I would love to see the most recent 1040s and W-2s of everyone of these marxist thugs. It would speak volumes. The opposition can’t counter-demonstrate; they’re too busy working.

How Tightly Does the Democratic Party Control the Rioters?—by John Zmirak

In my last column I wondered who was in the saddle in riot-torn blue cities. Was it Antifa and Black Lives Matter, or the Democratic Party? Does the Democratic National Committee have the power to call the looters in to start urban chaos and shake business leaders down for donations? To make President Trump look weak, for tolerating this disorder? Or better yet, tempt him to overreact with a blood-soaked crackdown?

Even more importantly, can the Democrats call off the wolves when things go too far? For instance, when terrified citizens in a blue state or city put too much pressure on local Democrats, maybe pushing them to send in National Guardsmen with fixed bayonets? That would backfire spectacularly on Democrats, enraging their most unhinged leftist street squads, as happened in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

The game of political chicken continues in embattled American cities. But only those run by Democrats. Not a single city in a red state, as far as I’ve seen, has witnessed extensive rioting. Here in Dallas (blue city, red state) rioters trashed my beloved Downtown for a single night. They smashed the front windows of my parish, which serves the homeless. Then they met the National Guard, which herded them onto buses, and shipped them back out of town.

Send in the Commandos
That fact is suggestive to me. It suggests that the hard left within the Democratic party is using the mobs to push “reforms” it hasn’t the political nerve to present the old-fashioned way — you know, via legislation and popular votes. But a city council can vote to defund the police in the face of a ravening horde (as in Minneapolis), a proposal that in normal times would get laughed at.

And of course, all those torn-down or headless statues sends a powerful message to citizens who don’t back the radicals’ policies. We have the power to strike you whenever you want. The cops won’t protect you, and the Second Amendment is a dead letter here. Cough up donations, and maybe we’ll spare you. If Trump wins, expect more of the same.

You Sure You Want to Cast that Vote?
Yes, these riots are a form of election tampering. What Russia never achieved in 2016, the Democrats are pulling off now, with hooded, violent white people intimidating voters just as the Klan did in past decades. Just how comfortable do you think black voters attracted to Donald Trump — as millions are — will feel trooping out to vote for him past burned out storefronts, at precincts run by those who cheered on the riots?

Now I’m mostly convinced that the rioters are under tight political discipline, imposed via networks of leftist organizations funded by wealthy donors, of whom George Soros is merely the most anti-Semitic. Why do I think that?

Someone Pulled a String
Because of Seattle. Remember that leftist separatist enclave that Antifa and BLM set up, seizing six city blocks? Its supporters never quite settled on a name, vacillating between “CHAZ” and “CHOP.” To save time, I called it “Wankistan.”

Thousands of innocent Americans got trapped in that enclave, where assaults and rapes could flourish, in the absence of police. Virtual warlords strutted around, imposing “street justice” on hapless reporters, suspected spies, and dissidents. Republicans railed at the Washington State governor, demanding he reimpose order. But that would have backfired, hideously.

And besides, it wasn’t necessary. Wankistan is now dissolving itself peacefully, and almost instantaneously. Almost as if it had served its purpose, and the puppeteers behind Antifa and Black Lives matter made a simple phone call, pulling its strings. As if the rioters were paramilitary forces, who follow orders.

Learning from the Brown Shirts
Antifa traces its heritage back to Communist street militias who battled the Nazis, and beat up hapless Social Democrats and Catholics in the streets of Weimar Germany. They lost those battles, and learned from the national socialists who beat them. They learned a powerful lesson: The overwhelming synergy of biased public authorities and ruthless political street thugs. In Weimar, the public authorities might have feared the Nazis’ zeal and tut-tutted at their tactics (cracking heads and murdering Jews). But they sympathized with them as hard-core enemies of Communism.

So when the police arrested both sides in a Red/Brown brawl, only the Communists went to prison. The brown shirts got slapped on the wrist — as Hitler himself was. His Beer Hall Putsch was an act of treason. He should have been put up against a wall and summarily shot. Instead, he got a short prison term in a cozy cell, with a private secretary and a typewriter. He came out with the manuscript of Mein Kampf, as a major political figure.

