Category Archives: Politics

If You Believe Life Will Return to Normal, You Have a Fundamental Misunderstanding of the Times in which We Live

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Despite all of the craziness that is going on out there, many pundits are trying to convince us that life will soon “return to normal” and that great days are just around the corner. They are telling us this despite the fact that the state of Texas has been in a state of collapse this week, the real economy continues to implode, the unemployment numbers are going up, civil unrest continues to rage in our streets on a nightly basis, and our entire planet continues to become even more unstable. Those that believe that happy days are here again have a fundamental misunderstanding of the times in which we live. This isn’t a period of time when America is going to “build back better”. Rather, this is a time when America is going to go even deeper into “the perfect storm”.

One of the reasons why so many on the left are feeling optimistic right now is because the COVID pandemic appears to be subsiding…

According to a CNN analysis of data from Johns Hopkins University, the US is seeing a 29% decline in new Covid-19 cases compared to this time last week, the steepest one-week decline the US has seen during the pandemic.

Improvements have been made; in a White House briefing Friday, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said the US continues to see a five-week decline, with the seven-day average of cases declining 69% since peaking on January 11.

We are being told that if the numbers continue to plummet like this, soon there won’t be a need for masks, social distancing and other restrictive measures any longer.

In fact, James Hamblin says that there is a possibility that “pre-pandemic life will return even before summer is upon us”…

If all of this holds true, it would mean that many aspects of pre-pandemic life will return even before summer is upon us. Because case numbers guide local policies, much of the country could soon have reason to lift many or even most restrictions on distancing, gathering, and masking. Pre-pandemic norms could return to schools, churches, and restaurants. Sports, theater, and cultural events could resume. People could travel and dance indoors and hug grandparents, their own or others’. In most of the U.S., the summer could feel … “normal.”

But is this pandemic really over, or is it just transitioning into a new chapter?

According to the Daily Mail, the number of confirmed cases of “Super COVID” in the United States is now doubling every 10 days…

There are now more than 1,600 cases of the UK’s B117 ‘super covid’ variant in the US, according to a DailyMail.com analysis. Cases are doubling approximately every 10 days, according to a recent Scripps Research Institute study.

‘Super covid’ cases have exploded in two states that took opposite approaches to the pandemic: California, which has been under some of the nation’s strictest lockdowns, and Florida which has never had a mask mandate.

Cases of the 70 percent more infectious variant have exploded to 433 in Florida, in less than one month since the first case was discovered there.

Of course many experts are far more concerned about the new COVID variants that have emerged in Brazil and South Africa. Both of those variants have now made it to the U.S., and we already know that the current vaccines don’t work very well against the South African variant.

Meanwhile, the U.S. economy continues to crumble right in front of our eyes.

On Thursday, we learned that another 861,000 Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week…

Last week’s initial jobless claims soared to 861,000, despite more states and cities lifting restrictive business measures amid a decline in the number of coronavirus cases. Economists had predicted around 773,000 first-time claims for the week ended Feb. 13. Data for the previous week was revised up to 848,000 from 793,000.

Unemployment claims have been at catastrophic levels for nearly a year, and now they are starting to surge higher once again.

We also just learned that a whopping 92 percent of all restaurants in New York City “could not afford to pay their rent in December”…

A new report from the NYC Hospitality Alliance shows the extreme financial problems restaurants in New York City are facing, as 92% of the city’s restaurants could not afford to pay their rent in December.

The number has steadily worsened throughout the pandemic, from 80% of restaurants in June 2020 not being able to pay rent.

92 percent!

That isn’t what a “recession” looks like.

The truth is that we are in an economic depression, and there is no end in sight.

At the same time, communities all over the U.S. continue to be plagued by civil unrest and crime.

In cities such as Seattle, violent protests and riots have essentially become a nightly occurrence at this point. But most of the violence that we are witnessing is old-fashioned crime. One study found that murder rates in major U.S. cities were up by an average of 30 percent last year, and the chaos has continued into 2021. If you want to see an example of the lawlessness that is prevailing in our urban areas right now, just watch this video.

On top of everything else, our entire planet continues to behave in very unusual ways.

For instance, on Friday morning there was a magnitude 4.2 earthquake in Oklahoma…

A 4.2-magnitude earthquake shook Oklahoma and Kansas Friday morning, the U.S. Geological Survey reports.

The 4.3-mile deep quake hit near Manchester, Oklahoma, at 7:56 a.m. CST, according to the USGS. Manchester is in northern Oklahoma near the state’s border with Kansas.

It is not normal to see earthquakes of that size in the middle of the country, but of course we are moving into times when all of the old rules will no longer apply.

Earlier this month, I wrote an article about how volcanoes all along the Ring of Fire have been “starting to pop off like firecrackers”. I believe that we have entered a time when we will see natural disasters become increasingly frequent and increasingly powerful, and despite all of our advanced technology we are exceedingly vulnerable.

Just look at what just took place in Texas. A single wave of cold weather plunged the state into a nightmare scenario.

If cold weather can cause this much chaos in Texas, what would a much more severe long-term emergency mean for our entire nation?

The events of the past week should be a wake up call for all of us, because the road ahead is certainly not going to get any easier.

Michael Snyder

Democrats Turning Down the Thumbscrews on Us to Make Us Suffer—Tormenting Us With Our Imaginary Sins

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Everything the Democrat Party does should be seen not from an economic or a political perspective, but one of sin and suffering — the suffering it imposes on us to expiate our imagery sins.

It came to me in a flash of insight when I heard of a now-disgraced bureaucrat (“an undersecretary of climate change” in Massachusetts) who told a gathering of his colleagues that to fight melting ice caps and rising sea levels they would have to “break the will” of ordinary Americans, by “turning the screws” — raising energy costs so high that they would have to “stop emitting.” Admirable candor from a functionary of the state with the soul of a Medieval torturer.

But it goes beyond the need to make us obey. Progressives believe Americans must be made to atone for our sins (environmental, racial, economic and national) with higher taxes and energy costs, a lower standard of living, crime, open borders, racial humiliation and national dissolution.

It’s not a power-grab as much as an attempt to force a sort of secular Calvinism on the nation.

Global Warming – Our sins here include the internal combustion engine and reliance on fossil fuel, leading to CO2 emissions said to cause depletion of the earth’s ozone layer.

Democrats demand that we expiate these sins through higher energy costs, homes that are cold in the winter and hot in the summer, gas so expensive that we’ll be forced to walk or bicycle instead of driving. If you offered AOC and the other Green New Dealers an energy source that was clean, cheap and abundant, they’d reject it out of hand because there’s no suffering involved.

Open borders – According to their holy writ, we must pay for the sins of colonialism, exploitation of the Third World, using an unfair share of the earth’s resources and treating “migrants” cruelly. Our suffering includes being forced to take in hordes of poor, uneducated, unskilled invaders, including a significant criminal element (through lack of border enforcement and amnesties), which in turn will raise the costs of education, health care, criminal justice and welfare. But this is only right. If Hondurans are mired in poverty, it’s because we’ve exploited them, the left tells us.

Racial equity – To counter the sin of white supremacy, Caucasians must be made to suffer with reparations, riots, indoctrination of their children and public confessions of guilt. In some places, public schools are imposing a curriculum that forces students and parents to admit that their whiteness is a crime against the rest of humanity. If this seems like an updated version of Maoist self-criticism sessions, that’s because it is.

Gun confiscation – Gun owners (all 72 million in the United States), manufacturers and the NRA are said to be responsible for crime and mass shootings by clinging to the outmoded idea of a 2nd. Amendment right to keep and bear arms. The sins of bitter-clingers must be expiated by taking away their means to self-defense and shaming them – making them understand that every time a whack job shoots up a school, theater, nightclub or concert they are to blame.

The Lockdown Culture – The sin is not “listening to the scientists” (which ones?) as Clueless Joe would have it – and not taking the pandemic seriously at the outset, unlike the Red Chinese. The suffering is destroying businesses on a whim (more than 110,000 restaurants have closed permanently), eliminating shopping and entertainment and forcing us to go through the silly rituals of social distancing and face masks (which the Great Fauci assured us were unnecessary in March). Biden – who promised us the pain of a “dark winter” — has made face masks the symbol of his administration, going so far as to tell us that donning a mask is our patriotic duty – unless you’re Nancy Pelosi getting your hair done at a pricey San Francisco salon or Gavin Newsom dining with lobbyists at a swank eatery.

Socialism – What a wonderful way to spread the misery as widely as possible. Greedy capitalists are responsible for the plight of the masses, through unequal distribution of wealth. This must be rectified through income leveling, confiscation by taxation, in the name of fairness which (because competition is eliminated) results in a lower standard of living for just about everyone.

Given a choice between prosperity and what they call fairness, the Sanders and AOCs of the world – who are now driving the Democrat Party – will choose “fairness” every time, even if Venezuela and the rationing of toilet paper lie at the end of the road.

Biden is the perfect Great Leader for the grin-and-bear-it Democrats – dour, obsessive, guilt-mongering, insistent that we sinners bend to his will. Open borders, racial guilt, gun confiscation and a Green New Deal are pillars of his administration.

At the bottom of the sin and suffering paradigm is hatred – hatred of capitalism, hatred of Middle America and (at least subconsciously) hatred of the human race.

Besides sin and suffering, there’s also masochism. (Ayn Rand called it “the sanction of the victim.”) Roughly half the population was complicit in putting Torquemada – progressivism’s grand inquisitor – in the White House cum torture chamber.

Now, if he can only remember where he put his thumbscrews.

Don Feder, frontpagemagazine

How Does This All End ?

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There is a sense in the air that the pandemic is winding down, and the toxic culture of division, fear, and hatred along with it. Cases are down dramatically. Deaths too. Hospitalizations are no longer irregular. Restrictions are being repealed. You can follow all the action daily at the CDC’s new and unusually competent landing page on the virus (it only took them a year to build this).

Despite all the talk of a new normal and infinite mandates, there is hope that it could all unwind quickly, pushed by force of public impatience and frustration with restrictions, and a political scramble to avoid responsibility by running away from all that they did for the last year.

The list of signs and symbols could be made very long. .

The politicians who overreached are suddenly being held accountable, with both Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom on the hotseat. Calls for governors and mayors to resign consume state and local news. There is clearly major political tumult building.

The Great Barrington Declaration scientists can hardly keep up with the requests for respectful interviews, now that it is becoming clear that they were right all along.

The experience in open states like Florida, Georgia, South Dakota, and so on, makes it impossible to ignore the grim truth that the lockdowns achieved nothing for public health but did harm health, businesses, liberties, law, and civilized life.

The push to open economies, by the same people who locked down the economies, such as Boris Johnson in the UK, is an implicit repudiation of the nonsensical ZeroCovid movement. Everyone seems now to agree with what AIER has been saying for a year: humanity must deal intelligently with pathogens and stop pretending that political forces can control them.

AIER visiting senior fellow Naomi Wolf had a hit just last evening on the Tucker Carlson show, and they spoke as allies in the reopening efforts after years of ideological sparring. There is growing weariness of Anthony Fauci’s daily word salads that have massively mixed up the public health messaging for a full year, to the point that Meghan McCain has called for his firing.

A year ago, Slate was making sense until the virus became political and they joined the lockdown mob. Now the publication is back to making sense again, with this excellent piece. British medical journal The Lancet is publishing excellent short pieces on the cost of lockdowns, including this riveting letter from Martin Kulldorff. .

A prestigious European journal of public health has published a blistering attack on the very idea that a power government should ever be trusted with virus mitigation. .

The people who have committed their careers and lives to this pandemic and the policies surrounding it might soon need to find a new raison d’etre. Then the clean up begins – how did this happen, who did it, how to make sure it never happens again – and does not end perhaps for decades.

It’s been fascinating to see the early drafts on the reasons why. There will be some perfunctory efforts to credit lockdowns, masks, human separation, and closures for somehow making the virus go away. The trouble is that there is no evidence of this. There is evidence for many other explanations having to do with herd immunity and “seasonality” (another way of saying the pathogen comes and then goes) and possibly more precision in testing.

For example, this new article by the very sensible Jennifer Beam Dowd of Oxford names many factors (while downplaying the role of vaccines) but says of masks and so on that it is “challenging to identify their specific effects, and cases are dropping in almost all states even with a wide range of policies.”

Indeed! .

The reckoning will be taking place for months if not years. In the end people will be left wondering why we took such extreme measures that wrecked so many lives when the endemic equilibrium comes in time regardless of all these measures. We tried a crazy experiment in social and economic control and we are left with scant evidence that it made much difference on the virus but vast evidence that they demoralized and ruined life for billions of people.

What about the opening? There will continue to be those who will cower in fear, still dealing with the deep psychological trauma that comes from watching TV journalists scream panic for the better part of a year. But there will be an emerging majority that will be more than willing to go back to real life.

My go-to book on the pandemic and the response has been Albert Camus’s remarkable novel The Plague. He wrote it as partially autobiographical about his own quarantine. It was published in 1947. It still stands as a brilliant account of the sociology and psychology of fear during pandemic and lockdown.

As we approach the end of the novel, the plague begins to lift, not because of anything that the townspeople did or because of the restrictions on their lives. It lifts because the virus ran its pandemic course. What’s striking is how quickly the dawn of normalcy happens, followed by a new appreciation for life, fun, revelry, and exuberance.

As people begin to see the end, Camus records the fictional scene.

No doubt the plague was not yet ended—a fact of which they were to be reminded; still, in imagination they could already hear, weeks in advance, trains whistling on their way to an outside world that had no limit, and steamers hooting as they put out from the harbor across shining seas. Next day these fancies would have passed and qualms of doubt returned. But for the moment the whole town was on the move, quitting the dark, lugubrious confines where it had struck its roots of stone, and setting forth at last, like a shipload of survivors, toward a land of promise….

In streets and squares people were dancing. Within twenty-four hours the motor traffic had doubled and the ever more numerous cars were held up at every turn by merry-making crowds. Every church bell was in full peal throughout the afternoon, and the bells filled the blue and gold sky with their reverberations. Indeed, in all the churches thanksgiving services were being held. But at the same time the places of entertainment were packed, and the cafés, caring nothing for the morrow, were producing their last bottles of liquor. A noisy concourse surged round every bar, including loving couples who fondled each other without a thought for appearances. All were laughing or shouting. The reserves of emotion pent up during those many months when for everybody the flame of life burned low were being recklessly squandered to celebrate this, the red-letter day of their survival. Tomorrow real life would begin again, with its restrictions. But for the moment people in very different walks of life were rubbing shoulders, fraternizing. The leveling-out that death’s imminence had failed in practice to accomplish was realized at last, for a few gay hours, in the rapture of escape.

And so on goes the opening, slowly at first, then quickly, then all at once. The decisive turn is when the public returns to thinking rationally, refuses to be locked up anymore, and decides to trust themselves and the medical profession rather than the powerful elites who only pretend to manage disease. The trauma lasts, of course, but the healing also begins.

Last April, in a more naive time, I truly did imagine that these lockdowns and restrictions could not last. I had underestimated both the public panic and the government’s willingness to double- and triple-down on unworkable policies. .

I also overestimated what I had previously imagined to be a widespread commitment to liberty and property that would have inspired some public revolt early on. So here we are a full year later, with the reports of lockdown carnage pouring in by the day and hour. It’s a gigantic mess, to be sure, but the end does seem to be in view, and thank goodness for that. Let the blowback begin.

Jeffrey Tucker, American Institute for Economic Research

Three Libertarian Principles for Education

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Although the presidency and both Houses of Congress are now controlled by Democrats, some conservatives still think that they can have some influence on the federal government’s education polices.

Whether Washington could help promote conservative principles of education is irrelevant because Washington shouldn’t even be trying.
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A case in point is a new report by Michael Q. McShane of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), “Where Conservatives Should Lead on Federal Education Policy in 2021.” McShane is an adjunct fellow in education policy studies at AEI and director of education policy at the Show-Me Institute, where he studies and writes about K–12 education policy, including private and religious schools and the politics of education.

His key points are:

  • Conservatives have an opportunity to play a productive role in federal education policymaking. They have to do more than just say no.
  • Early childhood education policy should center on family and work to make family life in America easier.
  • Federal K–12 policy should focus on deregulating existing programs and broadening their eligibility to allow new and different providers to access federal funds.
  • Higher education policy should diminish the power of existing gatekeepers and open the field for more innovation, with new means of ensuring that dollars are spent well.

McShane has also joined with Frederick M. Hess, a resident scholar and the director of Education Policy Studies at AEI, where he works on K–12 and higher education issues, in writing an op-ed titled “Three Conservative Principles for Education.”

McShane and Hess mention an AEI collection of more than two dozen education proposals called “The Next Conservative Education Agenda.” This includes proposals like

  • Rethink the School Day and Year
  • A Three-year Bachelor’s Degree
  • Three Perspective Shifts to Advance Choice
  • Third-Party Credentialing for Higher Education
  • Two Steps to Restoring School Safety
  • A Constitutional Right to a High-Quality Public Education

But as McShane and Hess point out: “These varied ideas have much to recommend them but are all, quite intentionally, policies—not principles. As we set forth on a new decade, in a time of massive social and political disruption, it’s worth considering what principles ought to undergird conservative policy, in 2021 and beyond. Here, we offer three:

First, the family is the foundation. We understand that parents know their children better and care for them more than any bureaucrat, and that’s why we should fight to put parents in the driver’s seat when it comes to choosing the best options for child care, preschool and K-12 education.

Second, schools are formative, not performative, institutions. Schools are supposed to be formative institutions. They’re supposed to shape students into young adults who can reason, think and grow into responsible citizens. Teachers and professors are to serve as mentors, role models and sources of insight and wisdom, moderating the hubristic zeal of young people.

Third, conservatives should be confident pluralists. We should allow parents and educators in varied situations and different communities to create the schools that best meet the needs of their children. Public dollars for education should equitably support a wide array of options.

The authors then ask the questions: “Can Washington help promote these principles? Should it?”

Their answer is that the federal government “can, and it must, in a limited way—mostly by expanding eligibility for existing federal programs and loosening the regulatory vise governing the use of those funds.”

They conclude: “As conservatives look to help hard-hit families recover from the dislocations of COVID-19 and gear up for the policy debates of the Biden era, we need to think about what we offer when it comes to schools and schooling. A tough-minded examination of our core principles is a good place to start.”

I think a better place to start would be a tough-minded examination of the libertarian core principles of education. As a counter to McShane’s and Hess’s “Three Conservative Principles for Education,” here are three libertarian principles for education.

1. The federal government should have absolutely nothing to do with education. Nowhere does the Constitution authorize the federal government to have anything to do with education. What James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 45 is still applicable today:

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the Federal Government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State Governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will for the most part be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people; and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.

This means not only no Department of Education, but no Higher Education Act, no Elementary and Secondary Education Act, no bilingual-education mandates, no math and science initiatives, no Title IX mandates, no school accreditation, no anti-discrimination policies, no standardized-testing requirements, no Common Core standards, no Race to the Top funds, no No Child Left Behind Act, no desegregation orders, and no special-education mandates.

2. All education should be private education. Every state has a provision in its constitution for the operation of K-12 schools, colleges, and universities. Therefore, if there are to be any public schools; that is, government schools, they should be limited to state-government schools, fully staffed and supervised by state governments. Although this is preferable to the federal government being involved in education, it is still not ideal. It is an illegitimate purpose of government to establish public schools or provide educational services to anyone. Education is a service that should be provided on the free market by private entities. There is nothing inherently unique about education which necessitates that the government provide it.

3. Education should not be funded by the state. Neither the federal nor the state governments should fund education in any way, even if they are not involved in the operation or regulation of schools. This means no vouchers, no charter schools, no school breakfast and lunch programs, no Pell Grants, no student loans, no research grants to colleges, no scholarships, and no Head Start funding. Education is not a constitutional right. It is the responsibility of parents to educate their children. No American should be forced to pay for the education of any other American or their children.

So, to answer the questions posed by McShane and Hess, whether Washington could help promote conservative principles of education is irrelevant because Washington shouldn’t even be trying.

Lawrence M. Vance, FEE

The Resurrection of the Third Reich in America

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Yes, the Third Reich is undergoing resurrection, but not by white supremacists. It is the white liberals in the Democrat Party and their presstitute propaganda machine—New York Times, CNN, NPR, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and the rest of the presstitute whores— that comprise the new Nazi movement. The only difference is that this time the target is white gentiles.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says that “the goal of Nazi propaganda was to demonize Jews and to create a climate of hostility and indifference toward their plight.” In actual fact, the purpose was more severe. The purpose was to deprive Jews of their dignity and the protection of law. This has now happened to white gentiles in the United States. For example, as I reported earlier today, Jodi Shaw, a white female staff member of Smith College, in former times a prestigeous women’s college, now an anti-white propaganda institution, resigned, accusing the college of creating a “racially hostile environment” for white people.

Shaw said that Smith College’s anti-white racism left her “physically and mentally debilitated. I endured racially hostile comments, and was expected to participate in racially prejudicial behavior as a continued condition of my employment. I endured meetings in which another staff member violently banged his fist on the table, chanting ‘Rich, white women! Every day, I watch my colleagues manage student conflict through the lens of race, projecting rigid assumptions and stereotypes on students, thereby reducing them to the color of their skin. I am asked to do the same, as well as to support a curriculum for students that teaches them to project those same stereotypes and assumptions onto themselves and others. I believe such a curriculum is dehumanizing, prevents authentic connection, and undermines the moral agency of young people who are just beginning to find their way in the world.” https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2021/02/22/the-demonization-of-white-americans-is-official-educational-corporate-and-government-policy/

Thinking she was protected by the Civil Rights Act, she filed a complaint. The result? “I was told that the civil rights law protections were not created to help [white] people like me,” she wrote. She was stripped of duties, which was a retaliation for her filing the complaint.

President Trump tried to stop the discrimination against white people, who are being forced out of their jobs just as Jews were in Nazi Germany. But the election thief, Biden has restored and elevated the discrimination against white Americans. The “racial sensitivity” classes in the military and government agencies in which white people are taught to acknowledge their “systemic racism,” and thus to understand any correction of a person of color is an act of racism and must not occur if you are to avoid retribution for being a systemic racist. Thus, all standards collapse.

David Flynn, the football coach at Massachusetts Dedham High School for the past decade was fired becaus he complained that his 7th grade daughter was being propagandized against her white race in her school classes. https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2021/02/22/the-demonization-of-white-americans-is-official-educational-corporate-and-government-policy/

The demonization of American white people is a hard undeniable fact. They have been discriminated against for decades because of racial quotas in university admissions, hiring, and promotion. But now discrimination against whites has become persecution, and it is more scary. In Germany Jews were a tiny minority. In the United States whites are still a 60% majority. In the US it is the majority that is being demonized. Moreover, it is white liberal Democrats who are demonizing white people.

The election thief, Biden, has staffed his administration with anti-white racists, and has put anti-white racists in positions where they can best demonize white Americans. All of this is happening in plain view, and insouciance prevails.

White peoples are still a majority in the Western World, but they comprise a small minority in terms of world population. As anti-white propaganda has originated in the white Western world, the white world has set itself up for demonization by the world majority. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres declared today at the UN Human Rights Council that white supremacy is “becoming a transnational threat.” The UN Secretary General believes that there is a “growing danger” from white people of “ethnically motivated terrorism.” He calls on the world for “coordinated action” to counter this threat that is “growing by the day.” https://www.rt.com/news/516277-unitednations-white-supremacy-nazi/

Obviously, the Western world has no moral authority when it is seen as a racist threat that is “growing by the day.”

Western civilization is the first civilization to demonize itself and, thereby, reduce itself to an immoral entity and perceived threat by the rest of the world.

The Western world has become disconnected from reality and from truth. Last Saturday a hyphenated American, a Filipino-American, was viciously slashed on a New York City subway by a black attacker. Protests were immediately organized against white nationalism: “End the violence toward Asians. Let’s unite against white nationalism.” https://www.rt.com/usa/516245-new-york-asian-attack-protest/

I cannot find in any American institution or any institution in the Western world any respect for truth and any integrity. The Western world is devoid of any sustaining values. There is nothing there. It has devoured itself. Western civilization has been caricatured out of existence.

Western civilization has stamped itself out. The process began with stamping out Southern culture, literature, history and creating a false history that serves the orchestrated story of white racism. In recent days, the Virginia military Institute was forced to remove the stature of its most famous professor—Stonewall Jackson—where it stood on the parade ground. The stature had to be removed because of the unsupportable lie that Jackson fought to preserve slavery when in documented fact he fought because Virginia was invaded by Lincoln’s Empire Legions. https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/02/jacob-hornberger/the-vmi-controversy/

Today like all other Southern educational institutions VMI has been destroyed. Southern university and college presidents were too weak. They were too intellectually and emotionally weak to stand up to the demonization of the South. They tried to prove their validity by staffing their institutions with graduates of Northern universities and refusing to hire their own graduates. Their weakness turned the South against itself. Southern culture has been essentially extinguished.

In the US the 14th Amendment—equal treatment under the law—has been extinguished by “affirmative action.” Today in the US only white people can be demonized without it being a hate crime. No more proof is needed that white Americans are second class citizens in the country that they built and in which they are still a majority.

The United States has had its own Kristallnacht with the lootings and burnings of businesses in many American cities encouraged and forgiven by Democratic administrations that instead of punishing the criminals defunded the police and brought prosecutions against white people who defended their property. White Americans are so intimidated that it is not only the South that permits monuments to Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson to be removed, but also the entire country where all monuments even to Lincoln, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson are obliterated.

The US military, whose most effective fighting force has always been men from the South, is removing all names of bases that have Southern connections. It has always struck me as strange that the South, abused by a northern invasion, by Reconstruction, by a second Reconstruction, and now by removal of all Southern connection to the US military, has been the most effective military component in the US Army. Has the South been so deracinated that the South despite its demonization will continue to be the backbone of the US military? Why would white males fight for a country that hates and demonizes them?

Once a people are demonized, how do they recover? Can they become a victim group and claim the protection that their enemies used against them? Not if their enemies control the explanation via the media, which they do.

Look at America today. The country has massive unemployment due to job and investment offshoring and lockdowns, and the election thief is opening the borders in order to drive wages of white people lower while building the voter rolls of Democrat voters. The Republicans as we have seen from McConnell and Romney are as anti-American as the Democrats. In America today neither political party represents the white American people who built the country and gave it civil liberty.

How can a people survive demonization and destruction of sense of itself?

They cannot. And they sit there, insouciant, sucking their thumbs, sheep ready for slaughter.

Paul Craig Roberts

The United States is Now Like Soviet Russia, 1984

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Remember Chernenko? He ruled Soviet Russia in the mid-1980s, along with a string of other half dead totalitarians. America now has the very same thing today. Biden signs unconstitutional executive orders like it’s Communist Russia in 1984. It’s so ironic: The Soviet Union collapsed 30 years ago, only for the United States to morph into the very same thing. We’ve got our Chernenko. All that’s left are jailing of dissidents and bread lines for the soon-to-be-former middle class. #NotMyDictatorship

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Supreme Court Goes Full Nicaragua in PA Election Case

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For a couple of years, my wife and I escaped Obama’s America by owning a Pacific Ocean hotel in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua. The irony was that in supposedly socialist Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega’s government left us alone far more than government did in the supposedly free country of the United States of Obama.

Still, while Ortega 2.0 might have shed most of his socialism, he had not shed his lust for power, and the job of making sure he never lost again was that of the Chief Justice Roberto Rivas Reyes of what is in effect the Nicaraguan Supreme Court. I’m not sure who was actually more powerful or corrupt — President Ortega or Justice Rivas — but Rivas’s was bigger. His motorcade, that is, and he owned the two biggest homes on the two most elevated lots in San Juan del Sur, the nation’s top coastal town, a few hundred yards from our hotel.

Today I’m not sure whose court is more corrupt vis-a-vis election law: Nicaragua’s court or our Supreme Court. It appears that Donald Trump has remade the U.S. Supreme Court — in Mitt Romney’s image! (I am not blaming Trump, just stating the obvious.)

While I think the United States Supreme Court stumbled badly in its 7-2 rejection of the Texas case on standing last year, the refusal to “grant cert” (i.e., to take the case) yesterday in a Pennsylvania case is horrifying beyond words. I could say that our election laws are now full-on banana republic, but I’d hate to insult bananas that badly.

What the Supreme Court codified yesterday, and what it started with the Texas rejection, is that election laws and procedures cannot be challenged beyond a state court, at any time, regardless of how badly those states shred the United States Constitution, and regardless of the major consequences to the other 49 states as a result. They don’t ever say that per se, but the results of what those two rulings have done are just that. Period.

Those trying to challenge Pennsylvania’s obviously corrupt and rigged election system have been told that they cannot challenge the laws ahead of the election, because there is not yet a victim. They’ve been told that fellow Americans impacted by Pennsylvania’s corrupt system cannot challenge, because of standing. Now they’ve been told that they cannot challenge after the election, because it’s after the election – and therefore moot.

Ortega on line one, asking the Democrats just how do they get away with this?

This kind of infantile and absurd logic just defies belief and takes one’s breath away. And not just mine. I think it’s clear that Justice Clarence Thomas is even more mystified than am I, and he was livid. He was also, as he always is, right on the money in his analysis.

“One wonders what this Court waits for,” understates Thomas in his dissent, adding “we failed to settle this dispute before the election, and thus provide clear rules. Now we again fail to provide clear rules for future elections. The decision to leave election law hidden beneath a shroud of doubt is baffling. By doing nothing, we invite further confusion and erosion of voter confidence. Our fellow citizens deserve better and expect more of us.”

In other words, we are punting the ball again. But let’s make no mistake — this is “not doing nothing” with all respect to Justice Thomas. This is proactive, and it absolutely legalizes institutional voter fraud and neuters state legislatures in lieu of state courts. Lawyers gonna lawyer, I reckon.

The only other quibble I have regarding Justice Thomas’s statement is that actually no, we don’t expect more of our courts any more. This is exactly what we have come to expect. We saw Brett Kavanaugh emasculated in his hearing process, and clearly he hasn’t had enough testosterone replacement shots yet, and Amy Coney Barrett, the mom, seems worried about her kiddies at school. Cancel Culture 1, Constitution 0. Voters be damned.

For the record, the broad strokes of the Pennsylvania case revolve around the fact that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court changed election laws at the last minute to expand unchecked mail in voting. The Constitution, that once relevant but now apparently irrelevant document, makes it clear that the state legislatures are in charge of state elections. In Pennsylvania, as in many states, the legislature is controlled by Republicans – while Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court is controlled by radical leftists. One lesson the late, great Rush Limbaugh helped teach us is that the left always uses the courts to get stuff done that they could never accomplish through the ballot box.

Never has that been truer than in the 2020 Election, in Pennsylvania and other places as well. As Thomas adds:

“The Constitution gives to each state legislature authority to determine the ‘Manner’ of federal elections…Yet both before and after the 2020 election, non-legislative officials in various States took it upon themselves to set the rules instead…. [T]he Pennsylvania Legislature established an unambiguous deadline for receiving mail-in ballots… the Pennsylvania Supreme Court extended that deadline… (and) ordered officials to count ballots received by the new deadline even if there was no evidence—such as a postmark—that the ballots were mailed by election day. … these cases provide us with an ideal opportunity to address (this) before the next election cycle. The refusal to do so is inexplicable.”

Tragically, it’s not inexplicable. It’s very explicable. It’s that the explanations are chilling and uncomfortable. Our Supreme Court is now part of the Washington Swamp, and the Washington Swamp is now totally divorced from any understanding of or caring about the rest of the nation. Roberts surrendered to the Swamp shortly after being seated. Kavanaugh and Coney-Barrett have done so even quicker.

Our Supreme Court is now no more an agent of a free people than similar courts are in places like Venezuela and Nicaragua. Our nation is becoming ungovernable, because there is no reason for a thinking person to have any respect for our institutions like the FBI, The Justice Department, or our courts on any level. We are facing dark days indeed.

Edmund Wright is a long time contributor to American Thinker, Breitbart, Newsmax TV, The Rush Limbaugh Show and author of several political books.

Economists Warn We Can’t Ignore National Debt Forever

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With COVID-19 ravaging the country and government pandemic lockdowns devastating our economy, the national debt has understandably slipped to the back of many Americans’ minds. But the federal government continues to fall deeper into the red at a dramatically accelerating rate. Free-market economists interviewed by FEE warned that we can’t continue like this forever without grave consequences.

Even before the potential passage of President Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus proposal, the national debt officially exceeded the size of the economy in 2020. This means we will soon owe more than we produce in an entire calendar year. And it’s only going to get worse. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Official now estimates that we will hit a 200 percent debt-to-economy ratio in 30 years, a truly unthinkable and unprecedented level of debt.

And that’s under “a rosy scenario that assumes no new spending programs, no wars, no recessions, all temporary tax cuts expire, and interest rates remain low,” Manhattan Institute economist Brian Riedl tells me.

“By that point in 30 years, CBO projects an annual budget deficit of 12.6% of GDP (the equivalent of $2.5 trillion today),” Riedl says. “Half of all taxes will go towards interest on the debt. Again, that is the rosy scenario.”

Of course, the government drowning in debt likely isn’t going to affect the average American tomorrow. But while interest rates are at near-zero levels, they can’t continue like that forever, Riedl warns.

“Too many people believe interest rates can never rise again, or do not realize that nearly the entire national debt would reset into the higher interest rates,” he said. “Basically, we are gambling America’s economic future on the hope that interest rates stay below 3% or 4% forever.”

Economist Veronique de Rugy concurred.

“With these debt trajectories, interest rates are going to take off eventually,” said de Rugy, a Mercatus Center senior fellow. “What happens when these rising rates coincide with the Medicare Trust Fund depletion in five years, or Social Security in thirteen years?”

Cato Institute economist Ryan Bourne offered a somewhat different perspective, arguing that the bigger problem is the “longer-term trajectory.”

“Every time a recent major crisis hits the federal debt level jumps, but never falls back at all afterwards,” he said. “We therefore engage in a step up in the level of debt after each crisis, which has worsened our starting point as we are now sailing into an unprecedented fiscal tidal wave of debt as a result of entitlement commitments made to an aging population.”

“Without near-term policy change to entitlements to head that off, there will at some stage be a much bigger reckoning,” Bourne concluded. “But I see no desire to head that off today.”

While the future of interest rates may indeed be uncertain, it is nonetheless projected that Americans will soon have to pay trillions in federal taxes every year just to cover the interest on the debt—all while the problem continues to snowball out of control.

Even before this happens, though, there are real consequences that come with runaway deficit spending. The federal government cannot create wealth out of thin air. Every dollar that it spends or borrows has to come from somewhere else in the economy. (Unless it prints money, in which case it stealth-taxes us all through inflation).

“Deficit spending extracts resources from the real economy and there is no guarantee that the government uses these resources better than the private sector,” de Rugy said.

She also pointed to numerous studies showing that higher debt leads to lower economic growth.

“We are likely already paying for the heightened debt levels in the form of lower living standards,” de Rugy concluded. “And we will continue to suffer if we keep this up.”

So, what does this all mean for Biden’s proposal for nearly $2 trillion more in COVID spending and other big-spending policy proposals? Well, we’ve already spent an astounding and unprecedented $4-5 trillion on COVID relief, much of which proved fraud-rife and inefficient.

In light of this, “keeping our debt under control is a better priority,” de Rugy says. “The more in debt we are in, the harder it becomes to respond to future emergencies, and the more we risk slowing down growth and burdening future generations.”

Meanwhile, Riedl said that some forms of government spending can be necessary during a pandemic, but insisted “that is not a blank check for wasteful or ineffective programs.” Indeed, a new Ivy League analysis found that Biden’s budget busting plan—which contains $300+ billion in unrelated partisan spending—would actually lead to lower growth and wages in 2022.

As for other spending proposals, Riedl pointed to the projected $100 trillion in deficits we’re expected to run over the next 30 years. “Let’s figure out how to pay for that first before pouring gasoline on the fire,” he concluded.

The need to temper Congress’s big-spending ambitions was a point of agreement among the three economists.

“A lot of the Democrat spending proposals clearly go way beyond what’s needed to deal with the actual pandemic problem,” Bourne added. “So I don’t think there’s an economic case for most of this bill—it will merely worsen the underlying public finances without much clear economic rationale, and maybe even harming the recovery.”

Critics are quick to scoff at concerns about the debt and deficits, particularly given the hypocrisy of many Republican elected officials on the issue. But the laws of economics haven’t changed, and there’s still no such thing as a free lunch.

At some point, the consequences of our runaway national debt will become too punishing to ignore.

Brad Polumbo, FEE

Since We Now Live in a Dictatorship, Will Trump Go to Jail ?

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Former President Donald Trump reacted Monday to the Supreme Court decision to reject his attempt to prevent New York prosecutors from obtaining his financial records. “The Supreme Court never should have let this ‘fishing expedition’ happen, but they did,” Trump wrote in a lengthy statement to reporters in which he condemned the decision. [Breitbart]

It’s worse than a fishing expedition. We live under a dictatorship now. One party–Democrats merged with RINOs–control everything, and cannot lose future elections for reasons we know well. The dictatorship includes the Supreme Court (minus Justices Thomas and Alito) and dictators jail their vanquished opponents. I believe his opponents will ultimately jail Trump under any pretext they can find.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason