One of my great joys in life is eavesdropping. As a psychologist, I have long been interested in people—in what they think, feel, and how they behave. I enjoy watching people’s facial expressions, listening to their word choices, and tracking their emotional tone. Among my favorite venues for people-watching is the airport. Unlike restaurants or movie theaters, airports are locations where people are placed in close quarters and where I have nothing better to do than listen in to the lives of others.article continues after advertisementnull

Unfortunately, a lot of what I overhear are complaints. I hear people gripe about delayed flights and uncomfortable seats. I listen to business people make calls in which they tear down co-workers and competitors alike. I bear witness to a litany of problems: bad weather, wars, poor economic performance, nosy in-laws, and broken bones. You’d think the world was ending.

The Psychology of Complaining

If complaining is so awful, why is it so prevalent? It turns out that complaining has captured the attention of many of my colleagues. There is a growing body of research addressing complaining: what it is and when and why it happens. To begin with, complaining is simply expressing dissatisfaction. This usually happens verbally, as in the case of two people on a date commenting on the awful dinner they have been served. For consumers, it can happen through online feedback forms or customer service counters—but consumer complaints are a separate matter.

Complaining usually happens in the wake of a negative situation. Traffic was worse than expected. The movie was disappointing. The contractor did shoddy work. The city council should never have approved that new development. Of course, it is not just situations but also personal factors that are involved. You’ll notice, for example, that some people tend to complain while others hold their tongues. Indeed, there is a “complaint threshold” that must be reached before someone decides to grumble.

This threshold is still being explored but it likely has many facets. One may be the “locus of control,” or how much control a person feels she has in a situation. If an airline misplaces your suitcase, for instance, you are more likely to lodge a complaint because you feel that your notification of the problem will help to solve it. There may be other personal factors involved as well, such as tolerance for conflict, age, and the desire to present one’s self positively.article continues after advertisement.

The Flavors of Complaints

It is useful to understand that complaining (and, by extension, complainers) come in different types. There are those who never seem to be satisfied. These are known as chronic complainers. They have a tendency to ruminate on problems and to focus on setbacks over progress. Some research suggests that making a habit of complaining can “re-wire” the brain so that those particular thinking orientations become ingrained. It is possible to re-wire this re-wiring to make it more positive, of course, but chronic complainers probably don’t think it would work all that well.

The second type of complaint is the familiar “venting.” Venting is expressing emotional dissatisfaction. It turns out that people who vent have an agenda. They tend to be focused on themselves and their own—presumably negative—experience. By showing their anger, frustration, or disappointment, they are soliciting attention from their confidantes. They can feel validated by receiving attention and sympathy. Venters are particularly likely to discount advice and proposed solutions to their problems. They aren’t looking to solve anything; they simply want validation.

One unfortunate downside to both venting and to chronic complaining is that it can dampen people’s moods. In one series of studies, researchers tracked people’s moods before and after hearing a complaint. As predicted, listening to gripes made people feel worse. What’s more, the complainer also felt worse!article continues after advertisement.

How to Complain Well

The last type of complaint is known as the “instrumental complaint.” Unlike its wrinkle-nosed conceptual cousins, the instrumental complaint is all about solving problems. When you confront your romantic partner about overspending on the credit card, that could be instrumental complaining. Especially if you focus on the impact of the problem, the importance of change, and cooperate to create a plan for change. One study suggests that these types of complaints make up fewer than 25 percent of all complaints.

In one study, researchers found that happy people complain less. They also looked at the evidence that the happy folks in their study were more mindful. They hypothesize that more cheerful folks are likely to complain more mindfully—more strategically if you will—and with a specific goal in mind. When viewed this way, a rough guide for complaining emerges:

• Avoid dampening your mood by complaining only rarely
• Complain only in instances where you believe it will affect real and positive change
• Consider whether affirmation or some other strategy will work instead of complaining
• Limit your exposure to complaining by limiting your exposure to complainers

Robert Biswas-Diener

“No matter how worthy the cause, it is robbery, theft, and injustice to confiscate the property of one person and give it to another to whom it does not belong.”

“Three-fifths to two-thirds of the federal budget consists of taking property from one American and giving it to another. Were a private person to do the same thing, we’d call it theft. When government does it, we euphemistically call it income redistribution, but that’s exactly what thieves do – redistribute income. Income redistribution not only betrays the founders’ vision, it’s a sin in the eyes of God.”

Your comments and suggestions are welcomed and encouraged. Please e-mail me anytime at artfuldilettante@outlook.com

With the manufactured “news” that Pennsylvania and Nevada have been called for Joe Biden by news media, liberals celebrating the supposed victory of the purported 46th president took to the streets in euphoria and revelry. It seems logical to assume that many of today’s celebrants were also participants in the street protests four years ago when Donald Trump beat their gal Hillary.