That’s how Democratic officials are treating the thugs of Antifa and BLM. Those who learn from history are tempted to repeat it.

Burn Down the System
Do you think maybe I’m overstating the radicalism of the forces we confront? Don’t listen to me then. Listen to them. The leader of Black Lives Matter in New York is Hank Newsome. Here’s what he was unafraid to say on national television, to Martha MacCallum of Fox News:

“You … have said that violence is sometimes necessary in these situations,” host Martha MacCallum told Newsome. “What exactly is it that you hope to achieve through violence?”

“Wow, it’s interesting that you would pose that question like that,” Newsome responded, “because this country is built upon violence. What was the American Revolution, what’s our diplomacy across the globe?

“We go in and we blow up countries and we replace their leaders with leaders who we like. So for any American to accuse us of being violent is extremely hypocritical.”

“I said,” Newsome told the host, “if this country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it. All right? And I could be speaking … figuratively. I could be speaking literally. It’s a matter of interpretation.

“Let’s observe the history of the 1960s, when black people were rioting,” he went on. “We had the highest growth in wealth, in property ownership. Think about the last few weeks since we started protesting. There have been eight cops fired across the country.”

“I don’t condone nor do I condemn rioting,” Newsome added. “But I’m just telling you what I observed.”

…

“I just want black liberation and black sovereignty, by any means necessary.”

Terrorists.
Maybe Newsome is just an outlier, who rose to the top in the backwater that is the NYC metropolitan area.

No, he isn’t. Here’s some scoop about BLM national co-founder, Patrisse Cullors, courtesy of David Harris:

BLM co-founder, Patrisse Cullors, spent ten years being mentored by Weather Underground terrorist and Bill Ayers; comrade Eric Mann. That is where she learned political organizing and the Marxist/Leninist regimen that has shaped her world view according to the Gateway Pundit.

Mann was not only a member of the terror group, Weather Underground but Students for a Democratic Society as well in the 60s and 70s. They were noted for bombing police stations and government buildings.

The Democrats are willing to turn our cities over to people like this, even while Trump is president. Can you imagine how emboldened they’d be with Zombie Biden in the White House?

Here’s a hint: The Biden campaign still refuses to condemn the mob attacks on statues of Ulysses S. Grant.

THE HOLLOWNESS OF VIRTUE SIGNALING, by Steven Hayward

There’s an interesting line in Tim Alberta’s Politico story linked in our “Picks” section today about the attitudes of black voters: “Biden choosing a woman of color might actually irritate, not appease, Black voters.”

I’ve been wondering if this kind of sentiment might be much deeper and more widespread than this comment indicates. Talk is cheap. Action is another matter.

It is not news that virtually every institution of higher education has turned up their rhetorical anti-racist bona fides to 11 in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. The University of California is no exception. But the labor union that represents many UC employees issued this notice yesterday:

Oakland, CA — University of California employees will mount pickets in front of UC Hospitals across the state Wednesday in response to recent notifications that at least two hundred of the institution’s lowest paid workers—almost entirely workers of color— will be laid off for at least 10 weeks into the fall.

In recent weeks, University Administrators have notified workers that despite strong hospital revenues, receipt of hundreds of millions of dollars in Federal Coronavirus Relief funds, and more than $10 billion in unrestricted cash reserves, it would begin laying off employees. The first notices went out to approximately 200 primarily food service workers at UC San Diego and UC Riverside over the past week. The workers make annual salary of $41,000/per year, and the layoffs are expected to save the $40 billion UC system a total of $1.5 million—or four thousandths of one percent. . .

UC’s latest round of layoffs against AFSCME 3299 represented workers follows similar action by the UC Hastings College of the Law in late May. Despite $83 million in cash reserves and a $6 million surge in private donations over the past year, Hastings Administrators announced a first round of layoffs impacting 8 AFSCME 3299 represented employees– who had each worked at the school an average of 12 years and were all people of color—in late May.

Gee, you’d think that the University of California could think of some way to put their money where their big mouth is to save the paychecks of people of color, maybe by furloughing or laying off a multiple-six figure white administrator or something, or cutting professor salaries by 5 percent.

