People talk about the importance of humility. For example, reformed alcoholics or drug addicts will say, “Until I learned humility, I could not become sober.” They’re certainly on to something profound and important here, but is it really humility that saved them?
A website focused on addiction and recovery defines humility this way: “Humility can mean different things to different people, but in basic terms it refers to modesty and respectfulness … . Being humble means that an individual is able to accept [his or her] own limitations and weaknesses. It also means [having] a realistic understanding of [one’s] own strengths.”
Modesty and respect towards whom? And why? Should we show the same respect toward everyone? Or should we first show respect to ourselves, and then to those who have earned our respect, love and trust? The essence of self-esteem is self-respect. Ask any recovering addict. Regardless of what he says about modesty, he will tell you that stopping substance abuse goes hand in hand with greater self-respect. Without that, nothing else works. You hear about the corrosion of values and consideration in people who abuse drugs. They lie, steal and even kill for the sake of their addiction. Do such behaviors come from a sense of too much self-interest or too much self-respect or too much love of life and self? Of course not. Just ask any former addict.
Accepting ones limitations and weaknesses doesn’t sound like modesty to me. It simply sounds like an acceptance of reality. But be careful here. Your limitations and weaknesses refer to facts you cannot change, i.e., you can’t read people’s minds; you can’t foretell the future; you can’t flap your arms and fly; you cannot control or change other people. It’s not humility, but simply realistic to accept these hard facts. They’re not really flaws or limitations; they’re just facts – metaphysically given truths nobody can change. In fact, it is difficulties with reality itself that leads so many to substance abuse in the first place.
A lot of reformed addicts, especially those who participate in Twelve Steps programs, talk about humility in the face of God. “God” is a totally faith-driven concept, but authentic self-esteem, while often influenced by significant others, is rooted in confidence in one’s own mind – not just the mind’s capacity to feel, but to rationally and objectively think and know. Again, ask any reformed addict, and she will likely tell you that she’s much more confident in her own reasoning abilities now, than when she was stoned or drunk every day.
Arrogance is the opposite of humility, many say. But what is arrogance? It’s certainly arrogant, but also naïve and foolish, to think more of yourself than you really are. It’s arrogant to think you can change the oil in your car if you don’t even know how to open the hood. It’s arrogant and stupid to lie to yourself; to declare war on facts or reality. But the risk of arrogance does not rule out the possibility of confidence.
We all should be confident in our capacity to think and reason. Thought and reason do not guarantee success. But they offer the always present possibility that we can figure something out. If we can’t figure it out, we can find intelligent people to ask, while using our own brains to critically evaluate their answers.
We’re in the driver’s seat of our own lives and our own minds. Nobody can do our thinking for us. That doesn’t mean we have to pretend we know everything. But we’re capable of thinking, concluding and judging, and don’t have to let anyone else do these things for us. Even when we delegate tasks to specialized people – car mechanics, tax accountants and the like – we still exercise judgment about what to ask, and whom to trust.
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You only need to be informed about facts, and objective truth. The insane ravings of lunatics in 99 percent of the media and government are neither facts nor truth. Stick to what’s true, and what’s necessary for survival. Focus on what you know, not on what morons and sociopaths babble about. Ditch most of the media, and ignore the government and the culture as much as you can. It’s all in the process of falling apart completely, and in many ways the world will be better off without them.
In the likely troubled times ahead, you will need your inner strengths and your virtues; Rachel Maddow, the View, the DNC, and Don Lemon–trust me–are not going to matter. The people you’re allowing to compromise your sanity are parasitical, and have no virtue, no strength, and no redeeming qualities whatsoever. They really don’t matter. Once you better understand this, you’ll be both sane, and free.
Follow Dr. Hurd on Facebook. Search under “Michael Hurd” (Charleston SC). Get up-to-the-minute postings, recommended articles and links, and engage in back-and-forth discussion with Dr. Hurd on topics of interest. Also follow Dr. Hurd on Twitter at @MichaelJHurd1, drmichaelhurd on Instagram, Michael Hurd Ph.D. on LinkedIn, @DrHurd on TruthSocial
Each of the following quotes are from Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.”
