It’s official. Back in 1957, Ayn Rand was writing about America and the world of 2023. With stunning accuracy. It wasn’t psychic power. It was a grasp of the logical power of philosophical ideas — specifically, the toxic ideas now taking hold of our culture.

“When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, ‘Who is destroying the world?’ You are.”

– Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

People are often surprised when I suggest that one of our coaching goals will be to help them think, i.e., trusting their senses, and integrating reality into abstract conclusions. Rational thought is necessary to intelligently answer big questions like, “Should I get married?” Or, “Should I quit my job?” It also helps ensure a happy day-to-day life. People often say, “He should get help!” Or, “She’s in denial.” He or she simply needs to think. Choosing not to think sets the stage for “needing help,” denial and more serious psychological problems.

People sometimes tell me that they’re uncomfortable thinking about personal matters. Denial is a good example. Life goes on around us whether or not we choose to think about it, and actions indeed have consequences — even if we’re not paying attention. Thinking grants us the power to control what happens to us. People who are perpetual victims of “circumstance”, “bad luck” or whatever, are guilty of one central offense: Failing to think.

Of course, thinking doesn’t guarantee accuracy, but mistakes can be corrected with even more thinking. Life is a work in progress. Refusing to think can turn existence into one continuous mistake, putting us squarely in the path of chance events. And whining about “having a bad day” won’t make a bit of difference.

No wonder the world is filled with anxiety disorder, depression, low self-esteem! We blame the economy, hormones, brain chemistry, or whatever “disorder” happens to be the latest vapid topic on Oprah. But nobody ever stops to say, “Y’know, maybe there’s not enough thinking going on.” Ironically, arriving at such a conclusion presupposes that thinking did, in fact, take place.

In the middle of a discussion such as this, people sometimes say to me, “Just because you think doesn’t mean you’re being rational.” Of course that’s true. Mental activity assumes that there is an objective reality and that this reality can be discovered through the use of reason. If your reasoning rests on arbitrary assumptions, unfounded generalizations, fact-dropping or fantasy, then you’re not truly thinking. So yes, in that sense, thinking doesn’t always lead to rational conclusions.

That’s why professional help sometimes seems to be a waste of time. If our mental activity breaks with actual facts, then the computer-age proverb, “Garbage in, garbage out” applies. But the possibility of error doesn’t lessen the value of thinking. In fact, it demonstrates how important it is to achieve a solid interaction between the mind and reality, and then form conclusions within that framework.

The laws of logic and reason (aka, common sense) must be applied to daily life, not just to abstract subjects. This point was made perfectly by educator Maria Montessori: “The greatest sign of success for a teacher … is to be able to say, ‘The children are now working as if I did not exist.’” Unfortunately, we all know that nowadays this is not the outcome for many students or schools.

Some people have a knee-jerk reaction to self-responsibility because they think of it as having to “suck it up.” But it’s a lot more powerful than that. It requires the active use of your mind. It requires being thoughtful and tuned in, and it’s the cornerstone of empathy and compassion. Thinking does not mean having to be right, but it does mean using logic and facts to figure out what “right” is. The resulting self-confidence and mental health is well worth the effort.

Introspection is a form of thinking specifically relating to personal decisions and emotions. Thinking, in the rational sense (i.e., integrating your perceptions into objective reality) is the common theme that runs through it all. You can change your life by paying attention to what’s around you and then acting accordingly. See facts for what they are, and then form conclusions based on them. Will you be right all the time? Of course not. But rational thought and reflection, based on objective data from your senses, can lead to independence and genuine self-respect.

Michael J. Hurd, Life’s a Beach

Biden has reportedly spent 40 percent of his presidency on vacation. This shows two things. One, he’s not in charge. He’s a figurehead. Two, we are living under an occupation that merely replacing Biden will not resolve. We need a revolution, not an election. We need a restoration of the Constitution and the severely limited government our founders envisioned and gave us. What we have now simply cannot stand.

Michael J. Hurd

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THE LEFT

What the Left Did to Our Country

Will their upheaval  succeed?