Then there’s the enthusiasm for issuing a Land Declaration about the injustice of owning land that once belonged to native Americans. The one I’ve seen runs as follows:

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: We recognize that Berkeley sits on the territory of Huichin, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo Ohlone, the successors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Ohlone people. We recognize that every member of the Berkeley community has benefitted from, and continues to benefit from, the use and occupation of this land since the institution’s founding in 1868. Consistent with our values of community and diversity, we have a responsibility to acknowledge and make visible the university’s relationship to Native peoples. By offering this Land Acknowledgement, we affirm Indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold the University of California, Berkeley more accountable to the needs of American Indian and Indigenous peoples.

Here’s one idea for making “Berkeley more accountable” for occupying “unceded land” of native Americans: Give it back. Or at the very least pay fair compensation. Funny how no one ever suggests either of these steps. All native Americans are offered is an “acknowledgement.” That and 25 cents won’t even get you a thimble of coffee.

The insincerity of leftist statements on these matters is obvious to everyone except the people making them.

By the way, did you know that Bishop George Berkeley, for whom both the City of Berkeley and the University were named, owned slaves? (You could see that coming a mile off, couldn’t you?) Berkeley not only owned slaves, but donated them and his plantation to . . . wait for it . . . Yale University!

I guess Berkeley will need to change its name too.

The Communist Democratic Party platform:

Until there’s a vaccine for COVID, and until we are 100 percent sure every single person has been injected, there will be lockdowns and masks.

Until police prove they will never, ever shoot a criminal again, there will be no police.

And, by the way, we’re taking your guns away, we’re ending free speech, and we’re ending your ability to watch any non-leftist speak, starting with President Trump and his rallies.

And don’t forget: No gasoline as fuel in 10 years. No more airplanes. Few or no cars. After that, it’s back to Little House on the Prairie. Except for important public officials and their connections, of course.

And 90 percent tax rates, government-run medicine and a government-run finance system. Meaning you can’t finance a house unless you’re connected and correct with the government. And churches meet or assemble only when government grants permission. COVID, you know.

We will accomplish all this by scaring you, and, when all else fails, with brute force. But without police. Well, without police as we know them. We’ll get a new kind of police … the Stalinist kind.

If you call yourself a Democrat, then this is what you stand for. I call you a horrific hybrid of Communist, fascist and totalitarian.

Ideas have consequences in tangible, everyday reality. Anyone who supports and votes for what these leftists are doing is personally responsible for what happens to our country.

No free passes for Democrat voters. Not anymore.–Michael J. Hurd

WHAT WE ALL KNEW: Red China Bought the Vatican In the Deal Brokered By Ted “Blanche” McCarrick for the Bargain Price of $2Billion per year
HOW MUCH DOES AN ANTICHURCH COST? $2 Billion per year, apparently.

HIV antiretroviral scrips, cocaine, rent boys and child sex slaves ain’t cheap, folks.

IF the $2 Billion per year figure is accurate, it is some of the most “effective” tactical money ever deployed.

Now do we fully understand why Antipope Bergoglio and the whole wretched cabal are so aggressively evil? Why they openly preach Marxism and hatred of God and His Holy Church? Why Antipope Begoglio and his cabal are all 100% on board with the fake CoronaCold crime against humanity?

Remember who brokered the destruction of the Catholic Church in China: Blanche McCarrick – one of the most notorious and open boy chasers in the Church. Upon usurping the See with McCarrick being a key “kingmaker” in the invalid faux-conclave of March ARSH 2013, Antipope Bergoglio INSTANTLY sent McCarrick to China to broker this deal. Theodore McCarrick is one of the most evil human beings alive today, and that’s saying something.

I wrote a while back about psychopathy and criminality being a FEATURE not a bug in the institutional Church. The perfect exemplar of this is Fr. Thomas Williams the Legion of Christ kingpin, who poses as a “conservative” and does cut-and-paste stories for Breitbart (Steve Bannon hired Fr. Williams when Fr. Williams was about to be exposed for having sex with his students in Rome, and presumably defrocked.) The bigger the psycho, the higher and faster he rises. Evil people flock together. Sewage coagulates. Speaking of which…

LOOK FOR THE ETHNICALLY CHINESE FILIPINO CARDINAL “Chito” TAGLE TO BE PUSHED AS THE NEXT ANTIPOPE.
TAGLE IS A HIGH STAKES GAMBLING ADDICT, AND IS KNOWN TO HAVE MULTIPLE SEVEN-FIGURE OUTSTANDING MARKERS (casino loans) IN THE CASINOS OF MACAU.
THE CHICOMS WOULD LOVE TO HAVE A MAN INSTALLED AS ANTIPOPE THAT HAS THE CHINESE MAFIA ALREADY HOLDING A GUN TO HIS HEAD.

Ayn Rand always warned about the “argument from intimidation.” This refers to people getting you to back away from your fact-based position based on emotional intimidation. For example, “You can’t say X, because you’re white, and that means you have white privilege.” Or, “You’re a man, so you can’t make a comment about what constitutes sexual harassment against a woman.” But what does being white or male have to do with the truth or falsehood of something?
The latest example of the argument from intimidation: “Oh, so you subscribe to a conspiracy theory.” You get this when you challenge the value or justification of continuing coronavirus lockdowns. This comes from the same people who believed, without any evidence, that Russia and Trump falsified election results — in a conspiracy — so that Trump could become President. Despite the obvious fact that any American adversary would prefer a Democratic President — or any President — over Donald Trump. The same people who buy this crap accuse you of being a “conspiracy theorist” if you even suggest that coronavirus lockdowns are about politics, government control or anything other than the safety of individuals. Their naive and dishonest premise: “All the facts and figures that our government gives us are true. Therefore, to question the value of continued coronavirus lockdowns is to question science.”

So we’re supposed to naively assume that state and local governments always give us honest facts and figures in order to continue with lockdowns they clearly never intend to end. Yet in states where the governments are more moderate — let’s say Florida — we are NOT to believe anything they say. And if President Trump cites any figures of any kind, “Well, those are automatically wrong.”

It’s the same with mass events. BLM protests? Antifa looting? Not only is there no coronavirus danger, in those situations. You are RACIST if you even express the concern. You shall be intimidated and perhaps coercively silenced if you suggest an inconsistency. A Trump rally? Why, even planning such a thing will immediately lead to the death of thousands, if not millions. If you go to a Trump rally, or support its existence, then you are no different than a Nazi ordering victims into concentration camps. That’s what the argument from intimidation states these days.

So basically, if you believe anything that supports the continued totalitarian tyranny of state and local governments — as well as the federal government, once they can install a Communist puppet like the decrepit Biden to take over the federal bureaucracy again — then you are rational, scientific and objective. But the moment you point to facts or logic that suggest maybe the lockdown wasn’t necessary, wasn’t the best idea, and wasn’t morally or politically justified — why, you’re a conspiracy theorist. “You don’t believe there even was a coronavirus,” they’ll claim, even though you obviously believe there was. You’re only saying that 100 percent of human activity shouldn’t end because of it.

This is what happens when you allow the inmates to take over the asylum. The inmates are the sociopaths and psychopaths who dominate our media, academic and corporate worlds. For decades, they have been gradually taking over. Now the masks are off, even as they order us to permanently put our masks on. These creepy, evil collectivists care for nothing other than power and money — at any cost. These inmates are turning our once free, prosperous and fairly rational society into a literal asylum.

It will take unblinking courage, strength, critical thinking and confidence to fight back.—Michael J. Hurd

“Cancel culture” is all about fear. It would not happen without fear.

Probably some leftists find it absurd. But they are AFRAID of being called “racist” by their fellow Democrats. Quite frankly, Democrats are not usually the smartest people. Over the years, I have found most of them to be disappointing adversaries. Consequently, if cancel culture advocates told them to stand on their heads and recite the alphabet backwards — and that failure to do so would mean being called “racist” — then they would willingly comply. ANYTHING not to be called racist.