Hillary Clinton made the fatal mistake of revealing the way she truly thought of half of the American population that supported Trump by calling them “a basket of deplorables.”

Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” moment (YouTube screengrab)

And the next four years we witnessed the greatest revolt in our nation’s history since the Civil War. The half of the country that supported Hillary refused to accept the results of the election and have been protesting – often violently — ever since.https://lockerdome.com/lad/9371484590420070?pubid=ld-8832-1542&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanthinker.com&rid=www.americanthinker.com&width=692

They were joined by the media that spent four years lying and echoing the narrative spoon fed to them from the likes of Adam Schiff and the rest of the Democrats from Obama on down. We now know that the deep state took immoral (if not illegal) steps to not only make it impossible for Trump to govern successfully but that they refused to allow a smooth transition of power, produced a disinformation campaign the likes of which we’ve never seen before, and finally found a lame excuse to impeach Trump in his final year – the good of the country be damned.

Now that the media have anointed Biden the winner, people are asking whether the right will take to the streets in protest of Biden. Unfortunately, if they do, they will certainly be justified, as we learn every day of another voter fraud accusation, unseemly incidents at polling places preventing legally-mandated observers from doing their jobs, and statistically impossible returns, all favoring Biden from ballots appearing out of nowhere.

The same people who thought that Russia stole the election for Trump and who refused to accept his presidency four years ago fail today to see the irony and hypocrisy as they criticize Trump and his supporters for questioning the results of the election when fraud seems apparent. As Ari Fleischer tweeted:

Resist. Overturn. Boycott. Surveil. Leak. Impeach. And now they tell us it’s time to heal. Where were they for the last four years?

The difference between us and them is that when the courts make the final pronouncement, we will not loot, burn down businesses, and stomp on the American flag. Cities across the country were boarded up ahead of the election for fear of the left, not the right. We are not the deplorables.

The Resistance movement was birthed before Trump even won and continued his entire presidency. And that taught us who the deplorables truly are. They wear their hatred and ugliness proudly and loudly, without reservation or self-awareness. We know the obvious ones – Democrats like Schiff, Pelosi, Schumer and others who have been lying and sneering for four years; the national media that has become an extension of the Democrat party; the Hollywood and Silicon Valley elites who use social media the way the Soviets used Pravda.

But it’s the average Americans who have spent four years suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, allowing it to fester rather than be treated, who have proven to be the true deplorables with their self-righteous, judgmental condescension and anger directed at anyone who has the audacity to disagree with them.  They spawned the cancel culture in which we now live, the social justice nonsense that has infected our institutions from professional sports to corporate American, and the intolerance that is destroying our freedoms.

Within the past week alone, I have encountered hate – and ignorance – of such a magnitude that it is clear that Joe Biden will not bring back “normalcy,” “morality,” or “civility” any time soon, since the perpetrators of abnormal behavior, immorality, and uncivil discourse are the exact people who have claimed they needed Trump to lose in order to save the nation.

One friend I have known for 40 years has been suffering psychologically for some time, as is evidenced in Facebook outbursts and crazy ramblings about cutting people out of his life. The day before the election, he in fact did cut me out with a missive that included “F— you,” “I’m now a committed…equal opportunity hater,” and “the Republican Party goes to the graveyard tomorrow for a well deserved dirt nap.” Putting aside the stupidity of this, how much hate does it take to proudly announce it and throw friendships away over it? What level of ignorance and vapidity does it take to harbor such anger at someone with a different opinion?

A relative (an admitted socialist and Bernie supporter) took to Facebook on Wednesday to share that she was “speechless.  How is this even close? All we had to do was choose a man over a monster.”  (I guess monster was broader than Hitler which is the left’s favorite name for Trump.) She added, “I’m embarrassed to be an American” and ready for “blue states to secede and create a nation that values all people and supports equity, respect, tolerance, sustainability, and love.”

I like the secession idea but these people have no self-awareness whatsoever – tolerance, respect, and love?  Hmmmm? (Lord knows what sustainability has to do with the election but climate change is the left’s religion so I suppose sustainability is one of those values that we deplorables are lacking.)

Another relative responded: “I too am speechless. Dismayed, in shock, sad….  What kind of values do [we] live our lives by? Where is our humanity, compassion, integrity. No answers.”

Well, actually there are a lot of answers if these people could get their heads out of their blue bubble, lie-infested echo chambers. But their hate has led to otherwise seemingly intelligent people sounding like bitter, blathering idiots. In response to the “no answers,” someone posted an article discussing Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste,” in which the opinion writer espouses the notion that, “The soul of this nation is being sacrificed to assuage the abject terror felt by too many white people in knowing that people of color will outnumber them in about 20 years.” And we’re the deplorables?

