The riots of 2020 are the battlefront of a movement hatched from an alternative history built upon an abstruse foundation of systemic racism and white privilege.  In early summer, they created an apocalyptic spectacle of 23 American cities in flames, burned-out cars, shattered storefronts, unchecked looting, and occupied neighborhoods.  Then events then took a curious turn.

According to the Bridging the Divide Initiative, a Princeton think tank that conducts U.S. protest modeling with a wink and nod to the left, there was a free fall in the number of BLM-associated demonstrations and uprisings from a late-May peak to an October low.  Who or what was responsible for this plunge?

In a recent televised and racially-divisive speech, First Lady emerita Michelle Obama echoed the familiar line that 93 percent of BLM demonstrations were peaceful.  That’s true.  Almost eight thousand demonstrations nationwide between late May and early October have supported the BLM meme.  According to the Armed Conflict Location and Data Event Project (ACLED), a minority were major city demonstrations that culminated in street brawls.  By contrast, the overwhelming  majority were hometown gatherings and parades down main streets by teenage bubblegummers yelling buzzwords and waving homemade placards alongside their empathetic soccer moms.

The former first lady artfully omitted that the remaining 7 percent represented almost 600 violent BLM protests between late May and mid-September.  The better part of those were inner-city, post-George Floyd donnybrooks bunched together from late May to mid-June.  Antifa infested these demonstrations, their familiar black bloc regalia a telltale sign to police that a particular march would devolve into nighttime street brawling.

By late summer, Americans had suffered a bellyful.  Opinion turned dramatically against BLM, particularly among sought-after white independent voters.  Support dropped from 24 to 3 percent in just two months.

CNN anchorman Don Lemon, who has often made light of the mob violence for CNN’s two million primetime viewers, suddenly called for an end to hostilities.  He fretted not over the loss of life, attacks on police officers, or the destruction of small businesses.  Instead, he lamented that it wasn’t polling well for the Biden campaign.

Lemon’s apostasy and reproach was a warning shot to upper-crust Democrats that their reluctance to censure street anarchism was becoming a clear reflection of their support for the violence.  Political and media apologists for BLM and Antifa began to realize that giving comfort to revolutionists was eroding their voter base.  There was no sleight of speech that could whitewash a billion dollars in property destruction, the deaths of more than 30 people, and injuries to 400 police officers.

After an early summer windfall, corporate and individual donations are wilting.  In a panic, BLM has quietly scrubbed their website of Marxist diatribes and distanced themselves from their affiliation to the cop-killing domestic terrorist, Susan Lisa Rosenberg.  Rosenberg first raised hackles in May when she landed on the governing board of BLM’s first financial sponsor, Thousand Currents.  In early July, BLM began to move its donations platform to the unobtrusive Tides Center, burrowing ever deeper into George Soros’ progressive fundraising PACS.

The Trump administration has also been playing a strong hand in putting down the more serious outbreaks.  Offering no quarter by group or ideology, Attorney General William Barr has stood up a task force to target criminal conspiracies and major players behind the disturbances.  No matter what political creed, those arrested for vandalism, arson, looting, or felonious assaults will be fast-tracked for orange jumpsuits.  Sanctions have proven equally effective, as an early spate of statue toppling abruptly ended after the president tacked a ten-year prison term to the offense.

Twenty-something street insurgents may also be suffering from organic fatigue.  The mob is filled with newly minted college grads, turned out of higher education with deep-seated grievances embedded by militant professors revered for their anti-capitalist classroom rants.  The Class of 2020 matriculated into a summer job market destroyed by the pandemic, wiping out even the lowest-paying service occupations.  The most virulent took to the streets.  A few of the horde earned a few dollars as part of Antifa’s mobile phalanx, moving from city to city, gaslighting sympathizers to action and inspiring the local disadvantaged to loot.  Months later, their charge to throw hard objects, break windows, burn trashcans, scream bloody murder, and antagonize cops for days on end in hot protective gear has been both exhausting and increasingly toxic to future career prospects.

If current trends hold, BLM and Antifa will be but a fraction of the hundreds of protests anticipated by year’s end, with most focusing upon state COVID lockdowns, pro-police marches, 2^nd Amendment rallies, a U.S. Supreme Court nomination, and the presidential election outcome.  Their bottle-tossing and incendiary antics may have calmed for the present, but the well-stocked and financed city chapters of BLM, along with their Antifa cohort, will act impulsively when triggered by cop-on-black shootings and adverse judicial outcomes to those events.

Plummeting support, lethargy, and the fear of job-killing arrests and prison may be thinning the BLM ranks of its majority white Democrats.  This is no time for cops to rest on their haunches, however.  If we turn a page in the dog-eared, 60s-era guidebooks on revolutionizing America, we now find ourselves at a flash point.

A half century ago, the granddads and moms of today’s firebrands, frustrated with the failings and risks of street protests, abandoned the Students for a Democratic Society and joined the Weathermen.  Black Panthers ditched their leather coats and berets and became the Black Liberation Army.  An obscure New England-based prison reform movement went underground to form the United Freedom Front.

What followed in the 70s and early 80s put the FBI back on their heels.  It took a decade of rage, thousands of bombings, and 35 dead cops to put it all down with a series of botched federal prosecutions that brought few to justice.  If the past is prologue, the recent arrests in the Wisconsin plot to kidnap the governor offer a first whiff of that transfiguration, with likely more to come from protest groups of all ideological stripes.

Rick Fuentes is a working-class conservative with a Ph.D. who survived four decades in law enforcement.

