According to some reports, Chief Justice John Roberts won’t consider the evidence of election fraud because he fears there will be more riots. Now think about this a moment. Imagine if the founders of America’s republic had said, “We can’t declare independence from the British monarchy. We can’t uphold the rights of man. It might cause riots.” Earth to cowardly RINO John Roberts: We are already at war. The country is deeply divided, more so than at any time since the (first) Civil War.
Sadly, we can’t do anything about that. What we CAN still do is uphold the Constitution. The Constitution called for an honest election. If riots result from your choice (and obligation) to look into the evidence of fraud in the 2020 presidential election, then that’s on the rioters — not on the victims of the fraud. We have something called police. We have something called a military. Those individuals exist to uphold rights, in a free country. If rioters burn down private property and threaten the lives of innocent people, they should be arrested and prosecuted. YOU DON’T REFUSE TO TAKE A CASE BECAUSE YOU’RE AFRAID CRIMINALS WILL ACT LIKE CRIMINALS, OR TYRANTS WILL ACT LIKE TYRANTS.
John Roberts, you are a sickening disgrace. If you had done your job and led the way, the three disappointing, wimpy, possibly blackmailed or threatened Trump appointees might have followed. We’ll never know. So now everything appears to hinge on January 6, and Vice President Pence’s willingness and ability to refuse to accept the Biden electors in states where evidence of electoral fraud is overwhelming. If this doesn’t happen, our republic is going down. From there, believe me: It will be every man for himself.
More broadly, nearly every conceivable social activity, aside from popping out to a grocery store to stave off starvation (or, possibly, suicide) for another week, was either banned or severely restricted this year for millions of us.about:blank
Don’t like it? Don’t worry, said the experts: If you’re feeling a mite lonely after nine months of house arrest in Papillon-like solitary confinement, just throw a rollicking Christmas “social” event in which you stare, all alone, at a computer screen on a Zoom call, as the most ruthless, repressive, imperialist regime on earth monitors everything you say, and then instantly disables your account if you dare to criticize it. (Soon, no doubt, it won’t only be the Chinese government doing the monitoring and disabling, but our own—supposing it hasn’t merged with the CCP by then).
House arrest for nine months, careers and dreams imploding all around you, relieved only by the odd Zoom call, isn’t exactly my idea of fun—or anyone else’s. Yet you’d never guess that listening to anyone with political power this year (aside from the few remaining non-useless Republicans).
For months, these strange, power-mad robots have evinced zero indication they have any clue what it might feel like to be an actual human (with mouths to feed) suddenly placed under house arrest, forbidden from earning a living, stopped from pursuing activities which support his sense of identity, cut off from most (or all) social contact, fed reams of misinformation he knows is misinformation, and severed from a huge source of meaning in human life—namely, culture.
I’m not here arguing against the measures themselves (I will some other time). I am pointing out the inhuman indifference shown by the Lockdown Leviathans to the psychological, emotional, spiritual, and familial costs those measures have imposed, and continue to impose, upon their suffering subjects.
There is simply no sign they care.
Above, I used the word “subjects.” I used it because although these thugs were all elected, they rule like ancient Asian potentates. No force checks or balances them. Certainly, no one’s heard a single word from any federal law enforcement official about the Incorporation Doctrine, or any federal plan to bring these thugs to heel.
I find that odd.
Back in the 1950s, when the segregationist governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, tried to block black students from schools, President Dwight D. Eisenhower invoked the Insurrection Act and sent in the 101st Airborne. Just like that, Faubus came to heel. Eisenhower secured those students’ fundamental rights.
But now, when New York Governor Andrew Cuomo kills off thousands of American citizens, and California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti deprive millions of American citizens of their most basic liberties, nothing happens. A space alien visiting America for a few weeks this holiday season would never imagine that America had something called a “Constitution,” and that it sets limits on how governments, state or federal, may treat citizens. He’d be shocked to learn otherwise.
But let me get back to culture. It is a vital source of meaning in human life. Cut humans off from culture—including important social/connecting rituals, like all those I mentioned above—and you inevitably begin draining their lives of meaning. Drain enough of that meaning away, and you wind up with despondent, purposeless human beings struggling to feel any sense of context for, or meaning or worth in, their lives. Their bone-deep existential anguish leads them to try to numb it through drugs, alcohol, or suicide.
A child could understand that. But there’s no sign the Lockdown Leviathans understand it, or care—not even when this sensible assumption passes into the realm of rock solid empirical evidence, which it now has done (see here, here, and here). about:blank
And so, you wonder just how many tears, say, Cuomo and his comrades in gubernatorial malfeasance have shed over the souls devastated—or the lives killed off—by their incompetence and control freakery this year. And then, you conclude it’s probably zero—with “probably” being generous.
Presuming the talk of secession and national divorce subsides; presuming political calm emerges soon; there will be a lot to restore in the coming years. Between the riots and the lockdowns, the hard costs must be in the hundreds of millions. Buildings, businesses, inventories, houses, public monuments, educational careers, savings accounts . . . it’s a lot.
But just as important—in some ways, even more important—will be the task of restoring culture, which is to say, restoring all the important sources of meaning for human life arrested or erased this year. Restoring our Christmas rituals will be one important part, but all the other communal rituals must return, too: the shared civic ceremonies and sporting events, the shared sacrifices, the shared stories and songs, the concerts and theatrical performances, the social clubs and worship services and funerals, the big family dinners, the weekly visits to the grandparents, the book club, the group prayers, the symphonies and parades and weekly date night for husbands and wives—all the natural rhythms of life, and all their infusions of transcendent purpose, worth, and meaning into human life. It all must come back.
And it all must come back, because trying to save lives by demolishing all the things which make our lives feel worth living in the first place, doesn’t really get us ahead. We want to live, yes, but we also want to live lives of meaning, purpose, connection, and contentment.
Sure, there are risks to that. But so what? There’s no point otherwise. That’s what the Lockdown Leviathans don’t get.
“[I]f I were president-elect of the country, it’s the last thing I would say. Even if I believed it, I doubt that I would put it this way. But I don’t believe this anyway. Our darkest days are ahead of us? What a bleak way of looking at things. … We Americans have adapted to our problems. … Our freedom has allowed our adaptability. If disaster is coming our way, we don’t just sit there and endure it. We come up with ways to avoid it, to beat it back, to overcome it, but we don’t just sit there and accept it. And, as such, we don’t just resign ourselves to the fact that they’re living in the darkest days because we, at least to this point, still have the greatest degree of freedom of any people on earth. Now, it’s under assault and under attack and we all know this. But I don’t believe our darkest days are ahead of us. I never have. People have been asking, “You’ve always told us you’d tell us when it’s time to panic. Is it time?” It’s never time to panic, folks. It’s never, ever gonna be time to give up on our country. It will never be time to give up on the United States. It will never be time to give up on yourself. Trust me.” –Rush Limbaugh, 12/23/20
Since the 1960s the federal government has initiated countless programs to close racial gaps. All have failed, some have even exacerbated these gaps, but failure aside, all posited logical connections between the program and the intended beneficial outcome. Head Start, for example, rested on the plausible idea that blacks disproportionately suffered early childhood deprivations, and this limited their future accomplishments, so enrich early childhood. The Empowerment Zones of the early 1990s offered tax incentive to entice urban businesses to hire unemployed blacks. Yes, these and countless other nostrums came up short, but they were logical and fact-based and did not, by themselves, aim to transform American society.
Matters have drastically changed with the emergence of the White Racism theory of the crime. It is now no longer necessary to link cures and the intended outcomes; whites by their very existence are now responsible for all black tribulations. Why even try to prescribe one ameliorative fix after the next to target a particular ill when eliminating whiteness is the Mother of All Cures? Nor is it necessary for blacks to take any responsibility for their misfortune—whites must do the job. How simple and seductive for social justice warriors exhausted by plain-Jane incremental politics and having to change their own behavior.
This “white racism did it” theory can be understood as a form of mental illness, specifically magical thinking, “ a disorder of thought…[that] denotes the false belief that one’s thoughts, actions, or words will cause or prevent a specific consequence in some way that defies commonly understood laws of causality.” In other words, every black problem, no matter how miniscule or gigantic can be traced back to toxic whiteness. Even more bizarre, the logic of this “theory” of evil exclusively stresses thoughts, even unconscious thinking, as opposed to overt behavior. An odd parallel exists with some religions where “bad thoughts” themselves are a sin, so thinking about discriminating against African Americans its tantamount to actually discriminating against them. This is a transformation that not only awards immense magical power to brain waves but contrives America’s legal tradition that criminalizes behavior not (with miniscule exceptions) “bad thinking.”
Since whites and their legacy are everywhere, and their toxicity resembles inescapable background radiation, blacks must energetically stamp out this evil wherever they find it. Nothing is too small in this crusade. The picture on Uncle Ben’s box of rice is tantamount to a physical assault. Why else would removing Robert E. Lee’s name from a largely black school become so urgent? What’s the concrete benefit? Did black students fail because they daily observed General Lee’s name cut in stone and this damaged their self-esteem? Logic doesn’t matter—Lee’s name just somehow radiates whiteness, even if students don’t know who he is, and like gravity, his very whiteness invisibly pulls blacks down.
The opportunity costs of embracing this faith are huge. The supply of crackpot solutions to any problem are infinite, and provided ample funding is available, foolishness can persist forever and thus there is never any need to align solutions to tangible tribulations let alone admit that the problem is intractable. Ridding society of white racism is the equivalent of a full-time job with an unlimited budget for inventing an anti-gravity automobile engine, and rest assured, success will be just over the hill, around the corner, at the end of the tunnel, awaiting one adjustment to the devise, tweaking the fuel etc. etc. Just obverse how many blacks at college campuses devote their existence to overcoming omnipresent white racism versus actual learning.