Then there’s the father who wrote to “Trump-Supporting Friends and Relatives” that he feels unsafe because “we see your vote for Trump as a… blessing of everything we fight against, as an affirmation of the worst of humanity, and most importantly, as a direct act of violence against our family.” He shared that “this will be an irreparable wedge between us, a fracture that will be beyond ever fully healing, and it will be cause for me never to feel completely comfortable in your presence” and concluded “voting for Trump again is something I can’t and won’t abide.” Tolerance?

And I love this post: “Who was the last president that didn’t have a dog?!…that, alone, shows you what a putz he is.” At least that individual kept her attacks to Trump rather than the 71 million Americans who voted for him.

The problem with these people is not their hate and ignorance. That’s their problem, not ours. The problem is that there is no way to cure this.  They either get their socialist government, win elections, and shut down the free speech of half of the country or they take to the streets and social media like toddlers in the midst of the terrible two’s but more violent. They dress their judgmental condescension up in broad, elitist pronouncements as if they’re somehow expert and all-knowing.  

They fail to see how ignorant of history, culture, and America itself they are. They didn’t see Trump coming and can’t comprehend 71 million Americans voting for him because they don’t love America – certainly not the way that we deplorables do. They want to socialize it, the government to invade every aspect of our lives, and to control all of our thoughts and institutions. I fear it cannot be stopped because the country’s foundations from the media and academia to the deep state have been hijacked. Generations will continue to be indoctrinated, Democrats will continue to seek power for power’s sake, not love of country, and the rest of us will continue to be called the deplorables.

But we know who the real deplorables are. They show their true colors daily on social media, our streets, and elsewhere. They are truly bitter, hateful people.

Laurie B. Regan

Recent legislators, activists, and education reformers have promised to lead us into a new world of equity. No longer will some groups have a different lifestyle from others. No longer will some groups have a different education from others. There will be reform or else, Hawk Newsome warns, “we will burn down this system and replace it.”

For a preview of these glories, we have only to open Ayn Rand’s Anthem. In this dystopian novella, collectivists achieve their ideal by burning cities and books, then implementing central planning. Now everyone is equal: equally poor, equally housed, equally limited in what they can say and do and think.

If, as Jen Maffessanti observes, dystopian fiction helps us understand the dangers we face, then none is more relevant to this moment than Rand’s novella. What Anthem clarifies is the real significance of collectivist ideals and language, which undermine not only our rights but our ability to articulate them.

“OUR NAME IS EQUALITY 7-2521”

Anthem opens by foregrounding the triumph of the collective through the narrator’s struggle to express and justify his thoughts. In this world, there is no “I,” only the collective “we,” which has become synonymous with good. The novel opens,

It is a sin to write this. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. . . . And well we know that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone.

Only the “Council of Vocations” can approve such writing. The narrator, Equality 7-2521, struggles to conform even as he defies such rules: “We strive to be like all our brother men, for all men must be alike.” But he is not.

At six feet, Equality 7-2521 towers over other boys. His teacher warns, “There is evil in your bones.” In school, he is unhappy because “learning was too easy. This is a great sin, to be born with a head which is too quick.” How does he know? “The teachers told us so.”

Eventually, Equality 7-2521 tries to imitate the slow learners. But the teachers know, “and we were lashed more often than all the other children.” And when he turns fifteen, the Council of Vocations places him in the Home of the Street Sweepers, where he will have no more opportunities to display his “quick” mind. Equity achieved.

“OUR POISONED LANGUAGE”

Anthem anticipates F. A. Hayek’s later warnings about “our poisoned language.” In The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism Hayek observes, “so long as we speak in language based in erroneous theory, we generate and perpetuate error.”

That error is evident in the use of words to convey entire moral arguments. In Anthem, “we” and “the collective” are “good,” just as, Hayek observed, “social” now designates what is “morally right.” And “what at first seems a description imperceptibly turns into a prescription”: distributive justice.

A similar shift is now occurring in the use of “equity.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest recorded instance was from 1315, from which point “equity” has been used to mean “the quality of being equal or fair; fairness, impartiality, even-handed dealing.”

Now “equity” means the moral imperative to ensure equal outcomes, as in the concept of “educational equity”: “Equity recognizes that some are at a larger disadvantage than others and aims at compensating for these people’s misfortunes and disabilities.”

How does “Equity” do this? It “aims to take extra measures by giving those who are in need more than others who are not. Equity aims at making sure that everyone’s lifestyle is equal even if it may come at the cost of unequal distribution of access and goods.”

In other words, to achieve “equity,” the unacknowledged officials treat people unequally.

“THE PLANS OF THE WORLD COUNCIL”

Rand’s Anthem illustrates the results generated by such committees. The Council of Vocations achieves equal lifestyles by grouping diverse people in the Home of the Street Sweepers, where Equality 7-2521’s team consists of a talented artist and a man incapable of using his broom due to incessant convulsions. Their work is uneven, to say the least.

When Equality secretly discovers electric light and brings it to the Council of Scholars, they reject his invention because he invented it alone. Furthermore, it would destroy the Department of Candles and “wreck the Plans of the World Council,” which took fifty years to approve the candle. They insist it be destroyed, metaphorically seeking to keep their world in the dark.

For the collective, the goal is control of outcomes, not freedom or human flourishing. And to maintain that control, they make sure that no one can see the truth, much less say it. In the Home of the Street Sweepers at night, the men undress silently in the dim candlelight: “For all must agree with all, and they cannot know if their thoughts are thoughts of all, and so they fear to speak.”

“THE SMALLEST MINORITY ON EARTH IS THE INDIVIDUAL”

Over the last few months, we have come closer to Rand’s dystopia of fear, silencing, and distorted “equity.” In a recent survey at the University of North Carolina, students across the political spectrum reported that they (like the Street Sweepers) engaged in self-censorship in classrooms, remaining silent even when their opinions related to topics in class. They are afraid.

They are not alone. Online mobs are destroying careers and lives, as John Stossel observes in “Cancel Culture is Out of Control.” He urges those of us who can speak to do so.

Yet embracing free speech and other rights becomes increasingly difficult as governments push to eliminate them. Recently the California legislature passed ACA 5, which would allow for “race- and gender-conscious remedies” to correct differences in university admissions and government contracts. This measure for equity would overturn Proposition 209, which prohibits the state from discriminating against or granting preferential treatment to any group or individual on the basis of race, sex, or ethnicity.

If California’s citizens pass it, the government will be able legally to discriminate against individuals. Yet, as Rand argues:

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).

Rand urges individuals to take a stand. In her Author’s Foreword to the American edition of Anthem, Rand observes, “The greatest guilt today is that of people who accept collectivism by moral default.”

If we need models, we have only to look to Leonard Read. He discovered that Anthem had been published in England (1938) but had been rejected by American publishers. Deciding it deserved a broader audience, he issued the first American edition with Pamphleteers in 1946, the same year he founded FEE.

Our own options will vary, but as John Stossel urges, those of us who can speak up, must do so. Otherwise, we face entering the twenty-first-century version of Anthem.

Caroline Breashers is a Professor of English at St. Lawrence University.  Previous publications have appeared in EconLib, The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Modern Philology, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Aphra Behn Online, Script & Print, The International Journal of Pluralistic Economic Education, and Philological Quarterly. Her book Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing and the “Scandalous Memoir” was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017.  

Democrats are angry and astonished — astonished I tell you! — that President Trump and Republicans are accusing Biden and Democrats of cheating. This is rich beyond measure. Let me help Democrat friends understand an important concept, it’s in the Bible so you might now know it: You sow to the wind, you reap the whirlwind.

Welcome to the whirlwind.

Democrats perpetrated a four-year fraud on the American people centered on the illegitimacy of Donald Trump. No sense denying it. We were all there. Million woman marches, endless demonstrations, fake scandals claiming that Trump was not legitimate because Russia helped him. He was Putin’s pawn.

Democrats refused to even call him by his name. He was 45. Remember how about 20 Democrat members of Congress boycotted his inauguration. Remember #notmypresident trended for years and remained at least until Nov. 3. Remember for four years there was the #resistance to an illegitimate president.

The desperation to remove the duly elected president resulted in an empty impeachment after the Russia collusion hoax collapsed but only 10 months before the election. Then came Covid and the ongoing claims that Trump is personally responsible for 230,000 Americans’ deaths. This is too insipid to even respond to. Finally came the last final gasp with pre-staged BLM race riots, burning and destruction.

Always chaos and distrust. Always blamed on Trump. Four years of undermining every American norm. Trump tweets and language did not do it. Democrats and the allied American left did it — from the media to academia to Hollywood to BLM and Antifa — sowing to the wind with utter abandon, as though there would be no consequences for such abhorrent behavior. Calling all Trump supporters racists (I personally got that many times. It was the norm.) Or deplorables. Or Nazis and fascists. Etc.

Like The Revolutionary Act on Facebook

The media was wholly culpable in sowing to the wind as baseless anti-Trump stories ran daily for years, creating distrust not just in Trump, but in the institutions of government and actions of the elected president. The mainstream media was the mouth of the resistance, of truly fake stories and of the election campaign of Joe Biden.

And now, NOW, Democrats want civility? They want respect? They want unity!? They claim shock that we might question the veracity of the election, that we would dare launch legal challenges despite substantial evidence of actual fraud — not the fake fraud they hoisted on us for four years. They want us to pretend like their actions of the past four years never happened. Can’t we just get along?

Those years did happen. They changed the American norm going forward. No one on the right will forget. We had four years to witness the left busting American norms, and now an election with an enormous amount of corruption — some illegal, some unethical and some immoral. This is no old general that will quietly fade away. Democrats made a hash of the bed we all have to sleep in. And there is no changing that. It looks like they got what they wanted: Trump out of office. (I’ll wait for certified results after legal challenges.)

Like Rod’s new Youtube channel

This is a tragedy for our nation. I’m not sure at all this Genie can be re-bottled. For one, every one of us on the right knows that if Trump had squeaked out the win — or does still — Democrats will immediately flip back to illegitimate president and resistance mode. They know it. And we know it.

In fact, there are even leading members of the media and the left that are not content with the “win.” They want Trump supporters punished and the GOP destroyed.

Washington Post columnist in good standing Jennifer Rubin told MSNBC Sunday: “It’s not only that Trump has to lose, his enablers have to lose. We have to, in essence, burn down the Republican party. Because if there are survivors, if there are people who weather this storm, they will do it again.” Survivors!

It’s not just Rubin — who isn’t exactly nobody. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes wants to make lists of the “thousands” who are “complicit” in Donald Trump. And then what? Slate magazine called for imprisoning Trump advisor Stephen Miller for “crimes against humanity.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) called for recriminations beyond just White House officials. These are all after Biden’s declared victory.

Own it, Democrats. This terrible new dynamic, possibly new norm, is on you. And you alone. But we will all pay for it.

Liberty 7732, The Revolutionary Act

Your comments and suggestions are welcomed and encouraged. Please e-mail me anytime at artfuldilettante@outlook.com

Voting, the be all and end all of modern democratic politicians, has become a farce, if indeed it was ever anything else. By voting, the people decide only which of the oligarchs preselected for them as viable candidates will wield the whip used to flog them and will command the legion of willing accomplices and anointed lickspittles who perpetrate the countless violations of the people’s natural rights. Meanwhile, the masters soothe the masses by assuring them night and day that they – the plundered and bullied multitudes who compose the electorate – are themselves the government.”–Robert Higgs

President Trump, you won the election, but the deep state leftists are trying to cheat you out of victory. Even though you led in Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, mysterious paper ballots materialized, reversing the will of the people. Pepe Escobar, writing in the Asia Times, explains how it was done:

Stuffing the ballot box is a typical scam applied in Banana Republic declinations of color revolution. Blue operators use the tried and tested method applied to the gold futures market, when a sudden drop of naked shorts drives down gold price, thus protecting the US dollar.

Blue operators bet the compliant mainstream media/Big Tech alliance will not question that, well, out of the blue, the vote would swing towards Blue in a 2 to 3 or 3 to 4 margin.

They bet no questions will be asked on how a 2 percent to 5 percent positive ballot trend in Red’s favor in a few states turned into a 0.5 percent to 1.4 percent trend in favor of Blue by around 4am.
And that this discrepancy happens in two swing states almost simultaneously.

And that some precincts turn more presidential votes than they have registered voters.

And that in swing states, the number of extra mysterious votes for Blue far exceeds votes cast for the Senate candidates in these states, when the record shows that down ticket totals are traditionally close.

And that turnout in one of these states would be 89.25 percent.

You should of course continue to press your legal challenges to the fake vote as much as you can. The news media has no power to declare Biden the winner. But even if you don’t succeed and have to leave the White House on January 20, you are legally president until that day. In the time until then, you should act decisively against the deep state and the enemies of the American people. Here are a few suggestions on things to do.

You should fire Anthony Fauci and Christopher Wray. One of the main ways that the deep state undermined you is by using the phony covid-19 crisis to wreck the economy. As Gary Barnett pointed out last May:

Tony Fauci got his wish, or at least he and others were able to manufacture a scenario that would make his wish come true. One of yesterday’s reports after Fauci testified before Congress stated:

Fauci, a member of Trump’s coronavirus task force, told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee that the nation’s efforts to battle the deadly virus and the COVID-19 disease it triggers should be ‘focused on the proven public health practices of containment and mitigation.’

In other words, everyone should remain in lockdown, which of course means home prison, and this is known by the perpetrators of this fraud to cause severe stress that kills the immune system, thus guaranteeing more sickness, more death, and more tyranny. Fauci knows this, as does his partner in crime Bill Gates. The longer people are isolated and stressed, the more disease that will occur, and that plays right into the hands of those like Fauci that desire total control over society in order to gain for themselves.

After you fire Fauci, you should urge that we open up the economy completely. We don’t need face masks, which prevent people from breathing and don’t stop the virus. Don’t fall for the phony vaccine propaganda. As Ron Paul has said:

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently admitted that lockdowns cause more harm than good. Following this announcement, one would have expected American politicians to immediately end the lockdowns. After all, the WHO’s pronouncements are considered infallible, so much so that social media sites silence anyone who dares challenge the great and powerful WHO. Yet, governors, mayors, and other government officials across the country are ignoring the WHO’s anti-lockdown position.

Instead of admitting that the lockdowns were a mistake, many in the political class, which includes a disturbing number of medical professionals whose positions and prestige depend on government, claim that we cannot return to normalcy until a coronavirus vaccine is in wide use. This suggests that people among the majority of Americans who do not wish to be vaccinated will remain under lockdown or be forced to be vaccinated against their will.

