The problem with America is NOT vaccines. The problem is that the government got involved in the vaccine — and medical — industry.

If the government stayed out of medicine, then the market would rule. Patients, people and doctors would decide what works and what doesn’t. There would be nothing but freedom of choice. The government would not pick winners and losers. The government would stay the hell out — doing nothing at all, other than enforcing private property rights.

Instead, the government gets involved; picks a winner; and then threatens to throw you in jail if you don’t agree. Many of us would be in jail right now, had it not been for President Trump’s federal court appointments who struck down most of the Biden vaccine mandates.

My point is: There never would have been any vaccine mandates in the first place, if the government had stayed the hell out of medicine.

The media would have no government propaganda to push. The media would have to persuade readers — in a free marketplace of ideas and news — that they were telling the truth. The media would not have all the influence and faux authority it enjoys now, if the government stayed the hell out of the private sector.

Similarly, the problem with America is NOT electric cars, or electric stoves or gas stoves. The problem is that the government gets involved where it has no business. The government has decided it’s time to move on from gas stoves and gas vehicles, and go to electric vehicles and stoves exclusively. It stands ready to mandate. If enough of the Trump judges are gone, then we’ll all be stuck with those mandates forever.

Government seeks to impose a one-size-fits-all solution on everyone. In a marketplace, there would be a variety of choices, a variety of solutions and ultimately — even if electric vehicles did prove to be a slam-dunk value over gas vehicles (unlikely) — then most people would eventually go along. Most people went along with the motor car over the horse and buggy. But it took decades and Henry Ford (who first mass marketed the automobile) to make this change. If the government has passed a law in the 1920s mandating that everyone surrender their horse and begin driving a vehicle immediately, it would have been catastrophic. Most would have been unable to afford vehicles, and Henry Ford would never have been forced to innovate and mass market the automobile to appeal to customers — not if customers were guaranteed by a government forcing them to buy a product they cannot afford. Thousands — millions, probably — would have slid into poverty and even starved, making the Great Depression seem like nothing in comparison.

That’s where we’re headed. The government gets involved — and makes a mess of things. Part of the reason? The average government bureaucrat is not very smart, and (even if he or she is smart), is not held accountable in any way. Politicians are even less accountable for the wreckage they create. No matter how much of a debacle a politician creates, he or she is rewarded with millions (or billions) in wealth and unconditional support from athletes, actors, celebrity superstars and corporate bigwigs who, in turn, are rewarded and subsidized by the government only if they please the government.

The government and all economic activity should be completely separate. Politicians, the least accountable and usually the least smart people in existence, should have less to do with making economic decisions than anyone. Yet we have created precisely the opposite situation.

That’s why America is so vulnerable to a state-run economy like China. China is better at being a state-run economy than America is. But if America were a free market economy, with no government intervention in what goes on, the United States would wipe the floor with Communist China. Instead, we’re losing.

It’s a brutal injustice. And such an unnecessary one. America is heading for a tragic ending, sooner than probably any of us know. And not a bit of it was ever, ever necessary.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

“A man is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits.”

Epictetus

************

“The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in prison.”

(Unknown)

************

“It’s better to be the oldest person in the gym than the youngest person in the nursing home.”

— @FitFounder, Twitter

************

“Two things define you: your patience when you have nothing, your attitude when you have everything.”

(Unknown)

“I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become.”

— Carl Jung

Dr. Ben Carson, in a radio interview this morning, made a great point. He said that little children don’t think, care or talk about race. It’s true. To care about race, children have to be taught. Specifically, they have to be indoctrinated.

Today, little black (and white) children are indoctrinated with the idea that race matters more than just about anything. If you’re white, you’re to be humble and ashamed; if you’re not white, you don’t have to be humbled or ashamed. The implicit message can even be understood by a child: It’s not just that race matters; it’s that race is (in one case) morally shameful; and (in another case) an indication of achievement.

Race is totally genetic. It does not and should not matter, other than from the point of view of a biologist studying the human body and human genetics. But to make race matter, and to imply that race is a moral issue — involving either shame or pride — is worse than erroneous. It’s the kind of mistake that’s never innocent.

