“I don’t want to fight for the people, I don’t want to fight against the people, I don’t want to hear of the people. I want to be left alone—to live.”

Ayn Rand, We the Living

I am a member of a fading generation of Americans who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s when the United States was a nation. I was a member of a homogeneous population with a common language, Christian religion, common morality, and shared values and outlook. In Atlanta Georgia of those years people in middle class neighborhoods didn’t bother to lock their doors, and 5-year olds could safely walk a mile to school. There was conformity, but it was because we were in agreement. Life was good. Families were large and close. Neighborhood schools were run by teachers and parents (PTA). Discipline prevailed because of upbringing, not from abusive enforcement. There were no police in the schools.

In 1964 a civil rights act was passed that had the good intention of providing enforcement to the 14th Amendment, and in 1965 an immigration “reform” bill was passed. The civil rights act had as its aim equal opportunity but was turned on its head by the EEOC and a quota regime was installed. As it has developed the preference system increasingly discriminates against the original white ethnicities that still, although declining, form the backbone of the American population. For one recent example of legal discrimination against white Americans, see: https://www.foxnews.com/media/minneapolis-teachers-union-agreement-stipulates-white-teachers-laid-off-first-regardless-seniority

The immigration bill opened the US to massive inflows of no longer enculturated persons. Assimilation was replaced with multiculturalism, and the nation was replaced with a Tower of Babel.

The consequence has been that today the US is no longer a nation. It is a geographical location that is a tower of babel in which rights depend on whether you are an “oppressed minority” or a “white oppressor.” There are no common values, no common morality or social mores, no common religion or language. The immigrant-invaders look at the weak and unsure white population, made guilty by years of brainwashing, and see that their time is coming.

In a half century the situation of the present-day original white ethnicity has gone from security to insecurity. In the prevailing Identity Politics, institutionalized in the Democrat Party, media, universities and school systems, white Americans are officially oppressors. Their oppressed victims are “people of color,” homosexuals, transgendered, and feminists who insist that women are suppressed and abused by white male heterosexuals, this despite crime statistics that show that white women in relationships with black males constitute a remarkable percentage of murder and physical abuse victims.

In my lifetime I have witnessed and experienced the destruction of a great nation based in principles hard to live up to, and its replacement with a criminal organization devoid of all principle except power in which law is weaponized and serves to beat down challenges to illegitimate power.

No American born in the 21st century, or even in the 1990s, has ever experienced a free country. The young have no idea of what has been stolen from them. The American youth are being trained to be happy in a virtual world where they will enjoy artificial and meaningless freedoms that do not threaten the power that rules over them.

In my lifetime I have watched a free country disintegrate into a police state that no aware person could possibly defend. Yet Washington has an army of FBI, CIA, NSA, and federal prosecutors whose job it is to persecute patriots and to cover up elections stolen by Democrats.

For decades Democrats have successfully stolen local and state elections. In 2020 the Democrats stole the Presidential Election, and they are at work blatantly in front of our eyes stealing the next national election by using the corrupt US Department of Justice (sic) and FBI to frame Trump in order to prevent his reelection. There is no other explanation for the aggressive FBI raid on Trump’s home to seize boxes of documents to which the FBI already had access except to create the public impression that Trump is a criminal. The presstitutes, of course, are doing all they can to harden this impression. Meanwhile, Democrats are prosecuting those who uncovered evidence of the stolen 2020 presidential election for spreading misinformation and for attempting to violate civil rights by casting doubt on the election outcome. These are not offences that can be found in law. It is Democrats using monopoly power to create offences out of thin air.

American patriotism rests to a large extent on the insouciance of patriots. They just know that America, although not perfect, is the best country. Period. Something like 9/11 being an inside job or a presidential election being stolen in plain view strikes them as off the wall. They simply cannot believe such things about their country. As the largest percentage of patriots are Republicans, the Democrats know that the insouciance of their opponents renders their opponents impotent. You cannot do something about something that you cannot recognize or acknowledge.

One can hope that information can bring people into reality, but first they have to be able to absorb the information, and they cannot do that when their gullible patriotism causes them to turn their back on “unfounded attacks on America’s purity.” As for the Democrats, decades of anti-white propaganda have left many of them skeptical of “white America” and those who defend it.

With each passing day it becomes more risky to expose the lies used to construct the false narratives that are used to control what Americans think and to erode our Constitutional protections against unaccountable and tyrannical government. If a President’s own Justice Department can come down on him like a ton of bricks while he is in office with such an obvious frame-up as “Russiagate,” what can they do to the rest of us? My generation, or some of it, was instilled with a sense of duty to truth, to the Constitution, and to our country. Today that sense of duty is essentially gone. Instead of duty, the value is money, success, and avoidance of being “cancelled” on social media.

Our nation is being murdered. We daily watch, if we are attentive, the disassembling of its institutions and moral values. But hope is eternal. Not all coups and attempts at brutal seizures of power succeed. Perhaps the Democrats’ attempt will fail. It will certainly succeed if fear forces us to abandon the defense of truth.

The boom produces impoverishment. But still more disastrous are its moral ravages. It makes people despondent and dispirited. The more optimistic they were under the illusory prosperity of the boom, the greater is their despair and their feeling of frustration. The individual is always ready to ascribe his good luck to his own efficiency and to take it as a well-deserved reward for his talent, application, and probity. But reverses of fortune he always charges to other people, and most of all to the absurdity of social and political institutions. He does not blame the authorities for having fostered the boom. He reviles them for the inevitable collapse. In the opinion of the public, more inflation and more credit expansion are the only remedy against the evils which inflation and credit expansion have brought about.

Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, 1949
 

I’ve always liked the saying, “If it were easy, everybody would be doing it.” Sadly, the natural response to that is often, “Well, it must be nice to have… [whatever you earned that they resent your having earned].”

A successful person doesn’t just wake up to discover great achievement. Good ideas usually evolve over time and are almost always accompanied by failure and disappointment along the way. Christopher Columbus had a good idea. Unfortunately, almost nobody believed him, and he needed the moral and financial support of others to launch his mission that changed the world. It must have been exhausting and frustrating, and the years that followed were a disappointment as well. It doesn’t take away from the greatness of his idea, but it shows how great ideas don’t always lead to easy street.

There’s a crucial difference between the attitudes of successful people and people who do not succeed. Successful people take failure in stride, using it as data to figure out what’s actually right. Their failures are far less important than the success they expect. Unsuccessful people see failure as unacceptable, so they never take risks. Of course Columbus wanted to prove that Earth was round, but he also wanted to accomplish other things that he could not. If he had realized how hard it would be, he might have given up rather than persisting against unbelievable odds. His life and the lives of everyone else – even today – would probably have been very different.

Success is a combination of good ideas and hard work. For someone who believes in a great idea, working hard is not a burden. In fact, it’s part of the reward! People who are filled with resentment (the “must be nice” crowd from above) don’t understand this. They look at someone who’s successful and they think, “He or she is so lucky.” Luck had nothing to do with it, other than serving as a general term for coincidence and happenstance combined with creativity and the effort required to bring that idea to fruition. The envious person who mutters “must be nice” believes that one person is just as likely as another to achieve fame, fortune, or success. It’s therefore “unfair” when one person accomplishes more than another.

Successful people unintentionally foster envy by saying things like, “I’m very fortunate.” Did your rich relative die and leave you millions? If so, then that’s certainly fortunate. But it’s still up to you to hold on to that fortune or spend it in a way that makes you happy. Inheritances aside, most fortunes have to be created. Envious people evade the fact that most wealth is caused by an idea somebody had for which a lot of people were willing to pay. A by-product of that envy is a sanctimonious disdain for money (though he or she clearly wants money). This disdain is nothing more than resentment toward the productive efforts of others and anyone who benefits from those efforts. Envy is prevalent, destructive and irrational, and it fuels much, if not all of today’s “us against them” social and political policies.

It’s psychologically healthy to value success, its potential and actualization in yourself and others. Healthy thinkers want success to flourish everywhere; the more the merrier. Achievement is not only an end in itself, but also a value to all who benefit from it. It can inspire, comfort and profit those who are not quite so successful. Great success is special, and it’s not the norm. It doesn’t come to everyone, inclduding those who make great efforts. But that’s no reason to resent it.

Michael J. Hurd, Life’s a Beach

People cry, “My body, my choice.” Well, I say, “Your student loan, your payments.”

Transferring student debt (or ANY debt) from those who borrowed to those who did NOT borrow is SLAVERY.

Biden isn’t “forgiving” or “canceling” debt. He’s shifting the burden from those who went to school to those who didn’t. Or to those who went to school and already paid. IT’S WORST THAN TYRANNY. IT’S SHEER EVIL.

Does this mean college is now free?

Why don’t we just make EVERYTHING free and let the government pay UNLIMITED amounts for UNLIMITED goods?

From Breitbart:

Of course, it is not really “debt forgiveness.” It is a debt transfer. The loan payments that will no longer be made by debtors will effectively be picked up by taxpayers. The money borrowed to make up for the lost revenue will need to be paid for in the form of higher taxes or lower spending in the future. The canceled loans migrate from the balance sheets of the borrowers to the collective balance sheet of the U.S. taxpayer, including many who never went to college or have already paid their loans down.

One question is how the Federal Reserve will react. Very likely, it will need to offset the inflationary pressure created by Biden’s scheme with higher interest rates. This very likely means that unemployment will wind up even higher than it otherwise would have and the looming recession will cut deeper and last longer. Part of the cost of relieving ex-college students of their debt will be throwing people out of work and damaging businesses across America.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason