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.
Black voters are bolting away from Joe Biden in herds, and it’s unlikely the president will win them back.
In a new Washington Post-Ipsos poll, only 23 percent of voters “strongly agree” with Biden’s job in office. Although, black Americans typically vote overwhelmingly in favor of Democratic candidates, the poll indicates they are frustrated with the lack of progress the Biden administration has made, despite countless promises of “change.”
The number of voters who think the Biden administration is “sympathetic” towards black Americans’ problems went from 74 percent to 66 percent.
According to the Pew Research Center, black voters carried Biden in the 2020 election, and even was the first Democratic president to win Georgia in 30 years. But many of those voters may think twice about their favor of Biden as the country continues to take a chaotic downward spiral thanks to the left.
The poll also found that only 60 percent of Americans feel as if Biden is keeping his campaign promises, while 60 percent said they were disappointed or angry about Democrats’ failure to pass voting rights legislation.
According to The Hill, Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney and activist said she feels as if Biden is doing the “bare minimum in terms of being attentive to the needs and issues facing the Black community.”
Kiev has given Washington assurances that US-supplied rocket launchers won’t be used to attack targets inside Russian territory, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Wednesday. He was the latest US official to raise the issue, as Moscow voiced concerns over the escalation of hostilities in Ukraine.
Speaking to reporters after a meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Blinken was asked about the HIMARS multiple launch rocket systems, the latest high-tech weapon the US has committed to sending Ukraine.
“The Ukrainians have given us assurances that they will not use these systems against targets on Russian territory,” Blinken said, adding, “There is a strong trust bond between Ukraine and the US, as well as with our allies and partners.”
He also dismissed Moscow’s warnings and concerns that Washington’s weapons deliveries to Kiev risked further escalating the conflict.
“The best way to avoid escalation is for Russia to stop the aggression and the war it started,” Blinken said, arguing that it could be “over tomorrow” if Moscow so chose, but is likely to go on for “many months” instead.
Okay, well, they’re not going to do that.
So now what?
“The only way to end this war is if the enemy offers an unconditional surrender” is an insane statement by any metric. In this case, it’s much worse than insane. The Ukraine military is destroyed, Russia is already occupying virtually all of the territory it claims, and there is just nowhere to go with this.
The Ukraine is suffering nonstop losses. Missiles are not going to make any difference to anything. The only thing that would make any difference to anything is a Western invasion of the country. From what I’ve read, as of right now they’re only planning on sending a few HIMARS systems anyway, which are going to get taken out quickly like all of the Ukraine’s other gifted equipment has been. So this is some kind of game that I don’t really understand.
US President Joe Biden officially announced the dispatch of HIMARS systems to Ukraine, along with other military equipment valued at $700 million, on Wednesday afternoon. According to Deputy Defense Secretary Colin Kahl, the launchers were “pre-positioned” in Europe pending the announcement, and the first batch of four will be handed over this week – though it may take three weeks to train Ukrainian troops in their use.
HIMARS fires barrage rockets with an effective range of around 30 km, but can also deploy tactical ballistic missiles with a range of up to 300 km. Russia has raised concerns with the US over the latter possibility.
Biden himself, his UN envoy Linda Thomas-Greenfield, and now Blinken have all insisted that Kiev will not be provided with the long-range missiles. Blinken is the first to mention the Ukrainian promises, however.
The Ukraine has already attacked inside Russia. They probably will again. But none of this even matters. The Ukraine does not have anything close to a path to taking back the Donbass, and the US State Department and Ukraine government are claiming they are also going to launch an invasion of Crimea.
The idea that these missile systems are some kind of game changer – it’s just utterly baffling. There is no amount of equipment that could be a game changer, because the Ukraine lacks the military personnel.
This is all just like a psychedelic nightmare scene. What are they even talking about? It doesn’t make sense.
I suspect the Kremlin has concluded that the limited intervention in Ukraine was a mistake. I don’t mean that the Kremlin will fail in its effort to drive all Ukrainian military units out of Donbass. The mistake the Kremlin made was in thinking that the military intervention could be limited.
The US and NATO are now involved in the conflict. Ukraine is being supplied with heavy weapons and with training in their use. Washington has now arranged to send missiles capable of hitting Russian territory. Clearly, there is nothing limited about the conflict.
