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.
Only the good die young. In the Wizard of Oz, you can throw water on evil and it melts away. Not this witch. We are stuck with her (Hillary Clinton), like Biden and Pelosi, seemingly forever.
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After 9/11 we classified captured terrorists as wartime “enemy combatants.” Morally, I consider members of the Biden regime and RINO party no different. And legally, if we were still a Constitutional republic and free country, they would be arrested and treated as such.
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Environmentalism is nothing more than state sanctioned and state established religion. It’s not only unsupported by science and facts. It’s unconstitutional.
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To love free speech, you must have confidence in your mind, your views and the power of reason and objectivity. The sniveling snowflakes who staff and run companies like Facebook and (previously) Twitter were never raised with these virtues. Thank you, government-run schools.
“Be assured young friend, that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” — Adam Smith
Are we sure that there is all that much ruin left in the United States?
We are $31 trillion in collective debt. The new normal is $1.5 trillion budget deficits. The military is politicized and short of recruits. We trade lethal terrorists for woke celebrity athletes as if to confirm our enemies’ cynical stereotypes.
Our FBI is corrupt and discredited, collaborating with Silicon Valley contractors to suppress free speech and warp elections. We practice segregation and racial discrimination and claim we do not because the right and good people support it and, anyway, the victims deserve it. The country has seen defeat before but never abject, deliberate humiliation as in Kabul, when we fled and abandoned to the terrorist Taliban a $1 billion embassy, a huge, remodeled air base, thousands of friends, and tens of billions of dollars in military hardware—and hard-earned deterrence.
We are witnessing the breakdown of basic norms essential for civilized life, from affordable food and fuel to available key antibiotics and baby formula. Old Cairo seems safer than an after-hours subway ride or stroll at dusk in many major American cities. Medieval London’s roadways were likely cleaner than Market Street in San Francisco. Speech was freer in 1920s America than it is now.
The Breakdown of Basic Society
Our California always is a preamble to America’s future. Our present is likely your tomorrow.
Each summer here we impotently expect forest conflagrations. Millions of acres of flames pour more millions of tons of smoke and carbon and soot in the skies. Tens of millions of hated combustion engines cannot begin to match the natural blankets of aerial dirt.
The state seems to shrug it off, saying wildfires are both inevitable and natural. Old-fashioned forest management and fire-fighting strategies, honed over centuries, are deemed obsolete by our green experts. So, we let fiery nature take its better course. What is the implicit message to those in the way of fires that devour homes and trees? Nature’s way? Natural wood mulch? Or that such fools should not build their cabins or homes where they are not wanted?
What was bequeathed to us from a state of 15 million—magnificent aqueducts, once brilliantly designed freeways and airports, superb universities and schools, perfectly engineered reservoirs, and downtowns of majestic skyscrapers—in a California of 41 million are frozen in amber or in decay. They have few updates and even fewer replacements. The decrepitude recalls the weedy forums and choked fountains of Vandal-era Roman cities, which is what happens when a later parasitic generation mocks but still consumes what it inherits but cannot create.
Our own generation’s pale contributions are multibillion-dollar, quarter-built, graffiti-defaced high-speed rail Stonehenge monoliths. We prefer to shut down rather than build nuclear plants. Our solar battery plants are as prone to combust as they are to store electricity. And our urban streets reek of feces. All seem testaments to our incompetence, arrogance, and ignorance. We fear the idea of homelessness, and so cede to the homeless our downtowns and avoid what follows.
Our great universities, once the most esteemed in the world from Berkeley and Stanford to UCLA and USC, grow burdened with commissars, too many of their outnumbered faculties are weaponized, and their students have never been more confident in their abilities, and with so little reason for that confidence.
A return to syllabi and grading standards of just 30 years ago would result in mass flunkings. Failure on tests apparently means the test, not the test taker, is found wanting.
What follows is the erosion of meritocracy and competence. And that reality is starting to explain the great unraveling: why our bridges take decades to build rather than a few years, why train tracks are not laid after a decade of “planning,”and why to drive down a once brilliantly engineered, but now crammed and dangerous road is to revisit the “Road Warrior” of film. Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes are the apt characters of our age.
Institutions That Went Rogue
The FBI has imploded. It has all but become a Third World retrieval and investigatory service for the Democratic Party. Its last four directors either have lied, misled, or pleaded amnesia while under oath.
In 2016, the bureau with the Democratic National Committee sought to destroy the integrity of an election by fabricating a Russian collusion hoax. Its continuance and coverup ultimately required FBI agents and lawyers to alter legal documents, to lie under oath, to destroy subpoenaed phone data, and to outsource illegal suppression of First Amendment rights to Silicon Valley contractors. The nation now fears there isn’t anything the FBI might not do.
As we became hyper-legal with Trump, we are more sublegal with the entire Biden family. For a decade, with impunity, it gorged multimillion profits from selling the “Big Guy”/Mr. “10 Percent” Joe Biden’s name and access—sums for the most part hidden and likely not completely taxed. We all know it is true, and we all know the FBI and Department of Justice know it is true, and we know further that the truth means nothing.
This self-satisfied generation constantly brags of transforming elections. But it will be known more as the destroyer of a once hallowed Election Day. Not so long ago 70-80 percent of the electorate took the trouble of voting under transparent protocols. We replaced it in most states with 60-70 percent of the votes without audit and the product of vote harvesting and curing. Our generation, in just a couple of years, destroyed Election Day voting and Election Night counting.
The New Medievalism
Despite different calibrations, various data reveal what is self-evident to the naked eye. The American middle class is shrinking, if not insidiously sliding into indebted peasantry. Westerners are regressing and by design, now deciding daily whether to top up the tank, turn up the heat, or buy beef.
Society is also bifurcating. A tiny powerful minority has more leverage than any other elite in the history of civilization. And a large underclass of subsidized poor shares with the wealthy a disdain for the struggling middle class, the old bulwark of democracy.
In place of knightly penances and chivalric oaths, our elite takes Bankman-Fried-like vows to “fight climate change,” support “transitioning,” and ensure “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” But like their Medieval brethren, they do so only by first enhancing, not endangering, their own careers.
For the ruling class, prep schools, alphabetic certifications from tony universities, and revolving-door résumés are modern versions of having an abbey on site, a stately coat-of-arms, or taking vows from the correct religious orders. Otherwise, it is the same medievalism masked by pretension.
Our Rhine and Danube
America is rapidly resembling something like wide-open fifth-century A.D. Rome, when its traditional inviolable northern borders on the Rhine and Danube rivers vanished. Thousands of unassimilated tribes crisscrossed as they pleased on the premise that no one among their overripe, soft hosts could or would dare stop them.
Joe Biden just remarked that he is too busy to visit the southern border. And why not? There may have been roughly 5 million illegal aliens who have crossed it since his inauguration. He earns contempt both from those who try to enforce the border and those who cross illegally over it.
Biden surrealistically trashes Trump’s supposed archaic idea of a wall—always without noting self-evident truths about it: anywhere Biden stopped the wall or has not replaced prior rickety fencing, there are the most porous and trafficked entry points.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ various mendacities that the border is “secure” translate to allowing as many million aliens as possible to break the law to enter the United States in the four years of the Biden experiment. The administration sees itself in a race to create a one-off window of historic laxity through which millions can pour in—before a comatose nation wakes up and shuts it down.
We are approaching an historic 50 million residents who were not born in the United States, and of various legal and illegal statuses. In a sane world, we might survive the challenge—if newcomers had all come legally, learned the customs and language of their desired new home, were audited and queued by some logical meritocratic process, and were quickly assimilated and integrated by a confident host population that assumed any who wished to live in America surely desired help in becoming an American and felt gratitude to their hosts.
Instead, there is only chaos—and it is by design.