And as for people on the right, or in the middle … they KNOW all this is absurd. But they’re AFRAID to say so. They’re not really afraid of being misjudged by fools. They’re just afraid of rocking the boat. They’re afraid of losing their jobs or, if they own a business, they’re afraid of losing customers. The irony is that many of their employers or customers agree with them. But they’ll never know it. Because everyone is so afraid.

When fear is rational, it’s life-saving. You look before crossing a street. You make sure you don’t eat or drink poison. You do your best not to get an illness. But when fear is irrational, it’s the most destructive thing there is. FEAR is how we got Nazi Germany. Fear is how human beings lose anything valuable. Fear, when exaggerated or misplaced, brings down people. That’s what I see happening now.

If the so-called “silent majority” learns NOT to be afraid in time, maybe cancel culture will end. But right now, it proceeds on the most targeted track seen since the Maoist Cultural Revolution in Communist China. That “revolution”, by the way, was followed by some of the most insane madness ever to inhabit the earth — even by the insane standards of Communism. THAT’S what’s happening in America, right now. If you’re afraid to stand up to it and be public about your true feelings, then consider the alternative.

Michael J. Hurd

Much of the mayhem we see today is linked to fatherlessness.

Sunday we celebrate Father’s Day. But fathers in our culture have not recently appeared very important — at least according to Hollywood and other culture-shapers.

We used to have programs like Father Knows Best or Leave It to Beaver with a respectable father figure. Then we devolved to Archie Bunker on All in the Family. He was the stereotypical bigoted, benighted patriarch who was not worthy of emulation.

Then we devolved to Homer Simpson, the buffoonish dad, who was anything but a role model.

Of course, in many households today, there is no dad. And that’s a serious problem. So many of the children in fatherless homes begin life at a serious disadvantage. The breakdown of the family at large has caused a huge crisis in our society. For instance, statistics show that the majority of prison inmates come from broken families. As the Family Goes, So Goes Society

Fatherlessness is a serious blight on American life. As the family goes, so goes society. And, contrary to what the left says (who spend much of their energy diminishing traditional gender roles and arguing that whatever “family you choose” is just as good as the real thing), fathers are integral to the life of a child.

Take an example. What is it that is devastating the black community today? Many in our current climate would say the main issue is racism. But sociologically, cultural pathologies are linked closely to poverty. And poverty is linked closely to the structure of the family. Government subsidies (by which the left buys votes) has created a permanent underclass of people by subsidizing fatherlessness and unemployment.

Prior to the Great Society, the rate of illegitimacy in the black community was relatively low and families were intact. And as economist Thomas Sowell points out, the poverty rate for African-Americans fell by 40 percent from 1940 to 1960 — just before the “Great Society” welfare programs. Today, the illegitimacy rate is over 75%, which is devastating — by virtually all accounts.

I remember many years ago when I attended an “evangelical church” in Chicago that was a little on the liberal side. One of the lay leaders, a man, got up and prayed, and he said, “Our Father, Our Mother….”

I was thinking, “What?!?” So I asked him after the service about the unorthodox prayer.

His response was that that church was in the shadow of the most notorious housing project in the city, Cabrini-Green. Fatherlessness was a huge problem there. Most people growing up there had a negative feeling about their earthly father because he was absent or drunk or abusive. Cabrini-Green was such a disaster that it has since been torn down.

Hearts of the Fathers

In his book, Hearts of the Fathers, Charles Crismier notes that many American children today lack the “God-ordered earthly anchor for soul security” because dad is not in the home. He notes, “It is well known but seldom discussed, whether in the church house or the White House, that fatherlessness lies at the root of nearly all of the most glaring problems that plague our modern, now post-Christian life.”

For example, take the issue of poverty. Says Crismier, “Children living in female-headed homes have a poverty rate of 48 percent, more than four times the rate for children living in homes with their fathers and mothers.”

He points out that fathers are so important in the Bible, beginning with God the Father, that the words “father,” “fathers,” and “forefathers” appear 1,573 times.

Obviously, children in fatherless homes can survive and even thrive despite that handicap. But what a better thing it is to follow God’s design for the family.

There’s also a link between fatherlessness and unbelief. About 20 years ago, when he was a professor at New York University, Dr. Paul Vitz wrote a book, The Faith of the Fatherless. In that book he showed how famous atheists and skeptics in history had virtually no father figure in their life or a very negative father.

As examples, he cites Voltaire, Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Paul Sartre, Thomas Hobbs, and Sigmund Freud, among others.

Conversely, Vitz found that strong believers often had positive fathers or father figures. In an interview for Christian television, he told me, “I would say the biggest problem in the country is the breakdown of the family, and the biggest problem in the breakdown in the family is the absence of the father. Our answer is to recover the faith, particularly for men, and we’ll recover fatherhood. And if we recover fatherhood, we’ll recover the family. If we recover the family, we’ll recover our society.”

If you’re a father and you stay with your children and you love your wife, you’re a real hero and role model.

Keep it up — our nation is counting on you.

Recently, I was reminded of John F. Kennedy’s most famous line, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country,” when I heard it among several famous sound bites leading into a radio show segment. It also reminded me that we will hear it more soon, as we are approaching JFK’s May 29 birthday. However, it is worth reconsidering what it means.

Of particular importance is Milton Friedman’s response that “Ask not” was “at odds with the free man’s belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny….[It] implies the government is the master…the citizen, the servant.”

You can see the reason by noting that “Ask not” is completely consistent with what a tyrannical government—the kind that has beset people throughout most of recorded history—expects of its relationship with citizens. Governors did not exist for the good of the governed; those governed existed for the good of their governors. So citizens shouldn’t waste their time asking what the government will do for them.

But when John Locke argued that government should be for the good of the citizens, not for the good of the governors, he turned that historic reality upside down. And America was formed based on that idea (as illustrated by Richard Henry Lee’s claim that Thomas Jefferson plagiarized the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence from Locke).

To Locke, a justifiable government would exist for the good of all. If that were so, every citizen would be willing to voluntarily join that society if given the choice. However, most aren’t given that choice. So Locke used the idea of a state of nature—in which one is not automatically committed to being a member of a particular society—to ask what a government that citizens would all willingly join would do for them. That is the opposite of what JFK told us to do. And the answer—very little—is quite different from the government we have.

At heart, what we all want government to do is what John Locke laid out in chapter 9 of his Second Treatise on Government:

Why…subject himself to the dominion and control of any other power?….[T]he enjoyment of the property he has in this state is very unsafe, very unsecure…[so] he seeks out, and is willing to join in society with others…for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the general name, property. The great and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property.

The most basic functions of government amount to better protecting property rights. National defense protects our lives, liberties, and estates from foreigners; police, courts, and jails protect them from our neighbors; and the Constitution (especially the Bill of Rights) protects them from our most powerful and dangerous neighbor—the federal government itself. How do those protections benefit us all? They better protect us from coercion by those who might overcome our ability to protect our property rights with superior force. That protection is the basis that enables uncountable acts of voluntary cooperation to jointly benefit us all, and which have made us incomparably better off than our forebears.

Given the apparent chasm between what Friedman recognized as the theory that inspired America and JFK’s inaugural address, is there a way to reconcile them? Yes. The key is who is being addressed by the statement. The inspiration for “Ask not” addressed politicians, not citizens. It was a Kahlil Gibran article, whose Arabic title translates as “The New Frontier.” It said “Are you a politician asking what your country can do for you, or a zealous one asking what you can do for your country? If you are the first, then you are a parasite; if the second, then you are an oasis in the desert.”

Clearly, politicians who abuse their positions to benefit themselves are parasites on their society. We can condemn them for asking what the country can do for them. But applying “ask what you can do for your country” to citizens instead of politicians turns America’s founding upside down. Advancing the general welfare means advancing the welfare of the individuals that comprise our country. But asking citizens to sacrifice for the country, especially when the government is misleadingly used as a proxy for American society, implies that we were made for the government’s benefit, rather than it for ours.

If we take what politicians should not do to citizens and extend it to citizens who conspire with politicians to get special treatment at others’ expense, the same criticism applies. We can condemn both those politicians and their special friends that pick the pockets of the rest of us. To that extent, “Ask not” also applies to citizens, and Americans broadly endorse the sentiment against special treatment.

However, that latter step puts the blame in the wrong place. If government followed the principle of “give not” special favors, we wouldn’t need to worry that people might seek them. In other words, we should not blame citizens for asking for what it is a central purpose of politicians in our constitutional system to say no to.

Even the recognition of how something that was originally addressed to politicians can also apply to citizens, however, does not answer Friedman’s critique. That requires asking something more. It is impossible to have a government that advances the interests of all its citizens—that will benefit all of us—unless we first ask the Lockean question of what government will be empowered to do. If what it is allowed to do goes far beyond the Lockean purpose of defending of our property rights against coercion, which enables far more mutually cooperative arrangements, then both politicians and citizens will violate America’s founding principles. Rather than advancing freedom, we will sacrifice people’s lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness to the unjustifiable violations of rights that will consequently dominate politics.

Once we think about what we must ask, we might actually find more useful inspiration in what Richard Nixon said we must ask and ask not: “In our own lives, let each of us ask not what government will do for me, but what can I do for myself,” because nothing is more inspiring than what individuals can achieve by pursuing their own advancement in liberty, through peaceful, voluntary cooperation that respects others’ equal rights. But when government and its special friends use its coercive power to interfere in such arrangements and impose their own dictates, it punishes rather than promotes the greatest source of societal advancement that exists.

Americans need to recognize that “ask not what your country can do for you,” beyond what advances our joint interests, is good advice, but that to “ask what you can do for your country” has been used to rewrite our founding principles. What government now demands of us “for our country” offers no guarantee to advance our interests.

Author:
Gary Galles

Gary M. Galles is a professor of economics at Pepperdine University. He is the author of The Apostle of Peace: The Radical Mind of Leonard Read.

Once people decide to STOP SEEING inconvenient facts, then you have lost their reason. And they have lost their own reason. And at that point, communication is at a standstill.

Therapists like myself see it at the end of marriages, all the time. You can tell when one partner, or both, have stopped caring about what’s true. They’re simply done. There’s no longer any good will. There’s no longer any benefit of the doubt. It doesn’t matter what’s true. You’re simply done.

That’s how it has become with America, as a whole. People in opposing factions have stopped listening to each other. Facts no longer seem to matter. I hear Trump supporters say to their friends who detest Trump, “Will you do me a favor? Will you turn off CNN or MSNBC for one week, and simply go on YouTube, watch Trump’s interviews and press conferences or speeches — not Fox News, just the raw data — and decide for yourself? Even if you don’t become a fan, will you at least evaluate objectively?” Stunningly often, the answer is NO. No reason is given. It’s treated as self-evident.

Years ago, before it was this bad, a Republican friend told me he was arguing, in a benevolent and intelligent way, with a Democrat about capitalism vs. socialism. He asked his friend to read Ayn Rand and share his thoughts. To both our surprise, the Democrat replied, “Why would I want to do that? It might challenge everything I’ve ever believed in. I’m not prepared to do that.” Insert shocked silence here.

And Trump supporters, or any kind of conservative or libertarian, will likely say the same if a similar request was made by a leftist. Of course, I don’t find many leftists making these kinds of appeals. They seem to take their conclusions as self-evident, and if you disagree with those conclusions you are considered insane, if not evil.

Reason has broken down. All I can tell you? When reason and good will are this far gone in a marriage, the marriage is long past over. In fact, marriages are usually well into divorce by this point. A divorce is kind of like a civil war. Some divorces are worse than others, and some civil wars are worse than others. A few divorces are benevolent, but most are not, and most leave lasting wounds. And divorce is truly where we are. When people VIEW their differences as irreconcilable, and there’s no swaying them, it’s over.

I say this not as a Trump supporter, a lover of the Bill of Rights, a Republican, a conservative, libertarian, Objectivist nor anything else in particular. I’m simply saying it as someone who observes irreconcilable differences all the time, in my professional life, and now, to my horror, I see it happening in the country as a whole. If anything, it’s worse.

I cannot predict the future and will not try. Things are so bad that I can’t even predict what it will look like by this fall’s election. In 2020, I have learned just how bad things are in this country — worse than I ever ascertained.

I can only tell you that this is NOT sustainable.

Michael J. Hurd