The assault on our liberty will not end with deployment and use of a vaccine. Moncef Slaoui, the chief adviser of the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed, a “public-private partnership” in charge of producing and delivering a coronavirus vaccine, has said that those who receive a vaccine will be monitored by “incredibly precise … tracking systems.” Slaoui has also indicated that tech giants Google and Oracle will help the government keep tabs on the vaccinated individuals. So, the vaccine program will lead to an increase in government surveillance!

You should urge people not to take the vaccine, even if Biden usurps power on January 20.

Christopher Wray has acted to undermine your administration. He pedals the fake charge that the Russians made you president in 2016, and he withheld from you the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell,” even though he had this since December. But you shouldn’t stop with him. As you well know, there is a cabal of FBI, CIA, and NSA agents who have acted to undermine you even before you took office. You should get rid of them. In fact, why do we need an FBI or a CIA at all? They are agencies of world disruption, and you would do the world a great deal of good by abolishing them.

The Left will stop at nothing to harm you and your friends if Biden gets in. You should immediately pardon yourself, your family, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, and all the others who have stood up against the Left. I strongly suspect that “Judge” Sullivan, a pliant tool of the Left, is planning to sentence Flynn to a long prison term as soon as you are forced out of office. He needs to be pardoned to preclude that from happening. You should continue to denounce and to act against the BLM and Antifa thugs who are rioting and looting.

One of the best things you could do is to fire the entire Federal Reserve Board. The Fed controls our economy in the interests of nefarious forces, and firing the Fed Board would be a great first step to the End the Fed. As Ron Paul has said,

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell recently announced that the Fed is abandoning “inflation targeting” where the Fed aims to maintain a price inflation rate of up to two percent. Instead, the Fed will allow inflation to remain above two percent to balance out periods of lower inflation. Powell’s announcement is not a radical shift in policy. It is an acknowledgment that the Fed is unlikely to reverse course and stop increasing the money supply anytime soon.
Following the 2008 market meltdown, the Fed embarked on an unprecedented money-creation binge. The result was historically low interest rates and an explosion of debt. Today total household debt and business debt are each over 16 trillion dollars. Of course, the biggest debtor is the federal government. The explosion of debt puts pressure on the Fed to keep increasing the money supply in order to maintain low interest rates. An increase in rates to anything close to what they would be in a free market could make it impossible for consumers, businesses, and (especially) the federal government to manage their debt. This would create a major economic crisis.

The Fed has also dramatically expanded its balance sheet since 2008 via multiple rounds of “quantitative easing.” According to Bloomberg, the Fed is now the world’s largest investor and holds about one-third of all bonds backed by US home mortgages.

Congress has expanded the Fed’s portfolio by giving the central bank authority to make trillions of dollars of payments to business as well as to state and local governments in order to help the economy recover from the unnecessary and destructive lockdowns….

Once the lockdowns end, the Fed’s actions may lead to a short-term boom. However, the long-term effect will be even more debt, continued erosion of the average American’s standard of living, and the collapse of the fiat money system and the welfare-warfare state. The crisis will likely be brought on by a rejection of the dollar’s reserve currency status. This will be supported both by concerns about the stability of the US economy and resentment over America’s hyper-interventionist foreign policy.

The question is not if the current system will end. The question is how it will end.

If the end comes via a meltdown, the result will likely be chaos, violence, and increased support for authoritarian movements as desperate people trade their few remaining liberties in hopes of gaining security.

There is another vital thing you can do. In your first term, you often complained about NATO and our involvement in foreign quarrels that don’t concern us. You would render the American people an inestimable service if you withdrew America from NATO and brought all American troops home. The American empire is vast. As Laurence Vance has pointed out,

According to the latest edition of the Department of Defense’s (DOD) Base Structure Report: “The DoD manages a worldwide real property portfolio that spans all 50 states, 8 US territories with outlying areas, and 45 foreign countries.” The majority of these foreign sites are located in Germany (194 sites). The DOD owns, leases, or controls 47,288 buildings occupying 481,651 acres on foreign soil. The DOD has acknowledged the existence of about 800 US military bases in 80 countries, but we know from the work of Nick Turse and the late Chalmers Johnson that that number is closer to 1,000.

Why not do what you can to end this empire and return America to our traditional policy of nonintervention?

You should also reject the false appeals for unity of Biden and his allies. America is not unified. The heartland of America stands opposed to the coastal elites, illegal immigrants, and disaffected minority groups who seek to exploit the rest of us. We need more disunity, not unity.

