Author Archives: theartfuldilettante

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About theartfuldilettante

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 Boundless Entitlement of Hillary Clinton

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Imagine Mitt Romney, five years after he lost the 2012 US presidential election to Barack Obama, reading out the victory speech he would have given if he’d won. And then imagine him breaking down half-way through as he contemplates what could have been – or, as he sees it, what should have been.

You would probably expect some sort of professional intervention.

This is no longer a hypothetical scenario. On streaming site MasterClass, which provides pricey ‘lessons’ from self-important, famous figures, Hillary Clinton has delivered the speech she would have given if it weren’t for those pesky Trump voters.

As she relives the 2016 victory that wasn’t, she does hold it together for a bit. But during a particularly butt-clenching segment, where she starts addressing her mother, Dorothy Rodham, Clinton starts to choke up:

‘I dream of going up to her, and sitting down next to her, taking her in my arms, and saying… “You will have a good family of your own and three children. And as hard as it might be to imagine, your daughter will grow up and become the president of the United States.”’

As Wilde might have put it, you’d have to have a heart of stone to listen to Clinton’s ‘victory’ speech and not laugh.

Just pause for a second and contemplate the scale of delusion and entitlement on show here. Even now, five years and one presidential election later, it seems Clinton is still acting as if she should have won. As if she had her rightful future stolen from her.

Sad, as Trump would say.

Part of the problem is Clinton herself. Long before 2016 she treated the presidency as little more than the next step in her brilliant career, the inevitable reward for being, as she put it, ‘the most qualified candidate in history’. Such was her sense of entitlement that voters, elections and democracy barely featured in her calculations. It was as if she was supposed to inherit the presidency rather than win it. As Dick Morris, a former adviser to Bill Clinton, put it in 2019, Clinton acted as if ‘God put her on the Earth’ to be president.

Indeed, she was so certain of becoming president that on the night of the election itself she tirelessly rehearsed her victory speech, only realising, much later, that she might have to deliver a concession speech instead.

Clinton has never come to terms with what happened. Trump’s victory appeared to her as a glitch in the matrix, a gross mistake or worse – a fiendish Russian plot.

Her 2017 book-length response to the election, What Happened, was shot through with delusion and displacement. She claimed that she would have been president if former FBI director James Comey hadn’t opened an investigation into the use of her private email account a few days before the ballot. That she would have been president if it wasn’t for ‘the unprecedented interference’ of Vladimir Putin, who ‘is not a member of my fan club’. As she told NBC’s Today in 2017, ‘Absent that, I believe the evidence shows I would have won’.

Imagine Mitt Romney, five years after he lost the 2012 US presidential election to Barack Obama, reading out the victory speech he would have given if he’d won. And then imagine him breaking down half-way through as he contemplates what could have been – or, as he sees it, what should have been.

You would probably expect some sort of professional intervention.

This is no longer a hypothetical scenario. On streaming site MasterClass, which provides pricey ‘lessons’ from self-important, famous figures, Hillary Clinton has delivered the speech she would have given if it weren’t for those pesky Trump voters.

As she relives the 2016 victory that wasn’t, she does hold it together for a bit. But during a particularly butt-clenching segment, where she starts addressing her mother, Dorothy Rodham, Clinton starts to choke up:

‘I dream of going up to her, and sitting down next to her, taking her in my arms, and saying… “You will have a good family of your own and three children. And as hard as it might be to imagine, your daughter will grow up and become the president of the United States.”’

As Wilde might have put it, you’d have to have a heart of stone to listen to Clinton’s ‘victory’ speech and not laugh.

Just pause for a second and contemplate the scale of delusion and entitlement on show here. Even now, five years and one presidential election later, it seems Clinton is still acting as if she should have won. As if she had her rightful future stolen from her.

Clinton has never come to terms with what happened. Trump’s victory appeared to her as a glitch in the matrix, a gross mistake or worse – a fiendish Russian plot.

Her 2017 book-length response to the election, What Happened, was shot through with delusion and displacement. She claimed that she would have been president if former FBI director James Comey hadn’t opened an investigation into the use of her private email account a few days before the ballot. That she would have been president if it wasn’t for ‘the unprecedented interference’ of Vladimir Putin, who ‘is not a member of my fan club’. As she told NBC’s Today in 2017, ‘Absent that, I believe the evidence shows I would have won’.

Clinton has never come to terms with what happened. Trump’s victory appeared to her as a glitch in the matrix, a gross mistake or worse – a fiendish Russian plot.

Her 2017 book-length response to the election, What Happened, was shot through with delusion and displacement. She claimed that she would have been president if former FBI director James Comey hadn’t opened an investigation into the use of her private email account a few days before the ballot. That she would have been president if it wasn’t for ‘the unprecedented interference’ of Vladimir Putin, who ‘is not a member of my fan club’. As she told NBC’s Today in 2017, ‘Absent that, I believe the evidence shows I would have won’.

But Clinton’s entitled arrogance isn’t even the main reason for her refusal to accept what happened five years ago. Her delusions of victory have been propped up and amplified by her affluent support base and the bruised political and media elites that cheered her on. They were so used to being in power, to having their views and values reflected in their leaders, that they simply couldn’t accept the 2016 result. So they sought to undermine it. They cast it as a racist, white-supremacist vote. They called themselves the ‘Resistance’. And they blamed Trump’s victory on Russian interference.

In their refusal to accept the result, they were denying democracy. And if Clinton’s tearful rendition of her victory speech is any indication, she is still denying reality. Someone really should make an intervention.

Tim Black is a spiked columnist.

The Way Out of the Statist Morass

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by Jacob G. Hornberger

Given the seemingly intractable welfare-warfare system that characterizes the United States, it might be tempting for some people to despair and simply give up and surrender to what might appear to be the inevitable — the permanent continuation of our lives as serfs on the welfare-warfare state plantation.

After all, Americans have lived under a welfare state since the 1930s, when President Franklin Roosevelt used the Great Depression as an excuse to revolutionize America’s economic system. That’s was what Social Security was all about — establishing a system where the federal government’s primary function would be to take care of people with money that has been forcibly taken from other people. 

Today, the federal government is viewed as parent or, even worse, a god, one that is charged with taking care of people’s retirement, healthcare, education, food, housing, and other welfare items.

Moreover, since 1947 Americans have lived under a national-security state form of governmental structure, one in which the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA wield omnipotent, totalitarian-like powers, such as assassination, torture, indefinite detention, secret surveillance, coups, alliances with doctoral regimes and criminal organizations, denial of due process, denial of trial by jury, and more. Because the United States was supposedly confronted by an international communist conspiracy to take over the world that was supposedly based in Moscow, Russia, the notion was that the United States had no choice but to become a national-security state to protect America from going Red. 

Today, the Cold War’s war-on-communism racket has been replaced by the war-on-terrorism racket. Despite losing a 20-year-long war in Afghanistan, U.S. troops, serving as deadly and destructive world policemen, are still stationed in the Middle East and other parts of the world killing and injuring people, impoverishing people, and destroying property. Moreover, the national-security establishment, bolstered by its assets in the mainstream press, has succeeded in converting two of its old Cold War opponents — China and Russia — into renewed official enemies, both of whom are supposedly coming to get us again.

Today, there is hardly any aspect of federal life that is not mired in crisis or chaos. Federal spending and debt to finance all this welfare and warfare are totally out of control. To pay off the debt and to enable the feds to spend more than what they’re bringing in with taxation, the Federal Reserve is printing money like there was no tomorrow. Its inflation of the money supply is now being reflected by soaring prices across the board. 

We have a massive healthcare crisis, reflected by Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, and COVID. 

We also have a decades-long, perpetual immigration crisis, accompanied by an immigration police state along the border — all because of America’s statist system of immigration controls.

Given the death and destruction that continue to be inflicted by U.S. troops and the CIA around the world, there is still an ongoing terrorism crisis. 

Let’s not forget the decades-long drug-war crisis, which has brought nothing but violence, corruption, and failure.

If there were no way out of this statist morass, there would be good reason for people to despair and lament and think about giving up and surrendering. If that were the case, it might be understandable why companies who sold cyanide capsules would be prospering.

But the fact is that there is a way out of this statist morass. That way is libertarianism, the most noble and glorious political and economic philosophy ever devised by man. Libertarianism is able to bring an end to all of these statist crises and all this statist-induced chaos. 

What would a libertarian society look like? 

It would be a society in which people would be free to keep everything they earn and decide for themselves what to do with it. No more mandatory charity. No more Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public schooling, public housing, or any other type of government-provided welfare. All charity would be voluntary.

No more government control or regulation of economic enterprise. Enterprise would be entirely free of governmental control and regulation.

No more drug laws. 

No more government involvement with healthcare whatsoever. No more Centers for Disease Control.

No more national-security state, including the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA. No more state-sponsored assassinations, torture, indefinite detention, denial of due process, denial of trial by jury, and other totalitarian-like measures. America’s founding governmental system of a limited government republic, with relatively small military force, would be restored.

No more foreign interventionism, foreign aid, and foreign wars. 

No more Federal Reserve. No more legal-tender laws. No more fiat (paper) money. Instead, a free-market monetary system would be implemented.

No more federal income tax and IRS.

Radical? You bet! But liberty — genuine liberty — is a radical idea. What matters is that there is a way out of the statist morass in which we are mired. It’s really just a question of whether we can achieve a critical mass of Americans who are passionately committed to living in a genuinely free, prosperous, peaceful, and harmonious society.

Stop Calling Them “Liberal”

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“If I like what you say or do, then you may do it. If I dislike or disapprove of what you say or do, then you may not do it; it’s a felony. If you FAIL to do what I want, that may also become a felony.”

What used to label itself “liberalism” has come to this.

The proper term is: totalitarianism. We went from a totalitarian mentality in the ruling elites of the Obama years to the actual practice of totalitarianism in the socialist-Communist-fascist era of the Bidenistas.

Example: forced medical treatment. Example: government monitoring of your spending, via seizure of your bank account passwords. Example: forced mask-wearing. Example: forced closure of your business based on arbitrary, subjective standards of “essential” and “non-essential”. Example: Selective use of the police based upon political status — as in letting Black Lives Matter supporters loot and riot unrestrained, while arresting pro-Trump supporters, and denying them due process, merely for showing up at the Capitol.

As for inflation, generated by government debasement of the currency in order to finance unlimited government spending, their answer is: “Live off of our programs.” In other words: Live a borderline-poverty life with no hope of advancement. How liberal is that?

As for the ruining of our once great military, through deliberate strategic blunders designed to destroy that military, the answer to dealing with aggressive tyrannies in Iran, Russia and China: “If you can’t beat them — join them.” In other words: Become the totalitarian countries who wish to conquer us because we are not totalitarian; or at least, we didn’t used to be.

There is nothing whatsoever “liberal” about today’s ruling elites or the officially prevailing viewpoints. The true liberals are those who stand up to these irrational, insane, unjust and dogmatic edicts. The true tyrants are the ones who will force their victims to live lives of intolerable mediocrity, impoverishment, enslavement and despair — merely so they can feel virtuous and and powerful.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Words of Wisdom in a Sea of Insanity

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Careful what you wish for. If Republicans retake the U.S. Senate, this hollow fossil will still be using his influence to make life easier for Communists. We need a new system. These awful people broke the republic our founders gave us.

“Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., gave Democrats until mid-December to find a resolution to raise the debt ceiling, but now he hopes to find GOP votes to support Democrats, and former President Donald Trump is blasting the Republican leader for folding on the issue.” [Newsmax]

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Unemployment (or increasing employment drop-out) is GOOD news to tyrants; they want us shiftless and dependent. Rising prices are GOOD news to them; they want us poor and helpless. Virus outbreaks (real or exaggerated) are GOOD news; viruses give them an excuse to control. Wake up: Your “democratically elected leaders” are not merely fools; they are evil people.

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Former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows is suing Nancy Pelosi and every member of the January 6 Committee as “unconstitutional.”

Better idea: If the DemComs fail to pull off another election fraud since they only enjoy the support of about 30 percent of the population, and they therefore lose control of Congress in 11 months, then let’s wait until after the election and ARREST and criminally prosecute all of them for subversion of the Constitution and illegally harassing members of a previous government solely for political reasons. This has got to stop. And it will not stop until we thoroughly and permanently defeat and permanently remove from power every last one of them. And let’s start with Liz Cheney.

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“The State reserves the right to be the SOLE interpreter of the needs of society.” — Benito Mussolini, 1934

Replace “The State” with “Fauci.” Or “CNN.” Or some actor or sports star. You get the idea.

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Here’s the thing: Nobody is coming to rescue us. We are on our own. This isn’t depressing. It’s our strength and our power. We have to discover it — and use it.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Leftist Critics are Misreading Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade

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Authoring a book comes with its usual praise and criticism and my latest book, Antifascism: Course of a Crusade, is no exception. One of my critics is the Canadian journalist and columnist at The Nation, Jeet Heer. His review leaves me wondering whether he has actually read my work, which charts the historical roots of the modern antifascist movement.

According to my critic, I—along with others like writer John Vella, who wrote a legitimate review of my book in The American Conservative—are laboring to rehabilitate Italian fascism. Those who have actually read my monograph will realize that I have not produced a lament for the lost glories of Mussolini’s Italy. Although I deal with the Italian attempt to build a fascist state, I am also quite critical of Mussolini’s career, especially his involvement with Hitler’s Third Reich and the unfortunate anti-Semitic laws that Il Duce issued in September 1938.

But Heer is irritated that still I notice the gigantic differences in degrees of tyranny between the nasty Third Reich and the authoritarian Italian fascist state before its takeover by Nazi Germany in 1943. I have no idea why my failure to denounce fascist Italy in a way that would please my critic constitutes a whitewash.Antifascism: The Cours…Gottfried, PaulBuy New $34.95(as of 06:14 EDT – Details)

Also, to Heer’s obvious displeasure, my book tries to show why Italian fascism became an attractive model for interwar national movements, including black and Jewish ones. I examine why young nationalists, who did not intend to murder minorities and who had no interest in making alliances with the Third Reich, were deeply attracted to Italian fascism. Explaining such matters may be as worthwhile an activity as clarifying why the woke left continues to venerate Communist mass murders and outspoken homophobes, a subject that my book most definitely explores. Has Heer ever wondered, as I have for decades, why the woke left continues to pay tribute to Castro, Che Guevara, and Mao, all mass murders who committed much worse crimes than did Mussolini?

If Heer had carefully read my monograph, he would have noticed that I did not produce a screed from the crazy right. Indeed, the second chapter of my book even pays fulsome tribute to those Marxists who treated fascism in a coherent, systematic way. I view these leftist theorists as models of critical analysis and praise the thoroughness with which they examined fascism as a counterrevolutionary movement allied to the capitalist class. Although I am not of their persuasion, my book has nice things to say about German Marxists who came up with usable explanations for Hitler’s dictatorship. But these facts do not faze Heer. Instead, he focuses on the fact that I knew Richard Spencer and collaborated with him on an anthology. Never mind that this collaboration occurred before Spencer went off the deep end into white nationalism; Heer presumes in his brief that my past association with Spencer is a clinching argument.

What irks Heer, and other leftist critics of my work, is that I diss their brand of antifascism. I dislike their hysterics and their efforts to brand those on the right who disagree with them as “fascists.” Moreover, I don’t play the game that I hear on Fox News of presenting the woke left as the grim return of the Marxist Communist monster. The modern antifa leftists are no more Marxists than Dodo birds; they are just loudmouthed bullies who vent hatred on normal people. They entirely lack the mental discipline and bourgeois morality that characterized the Marxists of my youth.

Nonetheless they are bona fide antifascists, as my book demonstrates. Woke leftists deny unchangeable specificities, such as definite ethnicities or sexualities. Antifascist woke leftists believe that, in contrast to fascism’s ascription of fixed identities, human persons have totally fluid essences that can be changed from one minute to the next. The only practical exception to this rule that has emerged concerns the right to call oneself black, which apparently is so exalted a victim category that it cannot be attached to someone who is not inherently of the black race.

Paul Gottfried

Another Vaxx Mandate Bites the Dust

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More bad news for tyrants–meaning, good news for human beings. This is why we have courts: to limit the power of tyrants. However, our federal executive branch, Congress and bureaucracies are littered with tyrants. Until or unless the courts can remove them from power, stop them from violating our Constitution and prosecute them (from Biden on down), we have to do all we reasonably can to ignore and disobey them.

“A federal judge in Georgia issued a nationwide injunction that prevents the U.S. government from enforcing a COVID-19 vaccine mandate on federal contractors, temporarily shutting down the last remaining vaccine requirement by the Biden administration.

U.S. District Judge Stan Baker in Savannah, Georgia, said Congress did not clearly authorize the president to use procurement to impose a vaccine requirement on contractors that will have “vast economic and political significance.”

The lawsuit was filed by the states of Georgia, Alabama, Indiana, Kansas, South Carolina, Utah and West Virginia as well as a trade group for contractors.” [Newsmax 12-7-21]

Will Biden even acknowledge or listen to these court rulings? Not likely.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

McConnell Caves Again

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Having thrown away what little leverage the Republican Party has in this one-party government, GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) compounded his felony by rolling over once again in the face of Democratic efforts to raise the debt limit with no conditions attached.

Democrats, of course, can raise the limit anytime they want because they would not need a filibuster proof majority for a budget bill under the Byrd Rule. But they want to share the blame for doing so with Republicans, so they won’t raise the debt limit alone.

And, obliging as ever, McConnell caved in and agreed to let them do it covered by a fig leaf of bipartisanship. He previously bailed the Democrats out over the summer and vowed not to do so again, but he can’t help himself and he rolled over again.

The Republicans could have exacted any number of commitments in return for their votes. They should have asked for an additional cut of $1 trillion in the Build Back America package. They could have insisted that the package have no language on immigration. For all their wails of outrage at the unilateral, arrogant Democratic refusal to consult them, McConnell led his troops in a total surrender — again.

Why don’t he and Manchin both switch parties and put their respective party establishments out of their agony?

Dick Morris