Image: Stephen Hogan

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Democrats call Republicans appointing judges to the courts “packing the court”. When they do the same thing, they don’t call it that. It seems that ACTUALLY packing the court — which means arbitrarily altering the Constitution in order to ensure a permanent majority for your own party — is acceptable, when Democrats do it. (And they won’t even tell you they’re going to do it.) But when Republicans merely do what’s permitted and required of them by the Constitution, when they happen to control both the White House and the Senate, it’s suddenly illegitimate.

These are bad, dishonest and really STUPID people, these Democrats. It comes from only talking to each other. They live in intellectual and psychological echo chambers. They think they’re really sophisticated and bright. They’re really idiots.

Nobody can whine like a leftist. However, it’s not leftist judges who wobble. Look at the Supreme Court. Democrat-appointed judges stick to the party line — now the Communist Party line — without blinking or yielding. Ever. It’s Republicans who sometimes sway — most notably Chief Justice John Roberts, who infamously swayed by upholding Obamacare in a bizarre, self-contradictory decision nobody on either side ever understood.

Democrats don’t care about justice, separation of powers, individual rights, or anything else. They only care about what all Communists care for: Unlimited, unending power.

Michael J. Hurd

Slavery is in the news and on our minds. Any historical figure who participated in the slave economy must be roundly excoriated, condemned, and consigned to oblivion. If such a person happens to be commemorated with a public statue, beware. It must come down—violently and with extreme prejudice. Such figures will not be tolerated—even if they are the Father of the Country or the author of The Declaration of Independence.

But in their condemnation of slavery, the most vociferous social justice warriors ironically, perhaps, champion the same categories they so vigorously condemn. They are, in short, unwilling or unable to extricate themselves from the mentality of slavery. In the process, they perpetuate the psychological structures they claim to abhor. The ongoing pathology of slavery can be seen in two significant ways.

First, the slave economy severed the connection between work and reward. The slave did the work, and the slave-owner reaped the benefits. The injustice is obvious. Significantly, even when slavery was being practiced in America, many observers noted that the institution was harmful to slaves and slave-owners alike. Obviously, slavery degraded and humiliated those in bondage. It broke up families and inflicted untold physical and mental pain. However, in a more subtle way, it degraded the slave-owner as well. It promoted sloth and a false sense of superiority. Such a system could not be anything other than corrupt and corrupting.

But here’s the curious thing: today, radical progressives insist that they be provided an array of free goods and services. They demand free college education, free healthcare, and a guaranteed income even for those who do no work. And now, like the slave-owners of the past, they are showing themselves willing to employ violence and fear to obtain the goods, services, and concessions they demand. One Black Lives Matter activist even described the August looting in Chicago as “reparations.” This represents a remarkable affirmation of the contours of the slave economy: work and reward are severed, one group benefits from the labor of another and uses force to extract the benefits they claim are rightfully theirs. As in times past, this economic structure is morally corrupting of all who participate, especially those who reap economic benefits from the labor of others. For with the economic benefits, they also reap moral injuries: sloth, a sense of entitlement, and a lost opportunity to experience the satisfaction of reward coming as the result of good work.

The notion of group guilt and innocence must be emphatically rejected. Instead, we must affirm the value, dignity, and responsibility of each individual.

The second feature of slave psychology that the progressives refuse to jettison is this: slavery was built around the basic assumption that some groups of people are superior to others. Today, those who embrace identity politics engage in the same patterns of thought. As in the slave economy, superiority and inferiority—today manifested in terms of guilt and innocence—are ascribed to racial groups, but in this new version, the roles are reversed: the descendants of slave-owners—and all whites in general—have ostensibly inherited the inferiority born of guilt, and the descendants of slaves—and all blacks in general—have inherited the superiority of innocence. Individual responsibility is eclipsed by group identity, and because guilt or innocence is inherited, it is for all practical purposes ineradicable—it’s in the DNA. Do public acts of contrition—some of which include kneeling, confession, and begging for forgiveness—assuage the grievances of the descendants of former slaves? Will true forgiveness and reconciliation ever result? At what point will BLM declare that whites have paid an adequate price and that accounts are now balanced? The answer is obvious: never, for to move beyond identity politics would be to abandon the psychology of slavery, and that must not be allowed to happen because it would deprive BLM of its power. BLM survives only by perpetuating the mental and social structures they claim to oppose.

The logic of reparations combines both of the pathological features of the slavery mindset. Those who have done no work will be enriched by those who are compelled to bear the guilt of their ancestors. No good can come of perpetuating the very categories that have caused so much damage.

There are two obvious steps to overcoming this pathology. First, we must make every effort to affirm the connection between work and reward. Rather than succumbing to the social justice mob with its limitless demands of free goods and services paid for by the labor of others, political leaders must focus their attention on the poor and marginalized—the people Christ called “the least of these”—by providing opportunities for meaningful work and the ownership of productive property. When economic reward follows hard work, the social and moral benefits are incalculable. Any economic structures or public policies that obstruct the possibility of ownership or undermine the connection between work and reward must be eliminated. Every effort must be made to ensure that ownership is a viable, desirable, and attainable reality. In short, black property matters.

Second, the notion of group guilt and innocence must be emphatically rejected. Instead, we must affirm the value, dignity, and responsibility of each individual. Guilt and innocence must be clearly and inextricably tied to individual action. Identity politics is the grotesque sibling of slave psychology. Both are morally objectionable for identical reasons. Only when progressives emphatically reject the mental structures of slavery can a truly just system be created.