The dilemma for Russia is that by confining its military operations to the Donbass region in east Ukraine, Western weapons are accumulating in west Ukraine where it is possible to raise an army to replace the one the Russians are destroying in Donbass. Whereas the Kremlin will succeed in liberating Donbass, it will fail in its goal to demilitarize Ukraine and turn Ukraine into a neutral state unless the intervention is expanded to all of Ukraine.
Additionally, the conflict has also expanded by the request of neutral Finland and Sweden to join NATO. The addition of Finland to NATO would greatly expand the presence of NATO on Russia’s borders, which the intervention in Ukraine intended to prevent.
The Kremlin warned that countries that intervene in the conflict would be treated as combatants, but has failed to take any action. The Russian threat is so disregarded that even militarily insignificant Denmark openly sends weapons to Ukraine. The consequence will be more intervention by the US and NATO.
A dangerous situation has been created by the Kremlin’s declaration of red lines that it does not enforce. Delayed and limited Russian responses to Washington’s provocations are the reason for the present conflict, and delayed and limited responses are the reason the present conflict is likely to spin out of control.
It was obvious that the Kremlin needed a quick and total conquest of Ukraine to prevent the expansion of the war by Western intervention and to intimidate non-NATO Europe from abandoning neutrality. Instead, the limited Russian action has given Washington months to widen the conflict and to keep the conflict going after Ukraine’s defeat in Donbass. Western propaganda has even succeeded in convincing the Western populations that Ukraine is winning the war.
The Kremlin, it seems, is unable to comprehend that there is no peaceful or diplomatic solution. It was the Kremlin’s false hope for the delusional Minsk Agreement that gave Washington 8 years in which to train and equip a Ukrainian force to retake the Donbass republics. The entire conflict could have been avoided if the Kremlin had accepted the request of Donbass to be reunited with Russia like Crimea. This strategic error by the Kremlin followed a larger and earlier error when the Kremlin stood aside and permitted Washington’s overthrow of the Ukrainian government and installation of a puppet regime hostile to Russia.
I admire the Kremlin’s restraint and disinclination to resort to violence. The question is whether this behavior encourages Washington to move more aggressively with the Wolfowitz doctrine against countries that are obstacles to Washington’s hegemony.
Russia can again sit on her hands, as she did during the previous 8 years, while Washington raises and trains yet another Ukrainian army, or she can deliver a quick knockout blow to Ukraine, replace the government, and hunt down and terminate all Nazi and CIA elements, or she can call it quits. Otherwise, the chances are high that increasing Western intervention will spin the conflict out of control.
The Kremlin sees this itself and warns of the prospect of nuclear war, but does not take the necessary action to foreclose this prospect.
According to a study released in mid-May by The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, “one in six students attend a school where over 90% of their peers were of the same race in the 2018-19 school year.” The publication of the report was timed to mark the 68th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision which ruled that state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools were unconstitutional.
While this may be news to some, the results are hardly surprising. For varied reasons, people tend to live in areas populated by those similar in race and class. And to complete the picture, we have a ridiculous zip-code mandated education system, which, courtesy of the Big Government-Big Teacher Union duopoly, forces children to go to the public school that is closest to their home – no matter how awful it might be – throughout most of the country.
Then, on the educational freedom front, a RealClear Opinion Research poll in February revealed that 72% of the respondents support school choice, with just 18% opposed. The results don’t vary much by race, with 77% of Hispanics, 72% of Whites, 70% of Blacks, and 66% of Asians expressing support.
In March, the American Federation of Children released the findings of a survey which shows that 77% of those surveyed support education-savings accounts (ESAs), which allow parents to withdraw their children from public schools and receive a deposit of public funds into government-authorized savings accounts with restricted but multiple uses. Interestingly, the poll finds that 75% of Democrats support ESAs, as do 85% of Hispanic voters and 84% of Black voters.
And unsurprisingly, when any privatization measure shows promise, the teacher unionistas and their fellow travelers step up their deceitful propaganda campaign. Traditionally, their argument has revolved around money. The unions claim that “privatization siphons funds from public schools.” This is a terrible argument for so many reasons, but mostly because we should be funding students, not systems. The union’s other main talking point – used increasingly these days – is that school choice is racist.
The ever-quotable Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, insists, “Make no mistake: This use of privatization, coupled with disinvestment are only slightly more polite cousins of segregation.” (A question for Weingarten and other choice-haters: While you despise any public money going to a parent who wants to send their child to a private school, you praise Pell Grants. These federal dollars go to needy college students, and can be used to attend private colleges, including religious schools like Notre Dame and Brigham Young. But on the k-12 level, giving parents choices – vouchers, ESA’s, etc., especially if used at a religious school – is your worst nightmare. Why is the private option perfectly okay for college students, but not elementary and high schoolers?)
The rarely coherent teacher union mouthpiece Diane Ravitch blogged in early May that the “origins of school choice are well-known; resistance to the Brown decision.” She blathers on, referring to libertarian Milton Friedman as a “right-winger,” and asserts that “Republicans are dedicated to destroying public schools, and stealing their funding.” Then doubling up on her wackiness, she exits with, “My addendum: if they destroy our public schools, they will destroy public libraries, public lands, the right to vote and, in time, our democracy.”
The National Education Association, the biggest union in the country, is a pit-bull on the issue. It regularly slams any privatization measure. In an extended piece on their website, the union trots out all the usual bromides – including that choice will lead to resegregation.
Homeschooling is also in the crosshairs of the purveyors of the segregation myth. In May, MSNBC got into the act, sharing a tweet claiming that homeschooling is being driven by “the insidious racism of the American religious right.”
And now for some facts.
Regarding the siphon argument, Martin Lueken, Director of Fiscal Policy and Analysis at EdChoice, researched the actual school choice participation rates and found that it “does not have a negative effect on public-school systems or their funding. In fact, research suggests that greater take-up in choice programs leads to better student outcomes for the vast majority of students choosing to remain in public schools. Looking at these facts, it seems clear that the claims of exodus and harm caused by choice programs are greatly exaggerated.”
Another analysis examined 11 choice programs across eight states and D.C. Of the 26 studies examining the effects of these programs on public school students, 24 reveal positive effects, one study shows no visible effect, and only one finds negative effects.
Despite the ridiculous homeschooling assertion made by MSNBC, the number of Black homeschoolers jumped, from 3.3% to 16.1% in 2020. Thus, Black children are homeschooling in much greater numbers than their White counterparts.
The Milton Friedman allegation is miles beyond inaccurate. In fact, Friedman and likeminded souls began touting vouchers as a strategy to combat segregation. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, researcher Phillip Magness explains that Virginia’s segregationist hard-liners recognized the likely outcomes of school choice and began attacking it “as an existential threat to their white-supremacist order.”
So, now just who are really the racists? The ones who want to free Blacks to choose their schools? Or those who force them to go to their frequently failing zip-code mandated school?
Going forward, school choice should be branded as a civil rights issue. Lt. Col Allen West said it best in a recent opinion piece.
“We must reassert educational freedom and parental choice in America, this is the new civil rights battlefield. My very own parents made the decision about my early education realizing that a good quality education unlocks the doors to equality of opportunity. If we continue down this current path we lessen the opportunities for our children, but we increase the ability for others to determine their outcomes. If taxpayers, parents, are the ones funding public education, then they are the investors and have a definitive interest in their return on investment.”
Amen, brother West!
Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.
That was Lysander Spooner’s strategy to stop unconstitutional acts that was very much in line with James Madison and other prominent founders.
Spooner was a prominent 19th-century slavery abolitionist. He is well-known in libertarian and anarchist circles for saying the Constitution either authorized the government we got or it was powerless to stop it. “In either case, it is unfit to exist.”
But many don’t know that Spooner also wrote quite a bit about the legal meaning of the Constitution – and strategy to defend and advance liberty.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 ranks as one of the most insidious laws in American history. It denied a black person accused of escaping slavery any semblance of due process. A white man could basically drag a black person south into slavery merely on the power of his word. This even put people born free in the North under the constant threat of being snatched up and sent to slavery.
The first part of Spooner’s pamphlet builds a strong seven-point case against the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act.
1. They authorize the delivery of the slaves without a trial by jury.
2. The Commissioners appointed by the Act of 1850, are not constitutional tribunals for the adjudication of such cases.
3. The State magistrates, authorized by the Act of 1793, to deliver up fugitives from service or labor, are not constitutional tribunals for that purpose.
4. The Act of 1850 is unconstitutional, in that it authorizes cases to be decided wholly on ex parte testimony.
5. The provisions of the Act of 1850, requiring the exclusion of certain evidence, are unconstitutional.
6. The requirement of the Act of 1850, that the cases be adjudicated “in a summary manner,” is unconstitutional.
7. The prohibition, in the Act of 1850, of the issue of the writ of Habeas Corpus for the relief of those arrested under the act, is unconstitutional.
Resist.
That was Lysander Spooner’s strategy to stop unconstitutional acts that was very much in line with James Madison and other prominent founders.
Spooner was a prominent 19th-century slavery abolitionist. He is well-known in libertarian and anarchist circles for saying the Constitution either authorized the government we got or it was powerless to stop it. “In either case, it is unfit to exist.”
But many don’t know that Spooner also wrote quite a bit about the legal meaning of the Constitution – and strategy to defend and advance liberty.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 ranks as one of the most insidious laws in American history. It denied a black person accused of escaping slavery any semblance of due process. A white man could basically drag a black person south into slavery merely on the power of his word. This even put people born free in the North under the constant threat of being snatched up and sent to slavery.
Spooner goes on to reason that if the fugitive slave acts are unconstitutional, it follows that they are really no law at all. Furthermore, “an officer of the government is an officer of the law only when he is proceeding according to law.” In other words, the federal government had no legitimate authority to enforce the unconstitutional fugitive slave act.
“If it have been shown that the acts of 1793 and of 1850, are unconstitutional, it follows that they can confer no authority upon the judges and marshals appointed to execute them; and those officers are consequently, in law, mere ruffians and kidnappers, who may be lawfully resisted, by any body and every body, like any other ruffians and kidnappers, who assail a person without any legal right.”
He goes on to write, “an unconstitutional statute is no law, in the view of the constitution. It is void, and confers no authority on any one; and whoever attempts to execute it, does so at his peril.”
Many in the founding generation came to a similar conclusion about any unconstitutional act. For instance, in Federalist #78. Alexander Hamilton wrote:
“There is no position which depends on clearer principles, than that every act of a delegated authority contrary to the tenor of the commission under which it is exercised, is void. No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the constitution, can be valid.”
James Iredell of North Carolina put it another way, saying a law “not warranted by the Constitution is a bare-faced usurpation.”
Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.”
But so what? Simply asserting that a law is unconstitutional and thus void doesn’t change anything in practice. The government is all too happy to continue enforcing unconstitutional acts. Spooner has already alluded to the only thing that can put teeth into constitutional assertions — resistance.
Spooner makes this point without equivocation.
“The right of the people, therefore, to resist an unconstitutional law, is absolute and unqualified, from the moment the law is enacted.”
Some will argue that resisting an unconstitutional act goes too far. They say we need to “work within the system” and get the law repealed. But Spooner says this is nonsense. This strategy tacitly acknowledges the legitimacy of the law until it is repealed.
“To say that an unconstitutional law must be obeyed until it is repealed, is saying that an unconstitutional law is just as obligatory as a constitutional one,—for the latter is binding only until it is repealed. There would therefore be no difference at all between a constitutional and an unconstitutional law, in respect to their binding force; and that would be equivalent to abolishing the constitution, and giving to the government unlimited power.”
Spooner calls the right to resist an unconstitutional act “a constitutional right.”
“The exercise of the right is neither rebellion against the constitution, nor revolution—it is a maintenance of the constitution itself, by keeping the government within the constitution. It is also a defence of the natural rights of the people, against robbers and trespassers, who attempt to set up their own personal authority and power, in opposition to those of the constitution and people, which they were appointed to administer.”
But shouldn’t we wait until a federal court strikes down a law as unconstitutional before resisting its enforcement? Spooner didn’t think so. He said, “there is not a syllable in the constitution, that makes a decision of the judiciary—of its own force, and without regard to its correctness—binding upon any body, either upon the executive, or the people.”
Simply put, we can’t count on judges to protect our rights or to protect the people from federal power.”
“On the contrary, they have uniformly—probably without a solitary exception—proved themselves, in all questions of this nature, to be nothing but the willing instruments of usurpation and oppression. They do not accept their offices with any other intention than that of holding all laws constitutional, which they suppose the legislature will pass—for nobody accepts an office, unless with the intention of being obedient to those, to whom they are amenable.”
