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.
The insanity of the American and Western world is the great sadness of my old age. It is absolutely clear to me now, with the idiotic and groundless fake panic over “omicron,” which is killing no one, that this is the “crisis” our ruling elites have been waiting for; and they will not let go of it. The disproportionality between the enormous and incalculable economic, psychological, educational, cultural, and human damage the covid measures are causing, and the nearly non-existent benefit they are producing, is of no interest to our elites. They know it is not about health, and they are unreachable by argument and facts addressed to that disproportionality.
This is about consolidating their power and inculcating subservience in their populations. They have a long agenda to enact, and for it, they need blind obedience and total subservience. Brexit, Trump, and the AFD in the Bundestag shocked them; they want to make future such expressions of popular resistance impossible. You know their goals – global governance by unelected bureaucrats, open borders, end of the western nation-state and its historic populations, greatly diminished standard of living in the West (while they live large), to save mother earth from another of their non-existent crises, “climate change,” etc. In general, they need a passive population and total control to impose these widely despised, evil changes. And they see covid as their big chance. They will not voluntarily let go of it. They will never give us normal human life back – we will have to demand it.
It is high time for an enormous movement like the one that took place in your homeland in 1989. Only when millions of people go out on the streets happily and courageously and demand their freedom and a totally normal life, we would have a chance to get something like that from our really totalitarian governments and avoid a “China of the West”.
But I fear that the totally unjustified fear that the governments and media are so cleverly spreading through the population has made this impossible. And the few who understand it all don’t want to risk anything.
If something like an enormous movement doesn’t take place, then a wonderful 2500 years of civilization will end.
Mass civil disobedience saves lives. If millions refuse to comply with tyrants, freedom wins. Do not be afraid.
Don’t let the ugly in others kill the beauty in you.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms–to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” [Viktor Frankl, Nazi concentration camp survivor]
“If ‘temporary’ provisions in the Build Back Better Act become permanent, U.S. national debt will increase by 24%.” [Elon Musk]
New poll reported by Breitbart News: Hispanic voters show 42-point shift towards Republicans since 2018. …and yet early morning data dumps, media coverups and blackmailed Supreme Court justices keep ensuring the victory of Democratic Communists. Plus the eradication of voter ID requirements, in-person voting and citizenship for voting. These polls probably understate the shift away from Bidenistas. Yet we are stuck with tired old tyrants and unaccountable henchpersons capable of unbridled evil. Can elections truly save us, at this point?
You think COVID is scary? Wait for hyperinflation.
How about a Surgeon General warning: Totalitarian control is bad for mental and physical health.
Just think. We’re a mere executive order away from this happening in the USA. Read on:
People in Sweden have started getting implanted with microchips that contain their COVID-19 passports, according to Newsweek.
The chip, developed by Epicenter, can store a covid passport under the skin.
“Implants are very versatile technology that can be used for many different things, and right now it is very convenient to have Covid passport always accessible on your implant,” Epicenter’s chief disruption officer Hannes Sjöblad told Ruptly.
It’s often said that today’s Democrats are not merely socialists; they are Communists. They are WORSE than Communists. They are a horrific hybrid of Communism, fascism, oligarchy, plutocracy, medical and cultural Nazism, amoral subjectivism and a little radical Islam thrown in. If we don’t defeat them totally, and decisively, they will ruin not just the United States, but all of civilization.
In the event you are unaware that insanity now encompasses the US Supreme Court, the Court ruled in 2020 with only three dissents that a person’s gender is self-declared and unrelated to biological fact. The consequences of the Supreme Court’s elevation of fiction over fact are now showing themselves.
A female middle school child declared herself to be male, but the school prevented her from using the boy’s locker room. A naked girl showering with naked males was not the school’s idea of family values. However, a local court in Blue Springs, Missouri (57,000 population) ruled that as the girl said she was a boy, she had to be believed. The school had singled her out on the basis of her female genitalia and ruled that she was female and not eligible for the boys’ locker room. This decision based on biological fact the jury decided was discrimination and awarded the girl $4 million dollars. https://www.rt.com/usa/543444-missouri-school-transgender-bathroom/
This is a good example of what I mean when I say that in the US facts no longer matter. A country in which counterfactual claims take precedence over fact is a country soon to be bereft of scientific and technological capability.
Facts no longer matter across the spectrum from history to law, from language to mathematics. In America, law is whatever a prosecutor decides. For example, a federal prosecutor has decided that it is espionage for a non-citizen outside the country to publish leaked documents, as journalists have been doing for decades. The law being applied to Julian Assange does not exist on the US law books. But it doesn’t matter as law is whatever a prosecutor says, just as a person’s gender is whatever the person declares. Glenn Greenwald Explains How Truth, Law, and Justice are Overwhelmed by Deliberate Disinformation: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-real-disinformation-agents-watch
The English language has the largest vocabulary and is the most expressive. But according to the Woke imbeciles, this makes it oppressive. The Woke program is to shrink the language until all oppressive elements, such as gender pronouns, are eliminated. Once we no longer can know if it is a he or a she, a mother or a father, a grandmother or grandfather, aunt or uncle we will no longer be oppressed.
The new history is also free of factual basis. Wars are about whatever issue an organized interest group finds serves its interests. Critical Race Theory is a theory that specifies the facts, not a theory based in facts.
Mathematics is racist. That 2+2=4 is a white racist construct. This reduces mathematics to systemic racism.
Disrespect for facts is the hallmark of tyranny. Educational systems are the institutions that enculturate people into society and pass on its values. It is how a society and a culture survive as a country lives and develops in time. Today enculturation has been replaced with alienating youth from the society and culture that is their birthright. Instead, they are taught that their culture is evil and has a long history of crimes against humanity. Indeed, the New York Times 1619 Project teaches that the United States was founded on racism. The so-called “Civil War” is explained as the North’s attempt to cleanse itself of its own racist sins by projecting them upon the South.
When a country’s universities are against the country, sooner or later the people will be so also. Universities train leaders and educators who take the training to children. It is entirely possible to completely revolutionize and destroy a society through its educational system. That is what is happening in the US and UK. The two societies are erasing themselves. There is very little left.
High inflation can harm low-income families. Immigration, not so much.
Inflation, labor shortages, and the migrant crisis have captivated the news cycle for most of 2021 and led to wavering debates over the severity of these problems and how best to resolve them. Lately, the attention has been on whether soaring inflation will erode the real earnings of the average American. That hasn’t stopped some people from sounding off alarms on immigrants—whether at the border or on employment-basedvisas—for fear that increased labor competition will depress the wages of America’s existing low-skilled workers.null
How real are these concerns for the most vulnerable Americans? Should they be worried for their wallets due to increased inflation, immigration, or neither?
Inflation can act as a regressive tax if rising prices are centered on necessities and if workers in poorer bargaining positions are unable to obtain pay increases. When inflation was growing at about 2 percent per year pre-pandemic, a person making $15 an hour, or $30,000 annually, would lose about $600 a year without a pay increase—not a trivial amount for someone living paycheck to paycheck.
But 2 percent inflation growth is no longer our reality. Prices are now up 6.8 percent since last year, which is the sharpest increase in 39 years. If a $15-per-hour worker didn’t receive a pay raise over this last year, his real earnings could fall by as much as $2,040.
Some workers did see a bump in their paychecks, albeit not enough to offset inflation. After accounting for increases in nominal earnings, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has estimated that, on average, workers experienced a 1.9 percent pay cut over the last year due to inflation. This means a $15-per-hour worker likely saw $570 disappear from his wallet.null
Averages can often be misleading, though. Gas prices have climbed by 58.1 percent over the last year, and low-income Americans tend to spend more of their average dollar on gas. Indeed, a Federal Reserve Bank of New York study found that poor and rural households are particularly hard-hit when gasoline prices skyrocket, and this was a main contributor to “inflation inequality.”
Finally, we should acknowledge another factor that masks the typical impact of inflation on wages: the unique labor shortage experienced in the last year, which was partially caused by lingering unemployment benefits and has led to higher-than-usual increases in pay for many workers. Without it, low-income workers would be significantly worse off due to climbing inflation.
Notably, some inflation is not always concerning—especially if it’s steady, or temporary, or accompanied by simultaneously raising wages. But today, we can still say with confidence that low-income workers are in for a rough adjustment.
In contrast, most research shows that immigration has a small effect on wages in the short run, whether it’s a positive or negative effect.
To put this into perspective, the highest-end negative estimate (and one frequently cited by opponents of immigration) finds that the relative wages of U.S.-born workers fall by almost 4 percent when immigration increases the number of workers within the same skill group by 10 percent. However, even this high-end estimate is often misinterpreted and miscited because it measures the relative impact and not the absolute impact on wages. In other words, it measures the effect of immigration on the wages of one skill group relative to another, and not how immigration impacts the total amount of money someone actually makes.
Over the past decade, immigration has increased the number of workers with only a high school diploma by 0.14 percent per year on average. Even if we put aside the problems of using the high-end estimate, this would result in U.S.-born workers with the same education experiencing a fall in income of about 0.06 percent annually. For our $15-per-hour worker, this amounts to a yearly pay cut of only $18 due to low-skilled immigration. That’s hardly a comparison to the real impact of inflation on the same worker.
It’s not even clear that we need to be making the comparison. The United States has experienced a net outflow of immigrants without a high school diploma since 2010, meaning U.S.-born workers who dropped out of high school would actually be earning more using that same estimate. Immigration patterns have shifted in the last few decades, with more high-skilled immigrants moving in. The research consensus is that high-skilled immigration improves the wages and employment prospects of all Americans, with long-term increases in innovative activity and economic growth.
The bottom line is that immigration fears seem to be overblown when we ground them in real numbers, while high inflation can harm many low-income earners in the short term. Today, compared to immigration, Americans should be far more concerned about inflation eroding their earnings.
Facebook strikes again. Last week, they flagged one of my posts. It was a Mussolini quote. They said it violated their Community Standards, and suspended me for a week. Interesting, because when Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and AOC say the EXACT SAME THINGS that Mussolini used to say about the supremacy of the state over the individual, Facebook has no problem with it. Nevertheless, I posted the quote in order to disparage Mussolini, not to uphold him. I disputed their suspension, and they wrote back in agreement, saying they got this one wrong. My 1 week suspension was reversed. Then, mysteriously, about 8 hours later, the suspension was put back on. No reason given. When I inquired, the reason they gave for the resumption of my suspension was the original Mussolini quote post. I wrote them with screenshots of their having reversed my suspension earlier that day for that very post. All I got were form letter-type replies saying that various posts of mine over the past year had violated their Community Standards, blah, blah, blah. Interestingly, the PAST posts they say violated their Community Standards were also reversed by them, in many cases.
So it seems that Facebook can suspend you now for any reason it feels like, whenever it feels like it, with no internal consistency required. The “Community Standards,” aside from being unintelligible to anyone who lives outside the socialist woke Mecca of Silicon Valley, are not standards at all. They are merely feelings and whims. No surprise to me. That’s the mentality of any fascist totalitarian. Right now, they’re running a very influential company that most of us still use; they dominate the culture, although they don’t yet have an absolute monopoly on the dissemination of information and ideas. Imagine when, and if, these fascist totalitarians get control of the entire government. They’re on their way. Unless we find a way to stop them.
Build Back Better” — the Orwellian name for Biden’s monster proposal for fascism and socialism — illustrates everything that’s wrong with our government and culture.
Consider the type of person who exploits or creates crises in order to feel superior and useful. Families are full of people like this, as are businesses.
“Build back better” refers to rebuilding after a disaster caused by government interventions — lockdowns, mask mandates, mass fear-mongering, etc. Government is praising itself for cleaning up ITS OWN MESS. And it’s spending trillions of dollars belonging to THE VERY PEOPLE IT VICTIMIZED.
The narcissist, the sociopath, the psychopath or the borderline personality — these are all the personality types who create and exploit problems in order to make everything about THEM.
That’s precisely what our elites, politicians and their media are doing — only there’s no escaping it. If you have a toxic boss or co-worker, you can change jobs. You can divorce a toxic spouse, and minimize your contact with (even cut ties with) toxic family members or friends.
But you can’t escape the consequences of “Build Back Better” and its many equivalents — inflation, supply chain crises, vaccination passports, vaccination mandates, and all the rest of the totalitarian nightmare unfolding.
Whether Biden’s monster bill passes or not, you can be sure we’ll get all or most of its provisions. In words and deed, Biden has made it clear that what he can’t get legislatively or through the courts, he’ll simply issue by executive edict. And if a court stalls or strikes down his executive edict, he’ll simply ignore it.
Totalitarianism ONLY flourishes where self-esteem, self-respect and individual assertion are on the decline (or dead). It’s safe to say that rational individualism is dead at universities, in the media, in big corporations and in other arenas of elite culture. Rational individualism is not dead in the rest of America. It’s not exactly flourishing, but it’s clearly not dead, and in the hearts and minds of some it’s flourishing. But it’s under attack as never, ever before in American history. It remains an open question how much longer individualism can survive, much less flourish, in the face of relentless governmental, media, educational and cultural attack.
America, right now, is undergoing its own Maoist Cultural Revolution. Build Back Better is only one small component of that. How well will this cultural revolution succeed, even when backed up by brute force, as it increasingly is? We will soon know.
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What is behind recent pessimistic appraisals of democracy’s future, from Hillary Clinton, Adam Schiff, Brian Williams and other elite intellectuals, media personalities, and politicians on the Left? Some are warning about its possible erosion in 2024. Others predict democracy’s downturn as early as 2022, with scary scenarios of “autocracy” and Trump “coups.”
To answer that question, understand first what is not behind these shrill forecasts.
They are not worried about 2 million foreign nationals crashing the border in a single year, without vaccinations during a pandemic. Yet it seems insurrectionary for a government simply to nullify its own immigration laws.
They are not worried that some 800,000 foreign nationals, some residing illegally, will now vote in New York City elections.
They are not worried that there are formal efforts underway to dismantle the U.S. Constitution by junking the 233-year-old Electoral College or the preeminence of the states in establishing ballot laws in national elections.
They are not worried that we are witnessing an unprecedented left-wing effort to scrap the 180-year-old filibuster, the 150-year-old nine-person Supreme Court, and the 60-year tradition of 50 states, for naked political advantage.
They are not worried that the FBI, Justice Department, CIA, Hillary Clinton, and members of the Obama administration systematically sought to use U.S. government agencies to sabotage a presidential campaign, transition, and presidency, via the use of a foreign national and ex-spy Christopher Steele and his coterie of discredited Russian sources.
They are not worried that the Pentagon suddenly has lost the majority support of the American people. Top current and retired officers have flagrantly violated the chain-of-command, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and without data or evidence have announced a hunt in the ranks for anyone suspected of “white rage” or “white supremacy.”
They are not worried that in 2020, a record 64 percent of the electorate did not cast their ballots on Election Day.
Nor are they worried that the usual rejection rate in most states of non-Election Day ballots plunged – even as an unprecedented 101 million ballots were cast by mail or early voting.
And they are certainly not worried that partisan billionaires of Silicon Valley poured well over $400 million into selected precincts in swing states to “help” public agencies conduct the election.
What then is behind this new left-wing hysteria about the supposed looming end of democracy?
It is quite simple. The Left expects to lose power over the next two years – both because of the way it gained and used it, and because of its radical, top-down agendas that never had any public support.
gaining control of both houses of Congress and the presidency – with an obsequious media and the support of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, higher education, popular culture, entertainment and professional sports – the Left has managed in just 11 months to alienate a majority of voters.
The nation has been wracked by unprecedented crime and nonenforcement of the borders. Leftist district attorneys either won’t indict criminals; they let them out of jails or both.
Illegal immigration and inflation are soaring. Deliberate cuts in gas and oil production helped spike fuel prices.
All this bad news is on top of the Afghanistan disaster, worsening racial relations, and an enfeebled president.
Democrats are running 10 points behind the Republicans in generic polls, with the midterms less than a year away.
Joe Biden’s negatives run between 50 and 57 percent – in Donald Trump’s own former underwater territory.
Less than a third of the country wants Biden to run for reelection. In many head-to-head polls, Trump now defeats Biden.
In other words, leftist elites are terrified that democracy will work too robustly.
After the Russian collusion hoax, two impeachments, the Hunter Biden laptop stories, the staged melodramas of the Kavanaugh hearings, the Jussie Smollett con, the Covington kids smear, and the Rittenhouse trial race frenzy, the people are not just worn out by leftist hysterias, but they also weary of how the Left gains power and administers it.null
If Joe Biden were polling at 70 percent approval, and his policies at 60 percent, the current doomsayers would be reassuring us of the “health of the system.”
They are fearful and angry not because democracy doesn’t work, but because it does despite their own media and political efforts to warp it.
When a party is hijacked by radicals and uses almost any means necessary to gain and use power for agendas that few Americans support, then average voters express their disapproval.
That reality apparently terrifies an elite. It then claims any system that allows the people to vote against the Left is not people power at all.
The majority of the Supreme Court, that is. The ones who refused to even consider a hearing for the avalanche of evidence of election fraud claims.
Who knows if the small number of people who stormed the Capitol were actually Trump supporters, or hired guns by left wingers, Biden supporters and Never Trumpers. We’ll never know, because exclusive control over the “objective” investigation is in the hands of left wingers, Biden supporters and Never Trumpers. It’s a worse than worthless exercise.
Regardless, the Supreme Court is to blame. Most especially, the turncoat John Roberts, who will never, ever permit an open hearing for election fraud claims — not when such a hearing has the potential to benefit Republicans.
Stephen Baskerville, a writer I have followed for many years, explains in the June 2021 issue of Chronicles that it is the US welfare system constructed by the “Great Society” programs, not racism, that explains the plight of many black Americans. Democrat US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned at the time that the welfare system Democrats were putting in place would destroy the black family. As Moynihan predicted, the “war on poverty” decimated the African-American family and created a self-perpetuating underclass of single mothers and fatherless children.
Moynihan spelled it out for his colleagues:
“A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, that community asks for and gets chaos.”
But the welfare bureaucracies set in place were not about to let go of what was valuable to them. Baskerville says the real problem was not waste and “Welfare Queens” living extravagantly at public expense as conservatives complain, but money spent on turning black children into criminals, addicts, dropouts, and rioters, thus creating more problems requiring more government intrusion.
The appearance of radical feminism exacerbated welfare’s destruction of the black family by glorifying female independence and single-mother homes. Barbara Ehrenreich, for example, declared that “Independence, even in straitened and penurious forms still offers more sexual freedom than affluence gained through marriage and dependence on one man.”
Having driven away black fathers with financial bribes to women, the welfare system then shifted costs to fathers. “Deadbeat Dads” were criminalized and imprisoned under child support laws.
Next feminists used “no fault” divorce laws to extend the destruction of the family into the white component of society. “No fault” divorce destroyed marriage as a legally enforceable contract and replaced it with the ability of one spouse to unilaterally end a marriage without any grounds. Baskerville says that this feminist achievement extended family destruction into white middle class ranks. The resulting bitterness among women created more hatred of men and gave rise to the #MeToo movement which has spread chaos and bitterness.
Democrats have succeeded in shifting the blame for the consequences of their work to “white racism,” and feminists have succeeded in demonizing men. Curiously, feminists blame men for taking advantage of the sexual promiscuity of women that feminists advocated. With the relations between races and the relations between the sexes so badly damaged, what hope is there for society?
Hanne Herland’s examination of feminism and its consequences bolsters Baskerville’s. The ease with which ideologies prevail over facts is an unheeded lesson.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 