By Victor Davis Hanson

September 4, 2023

In the last 20 years, the Left has boasted that it has gained control of most of America institutions of power and influence—the corporate boardroom, media, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the administrative state, academia, foundations, social media, entertainment, professional sports, and Hollywood.

With such support, between 2009-17, Barack Obama was empowered to transform the Democratic Party from its middle-class roots and class concerns into the party of the bicoastal rich and subsidized poor—obsessions with big money, race, a new intolerant green religion, and dividing the country into a binary of oppressors and oppressed.

The Obamas entered the presidency spouting the usual leftwing boilerplate (“spread the wealth,” “just downright mean country,” “get in their face,” “first time I’ve been proud of my country”) as upper-middle-class, former community activists, hurt that their genius and talents had not yet been sufficiently monetized.

After getting elected through temporarily pivoting to racial ecumenicalism and pseudo-calls for unity, they reverted to form and governed by dividing the country. And then the two left the White House as soon-to-be mansion living, mega-rich elites, cashing in on the fears they had inculcated over the prior eight years.

To push through the accompanying unpopular agendas of an open border, mandatory wind and solar energy, racial essentialism, and the weaponization of the state, Obama had begun demonizing his opponents and the country in general: America was an unexceptional place. Cops were racist. “Clingers” of the Midwest were hopelessly ignorant and prejudiced. Only fundamental socialist transformation could salvage a historically oppressive, immoral, and racist nation.

The people finally rebelled at such preposterousness. Obama lost his party some 1,400 local and state offices during his tenure, along with both houses of Congress. His presidency was characterized by his own polarizing mediocrity. His one legacy was Obamacare, the veritable destruction of the entire system of a once workable health insurance, of the hallowed doctor-patient relationship, and of former easy access to competent specialists.

Yet Obama’s unfufilled ambitions set the stage for the Biden administration—staffed heavily with Obama veterans—to complete the revolutionary transformation of the Democratic Party and country.

It was ironic that while Obama was acknowledged as young and charismatic, nonetheless a cognitively challenged, past plagiarist, fabulist, and utterly corrupt Joe Biden was far more effective in ramming through a socialist woke agenda and altering the very way Americans vote and conduct their legal system.

Stranger still, Biden accomplished this subversion of traditional America while debilitated and often mentally inert—along with being mired in a bribery and influence-peddling scandal that may ultimately confirm that he easily was the most corrupt president to hold office in U.S. history.

How was all this possible?

Covid had allowed the unwell Biden to run a surrogate campaign from his basement as he outsourced his politicking to a corrupt media.

Senility proved a godsend for Biden. His cognitive disabilities masked his newfound radicalism and long-accustomed incompetence. Unlike his past failed campaigns, the lockdowns allowed Biden to be rarely seen or heard—and thus as much liked in the abstract as he had previously been disliked in the concrete.

His handlers, the Obamas, and the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren radical Democrats, saw Biden’s half-century pretense as a gladhander—good ole Joe Biden from Scranton—as the perfect delivery system to funnel their own otherwise-unpopular leftwing agendas. In sum, via the listless Biden, they sought to change the very way America used to work.

And what a revolution Biden’s puppeteers have unleashed in less than three years.

They launched a base attack on the American legal system. Supreme Court judges are libeled, their houses swarmed, and their lives threatened with impunity. The Left promised to pack the court or to ignore any decision it resents. The media runs hit pieces on any conservative justice deemed too influential. The prior Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer whipped up a mob outside the court’s doors, and threatened two justices by name. As Schumer presciently put it, they would soon “reap the whirlwind” of what they supposedly had sowed and thus would have no idea what was about to “hit” them.

Under the pretense of Covid fears, balloting went from 70 percent participation on election day in most states to a mere 30 percent. Yet the rates of properly rejected illegal or improper ballots often dived by a magnitude of ten.

Assaults now followed on hallowed processes, laws, customs, and institutions—the Senate filibuster, the 50-state union, the Electoral College, the nine-justice Supreme Court, Election Day, and voter IDs.

Under Biden, the revolution had institutionalized first-term impeachment, the trial of an ex-president while a private citizen, and the indictment of a chief political rival and ex-president on trumped up charges by local and federal prosecutors—all to destroy a political rival and alter the 2024 election cycle.

Biden destroyed the southern border—literally. Eight million entered illegally—no background checks, no green cards, no proof of vaccinations. America will be dealing with the consequences for decades. Mexico was delighted, receiving some $60 million in annual remittances, while the cartels were empowered to ship enough fentanyl to kill 100,000 Americans a year.

“Modern monetary theory,” the Leftist absurdity that printing money ensures prosperity, followed. It has nearly bankrupted the country, unleashed wild inflation, and resulted in the highest interest rates in a quarter-century. Middle-class wages fell further behind as a doddering Biden praised his disastrous “Bidenomics.”

Biden warred on fossil fuels, cancelling federal leases and pipelines, jawboning lending agencies to defund fracking, demonizing state-of-the-art, clean-burning cars, and putting vast areas of oil- and gas-rich federals lands off-limits to drilling.

When gas prices predictably doubled under Biden and the 2022 midterms approached, he tried temporarily to lease out a few new fields, to drain the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and to beg the Saudis, and our enemies, the Iranians, the Venezuelans, and the Russians, to pump more oil and gas that Biden himself would not. All this was a pathetic ruse to temporarily lower gas prices before the mid-term elections.

Biden abandoned Afghanistan, leaving the largest trove of military equipment behind in U.S. military history, along with thousands of loyal Afghans and pro-American contractors.

Biden insulted the parents of the 13 Marines blown up in this worst U.S. military debacle since Pearl Harbor. He lied to the parents of the dead that he too lost a son in the Iraq war, and when among them later impatiently checked his watch as he seemed bored with the commemoration of the fallen—and made no effort to hide his sense that the ceremony was tedious to him.

Vladimir Putin summed up the Afghan debacle—and Biden’s nonchalant remark that he wouldn’t react strongly to a “minor” invasion of Ukraine if it were minor—as a green light to invade Ukraine.

When Biden did awaken, his first reaction was an offer to fly the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy out of the country as soon as possible. What has followed proved the greatest European killing ground since the 1944-45 Battle of the Bulge, albeit one that has now fossilized into a Verdun-like quagmire that is draining American military supply stocks and killing a half-million Ukrainians and Russians.

Suddenly, there are three genders, not two. Women’s sports have been wrecked by biological men competing as women, destroying a half-century of female athletic achievement. Young girls in locker rooms, co-eds in sororities, and women in prison must dress and shower with biological men transitioning to women by assertion.

There is no longer a commitment to free speech. The American Civil Liberties Union is a woke, intolerant group trying to ban free expression under the pretense of fighting “hate” speech and “disinformation.”

The Left has revived McCarthyite loyal oaths straight out of the 1950s, forcing professors, job applicants, and students applying for college to pledge their commitment to “diversity” as a requisite for hiring, admittance, or promotion. Diversity is our era’s version of the Jacobins’ “Cult of Reason.”

Race relations hit a 50-year nadir. Joe Biden has a long history of racist insults and putdowns. And now as apparent penance, he has reinvented himself as a reverse racial provocateur, spouting nonsense about white supremacy, exploiting shootings or hyping racial tensions to ensure that an increasingly disgusted black electorate does not leave the new Democratic Party.

The military has adopted wokeism, oblivious that it has eroded meritocracy in the ranks and slashed military recruitment. It is underfunded, wracked by internal suspicion, loss of morale and ginned up racial and gender animosity. Its supply stocks are drained. Arms productions is snail-like, and generalship is seen as a revolving door to corporate defense contractor board riches.

Big-city Democratic district attorneys subverted the criminal justice system, destroyed law enforcement deterrence, and unleashed a record crime wave. Did they wish to create anarchy as protest against the normal, or were they Jokerist nihilists who delighted in sowing ruin for ruin’s sake?