It wasn’t innocent when true white racial supremacists taught it; it wasn’t innocent when Hitler’s Nazi racists taught it; and it’s not innocent when today’s government and official authorities — the only ones permitted to offer an opinion, any longer — say it.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Her debut book, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom (2016), recounted, first, her life in the incomparably vile Hermit Kingdom, where there were no words for tyranny, trauma, depression, or love, and where, for nourishment (and long before Klaus Schwab decreed that it was our common culinary destiny) she captured and ate insects on the way to school; second, her 2007 escape to China, where at thirteen she was a sex slave; and, third, her 2009 flight to South Korea, where she began to learn what it meant to be free.

In sum, a remarkable story of triumph against extraordinary odds. But Yeonmi Park’s newly published second book, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector’s Search for Freedom in America, carries a message that’s even more relevant to Western readers.

For Park, South Korea was a revelation; landing there, after living in two Communist dictatorships, “was like traveling through space and time.” But it was nothing compared to America – to which, after being taken by Christian missionaries to Texas and Georgia, she returned to attend an anti-North Korea “hackathon” in California (although she wasn’t quite sure what hacking was).

“There are a number of places that are even more spectacular in person than they are in legend,” Park writes. “The same is rarely true of countries as a whole.” But for her it was most assuredly true of America, whose people she found to be astonishingly friendly, self-confident, and open – “clearly the descendents, I thought, of those who overturned imperialism and slavery, defeated fascism and communism, invented motion pictures and jazz, eliminated diseases, created the internet, and landed on the moon.”

In 2014, Park became an international sensation when a speech she gave in Dublin went viral. Soon afterwards I saw her speak at the Oslo Freedom Forum. It was there that she first heard about a U.S. residency visa for which she might be eligible. She applied, and was accepted. Shortly afterwards she flew to New York for the first time. If her delight in America had exceeded her wonder at South Korea, her awe at the Big Apple’s grandeur, dynamism, and diversity outstripped everything. In 2o15, she moved there.

Then she enrolled at Columbia University – and the bloom fell from the rose. Even before classes started, her professors and fellow students began trying to destroy her adoration of America: at orientation, an instructor told her that Jane Austen’s novels promoted “female oppression, racism, colonialism, and white supremacy.” In a freshman course on Western music, her classmates agreed with the instructor (whose hands, he lamented, were tied by the core curriculum) that studying dead white men like Beethoven and Mozart was problematic. When Park tried gently to push back, the instructor suggested that she’d been “brainwashed.”

So it went for four years. Too often at Columbia, Park encountered indoctrination, not education; instead of experiencing lively debate, she heard students mindlessly parrot their professors’ denunciations of “capitalism, Western civilization, white supremacy, systematic racism, oppression of minorities, colonialism, etc.” Talk about being brainwashed! For Park, it was all too reminiscent of North Korea – and a betrayal of the America she’d fallen in love with. This is, note well, a woman who, when she quotes the First Amendment, makes you read it with fresh eyes, and makes you see anew just how remarkable it is.

And yet Columbia and other Ivies teach young Americans to despise it.

It was at Columbia that Park first heard about “safe spaces” and “triggering.” She met rich kids with “made-up problems” – callow twits who “created injustice out of thin air” but had no clue as to “what injustice looks like in the world.” She saw boys twice her size break into tears over nonsense. “A lecture about Homer,” she recalls, “would end with a white student crying about colonialism.”

Then there was “misgendering.” One biological male who went by “they/their” admonished Park for calling him he. If she chose not to strike back by “tell[ing] this fragile soul about life in North Korea versus life in America,” it was because she saw “real suffering” in his eyes: he “truly felt threatened, harmed, and oppressed.” And she genuinely sympathized, understanding that he’d been indoctrinated – just as she’d been in North Korea.

But Park wasn’t entirely immune to progressive lies. Reading the New York Times and Washington Post daily, she had no doubt that Trump was indeed a “fascist” and “would-be dictator.” When friends vowed that they’d move to Canada if he won, she believed them; when he did win, she bought the lie that Putin was behind it.

She’d learn the truth soon enough – and much of that learning took place on the lecture circuit. Attending a 2014 women’s conference alongside Hillary Clinton and Meryl Streep, Park described women’s suffering in North Korea, but discovered that this glitzy gathering was all about “the suffering of women in America” – for example, “being only the vice president of a Fortune 500 company rather than the CEO.”

Then Jeff Bezos flew her on a Gulfstream to a Santa Barbara event called Campfire, where another star-studded crowd (Tom Hanks, Reese Witherspoon) cheered Harvey Weinstein’s rags-to-riches story. They also applauded Park’s talk about North Korea – until she started in on the evils of China. These elites’ wealth, she came to realize, depended largely on the CCP. They were, Park grasped, “more immoral than I’d thought they were,” and events like Campfire, swathed in noble rhetoric, were fundamentally unserious – opportunities for the beau monde to schmooze. (Later, by the way, when Weinstein was disgraced, Park asked someone she’d met at Campfire if she’d known about Weinstein’s conduct. “[O]f course she knew – everyone did.”)

On, then, to the 2017 Met Gala, where Park reflected that Pyongyang’s stereotypes of Western shallowness and materialism “might actually contain a hint of truth.” Still, she kept showing up at these glitterati conclaves, hoping to help her homeland. But the big shots, obsessed with Trump and climate change, didn’t give a damn about North Koreans.

And what of China, whose power over U.S. elites Park depicts so chillingly? It was, alas, her bluntness on this topic that turned her from an elite darling into a persona non grata. A Samsung subsidiary canceled a talk by her; so did the FBI’s Dallas field office. Park’s YouTube channel on North Korea got millions of hits – but when she covered China’s enslavement of North Koreans, her videos were demonetized. (Meanwhile, YouTube continues to host DPRK videos in which Park’s North Korean relatives and neighbors denounce her.)

Then Critical Race Theory and the “anti-racism” movement came onto her radar, reminding her of Juche – the Kims’ official ideology, “with its arcane vocabulary and impenetrable set of ideas that pretend to serve political change but really just sort ordinary people into different identity categories that keep them as separate as possible from the elite.” Having been “filled with joy” during her first American trips “to find that Dr. King’s dream was a reality” in the land of the free, Park understood at once just how anti-MLK CRT was.

Nor was she taken in by the woke crowd’s new race rules, whose utter absurdity was never clearer than when applied to her: she’d literally been a slave, but because she was Asian, the folks who adjudicated these things considered her white-adjacent and therefore an oppressor of 21st-century black Americans – whom they saw as still bearing slavery’s scars. (Regrettably, Park’s publisher, in line with CRT but in opposition to Park’s manifest sensibilities, has capitalized the word black throughout her book.)

In 2016, Park married. Two years later, she gave birth to a son. Last year, she became a U.S. citizen. God bless her. People like her – not that there are many of them – are America’s best hope. Her respect for its founding ideals, and her insights into the appalling ways in which many Americans today betray those ideals, are invaluable. Certainly few people’s life stories underscore as effectively as hers does the sheer inanity of the concept of group victimhood. In a recent interview with the Canadian author and podcaster Gad Saad, Park admitted that in her first book, on the advice of her publishers, she’d bitten her tongue about wokeness. No more.

Park shared with Saad, incidentally, one more story that revealed China’s influence in the U.S. today. Some Hollywood studio, she told Saad, purchased the film rights to her first book and eventually sent her a draft screenplay. To her shock, it portrayed her deliverance into freedom as taking place not in South Korea or America but – guess where? – in China.

Yes, this Tinseltown script transformed China – where the government harvests the organs of North Korean refugees – into Park’s “promised land.” This is precisely the kind of toxic thinking that goes on nowadays in New York, Washington, and Los Angeles – and that decent Americans need to be aware of and to stand up to. In While Time Remains, Yeonmi Park does a wise and valiant job of showing us how.

Bruce Bawer, Front Page Magazine

In 1987, Allan Bloom, then a professor at the University of Chicago, published The Closing of the American Mind. The book was hailed by conservatives and liberals alike. The New York Times wrote that it “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy.” The Washington Post called it, “Rich and absorbing… A grand tour of the American mind.” 

Bloom showed how the relativism taught at universities leads to closed minds. He lamented “parents’ loss of control over the children’s moral education at a time when no one else is seriously concerned with it.” The book was influential, but I wish its influence had been even greater. The Closing of the American Mind was like a sandcastle trying to hold back a rising tide.

Over time, the entertainment, political, media, and religious establishments joined the educational establishment in pushing the deadly ideas Bloom warned against. Today in America, the establishment has imprisoned the nation’s young within walls of closedmindedness, superstition, and paganism. The results have been devastating.

According to a new study released by the CDC, one in three high school girls admits to considering suicide in the last year. 57% of high school girls and 29% of high school boys say they experience persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness. Almost half of LGBTQ+ students have considered suicide and 37 percent of them have formed a suicide plan.

These numbers are staggering. What’s going on? Relativism, though a huge problem, is really the symptom of a bigger problem. You’ll find the real problem laid out in Romans 1:1832. Those verses speak of human beings “who suppress the truth in unrighteousness” (vs 18, NASB). It says, “Professing to be wise, they became fools” (vs 22). “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie” (vs 25).

God’s judgment is to allow his repudiators to have what they desire. “God gave them over to degrading passions” (vs 26). In Greek, the words translated “gave over to” carry the connotation of “surrender.” In a sense, God simply lets go. Romans 1:28 is one of the saddest verses in the Bible. “Just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind.” God surrenders them to the consequences of their own choices and desires.

Romans 1:29-31 gives us a taste of how depravity of mind manifests itself into the world. It leads people to “unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice.” It goes on to say, “They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful.”

We now live in that world. And we see the pain, sadness, loneliness, misery, and mental illnesses it causes. God remains all-powerful, but He allows us to choose whether we will push Him away or invite Him in. Americans as a whole have actively pushed God away for generations. We now see the sad, ugly results.

We should pray for a spiritual awakening in America and the world. But most of, let us pray for revival within ourselves and among our fellow Christians, so that we may effectively share God’s light in a darkening world.

Hal Lindsey

Biden Admin Negotiates Deal to Give WHO [World Health Organization] Authority Over US Pandemic Policies” [headline from theepochtimes.com]

This is the equivalent of giving the Chinese Communist Party–which is what WHO is–control over all 50 states. Not just New York and California, already run by Communists; but Texas, Florida, South Dakota, South Carolina, Oklahoma and Arkansas too.

Unless election fraud is magically fixed very soon, this is everyone’s future. Now do you understand why we need the decentralization of secession?

*****************

A Rasmussen Reports poll found that only 45 percent of voters under 40 say capitalism is better than socialism, while strong majorities of every other age group support capitalism. More than a third (34 percent) of voters under 40 think socialism is better, compared to 11 percent of voters ages 40-64 and 7 percent of voters 65 and above.

In the next couple of decades, America as we know it will be gone. The snowflakes will get their socialism, and my, how they’ll scream.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

In the 1960s Europe was European. Germany was German. France was French. Italy was Italian. The Netherlands were Dutch. Sweden was Swedish. Spain was Spanish. The distinct ethnic nationalities gave Europe a lot of diversity. Today all of these countries are towers of babel like the US and Canada. Even as recent as the beginning of the 21st century, immigrant-invaders accounted for only 1.6% of the Spanish population. Twenty years later immigrant-invaders are 15% of the population. Immigrant-invaders make up 26% of the German population ( https://www.dw.com/en/german-population-of-migrant-background-rises-to-21-million/a-54356773 ).

The immigrant-invaders concentrate in cities. According to this report — https://qz.com/337508/london-has-more-people-than-ever-and-44-are-ethnic-minorities — in 2015 “44% of London’s population consisted of black and ethnic minorities,” up from 29% in 2001. By 2020 the percentage had grown to 55% immigrant-invaders. The capital of Great Britain no longer has a British ethnic majority population.