The legal immigrant waiting in line to enter the United States is considered a fool, while illegal aliens and residents instead quickly absorb three messages from their hosts. First, illegal residents will often be treated better than American citizens, at least in terms of lax law enforcement, various legal exemptions and amnesties, and unaudited entitlements.
Second, many will soon learn they can assume immediate moral claims against the majority population of their new home, who can be seen as racist oppressors and obligated to offer reparatory concessions in terms of hiring, admissions, and entitlements.
Third, too many will quickly learn, Ilhan Omar-style, to harbor a quiet derision for their benefactors. Their contempt is not due to Americans’ dearth of magnanimity and generosity, much less to “systemic racism.” Instead, their American hosts are silently assumed to be naïve, timid, overly solicitous, malleable, easily manipulated, rolled, and conned—especially when it is understood that if the roles were reversed and the entrants were the hosts, they would have a different notion of borders.
The idea of 330 million American citizens of different incidental races and ethnicities united by a common American identity of shared values, customs, and traditions is all but mocked. In its place is arising something like the former Yugoslavia—an undefined mishmash of competing and increasingly hostile tribal interests, with residents sorting themselves out into red and blue states that eventually will lead to two antithetical Americas.
So once assumed services, customs, institutions, and expectations are eroding—from a safe walk to a government office in a large city’s downtown, to a visit to the local public emergency room in extremis for humane, rapid, and competent care, to a clean, safe subway ride in a major city, or watching election returns conclude on Election Night.
A Nation of Thieves?
In a nearby Home Depot the other day, there were two long lines to check out. The other six were closed, as was the largest exit with several self-check-out counters.
Why? When asked the clerk whispered that the theft rate is high in the store and that from time to time it shuts down various exits to limit stealing or perhaps to confuse calculating thieves. I added that I had learned that almost any large item in a box purchased at Home Depot had to be first opened to ensure that key parts like knobs, wires, and screws had not been ripped off.
A local Walmart stopped its 24-hour service; again, the clerk said it was due to unsustainable looting during the early morning hours.
I also went to Walgreens and Rite-Aid recently. Much of what anyone wanted, from razors to antihistamines, was under lock-and-key. None of this was true just a decade ago. I live in a rural area among small towns—a world away from Los Angeles and San Francisco where smash-and-grab robberies and unapologetic looting have caused the mass closures of pharmacies and all-service stores.
Exemptions given thefts under $950 in some states may be the culprit. Others cite the post-George Floyd riots and the climate of unpunished street criminality. Maybe years of mask-wearing made us forget who normally had used masks and for what reasons.
Weaponized activist district attorneys and virtue-signaling mayors also signal to criminals that property crimes don’t warrant arrest, much less conviction, much less incarceration.
But whatever the cause, a once famously lawful America has become a veritable land of thieves. The criminal is all but exempt. And the middle class and poor suffer as a result from poor services, higher prices, reduced hours, and fewer stores.
We know the solution is to deter crime by assured punishment for the guilty. But the majority of Americans either cannot or will not demand a return to sanity for fear of some sort of undefined pushback from their elites. Pick your charge: “racism,” “privilege,” “bias,” “discrimination.” Any will do.
We have seen lots of cultural revolutions in this country, but never one that was so singularly focused on razing the foundations of America—until now. Yes, there is a lot of ruin in great nations. But even America is by now running low on it.
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 newly released The Dying Citizen.
Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities for our original content, please contact licensing@centerforamericangreatness.com.
Secession, resistance and nullification are all we have left.
Elections are pointless. Republicans will not win. And even if they do, most Republicans are RINOs. Or they become RINOs after a few years in the Imperial City, with rare exception.
Trump is over, we’re told. But even if he’s not, how can he win? What’s different in 2023 or 2024 compared to 2020? Or if the only other meaningful Republican — DeSantis –runs for President, how can he win? The rules aren’t rigged in Florida. Alternative media is allowed to speak and function in Florida. Nationally, that’s not so. Social media deletes everything it dislikes, and 99 percent of what they delete is nonleftist.