The spirit and the content of this novel are the polar opposite of everything in our culture, our corporate world, our schools, our art and our government today.
If you sense that absolutely everything today is wrong, both in principle and practice — implicitly and explicitly — then you’d do well to take a look at Ayn Rand’s magnificent and timeless novel, “The Fountainhead.”
“Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. man had no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons,and to make weapons – a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and we have comes from a single attribute of man -the function of his reasoning mind.”
“Listen to what is being preached today. Look at everyone around us. You’ve wondered why they suffer, why they seek happiness and never find it. If any man stopped and asked himself whether he’s ever held a truly personal desire, he’d find the answer. He’d see that all his wishes, his efforts, his dreams, his ambitions are motivated by other men. He’s not really struggling even for material wealth, but for the second-hander’s delusion – prestige. A stamp of approval, not his own. He can find no joy in the struggle and no joy when he has succeeded. He can’t say about a single thing: ‘This is what I wanted because I wanted it, not because it made my neighbors gape at me’. Then he wonders why he’s unhappy.”
“It’s easy to run to others. It’s so hard to stand on one’s own record. You can fake virtue for an audience. You can’t fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge. They run from it. They spend their lives running. It’s easier to donate a few thousand to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement. It’s simple to seek substitutes for competence–such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence.”
Follow Dr. Hurd on Facebook. Search under “Michael Hurd” (Charleston SC). Get up-to-the-minute postings, recommended articles and links, and engage in back-and-forth discussion with Dr. Hurd on topics of interest. Also follow Dr. Hurd on Twitter at @MichaelJHurd1, drmichaelhurd on Instagram, Michael Hurd Ph.D. on LinkedIn, @DrHurd on TruthSocial
Men and boys are struggling mentally, physically, academically, economically, and spiritually because of the absence of fathers, the failures of our education system and policies, and changes in both the job market and our culture. Playing a key role behind the scenes is expressive individualism, a radical autonomy that replaces the embodied relational person, connected to family and human nature, with the isolated psychological self who constructs his or her own morality. Solutions to the boy crisis must encourage relationships rather than personal license. They must repair the ties between inalienable rights and their accompanying duties, between happiness and virtue, and better situate the individual within the broader social matrices that truly shape him: God, family, and country.
AUTHOR
Brenda Hafera is the Assistant Director and Senior Policy Analyst at The Heritage Foundation’s Simon Center for American Studies. She previously served as the Director of International and Continuing Education at The Fund for American Studies and the Assistant Director of the Matthew J. Ryan Center for the Study of Free Institutions and the Public Good at Villanova University.
Brenda holds a bachelor of arts in Political Science, a bachelor of science in Finance, and a master’s in Political Science from Villanova University. She was a Publius Fellow at the Claremont Institute and a James Madison Fellow at Hillsdale College. Her articles have appeared in publications such as Modern Age, The Federalist, Law and Liberty, The National Interest, RealClear Public Affairs, and The Hill.
It’s no secret that many Democrat voters have “daddy” issues. They grew up in homes without strong, loving fathers and desperately seek from government what they never found in their youths: a protective authority figure and lifelong role model.
When Democrats with “daddy” issues find their way into power, they force their own psychological deficiencies upon the broader populace. Why? Because they try to play “father” to their constituents but have no idea how a good father is supposed to behave. They scream and shout because they confuse insults and tantrums with masculinity. They reimagine the ideal male leader as someone who would enjoy wearing make-up and behaving like a teenage girl. They demand that male “allies” relinquish any say over the healthy delivery of their unborn children. Instead of taking personal responsibility for missteps in life, they blame their problems on the nebulous “patriarchy” — or rather, the failed fathers of the past!
After punishing all the good men as stand-ins for all the weak men who never properly parented them, Democrats are left with the wimpiest, least wise leftovers of the sorry lot. Then some angry, man-hating leftist with zero self-awareness uploads a video onto social media demanding to know where all the good men have gone. Well, you chased them away, you trans-obsessed, insult-spewing, sniveling punk!
Greg Gutfeld made this point on a recent episode of The Five when discussing the exodus of black and Hispanic voters from the Democrat party: “They’ve alienated men in order to please miserable activists, and men are like, ‘Hey, we know when we are not wanted. We will see ourselves out. We know what a woman is, right? We know what is best for our kids. We know what it takes to protect our cities and our families, and we are tired of apologizing for laughing at funny jokes and having natural testosterone.’”
Because the Democrat party is filled with fake men and phony fathers, it continues to shove real men and fathers away. Then, when Democrat voters find that their trusted “authority figures” have squishy backbones, too, their “daddy” issues spiral out of control. They need more laws, more mask mandates, more punishments; they become desperate for some governmental “daddy” to tell them what they can and cannot do.
This hits at a major distinction separating Democrats from the liberty-loving conservatives whom leftists naturally resent. Liberty-lovers do not confuse the government for their own parents. Government is, at best, a nuisance and, at worst, a thuggish bully. It does not exist to keep you safe at night, to put food on the kitchen table, to teach you right from wrong, or to furnish you with love. Government is a bureaucratic machine that specializes in using the threat of force and the application of actual violence to coerce strangers into doing exactly what the State wishes them to do.
Depending on the government to behave like a loving parent is like depending on one of James Cameron’s cybernetic Terminators for a soothing hug. Both have the kind of uncaring programming that makes most embraces fatal. Still, for Democrats with “daddy” issues, those bureaucratic Terminators are the closest things to family that they’ve got. They’d gladly put their trust in a brutal and dogmatic State that occasionally pats them on the head and promises to take care of them. It’s psychological abuse disguised as “caring government.”
This fraudulent parent-child construct produces nothing but servile citizenry. In a healthy family, parents nurture their children until they become competent, self-sufficient adults. Good parents supervise what their children learn, keep them from harm, and guide them along their journey to adulthood. The love and respect between a parent and child never go away, but the relationship is not meant to produce lifelong juveniles stuck in a permanent state of dependency. Children grow to become capable adults; those adults have children of their own; and the cycle promotes a strong, healthy society.
When governments act as false parents, however, they are not interested in transforming juveniles into adults. They do not seek to create competent citizens who are capable of taking care of themselves. They do not want to produce a population strong enough to think for itself. Because a citizen’s self-sufficiency eliminates his dependency on government, bureaucrats must infantilize grown adults for the rest of their lives. The State is not equipped to be a parent, but it is an ideal machine for mass-producing slaves.
I suspect that part of President Trump’s popular appeal comes from his refusal to treat adults as if they were still children.
Parents sometimes have to “pretend” around their young children. To keep them safe from the terrors of an often dark world, they “bend the truth” here and there. When a family seeks shelter during a tornado, or a parent is laid off from work, or a relative is diagnosed with a scary illness, parents will look into their children’s eyes and say, “Everything will be all right.” That’s what good parents do when the best that they can do for their children is to soothe their worries with fearless love and steady support.
Adults, on the other hand, should be able to speak bluntly to each other without concern that an unvarnished truth will “trigger” another adult to melt into a trembling, catatonic puddle of tears. Trump told NATO countries that they should pay their full financial commitments to the alliance if they really fear for their own security, and the fainting class screeched, “How dare he tell the truth so publicly?” Trump (allegedly!) pinpointed Haiti and other unstable nations as “S-hole countries,” and celebrities came out of their mansions to pretend Haiti is just as luxurious as Hollywood. Trump told Americans there is a dangerous invasion of foreign nationals crossing our open borders, and the corporate news propagandists denounced his accurate assessment as intolerably “racist.”
Time and again, the pundit class has insisted on treating American adults as if they were children too young to understand harsh realities. President Trump is the first national leader in most Americans’ lives to show them respect by plainly speaking the truth.
A lot of people did not quite understand how long their government had been treating them like toddlers until Donald Trump’s frank speech jolted them awake. He questioned the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, excoriated globalism’s destruction of America’s middle class, and refused to search for the constantly shifting line denoting what is “politically correct” to say out loud. He called out “journalists” for spreading fake news, criticized monetary policies that have transferred Americans’ wealth to foreign adversaries, and rebuked “allies” that facilitate illegal immigration into the United States.
When threatened by foreign regimes, he threatened them back in direct and unequivocal terms. When speaking of rising crime in the United States, he did not worry about the criminals’ feelings. When his enemies used the Intelligence Community, Department of Justice, and politically partisan judges to threaten his freedom, he never hesitated to call out the abuse and corruption taking place. At first, a lot of Americans thought, “He can’t say that!” Over time, however, a lot of those same Americans wondered, “Why shouldn’t he be able to say that?”
Why must we censor our own speech and pretend that untrue things are true simply to avoid the possibility of feeling uncomfortable? Are we not all adults? Are we not capable of speaking to one another candidly?
One of the most important things President Trump has done for our country is to stop pretending that things are fine when they clearly are not. Pretending is for young children. Facing hard truths head-on is for adults. Childish Americans must grow up because the government can never be their “daddy.”
When Democrats with “daddy” issues find their way into power, they force their own psychological deficiencies upon the broader populace. Why? Because they try to play “father” to their constituents but have no idea how a good father is supposed to behave. They scream and shout because they confuse insults and tantrums with masculinity. They reimagine the ideal male leader as someone who would enjoy wearing make-up and behaving like a teenage girl. They demand that male “allies” relinquish any say over the healthy delivery of their unborn children. Instead of taking personal responsibility for missteps in life, they blame their problems on the nebulous “patriarchy” — or rather, the failed fathers of the past!
After punishing all the good men as stand-ins for all the weak men who never properly parented them, Democrats are left with the wimpiest, least wise leftovers of the sorry lot. Then some angry, man-hating leftist with zero self-awareness uploads a video onto social media demanding to know where all the good men have gone. Well, you chased them away, you trans-obsessed, insult-spewing, sniveling punk!
Greg Gutfeld made this point on a recent episode of The Five when discussing the exodus of black and Hispanic voters from the Democrat party: “They’ve alienated men in order to please miserable activists, and men are like, ‘Hey, we know when we are not wanted. We will see ourselves out. We know what a woman is, right? We know what is best for our kids. We know what it takes to protect our cities and our families, and we are tired of apologizing for laughing at funny jokes and having natural testosterone.’”
Because the Democrat party is filled with fake men and phony fathers, it continues to shove real men and fathers away. Then, when Democrat voters find that their trusted “authority figures” have squishy backbones, too, their “daddy” issues spiral out of control. They need more laws, more mask mandates, more punishments; they become desperate for some governmental “daddy” to tell them what they can and cannot do.
This hits at a major distinction separating Democrats from the liberty-loving conservatives whom leftists naturally resent. Liberty-lovers do not confuse the government for their own parents. Government is, at best, a nuisance and, at worst, a thuggish bully. It does not exist to keep you safe at night, to put food on the kitchen table, to teach you right from wrong, or to furnish you with love. Government is a bureaucratic machine that specializes in using the threat of force and the application of actual violence to coerce strangers into doing exactly what the State wishes them to do.
Depending on the government to behave like a loving parent is like depending on one of James Cameron’s cybernetic Terminators for a soothing hug. Both have the kind of uncaring programming that makes most embraces fatal. Still, for Democrats with “daddy” issues, those bureaucratic Terminators are the closest things to family that they’ve got. They’d gladly put their trust in a brutal and dogmatic State that occasionally pats them on the head and promises to take care of them. It’s psychological abuse disguised as “caring government.”
This fraudulent parent-child construct produces nothing but servile citizenry. In a healthy family, parents nurture their children until they become competent, self-sufficient adults. Good parents supervise what their children learn, keep them from harm, and guide them along their journey to adulthood. The love and respect between a parent and child never go away, but the relationship is not meant to produce lifelong juveniles stuck in a permanent state of dependency. Children grow to become capable adults; those adults have children of their own; and the cycle promotes a strong, healthy society.
When governments act as false parents, however, they are not interested in transforming juveniles into adults. They do not seek to create competent citizens who are capable of taking care of themselves. They do not want to produce a population strong enough to think for itself. Because a citizen’s self-sufficiency eliminates his dependency on government, bureaucrats must infantilize grown adults for the rest of their lives. The State is not equipped to be a parent, but it is an ideal machine for mass-producing slaves.
I suspect that part of President Trump’s popular appeal comes from his refusal to treat adults as if they were still children.
Parents sometimes have to “pretend” around their young children. To keep them safe from the terrors of an often dark world, they “bend the truth” here and there. When a family seeks shelter during a tornado, or a parent is laid off from work, or a relative is diagnosed with a scary illness, parents will look into their children’s eyes and say, “Everything will be all right.” That’s what good parents do when the best that they can do for their children is to soothe their worries with fearless love and steady support.
Adults, on the other hand, should be able to speak bluntly to each other without concern that an unvarnished truth will “trigger” another adult to melt into a trembling, catatonic puddle of tears. Trump told NATO countries that they should pay their full financial commitments to the alliance if they really fear for their own security, and the fainting class screeched, “How dare he tell the truth so publicly?” Trump (allegedly!) pinpointed Haiti and other unstable nations as “S-hole countries,” and celebrities came out of their mansions to pretend Haiti is just as luxurious as Hollywood. Trump told Americans there is a dangerous invasion of foreign nationals crossing our open borders, and the corporate news propagandists denounced his accurate assessment as intolerably “racist.”
Time and again, the pundit class has insisted on treating American adults as if they were children too young to understand harsh realities. President Trump is the first national leader in most Americans’ lives to show them respect by plainly speaking the truth.
A lot of people did not quite understand how long their government had been treating them like toddlers until Donald Trump’s frank speech jolted them awake. He questioned the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, excoriated globalism’s destruction of America’s middle class, and refused to search for the constantly shifting line denoting what is “politically correct” to say out loud. He called out “journalists” for spreading fake news, criticized monetary policies that have transferred Americans’ wealth to foreign adversaries, and rebuked “allies” that facilitate illegal immigration into the United States.
When threatened by foreign regimes, he threatened them back in direct and unequivocal terms. When speaking of rising crime in the United States, he did not worry about the criminals’ feelings. When his enemies used the Intelligence Community, Department of Justice, and politically partisan judges to threaten his freedom, he never hesitated to call out the abuse and corruption taking place. At first, a lot of Americans thought, “He can’t say that!” Over time, however, a lot of those same Americans wondered, “Why shouldn’t he be able to say that?”
Why must we censor our own speech and pretend that untrue things are true simply to avoid the possibility of feeling uncomfortable? Are we not all adults? Are we not capable of speaking to one another candidly?
One of the most important things President Trump has done for our country is to stop pretending that things are fine when they clearly are not. Pretending is for young children. Facing hard truths head-on is for adults. Childish Americans must grow up because the government can never be their “daddy.”
It’s no secret that many Democrat voters have “daddy” issues. They grew up in homes without strong, loving fathers and desperately seek from government what they never found in their youths: a protective authority figure and lifelong role model.
When Democrats with “daddy” issues find their way into power, they force their own psychological deficiencies upon the broader populace. Why? Because they try to play “father” to their constituents but have no idea how a good father is supposed to behave. They scream and shout because they confuse insults and tantrums with masculinity. They reimagine the ideal male leader as someone who would enjoy wearing make-up and behaving like a teenage girl. They demand that male “allies” relinquish any say over the healthy delivery of their unborn children. Instead of taking personal responsibility for missteps in life, they blame their problems on the nebulous “patriarchy” — or rather, the failed fathers of the past!
After punishing all the good men as stand-ins for all the weak men who never properly parented them, Democrats are left with the wimpiest, least wise leftovers of the sorry lot. Then some angry, man-hating leftist with zero self-awareness uploads a video onto social media demanding to know where all the good men have gone. Well, you chased them away, you trans-obsessed, insult-spewing, sniveling punk!
Greg Gutfeld made this point on a recent episode of The Five when discussing the exodus of black and Hispanic voters from the Democrat party: “They’ve alienated men in order to please miserable activists, and men are like, ‘Hey, we know when we are not wanted. We will see ourselves out. We know what a woman is, right? We know what is best for our kids. We know what it takes to protect our cities and our families, and we are tired of apologizing for laughing at funny jokes and having natural testosterone.’”
Because the Democrat party is filled with fake men and phony fathers, it continues to shove real men and fathers away. Then, when Democrat voters find that their trusted “authority figures” have squishy backbones, too, their “daddy” issues spiral out of control. They need more laws, more mask mandates, more punishments; they become desperate for some governmental “daddy” to tell them what they can and cannot do.
This hits at a major distinction separating Democrats from the liberty-loving conservatives whom leftists naturally resent. Liberty-lovers do not confuse the government for their own parents. Government is, at best, a nuisance and, at worst, a thuggish bully. It does not exist to keep you safe at night, to put food on the kitchen table, to teach you right from wrong, or to furnish you with love. Government is a bureaucratic machine that specializes in using the threat of force and the application of actual violence to coerce strangers into doing exactly what the State wishes them to do.
Depending on the government to behave like a loving parent is like depending on one of James Cameron’s cybernetic Terminators for a soothing hug. Both have the kind of uncaring programming that makes most embraces fatal. Still, for Democrats with “daddy” issues, those bureaucratic Terminators are the closest things to family that they’ve got. They’d gladly put their trust in a brutal and dogmatic State that occasionally pats them on the head and promises to take care of them. It’s psychological abuse disguised as “caring government.”
This fraudulent parent-child construct produces nothing but servile citizenry. In a healthy family, parents nurture their children until they become competent, self-sufficient adults. Good parents supervise what their children learn, keep them from harm, and guide them along their journey to adulthood. The love and respect between a parent and child never go away, but the relationship is not meant to produce lifelong juveniles stuck in a permanent state of dependency. Children grow to become capable adults; those adults have children of their own; and the cycle promotes a strong, healthy society.
When governments act as false parents, however, they are not interested in transforming juveniles into adults. They do not seek to create competent citizens who are capable of taking care of themselves. They do not want to produce a population strong enough to think for itself. Because a citizen’s self-sufficiency eliminates his dependency on government, bureaucrats must infantilize grown adults for the rest of their lives. The State is not equipped to be a parent, but it is an ideal machine for mass-producing slaves.
I suspect that part of President Trump’s popular appeal comes from his refusal to treat adults as if they were still children.
Parents sometimes have to “pretend” around their young children. To keep them safe from the terrors of an often dark world, they “bend the truth” here and there. When a family seeks shelter during a tornado, or a parent is laid off from work, or a relative is diagnosed with a scary illness, parents will look into their children’s eyes and say, “Everything will be all right.” That’s what good parents do when the best that they can do for their children is to soothe their worries with fearless love and steady support.
Adults, on the other hand, should be able to speak bluntly to each other without concern that an unvarnished truth will “trigger” another adult to melt into a trembling, catatonic puddle of tears. Trump told NATO countries that they should pay their full financial commitments to the alliance if they really fear for their own security, and the fainting class screeched, “How dare he tell the truth so publicly?” Trump (allegedly!) pinpointed Haiti and other unstable nations as “S-hole countries,” and celebrities came out of their mansions to pretend Haiti is just as luxurious as Hollywood. Trump told Americans there is a dangerous invasion of foreign nationals crossing our open borders, and the corporate news propagandists denounced his accurate assessment as intolerably “racist.”
Time and again, the pundit class has insisted on treating American adults as if they were children too young to understand harsh realities. President Trump is the first national leader in most Americans’ lives to show them respect by plainly speaking the truth.
A lot of people did not quite understand how long their government had been treating them like toddlers until Donald Trump’s frank speech jolted them awake. He questioned the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, excoriated globalism’s destruction of America’s middle class, and refused to search for the constantly shifting line denoting what is “politically correct” to say out loud. He called out “journalists” for spreading fake news, criticized monetary policies that have transferred Americans’ wealth to foreign adversaries, and rebuked “allies” that facilitate illegal immigration into the United States.
When threatened by foreign regimes, he threatened them back in direct and unequivocal terms. When speaking of rising crime in the United States, he did not worry about the criminals’ feelings. When his enemies used the Intelligence Community, Department of Justice, and politically partisan judges to threaten his freedom, he never hesitated to call out the abuse and corruption taking place. At first, a lot of Americans thought, “He can’t say that!” Over time, however, a lot of those same Americans wondered, “Why shouldn’t he be able to say that?”
Why must we censor our own speech and pretend that untrue things are true simply to avoid the possibility of feeling uncomfortable? Are we not all adults? Are we not capable of speaking to one another candidly?
One of the most important things President Trump has done for our country is to stop pretending that things are fine when they clearly are not. Pretending is for young children. Facing hard truths head-on is for adults. Childish Americans must grow up because the government can never be their “daddy.”
The pace of FBI arrests and the opening of new Jan. 6, 2021, criminal cases increased so much in late 2023 and early 2024 that District of Columbia federal courts could bend under the weight.
In the past two months, 93 people have been arrested and charged, according to Department of Justice (DOJ) reports. At the current rate, some 445 new cases could hit the docket in 2024—more than in 2022 and 2023, according to one estimate.
In total, up to March 6, at least 1,358 people had been arrested by the FBI and criminally charged by the DOJ for crimes related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach.
If the current trend is to hold, total arrests could be 2,150 by the time the statute of limitations on Jan. 6 crimes expires in early 2026, according to Jacob Rugh, associate professor of sociology at Brigham Young University. Mr. Rugh and researcher Isabella Felin have been publishing Jan. 6 statistics and data visualization on social media platforms X and Instagram since August 2022.
William Shipley, a former federal prosecutor who has represented more than 50 Jan. 6 defendants, said he noticed an upswing in cases starting in September 2023.
Free market capitalism has a long track record of fueling innovation, increasing choice, and providing the best prices for consumers. The reason the vast majority of the world is not still riding on the backs of animals has everything to do with the free market.
But a funny thing happens when politics meets the free market: A desire arises within the politician to exert control over that free market. Politicians see the freedom of the market as a threat to their identity and their hold on power and therefore develop excuses to exert control over it. Within the American context, this political control comes most obviously in the form of bureaucratically formed regulations.
These Washington elites see Americans not as their equals, not as fellow citizens for whom they have been elected to represent so as to ensure that Americans’ freedoms and rights are upheld and protected. Instead, they see them as inferiors who need to be “cared” for and directed as if they were little children.
How else does one explain Washington’s insistent “need” to overregulate? This reality becomes further evident when Washington embraces a certain ideological agenda that much of the country rejects — an agenda such as the climate change cult.
The climate change cult is why Joe Biden has pushed an economically unsustainable green agenda, and it explains why he has targeted the fossil fuel industry for eventual elimination. He proudly promised to “end fossil fuel” back in 2019, and his administration has done much to make headway toward that end.
This explains the Biden administration’s push for electric vehicles, which is costing the auto industry and consumers a lot of money.
Indeed, the rate of EV sales has increased, but it doesn’t remotely meet the levels needed to hit the Biden administration’s stated target of 50% of auto sales by 2030. With just 9% of all auto sales last year being EVs, automakers are now cutting back their EV production and future sales outlooks.
As a recent article from CNBC put it: “EV euphoria is dead. Automakers are scaling back or delaying their electric vehicle plans.” Tellingly, the article notes that automakers have shied away from ESG investing and “companies are again cheering consumer choice.” As the old motto states, the customer is always right.
It’s too bad the Biden administration hasn’t embraced a similar motto of the American consumer always being right. Instead, the administration is seeking to dictate what consumers will and will not be allowed to buy. As we have noted, it’s not just with EVs; it’s also with household appliances.
The International Code Council (ICC) issues building codes for new construction. While the ICC is not a government agency, it does effectively establish building codes for much of the country. Now the American Gas Association is accusing the ICC of “serious lapses in due process” with its soon-to-be-released International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) for 2024. While the energy codes are typically noncontroversial, this year the AGA, which supplies natural gas to 180 million customers across the nation, notes that it was left completely out of the consulting process.
Apparently, the AGA was left out because the new IECC eliminated natural gas in its energy efficiency codes. As AGA CEO and president Karen Harbert contends: “They’re incentivizing electrification and discriminating against the natural gas industry by excluding it from being part of the code. That really is anticompetitive behavior.”
The irony is that eliminating natural gas from building codes will actually negatively affect energy efficiency and increase construction costs, which will in turn raise the price of homes.
According to Harbert, this move by the ICC has everything to do with pushing an activist climate agenda that is anti-fossil fuel. “The activists that are supporting an all-electrification agenda tried to come in through the policy front door, which was to ban natural gas in cities, and that got overturned in the Ninth Circuit. They tried to ban gas at the state level, and that’s now being challenged. And they have tried to do it through regulation and have been unsuccessful.”
The Biden administration is dancing to the same climate activist tune. This is not about what is best for Americans or even what is best for the environment. Rather, it’s about forcing an activist ideology onto the country irrespective of its negative impact on the economy and Americans’ freedom to choose what they want to buy and what works best for them.
When inflation predictably soared following the Biden administration’s decision to spend like drunken sailors in part because of the Democrats’ “green dream” agenda, the president’s response was dismissive. “There’s nobody suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way, no serious economist,” Biden claimed back in July 2021.
Indeed, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen infamously insisted that the sky-high inflation was “transitory” at the time. Of course, she now says: “I regret saying it was transitory. It has come down. But I think transitory means a few weeks or months to most people.” Yeah, not years. But this is what happens when an activist agenda guides an administration’s policies.
It’s promoting an agenda of globalism over and against nationalism.
Democracy” is not the defining feature of a free country.
The defining feature of a free country is: individual rights.
Either you have rights, or you don’t. The most basic right is the right to life. A resulting right is the right to be left alone. A government should not exist at all, other than to help protect your rights to be left alone — including, from the government itself.
In a free society, the only thing that’s illegal is the initiation of force. If someone tries to kill you, and you shoot them first, that’s not the initiation of force. That’s self-defense. If you physically impose yourself on another, that’s the initiation of force. It’s at this point — and only at this point — that we need police: to protect the rights of the individual. That’s it.
Fraud should also be against the law. However, fraud has to be objectively proven under a Bill of Rights and the rule of law. The law doesn’t get suspended for people who are IN with the government, and activated against people who are not IN with the government. That’s not a free country, and that’s not a government. That’s a gang of unaccountable mobsters, which we absolutely have today, unequivocally at the federal level and often at the state or local level.
“Democracy” does not refer to a free country where the rights of the individual are paramount. Democracy is a form of mob rule. The majority ruling over the rights of the individual refers to the precise opposite of a free country.
All we hear about today are people who are “threats to democracy.” All this means — both in principle, and in practice — are threats to the ruling Party. The ruling party are the paid-off and/or blackmailed politicians who comprise literally all of the Democratic Party and much of the Republican Party (the RINOs). We might call them the Uniparty.
We’re told that the majority supports the Uniparty. That’s almost certainly not true, and we have no way of knowing since elections are increasingly rigged and most of the media lies about virtually everything, in service of the Uniparty.
But even if the majority supports the slaughter of our Constitution and Bill of Rights that’s done openly, on an hourly basis by the Biden regime and an almost entirely complicit Congress and federal court system, it does not matter. If 99.9999 percent support all of it, it’s still wrong. And in a free country, it would be illegal.
Treason is about the gentlest term to apply to the people who have become our rulers in this “democracy.” If we’re ever to be free again, they all have to be removed from power, appropriately punished and never permitted to ruin any of our lives again.
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THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 