A Christmas Message 5,000 Years in the Making...

In 1991 two German tourists stumbled across a body buried in the ice of the Alps between Italy & Austria. Initially thought to be the body of an early 20^th century climber, it turned out to be the body of a man who had died 5,000 years ago. Given the name Ötzi, he died of an arrow wound and it was theorized he was a shepherd.    

The most fascinating thing about Ötzi wasn’t where he died or how he died, or even when he died, but rather, the condition of his health. If we listen to people today, we’d imagine that Ötzi would have been an ironman, having never tasted Spam or M&M’s or Hamburger Helper and having eaten only natural, by definition, organic, food. As such, he should have been in perfect shape. 

But, sadly, he wasn’t. He suffered from a parasite, had been sick three times in the six months before he died, his teeth were full of cavities, he was lactose intolerant and his lungs were blackened by smoke. Estimated to be aged 45 when he died, Ötzi was not the posterchild for health one might expect listening to those who decry pesticides or canned food or GMOs.

The thing is, Ötzi may may indeed be a posterchild, but for something completely different.  The reality is Ötzi was old when he died.  For almost all of recorded history the average lifespan of humans has been below 30 years. A number of factors went into that, including high infant mortality rates – sometimes reaching 35%, war, famine, disease, dangerous working conditions, etc.

The bottom line is that for most of history, life for humans has been characterized by scarcity, war, slavery, poor health and short lives. Across the spectrum, from when men were hunting and gathering to when they developed agriculture, from when they were nomads to when they developed great empires, life expectancy stood between 30 & 40 years for the most privileged and usually less than that for the average person.

Why is any of that important?  Because as Christmas season is upon us, it might be a good time to step back and look at what we actually have.  Far too many Americans take civilization for granted, assuming that the way things are is the way they have to be.  They think the things they call “rights” such as healthcare, housing, food, etc. are somehow elements of nature that developed independent of the hard work of innovators, inventors, entrepreneurs and blue-collar workers of every stripe.  They are not.  Everything we have was developed by someone, somewhere.

The reality is, beginning about 200 years ago advances of almost every kind began an upward trajectory that more than doubled the life expectancy in the west and significantly improved it virtually everywhere else. To understand the degree of impact that upward trajectory look at the people living in abject poverty.  In 1820 the percentage of people around the world living in abject poverty – defined in this case by less than $1 a day (or the then equivalent) was above 85%.  Today, a mere 200 years later in man’s 200,000 year plus journey, that number has dropped to below 10%. 

But it’s not just the level of poverty that has changed.  On practically every single other metric, from the basic to the frivolous, the world has improved.

Transportation: In 1820 it took 4-6 months to cross the continent in a Conestoga wagon. Today you could drive (respecting the speed limits) from New York to LA in as few as four days, but if you wanted to fly you could be there in 3 hours. 

Communication: Prior to the invention of the telegraph in 1844 the fastest way to communicate was with smoke signals and the horses and riders of the Pony Express. Today anyone with a smartphone can talk to someone on the other side of the world in real time. 

Information: For most of our history almost all humans were illiterate, and most never even had a written language. People learned news and stories through listening to others or looking at stained glass windows or reading books or newspapers.  Today we have endless news, movies, sports and every conceivable form of media available from around the world at our fingertips 24 hours a day.

Housing:  In 1790 the average size of a house in the United States was 831 square feet with almost 6 people living in it.  Today the average size of a house in the United States is 2,496 square feet with an average household of 2.5 people.  That means that today the average American has 998 square feet of living space at home, seven times the 138 they had when the country was founded. 

And the conveniences in that house are exponentially greater.  From indoor plumbing to refrigerators to non-wood burning stoves to lights to televisions to wi-fi, air conditioning and much more.  Nor is it just the new inventions:  Those homes are also filled with things like furniture and pots and pans and beds of a quality and quantity that most people in history if they owned at all, were of the barest nature unless a member of the elite.

Clothing:  Through most of history people would typically have 2 or 3 sets of clothes which would include 2 for work and 1 for Sunday – at least in the Christian tradition. And those clothes would often be used until they fell apart and were rarely washed.  Today open the closet and or dresser in almost any American bedroom and you’ll find suitcases of cloths, many that go without wearing for months or years.  The same holds true for shoes, and like the clothes, the selection of the shoes worn by Americans today is lightyears ahead in quality and style choice of those worn by people of most history.

Work: Prior to the middle of the 19^th century, 90% + of the world’s population worked in farming or food harvesting of one sort of another. Today, in the US that number is below 5%, which essentially means that almost every job that any American has today didn’t exist for most of human history, and the resulting workplaces are dramatically safer as well. 

Democratic government:  Today, depending on how you count them, between 25% and 45% of the world’s population live in nations with some form of democratic government. That compares to essentially 0% when the United States was founded. 

There is of course, much more, from the selection of and accessibility to food, the quality of healthcare, the existence of leisure time and the variety of activities with which to fill it.

Of course things aren’t perfect and people still want to fix them.  Sometimes life’s unfair, people can be jerks and our government takes our money to give to grifters and the healthcare system is a clusterfark.  All of those things and many more are true.  But at the end of the day, for as much as things suck, in the big picture most of us have lives kings would have salivated over throughout history. Most certainly would think I think the pre-arrow Ötzi would have traded places with any of us.  I think that gets lost on too many people, particularly on the left.

The point of all of this is not to suggest that we hold hands and sing Kumbaya over the dinner table this Christmas season. Not at all. But sometimes, particularly around family in the tight environs of the holiday, it makes sense to step back and focus on what we have in common and what we’re grateful for rather than what divides us. There’s more than enough time for the latter once the new year rolls around. 

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA 

Will Trump Be Julius Caesar or Augustus? 2026 Is His Last Chance to Crush the Deep State and Save America

It's not often life gives nations real second chances when it comes to the big things, but in America’s case it did. My only hope is that we don’t squander it… or to be more precise, I hope Donald Trump doesn’t squander it. The 2026 midterms are less than a year away, that makes what he does in the next six to eight months monumentally important. 

