The Artful Dilettante is a native of Pittsburgh, PA, and a graduate of Penn State University. He is a lover of liberty and a lifelong and passionate student of the same. He is voracious reader of books on the Enlightenment and the American colonial and revolutionary periods. He is a student of libertarian and Objectivist philosophies. He collects revolutionary war and period currency, books, and newspapers. He is married and the father of one teenage son. He is kind, witty, generous to a fault, and unjustifiably proud of himself. He is the life of the party and an unparalleled raconteur.
Did you know that I started Facebook? Really! Well, sort of …
When I was in college at all-male Princeton, I tried to make money by adding photos to a snarky guide to neighboring girls’ schools. The guide had been a profitable publishing success, and my idea was simply to add the girls’ pictures. Schools like Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Vassar, etc., already published those pictures, so all I had to do was get permission from administrators at those schools. Surprisingly, they gave it to me.
Unfortunately for me and my “Face Book,” there was no Internet then. So I don’t own a company worth $180 billion. The book, “Who the Girls Are,” was a flop.
Oh, well.
I’ve started other businesses since then — and they didn’t succeed either.
But that ability to try to succeed is a reason America has been successful. In the USA, it’s OK to fail and fail and try again. In most of Europe and much of the world, the attitude is: You had your shot, you failed, and now you should just go work for someone else.
But this limits the possibilities. And some of America’s biggest successes came from people who failed often.
We know that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, but few people know that Edison filed 1,000 patents for ideas that went nowhere. He was fired by the telegraph office. He lost money investing in a cement company and an iron business.
Henry Ford’s first company failed completely. Dr. Seuss’s first book was rejected by 27 publishers. Oprah was fired from her first job as a reporter. A TV station called her “unfit for TV.”
But they all kept striving — and succeeded. They were lucky to live in America, where investors and your neighbors encourage you to try and try again. We are lucky to benefit from their persistence.
But those happy experiments are less likely to happen today. Now there are many more rules, and regulators add hundreds of pages of new ones every week.
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban left school with no money and no job prospects. He managed to become a billionaire by creating several businesses from scratch. I asked him if he could do it again today, and he said, “No … now there’s so much paperwork and regulation, so many things that you have to sign up for that you have a better chance of getting in trouble than you do of being successful.”
That’s tragic.
It’s not just big corporations that get hassled by regulators, the way progressives might like to imagine.
Kids’ lemonade stands — and one I tried to open in New York City — are sometimes shut down for not having proper business licenses. When Chloe Stirling was 11 years old, health officials shut down her home cupcake-making business.
The more government “protects” us, the more it puts obstacles in the way of trying new things. It does that every time it taxes, regulates and standardizes the way things are done. Simultaneously, government offers “compassion” — welfare and unemployment benefits.
Faced with the choice of collecting unemployment or putting your own money at risk and hiring an army of lawyers to deal with business regulations, I understand why people don’t bother trying. When that attitude is pervasive, the American dream dies.
On my TV show this week, economist David Goldman says, “The U.S. government has done everything possible to make it hard for people to take a new idea from inception to startup to expansion.” He says that when he told a former CEO that he was going to be on my show, the ex-CEO said: “Just tell them to shut Washington down. That’s all they need to do!”
Washington won’t shut down. But couldn’t regulators just chill out for a while?
Big government doesn’t send us the message that we can make it on our own and that great things may happen if we dare to try. Government mostly hinders us, and then brags that it is waiting to take charge when we fail.
“A politician is a fellow who will lay down your life for his country.”
Increasingly, in America, this will be literally true.
They’re no longer just sacrificing our wealth and income. They’re now demanding our very lives.
No more fossil fuels? That will kill millions. They don’t care. If you are one of those millions — tough.
An experimental medical treatment you’re not allowed to ask about, to be imposed by force? Even if it kills you, since the manufacturer has ZERO civil or criminal liability? They don’t care. If you are one of the thousands or even millions killed — tough.
The ability of the government to arbitrarily declare an emergency so that the Second Amendment can be suspended for 30 days — subject to renewal by that government’s subjective feeling every 30 days? And the First Amendment too — why, the whole Bill of Rights, while we’re at it. Why not? What if your inability to defend against criminals and thugs (including those now working for the government) gets you killed? Tough.
Individual rights are inconvenient obstacles to unlimited government. At present, unlimited government is winning — even in America. It’s winning all of the battles as well as the war.
That’s where we literally, really are. Awake yet? Planning to fight back yet?
Or will you just keep rolling over?
You can evade the decision. But you cannot evade the consequences of your decision. Reality is coming at you!
Someone asked me: When will the young people wake up and realize we’re totally on the wrong course, that capitalism and freedom are superior to socialism and unlimited government?
They’ll wake up when hyperinflation or other disasters set in. Because of the brainwashing, most of them will blame capitalism and anything but the real causes. Remember, they’re not just wrong. They’re ignorant. So are most of their parents, by the way.
You can conclude, “Wow, I guess capitalism is better after all and we should move in that direction.” They were only exposed to one side. There is no other option.
They’ll support doubling and tripling down on the disaster, just like presently happens in Central America, South America, Russia, much of Europe and most of the world. Oh, and they’ll also favor tripling down on the enviro-fascism based on nonexistent man-made climate change; the up and coming generation is more committed to green fascism than they are either to Communism or socialism.
All three — socialism, Communism and green fascism — lead to the same result: the decline and the end of the middle class; the war of all against all created NOT by unfettered capitalism, but by Marxism.
The green agenda does the same thing Soviet Marxism in America would have done: Gradually give government control over the entire private sector. Instead of doing it in the name of abolishing the middle class (Americans would never have signed on for that), they do it in the name of “saving the environment.” And we’re expected to believe these totalitarians in Washington DC can predict the weather 1000 or 10, 000 years from now.
Oh, and if you don’t comply — well you’re also a “racist.” Why not throw that in? Since that unearned guilt has worked with absolutely everything else, just as COVID did.
Marxists in universities, going back to the 1970s and 1980s if not before, reasoned that America could have a Communist revolution, not as Russia and China did, but through the green movement. And they are succeeding. The overwhelming majority of under 30 in America take it for granted that “climate change” is a clear and present danger; and that government must be given all the power it wants to abolish climate change.
COVID is just a fun side trip for our tyrants in power. It was also an important test to see how compliant most Americans can be counted on to be. Wow — the vast majority, based on our experiences in 2020-22.
Green fascism will be the real end of America, just as I predicted in the midst of COVID back in spring 2020. It’s happening now.
Man-made climate change that’s on the verge of destroying us all — why, that’s simply a matter of fact, and if you question it — well, you must be crazy. A lot of older folks react this way too.
That’s the essence of propaganda. It doesn’t say, “Here are two sides, and one of them is wrong.”
They simply present the one side, and imply that if you thought otherwise, you’d have to be delusional.
When today’s young people wake up one day at age 40 or 50 or 70 and realize what they’ve done, they’ll blame capitalism. And racism. And their history books will all say Donald Trump caused it, too.
The following post was written jointly by Jane Menton and Francis Menton:
In New York, politicians are selling the public a narrative that electricity is going to be the solution to climate change. We will eliminate all CO2 emissions by banning gasoline-powered cars, banning natural gas infrastructure, banning gas heat in buildings, and banning gas for cooking. All of these are to be replaced with supposedly “green,” emissions-free, alternatives – which in practice consist of only one thing, electricity. We’ve been told that this is how we are going to protect the planet for future generations.
But there is nothing emissions-free about the way electricity is currently generated in New York. About half of our electricity comes now, as it traditionally has, from burning fossil fuels. New York has announced plans to eliminate those from electricity generation by 2030, but as of now has no realistic plan to replace them. Meanwhile, it is forcing its citizens to convert essential systems like heating to electricity, with no basis to believe that the electricity will be available to prevent people from freezing in the winter only a few years from now. This is a glaring contradiction, that needs urgently to be addressed before we suffer a self-inflicted catastrophe.
At present, fossil fuels are critical to our generation of electricity. According to the most recent data from the federal government’s Energy Information Administration, in 2021 New York got some 46% of its electricity from burning natural gas and another 1% from fuel oil, and almost all of the rest from either nuclear (25%) or hydropower (23%, most of which comes from Niagara Falls). Non-hydro “renewables” (wood, wind and solar) provided only about 6% in total, and about 2% of that was from wood. After decades of hype about their wondrous future, wind and solar provided only about 4%. And in 2021, the state closed the Indian Point nuclear plant, replacing its output almost entirely with natural gas generation, meaning that the percent of our electricity supply coming from fossil fuels is now up near 50% today.
If more electricity is needed, the options are few. New nuclear plants face vociferous opposition from environmentalists, with almost no prospect that that can be overcome. A completely finished nuclear plant called Shoreham sits idle on Long Island, having never been approved for commercial operation in the face of vigorous environmental opposition. As to hydropower, we do not have another Niagara Falls. Wind and solar produce remarkably small amounts after decades of hype and massive subsidies; and what they do produce is intermittent and often unavailable when most needed on the hottest and coldest days. The last option, natural gas – the one that is available, scalable, and actually works – is the one our politicians are pledging to eliminate without anything to replace it.
In the face of this generation picture, the State and New York City are proceeding with proposed electricity mandates that will have the effect of greatly increasing demand for the power. This will either require scaling up our electric grid to match that need or else leaving people without functioning infrastructure. Policies already in place in New York City require electrification of cars, heat, and cooking, aiming for widespread conversion by 2035, and continuing thereafter. A piece in the Daily News on June 3 includes a projection from National Grid (one of our utilities) that the State will need to increase the capacity of the grid by 57% by 2035, and 100% by 2050.
In scenarios where people’s cars, heat, cooking and more are all entirely dependent on reliable electricity, ensuring that our electricity sources are adequate and reliable is critical to the functioning of everyday life. Yet, even as our government is rapidly rolling out electrification mandates, it is simultaneously closing the biggest piece of our reliable generation.
New York is Exhibit A of a current crisis-in-waiting. At the State level, Governor Hochul has committed to closing all of the State’s fossil fuel electricity plants by 2030. Current New York State summer installed capacity is 37,520 MW, or 37.5 GW. Of that, about 60%, or more than 22 GW, consists of natural gas facilities, which are capable of running nearly all the time and ramping up to maximum output when most needed. Based on National Grid’s projection of 57% increased demand by 2035, New York should be planning to have 37.5 GW x 1.57, or almost 59 GW of always-available capacity on hand by that year. Yet the only significant plans for additional capacity by 2035 consist of about 9 GW of offshore wind, and another 1.25 GW to come from a transmission line to bring hydropower from Quebec. (In recent weeks, all of the offshore wind developers have demanded major contract price increases of 50% and up, failing which they threaten to walk off the job.)
Something here does not remotely add up. If New York state succeeds by 2030 in closing its natural gas plants — the plants that account for 60% of the State’s generation capacity — that would bring our total installed capacity down from 37.5 GW to as little as 15 GW. But we need almost 60 GW to meet projected demand. And that’s 60 GW that can be called on any time as needed to meet peak usage. The 9 GW of projected offshore wind turbines wouldn’t make much of a dent even if they operated all the time and could be dispatched to meet peak demand, which they can’t. Instead, they will operate only about a third of the time, and at their own whim. At best they will provide about 3 GW on average, when what we need for this full electrification project is more like 45 GW of dispatchable power to add to our existing hydro and nuclear.
The New York Independent System Operator, which is well aware of this gigantic contradiction, talks vaguely of something they call a “dispatchable emissions-free resource” to fill the enormous gap. Other than nuclear, which is blocked, that is something that is a pure fantasy and does not exist.
Our State’s and City’s proposed plans are putting New Yorkers on a path to catastrophe, with greatly increased dependence on electricity, but without nearly enough of the stuff to function at even the current usage level. New York City got a huge lesson on dependence on electricity from Hurricane Sandy a decade ago, when a week-long blackout left people in high-rises without elevator service and without water. Now they plan to add all heat, cooking, and transportation to the things that absolutely require electricity. In that world, insufficient electricity becomes a humanitarian crisis.
It is high time for the politicians writing electricity mandates to demonstrate that it is even possible to build and scale an emission-free grid, one that is dispatchable (meaning it will work when we need it), reliable, and resilient. In today’s world, no demonstration of such a grid exists anywhere in the world.
If these mandates are allowed to go forward unabated, the real cost of will be the impoverishment of communities and destruction of quality of life. It’s up to us to realize we’re being sold a false narrative and to stop playing along.
“If they could take all that money, they’d solve world hunger.”
No, they couldn’t. Not if they seized all the money in the world.
Let’s say you got hold of $10 trillion. That would feed a lot of people, for a long time — assuming you could get it distributed to all the people without difficulty (a huge assumption).
Nevertheless, at some point: the money will run out. I don’t know how long it will take to run out. Maybe less than you think. Maybe a long time. But we can be 100 percent certain: at some point, the money will run out.
What then? Someone will have to come up with another $10 trillion. But if there’s nobody around to create all the wealth, then how do you get it to the people — whether for food, shelter, health care, schooling, or whatever?
Nobody ever answers this question because it’s never asked. And if you dare to ask the question — you’re greeted with verbal hostility (if you’re lucky).
This isn’t just a mistake the “Democrats” or the Communists make. It’s a mistake nearly everyone makes. You hear everyone saying it, even apart from opinions about the government or politics. “We should take the money and spend it on…” WHOSE money? And HOW? What impact will seizing the money have on the people who are forced into giving it up? Will they keep producing the money? If not, what are you to do when you and the millions or billions of people depending on it run out?
Good economists have already figured it out. The chief challenge for human beings is not distribution, but production. Demand is limitless; supply is scarce.
If those hungry people live in a system where wealth is privately owned, profit permitted and rewarded, then sooner or later the food will reach the hands and mouths of the people who need it and want it. Assuming they’re willing to trade for the food, not merely have it handed to them as passive recipients of an entitlement.
This is not merely an expression of how it should be. It’s an expression of how it IS. If you’re ignorant of this fact — or worse yet, if you choose to remain ignorant of it — then you’re living in the Dark Ages. That’s where the human race is. In the midst of Star Trek-like, 21st Century technology, we’re still moral and intellectual savages when it comes to issues associated with human behavior.
There are very smart people who have already figured this out. But it doesn’t seem to have an impact. As the present decline of America tragically shows, people — by and large — will do the equivalent of jump off a 150 level building before listening to reason on this subject. History will record that even after America briefly created the proverbial shining city on a hill, most Americans ultimately opted to jump off the cliff and (if only be default) revert to some version of the tribal, socialistic, communistic mentality.
Maybe in the future, it will be different. But we’re still in the Dark Ages in the area of ideas. If mankind is to have a future, we’d better start to get this right.
Biden celebrated 9/11 yesterday by praising the Saudis — you know, the same Saudis who produced the 9/11 terrorists. Biden loves the Saudis because they support his climate change propaganda. Well of course they do — anything that will weaken the United States.
And Biden’s puppet regime will also be paying $6 billion to one of our most mortal enemies — Iran.
Tell me we’re not an occupied country. On 9/11/01, we were attacked by foreign enemies. Today, we are an occupied country in far more danger than we ever were on that day.
If our government still had a shred of accountability for anything, none of this would be possible. This is what dictatorship looks like. This is what the final years of the Soviet empire looked like — a parade of unaccountable, toxic geezers. This is what Maoist China looked like — a society overrun by psychosis and hysteria. This is what the declining years of the Roman republic looked like. When the people stop expecting virtue and sanity from themselves or others … they get “President Biden”. Or even worse to follow.
RFK Jr. is being told he will have to pay to enter Democratic primaries. The DNC wants no competition. They have done to their own party what they’re trying to do to the country: eradicate dissension.
Imagine if Biden is still the “president” 5 years from now. What in the hell will he and this country look like?
What I see happening is Biden will step down due to covid (hence mail in ballots) Kamala will step in as prez and PARDON all of the Bidens…they will run Gavin and the dead vote will sweep him into office.” — Jeannie Chmielewski-Royack
Interesting theory. Leftists are capable of anything. Biden isn’t really in charge. Neither is Kamala. Not even Dr. Jill. Goodness knows, these people are too unscrupulous and stupid to be in the positions they’re in from their own abilities or achievements. Whoever put them there certainly has even worse things in store for us. Until or unless we the people rise up and bring about another 1776 or, failing that, another French Revolution, things will continue to spiral downward. Surely they will try another COVID lockdown strategy. Why wouldn’t they? It was the most successful totalitarian move in human history.
Sooner or later, whether through mass passive resistance or more than that, WE will have to stop them. They are NOT going to stop peacefully, or voluntarily.
An impeachment inquiry looms and the shrieks of outrage are beginning.
The Left is now suddenly voicing warnings that those who recently undermined the system could be targeted by their own legacies.
So, for example, now we read why impeachment is suddenly a dangerous gambit.
True, the Founders did not envision impeaching a first-term president the moment he lost his House majority. Nor did they imagine impeaching a president twice. And they certainly did not anticipate trying an ex-president in the Senate as a private citizen.
In modern times, the nation has not rushed to impeach a president without a special counsel investigation to determine whether the chief executive was guilty of “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
But thanks to the Democrats, recent impeachments now have destroyed all those guardrails. After all, Trump was impeached the first time on the fumes of an exhaustive but fruitless 22-month, $40 million special counsel investigation—one designed to find him guilty of Russian “collusion” and thus to be removed from office but found no actionable offenses at all.
Instead, dejected Democrats moved immediately for a second try. In September 2019 a few weeks after Trump had announced his 2020 reelection bid, the Democratic House began to impeach the president on the new grounds that he had talked to the President Zelensky of Ukraine and said he might delay offensive arms shipments—unless the Ukrainians could demonstrate that they had ended corruption and, in particular, were no longer influenced by the Biden family quid pro quo shakedowns.
Trump was proven right: the Biden family is not just corrupt, but, in particular, Joe Biden as head of the family and Vice President had intervened in the internal politics of an aid recipient, by threatening not to delay but rather to cancel outright all U.S. aid to Ukraine—unless it fired Viktor Shokin, a Ukrainian prosecutor.
Shokin was then looking into the misadventures of Biden’s son Hunter, and why the Vice President’s imbecilic son was receiving lucrative compensation on the boards of a Ukrainian energy company Burisma, yet without any demonstrable expertise or education in matters of energy policy.
Since Trump was impeached, we now know that Joe Biden did lie that he had no connection with or even knowledge of his son’s business. And we know that the fired prosecutor believed the Bidens were recipients of bribes. We know that contrary to Biden’s assertions, he was not following State Department policy.
In contrast, the U.S. had, in fact, lauded Shokin’s efforts to repress corruption. In sum, Biden was undermining the stated policy of the U.S. government to protect his son’s—and his own—efforts to leverage money from Kyiv by monetizing the influence of his own Vice Presidency. In some sense, Biden was guilty of the very “treason” charge—altering U.S. foreign policy for personal benefit—by which Rep. Adam Schiff had earlier falsely accused Trump.
Given that reality, it is easy to argue that the House impeached Donald Trump in 2019 for crimes that he did not commit, but which the current president Joe Biden most certainly had during his Vice Presidency.
But weaponizing impeachment is just one baleful legacy of the Left. There are plenty more of their own precedents that Leftists now would not wish to have applied to themselves:
Will the next president have the FBI pay social media censors to suppress the dissemination of any news it feels is unhelpful to the reelection of a Republican president?
Is it OK now for the next Vice President to invite his son onto Air Force Two to cement multimillion dollars deals that benefit both, with Chinese, Russian, and Ukrainian oligarchs who enjoy government ties?
Should a conservative billionaire stealthily insert $419 million late in the 2024 campaign to absorb the work of registrars in key voting precincts?
If a Democratic president wins the 2024 election should conservative groups riot at the Capitol on Inauguration Day? Should a conservative celebrity yell out to the assembled crowd of protestors that she dreams of blowing up the White House? And if a Republican wins, should he prosecute any Democratic rioters who once again swarm Washington on Inauguration Day and charge them with “insurrection,” meting out long prisons sentences to the convicted?
Is Joe Biden now vulnerable to being impeached for systematic family corruption, or using the Department of Justice to obstruct the prosecution of his son in his last days in office, and then being tried in the Senate as a private citizen?
If the Republicans gain the Senate, will they move to end the filibuster in agreement with Democratic assertions that it is “racist” and a “Jim Crow relic”?
If the midwestern Electoral College “Blue Wall” seems to reappear, or if Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada recreate new blue walls, will there be a conservative effort to end the constitutionally mandated Electoral College?
If in 2024 there is a narrow Democratic win in the Electoral College, should conservative celebrities conspire to run ads urging the electors to reject their constitutional duties and not vote in accordance with their state’s popular vote that went Democratic? Should a Republican third-party candidate sue to stop a state’s selection of its electors on grounds the voting machines were rigged?
If Supreme Court decisions begin to appear to favor the left, will Republicans talk of packing the court, or have the DOJ turn a blind eye when mobs began to swarm the homes of liberal justices? Should the conservative media go after liberal judges with serial accusations of corruption? Should the Republican Senate leader assemble a mob of pro-life protestors at the doors of the court and call out Justices Sotomayor or Jackson by name, with threats that they will soon reap the whirlwind they have sowed, given they have no idea of what is about to “hit” them? Should conservative legal scholars urge the country to ignore Supreme Court decisions deemed liberal?
Will local prosecutors in red jurisdictions begin filing criminal charges against leading Democratic candidates on various charges, among them accusations of old inflated real estate assessments, campaign finance laws, questioning ballot results, or taking classified documents home? If Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton were to run in 2024, will their past illicit behavior gain the attention of a city or state attorney in Utah, West Virginia, or Wyoming?
If Joe Biden continues to decline at his present rate, will Republicans demand he be given the Montreal Cognitive Assessment? Will they subpoena Ivy League psychiatrists to testify that an intervention is needed to remove him from office? And will an FBI director and a deputy Attorney General plan to wear wires, and record Biden in his private moments of senility, as a way of convincing the cabinet or Congress that he is demonstrably mentally unfit for office?
In the 2024 election, should the Republican nominee hire a foreign ex-spy to compile falsehoods about the Democratic opponent and then seed them among the media, and Department of Justice? Should the FBI hire such a Republican contractor and likewise use him to gather dirt on the Democratic nominee?
If there appears incriminating evidence concerning a Republican nominee, should the FBI retrieve such evidence, keep it under wraps, lie about its veracity, and instead go along with media and ex-intelligence officers assertions that it is a fraudulent production of Russian intelligence?
Will conservative CIA and FBI directors, and the Director of National Intelligence be given exemptions from prosecutions for systematically lying while under oath in Congress or to federal investigators?
Will conservative celebrities ritually on social media, without fear of censorship, brag about ways of decapitating, shooting, stabbing, burning, or blowing up the Democratic nominee?
Since in many states the statues of limitations have not yet expired for arson, murder, assault, looting, and attacks on 1,500 police officers during the summer 2020 riots, will state prosecutors now begin identifying those 14,000 once arrested and mostly released, and begin refiling charges of conspiracy, racketeering—and “insurrection”?
Will they also file insurrection charges against those who torched a federal courthouse, a police precinct, and a historic Washington DC church, or conspired to riot and swarm the White House grounds in an effort to attack the President of the United States?
Will they file charges against Vice President Kamala Harris for “inciting” ongoing violent demonstrations with monotonous, emphatic, and repetitive threats in the weeks before her nomination? Contrary to liberal “fact checkers” at time of nationwide violence, Harris certainly did not distinguish violent from non-violent protests, but in fact implied that they were intimately tied to the upcoming election and beyond. So given the hundreds of police officers injured, the hundreds of millions in property damage, and the dozens killed, what exactly did Harris mean by tying that ongoing summer of often violent protests to Election Day?:
“But they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop, and this is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not gonna stop, and everyone beware, because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not gonna stop after Election Day. Everyone should take note of that, on both levels, that they’re not going to let up — and they should not. And we should not.”
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Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump and the recently released The Dying Citizen.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 