Mark T. Mitchell, Dean of Academic Affairs, Patrick Henry University

Democrats can’t character-assault Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett the way they did Brett Kavanaugh, so they’re screaming bloody murder that Barrett will kill millions of Americans in the event she rules against Obamacare. 

According to Rich Lowry, writing in the New York Post:

Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin says that this is her “assignment.” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse from Rhode Island says that she is a “judicial torpedo” aimed at the Affordable Care Act.

She’s coming to take something away from you.

This is total garbage.  It comes as a study rolls out showing that Obamacare itself is killing off millions.

Matt Margolis at PJMedia found this ugly little detail about this government health care takeover that Democrats confuse with actual health care:

According to a Gallup survey from December 2019, 33 percent of Americans say they or a family member put off treatment for a health condition because of the costs.

This number has remained virtually unchanged since Obamacare was passed. In fact, the number has averaged about 30 percent since 2006, which is significantly higher than it was back in 2001, when only 19 percent of Americans said they or a family member put off treatment for a health condition because of the cost.

He also tweets this:

The sorry reality of Obamacare is not only do you not get to keep your doctor, but your health care costs go through the roof.  No subsidy can fix this so long as no free market exists.  Leftists pile up mandate upon mandate to each and every insurance policy sold, and the only way to pay for such things is to keep raising premiums, which are generally minimal with price controls, and let deductibles go through the roof. 

These days, millions of Americans not only face zero choice in which health care plans they can have, but also face skyrocketing deductibles, making the payment of the rent-sized premiums an insult of sorts, given that they still have to shell out thousands more for the privilege of paying those huge premiums.  It’s as though the premiums go for bureaucrat overhead (check out some of the king-sized salaries of some of these health care bureaucrats), and the deductibles pay for the actual care.

As it’s a system whose costs never go down and instead every year go up, it’s ultimately unsustainable as millions of people have no choice but to drop out.  Every delayed treatment means less treatment, less health care, less health, and more deaths, all done in the name of preserving Obamacare and President Obama’s signature legacy.  It’s now a joke, yet Democrats call for its preservation at any cost now.

Fact is, Obamacare’s deductibles are killing people.  Any judge who’d get rid of that is owed a nation’s full gratitude.

American Thinker

In the ancient world, when nations conquered their foes, they followed familiar patterns. Generally, the conqueror would execute most adults of the elite and educated class. They would destroy the memorials of the defeated nation’s past, and destroy the sacred places. The uneducated rural were usually left behind. The conquering nation would take the conquered nation’s wealth and usually bring back the children of the defeated nation’s elite/educated class to acculturate them. The complete vanquishment of the conquered nation occurred when the link to the nation’s past and culture was broken in that generation. America is in danger of a fate similar to that of ancient conquered, but from an internal enemy using similar pattern. Let me explain.

First, it’s important to note the one conquered nation which survived the ancient means of vanquishment. When the Babylonians conquered the Hebrew Kingdom of Judea in the 6th century BC, Hebrew children of the educated class were taken back to Babylon. As described in the 1st book of Daniel, the exiled children Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah (and others not named) dedicated themselves to their national history. As the book of Daniel continues, we discover this exiled generation’s dedication to the nation’s history. After approximately 70 years, the Hebrews brought the national culture back to Judea to continue as a nation. The nation of Israel later maintained itself through diaspora from the land of Israel for almost two millennia through generational dedication to history in scripture. The young Hebrews learning and following national history made the difference.

Beyond the many examples of nations destroyed by conquest from outside, history also records nations being destroyed from within in a similar way. One modern example is the “Cultural Revolution” in China from 1966 to 1976. Driven by Communist dictator Mao Zedong, Mao was trying to take China from an ancient national culture to a Communist China disconnected from the past. From 1958-1962, over 30 million Chinese died in famines due to Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”, and Mao worried about Chinese history making a comeback against communism due to the tragedy. Students from China’s elite Beijing university, who called themselves the “Red Guards”, went throughout China attempting to destroy any vestige of China’s history. Red Guards went after what they called “the four olds”. This included violence and persecution against anyone suspected of harboring “old” ideas. It descended into violence and mayhem killing millions. The young Red Guards were educated after the victory of the Communist Revolution in China in 1949, and so didn’t have that connection to China. They went after those who were old enough to have been educated in the history of “old” China.

According to Chinese-American Helen Raleigh, whose family suffered first-hand through the cultural Revolution: “Mao’s Cultural Revolution movement was the darkest chapter in China’s history. It should be called “Cultural Destruction.” It brought the Chinese people nothing but misery. It did fundamentally transform Chinese society: millions, including a generation of China’s intellectual backbone, perished, and an entire young generation grew up without any formal education. It tore the social fabric that used to unite people, and overturned traditional close relationships among families and communities. Its irreplaceable destruction of China’s cultural heritage left Chinese people in a spiritual and moral vacuum.”

For the Cultural Revolution to occur, the dearth of Chinese history among the college students was necessary. Red Guard students learned to hate and despise the history of China. This led to hatred against older Chinese who appeared to have nostalgia for Chinese culture. Red Guards saw themselves superior to the older generation educated in Chinese history and culture and sought it’s destruction.