Finally, remember that Joe Biden is not the legitimate president—you are. You should do and say everything you can, both before and after January 20, to delegitimize him, Kamala Harris, and the whole gang. Just as you have been doing, you should stress the blatantly fraudulent “results” in Biden’s favor. As the New York Post has pointed out, the election might be decided by Congress:

With the final vote in dispute, states with Democratic governors but Republican legislatures — including the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan and Wisconsin, the latter two of which have already been called for Biden — could conceivably end up dispatching two distinct groups of Electoral College voters, reported Marie Claire, citing a study by election scholar Edward B. Foley. In that scenario, those states would have two competing sets of electoral votes, and, as president of the Senate, Republican Vice President Mike Pence would be tasked with unraveling the situation. He could opt to throw out both sets of votes from those states, meaning neither candidate could reach the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency. In that event, the members of Congress would vote for president and vice president. The House of Representatives would vote for president, with each state’s delegation getting one shared vote, and a simple majority of 26 votes needed to elect. In the Senate, each senator gets one vote, with a simple majority of 51 votes needed to elect.

If you are forced out on January 20, you should set up a White House in exile and continually criticize what Biden does. You should use your unrivaled media skills to always keep in the public eye. You won the election, and you are the rightful president. If you do these things, you will be remembered as a great American president.

Reprinted with permission from LewRockwell.com.

The ugliness that we have recently witnessed including rioting, billions of dollars of property destruction, assaults, murders and grossly stupid claims about our nation has its origins on college campuses. Two websites, College Reform and College Fix, report on the despicable teachings on college campuses across the nation. Let us look at some of it.

In response to Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson’s tweeting that he supports “citizen soldiers” in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Tressie McMillan Cottom, a black professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science declared that “they have deputized all white people to murder us.”

Jesse A. Goldberg, professor in the English department at Auburn University who teaches classes in African American literature, American literature and composition wrote a now-deleted post on Twitter, “f—- every cop. Every single one.” Goldberg added, “The only ethical choice for any cop to make at this point is to refuse to do their job and quit.”

Eddie Glaude Jr., a Princeton University professor and chairman of the Department of African American Studies said that when it comes to policing in America “Black people still live under the slave codes.” Glaude’s tweet came in response to news that Jacob Blake was handcuffed to his hospital bed after being shot by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Glaude added:

“Placing shackles around the feet of Jacob Blake amounted to a physical reminder that he was still, no matter the protests, a n——r in the eyes of these policemen.”

New School professor Richard Wolff has called for the abolition of grades. He claims they are not only unfair to students, but also that they are a means of propping up capitalism, and as such, academia would be better off doing away with grading entirely. He went on to say: “Grading takes up much of my time that could be better spent on teaching or otherwise directly interacting with students.” Administering grades to students has “little educational payoff” and “disrespects (students) as thinking people.”

Wichita Falls, Texas, station KFDX-TV reported that Midwestern State University far-left philosophy professor Nathan Jun wrote on Facebook, “I want the entire world to burn until the last cop is strangled with the intestines of the last capitalist, who is strangled in turn with the intestines of the last politician.”

Vanderbilt University scientist Heather Caslin Findley says that “white supremacy, racism, and prejudice” are perpetuated by the concept of “academic freedom.” She added, “I hope there are a lot of circles in academia having a serious conversation on how ‘academic freedom’ upholds white supremacy, racism, and prejudice.” Findley also addressed past violent riots, writing that she was initially opposed to the 2015 Baltimore riots and was worried for the police officers but changed her mind. She said: “I was scared for the fires, for the rioting, for the storefronts that would need to be rebuilt. That was my ‘protest differently,’ ‘all lives matter,’ and ‘blue lives matter’ moment. I was wrong and I was called out.”

In the wake of financial problems, many colleges are crying broke and want government bailouts, but they have enough money to hire costly diversity people. For example, University of Pennsylvania pays its chief diversity officer more than $580,000 a year. University of Michigan pays it vice provost for equity and inclusion and chief diversity officer $385,000 per year. Other universities around the country pay their chief diversity officers annual salaries of $200,000 and up.

Many university professors do not buy into the gross academic deception that has become part and parcel of today’s college education today. They are too busy with their own research to get involved with campus politics. Rather than being on the committees that run the university, they concede the turf to those who are willing to take the time. Often those who are willing to take the time are not necessarily the most talented people but people with a political agenda to change what has been traditional college education. But all is not lost. Taxpayers, parents and donors who foot the bill can have a significant impact if they would stop being lazy and find out what is going on at our colleges. And, if they do not like what they see, they can snap their pocketbooks shut.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at http://www.creators.com.

Why watch COVID press conferences and briefings by politicians? They are just upsetting. These people seem to have no clue about why the virus is ignoring them. They keep issuing strange and arbitrary rules that they make up, change by the day, all enforced by intimidation and compulsion. They posture in this silly way as if their edicts have this virus under control when they clearly do not.

Even worse, and what chills me to the bone, is the strange absence of normal human emotion in their public performances. With day-to-day human communication in the presence of uncertainty, there would be some admission of the possibility of being wrong, of mistakes made, of the difficulty of knowing, of the limits of information to make informed decisions, of the pain wrought through such disruptive governance.

You don’t see any of this in these governor’s announcements. Despite all evidence, they act as if they have got this under control. They don’t admit error. They don’t admit ignorance. They stare straight at the cameras and issue edicts, without even an apology for all the lives they have ruined and continue to ruin. They talk down to us. Condescension in every word.

You are welcome to watch a typical case here, but no need since you know exactly what I’m talking about.

We don’t talk this way to each other. Instead we share stories of how our lives have been affected. We share pain with each other, and frustration at how destabilized we feel, how we’ve been separated from family, how lockdowns have led us to dark places, how caged we feel. We worry about our finances, our loved ones, our very futures. We are astonished at how quickly and radically our freedoms have been taken away. And in sharing these stories with each other, we come to understand more and feel a bit of healing perhaps.

In short, we have empathy. The politicians on the other hand show none. They have glassy eyes that reflect cold blood. Even worse, they come across as bloodless, like generals who order troops around knowing with certainty that many people will die.

They rarely if ever talk about what they are doing in human terms. They talk about data, restrictions, trends in infections and hospitalizations, and death, but not as if any of this involves real humans or tradeoffs. They preen with certainly that is not really believable.

Adam Smith explained empathy as a feature of the human personality. “As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel,” he wrote, “we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel like in the situation … By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments … and become in some measure the same person with him.”

That’s what real life is like. But political life today seems to seek to banish that very human feeling. It’s as if they are playing a video game featuring all of us but we are mere figures on a screen programmed to do what they want. They have no obligation to understand us, much less worry about the pain they inflict, because, like figures on a gaming screen, we surely don’t feel pain at all.

And that is also how the media has come to talk of this calamity. Its numbers, charts, and trends, all highly alarmist and always with the same conclusion: the political class needs to impose more restrictions on us to make this virus go away. We sit helpless watching all of this unfold day after day, astonished that our rules could be so impervious to what has taken place before our eyes.

The emotional gap between the rulers and ruled has never been wider in modern times. It seems completely unsustainable. It’s like they aren’t even trying to connect with people.

Politicians are no great shakes in normal times but they seem worse than ever now, throwing out law, tradition, morality, and even the appearance of caring about how their lockdowns have destroyed so many lives.

The question is why. Here is my attempt at an answer. The lockdowns have all been based on an implausible claim that viruses can be controlled via coercion, same as people can be. But they cannot. And it is not surprising to find enormous evidence, accumulating by the day, that everything they have done has achieved nothing.

Below is a chart that compares COVID deaths per million around the world against Oxford University’s government stringency index. If lockdowns achieved anything you could expect there to be some predictive power here. The more you lock down, the more lives you save. The lockdown countries could at least claim to have bolstered the lives of their citizens. What you see instead is: nothing. There is no relationship. There is the virus. There are lockdowns. The two operate as seemingly independent variables.

The political class has started to intuit this. They suspect in their heart of hearts that they have done something horrendous. They worry that this realization is going to spread. Then they will be held accountable, maybe not right away but eventually. And this is rather terrifying to them. Thus are they spending their days trying to forestall this moment of truth in hopes that the mess they made will eventually go away and they escape blame.

Which is to say: they are lying. Then they lie more to cover their previous lies. If you are going to push such a line in the face of the mounting evidence showing them to be frauds, if you are going to lie with impunity to keep the game going, you will have to steel yourself against emotion and empathy. You become a sociopath. This might be enough to account for their bloodless posturing.

There is another factor too: the more pain you inflict on people, the worse of a person you become. Power is dangerous even when not used, but deploying it brutally and pointlessly rots the soul. This is a good description of almost the entire ruling class around the world today, save a few civilized countries that never locked down.

Jeffrey A. Tucker, Atlas Society

The American system is not a democracy. It is a constitutional republic. A democracy, if you attach meaning to terms, is a system of unlimited majority rule; the classic example is ancient Athens. And the symbol of it is the fate of Socrates, who was put to death legally, because the majority didn’t like what he was saying, although he had initiated no force and had violated no one’s rights.

Democracy, in short, is a form of collectivism, which denies individual rights: the majority can do whatever it wants with no restrictions. In principle, the democratic government is all-powerful. Democracy is a totalitarian manifestation; it is not a form of freedom . . . .

The American system is a constitutionally limited republic, restricted to the protection of individual rights. In such a system, majority rule is applicable only to lesser details, such as the selection of certain personnel. But the majority has no say over the basic principles governing the government. It has no power to ask for or gain the infringement of individual rights.”

— Philosopher Leonard Peikoff, author of “The Ominous Parallels” and “Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand”

Here are some hopeful articles with facts and evidence to support the idea the Election of 2020 may not yet be over:

Wait Just a Minute! Some Very Good News May Be Coming

Dick Morris: Trump Can Still Win

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason