He theorized that individual private property had been a late development. Property had been at first held communally, he wrote, then by the village, then the tribe or clan, and then the “gens”, or expanded family. According to Engels, when property finally began to be conceived as private (as with the ancient Athenians), then there was a need for the monogamous, patriarchal family:

“It is based on the supremacy of the man, the express purpose being to produce children of undisputed paternity; such paternity is demanded because these children are later to come into their father's property as his natural heirs.”

Engels obviously despised the concept of “inheritance”. He would, upon a patriarch's death, have the inheritance confiscated by the state. Of course, the patriarch believes that he should be allowed to will the estate he earned during his life to any person or institution he pleased.

Individual property represented those greatest aggravations of all communists: “the rise of the inequality of property” and “wage-labor”. Because any two or more examples of owned property can rarely, if ever, be considered to be “equal”, the very concept of “private property” is unacceptable to a communist. And “wage-labor”, the agreement between two parties involving work performed at a predetermined wage rate, is considered by communists to be equated with or placed near “slavery” and class differences such as the “caste” system in India, elements of which persist even today.

Engels metaphorically compared the family unit with society. In the family, the husband is the bourgeois (elites) and the wife is the proletariat (workers). By collectivizing child rearing through “social services”, all children would be cared for equally, whether born in wedlock or not, so that over time monogamy and morality would eventually be replaced by unrestrained sexual intercourse and a more tolerant public opinion with regard to a maiden's honor.

To Marx and Engels, the co-authors of the Communist Manifesto, economics was everything and individual private property was the original sin that had made it necessary for men to know who their heirs would be through a monogamous family. Engels contradictorily insisted, however, that ancient Athenian women cheated on their husbands as much as their husbands cheated on them (which was quite a lot), making the men fall “into the abominable practice of sodomy”. Obviously Engels could not look far enough ahead in history to the opportunity by which such “abominable practice” would be normalized to create yet another “victim” category.

Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci was born in 1891 to a literate Sardinian family – at a time when nine out of ten people in that Italian region could not read or write. He went on to become the preeminent European communist intellectual of the twentieth century, and certainly the one with the biggest impact in the United States of the present century. Whether they realize it or not (and the overwhelming majority certainly do not), Americans today make decisions or attach themselves to identities because of what Gramsci wrote. The identity politics in which we all bathe daily is partly a Gramscian invention. Venezuela and other parts of Latin America are the messes they are today not just because of Marxian socialism, but because Gramsci refined Marxism and created ideological vectors through which entire societies could be clandestinely infected with Marxist pathologies.

Despite a spinal deformity (which gave him a hunchback later in life) Gramsci had to work early because his father, a local bureaucrat, was accused of corruption and thrown in prison. At age fourteen he began receiving issues of Avanti!, the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) organ, from his brother, who was in military service in the industrial hub of Turin. After becoming an activist for the PSI in 1913, and later writing articles in Avanti! supporting the Russian Revolution of 1917, Gramsci and the radical wing of PSI founded the Communist Party of Italy. After spending two years in Moscow he was elected to Italy's parliament in 1924. After Mussolini outlawed his party he was arrested in 1926 and imprisoned in 1928, sentenced to 20 years to “stop his brain from working”. He was released in 1937 and died a few days later. But his brain had continued to work in prison as Gramsci developed his “philosophy of praxis”, his inventively described concept of putting abstract philosophical ideas into concrete political action. He wished to completely replace one political system with another, from the top down.

Lenin had realized that Marx was wrong in assuming that the working class would spontaneously rise up and overthrow capitalism; Gramsci agreed with Lenin that an “intellectual vanguard” would have to instruct the workers as to how they were being oppressed and how to topple their oppressors (the bourgeoisie). Gramsci's main targets were Christianity and Education, which both stood in the way of workers being conscious of their class designation, the realization that they were not employees but “slaves” to the middle class (bourgeoisie). Our American middle class today does not yet fully realize how much communists hate them; they will when they are shot to death as in even recent communist regimes such as Venezuela.

Gramsci believed that it was through “culture” that socialism would be implemented. Gramsci's prose can be bombastic, as writing on the left tends to be, but he must be quoted in full so the reader can begin to understand the origins of today's disorders regarding “identity politics”. Radical leftists' constant talk of “privilege” and the use of the term “community organizer”, the denigration of US History, and the insistence that America was rotten from its founding, all come from Gramsci.

Gramscian theories, applied through political action (praxis) in the twentieth century in America, led to the organizing of Mexican Americans, the creation of the categories of Hispanics and Asian Americans, and the instilling of a sense of victim-hood and grievance in people whose cultural beliefs had previously held that they could strive for success on their own individual initiative.

The Frankfurt School

The final execution of Gramsci's ideas would have to wait for another evolution of Marxism that began at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany in the 1920s. From 1918 through 1933, Marxists had three choices regarding their future; support the moderate socialists who had just created the Weimar Republic, join the newly formed German Communist Party, or perform a searching reexamination of the basic foundations of Marxist theory. When the moderate socialists were taken over by the National Socialist German Workers Party (NAZIs) in 1932, the choice became to join either of two subversive revolutionary militaristic organizations or seek a more cerebral path that involved subversion of culture through education. Many of these Marxist philosophers and sociologists then left NAZI Germany, first to Geneva, Switzerland, then to New York to establishing a base at Columbia University from where they became a major influence on American academia. Is it surprising that those behind the “refinement” of Marxism might not have the courage to give their life to the cause by joining the German Communist Party?  Especially when America promised a haven for freedom of thought? So the biggest impact of the Frankfurt School was not on Germany but instead on the United States. From their perch at Columbia University, the Frankfort School thinkers began to directly influence the United States.

Max Horkheimer

One of the Frankfurt School's innovations was to integrate Marxism with Freudian-ism under the assumption that mankind did not act only out of material interest but also out of psychology (including sexuality). Accordingly, in 1937, the second director of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer published the school's manifesto, Traditional and Critical Theory, that introduced the concept of Critical Theory; that man could not be objective and that there are no universal truths. It's dialectic criticism was a way to tear down societal norms, but only those of the West. This “Critical Theory” represented (and still does, in academia today) an assault on Western civilization, its tenants and traditions.

In the early 1940s, Horkheimer moved to southern California, where he joined other Germans in exile. He and others sensed early on the value of the film industry for spreading messages into the popular culture. Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno teamed up to write Dialectic of Enlightenment, a long tirade against the Enlightenment and Capitalism, a dissertation that espoused Gramsci's concept that the modern worker had assimilated into the morality of the ruling class and thus, without a need for correction, had become its willing slave.

FDR

In the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration there were at least 300 Soviet spies working in the US government, including high ranking officials who had access to top-secret information, according to the Venona files, a collection of Soviet communications that were decoded by U.S. intelligence during World War II and declassified by the U.S. government in the 1990s. Some of these soviet agents that were hired during our alliance with Stalin against Hitler used their positions to influence U.S. policy making and statecraft, such as U.S. Treasury official Harry Dexter White, State Department official Alger Hiss and others less prominent in history.

When Roosevelt enacted “The New Deal” in the 1930s the size of government almost doubled overnight and communists waiting in the wings were hired into government agencies, especially agriculture, industry, finance, labor, and education to begin the American regulatory and welfare state.

Senator Joseph R. McCarthy

The mainstream media of today still falsely refer to McCarthyism as if it were a synonym for “witch hunt”. The Senator from Wisconsin, during the 1950s, exposed the communists in government, entertainment, higher education and elsewhere, as proven in the Venona papers. If you are still doubtful, read the following historical accounts, as I have:

The Venona Secrets by Herbert Romerstein and Eric Brenidel (c 2000)

Blacklisted By History, The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy by M. Stanton Evans (c 2007)

Hollywood Traitors, Blacklisted Screenwriters Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler by Allan H. Ryskind (c 2015)

Some of the mainstream media lies concerning McCarthy during his election campaigns:

McCarthy was a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee (he was in the Senate)

American Communist Party supported McCarthy in 1946. (never happened)

McCarthy quoted welcoming American Communist Party support. (never happened)

Connected McCarthy to the House Un-American Activities Committee investigation of Reds in Hollywood. (again, McCarthy was a Senator)

The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) itself never became a major political force, largely because of McCarthy, but it was able to infiltrate workers' and students' movements, the church, and the government. Communists have never been removed from their positions and they keep on hiring more communists from within, making our state department and large segments of other government agencies anti-American through and through. The Marxist pseudo-government within our government has been growing for 90 years and they don't have to call themselves Marxists or Communists… they simply call themselves “progressives”.

Theodor Adorno

In 1950, a major figure of the Frankfurt School, Adorno published The Authoritarian Personality, a book that pathologized a respect for authority, tradition, religion, and honor… as being especially susceptible to fascism. Fascism; the political philosophy of Germany's Hitler and Italy's Mussolini, that exalts nation and race and stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictator demanding severe economic and social regimentation, along with forced suppression of opposition. I would add to Webster's definition the word “worldwide” to read instead, “centralized autocratic worldwide government”. Is there any doubt that Hitler and Mussolini wished to conquer the world? On the faculties of universities across America today, critical theory's ideas have become weapons to replace the narrative of America's founding principles with the counter-narrative of Marx and Engles.

Mercifully, Horkheimer and Adorno, in 1949, were able to leave the capitalist hell that was California and return to Germany to reinstate the Institute for Social Research.

Antifa

Antifaschistische Aktion , commonly known under its abbreviation Antifa (German: [ˈantifaː]), arose within the Weimar Republic. “Antifaschistische Action” (Antifa) was started during 1932-33 by militant anti-fascist members of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) to fight the NAZIs in the streets of Germany. The NAZIs prevailed and the rest is history. Modern day America's “Antifa”, aligned with Marxist led BLM (Black Lives Matter) has the same Communist roots.

The empirical evidence (such as outlined in The Black Book of Communism by Stéphane Courtois) from the world's actual experience with both Communism and Socialism reveal the failure of these ideologies to improve the long term lot of the worker. It is imperative therefore that the “Workers of the World” who are called upon to “Unite”... learn from history that such “Unity” eliminates jobs while enriching the leaders calling for such “Unions” of workers. Over a hundred million have been murdered in order to enrich the leaders of movements that promise “Heaven on Earth”.

Herbert Marcuse

A German-born American social theorist of the Frankfort School, Herbert Marcuse, agreed with Gramsci that it was nearly impossible to instill into the proletariat the consciousness of grievances that would lead to the mass organization necessary for actual revolution (not the “angry but uncourageous” Bernie Sanders version).

Marcuse argued, in 1964, that no one can be free who does not first understand that he is not free. “They find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment...” said a despairing Marcuse. The vanguard of revolution would, therefore have to come from the “substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and the persecuted of other races and other colors”. If only the “victim groups” of today could hear Marcuses word, they may begin to realize that they are the “useful idiots” that become “cannon fodder” to be sacrificed on the streets in order for communists to gain political power.

Bill Moyers, the White House press secretary to President Lyndon Johnson, wrote in a 1987 essay, “In 1965, I sent to the President an essay by Herbert Marcuse, the leftist philosopher so admired by the student movement, in which Marcuse applauded LBJ's objectives, but doubted the government's ability to “stay the course”. Rebuilding the cities, restoring the countryside, redeeming the poor, and reforming education could produce nondestructive full employment.” Johnson's programs could effect these changes, Marcuse said, but it would require “the transformation of power structures standing in the way of its fulfillment.” Today, most Americans can look back and realize that the “Great Society” replaced poor black and white fathers with government welfare programs invented by uppity white bureaucrats.

Marcuse's student at UC San Diego in 1968, Angela Davis, a future Black Panther, spent time in prison for her role in the murder of a judge. Davis, a member of the Communist Party USA, was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by the East German government, one of the most repressive regimes behind the Iron Curtain. Today she tells her audiences at UC Santa Cruz (where she is a distinguished professor emerita) “I have always been a communist” whereupon they offer her a standing ovation.

The 1960s

During the 1960s, Americans began to be segregated according to race, ethnicity, and sex. It is in this splintering of our society that the identity politics of today started to jell, and the original dreams of Marx and Engels began to be made real.

The subversion of America was exemplified by figures such as Saul Alinsky (Obama's buddy), Fred Ross, Julian Samora, Lillian Fabros, Kate Millet, and Linda Sarsour, who collectively instilled grievances into people's hearts to spread the anti-gospel of victimization. “All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude”.

To accomplish this goal of subversion, they would have to quash aspiration, personal agency, and individuality. It was the devil's work... but so be it. Alinsky did famously dedicate his book to Lucifer.

The Present

Rather than continue to share the steady road to communism represented by political correctness and identity politics, I leave it to you to read this book to fully understand how America is being transformed under our noses with way too little push back by Americans.

Reflecting Back

• I remember my grade school teachers telling me that only the best and brightest go into politics; that was not true. Politicians are a mirrored reflection of their constituents, those who they represent. Most are smart… all are ignorant in many areas, only competent in a few areas.
• I remember my junior high school teachers telling me that the national debt was not a problem because it was only money we owe ourselves. I now know that it is a way to steal from future generations to the benefit of politicians seeking re-election.
• I remember, during the Jimmy Carter administration, being told that the way to arrest rampant inflation of the money supply was to raise interest rates. I now know that many large and beautiful bank buildings were built on that bogus practice.
• I remember when people believed that government could not prevent you from going to work, no matter what the risks. Now I know how adept that socialist leaning politicians are at infringing on our rights in the name of “safety” and “security”.
• I remember when the United States of America was a beacon to the rest of the world with regard to free and fair elections and how former president Jimmy Carter's organization was a beacon of fairness in elections. Now I wonder if his involvement in monitoring Georgia's Senatorial elections is to insure that the Republicans win (to cover up the fraudulent Nov 3, 2020 presidential election) or to insure that the Democrats control all branches of government, including an enlarged 13 member Supreme Court. He has, at his disposal, the Dominion machines likely necessary to accomplish either goal.
• I remember when I trusted most Republicans to do the right thing and I trusted that Democrats had not been taken over by their communists within. Now I have too little confidence that our Free Market Democratic Republic will survive the immediate future.

It is a time for prayer… that our God will deliver us from evil...