Radical racial activists, with Democrat endorsement, demand polarizing racial reparations. The louder the demands, the quieter they remain about smash-and-grab looting, carjacking, and the swarming of malls by disproportionally black teens—even as black-on-black urban murders reach record proportions.

In response, Biden tried to exploit the growing tensions by spouting lies that “white supremacy” and “white privilege” fuel such racial unrest—even as his ill-gotten gains, past record of racist demagoguery and resulting lucre and mansions appear the epitome of his own so-called white privilege.

This litany of disasters could be vastly expanded, but more interesting is the why of it all?

What we are witnessing seems to be utter nihilism. The border is not porous but nonexistent. Mass looting and carjackings are not poorly punished, but simply exempt from all and any consequences. Our downtowns are reduced to a Hobbesian “war of all against all,” where the strong dictate to the weak and the latter adjust as they must. The streets of our major cities in just a few years have become precivilizational—there are more human feces on the sidewalks of San Francisco than were in the gutters of Medieval London.

The FBI and DOJ are not simply wayward and weaponized, but corrupt and renegade. Apparently the perquisite now for an FBI director is the ability either to lie while under oath or better to mask such lying by claiming amnesia or ignorance.

Immigration is akin to the vast unchecked influxes of the late Roman Empire across the Danube and Rhine that helped to finish off a millennium-old civilization that had lost all confidence in its culture and thus had no need for borders.

In other words, the revolution is not so much political as anarchist. Nothing escapes it—not ceiling fans, not natural gas cooktops, not parents at school board meetings, not Christian bakeries, not champion female swimmers, not dutiful policemen, not hard-working oil drillers, not privates and corporals in the armed forces, not teens applying on their merits to college, not anyone, anywhere, anytime.

The operating principle is either to allow or to engineer things to become so atrocious in everyday American life—the inability to afford food and fuel, the inability to walk safely in daylight in our major cities, the inability to afford to drive as one pleases, the inability to obtain or pay back a high interest loan—that the government can absorb the private sector and begin regimenting the masses along elite dictates. The more the people tire of the leftist agenda, the more its architects furiously seek to implement it, hoping that their institutional and cultural control can do what  ballots cannot.

We could variously characterize their efforts as destroying the nation to save it, or burning it down to start over, or fundamentally transforming America into something never envisioned by the Founders.

Will their upheaval  succeed? All the levers of the power and money are on the side of the revolutionaries. The people are not. And they are starting to wake to the notion if they do not stop the madness in their midst they very soon won’t have a country.

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About Victor Davis Hanson

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.

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Self-interest is good, altruism is evil.

But before we investigate this issue, keep in mind that clear definitions are critical in evaluating statements about the morality of self-interest and altruism. This is especially critical here because both concepts have more than one definition.

One definition of self-interest, selfishness, or egoism is mindless emotionalism. You should do anything you feel like doing. But doing what you want, if based on mindless emotion devoid of reason and ethics is, harmful. Taking illicit drugs could kill you. Smoking will take many years off your life. Rejecting education makes you unemployable. Committing crime may put you in prison. Spending money mindlessly can leave you bankrupt. Treating your partner cruelly can end your chance for romantic happiness. Lying can destroy all your friendships. Conforming blindly to popular opinion leads to other people controlling your life.

In contrast, rational egoism requires thinking about what is actually good for you, including respecting the rights of others. You need to think, for example, about what is good for you to eat and drink. It is in your self-interest to get educated and to develop work skills that will bring you success in your job and career. Being honest in all your relationships leads to you being trusted. Rejecting crime means staying free to act. Romance includes voluntary and honest economic cooperation and spiritual (conscious) exchange between people—mutual enjoyment of each other “you and me together”. In this way, self-interest is moral. It means that you are acting in accordance with what is actually good for you and you would want others to do the same.

Now consider altruism. The original meaning of altruism is “other-ism.” Under this philosophy, you have no rights, no personal values, and no self. You exist only to serve. You are nothing.

But the term is also used, in contradiction to its original meaning, in another way: to refer to helping and supporting others whom you selfishly love or care about, such as your romantic partner and children. You might give money to your children or grandchildren so that they can attend college. You might donate to charities whose goals you support because you can afford the time and money because you take pleasure in seeing the charity fulfill a mission you personally support. True altruism, in contrast, would be serving others whom you do not like or giving donations you cannot afford or to a cause for which you have no interest. Better yet, it would mean sacrificing as a duty to a person or cause that you despise. Worst of all, it would mean, in the name of morality, marrying someone you do not even like out of pity. To be consistent, the sacrifices would have to go down the line. The person who first received your sacrifice would be selfish to accept it so they would have to give it to someone even more needy and so on until everyone in the world was unhappy down to the last miserable person on earth. No one could live this way.

What about police officers and soldiers who risk their lives every day to protect our rights? Are they altruists? The key to answering this question is to ask another question: Do they personally love this work? Does it have personal meaning? Not everyone wants to be a police officer or soldier, but for some people, that is a personally important job. These people enjoy and love protecting their city or country. They are proud of their role and admire the values their city or country stands for. They are, in fact, acting in their own self-interest if helping others involves a personal value (i.e., freedom).

Rational self-interest is good, including when used to help others whom you value, but true altruism (as opposed to helping valued others) works against human life and happiness. (For a deeper look at the virtue of self-interest, see Objectivism The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leoanrd Peikoff, 1991).

Edwin A. Locke

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HONG KONG WAS ALWAYS DOOMED TO BE UNDER BEIJING’S THUMB

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Aug 29, 2023

Hong Kong and mainland China national flags stand together with copy space. Nation symbol, countries political conflict concept

On midnight July 1, 1997 a century and a half of British colonial dominion was brought to an end with the handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China (hereafter PRC). This was in accordance with the 1984 Sino-British Declaration. That treaty, which had been worked out between British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Deng Xiaoping, was to have secured Hong Kong’s relationship with Beijing on the basis of “One Country, Two Systems”—that is, the assurance of Hong Kong’s relative autonomy on certain economic and political matters for at least the first 50 years after its return to China.

This had not been the British government’s first choice; and if certain measures of public opinion at the time are to be believed, it wasn’t what Hong Kongers generally wanted either. If true, this was understandable on both counts. After all, under British rule Hong Kong had come to flourish as a southeast Asian manufacturing and financial hub, enjoying a per capita income in 1996 many times that of their PRC counterparts. And for the British, with the hundred year pro forma lease it had dictated to the decrepit Qing Dynasty nearing its end, a great deal of investment and financial stability stood in perceived jeopardy.

But whatever local opinion, and though Mrs. Thatcher’s government had just a few years before fought a war with Argentina to keep the Falklands (1982), China’s battle-hardened, million-man army and hydrogen bombs meant continued British control of Hong Kong had been for decades entirely at the discretion of Beijing. And no amount of negotiating was going to change the fact that Beijing was in no way willing to countenance an extension of the prior humiliating “lease” of its territory. Much as in the case of Taiwan, the Chinese made clear that while a peaceful transfer was their aim, a military solution to the restoration of Chinese sovereignty over its internationally accepted territory was never ruled off the table.

And so the British packed up and left, with the people of Hong Kong left behind with only their agreed upon Constitution, or “Basic Law,” as a guarantee of their promised, separate rights. Even so, though now one of Beijing’s “Special Administrative Regions” with the central government responsible for “interpreting” that law in points of actual practice, for the first decade and a half things proceeded relatively smoothly. Apart from small and sporadic pro-democracy demonstrations by local NGOs—often with the open support of outside groups like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)—the trouble really began in 2014, when Beijing decided that it would effectively pre-screen candidates for Hong Kong’s highest office, the Chief Executive.

The controversy can be summed up as follows: while Article 45 of the Basic Law says the eventual aim is the election of the Chief Executive of Hong Kong by universal suffrage, the same Article 45 stipulates that Chief Executive still has to then to be “appointed,” essentially approved, by the Cetral People’s Government. That was what was agreed in the Joint Declaration and it is what is written in the Basic Law. Whether there was universal suffrage or not, it was never and nowhere written that whomever was elected had to be accepted by Beijing.

Here it is also worth noting that the structure of Hong Kong’s democracy under the Basic Law was further limited by the Legislative Council, or law-making body. There nearly a third of all seats are unelected, with representatives being accorded to various business or administrative interests. These tend to lean toward Beijing on questions of concern to it on account of the obviously considerable economic interests at stake. Therefore, though regularly grabbing the majority of the popular vote, pro-autonomy and pro-democracy parties in Hong Kong have never been in a position to exclusively pass laws of their preference.

Whatever else one might say about such a system, that Beijing pushed for and got such an acceptable arrangement for itself comes as little surprise. What government with the means to do so would not have?

This was little consolation to the people of Hong Kong. Citing Article 68 of the Basic Law, which like Article 45 states the ultimate aim is the election of the Legislative Council by universal suffrage, frustrated pro-democracy activists took the streets following the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress’ (NPCSC) decision regarding the candidate selection process for the forthcoming (2017) elections. As they would be in subsequent years, in 2017 and again in 2019, the 2014 protests were totally defeated.

And in the case of the last, which were officially against an amendment to existing extradition arrangements with Taipei and Beijing, these led to the imposition of a new “national security law.” Passage of such a law, prohibiting among other things the public advocation of Hong Kong’s secession, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces, was stipulated by Article 23 of the Basic Law; the one finally signed by Xi in 2020 was similar to one almost passed in 2003. In point of practice the law empowers the government to virtually ignore the familiar liberal freedoms purportedly guaranteed to Hong Kongers by Article 27 of the Basic Law, including freedom of expression, assembly, and press.

This series of events culminated, at least for now, in 2021 when electoral changes were finally enacted; shrinking the number of directly elected seats to the Legislative Council while simultaneously expanding the Election Committee and the number of seats filled by government appointment or allotted to Beijing-leaning corporations or organizations. These reforms increased Beijing’s hold over the territory.

From Washington, these events were all viewed with displeasure. However, until President Donald Trump, this disquiet was largely confined to the pages of policy journals and think tank papers no one but a handful of people ever read. The Council on Foreign Relations (hereafter CFR), as near to officialdom as it gets, kept a running score. But it wasn’t until 2019-2020 that Congress passed the Human Rights and Democracy Act (2019) and Hong Kong Autonomy Act (2020) for Donald Trump to sign, and the Treasury began sanctioning members of the Hong Kong government, including its Chief Executives. This has continued under the Joe Biden Administration, whose stance toward China has been, if anything, even more hawkish.

An obvious question is whether the above events have impacted thinking about Taiwan inside the Beltway. While the CFR’s flagship periodical, Foreign Affairs, has openly asked the question, and the topic is one that is regularly raised in the corporate press, the author could find no publicly available official document linking any change in official Taiwan policy to what has happened in Hong Kong over the past decade.

That isn’t to say it hasn’t; nor is it to nod along to Washington’s protestations that it hasn’t substantially revised or abandoned the “One China Policy” or “Strategic Ambiguity.” It is only to say that we don’t know.

What is clear in all of this is that China is China and no part of America is over there. According to the CFR, Beijing’s actions have “dimmed hopes” that Hong Kong will ever become a “full democracy.” Such hopes were always delusional to anyone who had read the Basic Law or knew anything about great power politics. Continued involvement in what are internal Chinese affairs will bring nothing but potential trouble to the United States and its people. Because the truth is that what happens to Hong Kong, or Taiwan for that matter, has no long-term relation whatever to the security or prosperity of the people of the United States. It is high time the American people recognized this and reined in their government.

Before it is too late.

About Joseph Solis-Mullen

Joseph Solis-Mullen is a political scientist with degrees from Spring Arbor University and the University of Illinois, and is currently a graduate student in the economics department at the University of Missouri. An independent researcher and journalist, his work can be found at the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, Eurasian Review, Libertarian Institute, Journal of the American Revolution, Antiwar.com, and the Journal of Libertarian Studies. You can contact him through his website http://www.jsmwritings.com or find him on Twitter @solis_mullen

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