We are seeing the potential for a Cultural Revolution with the lack of historical knowledge among American youth. The evidence of historical ignorance is overwhelming. In 2011, Glenn Ricketts wrote the following for the National Association of Scholars in “Knowledge of American History Rapidly becoming History”:

“The bad news about history education keeps piling up. Our recently-released study, The Vanishing West, 1964 – 2010, documents the drastic changes in undergraduate history requirements since our baseline year of 1964. The once-familiar survey in Western Civilization, or some close equivalent, we found, has simply vanished….. If college students do study history, the chances that they’ll gain any sense of the Big Picture once imparted by the old broad surveys are essentially nil……… (Only) 20 per cent of fourth grade students, seventeen per cent of eighth graders, and twelve per cent of high school seniors performed well enough to be rated “proficient.” (in history)….. eighty per cent of fourth graders, eighty-three per cent of eighth graders and eighty-eight per cent of high school seniors flunked the minimum proficiency rating. And within the senior cohort, a mere two per cent correctly answered a question about the Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education.”

Historic knowledge has only spiraled downhill since 2011 in the decreasing performance of college students with respect to American history. A 2018 Woodrow Wilson Center Poll found that 60% of college students couldn’t name our enemies in WWII. 37% believed Benjamin Franklin invented the lightbulb. There was Complete historic ignorance of the Holocaust. A 2020 National Assessment of Educational Progress found that only 15% of 8th graders were proficient at US History. At the same time, the studies found exploding alternatives to US history in cultural studies and other such programs. This dynamic helps explain why the completely discredited “history” of the 1619 project made such headway.

Americans must recognize the danger of the lack of knowledge of American history among our young. It’s also time to recognize the danger of what’s filling the void with alternative “history” bringing hatred of America. We must understand and recognize the connection between national historic ignorance the seeming hatred for America we have experienced. The destruction of many historic national icons, and destruction of so many memorials to American history and culture. The similarity with the Cultural Revolution in China is inescapable. History teaches that a nation is only vanquished when a generation is cut off from its past. Let’s ensure our past is preserved, if we want to ensure America is never vanquished.

____________________________________________________

Bill Connor, an Army Infantry colonel, author and Orangeburg attorney, has deployed multiple times to the Middle East. Connor was the senior U.S. military adviser to Afghan forces in Helmand Province, where he received the Bronze Star. A Citadel graduate with a JD from USC, he is also a Distinguished Graduate of the U.S. Army War College, earning his master of strategic studies. He is the author of the book Articles from War.

On October 12, 1492, the Genoan navigator Crisforo Colombo first reached land in the Western Hemisphere.

Columbus takes a lot of ribbing these days, for having thought he was in another part of the world, for not really being the first to discover the Americas, for having worked for a different country than the one of his birth, for never admitting that he had discovered a whole new land mass.

But, buried beneath these minor complaints, his accomplishments were enormous.… He did what had never been done before, showing amazing creativity, political skill, and determination.

Yes, Columbus does deserve a day to himself… Not only here in the United States, but across the Americas. We all owe our superior standard of living to the man who opened up this hemisphere to the ways of the West.

Not Really The First

Let’s begin by dispensing with the silly notion that Columbus shouldn’t deserve credit, because others discovered the Americas first.

Well, so what if they did?

Yes, Erickson and his Vikings discovered Greenland, and probably Nova Scotia too, hundreds of years earlier. But they didn’t do much with it. They stayed a little while, then left, and it was forgotten.

Thousands of years earlier, the Mormons believe, a lost tribe of Israelites landed in North America, and settled here. But even if that’s right, they didn’t bring western ways to the Americas; they disappeared.

Similarly, thousands of years earlier than that, Asians crossed over to the Americas and settled. Some came by sea, across the South Pacific. More came by land, across what is now the Bering Strait, over what is assumed to have been a land bridge at the time. They established civilizations of a sort, but they were what we would call prehistoric civilizations. Some had a calendar, some had some temples, but none were civilized in the way we view the term.

This is not to insult the people who were here when Columbus arrived. It is not to insult any of the cultures in the Americas… It is just a fact. We are not perfect today, no one claims us to be… But we are certainly more advanced than the populations who lived in caves, mud huts and tents. We are certainly more advanced than civilizations that practiced human sacrifice, lived as hunter-gatherers, and enslaved or slew the warriors they conquered in battle.

Western civilization was far beyond that, in the 1400s. It wasn’t perfect, but it had progressed incalculably further than the pre-Columbian American civilizations had.

Columbus didn’t bring any evils to this hemisphere that weren’t there already; the Americas already had disease, war, slavery, dictatorship. He didn’t introduce such things anew.

What Christopher Columbus brought with him to the Americas was that greatly advanced civilization: the civilization of written language, advanced metalwork, artwork, and industry, the Judeo-Christian family of religions, building techniques that could provide comfortable and even beautiful housing for unlimited numbers of people, and so much more.

Admittedly, Western Civilization was not then as advanced as it is today. We have continued to advance; time and progress did not stop in 1492. Since then, we have made incredible advances in medicine and all the sciences, in industry, philosophy and law. Since Columbus’s day, we have banned slavery; we have established countless career paths for people of all origins. We have set examples for governing by the rule of law rather than by the rule of might. We have improved standards of living immeasurably, with luxuries from grocery stores to home computers, from HVAC systems to automated factories.

Western Civilization has done this.

It is not one man, or one order, or one ruling family, or one book. The source of the continuous advancement of the ages is Western Civilization.

It is Western Civilization that encourages, facilitates, and rewards such advances. Non-western societies have not done so. Pre-Columbian American civilizations did not do so.

If Columbus had never set foot in the Americas, there is no reason to believe that these two continents would be any further along today, in terms of advancement, then they were then. Pre-Columbian American society was stagnant, and has been for thousands of years.

Again, this is nothing against the people; it is just a statement of fact about their civilization. It took western ways to facilitate advancement in Europe too, after all. If Europeans have been stuck with the same societies the pre-Columbian America had, then Europeans would not have advanced either. Europeans too would have been living in caves, mud huts and tents without the worldview of Western Civilization to spur them to improve.

It is the western approach to life… The Judeo Christian tradition, the western worldview, the philosophy of the Renaissance, that enabled every place under the umbrella of Western Civilization to develop as it has.

Bringing that worldview to the Americas was a gift.

Perseverance, Dedication, and Talent

The personal story of Christopher Columbus is a fascinating one.

Born in Genoa, in what is now northwest Italy, he went to sea early, sailing from a home base of Lisbon, Portugal by the age of 20. He spent his young years in merchant sailing, at a time when marine commerce was booming.

All the known world was excited at the prospect of buying and selling goods from distant lands. From Great Britain to the Mediterranean, from Western Europe to Asia, merchant caravans moved over land, and merchant vessels sailed the seas, creating business for exotic marketplaces, insurance firms, and all the wonderful developments that come from a bustling trade. Port towns flourished and the manufacturing guilds prospered.

But there was a problem – a problem that had been growing for nearly 1000 years already, interference by aggressive Muslim chieftains.

The aggressive spread of Islam was fast making eastward land routes too dangerous… And Muslim control of important passages, such as the Straits of Gibraltar and the land bridge between the Mediterranean and Arabian Seas (remember, there was no Suez Canal then) made even seagoing activity more dangerous than it had to be (as if the natural barriers of weather and Renaissance shipbuilding methods didn’t already make it dangerous enough).

So, not unlike today, when we are frustrated by an unpleasant obstacle, one of the most common exclamations of frustration among the sailors of the day, was the old saying, “If only there were another way.”

Well… Christopher Columbus believed that there was.

He sat down and did the math, and came to a decision. He believed that they could get to eastern coast of Asia by sailing due west from the Canary Islands.

On all of the big issues, he was right:

A western, all-water path would free them from the threat of hostile Muslim barriers along the way. Despite the obvious risk of an ocean voyage, on balance, a direct westerly all-water route could be both safer and quicker then sailing around Africa, or attempting any of the many overland routes then known. And financially, the potential for commercial activity was so high as to ensure it would be worthwhile in the end.

Someone, somewhere, just had to be willing to try it first.

Columbus and his brother Bartholomew went to work as salesmen for the idea; they pitched their plan to country after country. It is believed that the brothers pitched the idea to not only Castile, but also Portugal, Genoa, and England, maybe more.

King Henry VII of England even accepted the idea, eventually, and wrote back his intent to bankroll the effort, but only after taking so long to make up his mind, that Columbus had already accepted Spain’s offer and begun preparations.

Columbus tied a great many purposes together in both building his case and designing his plan:

He capitalized on the clear western recognition of a need to counter aggressive Muslim expansionism. He capitalized on a public excitement, all across Europe, for travel, exploration, and world trade. He capitalized on the international rivalries of the West – Ferdinand and Isabella were anxious to protect their new-won security; success in this endeavor would strengthen their position as European leaders. And of course, Columbus had a very real personal devotion to the Western Civilization that he hoped to help spread to Asia.

Columbus was masterful in his plans; right on almost everything, wrong on only one big issue: the earth’s circumference was bigger than he thought. If it weren’t for the Americas, it would’ve taken him much longer to get to Asia by his route.

The possibility that a western path would be too long for a sea journey had always been the mariners’ fear. What if the crew got fed up, and mutinied? What if the crew ran out of food and water? What if, as ocean storms spun one’s ship around, the stars changed their appearance, and the lack of maps made navigation impossible, one would go off-course so far as to be hopelessly lost at sea?

Other navigators had the idea before Columbus, but hadn’t had the courage to try it.

No doubt others would’ve had the idea after him, and the same lack of resolve would have stopped them as well.

It could easily have been another fifty years, another hundred, another two hundred, before another European country had the courage and the wherewithal to attempt that western journey.

Only Columbus made it happen.

Ah, but once Columbus started the trend, others followed. He blazed a trail soon joined by Italians, Portuguese, Englishmen, Dutch… all of whom would likely have continued sailing eastward if Columbus hadn’t proven the westward path was there.

We will never know how long the delay would have been without Columbus. All we do know is that Columbus was the first.

It was Christopher Columbus who convinced a king and queen to take a gamble on an Italian navigator with funny math.

It was Columbus who had the nerve, and the force of will, to inspire three shiploads of sailors to dare a voyage that had never been dared before, and to keep sailing west when nothing was in sight, day after day, and all the world they knew was east.

It was Columbus whose math told him that Asia would appear thousands of miles before it actually did, and who lucked out by discovering an entire hemisphere, a different land than he expected, but an important and welcoming land nevertheless… Just in time, just as his crew was beginning to lose hope.

Luckily for him, and luckily for us too, the Americas were there, unexpectedly, right when and where he needed them to be.

Whether that monumental discovery was luck or Providence, on October 12, 1492, it was indeed a blessing… for him, for us, and for all the world.

Happy Columbus Day!

Copyright 2020 John F Di Leo

The ideas of historicism can be understood only if one takes into account that they sought exclusively one end: to negate everything that rationalist social philosophy and economics had established. In this pursuit many historicists did not shrink from any absurdity. Thus to the statement of the economists that there is an inevitable scarcity of nature-given factors upon which human well-being depends they opposed the fantastic assertion that there is abundance and plenty. What brings about poverty and want, they say, is the inadequacy of social institutions.

When the economists referred to progress, they looked upon conditions from the point of view of the ends sought by acting men. There was nothing metaphysical in their concept of progress. Most men want to live and to prolong their lives; they want to be healthy and to avoid sickness; they want to live comfortably and not to exist on the verge of starvation. In the eyes of acting men advance toward these goals means improvement, the reverse means impairment. This is the meaning of the terms “progress” and “retrogression” as applied by economists. In this sense they call a drop in infant mortality or success in fighting contagious diseases progress.

The question is not whether such progress makes people happy. It makes them happier than they would otherwise have been. Most mothers feel happier if their children survive, and most people feel happier without tuberculosis than with it. Looking upon conditions from his personal point of view, Nietzsche expressed misgivings about the “much too many.” But the objects of his contempt thought differently.

In dealing with the means to which men resorted in their actions history as well as economics distinguishes between means that were fit to attain the ends sought and those that were not. In this sense progress is the substitution of more suitable methods of action for less suitable. Historicism takes offense at this terminology. All things are relative and must be viewed from the point of view of their age. Yet no champion of historicism has the boldness to contend that exorcism ever was a suitable means to cure sick cows.

But the historicists are less cautious in dealing with economics. For instance, they declare that what economics teaches about the effects of price control is inapplicable to the conditions of the Middle Ages. The historical works of authors imbued with the ideas of historicism are muddled precisely on account of their rejection of economics.

While emphasizing that they do not want to judge the past by any preconceived standard, the historicists in fact try to justify the policies of the “good old days.” Instead of approaching the theme of their studies with the best mental equipment available, they rely upon the fables of pseudo economics. They cling to the superstition that decreeing and enforcing maximum prices below the height of the potential prices which the unhampered market would fix is a suitable means to improve the conditions of the buyers. They omit to mention the documentary evidence of the failure of the just-price policy and of its effects which, from the point of view of the rulers who resorted to it, were more undesirable than the previous state of affairs which they were designed to alter.

One of the vain reproaches heaped by historicists on the economists is their alleged lack of historical sense. Economists, they say, believe that it would have been possible to improve the material conditions of earlier ages if only people had been familiar with the theories of modern economics. Now, there can be no doubt that the conditions of the Roman Empire would have been considerably affected if the emperors had not resorted to currency debasement and had not adopted a policy of price ceilings.

It is no less obvious that the mass penury in Asia was caused by the fact that the despotic governments nipped in the bud all endeavors to accumulate capital. The Asiatics, unlike the Western Europeans, did not develop a legal and constitutional system which would have provided the opportunity for large-scale capital accumulation. And the public, actuated by the old fallacy that a businessman’s wealth is the cause of other people’s poverty, applauded whenever rulers confiscated the holdings of successful merchants.

The economists have always been aware that the evolution of ideas is a slow, time-consuming process. The history of knowledge is the account of a series of successive steps made by men each of whom adds something to the thoughts of his predecessors. It is not surprising that Democritus of Abdera did not develop the quantum theory or that the geometry of Pythagoras and Euclid is different from that of Hilbert. Nobody ever thought that a contemporary of Pericles could have created the free-trade philosophy of Hume, Adam Smith, and Ricardo and converted Athens into an emporium of capitalism.

There is no need to analyze the opinion of many historicists that to the soul of some nations the practices of capitalism appear so repulsive that they will never adopt them. If there are such peoples, they will forever remain poor. There is but one road that leads toward prosperity and freedom. Can any historicist on the ground of historical experience contest this truth?

No general rules about the effects of various modes of action and of definite social institutions can be derived from historical experience. In this sense the famous dictum is true that the study of history can teach only one thing: viz., that nothing can be learned from history. We could therefore agree with the historicists in not paying much attention to the indisputable fact that no people ever raised itself to a somewhat satisfactory state of welfare and civilization without the institution of private ownership of the means of production. It is not history but economics that clarifies our thoughts about the effects of property rights.

But we must entirely reject the reasoning, very popular with many 19th-century writers, that the alleged fact that the institution of private property was unknown to peoples in primitive stages of civilization is a valid argument in favor of socialism. Having started as the harbingers of a future society which will wipe out all that is unsatisfactory and will transform the earth into a paradise, many socialists, for instance Engels, virtually became advocates of a return to the supposedly blissful conditions of a fabulous golden age of the remote past.

It never occurred to the historicists that man must pay a price for every achievement. People pay the price if they believe that the benefits derived from the thing to be acquired outweigh the disadvantages resulting from the sacrifice of something else. In dealing with this issue historicism adopts the illusions of romantic poetry. It sheds tears about the defacement of nature by civilization. How beautiful were the untouched virgin forests, the waterfalls, the solitary shores before the greed of acquisitive people spoiled their beauty! The romantic historicists pass over in silence the fact that the forests were cut down in order to win arable land and the falls were utilized to produce power and light. There is no doubt that Coney Island was more idyllic in the days of the Indians than it is today. But in its present state it gives millions of New Yorkers an opportunity to refresh themselves which they cannot get elsewhere.

Talk about the magnificence of untouched nature is idle if it does not take into account what man has got by “desecrating” nature. The earth’s marvels were certainly splendid when visitors seldom set foot upon them. Commercially organized tourist traffic made them accessible to the many. The man who thinks “What a pity not to be alone on this peak! Intruders spoil my pleasure,” fails to remember that he himself probably would not be on the spot if business had not provided all the facilities required.

The technique of the historicists’ indictment of capitalism is simple indeed. They take all its achievements for granted but blame it for the disappearance of some enjoyments that are incompatible with it and for some imperfections that still may disfigure its products. They forget that mankind has had to pay a price for its achievements — a price paid willingly because people believe that the gain derived, e.g., the prolongation of the average length of life, is more to be desired.Author:

Ludwig von Mises

Ludwig von Mises was the acknowledged leader of the Austrian school of economic thought, a prodigious originator in economic theory, and a prolific author. Mises’s writings and lectures encompassed economic theory, history, epistemology, government, and political philosophy. His contributions to economic theory include important clarifications on the quantity theory of money, the theory of the trade cycle, the integration of monetary theory with economic theory in general, and a demonstration that socialism must fail because it cannot solve the problem of economic calculation. Mises was the first scholar to recognize that economics is part of a larger science in human action, a science that he called praxeology.

On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas and changed the course of world history forever.  In honor of this historic event, Columbus Day is observed in the United States, Latin America, Spain, and Italy.  In more recent years, however, there’s been increasing opposition to Columbus Day in favor of Indigenous Peoples’ Day.  According to the left’s narrative, the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World marked the beginning of one of the largest genocides in human history.  But was it really?

It’s true that many American Indians died after the Europeans discovered the Americas.  However, the vast majority of the native population, some 75 to 95 percent, were killed by Old World diseases to which they had no immunity.  While no less a tragedy, it does not constitute a genocide.  A genocide requires a calculated, deliberate intent to exterminate a whole group of people.  The Europeans were unaware that the natives didn’t have immunity to Old World diseases, let alone how infectious diseases even worked.  Germ theory was not fully developed and accepted until the latter half of the nineteenth century.  It should also be noted that in the United States, at least, there was never a government policy for extermination.  On the contrary, you don’t set up reservations and inoculate the people you are trying to exterminate.

With the call to abolish Columbus Day in favor of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, there is the implication that American Indians were and are more virtuous, deserving, and noble than their European counterparts.  The left tends to romanticize American Indians while vilifying Europeans.  It’s true there were atrocities and injustices done to the American Indians, but that’s only one side of the story.  Guess what: nothing the Europeans did was at all different from what the natives themselves did.  American Indians also conquered other native peoples for their land and to acquire slaves.  Slavery was widely practiced in pre-Columbian America, just as it was practiced everywhere at the time.  According to the Standard Cross-Cultural Files, at least thirty-nine pre-Columbian societies in North America alone practiced slavery, and it was not at all different from the slavery practiced elsewhere.  Indian slave masters had complete control over their slaves, even to kill them if they desired.  It’s a little known fact that in the nineteenth century, American Indians began to acquire black slaves.  In fact, the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians took a number of black slaves with them as they were forcibly relocated to Oklahoma “Indian” Territory.  In short, American Indians had the same sins and vices as the Europeans, and even some they didn’t have.

Nothing highlights this more than the Aztecs in what is today Mexico.  The Aztecs had an unrivaled occult bloodlust.  Some historians estimate that the Aztecs ritually sacrificed 50,000 people per year in a population area of four to five million.  That equated to sacrificing one percent of their total population annually.  Those ritually sacrificed were often captives taken from neighboring tribes.  The manner in which they were sacrificed was particularly barbaric.  Captives were taken to the top of a temple and laid upon a stone slab.  The priest would then take a sharp knife, plunge it into their chests, and rip out their still-beating hearts.  The bodies were then dismembered, the torso kicked down the temple steps, and the limbs were eaten.  The heads of the sacrificed were placed on a pole and kept as trophies.  Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who accompanied Hernán Cortés on his conquest of Mexico, witnessed more than one hundred thousand skulls stacked meticulously on top of one another, which Aztec texts, frescoes, and archeology have confirmed.  Most of the victims were men, but women and children were also sacrificed.  Women would also have their hearts ripped out, but more often they were slowly beheaded and skinned.  The priests would often wear these human skins while the sacrifices continued.  In one event, during the consecration of a new temple, an estimated 20,000 to 80,000 people were sacrificed over a four-day period.  That is the very definition of a genocide.

After the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors and ensuing conflicts, the Spanish witnessed some of their own being taken captive by the Aztecs.  The Spanish prisoners were stripped naked, brought to the temple, and forced to dance naked for an hour.  Afterward, the Aztec high priest sacrificed them alive, ripping out their hearts and dismembering them, as was commonly practiced.  When Cortés finally conquered the Aztecs, much of the slaughter that ensued was done by their Indian allies, who hated the Aztecs with a passion.  The conquistadors were certainly no saints, but not even the worst among them practiced human sacrifice or ate human flesh.  The Aztecs were not alone when it came to human sacrifice and cannibalism.  The Mayans, Incas, and other tribes had similar practices, including sacrificing children and infants.

When Columbus discovered the Americas, he encountered friendly natives, but he also encountered hostile natives.  Upon his second trip to the Americas, he encountered the Caribs, from which the word “Caribbean” is derived.  According to historian Samuel Eliot Morison, Columbus’s search parties on Guadeloupe found a disturbing sight: “They found large cuts and joints of human flesh … caponized Arawak boy captives who were being fattened for the griddle, and girl captives who were mainly used to produce babies, which the Caribs regarded as a particularly toothsome morsel.”  The French explorer Florentine Giovanni da Verrazzano is said to have been eaten on the beaches of Guadeloupe by Caribs while his companions looked on from their ship in horror.

