No Matter What You Think about COVID, it’s Still the Government’s Fault

Posted on by
Reply


If you think COVID was an exaggerated crisis and an excuse to establish a regime based on tyranny and control, then you have government (and its media) to blame. If you think COVID was a horrible tragedy unlike other illnesses or tragedies that should have been prevented, then you have government (especially the Chinese government and its arm in America, the Democratic Party) to blame.

Government is virtually always the problem, and virtually never the solution. The only value of government is an armed police force and military–provided those two things are kept in strict check with the sole aim of protecting private property and other individual rights.

Black Lives Matter is catastrophically wrong. They say let’s have NO police but otherwise have unlimited government control and unlimited government services. In other words: Communism. The exact opposite is true. If you want to destroy America, support the collectivism of Black Lives Matter. If you want to save it, support the complete opposite.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Posted on by
1


NEWS & POLITICS

In 1958 Communists Had 45 Goals to Take Over the U.S. Without Firing a Shot. Here Are the Ones They’ve Already Achieved

BY KEVIN DOWNEY JR. MAY 27, 2021 4:20 PM ETnull Share Tweet

The only statue of a Confederate general, Albert Pike, in the nation’s capital after it was toppled by protesters and set on fire in Washington early Saturday, June 20, 2020. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

The 1958 book by Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist, set forth 45 goals communists need to achieve to take over the United States without firing a shot. Some of them are outdated and immaterial. Some are debatable. Let’s see how many commie goals have been achieved.https://ecde8602f9e9625430f84a6b687abc8d.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N. 

DONE. The United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2758 made Communist China a member of the U.N. Today, China is one of five permanent members.

15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States. 

DONE. Communists were once hunted in the U.S. Today, Democrats like Bernie, AOC, and the Squad, with ideas that are clearly socialist, if not communist, are re-elected with ease.

17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks

DONE. Marxism has been in our schools for a while now, as pointed out brilliantly by Townhall’s Marina Medvin. Common Core is right out of the Stalin playbook. CRT is just the next step.

18. Gain control of all student newspapers

DONE. Fox News reported just one year ago that Republicans we looking into China’s influence on American universities overall, though not specifically student newspapers. A professor and two Chinese nationals were arrested at Harvard last year. The Chinese siege of our colleges and universities is underway.

20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking
positionsnull

DONE. CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBC, ABC. Need I say more? Not to mention China spending millions on propaganda in our newspapers.

21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures

DONE. Actor John Cena JUST kissed commie ass regarding the promotion of his newest movie after saying that Taiwan is a country. Not to mention 127 TV show episodes promoting Marxist BLM propaganda.

22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms”

HALF-DONE. Here is a list of 113 statues that have been toppled, defaced, or removed, though no shapeless, awkward, meaningless commie pinko forms have replaced them yet.

24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them “censorship” and a violation of free speech and free press       

DONE. I think we all know Pornhub is free and has whatever your creepy heart desires.

26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy, and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy”

DONE. Never mind homosexuality, I believe that is normal. However, in a ghastly attempt to normalize pedophilia, pederasts are trying to rebrand themselves as “MAPs” (minor-attracted persons) and are attempting to attach themselves to the LGBT movement. If you think this can’t happen down the road ask yourself this: did you ever think there would come a time when the country would argue about where a man in a dress can relieve himself?null

27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity, which does not need a “religious crutch”   

HALF-DONE. Whether or not communism has infiltrated our churches is up for debate. What can’t be argued is that Christians have been scorned and branded as “stupid” for believing in a “bearded guy in the clouds.” The left considers the Bible to be a book of fiction and questions the intelligence of people who believe in it.

28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the grounds that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state”   

DONE. Students may pray privately, however, school-sponsored prayer was banned by the Supreme Court in 1962, four years after the release of The Naked Communist. SCOTUS ruled school-sponsored prayer violated the First Amendment.

29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis

IN PROGRESS. All we’ve heard from the left this past year is that the Constitution was written by “racist, white men” and needs to be updated if not discarded. The lefty attacks on the Constitution occur on a near-daily basis.null

30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the “common man”     

DONE. Even Hillary Clinton jumped on the apparatchik bandwagon and said the Founding Fathers were racist and sexist.

32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture—education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc. 

DONE. Which of these HAVEN’T been centralized? Also, Sen. Chuck Schumer tweets calls for student-debt forgiveness once a month. It’s working. Even NBC can see that millennials are all for socialism.

38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders that no one but psychiatrists can understand [or treat]

DONE. You mean defund the police and send social service people to investigate crime instead?

40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce

DONE. BLM recently deleted this from its website,

We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

https://ecde8602f9e9625430f84a6b687abc8d.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use “united force” to solve economic, political, or social problems

DONE. We’ve watched BLM and their sisters in Antifa burn our cities for over a year since the death of George FLoyd, and we watched them get away with it.

If you’re counting, that’s 17 pinko goals that have already been achieved. We can debate the others, and we should, soon, because the Marxists are succeeding at an alarming rate.

How Dr. Fauci Became the Face of the Pandemic

Posted on by
Reply

Few events have accelerated Western institutional decay as the coronavirus pandemic, and it’s been Dr. Anthony Fauci’s foot on the gas.

Few events have accelerated Western institutional decay as the coronavirus pandemic, and it’s been Dr. Anthony Fauci’s foot on the gas.

As the pandemic sunsets on the United States, the nation stands far weaker, rocked by a public health emergency driving up debt and division amid a polarizing presidential election while political elites capitalized on the virus for ulterior ends. Legacy media got more irresponsible, big tech got more unfair, and half the population comfortably shut down their neighbors’ livelihoods in seeking an impossible life with zero risk, as if the virus had the potential to wipe out the human race.

At the center of this crisis stood National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director Fauci, who became a prominent voice in the first days of the pandemic while serving in the Trump White House. Standing at the press lectern each day to appear on evening television, Fauci took on the appearance of the trusted hometown physician.

At 79 years old and five feet seven inches with grey hair and glasses, Fauci’s voice became a familiar sound imbued with decades of experience and credibility. His early eagerness to contradict a president with his own love for the camera also made Fauci an attractive figure to a hostile press excited at the opportunity to make him “America’s Doctor.”

Americans don’t trust their institutions like they used to, and one can hardly blame them after the prior 15 months. Their leaders failed them time and time again when the stakes were high.

According to a poll conducted in February and March by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health that came out earlier this month, just more than half of Americans, 52 percent, said they placed a “great deal” of trust in the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Far less than half, 37 percent, said they held the same faith in Fauci’s umbrella organization, the National Institutes of Health.

Trust in the media fares worse. Less than half of Americans, 46 percent, said they trust traditional media, according to Edelman’s annual trust barometer reporting a new low, while raising Fauci as their COVID champion.

Flip-Flop Fauci Prescribes Experimental Lockdowns..

Among the most visible episodes to deteriorate institutional faith were public health officials’ excusal of protests against police while banishing religious gatherings throughout the summer. Fauci participated, claiming he couldn’t condemn the mass demonstrations but demanded what now would have been year-long stay-home orders.

“I don’t understand why that’s not happening,” Fauci said on CNN of several states that refused to pursue statewide lockdowns in early April last year. “If you look at what’s going on in this country, I just don’t understand why we’re not doing that. We really should be.”

In Fauci’s world, 14 days to slow the spread was never 14 days. Thirty days to slow the spread was never 30 days, and a year-long wait for a vaccine was never merely a wait, because months after full vaccination, Fauci clung to not one, but two of the face masks he once decried as unnecessary then later conceded was all for show in another of his infamous 360s.

“If you look at the masks that you buy in a drug store, the leakage around that doesn’t really do much to protect you,” Fauci told the USA Today editorial board in late February last year. “There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to wear a mask.”

Indeed, the CDC’s research on pandemic preparation did not encourage the use of face masks, for similar reasons.

“There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” Fauci told CBS’ “60 Minutes” just weeks later.

By April, Fauci was telling Americans to wear a mask.

By January, Fauci said to wear two masks. It’s “common sense.”

By March, a fully vaccinated Fauci wearing two masks said that, despite immunity status, people should keep the masks.

By May, Fauci said to make the masks a permanent fixture of post-pandemic life.

By last week, as Americans began to move on from Fauci’s rules after delayed CDC guidance confirming vaccinated individuals may drop the mask, the doctor conceded it was all theater, theater that sowed deep doubt about vaccine effectiveness in the process.

“I didn’t want to look like I was giving mixed signals, but being a fully vaccinated person, the chances of my getting infected in an indoor setting is extremely low,” Fauci said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “That’s the reason why in indoor settings now I feel comfortable about not wearing a mask because I’m fully vaccinated.”

Fauci lied about herd immunity too, first placing the number at 60 to 70 percent vaccination. Later, he upped the number to “70, 75 percent,” before it went up again to “75, 80, 85 percent.” Fauci admitted in December he was lying about required levels of vaccination to hit herd immunity because he kept reading about Americans hesitant to accept the vaccine.

“When polls said about half of all Americans would take a vaccine… I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’” Fauci told the Times. In other words, it was time to make threats so Americans would do what they were told. Even then, the masks stayed on for quite some time.

An Unelected Political Animal with Massive Power..

The face of the face mask, Fauci was also and more importantly the face of the lockdowns. Democrat politicians took Fauci’s word as gospel on the pandemic, embracing harsh restrictions to devastating results.

The four states with the highest rate of COVID fatalities are all in the northeast. Fauci — described as a “political animal” by former Trump White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Scott Atlas — praised those same states for following his guidance despite their deadly performance.

“We know that when you do it properly, you bring down those cases. We have done it. We have done it in New York,” Fauci told PBS in July, touting Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo for the next six months before legacy media finally picked up on the governor’s nursing home scandal, the severity of which Cuomo covered up and which even provoked an impeachment inquiry. At the time of Fauci’s praise, New York led the nation in COVID deaths by nearly double the closest state, with more than 32,000 dead.

Meanwhile, no dissent to Faucian prescriptions was to be considered — not by Fauci, and not by the corporate media who loved him. Speaking out might cost researchers who depend on federal grant money their funding.

In October, a trio of elite academics from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford universities unveiled The Great Barrington Declaration to promote an alternative pandemic strategy to the experimental lockdowns Fauci pushed ceaselessly. The document proposed a strategy of “focused protection,” or of lifting social restrictions on the general population while implementing targeted measures to protect the most vulnerable.

The three signers wrote they were compelled to propose the declaration after observing the severe consequences of lockdown measures. The lockdowns, they observed, presented costs that far outweighed the benefits, including lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings, and deteriorating mental health. The absence of kids in schools, they noted, was “a grave injustice,” yet endorsed by Fauci.

Within two days the document drew more than 3,500 signatures including an impressive array of scientists whose voices had been ignored or dismissed. By May 2021, the declaration featured signatures from more than 50,000 doctors, epidemiologists, and scientists, along with nearly 800,000 lay people.

Yet Fauci shot the Great Barrington Declaration down, running to the friendly press to dispel criticism of his pandemic prescriptions, any concession from which offered Fauci nothing to gain and everything to lose.

“Quite frankly, that is nonsense,” Fauci said of the document’s proposal, calling his peers in the scientific community stupid for their disagreement. “Anybody who knows anything about epidemiology will tell you that that is nonsense and very dangerous.”

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an epidemiologist and infectious disease expert at Stanford, was one of the document’s principal authors Fauci declared ignorant.

“Fauci propagandized against a reasonable alternative strategy,” Bhattacharya told The Federalist, “which absolutely shocked me.”

Speaking over the phone, Bhattacharya explained that his former admiration for the now-80-year-old doctor, whose textbook on internal medicine even sits on Bhattacharya’s shelf, has deteriorated with abject politicization.

“He has acted in ways that make him appear very political and has contributed substantially to the decline in trust among the American public,” Bhattacharya said, “At the beginning of the epidemic and decades before that, I had nothing but respect for him.”

A Tragedy For Students..

On schools, Bhattacharya said, Fauci’s influence has been particularly devastating.

As outlined by journalist Jordan Schachtel, Fauci first called for schools to shut down, then said closures should depend on community spread, then said schools should shift to primarily online learning, then reverted to the idea of opening if local transmission was low, then back to primarily online, and then said he always backed open schools.

Fauci was among the first to urge schools to shut down and transition to remote learning despite the science suggesting early on that COVID presented virtually no risk to children. In April, Fauci raised hysteria over Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis preparing to re-open schools, alleging kids would get infected and potentially die. The fall, Fauci said, was when schools could re-open again.

Four months later, Fauci said people should “think twice” before allowing kids back in the classroom, despite an entire summer of evidence overseas showing it safe, and even vital to return children to school given the minimal risk for community transmission. By September, the United States stood out as one of the only developed nations in the world with shut-down schools, in stark contrast to nearly every country in western Europe fully open.

Some U.S. students wouldn’t see the classroom for another seven months and, according to a tracker by the American Enterprise Institute, some districts still remain entirely remote while only 53 percent of districts nationwide were fully in-person by the end of the 2020-21 school year.

Fauci’s evolution on school closings over the pandemic has illustrated his remarkable high-stakes inconsistency so detrimental to public faith in institutional leaders. Throughout the entire saga, Fauci often took the side of teacher unions in their quest to guarantee more government funding without a pledge to keep schools open, landing upwards of $100 billion in deficit spending from Congress in the process.

Unions’ exorbitant influence on the CDC further eroded the credibility of the nation’s formerly pre-eminent authority on public health. Billions of the teacher union prize money, meanwhile, won’t be spent for years, and students whose education was held hostage for the money are already being described as the “lost generation.”

A Pandemic Coming Full Circle..

As the pandemic comes to a close, Fauci has been more sensitive to criticism of his performance steering the federal response. When asked in mid-March last year whether he would support a 14-day national lockdown, Fauci said he would prefer an overresponse and the criticism to come with it.

“I would prefer as much as we possibly could,” Fauci said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “I think we should really be overly aggressive and get criticized for overreacting.”

With the arrival of three broadly available vaccines 15 months later and a pandemic in recession, the story has shifted from viral mitigation efforts to investigating the origin of the virus, origins Fauci has been peculiarly hesitant to seriously pursue. His reasons for this have become clear with new revelations about Fauci’s potential role in that question.

While corporate outlets initially smeared the idea that COVID-19 emerged from a Chinese lab in Wuhan, the site of the first outbreak worldwide, new reporting from the Wall Street Journal this week has given life to the theory among those who consistently dismissed it, including Fauci.

Based on previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence, the Wall Street Journal reported three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) were hospitalized with COVID-like symptoms in November 2019 preceding the outbreak in the Hubei Province. The lab, known for its relaxed safety protocols, had been reportedly collaborating with the Chinese military, according to the Trump State Department, facts not disputed by officials in the Biden administration.

Part of the lab’s work focused on “gain of function” research, a method of pandemic preparedness for which scientists extract viruses from the wild and engineer them to infect humans to study potential therapeutics, including vaccines. The research is so dangerous that it’s been banned in the United States since 2014, but was being conducted on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab.

The lab operated with funding from Fauci’s National Institutes of Health (NIH). Fauci admitted this before he denied it in front of Senate lawmakers, all within the same line of questioning.

“Gain of function research, as you know, is juicing up naturally occurring animal viruses to infect humans. To arrive at the truth, the U.S. government should admit that the Wuhan Virology Institute was experimenting to enhance the coronavirus’s ability to infect humans,” Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul pressed during a Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions hearing earlier this month.

Yet Fauci denied that COVID-19’s origin as a potential product of gain of function research was funded with U.S. tax dollars.

“With all due respect, you are entirely, entirely, and completely incorrect,” Fauci said. “The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

According to longtime journalist and former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade, however, grant money from Fauci’s NIAID was being funneled through EcoHealth Alliance run by Dr. Peter Daszak to conduct the research banned in the United States.

“From June 2014 to May 2019 EcoHealth Alliance had a grant from NIAID, part of the National Institutes of Health, to do gain-of-function research with coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Wade reported in a Medium post.

.@RandPaul: “Dr. Fauci, do you still support…NIH funding of the lab in Wuhan?”

Dr. Anthony Fauci: “Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect…”

Full video: https://t.co/ILTKlTSQdC pic.twitter.com/t0HxwsWXmm

— CSPAN (@cspan) May 11, 2021

Wade wrote Fauci’s denial to Paul was “surprising” given the evidence of experiments “with enhancing coronaviruses and the language of the moratorium statute defining gain-of-function as ‘any research that improves the ability of a pathogen to cause disease.’”

Fauci conceded before House lawmakers Tuesday the NIH had earmarked $600,000 over five years to study which bat coronavirus could infect humans, but has continued to deny it was gain-of-function research. For that, he has a clear motive. Wade wrote Fauci’s denial may be a technical one to evade the connection between NIH funding of the Wuhan lab and its possible birth of the novel coronavirus that developed into a global pandemic.

“Dr. Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, for one, believes that the term gain-of-function applies only to enhancements of viruses that infect humans, not to animal viruses,” Wade explained. “So gain-of-function research refers specifically to the manipulation of human viruses so as to be either more easily transmissible or to cause worse infection or be easier to spread.”

Fauci’s funding of the lab that good evidence suggests could have given rise to the virus has begun to finally stoke calls for his resignation from lawmakers.

The Face Of Institutional Decay..

Fauci’s propulsion in the press is as much an indictment of the media as the doctor himself. His incentives as a public health official focused on the prevention of COVID transmission no matter the costs appeared to blind him to the effects of the policies he so adamantly, yet so inconsistently, demanded on the Sunday television circuit. Legacy outlets only propped up those whose ideas confirmed their pre-approved Faucian consensus.

As the face of the masks, the face of the lockdowns, and possibly even the face of the pandemic, Fauci also became the face of accelerating institutional decay, a political figure whose abject dismissal of alternative strategies amid high-stakes crises left a nation weaker and more divided than in decades. Worse, Fauci has become the face of lost time, lost opportunities, lost businesses, lost graduations, lost holidays, lost concerts, lost weddings, and lost futures for children.

The Hypocrisy of Critical Race Theory

Posted on by
Reply

The hypocrisy of Critical Race Theory is baldly obvious, but nowhere more so than when it comes from white proponents – who, by the way, seem to make up the majority of CRT supporters. It seems that white people are the ones making the bulk of accusations about systemic racism even as they occupy all the positions of power in “the system” but here we are.

A social media post from Brandeis University assistant Dean Kate Slater brought this hypocrisy into full clarity this week. Slater took to the internet to blast white people for their inherent and unavoidable racism. She even went so far as to say she despises her own “whiteness.” Although she’s since locked her account to avoid further scrutiny, The New York Post captured and reported on the most egregious parts of her screed. I feel compelled to break down the snippets. CRT worshippers bang on repeatedly about the need to hold the racism of whiteness to account, but are rarely asked to be held accountable for their own remarks. If you’re all in on CRT, then go all in. Take it to its logical conclusion.

“Yes, all white people are racist in that all white people have been conditioned in a society where one’s racial identity determines life experiences/outcomes and whiteness is the norm and default.”

The Truth About the Three-Fifths Compromise

Posted on by
Reply


The Constitution’s Three-Fifths Compromise, which counted three-fifths of a state’s slave population for purposes of taxation and the apportionment of representatives and presidential electors, was repealed by the Reconstruction Amendments over 160 years ago. Yet it still stirs strong political passions that are unfortunately not matched by knowledge of its genesis, content, or effects.

A few weeks ago, Justin Lafferty, a member of the Tennessee House of Representative, stated that the three-fifths compromise was part of an abolitionist movement to end slavery. Other commentators have denounced the compromise, arguing instead that it was wrong because it denigrated slaves as three-fifths of a person. Both perspectives illustrate the distortions that inevitably occur when history becomes a casualty of our culture wars.

