Showing posts with label freedom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label freedom. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 10, 2025

Ingratitude and Ignorance Are Driving The Destruction of The Greatest Civilization In Human History

I started writing my Imperfect America blog in 2009.  It’s my passion, despite the sad fact it’s never made me a penny.  Not even on Twitter, new or old, where my account is constantly throttled!

My first post was titled “Racism, America’s Original Sin”.  It was a response to the new normal of anyone disagreeing with Barack Obama being called a racist.  In it I talk about the 3/5th Compromise and the fact that it gave southerners less power in the House than they wanted, but more importantly, it was the key to America being one nation rather than two, one free and one slave. I pointed out that blacks would likely have been much worse off in a nation of only slave states. The 3/5th Compromise is a literal example of the subtitle of my blog: “Perfect is the enemy of the good.”

At the end of the day, over the last million or so words I’ve written about everything from race to the judiciary to entrepreneurship to European travel and more, most from a conservative, even libertarian perspective. I regularly make the argument that western civilization is the greatest that has thus far been produced by men. And it’s not even close. While the Egyptians built the pyramids 5,000 years ago, the Sumerians, Egyptians, and Greeks developed math and the Chinese invented gunpowder and paper, the reality is, almost every single thing used by most people around the world today is a consequence of western civilization.

For most of human history, life was brutal, short and dangerous. For most today, it’s not.  And there’s a reason. These five elements: Free speech, the rule of law, limited government, private property and Capitalism combined to give humans the unprecedented ability and motivation to be creative and productive. And the results were extraordinary. Longer lifespans. More food. Larger and safer living quarters and conditions. Vastly more options for making a living and safter conditions when doing so.  Cheaper, faster and more comfortable transportation. Unprecedented communication tools and energy. Exponentially more information available and accessible. Leisure time, something almost unheard of throughout history.  And the list goes on.

But none of that happens in a fascist state.  Nor a Communist state. None of that happens in a tyranny, nor in a cradle to grave nanny state. None of that happens when science and math and human nature are ignored, and finally, none of that happens when there are no consequences for bad actors. 

But those are all elements of what America is becoming.  Families on welfare for generations.  Giant banks and corporations privatizing profits and socializing losses.  Government regulation of virtually every aspect of life. Violent criminals let loose on society with slaps on the wrist. Freedom of speech defined by whose feelings get hurt.  Merit taking a back seat to a spectrum of victimization categories.  And this list too goes on.

But here’s the thing.  No society ever prospered on the basis of victimization and a nanny state culture where citizens turned on one another and the few worked to support the many. Never, not one.  And no, modern European nanny states haven’t prospered because of their paternalism, they prospered in spite of it because the United States guaranteed their security for the last 75 years.

I write to try and make a difference. I try to showcase the fact that most Americans, indeed most westerners, have lost sight of the reality that we’re living in the greatest and most prosperous time in human history, and more importantly, they willingly choose to ignore what created it and indeed attack those responsible. It’s not politically correct to say, but this civilization was largely created by white people, most originating in western Europe. Nor is it PC to say that Christianity was the force that impelled it. And finally, it’s individual liberty, private property, limited government and Capitalism that were the oil that lubricated the engine of advancement. 

To the degree that modern America and western civilization are making policies that are antithetical to all of those things, they’re killing the goose that laid the golden civilizational egg.  And it would be one thing if they could point to an example of some place, some time, some civilization that was equal to or greater than ours, particularly at scale.  But they don’t because they can’t. It didn’t work in New Harmony, Indiana, it never worked in the Soviet Union and it didn’t work in the 1960’s communes.

It was western civilization and the United States that took men to flight, put men on the moon, discovered DNA, invented the computer, harnessed nuclear power and revolutionized farming.

Nonetheless every day we’re faced with a growing faction of citizens who whine because someone else has something they don’t, because they’re victims of someone else’s success, that bad actors shouldn’t have to face the consequences of their actions or that someone is saying something that hurts their feelings.  And for them, the solution is always the same: More government.  More government to take from others to give to them. To stop others from being successful. To silence and imprison enemies and allow fellow travelers to do anything with impunity. That’s called tyranny and it never, ever, leads to prosperity.

Teddy Roosevelt said, “Comparison is the enemy of joy.”  I think it’s no coincidence that he also said, “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.” Both refer to setting oneself apart from others. 

Which is, I think, the fundamental problem with America and the west right now:  comparison, envy and the lack of gratitude for exactly where we are in the big picture.  That skewed perspective is what leads huge swaths of the population to be willing to destroy the good in pursuit of the illusion of perfection. I write to try and wake America and the west up to the fact that continued prosperity is not guaranteed. Much had to go right for us to get here but it wouldn’t take much going wrong to destroy it. 

You can only lay siege to the foundations of a civilization for so long before it collapses. We’re seeing that across Europe and the United States today. Gone is the appreciation of and gratitude for men who did great things and built this civilization, replaced by reverence for and desire to become influencers, most of whom have accomplished nothing. You have large numbers of illegals who don’t share western values and native-born minorities who hate the majorities and think the rules don’t apply to them. Add to that a self-hating wing of the majority and you have a perfect storm that will destroy the west and take civilization as we know it with it. 

Europe will find itself part of the caliphate while the United States will devolve into a bloody morass of demographically defined armed camps. And eventually the economically and militarily empowered Chinese Communists, not constrained by morals of any kind, will enslave much of the world.

When that history is written it will say that a once great west committed civilizational suicide, having crucified itself on a cross anchored by diversity, globalism, environmentalism and compassion. 

I’d prefer not to go quietly into that good night, thank you. Which is why I write. I may make all the noise of a tree falling in the woods, but I’m going to continue doing so for as long as the Lord allows.    

Tuesday, May 6, 2025

Of Foxholes and Atheists and Donald Trump

 The leftist elites always hate Republicans, but there is something much deeper going on with their hatred for Donald Trump. The desire to destroy him has an almost religious element to it.

They say there are no atheists in foxholes. The basic premise is that when facing an existential threat, particularly when lives are on the line, people will look for something stronger than themselves, often God, to pull them through.

The opposite might be when things are good. Then, atheism, or at least an indifference to God, grows.

Sadly, in this context, the last 75 years have been very good for the West. WWII was horrible, of course, but there were some good things that came from it.

The first good thing features two sides of the same coin, and that coin is the utter destruction of Germany and Japan. I don’t mean their defeat, but rather the utter destruction of their infrastructure and that of many of the nations fighting them. The result for the relatively unscathed United States was that its full wartime manufacturing footing put it in a position to provide pretty much of everything the war-torn world needed. The result was that by the middle of the 1950s, the American economy, with 5% of the world’s population, approached 40% of world GDP. Times were indeed good.

The other side of that coin was that because the German and Japanese infrastructures were so completely destroyed, they could leapfrog over many iterations of evolution and begin again with the latest technologies, machinery, and processes. The result was that by the 1980s, the Japanese and German economies were the most powerful in the world after the US.

The second positive outcome of WWII was the Cold War. Now the Cold War had many downsides, including the hot wars in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere, but what it did was draw a clear line between who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. America and the West were far from perfect, but we knew that at the end of the day, the West was the land of freedom, while the communists were tyrannies constantly seeking to expand.

The result of that clarity was that, for the most part, Western nations understood there was real danger in the world and prepared for it. They focused on trading with one another, they took defense seriously, and while they sometimes tolerated communists in their midst, they rarely made heroes of them.

The consequence of that Cold War clarity, and the Soviet and Chinese understanding that the West was willing to fight to preserve freedom across the planet, was a relative peace. And that relative peace was the West’s undoing.

For the half-century from the end of World War II until 2000, the world experienced more economic growth than it had in the previous 2,000 years combined. Driven by relative peace, world trade took off both within the West and with the developing world.

But then a funny thing happened on the way to perpetual prosperity. The West, basking in its victory over the Soviets and its certainty that communist China would evolve into a modern Western democracy if only allowed to sell us tchotchkes, began to turn on itself.

The peace / communist parties, which had been funded by Moscow and had always been a fringe element of modern Western polity, suddenly morphed into environmentalists and cloaked their anticapitalist ideas in far more voter-friendly “Earth First” shibboleths. Now, just as the money spigot from Russia was coming to an end, a far larger resource was becoming viable…Western governments.

The result was the extraordinary growth in the power of the far left in Western politics. And it wasn’t just environmentalism that was driving the train. As the Cold War wound down, Western nations used their “peace dividends” to shower citizens with benefits while simultaneously seeking to regulate their economies into perfection. (Spoiler alert: It didn’t work!)

The perfect encapsulation of the West’s metastasizing can be seen in the form of the European Union. Imagined as a vehicle to foster peace and then trade between perpetually warring European states, it morphed into a leviathan that not only seeks to control virtually every aspect of citizens’ lives in its member states, but it seeks to control who can grow what and when, how states can control their borders and even whether sovereign states can conduct their own elections.

Like so much of the modern West, an idea that started out as something ostensibly good metastasized into cancer. Stopping the pouring of chemicals directly into rivers morphed into eviscerating farms. A temporary safety net for the downtrodden morphs into generational welfare. An empathetic desire to help victims of war morphs into an invasion by legions of military-aged men.

And it’s not just capitalism and freedom that have taken body blows. The third leg of the stool upon which western civilization stands is Christianity, and it has been brutalized by Western prosperity, as have the foundations of Christianity, namely, marriage and children.

As they say, idle hands are the Devil’s workshop. The West’s relative prosperity has caused citizens not focused on a common enemy to turn on their own history. From British universities dropping Shakespeare and Chaucer to the New York Museum of Natural History removing Teddy Roosevelt’s statue to the Spanish government’s vow to “decolonize“ the nation’s museums, to the cancer of DEI, across the West, nations are turning their backs on their own foundations, the things that set them apart from—and above, frankly—every other civilization in human history. From socialism to communism to Islam, Western intellectuals have led the charge, via schools and the media, to champion everything that is anti-Western, anti-capitalist, anti-masculine, and anti-white.

At the end of the day, the globalist elites co-opted the hard-won prosperity and peace by leveraging technology, Chinese tchotchkes, and social media algorithms to aim society’s guns at the very things that built success in the first place. They’ve created a Mexican standoff where everyone loses as the core elements of Western civilization are undermined by policies specifically formatted to destroy them, while the resulting “culture” is not equipped to support anything close to the same level of civilization.

All of this is why Donald Trump is for the left, a new Jesus Christ—not in the sense that he’s godlike, because I think we can all agree that he’s not, but because he embodies their eventual destruction. Thus, just as Christ was a heretic whose message of love and a gracious God had to be destroyed because it threatened the established order, Trump’s pro-America, pro-masculinity, and pro-Western civilization message must be destroyed because it threatens the New World Order.

The globalists argue that they are best equipped to structure the lives of citizens, organize world economies, and control everything from speech to cow farts to electricity generation. Any message that suggests that citizens should control their own lives, that capitalism makes for the most prosperous outcomes, and that free speech is a cornerstone of civilization must be quashed.

Western elites think Donald Trump is the common enemy they need to unify citizens under the banner of globalism. They’ve got it backwards. They’re more likely to discover exactly how many of their citizens feel like they’ve been crouching in a foxhole waiting for someone to inspire them to climb out, pick up their weapons, and charge into a battle of ideas to take back their lives. Imagine the sheer horror on the globalists’ faces when they realize that Donald Trump just might be that guy...

Saturday, April 27, 2024

Dear Donald Trump: Compassion Should Not Be A Suicide Pact...

America is a land of immigrants. We’re told that constantly, and it’s true. Of course it’s also true that immigration of one sort of another is a hallmark of almost all of human history.

Wherever humanity originated, at some point members of the species immigrated everywhere else. It is of course never a simple issue. Sometimes it’s the result of the peoples being chased from their homelands like the Vandals who were chased by the Huns from eastern Europe into the Roman Empire, eventually settling in Gaul then Iberia and finally North Africa. Other times it’s the result of a people who seek to expand their territory through conquest such as with the various Muslim caliphates that emerged from Mecca & Medina whose desire to encircle the Mediterranean was only stopped by Charles Martel in Tours in 732 and by John III Sobieski in Vienna in 1683.

History is full of examples of peoples immigrating from one place to another. We often think of the earliest peoples moving into an area that was previously uninhabited. That may possibly be true of North and South America, but for the most part it’s not true. When the earliest humans immigrated out of Africa and into Europe, Asia and Oceania, they encountered our cousins, the Neanderthals, and after 100 centuries of war eventually eradicated them.

All of this to say that immigration is nothing new in human history. And it’s not in American history either. The United States was built by immigrants from Europe from a land that was extraordinarily sparsely populated when they arrived. It’s estimated that there were 4.5 million inhabitants north of the Rio Grande in 1492, or about one half a person per square mile. That compares to approximately 32 in Mexico at the time, 33 in Spain, 60 in France and the 103 in India, the world’s densest nation at the time.  Today America stands at approximately 100 people per square mile. 

From its beginning, what became America experienced a series waves of immigration which included approximately 86 million people through 2019, a number that has increased to approximately 100 million over the last 5 years. Although Donald Trump stemmed the tide somewhat, Joe Biden has opened up the floodgates with more than 10 million illegal immigrants pouring over the nonexistent border since his installation. That’s fully 3% of the US population.  As significant numbers of those people are heading to New York, California and other blue states who roll out the red carpet and give them free money, the Democrats don’t fight to keep the border open because it helps their Congressional numbers.  

This is simply not sustainable. Particularly when the overwhelming majority of the people coming across the border are from countries that don’t share our values and have little experience with the freedoms that helped create history’s greatest nation & economy. 

Across the country we’re seeing sanctuary states and cities being overwhelmed by the events they supported in the first place. Citizens, veterans, children and more are being displaced to make room for illegals, and taxpayers are picking up the tab. Virtually every aspect of public services is being overwhelmed, from shelters to schools to hospitals to police.

The good thing is, Donald Trump has promised that on day 1 he will start the largest domestic deportation operation in American history. That, combined with a wall the likes of which we’ve never seen is a great start.

But there’s a problem, and Jesse Kelly hit it right on the head on Twitter…

“70% of Americans SAY they care about the border.

Run one video of little Pedro sobbing as he and mother Lupe get loaded into an ICE vehicle a they get deported back to Guatemala and that 70% number will drop to around 5%.

Country is too soft for mass deportation. No chance. 0.”

Kelly is right. America is simply too soft to do what’s necessary in order to deal with this disaster.

Americans are largely a compassionate people. The LBGTQXYZ travesty we’re experiencing today is at its core the result of Americans reacting to gay partners not being able to visit dying lovers in hospitals during the AIDS epidemic because they didn’t have rights and families of the dying kept them out of the hospital rooms.

Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of babies are aborted annually because Americans are angered at hearing that a victim of rape or the mother of a severely handicapped fetus are forced to give birth rather than get an abortion.

In wide swaths of the country policing and justice have been eviscerated because too many Americans believe that blacks are incapable of overcoming slavery that ended a century and a half ago or discrimination that was outlawed back in the 1960s.

Americans are indeed a compassionate people, but sometimes compassion can get you killed. Compassion has a role to play in a moral civilization, but when it becomes the driving force to the exclusion of rational thought, it ceases to be a virtue. (See Europe, which since 2015 at Angela Merkel’s direction during the war in Syria, imported tens of millions of military aged men from Africa and the Middle East who are bringing war to the streets, many of whom despise western culture and want to bring Sharia.) You cannot run a country based on teary anecdotes. They make for great media and heartfelt stories, but they make for terrible policy.

If Donald Trump is going to fix this situation, he’s going to have to be willing to endure the unprecedented level of vitriol that will be thrown at him. AOC crying at the side of cages will be child’s play compared to what the media will do with images of little Pedro and his pregnant mommy being pulled from the taxpayer provided hotel room and loaded up into a DHS van. He’s going to have to be willing to endure stories about the heartbreaking lives that face deportees back in Mexico, Guatemala and Venezuela and the rest of the countries from whence they came with him playing the role of Hitler. At the end of the day, if Donald Trump is going to lead the nation out of the morass that Democrats and the swamp have led us into, he’s going to have to be willing to be vilified, cursed, defamed, libeled, reviled and basically all of the other things he has been exposed to over the last 8 years, on steroids.

He wasn’t willing to endure that abuse last time and allowed random judges to throw roadblocks all along the way, and as a result his wall was never finished and now there are 10 million new illegals here as a result. If he’s going to be the leader Americans need right now, he’s going to have be a lot more George Patton and a lot less Mark Milley…


Thursday, January 18, 2024

The West Should Stop Being Ashamed of Its Success And Stop Committing Cultural Suicide

I used to debate one of my teachers about culture.  As a fan of Rome I posited it was the greatest and most consequential civilization in human history.  He queried me about why. It’s laws, its size, its economy, its longevity? I suggested the clearest proof was the fact that there may be more Roman ruins remaining than from any ancient civilization in the world.

He disagreed, believing there were African empires whose cultures were equal if not superior to Rome's. The grandest of such being the Mali Empire in West Africa. Lasting from 1226 to 1670, it’s greatest king was Mansa Musa, who is sometimes said to be the richest man who ever lived.

He pressed me on others, stating that architecture and its survival might not be the best measure by which to measure a culture’s greatness.

Wondering if he might be right, I looked a bit more into some of those other societies about which I knew less than Rome.  There were the Incas, the Aztecs, the Egyptians, the Qin and Han Chinese, the Mongols, the Abbasid and Umayyad Caliphates and aforementioned Malian Empire.  All were fascinating.  The Mongols had the largest landlocked empire in history, but left very little in the way of architecture.  There were the Qun and Han dynasties who controlled a quarter of the world’s population some 2000 years ago and built the longest sections of China’s Great Wall. The Abbasid caliphate, which is considered the Islamic Golden Age, was considered to be the most advanced society of its time in reference to things like science, astronomy, math, and medicine.  The Egyptians not only left the Pyramids and Abu Simbel, but their papyrus was the earliest known paper. The Median and Achaemenid Empires of modern day Iran left extraordinary ruins that go back 500 years before Christ. 

Depending on how one wants to characterize them there have been thousands of cultures and civilizations and dynasties throughout human history.  As much as we might know about them, it’s likely there are even more about which we know nothing.  Which brings me back to my original point… how does one measure what a great culture is?  Is it the language they left, is it the ruins they left, is it how much of the earth or her population that it controlled?

It's possible to make an argument for any one of those, but the reality is that given the differences in time, geography and populations, it’s impossible to draw a hierarchical chart that defines “Greatness” with precision, particularly given the differences in what’s left of them.

Nonetheless, I stand by the opinion of my 15-year-old self about Rome being the greatest civilization of the ancient world.

That being said, there’s nothing in the ancient world to compare with what we have in the 21st century.  And the world of the 21st century was built by Europeans.  As much as Europe is in the midst of committing cultural suicide, it might be helpful to examine what that European culture has produced.

Yes, it has been cruel, barbaric at times, sanctioned slavery and resulted in bloodshed of native peoples in far off lands.  All those things are true.  But none of them are unique to Europeans.  Depravity is a mark that mankind shares across civilizations and has been constant from one degree or another across the space and time of human existence.

With that out of the way, back to western civilization. It’s brought the world democratic governance. It’s brought the world individual liberty, individual rights ordained by God, limited government and capitalism.  Together those things set the stage for the greatest advancement in the condition of man in all human history.

From the moment most of the people on the planet today wake up until the moment they lay their heads down at night, almost everything they do or interact with is a result of western civilization. Here is a short list of just some of the inventions western civilization has produced:

Automobiles. Telephony. Mobile phones. MRI machines. Plastic. Nuclear power. Bessemer Process steelmaking. Gasoline. Vulcanized rubber. Television. Radio. Elevators. Computers. Flight. Rockets. Electric light. Mechanical reaper. Heart transplants. Vaccines. The Internet. Sewing machines. Skyscrapers. Railroads. The steam engine. Internal combustion engines. Electric washing machines. Barbed wire. Air conditioning. Satellites. Movies. Submarines. Microwaves. Radar. Lasers. Artificial knees and hips. Robots. The movable-type printing press. Antibiotics. Batteries. Refrigeration. And much more.   

Then there are innovations that western civilization has produced:  Containerized shipping. DNA discovery and sequencing. Stock markets. Social media. GPS. Advanced farming. Google maps. Space travel. Blood transfusion. Constitutional Democracy. Individual freedom. Limited government. X ray machines. The assembly line.  Mars landers and solar system probes. And again, much more.

And then there’s science. Of the approximately 800 Nobel Prizes that have been handed out since 1901 in fields like Physics, Chemistry, Economics & Medicine (not including Literature because it’s so subjective and Peace, which after giving one to Barack Obama, has about as much credibility as the UN) Europeans and their offshoots have won approximately 750, including 350 for the United States alone.  

This is the world of the 21st century and it’s been built by the west. Aside from lost tribes or primitive societies who live like their ancestors did thousands of years ago, there’s virtually not a thing people around the world do on a daily basis that hasn’t been developed by the west.  The west won on the field of battle of ideas and power.  To pretend otherwise is simply fiction.

But that which the west has built is under assault… mostly from within. From citizens who became fat, dumb and happy during the prosperous times to the invitation into their nations tens of millions of people who don’t share their culture, most of whom come from cultures anathema to it.

Prosperity is a two edged sword.  On the one hand it has created a civilization greater than anything in history, but the beneficiaries of that prosperity have lost sight of the hard work, sacrifice, risk and perseverance it takes to create prosperity or how difficult it is to maintain. 

As a result, many, if not a majority of western citizens detest their own culture.  They have tunnel vision, focused with a modern day perspective on their forefathers’ flaws while creating a fictional nirvana-like perspective on every other civilization in history.  The self loathing is rampant within the west.

It's one thing to tolerate or even encourage self reflection in the pursuit of self improvement.  But that’s not what the left does. Like a 78 pound college student suffering from anorexia who looks in the mirror and sees herself as a “fat cow”, western liberals see the sins of their fathers or focus on the imperfections of their society and believe it’s evil, and like the anorexic, they engage in self sabotage, only in this case, it’s the culture they harm.

Culture and civilization are fragile, hard to build and harder to maintain. It’s particularly difficult when the youth of a nation despise their birthright, disrespect its legacy and actively undermine its foundations. Combine that with elites who are the fountainhead from which that disdain arises, and you have a dire future.

The left accuses Trump and the MAGA adherents of being racist nationalists. We’re not.  Charles de Gaulle perhaps said it best: “Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism is when hate for people other than your own comes first.  America and the west will not survive the rest of this century if their citizens don’t become patriots.  Indeed, Osama bin Laden saw the writing on the wall:  When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.” Self loathing may communicate many things, but strength is not one of them. 

Wednesday, April 19, 2023

Donald Trump, Tiberius Gracchus and a Canary in a Coalmine...

Donald Trump’s indictment makes one wonder if the members of the Democrat party have ever picked up a history book, walked by one in a library, or accidentally heard an episode of the History of Rome podcast. I doubt it because if they had, they’d know that Rome didn’t transition from a republic to an empire overnight, and they’d be familiar with the modern iteration of the George Santayana adage: Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.

By the time Caesar became dictator in 49 BC, the Republic was already gone in everything but name only. The Republic’s collapse had been put in motion 80 years before with the murder of Tiberius Gracchus.

Gracchus was a populist Plebeian tribune, essentially the equivalent of being a member of our House of Representatives. Citizens loved him, and the aristocratic Senate hated him. His assassination points the way to Caesar:

"[T]he oligarchy had introduced violence into the political system with the murder of Tiberius Gracchus and over the years the use of violence became increasingly acceptable as various political disputes in Rome led to more and more bloody discord."

With Gracchus’s death, violence became an increasingly common political weapon in Rome, with Sulla’s purges early in the 1st century BC as the clearest example. Sulla executed 9,000 rival Marian partisan supporters, without regard for age or sex.

Three decades later, Caesar would take control, only to lose his life at the hands of a cabal of his establishment rivals. This widespread political violence only came to an end (temporary as it might be) when his adopted son, Augustus, become emperor. Tellingly, however, Augustus achieved that peace only after executing thousands of his political enemies.

Rome devolved from a republic in which domestic politics were decided mostly by words and relatively objective laws, to a dictatorship where laws were anything but objective, and the emperor could take life and property on a whim.

The late Roman Republic had the equivalent of our “Swamp,” which it called the Senate. While ostensibly there were balancing powers of influence, such as the assemblies, two Consuls (a split executive office with a term of one year) and, occasionally, the appointment of a temporary Dictator, the reality is that the Senate, made up of the richest and most powerful citizens, ran the Republic. Even when one of the assemblies or one of the Consuls seemed to be ascendant, it was the senators calling most of the shots through their relationships with the state officials, familial connections to this or that general, and their control of the purse strings.

So, you have a body of rich and powerful citizens having ostensibly limited power through the visible levers of government, but actually exercising real power through the connections, relationships, and shared ideology of the apparatchiks in the bureaucracy, the opinion makers, and those who indoctrinate the youth who always act as the frontline shock troops. Sound familiar?

Things have changed a lot in 2,000 years, but the nature of man…not so much. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. As with most things today, political changes happen faster than they did in the past.

It took 100 years—from Gracchus’s emergence on the Roman stage until Augustus’s ascendance—for Rome to transform from a republic to an empire. It has taken less than 20 years since Barack Obama promised to “fundamentally transform” America for the country to change from a functioning but imperfect republic into a farce of a country characterized by a banana-republic-level tyranny.

With a complicit bureaucracy, Obama used the IRS to target political opponents, the Justice Department to coerce banks into blacklisting businesses he didn’t like, and Obamacare to give government unprecedented control over Americans’ health decisions while doubling the cost. He unconstitutionally opened the immigration spigot that has now become a torrent.

Within six months of taking office, Obama would set the tone for an administration that would set race relations back 50 years. His “evolution“ on gay marriage would give cover to the spineless Supreme Court to impose that travesty on the country and lay the ground for the fascist LBTQ hellscape America endures today. And finally, he weakened two of the most foundational elements of American society: The military and residential communities.

Obama set in motion a new set of rules in America, and Trump’s indictment, the Soviet style attack on J6 attendees, and the prosecution of Douglass Mackey combine to demonstrate exactly what those new rules are: Thou shalt not oppose the Democrat party, thou shalt not speak badly of or mock the Democrat party or its minions, thou shalt not push back against the regulatory state, and thou shalt not express traditional American values.

These sham “prosecutions” are really persecution. They are nothing more than the Democrats’ regulatory state wrapping itself around American citizens’ necks like the Burmese Pythons killing most native species in the Everglades. The indictment of a former president and current presidential candidate on such a weak and preposterous theory as this one puts the lie to the idea that the Constitution limits our government. This is nothing less than the established “swamp” inventing new legal theories while ignoring existing law to crush a political opponent. That foretells the end of the Republic.

Our Republic has survived for 230 years because most Americans believe in our Constitution and respect the laws that emanate from it. But the Constitution is nothing more than a piece of paper… it’s not a gun, it’s not an army, it’s not police state stormtroopers. It’s a piece of paper that states how the government should operate, limits that government’s power, and guarantees the citizens’ various inherent liberties and freedoms.

For most of our history, the Constitution’s words guided how our nation operated. Citizens had two ways to change the way the country was governed: voting and amending the Constitution. Today, however, neither works. The former has been undermined by a Democrat party that steals elections under the cover of night and calls you a conspiracy nut when you notice. The latter isn’t even a consideration because the Democrat party and the apparatchiks running the regulatory and security states are no longer constrained by its words.

America has become a tyranny where the people in power no longer feel the need to seek validation from the citizens. They decide on the outcome and manipulate the numbers to produce the result without even a fig leaf hiding their disdain for citizens. Whether it was Bernie Sanders in 2016, Donald Trump in 2020, or Kari Lake in 2022, the Democrat party and its entrenched government comrades have decided they no longer need to subject themselves to the will of the citizenry and, if anyone objects, they use the judiciary to crush that person.

America has been loosed from the anchor of the Constitution and the rule of law that kept our citizens free for two centuries. While the blood of the regime’s enemies may not yet be flowing in the streets, history very clearly tells us that, unless we change what’s happening, it will be. The question is, are there enough Americans who are familiar with history and willing to pull us out of our national death spiral before that terrible end is upon us? How Americans respond to Donald Trump’s persecution is the canary in the coal mine that will likely answer that question.

Follow me on Twitter at:  ImperfectUSA

Tuesday, November 1, 2022

Collapse of Civilization: Lessons Voters Might Take From Roman Britain

“Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it,” said George Santayana. He could well be describing modern leftists, careening back into the dark ages of post-Roman Britain.

At the end of the 2nd century AD Britain was a fully developed province of the Roman Empire.  It was as Roman as any city in the Empire. While still largely rural, Roman Britain developed towns and cities that mirrored those found in Italy or North Africa and connected them with a spectacular roadway. They had majestic villas, sprawling estates, baths, plumbing and of course aqueducts.  The Romans brought industrial sophistication to mining, unprecedented architectural capabilities and improved agriculture.  The province was awash in imported goods from around the Empire: Wine from Gaul, olive oil from Hispania, pottery from North Africa, and philosophy teachers from Greece; all the while exporting precious metals, agricultural products, shellfish and salt across the Empire.

One of the extraordinary things about the Roman Empire was the unprecedented, widespread prosperity it created from the Pillars of Hercules to the Levant and virtually everywhere in between. While there had always been a market for fine goods such as silk and porcelain and exotic foods, the Romans brought those goods to the masses. By building roads, ports, transportation hubs and funding the trade necessary to support the Legions, the Romans drove economies of scale and created a mass market for goods that had formerly been available only to the rich but had become inexpensive across the Roman world.  In doing so they created a cosmopolitan empire so thoroughly Roman that people from what are today Morocco and Britain and Germany and Israel likely spoke some version of the same language and would have found familiar products available regardless of where they were in the Empire.

Back in Britain, three hundred years after Caesar first invaded the untamed island in 55 BC the province was a sophisticated, shining example of all of the Empire had to offer. It was not to last however… In less than a century after the Romans abandoned the island for good in 410 the population collapsed, the economy collapsed, cities became ghost towns or disappeared and chaos reigned. Londinium, whose population peaked at 60,000 in the 2nd century, dropped below 20,000 and saw more than 75% of its buildings dismantled with the materials carted off into the countryside.

In less than a century Roman Britain went from a rich, flourishing cosmopolitan province with bustling urban centers and goods from across the known world to an economic and cultural backwater where modern architectural, plumbing and farming techniques seemed to have disappeared along with most of the import of goods. 

Most of the people living on the island in the middle of the 4th century probably assumed, like much of America in 2022, that the advances of civilization move only in one direction, upward.  They expected to continue to enjoy inexpensive food and pottery and clothing from elsewhere in while selling their wares in return.  The government would continue to provide protection and would maintain the ports and roads that facilitated trade. 

When those things didn’t happen life in Britain became a far darker experience.  Cities disappeared, warlords set up fiefdoms and invaders came from seemingly everywhere. Farming techniques were lost, building techniques were lost, trade collapsed and citizens were forced to become self sufficient as numerous petty would be “kings” set up trade and travel barriers and goods from the Continent became scarce.  The opposite of economies of scale and free trade took hold and Britain became far less prosperous as goods became more expensive, countless products and varieties of products simply disappeared and staples had to be produced locally.

It’s here where Santayana’s missive becomes relevant. Given that the history of post Roman Britain so clearly demonstrates the fragility of civilization’s advances, we might want to pay attention.  The reality is, our world, far more tenuously than the Britain of 1700 years ago, is but X bad decisions away from an agrarian, subsistence economy with no electricity, no gas, little trade, few economies of scale and most certainly no security or safety. 

Go through a day and see how many things we rely on that we couldn’t replace if a disaster occurred.  Imagine a blackout.  How many things would that loss of electricity impact?  Not only the lighting in our homes, but the refrigerators, phone chargers, garage door openers as well.  Outside our homes there’s even more: Elevators.  Gas pumps. Plumbing.  Street lamps & stop lights. Virtually everything in a hospital. Cell phone towers. Police switchboards and dispatches. Train signals and countless other things.

Then there’s the social aspects of such a crisis.  Rules and laws would go out the window, and it wouldn’t take long. During the New York City blackout of 1977 crime surged, with looting, vandalism and arson rampant (over 1,000 fires were set) while police arrested 3,776 people in the largest mass arrest in the city’s history.  The chaos cost over $1 billion in today’s dollars, and the lights were off for less than 24 hours!  Now jump forward to the BLM / Antifa riots of 2020 and the defunding of police.  Not only was there chaos and mayhem, there were murders, assaults, and rapes nationwide and communities literally burned to the ground. Then there is the mass looting and random violence that has occurred since 2020 and seems to be growing worse every day… and through all of this we still had electricity!

Of course electricity is only one element of what keeps our society civilized.  There’s gasoline, there’s trade, there’s what used to be a widespread respect for the rule of law.  Imagine no diesel fuel.  Trucks wouldn’t be able to deliver food and store shelves will go bare.  You probably have enough food in your kitchen for your family to last a few days or maybe a week at most. Then what? Are you going to grow wheat on your windowsill or in your backyard?  Is the neighborhood stray cat going to be your family’s next meal? Do you have a cow for milk? Not to mention medicines, building materials, gasoline for your car… the list of goods delivered via diesel is endless. 

One of the downsides of trade, division of labor and economies of scale is that most of us are dependent on others to provide for us those things we don’t produce for ourselves… which is to say, almost everything.  Our society is based on a trade system where we get paid to do some things and we pay others to do the things we don’t. It’s a well oiled machine… until it’s not.    

And that’s the point.  The climate alarmists who want to do away with fossil fuels have no concept of the ramifications of that folly. The equity cultists who want to eliminate the police and “reform” the justice system don’t care about the consequences of that absurdity. 

Just as the razor thin layer of atmosphere surrounding the earth sustains life on earth, our modern society thrives thanks to plentiful, inexpensive energy and a respect for the rule of law.  Inexplicably, those are the two primary targets of the Democrats who are currently in charge of wide swaths of the United States.  Indeed Californians regularly endure the absurd manmade disaster of rolling blackouts while Illinois is about to essentially decriminalize crime.  Neither is necessary…

When Americans step into their well lit, safe and private voting booths on November 8th they’d do well to think of those 5th century Britons who were about to careen into a darkness from which it would take almost a millennia to emerge, and vote accordingly.

 

Thursday, August 19, 2021

The Lesson of Afghanistan is a Simple One, But Probably Not What You Think

 Joe Biden is being roasted for his indefensible handling of the Afghanistan exit.  As well he should be.  Indeed, his incompetence is so legion that he’s actually getting roasted by a media whose only job appears to be to prop up the Biden regime.  Both the New York Times and the Washington Post pilloried him while over at CNN: 'the debacle of defeat and chaotic retreat in Afghanistan' is a 'political disaster' for President Biden. The Wall Street Journal suggested his statement 'washing hands' of Afghanistan 'is one of most shameful in US history'. 

They’re of course right.  This may be the most incompetent diplomatic / military exercise in American history… and it came straight from the Commander in Chief and his incompetent cabal of woke advisors. 

Given the tragedy unfolding today, one wonders if Americans will learn the real lesson of Afghanistan.  Sure, while one lesson would be to never put a senile incompetent leftist in the position of Commander in Chief, that’s not the real lesson to be learned…

American direct involvement in Afghanistan started out twenty years ago after the attacks of September 11th.  It didn’t take long to discover that the Taliban had been giving Osama Bin Laden and Al Queda training bases and a home from which to attack the US.  George W. Bush sent troops in to rout them, which was largely accomplished within months.  But of course the troops didn’t come home. They stayed, with the ostensible mission of helping Afghanistan craft a nation that would no longer be a haven for terrorists, and a government unwilling to protect them.  We – Americans, not me personally as I did not serve during that time nor in that theater – built roads, schools, bases, buildings, shepherded the writing of a constitution, facilitated elections and helped form a government with all the trappings of legitimacy.  One of the most laudable efforts was help to give girls and women opportunities that they had essentially never seen in Afghanistan.

Of course, the Taliban, while defeated in terms of running the country, never quite went away.  They hid in the hills. They hid in Pakistan and actually took parts of it over.  They operated under the cover of night and gave a constant reminder that they were never far away, having been funded and shielded by the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence service.  

All of this “progress” cost a great deal, both in terms of money and the lives of brave servicemen.  When all is said and done, the United States will have spent somewhere between $1 and $2 trillion seeking to build Afghanistan into a democracy with a functioning military and government.  At the same time, 2,500 American servicemembers lost their lives executing that mission. 

All for what?  Not much, apparently.  In just a number of days the Taliban took over the entire country.  The president fled. Americans were airlifted from the roof of the embassy.  Girls are now being stolen from their families to be given as wives to Taliban fighters.  Those who assisted the Americans and local police are being rounded up and killed.  The Afghan military has essentially evaporated, leaving the Taliban in possession of tens of billions of dollars of American supplied weapons and equipment.  Soon the Taliban will bring Afghanistan back to the 7th century, from whence they came.  Sharia law.  Women in bondage. No freedom.  Economic backwater.

The lesson of Afghanistan is not that the United States couldn’t turn The Graveyard of Empires into a thriving democracy, such as our own. That was never in the cards.  The American colonies grew up as part of the British Empire and had been marching slowly towards a representative government with individual freedoms for centuries, culminating in the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the ratification of the Constitution.  Of course neither of those was the final word and the United States has been evolving towards a More Perfect Union ever since. 

Afghanistan doesn’t have anything resembling the history we have.  Just the opposite.  The nation, to the degree that is actually a nation, exists largely on a map.  The people are far more tribal than they are Afghani, and most live lives like those their ancestors lived 1,000 years ago.  Nation building in Afghanistan was always likely to be a failure, whether the United States spent $2 trillion or $20. 

And therein lays the lesson of Afghanistan, through the words of Ronald Reagan.  Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

Americans live in the greatest nation in the history of man, one that took literally centuries to get where it is today.  It’s far from perfect of course, and it’s always evolving, but the fundamental principles of limited government, individual freedom and free markets have been guides the entire journey. But because it’s not perfect, the left wants to destroy it.  Tear down our Founding Fathers because they didn’t think about 21st century mores when they were busy carving out a new nation.  Eliminate free speech because mean words offend vulnerable sensibilities.  Eliminate free markets because they do not provide for a perfectly equal distribution of wealth.  Divide the country by an endless array of hyphens so that professional victims can identify their “oppressors”. 

The freedom that Reagan spoke of, the prosperity the United States has created and the opportunities Americans enjoy are not predestined. They aren’t written into our DNA, not guaranteed by God and not irreversible.  Just as a generation of Afghanis who grew up in a relatively free nation are about to discover, what is here today is not guaranteed to still be here tomorrow.  History is important. Culture is important. Shared values are important.  Twenty years and $2 trillion dollars in Afghanistan prove that and demonstrate how quickly rights and freedoms can evaporate.  

To the degree that pampered leftists who, in a global sense were born on third and think they hit a triple, want to change the rules of the game called America, change the dimensions of the playing field and change the players in the lineup, they’re playing with fire. They think they know where those changes will lead.  They’re wrong.  Free speech, and the respect for the free exercise of such, once gone are almost impossible to regain.  Private property, once taken, almost never makes it back into the hands of the rightful owners and with it goes free markets and prosperity.  Government programs, once launched almost never end, and edicts, once written are almost never rescinded.  A government unleashed from the constraint of the Bill of Rights will never find its way back into the cage.    

Some people know that reality while others clearly don’t.  Compare a 25 year old Afghani woman who is now facing home detention, a burqa for life and a husband she didn’t choose to a 25 year old American grad student standing in $300 sneakers holding a $1,000 phone and barking “F the police”.  One clearly understands what freedom is while the other wallows in his utopian fantasy utterly clueless of how the world actually works.  There’s a reason millions of people risk their lives every year to come to America or literally cling to the wing of a flying plane in order to escape Taliban Afghanistan.  It’s called reality. 

It would be nice if the left would learn the simple lesson of Afghanistan, that freedom is fleeting and must be prized and protected, but sadly they are unlikely to allow machinations in the real world intrude on their delusional fantasies.   

Tuesday, July 27, 2021

The Left Sacrifices Actual Greatness for the Illusion of Perfection

In 1776 56 men signed the Declaration of Independence and thus began a war with Britain.  When the war was concluded in 1783 American casualties would number 25,000 dead and 25,000 wounded.  Those 50,000 casualties paid the price so that a new nation, founded on the ideas of freedom and liberty, could take its place among the nations of the world. 

Eighty five years later the United States was at war with itself and eventually 360,000 Union soldiers gave their lives to extend that promise of freedom and end slavery.  Seventy five years later 405,000 Americans would die in an effort to save freedom from tyranny on two continents. 

Over the course of almost 250 years approximately 1 million American men gave their lives in defense of freedom, the vast majority of which were volunteers.  While their individual reasons for enlisting were likely as varied as their life stories, all made the decision that the nation was worth fighting for and indeed dying for if necessary.

Over the lifespan of our nation those million men sacrificed their lives and tens of millions of others put theirs on the line to defend the ideals set out in the Declaration of Independence and codified in the Constitution.  And despite the current crop of leftist brass leading the Pentagon, most servicemen and veterans are and have been extraordinary patriots.  But here’s the thing, America has been so incredibly successful in fostering peace around the world, been so extraordinarily successful in crafting the prosperity at home that relatively few modern day Americans ever have to bother putting on the uniform in the first place, nevermind actually fighting in a war in which they are asked to risk their lives. 

Most of those on the left who tell us that America is a fundamentally racist nation have never had to serve in a military environment, one of the most colorblind elements of American society.  No, most of them are pampered college educated agitators with very little skin in the game in terms of doing anything productive at all, not protecting the nation, not building the nation, not improving the nation. Others are minorities who have listened for years to grifters selling the fiction of serial victimization.  They attack the United States for not being the nirvana that Marx wrote about or the racial paradise Nikole Hannah-Jones pretends Cuba is.  (Ironically, Marx, a chronically unemployed writer who was perpetually supported by Engles, scion of a wealthy family with textile interests, spent his time theorizing and critiquing capitalists… including textile manufacturers… Similarly absurd, the nirvana we are told is Cuba is is today wracked with civil unrest as the poverty stricken population revolts against 70 years of communist oppression.)

Few on the left have life experiences that would enable them to understand the United States for what it really is… an imperfect nation with extraordinary goals where citizens have enjoyed unprecedented freedoms and achieved unparalleled prosperity.  Most of them have been indoctrinated into the mindset that defines the United States by its worst failures, never to be mitigated by its overwhelmingly more common successes.  Slavery and Jim Crow were indeed dark marks on America’s history, but a civil war to end the former and more than half a century of laws, programs and expenditures to overcome the latter count for nothing to redeem the nation. 

That is a hallmark of the left, like Marx… little experience but lots of ideas. How many modern leftists risked their lives for their country?  Probably not a lot.  How many of them risked every penny they had (or more) to start a business and find themselves forced to walk on the tightrope between paying the landlord, suppliers, and making payroll, all while trying to market their product, fight off competition and jump through a leviathan of regulatory hurdles?  Again, woefully few.  How many of them worked on a factory floor or an oil rig or were plumbers or welders or janitors, as they sacrificed much to try and give their kids opportunities they didn’t have? Certainly not many.  As America has became more white collar, more information centric and more focused on cheap imports over the last quarter century or so, many parents pampered and spoiled their children, creating an army of adult adolescents with few real responsibilities, rarely risking much of anything and even more rarely encountering opposition of any sort.

Which brings us to Donald Trump. One of the reasons Donald Trump was such a great president was that he was an actual businessman – granted, one who inherited much from his father.  But despite his father’s success, Trump was a successful businessman operating a real estate business in shark infested New York City, one of the most difficult cities in the country to navigate.  He dealt with New York’s kleptocratic regulatory boards, corrupt unions, and predatory banks all while focusing on making payroll, hitting deadlines and producing a product consumers would exchange their hard earned money for.  Donald Trump is not some Wall Street genius making billions by selling obscure financial products to giant retirement funds, nor is he a Silicon Valley prodigy who sold some selfie app to Facebook or Google. He’s a businessman who builds actual things.  At the same time he’s not some academic savant living in an ivory tower with no communication with the real world, a “journalist” with tunnel vision nor a Hollywood puppet speaking someone else’s words for a living, while flying around on private jets and living in mansions protected by ex Mossad agents. 

Trump may have the planes and the mansions and the security, but his words are his own and he is very much a man of the people.  In what was possibly the single most accurate tweet of all time, Trump said:  “In reality they’re not after me. They’re after you, I’m just in the way.” And that’s the key to all of what’s going on in America today.  The digital revolution, social media and government handouts have fundamentally transformed America from a hardscrabble place where people rolled up their sleeves and built tangible things, grew or extracted an income from the ground and signed up to defend their nation to one with overindulged snowflakes where virtually everything is digital, business is little more than delivering things built somewhere else by someone else and government largesse that makes actual work seem like a sucker’s game.

America today is allowing itself to be destroyed by groups of people who neither share its values nor its understanding of what’s necessary to build or defend a successful nation in the real world.  They, much like their gods, Marx, Sanders and Hannah-Jones, live in ivory tower worlds where virtually everything is theoretical because none of their ideas actually work in the real world.  They never concern themselves with building anything, improving anything or designing anything that actually survives an encounter with the real world. When you operate in the universe of ideas, everything is perfect because it’s never subjected to reality.  Much as the French learned at the end of the end of the 18th century, such theoretical perfection rarely survives exposure to the kilns of actual life, and giving the reins of society to simpletons who invoke such perfection is the fastest road to abject failure.        

Wednesday, July 7, 2021

Arguing with Leftists is an Exercise in Futility...

Last week Dan Bongino talked about the pointlessness of arguing with the left. He said something like “We think the left are simply people with bad ideas while the left thinks we are simply bad people…” He went on to say that while pointless in terms of trying to convince the person with whom you’re “arguing”, it’s worthwhile because others, who may be open minded and paying attention, might be persuaded.

This was driven home to me via a Facebook discussion that started out with a friend’s cartoon suggesting CRT is an innocuous addition to the teaching of American history that shows some of the darker chapters.

My response was: “No one opposes teaching history, warts and all. I studied slavery, Jim Crow, the Trail of Tears, Chinese workers basically in servitude to build the RR and more. You keep mischaracterizing CRT as just teaching the negative side of American history. It’s not. The heart of CRT is that the US is systematically racist and minorities can’t succeed. That’s fiction and you know it.”

Which started a firestorm from a friend of my friend, from which I’ve excerpted:

It’s apparent that you gained little insight from your studies. If they didn’t touch on the racist systems that led to those events occurring, you obviously got the sanitized, white washed version where the savagery and downright inhumanity to any non-white man BY white men was totally excluded. Just like your fellow GOP white Supremacists, there is NO reality that y’all can’t bend to save your false sense of identity that you’re superior to all non- whites and European genius and goodness is the only reality there is.

American Slavery was different and worse than any other slavery in the History of the World. It’s the only slavery where the slaves were dehumanized. No other slavery treated the slaves like a horse or a chicken.

To which I responded:

It’s true slaves were treated as property, but in fact, slaves in the American south were largely treated better than slaves in South America and the Caribbean. One major reason for that was the Constitution’s ban on the importation of slaves after 1808. Slaves therefore became far more valuable than they were in the rest of the Americas and it was to nobody’s benefit to work them to death. That is, very unlike Brazil, the Caribbean and elsewhere where slaves were cheaply imported and therefore expendable. The truth of this can be seen in the fact that 94% of the slaves brought to the New World went somewhere other than the United States, but by 1860 2/3 of the slaves in the New World were in the American south.

He continued: The effects are still being felt today when George Floyd’s murderer gets 22.5 years for killing a black human being but a black man killing a Police DOG recently was sentenced to 45 years. That just shows that the dehumanization of black folks specifically males is baked in to American society. The ONLY ones who are treated like human beings are the exceptional negroes who make it through systemic racism baked into every institution in America or those who entertain white folks in music, TV or sports. And even they can’t say anything bad about America or their lives could get turned upside down.

Wouldn’t it be nice if American Europeans tried to dismantle this system and rectify the damage? The boost to our economy through reparations alone and the good will gained worldwide as America denounces its past and pledges to make amends would truly place this nation at the top as it stones for its sins. But, white America collectively isn’t interested in any of that. It’s only interested in the maintenance of white supremacy for various reasons, not the least of which is white genetic survival, power and greed.

After more futile back and forth, I decided to take a different tact:

Let’s try a thought experiment... Imagine everything you said is true about programs being stacked against minorities. What do you do to fix them? Reverse discrimination? How about reparations? Who pays? Who gets what? Who decides? Does Obama pay or does he get money? Do recent African or Caribbean immigrants get money too or only people who can trace their lineage back to slavery or even Jim Crow? What about black families who owned slaves? Do the million or so black millionaires get money too? When are things as they should be? What's the measure? Will every company or classroom or board have to reflect the pigment hue of the country as a whole? Will it apply to everything from police to janitors to ditch diggers to the NBA and the NFL? Will all of this change the unwed birth rate in black America? Is murder still to be considered a crime as half of the offenders in the US are black males despite the fact that they make up only 6% of the population? Since reparations will make everything even do we do away with welfare programs that disproportionately benefit minorities?

Or, maybe all of us could be grateful for the fact that today virtually every one of us is extraordinarily lucky to live in a country that allows so much freedom and opportunity that millions of people literally risk their lives to come here every year and probably half or more of the rest of the world would happily change places with almost any American.

He responded: In other words, you’re just another psychotic white Supremacist and it makes NO sense trying to REASON with a psychotic.

To seek to evade all responsibility or accountability for the greatest crimes against Black humanity in history is the mindset of a Savage…PRETENDING to be civilized. Someone who cares nothing about Honor, truth, civility, fair-play OR in obeying their OWN laws, let alone those of God.

White Supremacy has made most white folks, LIKE YOU, spiritual MONSTERS to be able to say stuff like that with a straight face and sleep like a baby at night. There lies the entire problem of Racism in America which is a power dynamic that only WHITE AMERICANS have. Blacks can’t be racist towards you because we haven’t set up systems of power that can destroy the lives of you or your family. White folks do that to blacks ALL the time.

It was clear he was not really interested in ideas focused on making life better for black Americans,  but rather extracting revenge in the form of reparations from the whites who by definition are racists and guilty.

This is why Biden is in the White House, other than the fraud, obviously. Democrats have become the party of grievance, the party of victimization. If they can convince a group they’re victims, they never have to actually accomplish anything. The focus is always on past failures or some other strawman that rational policies simply cannot be allowed to address. It’s the ultimate in maintaining a grip on power. Why ever address policy failures or “unintended” consequences, when it’s so much easier to simply craft a grievance that can simply never be addressed. For Democrats that’s a recipe for success. For America it’s a recipe for disaster.