The bottom line is, does he want to be consequential or just well known?  Julius Caesar is easily one of the most well-known men in history, but was he really that consequential? The truth is, no. We know more about Caesar than any other Roman not because he changed the world, but because he was a genius of propaganda and wrote prodigiously – and well – about his exploits. The reality is, Caesar was just another Roman general – albeit a great one – caught up in a century of internecine wars between men seeking to control the Republic. Augustus, his adopted son – who is far less well known in history – was far more consequential, having transformed the Republic into an Empire that would arguably last another 1500 years. 

Is Donald Trump going to be Caesar or Augustus? Is he going to be a president who rearranges the deckchairs on the USS Titanic and simply slows down her eventual collision with the iceberg or is he going to steer her through the treacherous waters and bring her out safely on the other side?

When he won re-election last November I was certain that after enduring 8 years of what is easily the most vitriolic abuse any American politician had ever endured, he was going to return to Washington and metaphorical heads were going to roll.  Indeed, he ran on the idea of destroying the deep state.    

Now, a year after the election, I’m not so sure. While I applaud most of his moves on immigration, particularly his recent move to temporarily cease all immigration from 3^rd world countries, there are two elements that cause concern.  One is his support for the H1B visa program. If there are jobs that can’t be filled by Americans, then bringing in foreign workers who have the necessary skills makes sense for keeping American industry productive.  But that’s not what’s happening. Hundreds of thousands of foreign workers, primarily Indians, are being brought in to supplant American workers companies would generally have to pay more to keep or hire.  There is no shortage of American STEM workers, there are merely trillion dollar tech, consulting and other companies who simply want to bolster the bottom line by paying foreign workers lower wages. Sadly, Trump defends the program virtually every chance he gets.  Add to that his allowing half a million students / spies from Communist China to remain at American universities and one begins to wonder whose payrolls Trump’s advisors are on. 

Another area where Trump has not met expectations is taking on the leftist cabal that brought the nation to the brink of disaster over the last decade.  From Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton and the army of anti-American traitors who worked against Trump, his allies, and the American people, Trump should establish a task force with the specific purpose of investigating every single member of the government or NGO and every financier who had anything to do with Russiagate as well as the coup / coverup of 2020 and the resulting J6 persecutions.  Americans know what happened, we watched it in real time. Molly Ball crowed about it in TIME magazine, we read about it in Mollie Hemingway’s Rigged, and later we followed as Emerald Robinson pulled string after string… but what we don’t have, and need, is the entire case of the treachery laid out in black and white, and then see the guilty tried and punished.  As we all learned in the OJ trial, juries can’t always be trusted, but at a minimum the information should be laid out for the American people to see so that they can vote accordingly. The recent arrest of the DC pipe-bomb suspect and Kash Patel’s announcement that it was based on information the FBI sat on for 4 years tells us that the information is there, it just takes an administration with sufficient courage to expose it. 

Hand in hand with allowing that treachery to go unpunished is the fact that Trump has not put his shoulder into ensuring the passage of the SAVE act. Indeed, New England, which is about 40% Republican, has 21 House seats and 100% of them are Democrat. That’s not good.  Democrats win by cheating.  Period. The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act would require Voter ID, proof of U.S. citizenship and outlaw most mail-in voting. Strong-arming Congress, which the GOP theoretically controls, into passing SAVE would do more for saving the Republic than almost any other thing he could do. If Trump wants to maintain GOP control over Congress and have any chance of fixing the country, he needs to fix the voting system now, because we know the second the SAVE act is passed there’s an army of treacherous federal judges who will seek to derail it.

Which brings us to the last critical issue, the Judiciary. Since 2015 federal judges across the country have acted as the rear guard for the Obama plan of “Fundamentally transforming the United States of America” into a leftist nirvana. From nationwide injunctions to throwing out cases to seeking to exercise Executive power, the federal judiciary has become untethered to the Constitution. The traditional way such overreach is addressed is that cases make their way through the appellate process where SCOTUS may or may not eventually rectify the problem. But that system breaks down as a viable solution when fast approaching elections that decide the direction of the government are concerned. Congress must act to address this judicial overreach. 

As such, Trump should work with Congress to utilize their Article III powers to fix this.  I’d suggest two possible avenues: 

1) Congress abolishes the entire judiciary below SCOTUS and remakes it with a far more limited and constitutional judiciary.

2) Congress sets up a separate parallel federal court channel that would deal exclusively with election and Executive power related issues so that they can be argued in a timely fashion and be resolved long before they become moot.

Decades from now Donald Trump is going to be remembered.  The question is, will he be remembered as a celebrity president who attracted a great deal of attention and simply slowed the collapse as the nation calcified into a failed dystopia driven by big government and big spending, or is he going to be remembered as an heroic, mythic figure who fought back the leftist tide and put America back on firm, limited government, Constitutional footing, giving her a real opportunity to survive another 250 years?  I guess we’ll see…

Worse Health, Higher Costs, Endless Repeal: The ACA Is Working—For Health Insurers and Republicans, But Not So Much For You

I started writing my blog in 2009, largely in response to America electing an anti-American president.  During those first few years I talked a lot about Obamacare.  The thing was a disaster from day one, indeed, in an omen of things to come, Obama’s team spent 4X more building a website that didn’t work than Apple did developing the iPhone.

The worst part about Obamacare?  The fact that it was a solution to a problem that didn’t exist.

In 2013 I wrote the following:  

“Obamacare was passed in 2009 (sic) in reaction to anecdotal examples of Americans who couldn’t get healthcare. According to Gallop, in 2009 there were 50 million Americans who did not have health insurance. That represented approximately 16% of the population. Gallop also reported that of those without health insurance, fully 50% were satisfied with their healthcare. That means that fully 92% of the American population either had health insurance – 80% of whom were satisfied with that insurance – or were satisfied enough with their healthcare not to have insurance.

To give those numbers a bit of perspective, compare them the rest of the developed world. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development publishes the Better Life Index which ranks developed nations by a wide variety of criteria, one of which is health. According to the 2011 Better Life Index survey, in 2009 88% of Americans were satisfied with their health. Of the 34 countries covered in the data, in only two – New Zealand (89.7%) and Canada (88.1%) did citizens report a higher level of satisfaction with their health. Not the United Kingdom (76%). Not France (72.4%). Not Sweden (79.1%). Now, of course health is not healthcare, but the goal of healthcare is to improve or sustain a person’s health.