The three-fifths compromise reveals the intricacies of history and the care necessary when critiquing the actions of our forebears. Correctly understood, it reveals that historical events are themselves dependent on their own past and have unforeseen future consequences. And it also shows the importance of considering history counterfactually: there is indeed an argument that the three-fifths compromise ultimately helped end slavery, even if had nothing to do with the abolition movement, because the compromise was necessary to the creation of the union. History can ask normative questions, but only if it is not turned into a simple-minded morality play, where it is assumed that even the best of actors of the past acted only under our current constraints.

The Three-Fifths Clause and the Constitutional Baseline

The Clause provided:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons 

Note that the text of the Clause is itself complex. On the one hand, it gave the southern states more representatives than if only free persons were counted, but it also made them liable for more direct taxes which are proportioned according to representation. These states must take the bitter as well as the sweet. Moreover, the Clause consciously avoids mentioning slavery. This omission increasingly annoyed southern states, which dared to celebrate the institution when they wrote the Confederate Constitution.

But most importantly, understanding its text on representation dispels a misconception. It would have been worse for the opponents of slavery if slaves had been counted fully in the enumeration. A full count would have yielded slave-holding states more members in Congress and more presidential electoral votes. The great evil at the time of the Constitution was slavery itself and the inextricably linked fact that slaves did not have the franchise. The three-fifths clause added to this wrong by giving the southern states more power than if slaves had not been counted at all, but the discounting the enslaved population reduced the power of these states compared to full counting.

The harder question is whether this perspective furnishes the right baseline. Did the three-fifths compromise replace a result that would have been worse for ending slavery? This question forces us to consider how such an unusual fraction of three-fifths came to be included in the Constitution.

The first time that three-fifths appears was in an attempt to amend the Articles of Confederation, which regulated the relations among the states before the Constitution. The states had trouble raising money and some representatives, including James Madison, tried to create more authority in the continental Congress to impose taxes. The three-fifths provision in that amendment formulated an apportionment among the states for taxes. Slaves were an important source of wealth and thus the view was that some portion of that productive power should be included in the proportion of taxable economic activity. The reason that slaves were not fully counted for the purpose of taxation provides a window into one of the many evils of slavery: Self-ownership is far more conductive to productivity than slavery. The amendment was defeated for other reasons, but the principle of including a discounted proportion remained available for future use.

The consequences of the compromise underscore a historical reality that should be emphasized in every history course: decisions have profound results that no one intended at the time.

At the Philadelphia Convention, James Wilson of Pennsylvania, one of the most important architects of the Constitution, proposed that the proportion be used as a basis of apportionment. Charles Pinckney of South Carolina seconded the motion. Thus, its genesis shows it was a compromise with an opponent of slavery joining a defender to propose it. Abolition was not a possible proposal if the Constitution were to be ratified. As William Ewald, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and biographer of Wilson puts it, “the Convention would have come to a rapid end if [Wilson] had pushed for abolition.”

The Convention then defeated a proposal put forward by southern delegates to count the slaves fully for the purpose of apportionment. This motion reveals a kernel of truth in the Tennessee Representative’s position: The three-fifths proposal prevailed over one that would have given more power to the southern states.

The Compromise and Its Consequences

Wilson knew better than we do what deals had to be done for the union to be founded. To think otherwise is to engage in a kind of condescension toward the past. The greatest statesmen of any era understand the constraints under which they operate. Sadly, there was no way the Constitution could both have abolished slavery and created a union of the thirteen states.

We can consider whether it would have been better, in principle, not to have created the union at all—not to have made these compromises—by looking at future history counterfactually in a way that the Founders could not do.

If the northern and southern states had not been able to forge a union because of a failure to compromise, the most likely alternative would have been two regional compacts that resembled the Constitution in giving stronger powers than those of the Articles of Confederation to a central government. As Akhil Amar has explained, there was a geopolitical necessity to such a strengthening of government. The states needed a more effective constitutive mechanism to defend themselves against foreign powers.

But sectional compacts would have entrenched slavery for much longer. The South would not have faced the abolitionist pressures from the North. And of course, they would not have seceded from the larger union, triggering the civil war that ended slavery. More subtly, the Constitution’s creation of a commercial republic engendered a political climate that valorized free labor—an ideal that was in fundamental tension with slavery.

Another irony of the three-fifths clause is that it made possible Jefferson’s election—the so-called Revolution of 1800. That consequence was widely understood at the time when the extra electoral votes that he gained as a result of the three-fifths clause were termed the “slave power,” by those most opposed to slavery in the North. John Adams would have triumphed if the Southern states had not been able to count their enslaved populations, even at discounted rates.

While I am not by any means a partisan of Jefferson, the general view is that his victory in 1800 was one for democracy over elitism, for freedom (for those who were not slaves—and it should be noted that abolition was not yet part of the national political debate) over the tyrannical Alien and Sedition Acts. It probably also was essential to the Louisiana purchase that was the first step to the United States becoming a continental power, both because Jefferson was a more flexible negotiator than Adams and because as President, he was willing to put aside constitutional scruples over the federal authority to do so that his party would have strongly pressed had it been in opposition.

Thus, the unintended consequences of the three-fifths compromise democratized the nation’s political culture and expanded its boundaries. This sequence of events underscores a historical reality that should be emphasized in every history course: decisions have profound results that no one intended at the time. Like the effect of the three-fifths compromise on slavery, it is more proof of Kant’s dictum that “out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.”

The Danger of Critical Race Theory

Rep. Lafferty’s remarks came in an attack on critical race theory. Supporters of that theory seized on his error to suggest that they showed why critical race theory is needed. But the incident shows nothing of the kind. First, his critics often got their understanding of the three-fifths compromise wrong, not recognizing that fully counting the slaves would have been worse for the cause of ending slavery. Second, while Lafferty was not correct in connecting the clause with abolitionism, the three-fifths compromise was likely one of the compromises needed to create the union, which likely ended slavery faster than the plausible alternatives. Critical race theory, which sees American history as a simple tale of racial subordination, would suppress such analysis. Third, even the three-fifths compromise is far more complex in its effects than can be captured through the prism of race. Critical race theory, like Marxist theories of history, is terribly reductionist. Party lines in history always lead to a flattening of a past’s many dimensions.

John O. McGinnis

Are You on the Take ?

Posted on by
Reply

Because a politically connected businessman wants more for himself, and politicians have the power to demand that developers kiss their rings, Edgewater’s dump is still a dump.

Home prices keep climbing. It’s another reason to let people build housing.

But corrupt politicians sometimes prevent that.

The little town of Edgewater, New Jersey, sits right across the Hudson River from Manhattan. A developer, Maxal Group, bought a dumpsite there and proposed building more than a thousand new waterfront apartments.

The town said no.

Why? The development would generate $12 million a year in taxes for Edgewater. To please the politicians, Maxal even offered to build parks and a school at no cost.

But Edgewater Mayor Michael McPartland and his town council rejected the parks, school, and extra tax revenue.

Instead, they spent tax money on lawyers to try to seize the property using eminent domain law. They claimed they wanted to use site to park garbage trucks.

Why would they do this? So garbage could have a beautiful view of Manhattan’s skyline?

Reportedly, they did it because they wanted to please a competing developer, Fred Daibes, says Justin Walder, lawyer for the Maxal Group in my new video.

A lawsuit he filed alleged “corrupt transactions” between Daibes and Edgewater politicians. Walder says the politicians received “undervalued rentals, loans for their business purposes through a bank that Mr. Daibes started.”

Daibes did once tell a reporter, “You can’t be in Edgewater and not be affiliated with me.”

McPartland even lived in a building owned by Daibes and paid below-market rent, said Walder.

McPartland later denied that. The mayor and city council say they denied the project because it was too big.

But “they just approved a larger project!” Walder told me.

That larger project, twice as tall as Maxal’s, was controlled by developer Daibes.

Daibes declined our requests for an interview.

Edgewater’s mayor and city council didn’t even respond to our requests.

So, I dropped in on one of their meetings.

“Are you on the take?” I asked. “Rejecting one building in favor of the one owned by the guy where you live?”

That led to awkward silence.

I continued. “Is it true that four of you are getting loans from Mr. Daibes’ bank, and is it true that you (McPartland) get a discounted apartment in Mr. Daibes’ building?”

More silence.

Then the town’s lawyer turned to the mayor and said, “As your legal counsel, I’m going to suggest and recommend that you don’t answer the question.”

The mayor didn’t. He ended the meeting.

That confrontation occurred several years ago.

John Stossel

After Stossel TV released video of that moment in Edgewater, McPartland issued a statement that said: “The complaint filed and the biased reporting are slanderous and defamatory to me and the other members of the council. I am somewhat constrained with what I can say, given this matter is in litigation. But I look forward to shining a light on these greedy and profit-only driven developers who are looking only to helicopter into Edgewater, overdevelop the site and then leave with their profits.”

The Middle East is About Religion, not Land

Posted on by
Reply

If you’ve seen videos of recent attacks on Jews in New York City, Los Angeles, London and elsewhere, you may have missed a very revealing aspect of those attacks. They were almost always — as they have been for decades — accompanied by curses such as, “F—- the Jews.”

Now, given that the perpetrators are almost always Muslims — whether immigrants or children of immigrants from an Arab or other Muslim country — two questions present themselves:

Why attack American or French or British Jews? And why curse “the Jews”? In other words, given that the recent wars have been between Hamas and Israel, why aren’t these attacks outside of Israel on Israelis and Israeli institutions? And why level curses at “the Jews”?

The answer is this: The Muslims who seek Israel’s destruction do so because Israel is Jewish, not because Israel occupies the West Bank or Gaza.

First, the Muslim world sought Israel’s destruction from the day Israel was established in May 1948, before it occupied a centimeter of the West Bank or Gaza.

Second, Israel does not occupy Gaza. Israel withdrew completely from Gaza 16 years ago.

Third, the Palestinians rejected a state of their own five times:

Rejection No. 1: In 1937, the British Peel Commission offered the Arabs 80% of the geographical area known as Palestine. The Jews were offered 20%. The Arabs rejected it.