Consider how this escape from a difficult reality plays out in the “diversity industry.” Thanks to the Faith, why ask embarrassing question about why blacks cannot move up the corporate ladder despite putting the screws on whites to promote diversity and huge investments in education? Far easier to cleanse the workplace to toxic whiteness by hiring black experts to spend thousands of hours eradicating hidden bias, structural racism and countless other sins afflicting whites. The website compiled by SHRM lists some 83 such diversity consultants happy to toil long hours to exorcise evils debilitating African Americans. The firm OutSolve, for example, “… gives companies the advantage of effective affirmative action solutions that are comprehensive, customizable, and budgetable.” OutSolve, moreover, offers “… experienced consultants are ready to help, with the most comprehensive affirmative action planning services and consulting programs available” and services range from developing affirmative plans, devising bias-free compensation standards and navigating government rules and regulations. Keep in mind that these 83 firms are in addition to the hundreds of in-house departments in larger firms and especially universities, that likewise provide professional exorcisms. Now, thanks to the availability of all these exorcists, discussion can focus entirely on details of detoxification, so why bother with black IQ, work habits and similar awkward question?
Quackery also attracts those eager to accept endless failure provided the pay is decent. White racism is a pesky pathogen, so there can never be a “Mission Accomplished,” and a lifetime can be spent pushing the rock up the hill and, after a point, rock pushing is all the rock pushers know. Think all the Deans of Diversity and Inclusion spending careers seeking out racism in undergraduate admissions, choice of majors, grade point averages, faculty hiring and retention, research funding, and every other university function. And who knows what persistent digging will eventually uncover? Gaps in student participation in class discussions? Access to local stores selling black personal grooming supplies? Perhaps holistic admissions are insufficiently holistic or STEM textbooks ignore scientists of color but whatever the alleged defect, rest assured it will be scrutinized, assigned to some committee’s agenda, a report written and discussed, a few cosmetic changes suggested and when that, too, fails, onward to the next putative time-wasting panacea.
Most importantly, embracing the centrality of whiteness as the all-encompassing evil virtually guarantees totalitarian creep. Or to use the Soviet vocabulary, you have to break ever more eggs to make the omelet.
To understand this progression, suppose that white racism can be calibrated on a 0 to 1.0 scale, with 1.0 being totally racist society, e.g., apartheid-era South African. Further suppose that by daily mandatory anti-racism seminars, school textbook propaganda, fantasy interracial TV commercials, speech codes, de-platforming heretics, hate crime laws and lots more, racism among non-blacks is reduced from, say, .6 to .1, a seemingly momentous accomplishment. Is this reduction sufficient to eliminate racial gaps and all other inequalities? Can victory be declared? The answer is, sad to say, indeterminant since the theory of white toxicity fails to specify a numerical relationship between the causal agent (white racism) and any specific outcome. This is social engineering sans any benchmarks. Everything is just fighting white racism.
Conceivably, white racism resembles plutonium and an infinitesimal amount in the city’s water supply can kill the entire population. Or lethality depends on huge levels of whiteness. Of course, nobody can specify levels of lethality and, tellingly, this murkiness is hardly a problem for those insisting on the evil of whiteness. Toxic whiteness is toxic whiteness is toxic whiteness. The result of this scientific muddle-brained thinking is that the white-racism-is- culprit- theory is beyond falsification.
Actually, to be fair, theory confirmation can occur when the levels of Racist evil fall to 0.0 on the Racism Scale but how do we empirically establish this “0” point? Not easy given the belief that society might only appear free of white racism, especially since blacks can unknowingly internalize it despite their blackness (think black teachers in all-black Detroit to explain bad test scores). And whites can be asymptomatic or guilty of imperceptible dog whistle racism.
Here’s the answer to establishing zero white racism: it will be zero only when blacks and whites have identical average SAT scores, bar exam pass rates, out of wedlock births rates, murder rates, home ownership levels, infant mortality rates, drug abuse levels, identical life expectancies and incomes, proportional Nobel Prize awards and lots, lots more. Any remaining gap, regardless of where found and size, would be proof of lingering white racism since, after all, that is the source, and only source, of all gaps. Put formally, the independent variable (white racism) is thus measured by values of the dependent variable (gaps). The new frontier of statistical analysis.
A further fly in the ointment is that since the existence of toxic racism is often necessarily subjective, the likelihood of everybody agreeing on the extinction of racism is nil. Surely the Theory does not permit confirming the Utopian 0.0 level of venomousness by majority vote. Now, since there will always be white racism, and since any (unspecified) level of this toxicity drives black misery, de-toxification must necessarily be ongoing, if not perpetual, and with every greater coercion as past failure mount.
A racial version of Zeno’s Paradox is inevitable—America can go from .5 racism to .25 to .125 and even .00078125 on and on, but it will never be free of racism since the effects of racism will always be evident, somewhere, in unequal outcomes or beliefs about unequal outcomes. To paraphrase George Wallace, White racism today, white racism tomorrow, white racism forever.
Needless to say, assuming that zero racism, like zero degrees Kelvin, is reachable, the cost of attaining zero white racism would, in all likelihood, be exponential given past experience with narrowing gaps. What would it take, for example, to cut the black/white homicide gap by a factor of eight? Or asset differences by a factor of ten? And on and on across multiple substantial and enduring race-related gaps?
Chasing this unreachable fantasy of total de-toxification necessarily requires enormous coercion since not even spending the entire GNP would suffice. Only draconian laws and administrative dictates could ensure that blacks and whites were educationally identical, earned the same salaries, were equally incarcerated, suffered equal drug addiction rates and on and on. Remember, any gap “demonstrates” the persistence of white racism and thus achieving racial justice requires harsher and harsher exorcisms.