A report from migrationwatchuk.org reports that the foreign born population of Britain doubled between 2001 and 2020. “A majority of inhabitants of London (55%), Slough (69%), Leicester (58%) and Luton (57%) are of ethnic minority (EM) background. The EM share in inner London was 60% in 2016, 48% in Birmingham,, and 42% in Manchester.”

Many other formerly British cities have experienced major demographic transformations ( https://www.migrationwatchuk.org/briefing-paper/493/immigration-and-population-change-in-the-uks-towns-and-cities ).

The demographic change in formerly ethnic European countries has had a dramatic effect. The English now have Sadiq Aman Khan of Pakistani descent as Mayor of London. The British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, is of Indian descent. Both men might be more British than the ethnic British themselves, but nevertheless the highest positions are ceasing to be held by ethnic British.

The real changes come at the neighborhood and city level. For example, Rotherham, population 265,000, formerly a prosperous British industrial powerhouse, has been overrun by Pakistani immigrant-invaders.

Theodore Dalrymple reports in the City Journal (Winter 2023) and the BBC reports here — https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-28939089 — that during the 21st century a minimum of 1,400 young white ethnic British girls as young as 11 were lured, abducted, held in captivity, and gang-raped by gangs of Pakistani men. The children were beaten, doused with gasoline and threatened to be set on fire, and trafficked to other towns and cities. Some were murdered and others died from heroin overdose. One 16 year old girl, pregnant from her multiple rapes, was stabbed 40 times and thrown into a canal by two young Pakistanis. One was acquitted of the killing. The other received a 17.5 year prison sentence. Julian Assange, convicted of no crimes has been imprisoned in Britain for a decade. British justice treats truth-tellers harsher than murderers of children.

As the years rolled by nothing was done by the police or authorities. Dalrymple says “the real problem for the Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council, it turns out, was how to cover up the situation.” Authorities were afraid that if word got out it would discredit the government’s immigration policy. The police were afraid of being charged with racism for protecting white girls from people of color. Like white women in Sweden, Rotherham’s white British population live in terror in their own country. The Camp of the Saints foretold the story of Rotherham.

It is the same in many European and American cities. There are areas into which no white people will go. As fear of racist charges hampers law enforcement, even upper class white neighborhoods, such as Buckhead in Atlanta, are plagued with home break-ins. The horror and the terror are papered over by white liberals and commercial advertisements as joyous diversity and multiculturalism. Governments in diminishingly white countries are no longer capable of realism. White people everywhere are too intimated to organize and protect themselves. They realize that the governments of their countries are against them and that any attempt by white people to organize will be branded a “white supremacist insurrectionist group” and its leaders and members will be arrested. Today demonized and unprotected white people are in the same position as Jews were in Nazi Germany. The fact that whites are still a majority of the overall populations of the countries doesn’t matter as they are prevented from organizing. They cannot even protest their plight without being labeled “racist.” In fact, many white people are incapable of recognizing their predicament. Social Darwinism is real after all, and whites have proven that they are not the fittests to survive.

Paul Craig Roberts

My questions to the millions of conservatives with their heads in the sand:

1) What makes you think that 2024, with continued mail-in voting in swing states, will result in a different outcome for Trump, DeSantis or any other Republican candidate for President?

2) If the Republicans again lose in 2024, under questionable circumstances, what strategy will you reccomend then?

3) If you don’t think secession by red states/red cities/red portions of blue states from the Democratic-RINO regime/machine is feasible or desirable, then how do propose enforcement of individual rights as guaranteed by the Bill of Rights?

4) Do you think once Democrats and RINOs once again have control of the Supreme Court (once Clarence Thomas is gone), as well as the federal courts (once Biden appointments outnumber Trump’s), do you think Democrats in power will begin to act according to the principles of the Constitution in ways they do not now? What will cause them to improve when they have even more power?

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason