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.
“58 Percent of Americans Believe US Democracy in Danger of Collapse”, according to a Quinnipiac poll, reported by NEWSMAX 1-13-22.
First of all, America never was a democracy. America was a Constitutional republic with a Bill of Rights. The purpose of its government was to uphold individual rights, not vote them away gradually, as we did.
Secondly, you don’t have a republic OR a democracy without election integrity. Blue and purple states are rigged in favor of one party, and will never turn red again. It’s improbable we will see a Republican president again, especially a meaningful one like a Reagan or Trump, because the Electoral College counts on the votes of these rigged blue and purple states. We saw how that worked out in 2020. On top of it all, Congress is poised to pass a “voting rights” bill that will nationalize the rigged elections in favor of one party forever.
So even if it’s democracy you want, democracy is done in America. The fact that 58 percent of the population senses this fact is not shocking. What’s shocking is that there has been so little upheaval as a result. It’s truly as if mass numbers of Americans are under sedation. I suppose when the 2022 and 2024 “elections” expose still more fraud, to say nothing of what these Communists and tyrants have in store for us next, maybe 58 percent (or even more) of the country will arise out of its slumber then. Maybe.
After all: who says there will even be elections in 2022 and 2024? Governors and Presidents can now declare “emergency” any time they wish, for any reason they wish, or for no reason at all. That’s a fact. Or maybe require a vax ID in order to vote. There goes Florida, and there goes the red wave. You think it’s crazy? Wake up: YOU ARE LIVING IN CRAZY.
Commercials take up 27% of commercial television screen time and are the main source of income for TV and radio stations. In most cases, advertisements on all channels appear simultaneously, so don’t try to change the channel, there will be commercials elsewhere, too. Nowadays they have also taken over the Internet. For financial support, websites have to run ads on their pages, the largest share supplied and controlled by Google. Ads pry into your eyes, unceremoniously interfere with text, and on YouTube, in the most inappropriate places, they cut into the action of films, lectures, and concerts, tearing apart musical performances. There’s no escaping commercials, we’ve grown accustomed to them, and they become almost as much a part of our lives as food, toilets, and sleep.
In the United States today, the White population (not including Hispanics) is 57.8%. In real life, Caucasians are still in the majority, but now on TV and the Internet, they are swept under the rug like trash. Blacks comprise 14% of the U.S. population but appear in 50% of commercials. White actors now appear to promote health insurance, gold, loans, and some medicines. Moreover, if a White person appears in a commercial, he/she is usually old, sick, a freak, or at the very least, an appendage to a Black partner. If there’s a doctor on the screen, he’s usually Black, while the patient is usually White. Caucasian young men appear in only 4% of the commercials! If some aliens began to study the population of Planet Earth through our TV commercials they would have a somewhat distorted picture of Americans, to put it mildly.
Rocket Mortgage 2021 Super Bowl commercial
So why do advertisers ignore the long-standing rules of marketing, and to the detriment of their own financial interests, fill the media space with content that displaces and degrades its biggest market segment? The answer is simple. At the heart of this nonsense is political correctness in a form even an Orwell could not have foreseen. Business executives go out of their way to publicly show their conformity with the universal “diversity” and “critical racial theory” (CRT), demanding that the White man be blamed for all the sins one can imagine. Replacing ancient, long-vanished oppression of Blacks with real oppression of Whites, overcompensating and planting racism-in-reverse.
Why does the White population, which is still in the majority in the U.S., accept the banishing and belittling obediently and silently? Why is there no public criticism, much less resistance to the idiocy? Why don’t people don’t tell political correctness to go to hell? After all, the U.S. is not Stalin’s USSR, and anyone who disagrees with the party is not yet sent to a camp or shot. Why is there such stifling conformity among the American people, formerly known for their independence and freedom of speech? The answer is simple and sad: the reason is fear, albeit on a more vegetarian level than it was under Soviet rule.
Ordinary people keep their mouths shut for fear of losing their jobs, not getting a holiday bonus, not getting promoted, or being socially ostracized This is understandable, and I wouldn’t blame them, although I wouldn’t respect them either. But what are people of higher position afraid of — the heads and owners of businesses? What is threatening them? Indeed, nobody is going to drive them out of their positions or take their business, though fear of boycotts can be realistic. They are afraid of various inconveniences: negative articles in the leftist press, social shunning, frivolous lawsuits, loss of state and federal licenses, government contracts, unexpected audits by the IRS, fines for alleged violations of minorities’ rights, and the like small and large troubles.
People think that if they keep quiet, then the pendulum will swing back and everything will sort itself out. But comfort kills the will to resist and produces conformism, which inevitably leads to stagnation, degradation of society, reduction of living standards and, finally, to loss of that very comfort.
So what are we to do? I am not calling anyone to the barricades but only ask: Don’t live by lies. The least any of us can do today is not participate in lies of the CRT and other political correctness: not watch their movies, not read their newspapers, not vote for the conformist candidates, not support them financially, and certainly never buy anything that in a politically correct manner is singing and dancing on a TV or computer screen.
Finally, it’s fitting because in the coming year we should expect to see a deluge of celebration and schadenfreude from the Main Stream Media, gleefully noting the passing of another old white guywithout any self-awareness or even a hint that they’re just validating the ironic observations of both Mark Antony and Mr. Flaherty.
Colin Flaherty, an award-winning journalist and best-selling author whose career spanned over four decades, died on Tuesday at home, surrounded by friends and family. The cause was cancer, a family member said.
In 1992, Colin Flaherty was the darling of the liberal press, for exposing the truth. At some point in the next decade or two, he would be vilified for the same thing.
Thirty years ago, Colin used his extensive investigative skills to exonerate Kelvin Wiley, a black man wrongfully accused of attempting to murder his white ex-girlfriend. Flaherty won numerous awards for this work, and the case was later featured in the Los Angeles Times [Conviction Set Aside as Boy Recants, by Carol Masciola, August 20, 1992] and on Court TV.
But when the journalism profession orthodoxy moved on to become a publicity mill for the far Left, Flaherty stubbornly clung to his training, his ethics, and his conscience.
Colin’s Thought Crimes were legion. In two best-selling books, purchased by thousands of other Thought Criminals, he documented the epidemic of black criminality, vastly out of proportion to their presence in the population, and the Regime Media efforts to conceal it. He called this phenomenon “the biggest lie of our generation.”
Future PC Enforcers seeking to sanitize the past for the Ministry of Truth will have their work cut out for them trying to erase Colin’s massive content footprint. He leaves behind thousands of hours of videos, podcasts, and interviews, countless articles on rogue sites like American Thinker, VDARE.com, and American Renaissance.
He also leaves behind about two million subscribers that he had had on YouTube when they canceled him in the middle of last decade; a son and a daughter who had been estranged but with whom he had recently reconciled; and his older brother, who lived with him in Wilmington.
Often accused of racism by the same media whose lies he exposed, Colin was lauded and befriended by many black conservatives, notably Thomas Sowell and Jesse Lee Peterson, below, both of whom wrote laudatory jacket blurbs for his banned books.
Vilified by the MSM who once loved him, Colin had for the last decade focused his considerable talents “the biggest lie of our generation,” the false Narrative of black victimhood and white racism. Beginning with White Girl Bleed A Lot, published in 2011, Colin covered stories that were either neglected or whitewashed by the MSM, who refused to acknowledge the tremendously disproportionate violence perpetrated by blacks in the US. His follow-on book,Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry, sold even more than the first one and cemented his legacy as a serious exposer of hypocrisy.
Colin stopped making podcasts about a year and a half ago, but we are reminded of his prescience every day. He was amused by the recent discovery of Critical Race Theory by the MSM, who claimed that conservatives “can’t even define it.” For several years, he had defined it thusly: “White racism is everywhere. White racism is permanent. White racism explains everything.”[A New Poster Child for Black on White Crime, American Thinker, December 26, 2014]
And years before the Ruling Class opened the jails and legalized most black crime in the wake of George Floyd’s death, Colin observed that “crime is the new black entitlement.”
It doesn’t take much digging to see that recent crime statistics bear this out.
In Colin’s penultimate podcast on August 6, 2020, he began with a monologue that encapsulated both his raison d’etre and his acerbic wit:
So what we’re trying to do here is figure out what’s really going on, that’s why I love the video, why I love using these podcasts, using the audio from the videos; once I get my health back, I’m looking forward to getting full tilt into my videos. That’s what I used to say, but man, if you think I have confirmation bias, let’s meet out on the street at high noon and we’ll match video for video, ‘cause I think for every video you have of a white guy behaving badly, I think I have 25 to 100 of a fella misbehaving in a very masochistic, psychopathic way. And just to make it interesting, I think we should make a little wager to see who runs out of videos first, runs out of stories first.
No one ever wants to take me up on this. I mean, what kind of movie would Gunfight At The OK Corral have been if Kirk Douglas [as Doc Holliday] and Wyatt Earp got out there in the street and the Clanton boys didn’t come out to face them down. The Clantons never come out to face us. They always go to the next town over and talk trash about us, about how we have confirmation bias.
This quote, unscripted and yet well-spoken, also gives us a brief peek at Colin’s unbridled optimism that he’d eventually beat his disease.
As those of us who knew him would attest, he was well-deserving of another Shakespeare encomium:
“He only in a general honest thought And common good to all, made one of them. His life was gentle, and the elements So mixed in him that Nature might stand up And say to all the world, “This was a man.”
John Tremain [Email him] was a friend and admirer of Colin Flaherty.
Georgia Democrat gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams will miss President Biden’s voting rights speech in Atlanta and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough asserted on Tuesday that she is skipping the landmark event because she “obviously doesn’t want to be on the same stage as Joe Biden.”
I am not criticizing Stacey Abrams here,” Scarborough insisted. “I am making a comment about the political standing of Joe Biden as seen from a woman who’s running for governor of Georgia and wants to win that election. Politicians show up with presidents when they have 52% approval ratings. Politicians don’t show up with presidents when their approval ratings may be in the 30s in the state…”
“This is politics 101. I find it fascinating, and it speaks less to Stacey Abrams, that really does, than it does what she perceives Joe Biden’s political standing to be in the state of Georgia right now, that she’s not showing up in an event that was custom-made for her” he noted, pointing out that Abrams is “on the forefront of everything we are talking about today.”
“The fight for voting rights takes persistence. As MLK exhorted, ‘The clock of destiny is ticking out. We must act now before it is too late.’ Thank you, @POTUS, for refusing to relent until the work is finished. Welcome back to Georgia where we get good done,” Abrams tweeted on Monday while bowing out of the event.
Biden will grace the stage in Georgia with Vice President Kamala Harris to push the voting rights act. They will also visit Ebenezer Baptist Church and place a wreath at the crypt of Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King in a racially motivated photo-op.
“The president will forcefully advocate for protecting the most bedrock American right, the right to vote and have your voice counted in a free and fair and secure election that is not tainted by partisan manipulation,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday, promoting Biden’s push for federalizing elections to ostensibly keep Democrats in power permanently.
Biden has repeatedly asserted that he doesn’t support nixing the filibuster. But desperation in politics makes compromising your stances uber easy. Now he is saying he is open to carving out an exception (just this once) to the filibuster rule in order to shove through the voting rights act.
Axing the filibuster would lower the typical 60-vote threshold for passage to 50. In the equally split Senate, Harris could then break a tie, allowing Democrats to pass the act, bypassing Republican objections.
Conservatives were all over Abrams for the excuse she gave for not attending Biden’s speech.
The Senate Democratic leader is trying to bully his own members into breaking their word, breaking the Senate, and silencing the voices of millions of citizens, so that one political party can take over our nation’s elections from the top down,” McConnell said of Schumer’s efforts to break the Senate filibuster.
Once you impose a one-party dictatorship on a previously free people, you will provoke a rage and retribution like you have never seen — in a context where the millions of enraged people will have nothing left to lose (since you took away all their rights.) Not even Stalin or Hitler were this smug, or this deluded, in their ultimately unsuccessful quests to impose totalitarian rule. Careful what you wish for, DemComs.
Libertarianism is a political philosophy that holds that a person should be free to do whatever he wants in life, as long as his conduct is peaceful. Thus, as long a person doesn’t murder, rape, burglarize, defraud, trespass, steal, or inflict any other act of violence against another person’s life, liberty, or property, libertarians hold that the government should leave him alone. In fact, libertarians believe that a primary purpose of government is to prosecute and punish anti-social individuals who initiate force against others.
What are some policy ramifications of what has become known as the libertarian “non-aggression principle”?
People should be free to engage in any economic enterprise without permission or interference from the state. Thus libertarians oppose all occupational licensure laws and all economic regulations of business activity. Libertarians also believe that people have the right to keep whatever they earn and decide for themselves what to do with their own money–spend it, invest it, save it, hoard it, or donate it.
This then means, necessarily, that libertarians are ardent advocates of the free market, which is simply a process by which people are interacting peacefully with each other for mutual gain.
What are some specific applications of libertarian principles to real-world problems?
Education: libertarians call for the complete separation of school and state, which means the repeal of school compulsory-attendance laws and school taxes–that is, the complete end of all governmental involvement in education. This would mean a completely free market in education, in which consumers decide the best educational vehicles for their children and entrepreneurs (both for-profit and charitable) are meeting the demands of the consumers.
Social Security: an immediate repeal of Social Security, which is simply a coercive transfer program in which older people are able to steal from young people. Again, people have a right to their own earnings. If a person fails to provide for his retirement, he must rely on the charity and good will of his family, his friends, his church groups, or people in his community. Libertarians believe that it is morally wrong for a person to use the state to take what doesn’t belong to him.
Welfare: immediate repeal of all welfare primarily on moral grounds but also on the terribly destructive aspects of government welfare programs. People have a right to their own earnings and no one has the right to take someone else’s money against his will. Moreover, no one is made a better person because the state is taking money from one person in order to give it to another person. Finally, government welfare creates a sense of hopeless dependency on the welfare recipient.
Drug laws: the decades-long war on drugs is immoral and has proven to be highly destructive. People have a right to engage in peaceful, self-destructive behavior as long as their conduct is peaceful. Drug addiction should be treated as a social, medical, psychological problem, not a criminal one. Legalizing drugs would immediately put an end to drug lords and drug gangs and the violence associated with the drug war–that is, the burglaries, robberies, thefts, etc. associated with the exorbitant black-market prices that drug users must pay to finance their habits.
The IRS and income tax: repeal them and leave people free to keep the fruits of their earnings and decide for themselves how to dispose of their wealth.
Gun Control: People have a right to resist the tyranny of their own government and to protect themselves from the violent acts of private criminals.
Environment: Governments are the great destroyers of the environment. In fact, most environmental problems can be traced to public, not private, ownership of resources. The solution is to privatize public property to the maximum extent possible.
Health Care: the crisis in health care, especially with respect to ever-rising prices, is due to heavy government involvement in health care–Medicare, Medicaid, and licensure laws. These laws and programs should be repealed in favor of a totally free market in health care.
Immigration: Libertarians oppose any controls on the free movements of goods and people, both domestically and internationally. People have the right to move and to improve their lives.
Foreign Policy: Libertarians oppose involvement in foreign wars as well as all foreign aid. The U.S. government should be limited to protecting the nation from invasion but should stay out of the affairs of other
Civil Liberties: Libertarians are firm advocates of the First Amendment and the procedural aspects of due process of law, such as the rights to be protected from unreasonable searches and seizures, and in criminal cases the right to an attorney, notice and hearing, and trial by jury.
With the tragic exception of slavery and several minor exceptions, the philosophy on which the United States was founded was, by and large, founded on libertarianism, especially with the ideas in the Declaration of Independence and the limitation on powers in the Constitution.
In 1890 America, for example, the following government programs were virtually nonexistent: income taxation, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, economic regulation, occupational licensure, a Federal Reserve System, conscription, immigration controls, and gun control.
In the 20th century, the American people abandoned libertarianism in favor of the socialistic welfare state and the controlled or regulated society.
Thus, the intellectual and moral battle for the third century of our nation’s existence is between those who favor liberty — libertarians — versus those who favor state control of peaceful activity — “
With all the calls for a “democratic” socialism and paternalistic government to be established in the United States, it is worth remembering the first attempt to put in place a form of economic collectivism in early American history. It brought about disastrous consequences for the Pilgrims after they settled in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
The English Pilgrims, who left Great Britain and sailed across the Atlantic on the Mayflower in 1620, were not only escaping religious persecution in their homeland. They also wanted to turn their back on what they viewed as the materialistic and greedy corruption of the Old World.
Plymouth Colony Planned as Collectivist Utopia
They wanted to erect a New Jerusalem in the new world, a new Jerusalem that would not only be religiously devout, but would be built on a new foundation of communal sharing and social altruism. Their ideal was the communism found in Plato’s Republic. All would work and share in common, knowing neither private property nor self-interested acquisitiveness.
What resulted is recorded in the diary of Governor William Bradford, the head of the colony. The colonists collectively cleared and worked the land, but they brought forth neither the bountiful harvest they hoped for, nor a spirit of shared and cheerful brotherhood.
The less industrious members of the colony came late to their work in the fields and were slow and easy in their labors. Knowing that they and their families were to receive an equal share of whatever the group produced, they saw little reason to be more diligent in their efforts. The harder working among the colonists became resentful that their efforts would be redistributed to their more malingering neighbors. Soon they, too, were coming late to work and were less energetic in the fields.
Private Property as Incentive to Industry
Realizing that another season like those that had just passed would mean the extinction of the entire community, the elders of the colony decided to try something radically different: the introduction of private property and the right of the individual families to keep the fruits of their own labor.
As Governor Bradford put it:
And so, assigned to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number for that end . . .This had a very good success; for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted then otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field and took their little ones with them to set corn, which before would allege weakness, and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.
The Plymouth Colony experienced a great bounty of food. Private ownership meant that there was now a close link between work and reward. Industry became the order of the day as the men and women in each family went to the fields on their separate private farms. When the harvest time came, not only did many families produce enough for their own needs, but they had surpluses that they could freely exchange with their neighbors for mutual benefit and improvement.
In Governor Bradford’s words:
By this time harvest was come, and instead of famine, now God gave them plenty, and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many, for which they blessed God. And the effect of their planting was well seen, for all had, one way or other, pretty well to bring the year about, and some of the abler sort and more industrious had to spare, and sell to others, so as any general want or famine hath not been amongst them since to this day.
Rejecting Collectivism for Individualism
Hard experience had taught the Plymouth colonists the fallacy and error in the ideas that since the time of the ancient Greeks had promised paradise through collectivism rather than individualism. As Governor Bradford expressed it:
The experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years, and that amongst the Godly and sober men, may well convince of the vanity and conceit of Plato’s and other ancients; — that the taking away of property, and bringing into a common wealth, would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God. For this community (so far as it was) was found to breed confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.
Was the realization that socialism was incompatible with human nature and the prosperity of humanity to be despaired or be a cause for guilt? Not in Governor Bradford’s eyes. It was simply a matter of accepting that compulsory altruism and collectivism were inconsistent with the nature of man, and that human institutions should reflect the reality of man’s nature if he is to prosper. Said Governor Bradford:
Let none object this is man’s corruption, and nothing to the curse itself. I answer, seeing all men have this corruption in them, God in his wisdom saw another course fitter for them.
The desire of “spreading the wealth” and for government to plan and regulate people’s lives is as old as the utopian fantasy in Plato’s Republic. The Pilgrim Fathers tried and soon realized its bankruptcy and failure as a way for men to live together in society.
Instead, they accepted man as he is: hardworking, productive, and innovative when allowed the liberty to follow his own interests in improving his own circumstances and that of his family. And even more, out of his industry result the quantities of useful goods that enable men to trade to their mutual benefit.
Giving Thanks for the Triumph of Freedom
In the wilderness of the New World, the Plymouth Pilgrims progressed from the false dream of socialism to the sound realism of capitalism. At a time when too many in the United States are insisting on a massive turn toward more government with Green New Deal central plans, confiscatory redistributions of wealth, and imposed political paternalism on all we say and do in our associations with others, we need to harken back to the harsh and sometimes horrible lessons learned from past attempts to impose socialist systems on society.
Dr. Richard M. Ebeling is the BB&T Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Free Enterprise Leadership at The Citadel. He was formerly professor of Economics at Northwood University, president of The Foundation for Economic Education (2003–2008), was the Ludwig von Mises Professor of Economics at Hillsdale College (1988–2003) in Hillsdale, Michigan, and served as vice president of academic affairs for The Future of Freedom Foundation (1989–2003).
The return of mask mandates in blue states has nothing to do with health. It’s electoral anxiety. Democratic Communists are afraid there’s not enough fraud and censorship in the world to reverse the tide against them. By creating the image of an emergency they can hope to repeat the manipulation and deception that worked so well for them before. And if people continue to roll over and take it, it will continue to work.
It’s hilarious that they call the flu a “state of emergency.” If we were in a state of actual emergency, it would not be safe to leave the house. There’s an old saying, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” At some point, we have to stop being victims and simply defy or ignore the illegitimate tyrants. They can’t jail all of us. Create chaos, confusion and disruption. Practice disobedience and counter-deception. Why? Because increasingly, there’s very little left to preserve.
It is now a quantifiable fact that school closures do more harm than good. We have test scores, increased suicide rates, mental health decreases, and more warning signals from the New York Times to the Democrats. We know that prolonged closures adversely affect our children and that the unions in Chicago and elsewhere pushing for remote learning are doing everything they can to keep children out of schools.null
While the mental, academic, and social health of all of our children is important, there is a demographic of students who suffer the most: Children with special needs.
Students who fall on the autism spectrum, students who need accommodations, and students who generally just need extra support in the classroom are now left without because there is no classroom to be in and no help at home. While no one knows their child and his or her needs better than their parents, and the parents can provide some support at home, there are very talented, very well trained professionals at school who have dedicated their lives to helping these students get the most out of an education system that is built for the average, everyday kid – not the kid with exceptionalities.
Sometimes, these professionals and the services a school district provides are the only things standing between a student with special needs and the system leaving them behind.
This isn’t just about coursework, either. School is sometimes the only other place besides home where a child learns social cues, human interaction, and healthy emotional development. I’ve written about this before, but it’s especially true for these students. You have to have human interaction outside of your family in order to develop socially and emotionally, and for many students with needs beyond what the average student requires, school is the place where not just their social and emotional development, but indeed their very understanding of even basic social cues, can occur.
Students who are on the spectrum, for example, can struggle a lot with this. Others, kids with physical barriers like poor vision or hearing, need to be trained to pick up on things that most kids can easily interpret. Then, there are professionals in speech development who can offer the training students need to overcome speech barriers – training that parents may struggle to teach or may not have time to give in the midst of everything else that is part of parenting.
If you have never had the opportunity to work with or see some of these children in a school setting, what you have not witnessed is both the struggle that can take place and the absolute perseverance of these children. They fight, at times much harder than anyone will ever truly know, and when they find their success and achieve their goals it is one of the best moments you can witness in a child’s life.
But unions are pushing to close schools again. They defy the science. They defy the data. These are people who are fine with kids learning remotely or not learning at all (and, oftentimes, there isn’t much difference) because teaching while people are getting sick is just such a hassle.
Remote/virtual learning is not an education plan. It is, at best, a temporary solution that can be implemented on a school-by-school basis. It is not something that makes sense for entire school systems to adopt long term or for unions to push for. It actively hurts our kids, and while some can handle it in the long run, our most vulnerable children suffer when these decisions are made. That is unacceptable for a profession that is supposed to be serving these children.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 