Can fervent racial egalitarians ever be convinced to abandon this fantasy? Reasoned discussions are pointless. Forget arguing about financial constraints—money from white taxpayers is never a restraint, especially among the innumerate. Ditto for demonstrating the unscientific nature of this “theory” of Great Evil–too complicated and would probably be interpreted as a white ruse (”white science”) to subjugate blacks. What about empirically demonstrating that whites are not especially racist or that racism has seriously declined? Irrelevant since, as per theory of toxicity, a racism score of .25 or even .05 is just as debilitating as a score of .5 (and who can disagree given zero data or, for that matter, no efforts to collect these data). Nor will the failure of this “white racism did it” theory-of-the-crime vanish simply because anti-racism efforts fail. If anything, shifting the blame entirely to whites will reduce “agency” among blacks and probably only widen racial gaps, but this irony hardly disturbs the faithful. Actually, increasing pathology will be a boon for the close-the-gap anti-racism industry.
Extinction will arrive politically. Whites will eventually realize that putting the onus on whites for all black woes is but extortion and, as for all similar tactics, it has its political limits. There are inescapable budgetary constraints, legal barriers governing racial preferences and norms regarding fairness. More important, American politics is Newtonian–pushes and counter-pushes, and African American activists are not the only players in the game. The pay-me-for-my-victimization game is highly permeable, and those dispensing the goodies regularly confront cries of sexism, homophobia, ageism, Islamophobia and countless other claims on the public trough. In all likelihood The Great White Racism theory of the crime will eventually gradually loose its allure, just as religious fervor wilts with time, and today’s believer will move on to some new, more exhilarating dogma.
Much has been made of the Washington, D.C. “swamp” over the last four years. The vast apparatus of power that is now consecrated in the federal government is certainly immense and a far cry from what the Founders envisioned. It contains programs and agencies that work for both domestic and foreign goals.
The question of how the swamp came to be has no one particular answer. Some can be laid at the feet of the 20th-century Progressives during the Roosevelt-Wilson era. Other expansions of power originated with the New Deal. Certainly, the last quarter-century has seen its fair share of new agencies, policies, and expansions of government. However, one particular moment deserves its own focused attention if we are to truly understand the vast apparatus that is the swamp and the rationale for its creation from a national defense perspective: the National Security Act of 1947.
It was post-WW2. The United States under President Truman had challenging questions to deal with: how do we move forward in a postwar world? How do we deal with the Soviet threat? What should the role of government and the military be in a rapidly technologically changing world? To help deal with these troubles, the National Security Act of 1947 thrust into existence the National Security Council, the CIA, and with the first secretary of defense (among other positions, departments, etc.) as various agencies were morphed, merged, and created anew. In thinking about national security, the CIA itself was divided into two camps — one led by Richard Helms, who wanted the agency to be a purely information-gathering service, and the other led by Frank Wisner, who wanted covert actions to be used to alter political events to our favor (Weiner, p. 11). Eventually, it would become both. The information-gathering, in theory, would help the U.S. no longer be blind to world events or reliant upon the British to gather intel, thus allowing the NSC to formulate strategic and tactical planning, and the remodeled Defense Department would be better equipped to implement those plans.
There were a few reasons why President Truman would approve of this design. First, the advent of the Truman Doctrine, and the Marshall Plan the following year, led America into a much more interventionist foreign policy. By utilizing economic and military resources to aid other nations against the Soviets, Truman and his cohort believed they could contain the Soviet threat. The National Security Act of 1947 would go a long way in providing the framework to implement those designs. Secondly, the U.S. would have felt itself in an economic position to fund these programs. A solid internal industry, growing technology, and being a creditor nation certainly on the surface would justify that optimism. Finally, especially on the intelligence front, Americans felt that it was imperative that they be independent. This proved prescient, as historian M. Stanton Evans revealed in his seminal work on communist influence and infiltration in U.S. institutions both before, during, and after the war (Evans 2007). While the National Security Act did increase the size, scope, and power of the government, that power was meant to be used as a defense against what was considered an existential threat.
Fast-forward over a half-century. While the Soviet threat no longer remains, its ideology has permeated American universities, news rooms, and even state and federal legislatures. We are now a nation of debt and bailouts, with immense welfare liabilities that cannot continue to fund everything it used to. Yet the cyber-world has opened an entirely new arena for national defense that requires high levels of training and investment. The actual apparatus created in 1947 has expanded into countless competing agencies that requires an ever increasing budget to keep up with such demands. Still, other concerns have been raised as unintended consequences continue to emerge. The old adage of “power corrupts” has been present with the bureaucratic creations of the National Security Act of 1947, and growing concern over this point has certainly reached a new peak in 2020. However, it has been present since the passing of the 1947 Act. For example, in his history of the CIA, author Tim Weiner notes:
The CIA Act was rammed through Congress on May 27th, 1949. With its passage, Congress gave the agency the widest conceivable powers. It became fashionable a generation later to condemn America’s spies for crimes against the Constitution. But between the twenty five years between the passage of the CIA Act and the awakening of the watchdog spirit of Congress, the CIA was barred only from behaving like a secret police inside the United States. The act gave the agency the ability to do almost anything it wanted, as long as Congress provided the money in an annual package. Approval of the secret budget by a small armed services committee was understood by those in the know to constitute a legal authorization for all secret operations. (pp. 45-46)
These words are no doubt concerning to those who fear improper collusion of elected officials with agencies or councils designed to keep us informed and safe. Certainly, 20th-century history shows us that domestic abuses occurred to tragic effect in places like the Soviet Union and Germany. Yet it cannot be denied that the powers granted in the National Security Act of 1947 could be invaluable in protecting the nation if utilized properly and kept within our constitutional framework.
Where does this leave us? In Colonel David Hackworth’s critique of the post-WW2 army, he called for major reform that started with an emphasis on valuing moral courage, practical education that related to the actual profession of soldiering, and an end to ticket-punching nepotism in favor of meritorious promotion of actual intellects and warriors (Hackworth, 1989). A similar framework could undoubtedly do wonders for the offspring of the National Security Act of 1947, but if that framework is truly to be successful, it must be enacted by an American people who have followed it themselves.
Troy Smith, American Thinker
Bibliography
Evans, M. Stanton. Blacklisted By History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy. Three Rivers Press, 2007.
Hackworth, Col. David. About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior. Touchstone, 1989.
Weiner, Tim. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Anchor Books, 2008.
Earlier this week, right before Christmas, Congress passed a 5,600-page COVID-19 relief bill that no one could have the time to read in its entirety.
The bill, which the Senate Historical Office said appears to be the longest bill ever approved, was handed to Congress only a few short hours before a vote was scheduled to be held, forcing representatives to quickly scan the document and make a decision without knowing the ins and outs of the bill.
Some members of Congress even took to social media, calling the document a disservice to the American people and noting how their teams were going through the PDF using the “CTRL + F” function to find important information – ridiculous!
And let’s not forget that American citizens are supposed to be able to review the proposed bill as well, giving them time to go to their local representatives to share their thoughts.
Yet by the time it got released for review, we had less than four hours. I certainly can’t read almost 6,000 pages that quickly… Can you?
This is a clear loss of American civil liberties. I had the pleasure of talking with former congressman Dr. Ron Paul this week on the American Consequences podcast. We spoke about how this isn’t the first time Americans have lost their liberties due to the coronavirus, and it won’t be the last…
So far, we’ve lost the freedom to choose to go out when we want to, and the simple freedom to choose if we want to eat somewhere for dinner… We’ve lost the ability to see our friends and family for the holidays, risking potential repercussions for gathering in our own homes. Now, we’ve lost the right to read a bill before it passes.
How can American citizens stand up for their rights with a government that acts this way?
As the virus becomes more and more politicized, lawmakers can push through bills and demand regulation that actively hurts American citizens.
American citizens are being forced to close their businesses, sometimes permanently, while the very people passing these laws have not missed a paycheck since the quarantine began.
But at least $600 to every American citizen should help…
Oh, and let’s not forget $600 to non-American citizens in America as well. Because this new bill, unlike the first relief bill, allows for mixed-status households to also receive the stimulus checks. That’s just one of the many small changes that were pushed through in this fast-vote bill.
President Trump ripped apart the relief package, arguing the legislation includes measures that have nothing to do with COVID-19 and the stimulus checks are far too small to actually help struggling Americans.
Now that the bill has been voted on and the people have had a chance to really dissect it, a few other important pieces of information have come to light.
Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, also joined me on my podcast this week to discuss the interesting, and somewhat frightening, laws that have made their way into this bill. Here are just a few highlights:
$1.3 billion for the Egyptian military, which will fund the purchase of Russian military equipment.
A block of President Trump’s plan to merge functions of the Office of Personnel into the General Services Administration.
$40 million to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. (which is currently closed!).
Illegal streaming is now a federal crime instead of a misdemeanor.
$33 million to Democracy efforts in Venezuela.
I am the first person to agree with aid toward Venezuela after all that country has been through as it’s moving toward democracy. But is right now the best time to be spending $33 million of taxpayer money?
Victor and I both agree – now is the time to focus on assisting our own citizens… The stability of our national economy depends on it.
Victor even outlined the potentially disastrous effects of moving forward with so much fiscal stimulus.
“We can’t lower interest any more,” he says, commenting on the fact that it’s hard to borrow any more money while we’re already approaching an enormous amount of national debt.
Instead of locking down businesses and taking away our civil liberties, now is the time to open up the economy. And rather than send so much money to foreign efforts, we should be focusing on reinvesting in the American economy.
But at least now, thanks to the impending stimulus checks, people living in the U.S. can afford to pay for Netflix to avoid federal jail time…
In 1897, Dr. Philip O’Hanlon, a coroner’s assistant on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, was asked a question by his then eight-year-old daughter, Virginia, which many a parent has been asked before: whether Santa Claus really exists. O’Hanlon deferred. He suggested Virginia wrote asking the question to one of New York’s most prominent newspapers at the time, The Sun, assuring her that “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.”
Dear Editor: I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, ‘If you see it in The Sun it’s so.’ Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?
The response to Virginia’s letter by one of the paper’s editors, Francis Pharcellus Church, remains the most reprinted editorial ever to run in any newspaper in the English language and found itself the subject of books, a film and television series. In his response Church goes beyond a simple “yes of course” to explore the philosophical issues behind Virginia’s request to tell her “the truth” and in the process lampoon a certain skepticism which he had found rife in American society since the suffering of the Civil War. His message in short – there is a reality beyond the visible.
VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.
Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.
Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.
You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.
No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.
Undergirding the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution is a set of philosophical principles that are under assault by Progressives. These founding principles, derived mostly from the Federalist Papers, provide the lens through which we read and understand the Constitution. Without this lens, the meaning of the Constitution and American law becomes putty in the hands of every special interest group.
Progressivism seeks to replace the founding principles with a new set of doctrines based on the tenets of social justice — a system which elevate the rights of “protected classes” (non-whites, LGBTQ, women, etc.) by subordinating the rest of society. This so-called “just society” is not the kinder, gentler America that Progressives promise, but a dystopia where the rights of the many are trampled, dissenters are punished, and government has nearly unlimited power and scope. The examples that follow are selected from my recent eBook, The War on America’s Founding Principles: How Progressives Are Dismantling America One Plank at a Time.
Inalienable Rights. The assault on America’s Founding Principles begins by dismantling the inalienable rights upon which our nation is built. An attack on these rights, which are endowed by God rather than the state, is an attack on our entire constitutional system. The first inalienable right, according to the Declaration of Independence, is the right to life — the right to exist. Legalized abortion on demand, which Progressives promote with fanatical zeal, is a complete rejection of this inalienable right. Progressives have further embraced this rejection by elevating abortion access to a fundamental human right and insisting that the government fund abortions. Ironically, this renders government, which is charged with protecting inalienable rights, complicit in violating the inalienable rights of the most powerless members of our society.
Liberty. American liberties include freedom of religion; freedom of speech (and, yes, that includes hate speech); freedom of the press; and the right to bear arms. The principle of liberty restrains government power, preventing it from unduly interfering with or denying our divinely endowed freedoms. Except where authorized by citizens through the Constitution, government does not have the authority to limit these freedoms (Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments). Accordingly, every action of government should strive to protect liberty and should be weighed by this principle.
But we find an opposing inertia at work on the left. Progressivism commences with an authoritarian, regulatory-minded impulse that restrains the freedom of citizens. Government power is used reflexively to limit personal freedoms by regulating businesses, markets, consumption, education, speech, religious conscience, etc. All of this is necessary, according to Progressives, to create a “just society.”
Examples of this authoritarian impulse include the House-approved Equality Act (which severely limits religious freedoms in order to accommodate LGBTQ “rights”); the Affordable Care Act (which attempted to force religious ministries and schools to cover the insurance cost of abortion-inducing birth control drugs); federal zoning laws (which are intended to destroy the suburbs by merging them with large cities); onerous gun control legislation; and the relentless attempts on social media, in corporations, and on college campuses to limit or deny the free speech of conservative speakers.
In all of these examples, forced conformity to achieve a “just society” is valued by Progressivism above free thinking, individual liberty, conscience, and self-determination. This stands in stark opposition to the goal of the Founders, which was to minimize government interference in our daily lives — the right to be left alone — allowing us to pursue our own happiness.
Private Property. “Government is instituted to protect property of every sort,” said James Madison, including conscience, “the most sacred of all property.” The founding principle of private property is not limited to real estate. It encompasses the natural rights of all individuals to create, obtain, and control their possessions, beliefs, faculties, and opinions, as well as the fruits of their labor (Fourth and Fifth Amendments).
Progressivism subordinates the protection of private property to the goals of social and economic equality and environmental justice. Equal outcomes, or “equity,” as it is often called, can be achieved only by reallocating wealth through centralized planning and control, government coercion, confiscation of private property, and limiting individual economic freedom.
One of the primary vehicles for achieving these goals is excessive taxation, which is used to redistribute wealth through massive federal programs.* Though Progressives are not seeking to abolish private property outright, they believe that their vision of a just society warrants government confiscation of private wealth and property to whatever degree is necessary to implement “economic justice.” Effectively, the purpose of government is to appropriate private property rather than to protect it.
Not only do these policies violate the natural right of private property, but, as history has shown, attempts to heavily regulate and control businesses and markets, and to redistribute wealth through taxation, end in widespread poverty, shortages, and even starvation (e.g., the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, Venezuela, etc.).
Limited Government. The principle of limited government maintains that citizens are best able to pursue happiness when government is confined to those powers that protect their life, liberty, and property. History is littered with innumerable examples of “absolute Despotism,” to use the words of the Declaration of Independence. The lesson is clear: tyranny grows in proportion to power, threatening individual liberty. The Founders had a realistic understanding of the human condition and its tendency toward corruption and control. “It will not be denied,” warned James Madison, “that power is of an encroaching nature and that it ought to be effectually restrained from passing the limits assigned to it” (Federalist 48).
Progressivism, on the other hand, originates from an entirely different set of assumptions regarding government power. Progressives, as evidenced by their compulsive dependency on government, maintain that government should be as large and as powerful as necessary to implement social, economic, and environmental justice. The government, especially at the federal level, is viewed as the first resort in resolving social and economic problems such as health care, education, unemployment, housing, poverty, and the environment.
The Green New Deal, which will cost trillions of dollars, is the largest, most expensive proposed government expansion in history. It would use federal control to restructure utilities, transportation, infrastructure, agriculture, society, and the economy. Similar proposals include taxpayer-funded health care, taxpayer-funded childcare, taxpayer-funded college education (at state colleges), a minimum guaranteed income, slavery reparations, and even taxpayer-funded internet service. These programs promote an uncontrollable dependency on government that is diametrically opposed to the Founders’ vision of America.
The fatal flaw in the Progressive project is not just the expansion of government with its 430-plus federal agencies, but the failure to connect this growing government power with increasing tyranny. Progressivism has no limiting principle to restrain the growth of government because government is regarded as a benign agent of the people. But this is a naïve delusion. As we have already seen, a number of our constitutional rights are in jeopardy as government inches toward authoritarianism. Innumerable examples across the globe, especially from socialist and former socialist countries, also give proof to the Founders’ belief that tyranny and corruption always grow in proportion to power.
Though Progressives, like most Americans, believe they are defending and preserving our democracy, they are actually undermining and replacing American democracy with something radically and dangerously different. The threat extends far beyond the principles of limited government, private property, liberty, and inalienable rights. Progressivism, in its relentless attempt to delegitimize our historical foundations, also endangers the rule of law, due process, consent of the governed, and federalism, among other principles, as explained in my book. This sweeping demolition of our founding principles renders Progressivism the most dangerous existential threat America has faced since the Civil War.
William DiPuccio, Ph.D., is author of The War on America’s Founding Principles: How Progressives Are Dismantling America One Plank at a Time, a free eBook. His articles, books, and videos can be found on his blog, Science Et Cetera.
*Though citizens have a moral and civic duty to help those in need and improve society, it is not the prerogative of the federal government to coerce philanthropy. State governments, which are closer to the people and whose powers are more general, may, as the Founders believed, undertake such relief as a last resort (e.g., to help children, the disabled, the destitute, etc.). Thomas Jefferson, for example, co-authored the Virginia “Bill for Support of the Poor” in 1779.
The only demonstrable result of government-imposed COVID-19 lockdowns has been the destruction of national economies, the crippling of domestic and cultural life, the suffering and death of multitudes due to untreated prior medical conditions, and the drastic rise in suicide rates. The lockdowns themselves have seemed to do little to prevent the onset of the disease, hence one lockdown after another has led to no discernible effect—apart from the fact that the virus appears to strike primarily a designated older cohort of the population already suffering from comorbidities. A recent graph charting the effects of repeated lockdowns in the province of Ontario would appear to indicate that the lockdowns themselves are super-spreaders. Texas Tech professor Gilbert Berdine sums up: “After taking the unprecedented economic depression into account, history will likely judge these lockdowns to be the greatest policy error of this generation.”
The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to the mask mandate, somewhat less destructive but equally absurd. After touting home-made, cloth, and sundry other masks for six months, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam have discovered that Canadians should be wearing three-layer masks—a tacit admission that the single- and double-ply masks we have been wearing for all this time are patently inadequate. Apparently, no-ply also works, given that our Minister of Health Patty Hajdu was spotted at Toronto’s Pearson Airport unabashedly maskless and happily smiling, like her American counterparts Anthony Fauci at a baseball game and Governor Newsom of California at his favorite restaurant.
In fact, masks do not screen out (or keep in) viral microns averaging 100 nanometers in size; the weave of all masks, with the partial exception of the medical N-95, is far too large to repel the coronavirus particle, which varies between 60nm and 140nm. Further, masks may cause hypoxia and consequent immune deficiency through the ingestion of one’s own CO2. It gets worse. A 50-state-wide controlled study showed that there is no correlation between mask mandates and fewer cases. On the contrary, there is a reverse correlation: non-masking states and counties did better than their masking counterparts. There is no weeding around the graphic evidence. One wonders if CO2 -forced immunity depletion had something to do with this.
As for home isolation and travel restrictions, they are not taken seriously by our authorities. According to the Associated Press, Denver’s mayor flew to Mississippi to spend Thanksgiving with his family, after urging others to stay home. A Pennsylvania mayor banned indoor dining, then patronized a restaurant in Maryland. The governor of Rhode Island was photographed at a wine tasting. The mayor of Austin, Texas, flew to Cabo San Lucas on a private jet after hosting a wedding for 20. It’s common knowledge that Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker & family have blatantly violated his own travel ban. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s husband was caught attempting to sidestep her shutdown.null
Similarly, Dr. Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus response coordinator, after declaring that anyone who traveled over the Thanksgiving weekend should assume they were infected with COVID-19 and should limit celebrations to “your immediate household,” traveled to her vacation home in Delaware during Thanksgiving, “accompanied by three generations of her family from two households.” These people must know something the rest of us don’t. As IT professional Alexander Scipio writes, the political, social, and economic devastation we are suffering is not caused by a virus “with a survival rate of well over 99%,” but by a political and financial class—international oligarchs—seeking absolute power via “a weaponized virus from China.” But we go along with it, dutifully obeying the mandates, as if we were characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream bewitched by fairies and spells. “Shall we their fond pageant see? Lord, what fools these mortals be!”
“We as a society are becoming ever less bookish,” writes the great Theodore Dalrymple, which means we are becoming ever less informed, ever less knowledgeable, ever less educated. Indeed, we are on the whole ever more incurious and credulous, which is no doubt the permanent condition and status of the majority of human beings—except that never in the history of mankind has the accessible intellectual horizon broadened, at least potentially, to the extent that it has today: university education on offer for all, books readily available, libraries, museums, theaters, concert halls (pre-lockdown) open to the public, a World Wide Web and computers proliferating as domestic items. And yet studies suggest that genuine IQ is deteriorating, people are as gullible as ever, and mob psychology and identity politics are increasingly replacing the independent thought of the questing individual. One might call it Twitteritis.null
We are content to remain in a low-information twilight zone and, just as bad, to outsource common sense to our political betters, their hired-gun health officials, and so-called “experts” who can’t keep their stories straight. Thus, there is an irresistible tendency, in the face of government decrees with respect to COVID, to behave like lemmings obediently surging toward the cliff, “willing to obey the demands and commands of the world elite,” writes Sucharit Bhakdi, Chair of Medical Microbiology at the University of Mainz. He deplores the complete over-reaction to a virus that could have been handled differently and far more wisely. True, one must acknowledge those brave souls who have marched and demonstrated against government imposition of unconstitutional measures, but they are small in number, regarded as dissidents, troublemakers, and “spreaders” by the surrounding population and disavowed by majority opinion.
And there in a nutshell is the marrow-deep problem we are confronting. We can expect our nominal leaders, with few exceptions, to be incompetent, restrictively educated, partisan zealots, profoundly unintelligent, and visibly hypocritical. The spectacle of our politicians brazenly violating the very rules they have sternly imposed comes as no surprise. That is par for the course. But the public that should be keeping our politicians’ feet to the fire are, at least, equally undistinguished, as well as easily malleable and fundamentally incurious.
I speak to my neighbors, to people I meet in the public square, and to our professionals, medical, legal, and otherwise. When I point out certain obvious facts, I am usually met with glazed incomprehension or outright condescension. When I am informed, for example, that Sweden, which did not lock down, is currently experiencing the same winter spike in COVID infections as lockdown countries, and therefore that not to lock down is a failing strategy, I wonder at the incapacity for logical deduction. If the results are the same, I reply, then why in heaven’s name not keep the kids in school, allow bars, restaurants, and small businesses to stay open, and preserve the economy intact? No response. (Sweden, incidentally, remains one of the few sane countries on the planet.)null
When I point out that pro-pandemic agitator and Director of the World Economic Forum Klaus Schwab of Great Reset fame and a major influence on our Prime Minister has paradoxically confided in his book COVID-19: The Great Reset that COVID is “one of the least deadly pandemics the world has experienced in the last 2000 years,” the reaction is: Who is Klaus Schwab? Should I recommend familiarity with the police-state program called the Great Reset and its partner UN Agenda 2030, again, no interest.
When I suggest that instead of blindly following the government line, or deriving our information from suborned or ignorant journalists churning out a column a day, they might spend a few hours doing their own research and consult eminent virologists and organizations like the Great Barrington Declaration, the Truth Over Fear Summit, Medical News Today (MNT), the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM), The American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), and even the left-leaning The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—all readily accessible on the Net—people turn away as if I were some sort of crank. And yet spending merely a couple of minutes with a recent AIER assessment would help dispel the “fog of disease mitigation.” Citing a W.H.O. report that asymptomatic spread is “very rare,” the AIER concludes that “everything we’ve done over the months—the mask wearing, the grasshopper dance not to be next to people, the canceling of everything, the wild paranoia and premodern confusions—has been a calamitous and destructive waste of time, energy, and money.”null
When I suggest that it might be worthwhile to crack the spines of a few definitive books like Liberty or Lockdown or Corona False Alarm?, written by world-acclaimed specialists and epidemiologists—my interlocutors hem and haw. They are busy with work and family. They already have the truth—it was on CTV or Global. They prefer to park their confidence in the pronouncements of our Provincial Health Officer, who has already changed her mind three or four times.
I suspect my anecdotal observations could be universally generalized. One recalls Churchill’s famous (alleged) remark: “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” Of course, the same cognitive defect would apply across the board to the citizens of any other political system.
The Surgeon General of the United States Jerome Adams advises, “I hope that people will do their research and do the right thing for themselves and for their communities.” Of course, Adams assumes that people will follow the official guidelines, recommendations, and mandates, the presumable “right thing”—but what if prolonged and meticulously conducted personal research leads to other conclusions? Adams has nothing to say about this outcome. It must be admitted, however, that the odds regarding individual citizens actively pursuing a research program on their own initiative, exercising their curiosity, investigating the validity of government edicts, wishing to learn about what has disrupted their lives, spending a few hours reading a book—is probably statistically insignificant.
I realize I am belaboring the obvious. Still, one works, so to speak, one person at a time. Perhaps we need not wholly despair. Two of my correspondents, employees at the local supermarket who were avid lockdowners and maskers, did in fact follow up, check out my suggestions, and have recently told me they have changed their thinking. They are compelled to wear masks on the job, but discard them as soon as they leave the premises. They recognize that the lockdowns are the height of institutional folly—though they may not suspect the Machiavellian planning behind them.null
Nonetheless, minor victories. At least, something.
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David Solway’s most recent book Notes from a Derelict Culture was delisted by Amazon. It is currently available at Barnes & Noble.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 