Wokeness jumps the shark with Meghan Markle, Oprah Interview

Rare is it when you have one person so perfectly embody a moment in history as you do Meghan Markle in 21^st century America.

Meghan Markle is gorgeous. She’s well spoken. She’s famous. She’s rich. She’s literally married to a prince and has a beautiful child. She’s got it all… And yet she’s an insufferable crybaby and perpetual victim.

By any measure, Meghan Markle is living a princess’s life. From a broken, mixed race home, Meghan grew up in southern California before she went on to earn degrees in Theater and International Studies from Northwestern University. From there she spent years with bit parts in Hollywood until her big break at 30 when she landed a major role in the USA Network show Suits. After spending six years on the hit show Markle decided it was time to leave as she had literally found her prince. And they lived happily ever after…

Not so much. Despite having a life that 99.999% of the people on the planet might exchange their own for – at least the women – Meghan Markle wants us to know that she's a victim. She’s been forced out of the British Royal Family as she and her husband and her baby have been disrespected because she’s American, because she’s half black and because they’re jealous of her.

As a result of being booted from the Royal Family – despite the fact that it was she and her prince who chose to leave – Meghan has been forced to drag her family around the world, first staying in an exclusive home in Canada, later renting Tyler Perry’s estate in California and finally settling for the purchase of an $11 million California mansion of her own. In their often mentioned efforts to find “privacy” Meghan and the Harry sat down for an interview with one of the world’s most high profile journalists. In addition, the pair of outcasts will be forced to scrape by on just under $100 million a year in income via production deals with Netflix and Spotify.

If all of this sounds a bit surreal, it should. If it sounds familiar too, it should. Why? Because just as Meghan Markle, one of the world’s richest and most famous women spends her time whining that she’s a victim, the American left, home of some of the most pampered people to ever live in human history, spends its time lamenting the victimhood of its various constituencies.

And the victim groups are legion… blacks, Hispanics, Asians, gays, transgenders, women, Muslims, the poor, single mothers, teachers, the handicapped, illegal aliens and more… America’s left never met a group – other than perhaps the oppressive straight white Christian males – that they didn’t see as a victim group to be exploited for power and money. America is racist, sexist, homophobic or whatever else turns the group of choice into a victim of hate at the hands of those aforementioned oppressors.

But the thing is, America is in reality one of the least racist, sexist, homophobic etc. countries in the world, indeed Americans share far more with one another than we differ. Rare is the instance where someone can’t find success in America because of the characteristics the left champions. While America is not perfect, it in fact provides more opportunity to more people from more backgrounds than any nation on earth. Not sure? The dirty little secret the left will never let you know is that the poorest Americans are economically better off than the average European and exponentially so relative to the average person living in Asia, Africa or South America. Most Americans enjoy a standard of living better than virtually every person who’s ever lived on planet earth, including kings. The left won’t tell you that Americans enjoy a level of individual freedom unprecedented in human history. The reality is, despite what you hear on television and social media platforms, black Americans are not being hunted and killed by police and, according to the FBI, black and white interactions with police are actually quite similar overall.

Sadly, the fact that the reality of Meghan Markle’s lavish lifestyle does nothing to diminish her claim of victimhood is not unique. In 21st century America victimhood has become the coin of the realm. The left discards the reality of the egalitarian nature of the United States, the freedom of opportunity shared by almost every American and a standard of living that most people on earth would die for, all in the name of dividing Americans, turning them against one another and most importantly, accumulating wealth and power.

If America is lucky the Meghan Markle / Oprah interview might just jump the shark.  Perhaps Americans will finally come to recognize that if wealth, fame, beauty and influence can’t satiate the woke need for pity and victimization, then nothing can. Maybe after seeing the vapid blatherings of a prince and princess with a staggering lack of self awareness and frame of reference Americans will finally get back to the business of living their lives and seeking to interact with one another based on their content of character rather than viewing each another through a prism of glass fractured by the fabricated divisions of the left.

Barack Obama will go down in history as the most successful president since Abraham Lincoln...

The eight year reign of Barack Obama will go down as the most important in American history since Abraham Lincoln.  Lincoln led the United States at the single most important decision point in its history. At stake was no less than the question of whether the country would continue as a single nation or would it split in two as Manifest Destiny was fulfilled. Would there be a largely agrarian, slaveholding Confederate States of America bordering on a largely industrial and free United States of America or would a single, free and economically mixed United States emerge? At no point in the subsequent century and a half did the United States ever face a more foundational question.

Six years into Barack Obama’s presidency - and looking with much trepidation at the “last” two - one can’t help but wonder what kind of a nation will emerge on the other side. “History” said Winston Churchill, “is written by the victors” and like it or not, Barack Obama is the victor. Not sure about that? Take a look at the latest capitulation by his supposed opposition, Boehner and McConnell, the GOP leaders of the House and the Senate, respectively. In what is only the most recent example of obsequiousness they have vociferously attacked their own base in order to allow Obama to continue with his patently unconstitutional amnesty.

And what is it that Barack Obama has done to merit such distinction? He has opened the Pandora’s Box of unprecedented, omnipresent, government intervention. And like the evils escaping from Pandora’s Box, once government intervention is put in place you can’t get rid of it. With Obamacare he decreed that the government can tell Americans what they must buy, for their own good. With his NLRB appointees and the nationalization of General Motors he has eviscerated private property rights. With his using the IRS to muzzle opposition and his FCC taking over the Internet, he has taken a sledgehammer to concept of free speech and free markets.

In addition, his regulatory bonanza and welfare policies have cut the legs out from the basic premise of hard work being the key to success in America. By making entrepreneurship and job creation more difficult and by providing a seemingly endless array of benefits, he has driven the labor participation rate down to levels not seen in four decades.

And of course it’s not just the laws. He has set black against white as he constantly invokes racism in places where it simply doesn’t apply. What’s more, he has essentially told black Americans, those who are at most risk of being victims of crime, that the police are their enemies. He has set the poor and middle class against the rich as he assails the successful as robber barons who earned their success on the backs of others.

The country was far from perfect when Barack Obama took office and you can make the argument that it was already heading in a troubling direction when he came along. But the difference is, unlike Abraham Lincoln, who sought to save the Union, Barack Obama set out to fundamentally transform it. And that he has… from a place where individual initiative was the key to overcoming challenges, achieving success and finding happiness to a place where the first instinct of many is to look for someone to blame for their lack of success or happiness, or to try and figure out which arm of government to look to provide them.

Combine that entitlement / victim mentality with a legion of regulatory diktats and unconstitutional decrees – that no one in power seems willing to fight – and you have a recipe for a banana republic where power is held by whoever bribes the largest number of people and creates scapegoats to fuel populist furor. And so it goes as a nation of giants transforms into a nation of beggars and a government limited by the Constitution becomes a one limited only by a president’s appetite.

No president in 150 years has changed America more. Not Roosevelt, not Kennedy, not FDR not Reagan. Such is the transformation Barack Obama promised and delivered. Most Americans won’t view it as success, but the left does. Therefore, if history is indeed written by the victor – or in this case by his lefty sycophants in the media – Barack Obama will go down as the most successful president since Abraham Lincoln. And at this point it might be useful to think of something Churchill’s enemy, Adolph Hitler, said: “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.”

Mitt Romney should leverage his tax records to re-educate Americans on the prosperity capitalism can engender.

For months we’ve heard calls from Democrats for Mitt Romney to release his tax records. Last week Harry Reid even claimed he had it from “a number of people” had told him that Mitt Romney had not paid his taxes for a decade and demanded he release them.

I’d like to suggest Mitt Romney actually go ahead and release his tax records. Much like pulling a Band-Aid off a wound, where the fear of the pain is actually worse than the pain itself, I suspect the speculative hay that Democrats will be making over the next three months will be a far more attention grabbing than the actual returns themselves would be.

This is not to suggest that Romney should feel compelled to provide whatever information Democrats seek. On the contrary. I’m suggesting that Romney use his tax returns to do something he has yet to forcefully do: Make a crystal clear argument that capitalism is at the core of American success and it offers virtually every American the opportunity to achieve prosperity. Essentially his argument should be something like: “I’m proud to have earned hundreds of millions of dollars throughout my career. I’ve paid tens of millions of dollars in taxes, I’ve donated tens of millions more to charities and I’ve helped create tens of thousands of jobs and I’ve helped generate billions of dollars in honest income for tens of thousands of American families.”

Such language, when coupled with a telling of his time at Bain demonstrating the impact he and Bain had on companies from Staples, to Gartner Group to Domino's Pizza clearly tell the story of success that capitalism has written in our past and can write for our future.

Staples provides a perfect example. Bain Capital was one of the key early funders of the company in 1986. Not only did Staples itself create over 50,000 jobs within its stores, but it likely created hundreds of thousands more by giving small business people the opportunity to save money on office products, which they could then invest in other areas of their businesses such as marketing, capital and even employees. At the end of the day Bain Capital and Mitt Romney may have made tens of millions of dollars from their Staples investment, but the positive impact on the economy was worth billions.

But of course not all Bain endeavors worked out, and in some cases both money and jobs were lost. But that’s the whole point of capitalism. Mitt Romney’s job at Bain Capital was never to create jobs, nor to destroy them. It was to employ the capital in his care in such a way that it would legally earn the most money possible for his investors. Bain’s capital was simply one – albeit an important one – of the inputs necessary to build, grow or rescue a business. Others include everything from risk taking to janitorial services to manufacturing to R&D and hundreds more. Capitalism works because it harnesses the efforts of millions of producers, each seeking to achieve their own goals to meet the needs of millions or billions of consumers seeking an ever evolving supply of goods and services.

There may be no better demonstration of the power of the mechanism of capitalism than Leonard Read’s seminal 1958 essay “I, Pencil”. Read demonstrates with unparalleled clarity the myriad forces that come into play in order to manufacture one simple pencil. From the lumberjacks in California and Oregon to the graphite miners in Sri Lanka to the workers shipping the pumice from Italy, everyone plays a role in the manufacturing of the pencil, not by adhering to some grand top-down strategy for manufacturing a pencil, but rather by doing what they have chosen to do in response to the needs of the market.

The lessons Read wrote about in I, Pencil are as true today as they were in 1958. Compare the market driven success of the mobile device universe with the iPhone, Google’s Android, Amazon’s Kindle and their hundreds of thousands of apps with the abject failure of government driven endeavors such as solar power, ethanol, education and General Motors.

Mitt Romney should leverage his tax returns and the wealth they reflect to champion the cause of capitalism and clearly demonstrate the role it plays in American prosperity. Indeed he could not have asked for a better foil than Barack Obama in an effort to contrast that success with the abject failure of the progressive top-down statist approach. It’s not often that history gives a politician the opportunity to dovetail their personal story with current events to demonstrate with crystal clarity the superior nature of capitalism vs. statism. By releasing his tax returns and explaining the story behind them Romney will not only take a weapon out of the hands of his opponents, but more importantly, he can remind many Americans that it was capitalism that allowed us to prosper in the first place.