This is not to say that all American Indians were bloodthirsty man-eaters.  Just as in any society, there are good and bad people.  It’s in no way intended to vilify all American Indians — only to highlight the left’s one-sided argument against Columbus and Europeans in general.  Leftists conveniently ignore atrocities when committed by American Indians.  You will never hear them condemn genocides committed by the Aztecs or the barbaric practices of the Incas and Mayans.  These facts do not fit their narrative and must be disregarded.

You will also not hear about attacks upon white settlers.  During Pontiac’s War, for instance, Indian warriors entered a schoolhouse, killed the schoolmaster, and then tomahawked and scalped eight children.  Contrary to popular belief, Europeans did not teach scalping to the American Indians.  Archeological evidence indicates that scalping already existed in pre-Columbian America.

Ultimately, the attack on Columbus Day is an attack on Western civilization itself.  But whether anyone likes it or not, Columbus discovered America and it changed history irrevocably.  Ignoring the past will not change events, nor does it make it any less historic.  If Columbus had not discovered America, or rediscovered, if you prefer, it’s naïve to believe it would have remained sealed off from the rest of the world forever.  If it were not for Columbus or some other European, it would have been somebody else, possibly the Chinese.  Regardless, no matter who discovered the Americas, the outcome would have remained the same.  American Indians still would have died by the scores from diseases they had no immunity to, there still would have been a clash of civilizations, and they still would have lost.  It’s an unfortunate but predictable outcome.  When a technologically advanced civilization comes into contact with a primitive stone-aged civilization, it never fares well for the latter.

American Thinker

You will never understand politics and government until you appreciate the power of philosophy. You will never figure out ethics or psychology until you understand underlying philosophy.

It all boils down to a duel between the original two philosophers: Plato, who gave us subjectivism; and Aristotle, who introduced us to the power of objective knowledge. Psychologically and ethically, it boils down to how you answer this question: Is man’s mind competent — or is man’s mind helpless? How you answer the question leads to how you vote, i.e., whether you vote for freedom (so man may assert his mind) or totalitarianism (so man may be controlled). It also determines whether you have self-esteem, or not. It likewise influences whether you have mental disorders such as anxiety, depression, and the like. It’s really that simple.

Today, we live in a Kantian culture. Kant was a subjectivist. He was a product of Plato, not Aristotle. Immanuel Kant inspired the likes of Marx and Hitler. He inspired the postmodernists in America who gave us first, Barack Obama, and now the totalitarian horror show the leftist “Democratic Party” is today. Today, we’re clearly moving toward totalitarianism politically — because we are already there, culturally. Frankly, the culture is lost. It can always be regained, but no culture as screwed up and messed up as ours can sustain itself on its present lack of foundation. Not everyone will admit this, but most, I think, at least sense it. Hence all the rage coming out masking the terror of what’s happening to us. Most people — whether voting for Trump or Biden — are scared s**tless. And with good reason, although they don’t really know why.

Ayn Rand summed up the duel between Plato and Aristotle brilliantly in this quote:

If there is a philosophical Atlas who carries the whole of Western civilization on his shoulders, it is Aristotle. He has been opposed, misinterpreted, misrepresented, and—like an axiom—used by his enemies in the very act of denying him. Whatever intellectual progress men have achieved rests on his achievements.

Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history’s brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind. The Aristotelian revival of the thirteenth century brought men to the Renaissance. The intellectual counter-revolution turned them back toward the cave of his antipode: Plato.

There is only one fundamental issue in philosophy: the cognitive efficacy of man’s mind. The conflict of Aristotle versus Plato is the conflict of reason versus mysticism. It was Plato who formulated most of philosophy’s basic questions—and doubts. It was Aristotle who laid the foundation for most of the answers. Thereafter, the record of their duel is the record of man’s long struggle to deny and surrender or to uphold and assert the validity of his particular mode of consciousness.

Michael J. Hurd

“Just wait until after the election.” Wait–for what? I am not looking forward to the post-election. If Biden wins, I will know America is finally over and a leftist dictatorship is imminent. No options will exist, other than to go underground, arm oneself and prepare for a brave new world. Social media will buckle under to one-party rule, and gladly so. Fleeing is not an option, because the rest of the world is even less free than America; and because of America’s dominance economically, other countries will have to buckle under to the Communist-fascist axis of China, the US, and European collectivists. Eventually that may change, and there may be a haven for freedom-lovers to get to, but that will take a long time. America will be governed like California, and eventually like China. You know the rest.

If Trump wins big and Republicans flip the House, it will be a fabulous victory at first. But the left still dominates the entire cultural, media, corporate and academic worlds. In any society, these matter out of proportion to the rest of society, for better or worse. You can expect them to triple down with hostility, but at least we will still be a somewhat free country, at least in red states, until the media creates the next COVID-like excuse for tyranny (AND THEY WILL.)

And then there’s the perhaps most likely scenario: an uncertain Trump or Biden victory, tainted by a close election and/or evidence of Democratic foul play with chaotic voting methods. What then? Certainly an escalation in the psychological civil war we are already in, if not a real civil war, or more civil breakdown stoked by leftist mayors and governors. Perhaps a Constitutional showdown with Trump and Nancy Pelosi literally fighting for the loyalty of the U.S. military and our federal Deep State.

These are the three options I foresee. Certainly, I hope for a Trump blowout. But let’s be real: America is ill, mentally and politically. No one election will cure that.

Michael J. Hurd