Category Archives: Politics

Pink Floyd Reminds Us of Why We Should Defund Government Schools

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Lyrics from Pink Floyd’s song seem to be talking about Critical Race Theory, i.e., what passes for “education” in today’s thought control mills, government-run schools:

We don’t need no education
We dont need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall.
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.

We don’t need no education
We dont need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall.
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Joe Must Go

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After more than seven months of the worst presidency in American history, Joe Biden must leave the White House. He has been a complete and total disaster.

Almost every Trump voter understood that Biden would be an unmitigated failure as president. His 50-year career as a politician clearly showed that he was an admitted plagiarist and a serial liar who was wrong on almost every foreign and domestic issue.

He limped into the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination due to the worry that his major opponent, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT). was too much of a socialist. Ironically, Biden is now pursuing a socialist agenda that is very pleasing to Sanders.

In the presidential race, he was “elected” in a very disputed race against President Donald Trump due to a variety of factors. Most importantly, Democratic governors used the excuse of the pandemic to allow for massive and unverified “mail-in” voting that totally changed the dynamic of the election.

Upon taking office, Biden unleashed a torrent of executive orders and policy decisions that were designed to undo everything President Trump had accomplished. As president, Biden has appointed a radical cabinet of progressives to implement his socialist agenda.

As president, Biden has been wrong on every major decision. When he stopped construction of the border wall and the Keystone XL pipeline, Biden listened to his party’s left-wing instead of exhibiting common sense.

Thus, our border is wide open, and over two million illegal aliens are projected to arrive in our country, many sick with COVID, this year. Our country is once again begging OPEC for more production because we are no longer energy independent. Our cities are in crisis as crime has skyrocketed and inflation is on the rampage as prices for gasoline and other essential commodities have increased dramatically.

Despite all of these horrific mistakes, nothing compares to Biden’s catastrophic handling of the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. This is clearly his biggest disaster for Biden has now given our enemy, the Taliban, a tremendous victory, and provided Islamic terrorists an American defeat to use as a jihadist recruitment tool.

In the last few weeks, the United States has looked both weak and foolish in granting the Taliban control of our airport, our embassy, and our massive cache of weapons. Most importantly, this enemy now controls the fate of thousands of innocent American citizens.

In 1979, our country was traumatized because Islamic extremists held 52 Americans hostage at our embassy in Tehran. The crisis only ended when Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president and the terrorists in Iran were unwilling to test his mettle. If they had provoked Reagan, it would not have ended well for them, so they released our hostages.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban is holding thousands of our citizens hostage because they are not allowing them access to the airport to leave the country. When Trump dealt with the Taliban, they understood he was a tough president who meant business. This is why none of our troops were killed in the last 18 months of the Afghanistan conflict.

It was their fear of what President Trump may do that motivated their cooperation. They knew that Trump had rebuilt our military, had ordered the death of the world’s top two terrorists, and had destroyed the ISIS “caliphate” in Syria.

Their plan was to wait for Biden to become president and then act. Amazingly, Biden announced the withdrawal date from Afghanistan and then removed our troops before securing the escape of thousands of American citizens.

For the past few days, Biden has lied about the situation in Afghanistan in his press appearances. Contrary to Biden’s statement, it has not been possible for thousands of Americans to reach the Kabul Airport. In fact, a U.S. warning was issued for Americans to stay away from the airport because of safety concerns.

While Biden claimed Al-Qaeda had not returned to Afghanistan, spokesmen from his administration contradicted his assurances. Both Al-Qaeda and ISIS are surely back in Afghanistan and will certainly establish new terrorist training camps in the country because they know they will have the support of the Taliban.

Sadly, America is back to where we were in 2001, except that we have lost over 5,000 military heroes and contractors fighting in Afghanistan. In addition, the American taxpayers have paid over $2 trillion for this futile exercise in nation building.

The latest reports indicate the Taliban have seized a tremendous amount of our military equipment, including 200 aircraft, 600,000 weapons and 75,000 vehicles, along with 11 former U.S. military bases. Not only do Taliban terrorists control our military assets, but they also control the fate of thousands of American citizens and our Afghan allies.

Biden created this calamity and must be removed from office. Unfortunately, there are only a few options to allow for this result. He can resign, which is doubtful. He can also be impeached and convicted, and that is also unlikely because corrupt Democrats currently control the U.S. Congress.

The most likely option is to utilize the 25th Amendment. In this case, his removal can be triggered by an official declaration to congressional leaders from the vice president and a majority of his cabinet that the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

If Biden hangs on until the mid-term election and the Republicans take back control of the Congress, impeachment hearings can be commenced. Unlike President Trump, Biden deserves to be impeached and removed.

Coupled with his policy disasters that have destroyed border security, created chaos in our cities, threatened our economy with renewed inflation and energy dependence and endangered our national security with the Afghan withdrawal debacle, Biden is mentally compromised and unfit to uphold the duties of the presidency.

He is suffering from a serious mental decline that is obvious to anyone who watches his speeches or interviews. To make matters worse, his condition is deteriorating.

Joe Biden must go; the survival of our country depends on it.

Jeff Crouere

Biden Voters—Are You Tired of Losing Yet ?

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Hey Joe Biden voters, are you happy now?

Your boy Dementia Joe owns it all now — the catastrophe in Kabul, open borders, rampant inflation, skyrocketing urban crime, the destruction of American energy independence, endless nonsensical lockdowns over a mild virus that is killing almost no one, not to mention so many public misstatements by the doddering old clown that his own cabinet secretaries have to correct his insane lies even before he shuffles off to Marine One for the flight back to his weekend assisted-living facility in Delaware.

But no more mean tweets, right? And that’s all that matters, isn’t it?

Orange Man Bad used to ask, “Are you tired of winning yet?”

Dementia Joe, if he could still speak in coherent sentences, might sputter, “Are you tired of losing yet?”

After he was installed as president, Dementia Joe’s caregivers said of their Deep State foreign policy: America is Back. Surely they meant to say, “America is on its Back.”

Or maybe, America is Back on its Back, because this is a greater calamity than Barack Obama leading from behind — way behind. This is Jimmy Carter’s presidency on steroids, only worse, because at least Carter was trying, however ineptly, to do the right thing.

Dementia Joe, not so much.

Thanks, Joe Biden voters, for not being able to realize what Osama bin Laden did back in 2010, in a letter that was found in his personal effects after he was killed by the U.S. military (a raid Dementia Joe naturally opposed, because it was so obviously the right thing to do.)

Speculating about the prospect of a President Biden, bin Laden wrote:

“Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the US into a crisis.”

A terrorist knew it, 74 million Trump supporters knew it, but all those Biden voters (however many there actually were) apparently had no clue.

Or perhaps all of you Biden bumkissers were just bedazzled by his flowery oratory, his proposals for an American Rescue “Pan,” the centerpiece of his dream to “Build Back Pletter.” Biden voters, you believed every preposterous canard the alt-left media spoon-fed you — the Russian collusion hoax, the Ukrainian phone call, the Russian bounties on U.S. troops, Trump allegedly saying the military dead were “losers,” that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation,” that Jan. 6 was an “insurrection” and that a Capitol Police officer was murdered etc., etc.

But you didn’t care, did you, Biden voters? All you cared about was free stuff, handouts without end, because, you know, the virus.

Biden supporters are by definition low-information voters, because if they were paying attention, they’d be as concerned about the rapid unraveling of this society as those of us who work for a living and are not on the dole — i.e., aren’t Democrats.

Of course Biden’s cheerleaders in the media are handling the non-working classes the same way farmers do mushrooms — keeping them in the dark and feeding them excrement.

Last week, Dementia Joe sat down for a kid-gloves interview with Democrat operative George Stephanopoulos. The video was damning enough — Biden came across like a cross between Grandpa Simpson and Norm Crosby. But the transcript was even more damning.

This is what ABC “News” left on the cutting-room floor, and refuses to release the video of.

Steffie quotes an Army vet saying, “I just wish we could’ve left with honor.”

To which Joe responded, according to the official ABC transcript:

“Look, that’s like askin’ my deceased son Beau, who spent six months in Kosovo and a year in Iraq as a Navy captain and then major — I mean, as an Army major. And you know, I’m sure h-he had regrets comin’ out of Afghanista — I mean, out of Iraq.”

So he forgot the branch of the military service his beloved son Beau served in, his rank and the foreign country in which he was stationed. And this in a slobbering interview with an obsequious Democrat partisan.

Friday it was more of the same. Only “reporters” from the fakest of Fake News outlets — PBS, NPR, ABC “News” — were afforded an opportunity to fawn and pose him questions on bended knee.

And yet Dementia Joe still didn’t know his rear end from a hole in the ground.

On one issue after another — foreign opprobrium over our abject surrender, American citizens’ access to the Kabul airport, the presence of al-Qaeda — Biden either didn’t know what he was talking about, or he was lying, or both.

When Tucker Carlson nightly plays this video of a hopelessly addled old fool on Fox News, he always mentions at the end how sorry he feels for this feeble, ruined, corrupt shell of a human being.

I don’t feel sorry for Biden at all. I feel sorry for me — and for you, and for all of us who understood before his selection just how demented he was, and is.

Are you happy now, Biden voters?

Howie Carr

Why Civilization is Failing

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In a way, the greatest threat to civilization isn’t leftism, although leftism and Communism/fascism are the means of our present destruction. The greatest threat to civilization and freedom is lack of independent thinking.

If independent, rational thinking were more commonplace, leftism wouldn’t stand a chance. Nor would any form of irrational, self-contradictory, life-suffocating group-think.

I have known for decades that independent, rational thinking is a problem in our culture. I had no idea how widespread and deep this problem went, until the years 2020 and 2021. We don’t have a self-esteem crisis on our hands; it’s more like a self-esteem catastrophe. The great majority of us, even in America of all places, appear to be putty in the hands of the most inept, morally corrupt and intellectually decrepit rulers ever to present themselves in human history.

Independent thinking could have prevented 80 percent of this, and by mid-2021 we would have been well beyond the worst of it. Unfortunately, independent thinking is in amazingly short supply — and I say “amazingly” because we live in the age of information, where the vast majority have more information at their fingertips (even with free speech waning) than human beings have ever enjoyed in all of history.

An independent thinker is the type of person who does NOT do the following: Look at what everyone else seems to be doing, saying or thinking; and then doing, thinking or saying it.

An independent thinker looks at what’s true. He assumes there’s truth, and he takes responsibility for trying to figure it out. An independent thinker puts facts at the forefront, and always does his own thinking. Even when he defers to an expert, he THINKS about what makes that person an expert, and why that person deserves trust. He never depends solely on experts. He views experts (if worthy of the title) as means to the end of his own thinking.

An independent thinker does NOT look at the “expert” that “everyone else” seems to view as an expert, and then take it from there. An independent thinker makes assessments of who deserves to be considered an expert, and why. “Consider the source” is a statement you don’t hear much of these days, although it’s a profoundly wise one.

To most people, being an independent thinker sounds like too much work. It seems easier, and even more rational, and efficient, to look at others and say, “Well, this seems to be good enough for most people. So why not for me?”

However, when a dependent thinker does this, he’s relying on thousands or millions of people who are doing the exact same thing as he’s doing. “Everyone else wears a mask. Everyone else gets an experimental vaccine drug. Everyone else [fill-in-the-blank-here]. So I will too.” Or: “Nobody else seems to object to huge tax rates. Nobody else seems to object to vaccine passports. Nobody else seems to object to the rounding up of people and taking them away to government reeducation camps. So it can’t be THAT bad.”

The problem is that “everyone else” is ALSO thinking, “Well, everyone else is doing it. Everyone else seems to think it’s OK.” If “everyone else” is the standard, then what kind of standard do you have?

You’ve heard the phrase: the blind leading the blind. That’s literally how you get Nazi Germany. Or the anti-scientific, religiously enslaved Middle Ages (or Iran and Afghanistan today). Or the Western World today, where seven-year-olds are wearing masks at school, permanently into the future, and where they learn at those schools (as most of their parents did) how NOT to think independently.

It’s heartbreaking to experience, witness and endure the collapse of a once great civilization.

But to me, at least, it’s so easy to understand why it’s all happening. And why it’s so utterly, and tragically, unnecessary.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Why are we Being Deceived about COVID ?

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Why have US corporations involved themselves in public health policy? Why have they taken a position that is totally contradicted by all facts and all known evidence?

It is not only democratic governments that have turned totalitarian but also private corporations who are asserting authority to override the Nuremberg Laws and mandate that employees be vaccinated with the Covid Vaccine. A vaccination is a medical procedure and requires informed consent.

It is very strange to find corporations recruited to serve a coerced marketing campaign. We hear about the “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” But there is no such pandemic. All evidence shows that the majority of new cases are among the double inoculated.

Public officials and the presstitutes are implying that it is those who refuse the vaccine who are responsible for the new outbreak when to the contrary it is the vaccinated people who are the cause of the variants and new illnesses. As Dr. Malone, the inventor of the mRNA technology used to create the vaccine, has patiently explained, the vaccine trains the virus to produce variants that escape vaccines. https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2021/08/16/all-of-the-evidence-is-in-the-covid-vaccine-is-a-failure/

Considering the enormous number of deaths and injuries associated with the vaccine, we are faced with the conclusion that the vaccine gives those vaccinated Covid illnesses. Some have severe symptoms, some die, others don’t know they have it. It is the same as with the virus itself. https://covidcalltohumanity.org/2021/06/07/nicanor-perlas-scientists-sound-alarm-vaccines-will-kill-millions/

The medical establishment has avoided autopsies of vaccine-related deaths. The narrative doesn’t want to acknowledge them. People ruined by the vaccine can get no help from the medical establishment. Finally an autopsy was done, and the first autopsy of a vaccine-caused death supports these conclusions:

“This post-mortem study only confirms our worst fears that the Covid-injections cause more harm than good, and may actually even speed up the spread of the virus.

“According to the report, researchers found that the patient’s entire body had become overrun with high viral RNA loads, also known as vaccine-induced spike proteins. This has been reported by many investigators and even further research on what really is in the vaccine. [Read Covid vaccines not as effective as you think to learn more].

“This indicates two things.

“1. The mRNA from the vaccine is not localized to the injection site where it’s supposed to be but spread on other organs. [Read New evidence explains how mRNA vaccines cause organ damage to see the evidence.]

“2. We know the decedent was exposed to Covid-19. The virus was in every organ in his body. Based on what we know about coronavirus vaccines in the past, this could be seen as a signal of antibody-dependent enhancement [Read What is pathogenic priming? And Briefing document on Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine shows evidence of pathogenic priming among older adults]

“This means that the vaccine cannot stop the virus from spreading [in Pfizer’s briefing document to the Food and Drug Administration, they already intimated about this, see FDA knew there would be many COVID cases among the fully vaccinated and Leaked Pfizer contracts show they knew of adverse effects and lack of long-term efficacy of vaccines.]

“We have been programmed to believe that we can only go back to normal through the vaccines. Our governments didn’t tell us that these vaccines are ineffective and do not offer protection. [In the article COVID vaccines not as effective as you think, we learn that the real reduction rate for these vaccines, what scientists call absolute risk reduction or the difference in protection rates between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, is lower than 1% for some vaccines.] Expect massive propaganda of lies and panic especially with the advent of variants.”

https://covidcalltohumanity.org/2021/08/18/ground-breaking-autopsy-report-shows-the-vaccinated-had-toxic-spike-proteins-all-over-the-body/

No evidence exists that supports the claim of CDC director Rochelle Walensky that the delta variant is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”

No evidence exists that the vaccine protects against Covid. Indeed, the vaccine seems to spread the virus.

We have learned that there is no such thing as “fully vaccinated.” The new program is endless booster shots every few months, the result of which will be an explosion in adverse effects from the vaccine.

The Covid policy is so counterfactual and so contradicted by all evidence that conspiracy theorists who see a darker agenda at work are gaining credibility. When a vaccine has proven itself not to protect but to cause unprecedented deaths and illnesses, how can any intelligent person arrive at the conclusion that more vaccine is the solution?

How is it possible that the president of the United States is so poorly advised that he said on Wednesday August 18:

“Earlier today, our medical experts announced a plan for booster shots for every fully vaccinated adult American. This will boost your immune response, it will increase your protection from Covid-19. It’s the best way to protect ourselves from new variants that could arise.” The American president’s statement is total ignorance and blatant nonsense.

Why the desperate rush to force the unvaccinated to accept the vaccine? Fear was the instrument for the original vaccine push. Shame and guilt are the instruments for the second push. Is the game plan to get the world vaccinated before the deaths and illnesses from the vaccine can no longer be ignored?

It should disturb everyone and raise very serious questions why the leading experts and doctors are censored by the media and their warnings ignored by politicians and public health officials. When leading scientists and medical experts are ignored by authorities, how can we trust what politicians and bureaucrats tell us about Covid and the vaccine?

The Covid Narrative is a controlled one. Scientists are censored and public debate by scientists and doctors is prevented.

Why? Is there a secret agenda to which health and lives are being sacrificed?

Why Biden is Far More Dangerous than Jimmy Carter

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It’s interesting to watch the Communist media and all the Biden allies in European governments, as well as America’s Communist Democratic Party, pile on him.

Last year, and earlier this year, Biden could do no wrong. So long as he wasn’t Trump — and so long as he’s not a Republican, and so long as he’s not even a “moderate” Democrat — he can do no wrong. He serves his purpose.

Seemingly, that’s all out the window after the collapse of Afghanistan.

Is something afoot?

Remember: Biden has no accountability to the American people. Personally, he may have accountability– to the people who ensured his regime would be in office in the first place. If his regime no longer pleases them, then they will take steps, through the media they dominate, to do whatever they need to do. It’s just like mask mandates and vaccinations. So long as these things please them and serve their power pursuits, they are imposed; when they tire of these methods, they move on to others — or go back again. Whims are how tyrants function. There’s nothing mysterious or brilliant about it. There never has been.

None of these leftist, fascist or “woke” Communist tyrants care in the least about American military strength or credibility. They only care about their own power (and money, of course). In some sense, their power depends, at least in part, on the American military. They’re counting on everyone in the military to support their woke, far left efforts. But nothing seems to phase these people. They are drunk with power. In their drunkenness, they act like they’re truly mad. It stems less from mental illness than unchecked evil, combined with no accountability whatsoever for their actions.

Biden isn’t the main one to watch. The ones to watch are in the media. The media consists of thoroughly dishonest, and not-very-smart people who all look to each other for ideas about how to compose a narrative that fits in with what seems cool, or acceptable. They represent the utter antithesis of objectivity, or truth. Nevertheless, they are very much the drivers of today’s society. We have seen that with how they control other people’s behavior regarding COVID-19. They’re literally drunk with power. They know, or at least have reason to believe from repeated recent experience, that they can literally shut down civilization on a moment’s notice by screaming that the sky is falling (and getting “Dr. Fauci” to agree with them).

The real question: What does a leftist totalitarian have to gain through Biden’s downfall, if it happens? The rise of Kamala Harris? Perhaps. Or maybe something else is in store for us.

All we can know for sure is that the people in charge are NOT accountable to the voters. The voters stopped asserting their rights by giving in to COVID, including the phenomenon of mail-in voting which enabled Biden’s faux presidency.

The government does not serve any rational purpose, certainly not after the “election” of 2020. It does not serve the interests of the people, not any longer. The government is about service to a small number of corrupt elites — driven by money, irrational ideology, or both — who will sacrifice everything worthwhile about human life in order to get it.

When Jimmy Carter’s disasters piled up back in the late 1970s, he was actually held accountable. Ronald Reagan and the Republicans crushed him in the election of 1980, and the results of that election mattered for many years after. Some of the old-school, more conservative newscasters try to report about Biden on the same premise. What they’re missing is that this is not 1979; and it’s not your granddaddy’s failed presidency.

That’s what makes the present situation far more dangerous than 1979. Today’s leftists are not accountable. They are amoral, sinister and utterly irredeemable monsters. Our fate lies in their hands, unless the all-too-silent majority can yet figure out a way to bring them down. Biden is their poster child, but his arrogant ineptitude is simply a concrete illustration of just what we’re up against.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

White Privilege and White Racism are Hoaxes

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As part of the false reality that The Matrix has created for us, white people are privileged because of their skin. Allegedly, this privilege creates in white people the impression that they are superior to all others, and this makes them racists.

This dogma has become immune to all evidence. For example, when Americans elected Obama, who regards himself as black, President of the United States and then re-elected him, it passed unnoticed that these events disproved that the white majority is racist.

I have often wondered why Obama, who is half white and half black, chose to be regarded as a black person. This decision cost him “white privilege.” Obviously, Obama, a politician accustomed to considering what most improved his chances, decided that the advantage was in being black, not in being white.

Obama is not the only mixed race person of note who decided being black was advantageous to being white. Lewis Hamilton is also half white, half black, and he also has chosen to be black rather than white. His annual salary as a Formula One race champion is $50 million. His current net worth is $285 million.

His racing team mate Valtteri Bottas, a white man, makes $12 million annually, and has a net worth of $20 million. Bottas often has to forgo winning in order to block challengers to Hamilton.

There is no doubt that Hamilton has been for the past seven years the best. He has been aided by having the best car. Hamilton is a 7 times world champion, matching the record of the legendary German Michael Schumacher. Hamilton is a gifted race driver. I have watched many races in which he starts last as a result of mechanical difficulties during qualifying or penalties and wins the race. Formula One racing is highly competitive. Hamilton is up against Vettel, a four time world champion, and Alonzo, a two time champion, and a number of one time champions. The cars make much of the difference, and in recent years the Mercedes and Red Bull teams have had the best cars.

Until the last two races, Red Bull’s Max Verstappen was leading Hamilton in championship points. But Hamilton and then Bottas succeeded in knocking him off the track into the wall, thus putting him out of the last two races. This sets Hamilton up to own the record of 8 world championships. Mercedes, a German company with a black driver, is in line to again win the manufacturers championship.

Why does Hamilton, who is 50% white and 50% black, identify as a black if there is white privilege?

If white people were racists, why do the white British Formula One fans cheer Hamilton so sincerely and delight in his wins?

I watched recently the British Grand Prix, and the English stands full of tens of thousands of white people were enthralled with their black champion.

In other words, all this white racism stuff is poppycock. Go watch a deep South football or basketball game. 85-90% of the players are black, and the white fans cheer them wildly. How does this reconcile with white racism?

You are not allowed to say so, but the same holds for National Socialist Germany according to documented facts presented in his histories by David Irving. The national socialists went through extensive debates as to how much of a Jew one had to be to be a Jew. Whatever the decision, Irving reports that there were 150,000 half or quarter Jews serving as officers in the Wehrmacht.

How do we reconcile this fact with the holocaust? We can’t, because no one is allowed to investigate or offer an opinion. The holocaust is unchallengeable. Europeans and Canadians who challenge it go to prison.

The situation in which the Western world lives is one in which reality is based on suppositions and ideological assertions, not on facts. Facts have become irrelevant in the Western world. Having rejected facts, Western civilization, which is based on facts, has repudiated itself.

It is this self-repudiation that signals the dissolution of Western civilization.

As Jean Raspail made clear in 1973 in The Camp of the Saints, European Civilization only exists in its monuments. In the United States, allegedly a Christian country, no Christian symbols are permitted on public display at Easter and Christmas.

There is no such thing as a living civilization whose roots are dug up and cast away.

Biden’s Humanitarian Crisis

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The following is from the article, “How Big Is the Angry Majority?” by John Green, posted 8-20-21 at The American Thinker website.

If one takes the 2020 election results as legitimate (I don’t, but that’s for another day), Biden received 80.0M votes, and Trump received 73.9M votes. However, in November of last year, the Media Research Center conducted a poll of Biden voters. Seventeen percent said they would have changed their vote had they known about any of a number of news stories spiked by the MSM. The news stories of which they were unaware included Biden scandals (sexual harassment and influence-peddling) and reporting about Trump’s successes (the economy, Middle East negotiations, and energy independence). That’s a whopping 13.6M voters who wish they had voted differently — as of November of 2020! It also means that the number of voters now opposing Biden has gone from a minority of 73.9M to a majority of 87.5M (versus 66.4M who still favor him). It’s a testament to the power of propaganda. Is it likely that any of these people has moved back into the “happy with Biden” column? Hint: People don’t like being deceived; it makes them angry.

Now let’s look at what’s happened since the election and see if events are likely to move anyone out of the “angry” column and back into the “happy” column. As Richard Fernandez aptly put it, Joe Biden has treated America to a cascade of failures. The failures started immediately after his inauguration and have gotten progressively worse.

In his first week in office, President Asterisk signed a number of executive orders that throttled the fossil fuel industry in America. Prices at the pump have jumped an average of 40% in just the last eight months. More importantly, we are dependent on foreign oil once again. Joe even begged OPEC (including such friends as Iran, Libya, and Venezuela) for help. They politely declined. Who could have seen that coming? Is this moving Americans to the “happy” or “angry” column?

President Asterisk immediately reversed President Trump’s border control protocols and triggered a humanitarian crisis. Apprehensions have reached 200,000 per month — that’s apprehensions, not total crossings. Illegals are being detained in overcrowded facilities and even under bridges — and yes, we do have children in cages again. It’s gotten so bad that the Harris/Biden administration is bussing illegals — many of them COVID-positive — around the country and dropping them off in unsuspecting communities. Is this moving Americans to the “happy” or “angry” column?

Deficit spending and ill advised pandemic policies are creating skyrocketing inflation. Printing money has devalued the dollar, and paying people not to work has created a shortage of products and services. Any discretionary family income is rapidly being eaten up. People are losing buying power and watching the value of their savings evaporate. Is this moving Americans to the “happy” or “angry” column?

Joe has created a humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, which has cost America influence on the world stage. Just as he did with The Donald’s border plans, Joe threw away the Trump exit plans. Contrary to military and Intelligence Community recommendations, he ordered an immediate and unconditional exit from the country. Now we have something north of 10,000 Americans trapped in country. We’re being treated to images of panicked Afghans clinging to the side of departing aircraft, only to eventually fall to their deaths. According to a Trafalgar Poll, an astounding 70% of Americans disapprove of Joe’s handling of the exit. Is this moving anybody from the “happy” to the “angry” column?

Laissez-faire Capitalism: Still the Unknown Ideal

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Ayn Rand collected and published a number of her economic essays under the title, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.   She was not the first to identify the anomaly.  At the height of the Great Depression, Samuel Pettengill wrote:  “When it is said that free enterprise has failed, my answer is that we have not permitted it to work.”

Unfortunately, the debate over capitalism has largely overlooked the vital point Pettengill and Rand raised.  Thousands of words are written daily on the subject, but we have to wonder how many writers know what they are talking about?  Myths and misconceptions have plagued historical research and continue to hinder conceptual clarity on the question.

The capitalism we debate doesn’t exist.  There is Laissez-faire capitalism that respects productive labor, private property, and voluntary exchange.  Then there is crony capitalism.  By this arrangement corporate welfare benefits, privileges and immunities are awarded to well-connected lobbyists and special interest groups, invariably at public expense (if only for taxpayers).  Cronyism comes in a variety of flavors.  We speak of pork, bacon, earmarks, member items, constituent services, protective tariffs, farm, and business subsidies, bank bailouts, pay-to-play and too-big-to-fail.  And then there are the profits private, “non-profit” agencies reap by providing the services to which social welfare recipients are lawfully “entitled.”

These two economic models should not be lumped into a single unit of analysis and called “capitalism.”  Laissez-faire rejects the visible, invariably corrupt hand that crony politics plays.  Unlike genuine capitalists, counterfeit capitalists seek to mitigate normal market risks by getting the government to provide a safe bet or sure thing.  Hence is public power routinely put to private, pecuniary use (and thankful beneficiaries are happy to pay their benefactors a hefty price for the privilege).

Talk about myths and misconceptions, take the conventional reading of America’s past.  It is widely reported that the 19th-century American economy was essentially unregulated.  This economic “anarchy,” it is said, precipitated a long series of boom-and-bust business cycles.  So populists and Progressives naturally and “compassionately” demanded remedial measures to combat the hardships capitalist “progress” repeatedly produced.

Is any of this true?  First, the 19th-century economy was politically regulated every step of the way.  Perhaps government didn’t impose restraints on business enterprise (e.g., minimum wage or environmental mandates)  But at no point could the market freely go about its business.  Free enterprise must be free not just of acts that impede economic growth.  They must be free of public policies that positively promote economic growth, as well.

It turns out that the country’s long succession of financial panics and enduring depressions were precipitated not by free-market activities, but by crony capitalist policies?

Failed corporate welfare schemes, alone, created the “need,” and demand for social welfare reform from the Progressive Era to the New Deal and beyond?

Corporate welfare provisions helped some, harmed others, and severely distorted the pace and direction of business growth, especially with respect to patterns of capital investment.  Once the government’s best-laid plans bumped into flesh-and-blood, economic players, all bets for a happy ending were off.  Land and stock speculators saw their opening and took it.  They blew up the bubbles of prosperity that, for a while, happily expanded, then tragically exploded, leaving behind years of hardship.  In the history of the republic, this pattern forms an unbroken chain of events (down to 2008).  What is worse, the bold political efforts to revive a moribund economy only prolonged the pain.  Consider FDR’s New Deal.  Never before had an administration done so much to restore prosperity and never before had poverty spread so far and persisted so long.

The origins of the corporate welfare state can be traced to the second bill signed into law by our first president, the Tariff Act of 1789.  Indeed, a long succession of tariff acts benefited domestic manufactures but,  by crippling transatlantic trade, materially harmed farmers, planters, shipbuilders, seaport merchants, and thousands employed in the maritime and carting trades.  Every family paid more for the manufactured goods it purchased.  And since ever-higher tariff duties cut into Britain’s sale of textiles in America, her industries didn’t need as much southern cotton.  At a time when cotton was the country’s leading export, rising tariff duties devastated (1) those who labored in the soil and (2) the banks that issued their mortgages and loans.  In combination with Alexander Hamilton’s other “implied powers” and pragmatic financial plans, the young republic ran right into the Panic of 1792.

How did we get from that day to this?  Once the nation decided that some of its citizens had a right not to go out and get, but to lobby Congress and be given, it faced two daunting questions:  who else should be given and exactly how much should everyone get?  There was only one answer:  politics.  Out of the darkness of despair, men like John Dewey came along and promised a  bold, experimental path to reconstruction and growth.  The pragmatic politics of Progressivism would light the way.  We are just beginning to see where Progressivism is leading us.  What was the title?  The Road to Serfdom?

The conclusion is clear.  The boom-and-bust business cycle is a purely political, not an economic, phenomenon.  It occupies no space in a free, unfettered market governed only by Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand.  To this point, markets have not been free, but regulated for the benefit of a cacophony of special interests.  Drain the swamp, then watch what wonders a laissez-faire economy can generate.  Unbounded opportunity to pursue success in a multiplicity of human occupations and endeavors, outpourings of life-saving, labor-saving gadgets and inventions to bring affordable comforts and conveniences to the masses and lessen the burdens of daily life, this is what a laissez-faire future shorn of liberal, welfare socialism has to offer.  It’s an ideal worth working for and attaining.

Jerome Huyler