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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 Last White Person is Slain by Diversity

A mantra of our time is that white people have “white privilege.” Here is the latest shocking example of “white privilege:” https://www.foxnews.com/media/minneapolis-teachers-union-agreement-stipulates-white-teachers-laid-off-first-regardless-seniority

Here is an example from Britain: https://sputniknews.com/20220817/raf-recruitment-head-reportedly-resigns-after-service-temporarily-stops-hiring-white-men-minorities-1099680254.html

How long has it been since you have seen a corporate advertisement, or any kind of advertisement, in which there is a white couple with white children? Miscegenation is the requirement of diversity, which is a paradox as it means there will be no diversity, just a collection of brown people. Corporate advertisements increasingly consist of a black man with a white woman, or a white man with an Asian woman or sometimes a hispanic woman. The heads of corporations and the talking heads on TV are increasingly immigrant-invaders as are government officials, entertainers, and police. White people are being replaced in all visible forums.

The same thing is happening on university faculties and in the arts, if that is what they still are. Being an immigrant-invader, if you are also anti-white, raises your chance of being being recognized as a successful author.

White replacement in white countries is a fact. It is far advanced, but you are not allowed to mention it because if you do anything to defend white people from their intended “replacement,” an euphemism for annihilation, it proves you are a racist white supremacist who, with the rest of your ilk, will soon be “a distant memory.”

Moshin Hamid, a real privileged person, an immigrant-invader rewarded with admissions to Princeton University and Harvard Law School, has just published his fifth novel, The Last White Man. In short, white people cease to exist . We all turn brown.

The white liberals, of course, praise the immigrant-invader all over the media for describing the apocalypse “long feared by white supremacists” from which arises “a post-racial world.” You get it? Once whites are over and done with, so is racism as only whites can be racist. If you are an American white liberal, there is nothing racist about Antifa and Black Lives Matter looting white businesses and burning down white business sections of American cities. That is just restitution for white racism.

Hamid, Pakistani born, is beset with eulogisms from media presstitutes for telling a story told a half century ago by Jean Raspail in The Camp of the Saints (you can read it here: https://www.jrbooksonline.com/PDFs/Camp_of_the_Saints.pdf ), the difference being that Hamid, welcomed into white America via Princeton and Harvard, approves the disappearance, as do his reviewers, of all white ethnicities, whereas Raspail saw in it the destruction of a culture and a shrinking of diversity.

White people, being the brainwashed, stupid, hapless, insouciant fools that they are, have not caught on that “diversity” means the white races are erased. Indeed, judging by the immigration policies of white ethnic states, if democracy does indeed govern, a majority of whites prefer their erasure.

Another favored author by white liberals is J.R. Ramakrishnan. White liberals are swooning over his explanation that immigrant-invader takeover of the Western world is “a form of reparations for what has been wrought [by white demons] on the Global South.”

There is no doubt in my mind that the NY banks and their IMF protector have ruined every third world country stupid enough, or whose government was corrupt enough, to be paid to take a loan that could not be serviced or repaid. The consequence being that the IMF imposed austerity on the indebted country and forced the sale of its assets to foreign owners. This has happened over and over, but it is not because of “white racism.” It is because of capitalist greed and the greed for bribes by third world governments.

The Western bankers do the same thing to white Western countries. Greece, as I last heard is a “white” country, part of the “exploitative Western world.” Only a few years ago Greece was treated the same way as the “Global South.” Bribes were paid to the Greek government to take a loan that could be neither serviced nor repaid. Foreclosure loomed. The Greek government was forced to cut employment, health and education budgets in order to free up government revenues to pay its German and EU creditors and to sell its protected islands to foreign real estate interests. The austerity imposed on the Greek population was so severe that Greek women were forced into prostitution in order to survive.

Clearly what happened to Greece is the same as what happened to Ramakrishnan’s ” Global South,”and it had nothing whatsoever to do with racism.

The problem we face is not racism. The problem is that the weakening by design of the Christian religion in the Western world has unleashed Satanic evil, and the West has failed to confront and constrain evil.

Your Potential for Greatness Lies in Your Strengths

I received an email from a reader regarding a recent column where I wrote that a fear of success could be a fear of being “found out” as a fraud – whether you earned the success or not. The writer says that when she’s wrong about something or when there are smarter people around her, this feeling of insecurity and inadequacy creeps in.

We are trained at an early age by misguided parents and other authorities that we shouldn’t be “arrogant” or “confident” or, as the old saying goes, “too big for your britches.” In some kids, this (mercifully!) doesn’t stick, but I find that with most people it does. And it all comes out in my office after they grow up.

This ill-advised “advice” creates a grownup who feels guilty for his or her accomplishments. The emotional “logic” goes something like this: “I really have no business thinking that I have accomplished so much. And sooner or later, others are going to figure this out and I’ll be exposed.” A rational approach is needed to counter this emotion; specifically, to judge yourself objectively the same way you would a stranger. You might write down all your accomplishments and rate them in the same way you would another’s. If emotions start to contradict a positive self-assessment, then ask yourself, “Why the double standard? Why deny myself the praise and recognition I would give to somebody else?”

The writer says she feels like a fraud when she’s wrong. But being wrong doesn’t make you incompetent. Everybody is wrong sometimes. Obviously, the fewer errors you make, the better. But an error does not make you incompetent or less competent than your peers. Incompetence requires a lot more than that!

These feelings can arise from a flawed idea about certainty. Many people feel that capable and confident people never make errors. It doesn’t work that way. Errors are not a catastrophe. It’s all in how you handle them. If you have confidence in your power of objective reasoning to figure things out — despite occasional errors and corrections — then you’ll have greater trust and confidence both in yourself and others. When you have confidence in yourself, you love your own mind and what it’s capable of. And to love your mind you have to love the human mind at its best, i.e., when it’s thinking, creating and producing.

People with this feeling of incompetence tend to view others as smarter or less vulnerable than they really are. “I have this weakness, but others do not.” But how do you know that? How can you make such a generalization? If you overemphasize your weaknesses and limitations, you’re going to feel like a fraud when you’re applauded or recognized in some way. You’ll suspect, “They don’t know how I really am.” But there’s no basis in fact. As long as you’re being applauded, complimented or recognized for something that you actually did, then there’s no fraud.

Just because you’re not good at every possible thing doesn’t take away from the goodness or greatness in your accomplishment. If you did it, then you did it. Accept the applause with quiet satisfaction. Know that you earned it. And move on to your next goal, confident in the knowledge that you can.

If you accomplished the thing for which you’re granted recognition despite some flaws that others don’t know about, then that’s all the more credit to you for rising above whatever problems you might have. It isn’t flawlessness that makes people great at something. Infallibility is a myth. Look at all that human beings have accomplished to date — from the cave to the microchip, from illiteracy to quantum physics — and ask yourself if infallibility is required for people to achieve greatness.

It’s your strengths that make you potentially great. And achieving success in spite of your weaknesses is an even greater strength.

Michael J. Hurd, Life’s a Beach

Sadly, It is too Late for the Rule of Law

The Republican strategy re: the raid on President Donald Trump’s home may be doomed to failure.

The operating premise of this strategy is: Bring up the law. Prove that the Bidenistas at the DOJ and FBI didn’t comply with the law; and then all will be well.

But they’re counting on the Bidenistas who run the DOJ and FBI to cooperate in exposing their own already obvious wrongdoing. And they’re counting on the media to honestly report on it. Both assumptions are absurd. If the federal government had been taken over by a bunch of mobsters, would you expect the mobsters in charge to make available evidence to show that they’re running the government like a bunch of mobsters? If the media is 99 percent operated by people more loyal to the government than the state-run media of a literal dictatorship, do you think they’re going to emerge with a “smoking gun” exposing the outrages of the Biden regime?

It’s too late for the rule of law. NOT because the rule of law is an invalid thing; but because the rule of law is no longer in operation. We knew that well before the raid on Mar-a-Lago, which is why most of us were not terribly surprised by it, although it was still shocking.

I don’t wish to be negative. I’m just saying the obvious, aren’t I? The reply to this point I typically get from still hopeful conservatives is, “Well, what are we to do then?” That’s a difficult question to answer. But the difficulty of the question does not give one an entitlement to evade the gravity of the situation we’re in.

Pray and hope for the triumph of justice all you wish. Metaphysically, you’re not wrong. Evil is weak, because it only survives as a parasite on the good. Evil thrives only when the good and the just become afraid. But unjust, corrupt criminal gangs with zero accountability will never act justly. It’s not in their natures. And the fact remains: The federal government is now totally run by political operatives with no regard whatsoever for any rational, objective sense of law. This trend has been the case for a long time, I suspect; and it undoubtedly escalated during Obama’s terms in office. But it’s reality now, open for all to see, even with an overwhelmingly biased news media.

Whatever the solution or whatever the way out — not just for Donald Trump, but for anyone who values their liberty — it’s not the totally trashed, discredited federal government as we know it. That’s a difficult truth to accept, but accept it we must.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

America Now Looks a Lot Like Libertarians of Yesterday Said It Would

The media says “right wingers” want a civil war after Mar-a-Lago.

Not true.

Authentic, patriotic, freedom-loving Americans want a politicized, dangerous DOJ/FBI stripped of its power. They want the restoration of a rights-respecting republic.

To a Big Government leftist type, anything less than 100 percent control of everything by them is “anarchy” and “lawlessness.” When we had a President who favored a few tax cuts, a little relaxing of regulations and a slightly less expansive government than the near-totalitarian one we have now, they shrieked like insurrectionists. The moment they got what they wanted — unlimited and likely permanent power, effectively repealing our Bill of Rights — they shriek “insurrectionists” in the direction of anyone who so much as hints at dissension.

That’s what the DOJ and FBI are now for: Persecution of dissension.

Soon we’ll see how the IRS has taken that role on now, too.

Don’t kid yourself. If President Donald Trump can wind up in jail — and I’m predicting he will — then it can happen to any of us, at any time the government feels like it. Everything I have been writing for over a year now has come to pass. Only I’ve been understating it a bit, as we can see.

Libertarian types were warning us a century ago that the establishment of agencies like the FBI, the IRS, the FDA, the CDC, the FCC, the FEC the DEA and all the rest would, ultimately, lead to the enslavement of the people.

They were ignored and ridiculed.

What do you say to their objections now?

We’re the lucky generation who got to see that they were right.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Supersized IRS Will Shrink Liberty

West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin recently claimed the 15 percent corporate minimum tax contained in the Inflation Reduction Act, which should be called the Inflation Creation Act, is not a tax increase. Instead, he claimed, the bill simply closes a loophole that allows corporations to avoid paying all the taxes they owe. Despite what Senator Manchin says, the fact is the new minimum tax increases the amount of money some corporations must hand over to the government; in other words, it increases their taxes.

It is common for politicians, policy wonks, and even some libertarians to demonize loopholes for making the tax system too complex, but loopholes are simply ways that individuals can keep more of their money. Loopholes are thus pro-liberty and pro-sound economics.

In addition to raising taxes, the Inflation Reduction Act provides 80 billion dollars to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Some of the money will go to improving taxpayer services so, for example, taxpayers may actually talk to a real person who can provide information about the tax law when they call the agency. But, over 50 percent will be spent on enforcement.

The IRS is expected to hire approximately 87,000 new agents. Supporters of the expansion say the IRS will use the enhanced enforcement capacity to target only “the rich.” However, it is not necessary to massively increase the IRS’s enforcement capacity just to go after “rich tax cheats.”

Furthermore, rich people and big corporations can hire attorneys and accountants to make sure they limit their tax liability while staying within the legal limits. They can also fight any attempt by the IRS to make them pay more. Middle- and working-class Americans are unable to afford legions of attorneys and accountants to limit their tax liability or fight the IRS, so they are more likely to pay whatever the IRS demands.

The IRS has a history of disrespecting due process rights of Americans, so creating a new army of IRS agents with a mission to extract more money will lead to massive liberties violations. Given the IRS’s shameful history of harassing the political enemies of whoever holds power at the moment, we should expect the new agents to target opponents of US foreign policy, gun control, government promotion of green energy, and other policies of the current administration.

The IRS recently ran an ad seeking agents who are willing to carry a firearm and use deadly force. This comes after the tax agency’s purchase this year of 700,000 dollars worth of ammunition. Perhaps the agency is worried that the latest attempt to get more taxes from Americans already suffering from the inflation tax will lead to violence, or perhaps the IRS wants its agents to carry firearms to remind taxpayers that the tax laws are backed by the threat of government violence.

The premise behind the income tax is that the government is the true owner of all property and thus has the right to take as much from the people as it desires. Therefore, the income tax, like the other monstrosity created in 1913 — the Federal Reserve, is incompatible with a free society but necessary for an authoritarian welfare-warfare state. To avoid 1984, repeal 1913.

Ron Paul