Show me an alternative to nullification or secession — in other words, getting the hell away from a rotten, statist, tyrannical federal regime that’s so corrupt, and so hopeless, it makes the tyranny that the American revolutionaries fought (and managed to defeat) in 1776 small potatoes, in comparison. Show me an alternative to divorce.
Prove to me that a RINO Republican can win, and that such a victory (of a Romney, or a Cheney or a Bush–all of whom actively support far left Democrats) will make any difference. Prove to me that a Trump, a DeSantis or someone else like that can win in a climate of mail-in voting, ballot harvesting, overt intimidation, dark money (i.e., unlimited spending permitted for leftists, no unregulated spending permitted for nonleftists) and a media that won’t permit coverage or discussion of shocking violations of the law and common sense when it comes to elections.
Prove to me that there’s a better alternative. Don’t use the past as proof. Don’t say, “This is America. It can’t happen here.” It already has happened here. And it’s happening more every day. Just read the indirectly state-run media. Just read the propaganda; the facts we’re allowed to see are bad enough. Imagine the things we don’t know!
The past is over. This isn’t America. This is just another formerly free country that is trending authoritarian and on the road to totalitarian tyranny. That’s why we’re staring down the barrel of hyperinflation, wealth redistribution from the productive to the willfully insane, total economic ruin for the middle class (like Venezula, on our current fiscal course) and totalitarian government control (Chinese Communist style) rationalized first by medical fascism (that will return) and (ultimately) by “climate change” fascism. It’s all happening in a culture dominated by professors, bureaucrats and celebrity figures who are either bat-shit crazy or just plain evil — and whom the allegedly silent majority will NOT stand up to, not under any conditions. Cowardice and freedom cannot coexist.
Prove to me there’s a better alternative than just walking away, like the American revolutionaries did. I would love to know of one.
A faithful follower of this column writes, “I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a compulsive talker. My crazy need to say something or answer someone (even when no answer is required) often gets me into trouble. When I talk I get carried away. My husband tells me to THINK before I speak. The Bible says talking is not a good thing. Somebody else said ‘silence is golden.’”
Another problem is that I speak my thoughts, i.e., ‘I forgot to do this or that,’ or whatever. By the time I realize I’m mumbling, I’ve already made a fool of myself. My son does this too, and it makes him lose credibility just like me. Do I get a little credit for at least knowing that I’m doing it? I so want to stop!”
Dear Faithful Reader: It sounds like you’re struggling to think things out. Congratulations. Thinking is an ideal way of coping. It’s not a substitute for action, but it’s a necessary condition for making your actions effective. It sounds like when you’re talking, you’re attempting to think. Your intentions are good. But you need an alternative strategy.
A skilled counselor or psychotherapist can possibly serve as a sounding board to help you improve the focus of your thinking. A good therapist won’t condemn you for talking, and once you feel like you have a safe place in which to talk all you want, it’ll be easier to not talk to other people about your thoughts. You can save it for counseling. A good counselor is always interested. A client of mine once said, “I like coming to sessions. You have to listen.” Sounds funny, but it’s true.
I suggest you keep a journal – for your eyes only. Write down your thoughts and try to work them out. The more you do this, the less difficult it will be to remain quiet around others. You’re blurting things out because you haven’t yet developed the outlet you need for thinking on your own.
About the journal: There’s no right or wrong. Just write down your thoughts as they come. Get them out, if nothing else. Think of it as an alternative to talking to anyone and everyone. It’s good to tell yourself not to talk too much, and your husband’s advice is also good, but thinking before you speak presupposes that you have somewhere else to think! That’s what counseling and journal-writing are for.
Beware of anyone, especially credentialed professionals, who tell you that you’re suffering from an illness. You do have a problem, but there’s nothing irreparably wrong with you. Don’t view this as some kind of moral or physical flaw. Instead, view it as an undesirable habit that, with time and effort, you’re able to change.
Years ago I had a neighbor who talked compulsively. Even for a paid listener like me, she was a sight to behold. She was intelligent and knew she had a problem. During her extended patter she would even joke about it, “I’m such a compulsive talker I even drive myself crazy! I just go on and on and on I truly cannot shut up!” I always wondered what thoughts were in her head that she was trying to drown out.
Could that be you? Are you perhaps filibustering, like a politician, to keep something from coming to a vote that you don’t want to consider? I’m not suggesting you do this on purpose. But perhaps you’re afraid of hearing things from others that you don’t want to hear. So you filibuster.
If that’s indeed the case, the resolution is to not fear what others have to say. Someone saying something doesn’t make it so. People can be wrong. Hear them out and don’t be afraid of what they’ll say. You can always critique them in your mind, regardless of your words.
The notion of “white privilege” is collectivist. It’s Marxism seen through a racial lens.
You don’t need Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy to know that crimes are not racially shared, that there is no collective guilt. The fact that a group of people with white skin enslaved a group of people with dark skin does not mean that everyone with a white skin bears guilt for the crime. The same applies to the “Jim Crow” laws that used to exist in the Southern states: guilt for this rights violation does not attach to skin color.
But it seems that you do need Rand’s Objectivism, or at least quite an advanced understanding of capitalism, to realize the error and the insult to blacks in the idea that whites gained financially from slavery, as the term “white privilege” implies.
The truth is that, aside from the plantation owners (a tiny minority), the white population of the South was hurt by slavery—kept poor by it—rather than enriched.
Only racists, who believe that African-Americans are sub-human, could imagine that treating them like beasts of burden would be the path to riches. If you recognize that the enslaved people were human beings, with the rational faculty, you understand that slavery and discrimination were not only viciously evil but also socially and economically destructive. The forcible suppression of blacks was deliberately directed toward thwarting and paralyzing their minds—their deepest essence and most economically valuable asset.
In the words of Spinoza, “Nothing is more valuable to man than [another] man who lives by reason.”
Not just basic human decency, not just the understanding of individual rights, but also the profit-motive demands that you treat every member of every race as the rational beings they are.
Slavery sets the slave’s mind against you. Respecting a man’s individual rights and paying him for his services puts a free man’s mind on your side.
Or do the pushers of the slogan “white privilege” secretly believe that only whites can think rationally?!
The same anti-black, racist premise is behind the idea that capitalism is consistent with racial bigotry. The vile insult to those suffering from the bigotry is the ugly assumption that the members of the victimized race could not, in fact, perform as well as the members of the “privileged” race.
In concrete terms, the charge of “white privilege” assumes that it made economic sense for Southern businesses to give preference to whites over blacks. This assumes the inferiority of the black race! Otherwise, not hiring blacks and not selling to them would spell economic suicide.
On a free, capitalist market, the price of a man’s labor (his wages), like the price of any other factors of production, is set by the man’s contribution to production, not by non-economic considerations like his shoe size, the number of syllables in his first name, or his skin color.
Sure, in backward areas, like the 19th century Deep South, there would initially have been, from rednecks, resistance to doing business with blacks and general resistance to dropping racial prejudice. The Archie Bunkers have always looked with horror at competition from members of other groups (Jews, Irish, Italians, women, etc.). But as individual members of a group perform well, as they advance in wealth and form friendships, and marriages, with the more reasonable individuals of other groups, the old collectivist prejudices become less and less tenable—because they are false.
Capitalism sets the profit motive against irrationality. And racism is the height—or lowest depth—of irrationality.
To see why racism is anti-capitalist, consider the analogy to a Luddite prejudice against machinery. What would happen, under capitalism, to business owners who discriminated against machinery? Suppose the vast majority of businessmen thought machines were instruments of the devil; suppose they would not buy machines at all. How would these superstitious businessmen compete against a lone rational businessman who was not prejudiced against machines and gladly used them to save time and money? They couldn’t compete. The price of prejudice against machines would be: inability to cut costs, thus cut prices, thus maintain sales, thus stay in business. The same is true for prejudice against men.
Do the chanters of “white privilege,” then, think that it is rational to view blacks as inferior?
Originally appeared on HBLetter.com (HBL)–a private email list for Objectivists for discussing philosophic and cultural issues. A free trial is available at HBLetter.com.
We are told many pro-Trump candidates lost. So what? In order to win, Republicans needed candidates who did not agree with Trump. In other words: candidates who agree with DemComs. If that’s what it takes to win, then what’s the point of winning?
It’s the RINOs making the case that we need more RINO candidates. But it’s Trump who advocates the typical Republican positions — not the RINOs.
These RINOs are the biggest threat to America. Without them, the Republican Party would have a chance at heading off the one-party Communism and fascism now enveloping our once great country. RINOs — who sadly do, once again, control the Republicans — and the Democrats are the Uniparty. America, RIP.
A California English teacher with tenure says grammar and essay writing standards are part of “white supremacy culture.”
This loathsome “educator” is no less a racist than the most fearsome Klansman. Why? Because she’s clearly implying that nonwhite people are incapable of learning proper grammar. And she’s using grammar in expressing her denial of grammar’s moral legitimacy.
The evil of our era is not that there are people depraved enough to say such things. The evil is that the majority of us who KNOW it’s depraved are too scared to say so. If we let dimwit twits like this government-subsidized “teacher” intimidate us into silence, we truly are doomed.
“The mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. It is a secondary consequence. The primary act—the process of reason—must be performed by each man alone. We can divide a meal among many men. We cannot digest it in a collective stomach. No man can use his lungs to breathe for another man. No man can use his brain to think for another. All the functions of body and spirit are private. They cannot be shared or transferred.
We inherit the products of the thought of other men. We inherit the wheel. We make a cart. The cart becomes an automobile. The automobile becomes an airplane. But all through the process what we receive from others is only the end product of their thinking. The moving force is the creative faculty which takes this product as material, uses it and originates the next step. This creative faculty cannot be given or received, shared or borrowed. It belongs to single, individual men. That which it creates is the property of the creator. Men learn from one another. But all learning is only the exchange of material. No man can give another the capacity to think. Yet that capacity is our only means of survival.”
The media has ceased to exist, and the public plods on by assuming as true whatever the media suppresses and as false whatever the media covers.
The current “media”—loosely defined as the old major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post, the network news channels, MSNBC and CNN, PBS and NPR, the online news aggregators like Google, Apple, and Yahoo, and the social media giants like the old Twitter and Facebook—are corrupt.
They have adopted in their news coverage a utilitarian view that noble progressive ends justify almost any unethical means to obtain them. The media is unapologetically fused with the Democratic Party, the bicoastal liberal elite, and the progressive agenda.
The result is that the public cannot trust that the news it hears or reads is either accurate or true. The news as presented by these outlets has been carefully filtered to suppress narratives deemed inconvenient or antithetical to the political objectives of these entities, while inflating themes deemed useful.
This bias now accompanies increasing (and increasingly obvious) journalistic incompetence. Lax standards reflect weaponized journalism schools and woke ideology that short prior basic requisites of writing and ethical protocols of quoting and sourcing. In sum, a corrupt media that is ignorant, arrogant, and ideological explains why few now trust what it delivers.
Suppression
Once a story is deemed antithetical to left-wing agendas, there arises a collective effort to smother it. Suppression is achieved both by neglect, and by demonizing others who report an inconvenient truth as racists, conspiracist “right-wingers,” and otherwise irredeemable.
The Hunter Biden laptop story is the locus classicus. Social media branded the authentic laptop as Russian disinformation. That was a lie. But the deception did not stop them from censoring and squashing those who reported the truth.
Instead of carefully examining the contents of the laptop or interrogating Biden-company players such as Tony Bobulinksi, the media hyped the ridiculous disinformation hoax as a mechanism for suppressing the damaging pre-election story altogether.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 