Rejection No. 2: In 1947, the Arabs rejected the United Nations partition plan.

Rejection No. 3: In 1967, in the course of defeating the attempt by Egypt, Syria and Jordan to destroy Israel, Israel conquered the West Bank from Jordan, Gaza from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria. Most Israelis had no interest in retaining Gaza or almost any part of the West Bank except for East Jerusalem, the Jewish city in which Jews have lived for 3,000 years, from 1,400 years before Muhammad was born. The Palestinians, as the Arabs of Palestine came to be known, and all the Arab states rejected partition and peace.

Rejection No. 4: In 2000, at Camp David, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat a Palestinian state in all of Gaza and 94% of the West Bank (Set ITAL)with East Jerusalem as its capital. But Arafat rejected the offer. In the words of U.S. President Bill Clinton, Arafat was “here 14 days and said no to everything.”

Rejection No. 5: In 2008, Israel tried again. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert went even further than Ehud Barak had, expanding the peace offer to include additional land to sweeten the deal. The Palestinians said no, again.

The reason for all these Palestinian/Arab rejections of a state of their own was that it meant a Jewish state in the Middle East still existed.

The Middle East dispute has never been about land. Israel is the size of New Jersey. It is slightly larger than El Salvador. If it were the size of Manhattan, the Palestinians and many Muslim states would still seek its destruction. There are 22 Arab states in the Middle East, but there is no room for one Jewish state. There is even a state with a Palestinian majority: Jordan. The issue is not land. The issue is religion.

Why is Iran wholly preoccupied with destroying Israel? It has nothing to do with Muslim solidarity; the Iranians don’t give a damn about Palestinians. It is entirely about hatred of Jews and the Jewish state. If the Iranians cared about fellow Muslims, they would be targeting China, which is accused by the United States and other Western countries of committing genocide against the Uyghurs — a predominately Muslim ethnic group that lives in China — a charge that includes forced sterilization of Uyghur women.

Westerners want to believe it is about land — in part because they are secular and think in secular terms. And in part because they need to believe that the dispute is about land. Only then can they blame Israel. If it were about a Muslim desire to destroy the Jewish state, they could no longer blame Israel. Even worse: They would have to blame Islamist fanaticism.

Dennis Prager

Socialists are Children

Posted on by
Reply


Caring about the whole world is a fancy way of caring only about oneself.

In 1886, Henry James, who may be the greatest novelist of all, published what he considered at the time to be his greatest work—The Princess Cassamassima. Unfortunately, critics hated it. But it is an extraordinarily deep and penetrating novel, and it deals with a theme that is causing us a great deal of trouble at the moment—socialism.

It may be surprising that socialism was already a problem in the late 19th century, but of course Karl Marx, not to mention his spiritual predecessor, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, had already come and gone. A fresh generation of pseudo-intellectuals with too much free time on their hands was looking back on the Paris Commune of 1871 and even on the blood-soaked French Revolution with admiration, and looking forward to the time when they, too, would get to empower the underprivileged by exterminating the overprivileged.

It is difficult not to develop a deep and abiding hatred of the novel’s title character, an enormously wealthy and beautiful princess who, casting about for some meaning to the life she hates, becomes passionately devoted to social revolution and to elevating the lower classes. She is a greater destructive force than any deliberately evil character, combining her grandiose concern for the whole world with an almost limitless self-absorption.

She wants to see the worst slums of London. She wants to meet the lowest people in society—for the sake of their being low. She even wants to give up her money and luxury. And so she trades in her prime London residence for a vulgar little house with only one servant. She finds it disgusting that so many people work so hard and earn so little while others have so much more than they need.

The way the princess thinks is identical to today’s cutting-edge socialists. Except that a Bernie Sanders or an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez manages gradually to amass wealth rather than giving it away. But there exists the same condescending attitude towards those who must work for a living, and an idea of “saving” them, not through one’s own work, but through stealing the work of others.

Suppose this 19th-century socialist visited you today, and you told the princess about life in contemporary America: The working classes no longer go hungry. They can afford places to live. In America, people of the working classes own more than one set of clothes and can afford more than one pair of shoes—several, even. Ninety-three percent of households have access to their very own carriage, which can go ten times faster and ten times farther than the horse carriages she’s familiar with, which were reserved for the rich. Even the lowest income earners can keep their homes warm in the winter. Moreover, the working classes have access to on-demand, private entertainment—the equivalent of 100,000 plays, and 1 million concerts. Even the poorest homes can afford to light a candle—the equivalent of hundreds of candles—whenever they choose. All their children get to go to school until they’re 18, and anyone who wishes to can get a college degree.

Your 1890s socialist would be knocked off her feet by a society as wonderful as this one. It represents undreamt-of success: Bravo, our princess would think: The revolution has clearly happened, and has achieved everything. More than everything! We 19th-century socialists might have hoped to improve the conditions of the poor, but we never in our wildest dreams imagined we’d get this far, not even if we’d confiscated every penny from every wealthy person in the world. How did you do it?

Then we’d have to laugh a little and say, “Well, that’s capitalism, baby. And sorry to disappoint you, but we still have people who are wealthier than everyone else. It’s just that now our poor people are more comfortable than your wealthy people were. And they live longer, too.”

The princess furrows her brow: “How long did all this take?”

“A little more than 100 years. Less, for some important bits, like novocaine for example. But we’re actually so comfortable now that we can spend our time worrying about what gender we are.”

“Well,” says the princess, “100 years is a very long time. I’m sure a proper socialist revolution would have achieved all of this much more quickly!”

And then we’d have to break it to her—how all the socialist revolutions actually went, how well they succeeded. How they produced societies powered not just by oil but by millions of slaves in labor camps (labor camps that still exist in China, North Korea, and elsewhere to this day). How tens of millions of the working class were shot. How hundreds of millions were starved. How Trotsky’s “food armies” swept over the countryside to steal the farmers’ produce to feed the city elites. How the rebelling peasants went to hide in the forests and were exterminated with history’s first use of air-dropped chemical weapons (the Tambov Rebellion, 1921). How Chinese peasant families swapped children—so they wouldn’t have to eat their own (the Great Leap Forward, 1958).

At this point, the princess wouldn’t want to hear any more. She wouldn’t believe it, no matter what you told her. She would again be in exact harmony with today’s socialists, who, despite a century of experiments and counter experiments, despite the creation of extraordinary everyday comforts in America, and despite hundreds of millions of deaths elsewhere, still refuse to consider that socialism conceivably might not work.

A socialist you argue with today might as well have died in 1890, for all the history he’s learned. For a socialist, history has no past, it exists only in the future: History is simply what is about to happen. History is what he’s going to make.

Socialists don’t give a damn about the objective conditions of the working man. Any honest assessment would have to admit that the typical American enjoys an excellent and historically superior quality of life. During any given decade of the Soviet Union, Russian workers would be willing to die—as many did—for a chance to enjoy what every American gets as standard.

Socialists claim to give a damn about the relative conditions of the working man. That is, it doesn’t matter how comfortable the average person is. What matters is the inherent unfairness of someone else being more comfortable. So while any normal observer would be astounded at how much progress America has made, and how quickly it made it, a socialist today sees society exactly as a socialist from 1890 saw his own. And a socialist 100 years from now will look at his new world and see exactly the same thing: No progress whatsoever. Socialism is immune to progress.

And in the final analysis, socialists don’t care about the relative conditions of the working man either. What a socialist really cares about are conditions relative to himself: Specifically, he cares that no one seems to understand what a gifted, special, vitally important human being he is.

Caring about the whole world is a fancy way of caring only about oneself. A social crusader sees himself as a liberator, as someone who will become a great immortal by uplifting an entire section of society. This messianic attitude explains why Marxism is woven through all companion socialisms—like Black Lives Matter race socialism or trans-rights sexual socialism—movements which should, in theory, have nothing to do with Marxism but which always do.

Socialists need only an aggrieved class. It doesn’t much matter who that class is. The operative belief is the socialist’s belief in himself—his belief that the one thing all these people need is for him to save them.

The socialist’s chosen underclass, whether it be the proletariat or a minority group or all women—is really just a damsel in distress. The most old-fashioned, most chauvinistic, most anti-leftist cliché of all: that is how a socialist sees his chosen cause. A damsel in distress can do nothing on her own, and is capable of no independent action. The damsel can do nothing to improve her own lot. She is at a permanent disadvantage; she is a victim. She has nothing to say for herself, she is in fact of no value at all except as a token or symbol—she simply waits to be rescued. And in the act of rescuing, the socialist validates his own existence. By rescuing her, in other words, he feels less worthless.

Whether a youth or an adult, a socialist is really nothing but an unhappy child. A child with every sense of self-importance, but no sense of self-worth. And that is a sad reflection on the failure of our education system, and on society’s broader failure to give our young people projects worthy of their energy and devotion.

This is from the introduction to This Deception, a memoir by reformed Soviet spy Hede Massing: “Communism in the United States has little, if any economic base. It does not primarily appeal to the poor and the downtrodden . . . . During adolescence, when children are normally fighting parental domination to walk by themselves, when they are questioning traditional beliefs, Communists separate children from parents and beliefs, and substitute Stalin for father and Marxism for religion. The Ku Klux Klan should be more fully analogized in this respect to communism.”

That was written in 1951. Stalin is dead now. What else has changed.—Dan Gelernter

Insanity in the Air

Posted on by
Reply

Southwest Airlines reports an unprecedented amount of passenger misconduct in the last few weeks– hundreds of incidents [reported at Fox News 5/25/21]. What’s happening? Society is going berserk. Why? Because state, local and national rulers have become authoritarian. They treat us like we’re helpless, unable to think for ourselves or act responsibly, and this is what starts to happen. Many people start to fulfill or “act out” the claim, in part because of simmering rage over the loss of freedom and the utter insanity we are being told to swallow on a daily basis. In turn, these incidents–not just on airplanes, but throughout society–will be used as an excuse to clamp down even more on our few remaining liberties. Watch and see.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason