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.
Coercion is everything, in today’s America. The faith and confidence today’s rulers in D.C., academia, Big Tech and elsewhere put into the power of force is limitless. They FORCE us to stay home, even when reason tells us it’s not necessary. They FORCE us to wear masks, in the name of science, when science said the opposite two days earlier. They FORCE us to get vaccinations (and that form of force will come). They FORCE us to pay for the welfare, permanent unemployment benefits, college tuition, child care and virtually everything else of others — that is, if we work and produce and they do NOT. They FORCE us to ignore the information and data we wish to see, and they FORCE us to pay attention only to what they want us to see. They force us to register our guns, and very soon they will FORCE us to hand them over. It’s a religion of FORCE. And much more is coming. There’s no reason for them to stop, because the great majority of us are docile and compliant, at least behaviorally if not internally.
In a way, however, this is the weakness of the Communists, socialists, fascists or whatever you wish to label them: their unerring, unwavering belief in the power of force. If you look back on the Hitlers and the Stalins of history, you can’t deny they did a hell of a lot of damage with their use of coercion. But what did they ultimately accomplish? Whose hearts or minds did they appeal to, and win over? Certainly not the hearts and minds of anyone even remotely rational or decent.
Force cannot win because it’s not how the human mind operates. The human mind and psyche do not respond to force. Force appeals to one thing only: fear. The hapless Joe Biden and all the others are essentially communicating, “Do what I say — or else. And oh, by the way, do what I say in the name of freedom, liberty and unity.” It’s not new. It’s what totalitarians and tyrants have ALWAYS done. Anyone who grew up in a family run by a tyrant knows the code. Now that code, like it or not, has come to America.
You can be sure that the religion of force will fail in America as decisively as it failed elsewhere. However, the failure of force is no guarantee of liberty. We don’t get liberty simply because force fails again and again. We have to know what we’re FOR, and why we’re for it. That’s the only way out of this mess.
I read on MSN yesterday that Joe Biden claims he sees “no evidence” for people staying home because of unemployment benefits that surpass the salary of most jobs.
Clearly, Joe Biden doesn’t own a small business. Nor does he know anyone who does. He doesn’t care, either. Why should he? He has made millions (perhaps even billions) off of corruption and pull, thanks to his criminal family’s association with the Communist Party of China.
Joe lives in the world of payoffs. He’s the career politician to end all career politicians. He and his kind only understand what Ayn Rand called “the aristocracy of pull”. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with merit, achievement, or an honest day’s work. NOTHING.
Joe, like all tyrants, is a liar. He knows full well what the purpose of inflated, endless unemployment is: To make people dependent on the government; and to punish small businesses for not paying what elite politicians think employees should be paid. He has no grasp whatsoever of market economics, supply and demand, or the challenges small business owners in particular face every day of their lives.
There’s nothing wrong with big business, by the way. But big business should receive NO benefits or handouts due to pull or connection with the government. The only way to keep big business from becoming corrupt (as it has) is to separate economics and state … completely. A healthy economy will give rise both to big businesses and small enterprises. May the best products and services win, and often there’s room in the free market for plenty of big and small.
But the reality remains: Small businesses comprise most of the economic activity in America. By paying their workers to STOP WORKING, we are systematically murdering those small businesses.
The lesson of Officer Derek Chauvin’s show trial, a trial as crooked as any experienced by black Americans in the demonized South, is that police training needs to be changed. Chauvin is the victim of many years of media emphasis on police brutality against black Americans.
According to reports, US police, or many of them including those in Minnesota, were trained by Israeli firms. This is the worst possible choice. In Israel, police are used to brutalize and murder Palestinians. The emphasis is on the value and importance of the police officer’s life, not the Palestinian’s. It is training that guarantees excessive police force.
Officer Chauvin was convicted largely because of the influence over the years of national media reports of police shootings of black Americans. As the larger number of police shootings of white Americans was ignored, the reporting gave the police a racist hue. In other words, the presstitutes with their one-sided reporting turned a training problem into a racist problem. This made it easy for the presstitutes to use a misleading video suffering from camera perspective bias to turn Chauvin into a white racist who murdered black Floyd by depriving him of oxygen.
Indeed, the jury was so pre-convinced of Chauvin’s racism that the evidence presented in court of his innocence had no effect.
The failure of Democrat city administrations to understand the situation resulted in the burning and looting of their business districts and the belief among the “peaceful protesters” that they are not accountable to law. Getting back from here is not going to be easy. Many residents of Democrat cities have realized this and are fleeing the cities. Unfortunately for those of us more sensibly located, they will bring their destructive liberal beliefs into our communities and destroy us as well. I wish Florida’s governor would ban white liberal Americans from relocating in Florida. Perhaps we could put out the story that the Black Plague is raging and that would keep them way.
I doubt police training—the solution to the problem—will change. The Democrats benefit too much from the racism angle, and the Red States have seen what happens when police aren’t supported. The Red States are not in the mood for a kind and gentle police force.
When lies prevail over truth, as they do every day in America, the conundrums mount as the energy and courage to tackle them fades. The idiot white liberal Democrat mayor of Portland who called the rioters and looters in Portland “peaceful protesters” is now appealing to the residents to help him “take the city back” from lawlessness.
Only violence can do that, and Democrats only use violence against “white supremacist Trump supporters.”
Violence is spreading. Asians in New York City are now routinely brutally attacked by blacks on subways and in the streets. Within the ruling narrative, how can this be stopped without “racial violence” against blacks?
As I have explained for decades, a Tower of Babel has no common ground. There are no shared values, no shared culture, no shared holidays, no shared history. In their place is the cultivated hatred taught in public schools with critical race theory, the NY Times 1619 Project, and reinforced with sensitivity training in corporations, universities, and the US military. This means there is no basis for law. Whatever law exists is seen as a tool of the ruling race, not as something to respect.
One consequence is that the public interest disappears because there is no public interest—only the interests of the races, genders, classes. As has been clear throughout history, the lack of ethnic homogeneity means multicultural states are dysfunctional. They have no common basis.
White liberals will dispute this even as they live in an increasingly dysfunctional multicultural state that is thoroughly disunited and themselves spread disunity with their screams for death to Trump supporters.
The American people had a good thing going, and they stupidly let it be taken from them.
There is a war in Jerusalem right now, a war that ends the Israeli illusion that the Palestinian cause has somehow faded away or evaporated.
Veteran Israeli General Amos Yadlin, former commander of the IDF’s intelligence and a chief Israeli National Security analyst, described the Israeli reality in the most brutal terms in his commentary on Israeli N12: “The Israeli delusions are over. The Palestinian problem is Back. “
Yadlin believes that Israel’s lack of leadership has led to strategic paralysis, in which Israel and Palestine have practically morphed into ‘one state’ and it has only two options to choose from: either to ‘stop being a Jewish State’ or to be ‘undemocratic’! According to Yadlin, the “Palestinians are engaged in a different discourse today than in the past. After the failure of their three main strategies – terrorism, internationalization of the conflict and reliance on the Arab world, the Palestinians have greatly strengthened the discourse of rights. If they cannot achieve their own state, they seek equal rights as citizens of the Greater State of Israel – with the long-term hope of an Arab majority in one state. In the meantime, they hope to exhaust Israel’s economic benefits and gain points in the campaign for Israel’s delegitimization.”
I wouldn’t use Yadlin’s misguided terminology, as the Palestinians are already the majority of the people between the river and the sea. Yet, I believe that his dissection of the situation is largely accurate. It is also consistent with IDF intelligence’s reading of the Israeli Palestinian conflict since the early 1980s. IDF generals have been saying it for years: for the Palestinians to win, all they need to do is to survive. Mahmoud Abbas, whom many Palestine supporters tend to detest, also came to the same realization a while back. It is not war that will defeat Israel, it is actually peace which Israel fears the most.
As if the news is not bad enough for the Israelis and their future prospects in the region, the last election made it clear that the new Israeli kingmaker is no other than Mansour Abbas, the Leader of the Islamic party Ra’am. Benjamin Netanyahu was ready to form a government with him just to sustain his primacy, with the hope that this may help him stay out of prison. But an alternative centrist coalition also can’t be formed without the support of Abbas.
The hardcore right wing within the Israeli Knesset do understand that such political power in the hands of an Islamic party empowers their bitterest enemies. It is destined to bring many more Israeli Arabs to the polls in the next election and if Arabs in Israel enjoy the same political representation as the Jewish majority, they can easily become the biggest political force in Israel. Is Israel ready for an Arab PM, or Muslim minister of defence? I’ll let you ponder over that.
The most peculiar fact in all of that is that Jewish lobbies around the world are actually very successful in dominating different nations’ affairs that are relevant to Israel and Jewish interests. A lot has been written about AIPAC dominating American foreign affairs. A lot was said about the power of the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) and the Labour friends of Israel (LFI) in Britain. Yet in the USA Jews amount to less than 2% of the entire population. In the UK, Jews are less than 0.5% of the Brits. In Israel, on the other hand, Jews are 80% of the Israeli society and about 50% of the people who dwell between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea. One may draw a conclusion that Jews are doing far better for themselves as a marginal exilic identity than being a majority on the land. Zionism, for those who do not know, was born to refute that observation but it failed.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has a 417-foot superyacht that’s so massive it has its own “support yacht” with a helipad, according to Bloomberg. The estimated cost, not including the boat’s support boat, is $500 million.
I have NO issue with successful people having lots of money and buying nice things. But Jeff Bezos is a socialist–a Communist, actually, given that his political party, the Democratic Party, now endorses censorship, wealth redistribution, gun confiscation, election fraud and other open forms of tyranny.
According to Marxism and Communism, holding wealth is evil. You’re supposed to treat your wealth as community property, say the woke in academia, corporate America and media. That’s the attitude being imposed on those of us with middle class or lower incomes. Why do WE have to submit to the ideology of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”, while Bezos and other Communists like him still get to live in splendor?
Envy is an irrational psychopathology that gives rise to insane, unjust and impractical creeds like Marxism. But when you’re a corporate Communist and you foster envy to shut down capitalism, a system of profit-making that you, yourself, benefit from daily…Well, that’s monstrous and evil.
Never tell a leftist they hate America. They will correct you every time. They don’t hate America, they’ll tell you; they just want to improve it. They just want to help make it better. They just want America to live up to her ideals.
No, it’s not America per se that they hate, but rather the things that made America so spectacular in the first place. Free enterprise. Limited government. Federalism. Separation of Powers. Individual freedom.
But, while they don’t hate America, it is, according to them, racist, sexist, homophobic, ethnocentric, intolerant, and more. In addition, the Constitution is an outdated document that old racist White guys wrote, and it needs to be reimagined.
So, okay, sure, I’ll buy that leftists don’t technically hate America. Indeed, consider that, even when they have Hollywood or Silicon Valley or Wall Street type money and could live anywhere in the world…big surprise, they never actually leave!
When I tell leftists that America is the greatest nation that’s ever existed, it seems to send them over some sort of cliff. They often get angry and look at me as if I just told them the earth is flat. But the funny thing is that when I ask what nation is better or empire was better…crickets. They immediately launch into a polemic about how America is racist, sexist, homophobic, ethnocentric, etc. It’s ripe with inequality, inequity and rich White men run it. And not to be forgotten, its Constitution is an outdated document that old White racist guys wrote and, as such, shouldn’t control our lives today.
Then I suggest that even if it were the case that America was the hellscape they suggest, where should we go to escape it? Again, crickets.
Even though leftist snowflakes can’t point to a single place on earth or in history that is, or was, superior to the United States, or that had or has a more successful combination of prosperity and freedom than the US, they most certainly have an endless supply of ways to improve it:
Bans on hate speech, which they define as anything that hurts anyone’s feelings.
Defund the police.
Pack the Supreme Court.
Disband the INS.
$15 minimum wage.
Demonize the Founding Fathers.
Eliminate the Electoral College.
Cancel anyone who ever uttered an opinion that doesn’t comport with the currently favored position on any given subject.
Eliminate academic requirements and standardized testing for entrance into college.
Universal healthcare
Free college tuition
Green energy mandates and subsidies
Eliminate fossil fuels
Repeal the Second Amendment
Eliminate capitalism.
Eliminate the binary gender construct
Make the Pentagon the bleeding edge for social experiments
Tax the rich
Forgive student debt
Mandate vaccinations
And the list goes on, and on, and on. It literally never stops. Griswold v. Connecticut begat Roe vs. Wade which begat partial-birth abortion. Gay rights turned into civil unions turned into gay marriage. Jimmy Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act turned into coerced lax lending standards which turned into the housing crash. And the Americans with Disabilities Act started out as compassion for the handicapped and mutated into a vehicle for extortion of small businesses by a cabal of pernicious lawyers. Removing the Confederate Battle Flag from state flags led to pulling down statues of Abraham Lincoln and Fredrick Douglas to canceling Dr. Seuss and Aunt Jemima.
At what point, exactly, will America cease to be the racist sexist hellhole that the left tells us it is? Must the military perfectly reflect the hue and sex of America itself? Must corporate executives be promoted based on their socioeconomic heritage?
What else needs to be reflective of the demographics of the American populace? How about the NBA and the NFL? Black men make up 74% of the NBA and 70% of the NFL. Do we fire 90% of them to hire more White men and women of every race? Would that make the games more competitive, more exciting? Probably not.
Or how about nurses? 93% of nurses are women. Should 40% of them be fired to hire men to make the industry reflective of the rest of the country? Would that make healthcare better or patients happier and safer? Unlikely.
This could go on endlessly for every area of the economy: Ditch diggers. Sanitation workers. Teachers. Barbers. Rap artists. Surgeons. Lawyers.
The bottom line is the left knows how to do one thing well, and that is to destroy what someone else built. We’ve seen that play out across America time and again. From the burnt husks of Detroit and Washington that rotted for decades following the riots of the 1960s to turning once-great American cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles into giant homeless camps strewn with needles and feces to the economic devastation wrought in cities like Minneapolis and Portland and Seattle from a year of “mostly peaceful protests.”
When the left comes to power in successful cities, the march to a real hellscape begins. And it’s not just cities. The left broke the Boy Scouts, they destroyed the NFL as a truly national form of entertainment, they’ve ruined Disney and Marvel, and they are in the process of destroying women’s sports.
Dennis Prager often says, “The Left destroys everything it touches” and he’s right. The left has never built a nation that millions of people risk their lives to enter. The left has never built a society where freedom of thought, speech, and the press have thrived. The left has never built an economic juggernaut founded on free markets or anything else.
The left can do nothing more than take advantage of the freedom and prosperity that others have created and throw stones at it for its imperfections. Voltaire was prescient when he observed, “Perfect is the enemy of the good.”
America is no doubt imperfect. It is flawed and sometimes unfair and often inequitable… but mankind is all imperfect. All of God’s creations are. The reality is, the United States is by far the greatest nation God has seen fit to grace man with and, while it will continue to be imperfect until the end of days, it is nothing like the racist, fascist hellscape the left makes it out to be.
But of course, none of that matters because, for the left, building something great is never a necessity; in fact, it’s never even a consideration. Why bother trying to build anything when it’s so much easier to throw stones at those who are too busy actually building things to notice they’re being targeted for their imperfections by those who don’t have the courage to try.
I’m not sure what the textbook definition of “hate for ones country” might be but everything the left does and says most certainly looks like it — which makes one think of the old saying: “If it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck and acts like a duck, it’s probably a duck.”Vince
Vince: The product of a military family, growing up in Naples, Italy and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and being stationed in Germany for two years while in the Army, Vince spent half of his first quarter century seeing the US from outside of its own borders. That perspective, along with a French wife and two decades as a struggling entrepreneur have only fueled an appreciation for freedom and the fundamental greatness of the gifts our forefathers left us.
So why is Arizona’s Maricopa County refusing to comply with the court order and Arizona Senate subpoenas to provide the voting system logs for investigation? The clear answer is that Maricopa County is protecting the false news narrative of no electoral fraud.
The utterly corrupt “defund-the-police-Democrats” are claiming that to turn over the evidence would mean “the lives of law enforcement personnel could be endangered.” This is a false claim. Moreover, there is no excuse for not complying with a court order. Do the Democrats have enough power to get away with covering up the stolen election? They have so far.
People usually define “crazy” as “losing your mind”. What does it mean to lose your mind? It means to lose your REASON. It means to start substituting your common sense observations, along with your higher level, objective, independent thinking with: (1) blatant delusions; (2) the opinions of others, even if those opinions make no sense; or (3) arbitrary, random feelings or imagination unhinged from reality.
Staying sane means holding to your independent and objective knowledge even when those around you defy all reason or recognition of even obvious facts. ESPECIALLY when those around you defy all reason or recognition of obvious facts. It’s called integrity: to your mind, and to reality itself. Having integrity to what you KNOW is true is for your own sake, most of all. The world will benefit, too; because when this is all over, the world is going to need at least a few good, rational people able and willing to pick up the pieces.
A reader posted on Facebook: “Have people lost all logic and reason? This war on critical thought has too many victims. When I hear people parrot the news…. covid conscious, believe the science, safe and effective, white privilege, etc., I cringe. This is indoctrination.”
My reply: No, most still have sanity. If they didn’t, civilization as we know it would be in total collapse. But they make the tragic error of believing their media. The media consists of mostly intellectual lightweights who are polished performers, and who stare into the camera earnestly and seem believable to the majority when they spout their collectivist drivel . THIS is a big part of what’s destroying us.
There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money,” is an insight the famed biographer James Boswell attributed to Samuel Johnson.
Clients of the late Bernie Madoff, however, might take issue.
Over four decades, Madoff, acclaimed as the greatest fraudster of them all, ran a Ponzi scheme that swindled 40,000 people, including his closest friends, out of $65 billion.
But if “getting money” is among the most innocent of callings, America has more than its fair share of the goodly people who excel at it.
According to Forbes’s 35th annual ranking of billionaires, last year witnessed a population explosion. Some 660 new billionaires were added to the number for a total of 2,755.
And more than one in every four billionaires is an American.
According to Forbes, the richest man in the world is Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post, with $177 billion.
Last year was the fourth in a row that Bezos led the list. His wealth exceeds the entire GDP of almost 150 nations.
Directly behind Bezos, at No. 2, is Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla, whose wealth rose to $151 billion.
Numbers 4 and 5 were Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, with $124 billion, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook with $97 billion.
“As a class billionaires added about $8 trillion to their total net worth from last year, totaling $13.1 trillion,” says the Washington Post.
“The United States had the most billionaires, at 724, extending a rapid rise in wealth that hasn’t happened since the Rockefellers and the Carnegies roughly a century ago. China, including Macau and Hong Kong, had the second highest number of billionaires: 698.”
This tripling of the wealth of the world’s billionaires and 30% increase in their number came during a year when America and the West endured the worst pandemic in a century and worst economic collapse since the Great Depression.
“While most of the world’s wealthiest people prospered during the pandemic, thanks in part to stock prices,” writes the Post, “millions of Americans grappled with job loss, food insecurity, debt, eviction and poverty.”
Query: Where was the outrage?
In previous times like these, where the rich got richer and the poor and working class rode the rails, we would have heard the excoriations of economic populists and echoes of TR’s “malefactors of great wealth” and FDR’s “forces of entrenched greed.”
But Forbes’ report of the population explosion among billionaires in 2020 passed seemingly without protest.
The dogs did not bark. Why not?
One reason: Whatever one may think of Bezos, Amazon, in 2020, was indispensable for delivering food and medicines to tens of millions of Americans who, given the “lockdowns,” depended on such deliveries for survival. You don’t castigate people providing your food and medicine.
Also, today’s billionaires’ boys club has come to understand how to make its astonishing wealth acceptable, by ingratiating themselves with their old ideological enemies.
Set up a tax-exempt foundation, fund it with billions of dollars, invite in liberals to sit on the board, and, at munificent salaries, to run it and distribute its income to liberal causes. The way to diminish leftist resentment at huge piles of private wealth is to give them a cut.
No wonder Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax went nowhere.
However, they did it, America’s most successful capitalists have learned the lesson some previous generations of capitalists did not — how to preserve their wealth, privilege and economic power and avoid such derisive terms as “capitalist pig.”
Yet, of greater interest, and import, is that the China of the new Great Helmsman, Xi Jinping, a one-party Communist dictatorship, coexists with hundreds of Chinese billionaires.
What would Marx, Lenin, Stalin or the Mao of the Revolution that triumphed in 1949, who put his country through the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, say of Chinese oligarchs and plutocrats, each of whom possessed at least a billion dollars in wealth?
Politically, China remains under an ever-tightening Communist rule.
But today, there are inequalities of wealth between the working poor and middle class, and the well-to-do and rich, that would have been anathema to the revolutionaries who founded Communist China.
Is China running a capitalist economy to generate the wealth to consolidate Communist Party control of the nation and grow China’s economic, military and geostrategic power until China displaces America as the first power on earth? So it would appear.
One wonders: Has China found the formula for global ascendancy that eluded the Soviet Union of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev?
Use state capitalism and market incentives to build the economic wealth that can be translated into the growth to enable China to ascend to a level of power where it is indisputably the first nation on earth?
Are the Chinese billionaires the geese laying the golden eggs for the Chinese Communist party? Is Communist doctrine being updated to accommodate the most successful Communist country of them all?
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.”
Author Jordan Peterson has said his life “has not been happy” in the years since he spoke out about a controversial Canadian bill that protected gender expression and identity.
My psychological advice to the courageous Jordan Peterson: Once you really get how small, petty and metaphysically insignificant evil and irrationality are, you can shut them out and they cannot hurt you, at least not emotionally.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 