Spooner goes on to write, “A judicial decision, as such, has therefore no intrinsic authority at all; its constitutional authority rests wholly upon its being in accordance with the constitution.”
So, how do we resist unconstitutional acts?
Spooner called for jury nullification, writing, “It follows that, under the trial by jury, no man can be punished for resisting the execution of any law, unless the law be so clearly constitutional, as that a jury, taken promiscuously from the mass of the people, will all agree that it is constitutional.”
The federal government relies heavily on state cooperation to implement and enforce almost all of its laws, regulations and acts – including gun control. By simply withdrawing this necessary cooperation, states and localities can nullify many federal actions in effect. As noted by the National Governors’ Association during the partial government shutdown of 2013, “states are partners with the federal government on most federal programs.”
Resistance can come in many forms. The bottom line is we must resist federal overreach. The Constitution will not – and can not – enforce itself.
Canada’s dictator, Justin Trudeau, will freeze all sales of handguns (forever), and (in a few months) require mass confiscation of “assault weapons.”
Canadians should not be surprised. When you leave a dictator in power, he keeps taking more and more. Just weeks ago, Trudeau got away with tripling down on COVID fascism, getting peacefully protesting, heroic truckers fired, and seizing the bank accounts of people who gave even a few dollars to support them.
Now in America, Biden says he only wants to seize “assault weapons”; not handguns, like Trudeau.
Why not everything, Joe? If weapons (not criminals) are the cause of crime, then aren’t all weapons dangerous? If you have a right to seize one type of gun, despite the Second Amendment, then why not all of them?
And if the Second Amendment forbids you from seizing handguns, then how does it not forbid you from taking “assault” weapons too? Aren’t all weapons potential “assault” weapons, by the way? In the hands of a criminal, any weapon is an assault weapon. In the hands of a peaceful person, any weapon is defensive. You cannot wish this distinction away.
Madness. We used to talk about tyranny overseas, in Russia, or Eastern Europe or China. Now we have literal tyranny just over the border, in Canada. And, especially with another rigged election or two in America, we will soon have the same thing here.
Cancelling the Grand Old Party (GOP) was the mission of last week’s “Hard Truth” podcast, undertaken by your columnist, her partner, David Vance, and guest Jack Kerwick (introduced here). And on good grounds. The Republican Party has never stood up for you, will never stand up for you and is not going to do what it takes. Past is prologue.
As Dr. Boyd Cathey has observed, the “party which never conserves anything” had been exposed as such as far back as 1875. “The great Southern author, Robert Lewis Dabney, writing a decade after the end of the War Between the States … expressed presciently this tendency of dominant, post-war Northern conservatism”:
The history of the Republican Party is “that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is to-day one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will to-morrow be forced upon its timidity, and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn.”
A point of philosophy arises. From the progressive perspective, society—civil and state—are what shape the human being and account for his conduct. To the extent our world is filled with perverts, grifters, and deviants—they were propelled into misbehavior by societal forces often beyond their control. Or, so goes progressive-style social determinism.
Libertarians, for their part, also often err on the side of a structurally similar social determinism. The State, their reasoning goes, accounts, for the most, for deviance in society. Remove the State and you remove the incentives for people to behave badly.
This Hebrew takes the biblical view tested by time. It is that, as stated in Genesis 8:21 (with thanks to my editors), the instinct of man is evil from his youth. (Or, wackily mistranslated: “the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.”)
What we observe in the political landscape is a function and a reflection of human nature, acting in aggregate. Over and above the idea that we get the government that we deserve is the devastating reality that this government doesn’t stand apart from us. It is us.
Stated by a reader on American Greatness, “We are culturally rotten…as a country and a people…sick to the core. Without shame, without humility, without prudence or common sense.”
In the aggregate, this is probably true. We evince deep, all-engulfing systemic rot, manifested in public and personal life.
Some questions, however, lingered. Were we and our guest, Dr. Kerwick, being theoretical purists, rejecting or refusing to engage with the political reality as it is? Perhaps conservatives should just put up and shut up about the Only Game in Town? Succinctly put by an Unz Review reader:
“Yup! The Republicans suck. But the Democrats want to kill me.”
To that, David provided the perfectly plain answer, as is his wont. WATCH. So did the late Andrew Breitbart of blessed memory. WATCH AND SUBSCRIBE.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 