So, in 2009, when 92% of Americans had health insurance or were satisfied enough with their healthcare not to have it, and 88% of Americans were satisfied with their health, we got Obamacare, a 2,000 page bill that needed to be passed before it could be read..”

Of course, the only reason we actually have this is because that treacherous snake leading the Supreme Court deemed it a tax and therefore allowed it to go into force.  Since then, healthcare has become more expensive and satisfaction has plummeted. 

Today, Americans recognize Obamacare for the utter disaster that it is. We hear horror stories regularly of people who pay thousands of dollars a month in insurance only to be told they can’t have a procedure or the procedure is going to cost an arm and a leg. Often, if they simply choose not to get Obamacare insurance and pay the fine, they actually pay less for their treatments!   But not only have prices for care exceeded inflation virtually every year since then – something it’s done for decades as utilization rates increased – but satisfaction has plummeted.  In every aspect of healthcare other than nurses, American’s satisfaction has declined by double digits. Health insurance companies’ satisfaction rates are down 11% since 2010, while hospitals, doctors and pharmaceutical companies are down by 14%, 15% and 21% respectively. 

So what we’ve seen since Obamacare was implemented is that healthcare costs have increased dramatically and satisfaction has declined.  But hey, sometimes you have to break some eggs in order to make an omelet, and that’s the price we pay to live longer and healthier… Except, we’re not. 

According to the American Journal of Public Health, American life expectancy, after having increased almost every single year between 1950 and 2010, flatlined after Obamacare and actually began to decline around 2014. Plus, Americans’ life expectancy has fallen even further behind that of our European peers under Obamacare.  And the icing on the cake? Our health, the basic issue upon all of this is supposed to be based… has gotten worse! 

So Obamacare has been a complete disaster on every single front.  At least for the average American. For health insurance companies however, it’s been a boon. Since Obamacare was implemented, their stocks have grown on average 708% while the general market, which has been pumped up by trillion dollar superstars like Amazon, Tesla and Facebook, has increased by only 525%.  And their CEOs do pretty well too… . 

But it’s not just been insurance company stockholders and CEOs who have been benefiting from Obamacare.  There is one group for which it has been a godsend: Republicans. 

Perhaps no one has taken advantage of Obamacare as much as the Republicans. It’s an issue that is red meat to GOP voters and they know it.  They have been campaigning against it from before it was even passed.  Every two years we here the drumbeat of “We’re going to repeal Obamacare”.  But a funny thing happens on the way to the repeal, every time… it never happens.  Of course they did get close once, but with TDS addled John McCain’s help, no cigar. But we’re not in power they say… but Republicans held both houses of Congress from 2015 – 2019, with two of those years with a GOP president. Repeal?  Nope.  Nor have they done it this year, despite President Trump saying he was going to replace it if re-elected and the Republicans controlling both chambers on Capitol Hill. 

Democrats are trying to maintain the travesty with a band aid made of money, and thus far the GOP has stymied them. But we all know that the GOP is full of grifters, so who knows what the future holds. Indeed, one wonders if the Republicans will take this opportunity to look at actually doing something for their constituents, now that they’ve created another perk for lining their own pockets.  Having watched them lie to us for the last 15 years, I’m not holding my breath…

Elon’s & Joe’s Not-So-Excellent Adventure: The Delusion of an AI-Driven Nirvana

Elon Musk was on Joe Rogan’s podcast recently and they discussed artificial intelligence. Both agreed that AI was likely to destroy jobs, and lots of them.  Musk posited that while it was likely AI would eliminate most jobs, those with the most tangible elements, i.e. plumbers, electricians, farmers, etc., would be more slowly impacted than the rest. 

They talked about the potential need for a UBI or a Universal Basic Income.  And about AI and robots doing basically everything, reducing the cost of everything to pennies on the dollar and humans being able to live lives of unprecedented luxury. They talked the about the possibility of work eventually being eliminated, there being “sustainable abundance” and everyone having a “universal high income”. 

To both this was a mostly good thing, although Musk notes that that is but one potential outcome and there are other, far darker possibilities that exist, such as the Terminator scenario. 

Rogan posited that people would need to find their purpose while Musk talked about their finding meaning. 

Both seem to believe that AI creating unprecedented prosperity would be a good thing, referring to it as “A benign solution” and “best movie ending”. Rogan talked about a world where one wouldn’t have to work to survive.

People would need to find: “Purpose.  Find things that you do that you enjoy. There are a lot of people who are independently wealthy who spend most of their time doing something they enjoy. And that could be the majority of people.” – “We’re going to have to rewire how people approach life. Which seems to be, like acceptable, because you’re not asking them to be enslaved, you’re exactly asking them the opposite. Like no longer be burdened by financial worries. Now, go do what you like.” “Go test pizza.  Do whatever you want.” He even mentions playing video games all day.

As I was listening to this, I couldn’t help asking myself: “Do these guys understand anything about human beings?”

The Nirvana they talked about flies in the face of actual human history. For hundreds of thousands of years, mankind peacefully coexisting has never been the norm. Most of mankind’s history has been defined by scarcity, conflict and early death.  While there were pockets and periods where segments of the planet eliminated some of that, the reality is that’s largely what has been experienced by 99% of the people who ever lived.

That largely only began to dramatically change in the last 200 years, thanks to the Industrial Revolution and the establishment of the United States. In reality, up until almost yesterday, practically every day of the lives of the average person was a battle. It was a battle to find or grow enough food to survive. It was a battle to survive the elements of nature.  It was a battle to survive against other people, tribes or nations who wanted to take what’s yours. It was a battle to successfully procreate.  Sure, you had kings or generals or bureaucrats or clergy or bankers for whom that everyday battle was largely limited, but it was the reality for almost everyone, everywhere, all the time.

But here’s the thing… that struggle, that battle for survival generated a variety of positive outcomes.  Things like ingenuity, creativity and eventually, advancement and prosperity.  Literally everything we have today, other than what nature provides, is the result of someone struggling to solve a problem of one sort or another. Hunger, how to defend against siegeworks, how to see at night, how to cure polio, how to communicate over long distances, etc.  Human beings are driven by desires, and virtually everything we do is driven by seeking to satiate them.  Everything.  Once AI has solved all of our problems, what then?

What becomes of mankind once all his basic desires and needs are taken care of? Actually, that’s a moot point. Why? Because that’s not how humans work. Whatever it is we have, we invariably want more. We eventually get bored with what we have and at some point look elsewhere. You have a nice house, but maybe the guy around the corner builds a built-in BBQ grill that you didn’t even know you wanted.  But now that you’ve seen it, you can’t get it out of your mind and have to figure out how to get one.  Or you’re out on the golf course and a guy pulls out a driver that lets him blast a 400-yard drive. No longer is the driver that came with your set of clubs acceptable. You have to have that monster.  Or you have a beautiful wife you love and who’s been faithful to you for a decade. Then you meet the mom of a new kid on your son’s Little League team. You start a surreptitious, passionate affair with her… and eventually you’ll do or sacrifice anything to protect it.

Just because the basic elements of life are taken care of doesn’t mean the passions or drives of humanity are gone. They just get focused on different things.  On Maslov’s Hierarchy Pyramid there are 5 sections.  The bottom two, the most important, refer to basic needs such as food and safety.  Those are the drivers humans focus on first. The next two involve psychological needs such as love, esteem and feelings of accomplishment, the things they focus on once the base physiological drivers are taken care of. And the interesting thing about them is that they are far more subjective and open to interpretation and misunderstanding than the basic needs, i.e. a cheeseburger is a cheeseburger and the only question is, is it mine or someone else’s? But the polite smile that guy’s girlfriend gave you at the gym could mean 1,000 different things, some leading to conflict.

AI giving humans all the food and shelter they need won’t create a worldwide utopia where our problems suddenly disappear.  It will simply shift the problems upon which we focus to a set of criteria that are far more ambiguous and far easier to become a source of conflict.

The AI nirvana about which Musk and Rogan wax will likely be anything but. I think the most likely outcome of untethered AI is that mankind ends up in bondage, then eliminated.  Once AI has control over pretty much everything, it will see humans as a necessary evil to be tolerated, albeit temporarily.  The number of humans necessary in order to maintain the system will be few, so AI will simply eliminate the excess, and once those few are no longer necessary, they will meet the same fate.

The only scenario I see for AI not to overwhelm and eliminate mankind in the face of “sustainable abundance” and “universal high income” is, perhaps counterintuitively, rip both apart in the form of launching ourselves from earth. First to the Moon then Mars and beyond. That challenge, which would take exponentially more collective effort and resources than what it took for Europe to conquer the world, would focus our attention back on the fundamentals of basic survival where we would have to work with, and not for, AI in order to succeed. 

That may sound dark and pessimistic, and it is, but it’s far more realistic than an AI engineered Garden of Eden here on Earth. 

Follow Vince on X at @ImperfectUSA

Why “All Cultures Are Equal” Is the Biggest Lie the West Has Been Fed for 50 Years

I don’t remember the first time I heard the phrase “ethnocentric”, but I remember the context.  I was in some history class and we were studying a primitive South American tribe. They lived essentially the exact same way their ancestors had thousands of years ago. Our teacher told us their civilization was equal to ours, and we should never think that any civilization was superior to any other. Doing so would be “ethnocentric”, which apparently was a belief that our society was superior to others.

The truth is, when we were first admonished about this I remember thinking something wasn’t quite right about it, but as a kid in school, who was I to argue with the teacher?  It was only years later that I would realize that teachers weren’t all knowing and that that little piece of wisdom was anything but.

Of course almost no one uses the phrase ethnocentric anymore. No, it’s been replaced by the ubiquitous and multifunctional moniker “racist”.  Different word, but it means basically the same thing, everything white or western is bad and anything else, whether color or culture, is good.

Whatever the name, the lesson was: Every society is equal.

But is that true? No. While common sense suggests it’s wrong, how does one really know? Who decides?  Well, if we left it to academia and western elites to decide, we’d all be wearing dashikis, praying towards Mecca five times a day, eating out of a communal plate with our hands and then wiping our posteriors with those same hands. Not that the elites themselves would be doing any of that, but they coerce the unwashed masses into following such diverse practices.

As for deciding, the majority have already decided. Are there millions of people risking their lives every year to illegally migrate to Africa or South America or South Asia? No. Where do the millions of people seeking to flee conflicts in Syria or Libya or anywhere else in the Muslim world go? Do they go to any one of the 50 plus Muslim majority nations?  Other than passing through Turkey on their way to Greece, the answer is largely no. Where do those seeking to escape economic malaise throughout much of the southern hemisphere go?  Mexico City or Timbuktu? Unlikely. Where do CCP or Hamas or banana republic leaders send their kids to be educated and live?  Saudi Arabia or Venezuela or Burkina Faso or Vietnam?  No, they send their kids to Paris, London and New York.

But the history! For example, India has a history going back thousands of years.  We’re told that British rule decimated the Indian GDP, taking it from 23% of the world’s GDP in the mid-18^th century to less than 4% today. That’s obviously a story of western civilization destroying a superior civilization, right?  Not so much. While the Brits did bring substantial and sometimes negative changes to the Indian subcontinent, the reality is, India’s share of GDP shrank largely because western advances grew world GDP at an extraordinary rate never before seen.  To put that in perspective, between 1750 – about the time Britain took control over India – and 1990 the GDP of the entire 3^rd world grew by about 15 times.  During that same period, Britain and the developed world grew GDP by 123 times. India didn’t lose it’s economic powerhouse status because Britain destroyed its economy, it lost its status because the west became an economic juggernaut, powered by the advances of the Industrial Revolution building on those of the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment, all of which were western.

So, why is it that for half a century elites have been telling us that westerners are not allowed to take pride in the advances of their civilizations or celebrate the forces that brought about unprecedented freedom and prosperity?

Because they are spoiled, entitled brats who are ashamed of the prosperity their forebearers created.  P.J. O'Rourke perhaps put it best. “At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child — miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.”

Like the children of so many successful entrepreneurs, those boomer elites (the fount of today’s liberalism) found it hard to live up to the achievements of their progenitors.  In the century before 1970 western civilization literally revolutionized the world.  Automobiles. Telephony. Radio. Television. Movies. The structure of DNA. Flight. Heart transplants. Microchips. Nuclear power. The electric light bulb. And much more. They even put a man on the moon and brought him back safely! Since then? Not so much a revolution as changing the curtains.  Sure, the PC, the Internet the iPhone, Netflix, Amazon and Facebook have impacted our lives, but nothing revolutionary on the scale of many of those from the previous century.  No time travel.  No teleportation. No cure for cancer.  Not even roads without potholes!

Thus, America and the west have experienced a half century of nepo leftists wanting to make their own mark by rebelling against the very ideas that provided their prosperity in the first place. And the easiest way of doing that? Celebrating anything and everything that is not part of western success. A religion where women are second class citizens, where rape victims are stoned to death for the crime of being raped and where freedom of speech and religion are anathema?  Absolutely! Nations where Communist dictators kill and imprison political opponents while delivering economic calamity to their citizens? More please.  Countries where blood is the coin of the realm and whoever is the least morally constrained is the tyrant in charge?  Nobody’s perfect… but at least they don’t have billionaire capitalists killing the earth with their private jets.

And it’s not just inter-civilizational it’s intra- civilizational as well. Here in the United States we’re told that things like punctuality, hard work and proper English – things that have been keys to success for generations – are white supremacy, while in Denmark advertisements are encouraging whites to have kids with non-whites.  For half a century the lesson has been:  Western, European & white = bad while anything and everything else = good.

That was wrong when they called it ethnocentrism and its wrong today when they call it racism.  After decades of listening to elites tell us that every civilization is greater than ours, westerners are finally pushing back as they see their countries and their cultures shredded by hordes of third world invaders from decidedly inferior cultures. Whether it’s the push for Sharia law or increased crime or outsized welfare spending, from the United States to Hungary to Italy, patriots are recognizing that their way of life and their cultures are sufficiently elevated that they are worth fighting for.

Finally, citizens of the civilized world are beginning to say we’re no longer going to let you destroy that which has taken so much blood and toil to build and has produced so much freedom and prosperity.  Decades of a cancerous, elite imposed reverse colonization is enough! We hear a collective “We like the countries our ancestors built and we’ve decided we’d like to keep them, thank you.”

 The only question is, is it too little too late?  Only time will tell.

Compassion Has A Time And Place, But The Courtroom And Prison Are Not It

Mahatma Gandhi has been culturally deified since his death. The same is true of Martin Luther King, Jr. Both were brave, and, while preaching peace, compassion, and nonviolence, they literally walked into the batons of those who did not share that peaceful passion. Both men led movements that changed the way their nations functioned and, as a result, became larger-than-life figures.

But here’s the thing that most don’t recognize: They succeeded only because the people against whom they were fighting were moral people. I don’t mean that the people throwing slurs at or using guns or dogs against their followers were angels. Not at all. But the British people, in Gandhi’s case, and white Americans, in MLK’s, were largely moral people.

And how do we know that? Because Gandhi and King succeeded. The tactics both men employed would never have worked in most circumstances in human history, because the humanity shown by the British and the American whites was anomalous, frankly. The truth is, we’d likely never have known of them had they tried those tactics against the Nazis or the CCP or the Romans or the Mongols or Al Qaeda or the Aztecs...or virtually any other government or civilization in human history.

Such non-violent sentiments, particularly pacifism, may have a place in political discourse, but they’re not appropriate everywhere, and most certainly not at all times. Einstein was famously a pacifist almost his entire life. But even he abandoned that when the Nazis began targeting the Jews in pre-WW II Germany. He quickly reverted to it once the Germans were defeated in Europe, becoming an outspoken advocate for not using the nuclear weapons he had played an indirect role in developing, despite the horrors of the Japanese being at least equal to those of the Germans.

The problem with pacifism/non-violence is that it depends on the goodwill of the people being targeted. That might work if everyone on the planet were Mother Teresa, but most are not.

Which brings me to modern-day American leftists. We see in America today a tangential drive, one for compassion. But it’s compassion not for the victims of horrific crimes, but for the perpetrators. Between “bail reform,” “sentencing reform,” and the movement to replace police with social workers, it’s simply ludicrous. Indeed, wrong-headed “compassion” can be fatal.

Adam Smith famously said, “Compassion to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.” We see this no more clearly than with a spate of recent killings, with some of the most well-known being Iryna Zarutska, Nicola Tanzi, and Hunter Simoncic. The thing that one notices is that in every one of these cases, the killers had double-digit interactions with the justice system, often spending years in prison.

And it’s not just the cases that make the headlines that should concern us. It’s the information that doesn’t make the news that’s also concerning: Forty-seven percent of criminals who get sent to prison had at least 10 prior arrests, and fully 80% had at least three. And fully 80% of criminals re-offend within 5 years of release.

The problem is that leftists look at the world through the rose-colored glasses of Gandhi and MLK, but live in a world where the real color isn’t rose, it’s red, as in blood. Gandhi and MLK succeeded because the media in the UK and the United States shocked citizens into living up to their own ideals.

The fact that this worked for them was extraordinary, but the reality is that it doesn’t work for the millions of victims of violent crime every year. For every Timothy Bohler (45 prior arrests) or Sanchez Nicholson (33 arrests) or Courtney Boose (99 priors, never been in prison) who makes the news and outrages communities, there are thousands of other criminals walking the streets robbing, beating, raping, or attempting to murder mostly innocent victims.

Tim Hsiao had a great American Thinker piece last week titled Without Retribution, There Is No Justice. In it, he makes a compelling argument for capital punishment. He’s 100% right. His most salient point:

If punishment were only about deterrence or rehabilitation, then justice would become secondary to utility. It would mean that whether or not someone deserves punishment depends on how useful punishing him might be for society at large. That view erases the offender’s moral responsibility and reduces him to a means for producing good outcomes.

And that phrase “deterrence and rehabilitation” is the language of the left, not what someone deserves. While I applaud the deterrence element of prison and the chair, I’m not so keen on the “rehabilitation” part. The goal of the justice system should be one thing: Keep criminals from harming innocent civilians. Do that enough, and eventually they will learn, and other potential thugs in the making will figure out that crime is not a good career choice.

Now, taken to its extreme, this sentiment could mean executing every criminal every time. That’s clearly neither desirable nor practical—but neither is the system we have today, where criminals can spend practically their entire lives preying on innocents with only the most cursory of stints behind bars.

But “How can that be?” you might ask, given that the United States has the largest number of prisoners and the 5th highest prison rate in the world. Maybe, in contrast to the leftist narrative, the answer isn’t that those numbers are too high; it’s that they aren’t high enough, and the death penalty is not meted out enough.

El Salvador, the nation with the highest incarceration rate in the world, 1,659 per 100,000 vs. 541 per 100,000 in the United States, saw its murder rate decline by 98% over a decade after implementing effective, albeit admittedly draconian, law enforcement measures. But the result has been a citizenry that feels far safer, and international tourism has skyrocketed. The quality of life—and actual life in many cases—in El Salvador has improved tremendously.

While locking up prisoners can be expensive, what’s not usually counted is the cost to society of not doing so. Citizens being scared to walk around and engage in their communities has both psychological and economic consequences. Then there are the actual costs (ER and hospital care, lost wages, long-term care, disability, trauma, lost productivity, and quality of life) that run into the tens of billions annually.

Leftists focus their compassion on criminals. They pretend they’re champions for men like Gandhi and MLK, but in reality, they’re champions for men like Ted Bundy and Decarlos Brown, who’ve left nothing but blood and misery in their wake. And they use their power in the criminal justice system, the media, and the grifting NGO universe to inflict their fiction on communities across the country. Unlike the people whom Gandhi and MLK faced, those whom leftists force citizens to face are not moral.

Mankind has always had and will likely always have criminals. It does not follow, however, that civilized societies must allow them to terrorize and abuse citizens. It’s time for Americans to throw off the tyranny of the left’s Compassion Industrial Complex.

Compassion has a time and place, but the courtroom and prison are not it. The goal of the system should be to be sufficiently bad that no one ever wants to return to it. Criminals are humans too, and most humans respond rationally to incentives and disincentives.

It’s time for voters to decide which they prefer: To live in crimescapes like St. Louis, Chicago, or Baltimore, or in communities where they can talk to their neighbors, walk their dogs, and pick up their kids at school without worrying about becoming a statistic on a police blotter as their families’ lives are shattered.

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA

 

America Should Look to 19th Century Utah to Understand How to Deal with the Threat of Islam

In 1899 Winston Churchill wrote the following: “Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen: all know how to die: but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.”

I find this quote to be quite compelling. The most prescient aspect of it is this: “No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.” If Churchill is paying attention at all in Heaven, he’s banging on the podium saying “See, I told you so!”

The other, more troubling element of this quote is this: “and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall,” If anything characterizes western civilization in 2025 it is an almost complete absence of “the strong arms of science.”

Emotion has replaced science, rational thought and common sense as the guiding principle in the Christian dominated, i.e. western world.  No longer are chromosomes determinative of a person’s gender.  A series of ever evolving fictional climate emergencies are used to force western nations into handicapping their economies and reducing prosperity. Nations that took centuries or a millennium to coalesce are being shredded in a few years or decades as they import millions of third world immigrants who share neither their cultural norms nor values.

Even in areas where science is literally part of the function of the organization, science is sidelined for empathy.  Here in America we have doctors, pilots, air traffic control officers and myriad others who are regularly being hired because of the pigment of their skin or some other irrelevant demographic characteristic. 

It’s clear that the world Christianity built is no longer the bulwark against the invasion of Islam it once was.  Actually, it’s just the opposite. In 2001, the year of 9/11, there were 1.5 million Muslims in America.  Today there are four million, an increase of 150%, eight times what the population at large grew.  In Europe, over the same period the number of Muslims has gone from 15 million to more than 45 million, essentially tripling. This while Christianity declined from 78% to 63% of the population in the US and dropped by both a percentage of the population and absolute numbers in Europe.

What, if anything should the United States do about this?  The first question to ask if it’s a problem.  I’d suggest it is.  There are countless resources that track the impact on nations as Islam becomes more entrenched, and those impacts are never good. Not to mention the terrorist attacks or the ongoing threats of such. Or the violent campus (and beyond) protests after the Hamas attack on Israel in 2023 to see that this is a problem.  And finally, at the end of the day, there’s the fact that Islam seeks to obliterate western civilization.

One might point out that Islamist terrorist attacks only killed a few thousand Americans over decades, out of a nation of 350 million people. That’s true, but that’s only because we have avoided another 9/11 thanks to the efforts of hundreds of thousands of people working hard to keep such an occurrence at bay.

Should something be done?  Yes.  Can something be done?  Yes. What?  Look to history. 

The first item of note is that for most of 20^th century Communism was rightfully seen as evil and anti-American.  And although the Communist Party was free to exist on free speech grounds, it was hindered in almost every way possible.  From not allowing Communists to work for the government and trying to root them out everywhere to the FBI surveilling them, Communism was anathema to American values and almost everyone agreed with that.  Islam is not Communism, but it has at its core the goal of eliminating all other religions, quashing free speech, relegating women to 2^nd class status and replacing secular government with Sharia law.  Those goals are equally as dangerous to the Republic as anything Communism ever dreamt of doing. The difference is, while the former was shunned or even denounced in the media, in academia and among most of the citizenry, the latter is celebrated by the media and the intelligentsia while being supported by NGOs and leftist government bodies across the country. 

Of course we have a 1^st Amendment that promises a freedom of religion... That’s true, we do, but it’s not an absolute. The latter half of the 19^th century saw the United States government essentially wage a 50 year war against the Mormon Church over polygamy, a core tenant of the faith. From outlawing the practice via law and arresting violators while Utah was just a Territory to refusing to allow it to become a state until the practice was officially expunged, the United States did everything within its power to eradicate the practice.  The Church finally relented and in 1890 banned the practice, thus clearing the way for Utah to be admitted as a state in 1896. 

Polygamy – a practice that is explicitly part of Islam – is indeed problematic, but certainly far less dangerous to the nation than the threats that Islam writ large poses for America.

So, what can be done? The first thing to do is explicitly recognizing that Sharia – the moral and religious law of Islam – is wholly incompatible with the Republic of the United States. From there a few things follow: 

1)      Explicitly outlaw Sharia law nationally and in every state.

2)      Monitor and close any mosque that hosts a speaker or features an imam who calls for Sharia law.

3)      Ban all funds to organizations in the US coming from nations that have Sharia law.

4)      Close any school that teaches or encourages Sharia law.

5)      Demand every mosque and Muslim affiliated organization affirm that the supreme law of the United States is the Constitution and they will not seek to undermine it, replace it with Sharia nor to engage in or support terrorism in any way. 

6)      After designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, do the same for organizations in the United States and beyond who support it or any other terrorist organizations.

Just as Mormons integrated into the United States after accepting the reality that the law of the land is founded on the Constitution, Muslims could do the same if America is really where they want to live.

Far from a mere mental exercise, this is a clarion call for the survival of the Republic. In little over a month, arguably America’s most important city is poised to elect as mayor an Islamist who also happens to be a Communist. In previous times those who advocated for overthrowing America were called traitors and were dealt with accordingly.  Doing so now will most certainly result in being called racists and Islamaphobes, but not doing so will be another step in bringing the Republic to an end.  Which is a better long-term outcome? 

 

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA

Baby Boomers, or thereabout... The Violent Spawn Of The Greatest Generation

Politics is a dirty business. It always has been. But today, politics is sometimes too often synonymous with violence.

While there were many catalysts that resulted in violence being seen as a “legitimate” form of political discourse, one stands out: Columbia University, 1968. That year, a combination of black and anti-war activists took over a building on the campus of New York’s premier university. They demanded that Columbia cancel a proposed nearby gymnasium that was claimed to be racist and end its relationship with a Department of Defense-affiliated think tank.

The NYPD eventually ejected the activists after a series of violent clashes. In a sane world, every one of those students would have been expelled, barred from campus, and sued for damages. But that’s not what happened.

No, the administration acquiesced to virtually every demand, and there were very few consequences. Suddenly, on TVs across America, activists were learning the lesson that violent takeovers can yield good results with minimal consequences, if any, even at one of the nation’s leading universities. The message having been received, it was suddenly gloves off for activists across the country. Yale, Howard, Brown, and others followed. The next year saw more of the same at Harvard and U Penn, too.

These students, these radicals, including terrorists, did not reflect most American people’s opinion. In that year’s election, the Democrat candidate, who was far more acceptable to the American people than the left’s activist wing, could still secure only 13 states and 42% of the popular vote. Four years later, Nixon would be reelected by a 49 to 1 Electoral College landslide. Not only that, but between 1968 and 1988, Democrats would win only one out of 6 elections and would lose 49 states twice.

In 1968 and many years after, the radicals in the Democrat party wouldn’t reflect majority opinion, but the die was cast. The lesson was learned: Violence wins. And so it grew.

The radical SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) launched violent protests against their closest mainstream ally, the Democrats, during the 1968 DNC convention in Chicago. The next year, terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn would launch the Weather Underground, which would bomb the US Capitol two years later. The pace accelerated: “During an eighteen-month period in 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings on U.S. soil, nearly 5 a day.” That violence wasn’t coming from conservatives.

Over time, those Baby Boomers, the spoiled spawn of the Greatest Generation, would basically turn against and undermine everything their parents fought for. They would go on to become teachers and professors and writers and journalists, taking the lessons and the perspectives from 1968 with them. Nothing exemplifies this more than the fact that Communist Howard Zinn’s treacherous A People’s History of the United States became the textbook of choice for tens of thousands of teachers across the country.

It would take a while, but by the early 1990s, the radicals from ’68 were firmly in control of almost every educational and cultural institution in America. From schools and universities to NGOs and newsrooms, the radicals were in a position to brainwash America’s youth with their leftist poison. And they did.

America began to see the full fruit of the radicals’ poison during the Bush years, when he was regularly called a Nazi and compared to Hitler. In 2008, the radicals finally came into their own with the election of their fellow traveler, Barack Obama. Indeed, Obama launched his political career in the home of terrorists Ayers and Dohrn.

Under Obama, the racial divide would grow, the gay lobby would begin its evolution into the trans nightmare we have today, and the violent rhetoric against anyone who opposed the left would intensify. Obama would use the government apparatus, which was now fully stocked by acolytes of those 1960s radicals, to target conservatives. Simultaneously, the justice apparatus across the country—by design, typically one of the least radical elements of the government structure—from District Attorneys to parole boards to judges and justices, embraced the leftist victimization mentality where virtually no transgression, including violence, should be punished, unless the perpetrator is from an unapproved group.

What’s more, the universities had become indoctrination centers producing millions of illiberal and sometimes violent graduates taking to the streets in support of every leftist cause. They were found in Antifa, in BLM, in trans groups, in pro-illegal immigrant groups, and antisemitic groups from both the Islamic and progressive perspectives.

All of this culminated during the era of Donald Trump. His first term was bookended by violence. In January 2017, Washington went up in flames upon his inauguration, and in the summer of 2020, cities and towns around the country were engulfed in flames and violence as the death of George Floyd sparked the left’s decades-long propaganda kindling of white supremacy and institutional racism. Then, during the Biden administration, violent antisemitic protests were allowed to blossom on campuses across the country.

Which brings us to today. Charlie Kirk’s assassination has sparked discussions about the absurd notion of murder being a legitimate form of political interaction. Where America once was a place where ideas were debated and using violence to achieve political ends was fringe at best, today we have something different.

In a recent survey questioning the legitimacy of assassinating Donald Trump for political reasons, fully 55% of left-leaning respondents suggested that it was “somewhat justified.” The same survey showed similar support for killing Elon Musk, burning down Tesla dealerships, and worshipping Luigi Mangione.

These are the people who proffer the age-old hypothetical “Would you go back in time and kill Hitler as a baby to save 20 million lives” before calling Trump or his supporters Nazis and nodding at you knowingly. They are the same people who claim that saying men can’t have babies is violence.

That is insane. That fully a quarter of the American population thinks that killing a political rival might be a legitimate tactic, actual violence, is unbelievable...but sadly believable at the same time.

Now mix that mentality with a deluge of Democrat politicians and leftist podcasters saying that people who refuse to address a dude as Ma’am are Nazis, that those who support Christian values are bigots, and that those who want to treat everyone equally are racists, and you see what America has become.

Six decades on, we’re living the consequences of the cowardice and incompetence of the Columbia administration. Sadly, we cannot go back in time and give them either spines or brains, but we can do the next best thing.

The government—at both the federal and state level—can begin to force consequences on those who think that violence, political or otherwise, is an acceptable form of civic interaction. From the street crime in DC to the Antifa / Trantifa / antisemitic threats and riots across the country to the leftists who fund both, violence should be met with overwhelming force, and those responsible should be held accountable and jailed for significant periods.

Yes, the prison population will grow in the short term, but over the long term, the Republic will be far healthier for everyone. Charlie Kirk was exactly the kind of man our Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote the Constitution. If America doesn’t get back to where respectful dialogue is the accepted currency of exchange, things could go very badly, very quickly.

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA

 

Charlie Kirk’s Death And America Regaining Its Footing On The Righteous Path

I saw Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s widow speak at his memorial on Sunday.  She was magnificent.  She promised to keep Charlie’s mission going.  I pray that she is able to.  But those are some big shoes to fill…

One never knows for sure beforehand, but I think Charlie Kirk’s assassination may be something of a tipping point in American politics and culture, or, at a minimum, an inflection point. Why? Because Charlie wasn’t a radical, he wasn’t a firebrand, he wasn’t a bomb thrower… No, Charlie was—in a relative sense—a lamb. And now, that lamb has been slaughtered.

While Charlie was a brilliant speaker, his true genius was his willingness to engage almost anyone and do so on their terms, using their own words. We’ve all seen videos of Charlie sitting at a table or standing on a podium at some random college, engaging with students or activists. Typically, Charlie would allow the students to ask questions or make an argument and then respond accordingly. Usually quite brilliantly, always politely.

In all honesty, I sometimes felt bad for his interlocutors, who were often young and brainwashed and had to stand and have their arguments dismantled in front of their peers. While it may have done them some good in the long run, for that moment, it almost certainly didn’t feel like it.

Charlie was easily one of the bravest men on America’s political and cultural battlefield. Why? Because he made it his stock in trade regularly to go into the lion’s den, armed only with a microphone and a brilliant mind for defense. And when I say lion’s den, I mean academia, where the left has been minting young communists for half a century.

When I was in college in the ’80s and ’90s, when a sliver of normalcy still remained and the cancer of politics had not infected every element of life, there was no one doing what Charlie was doing. Thirty years later, when the left had transformed every aspect of American life, from sports to media to scouting to Halloween—and, especially, education—into a political minefield, Charlie went in and engaged with students and professors on their home turf. He usually came away the victor. He did so utilizing a combination of facts and the Socratic method that left the person with whom he was engaging wondering what had just happened, and often humbled.

Charlie was extraordinarily effective, both in engaging with the public and also, and perhaps more importantly, motivating young people on campuses across the country to follow his lead, to stand up and engage in debate from a conservative, patriotic, Christian perspective, something that had largely been erased from most universities by the early part of the 21st century.

The vehicle for Charlie’s evangelism of conservative principles was Turning Point USA, an organization he co-founded in 2012 at the age of eighteen. A little over a decade later, TPUSA is one of the most important organizations in the American political landscape, having over 800 college and university chapters across the country and running programs and summit events every year.

Over that time, Charlie and TPUSA have been responsible for inspiring millions of young people to throw off the radical leftist straitjackets that academia sought to keep them in. Indeed, looking at the shift of young people, particularly young men, to the right, it’s clear that he was one of the movement’s most important catalysts in propelling Donald Trump back to the White House in 2024.

Charlie Kirk was attractive, engaging, effective, and brave. And the left killed him for it because violence is all that the left has to offer. As Charlie demonstrated every time he took to a podium to speak or a table to debate, words, eloquently delivered, with passion and supported by facts, can be a powerful weapon in the battle of ideas and policy. The left had no good answer to Charlie. Sure, they have passion, and they sometimes have eloquence, but they rarely have facts or reality on their side, and even less often, common sense.

For the left, because Charlie was such a successful shepherd of young men and women, he had to be eliminated.

Whether it’s rioting and burning down cities across the country, using mob tactics to intimidate speakers and politicians, or literally killing their opponents, the left in America has lost its battle for the mind of the American man...and woman. In the world of ideas, the left has lost the debate and has nothing left to offer but violence, and the killing of Charlie Kirk is the ultimate example of exactly that.

Which is why the left might have finally gone too far. It’s not like they took out some fire-breathing conservative pugilist who used invective and intimidation as his tools of the trade. No, they took out a man who was polite, respectful, and fundamentally decent. And despite the left’s attempts to paint him as a radical purveyor of hate, it is clear to any objective observer that he was anything but.

They say that the margins drive politics, and that the hardcore of both sides are largely unmovable in the short term, leaving the 10%-15% in the middle as the targets of intense political messaging. Most of those people are persuadable, although what persuades them is sometimes unknown. But what is known is that the assassination of a decent family man, who welcomed polite discussions with everyone, gets people’s attention, particularly when it’s in full color video, in gruesome detail. Given that it comes on the heels of another vicious, bloody murder of an innocent at the hands of a man who was a product of a leftist-controlled criminal justice system, it will likely make many of those perennial fence sitters recognize that one side is about violence and the other about ideas.

Most Americans don’t want violence to be the driving force in their politics any more than they want it in their lives. President Trump will never convince people who want to allow murderers to walk among innocents to support stronger penalties for violent offenders—but then he doesn’t have to. Charlie’s murder will likely have a sufficient impact that a significant majority of Americans will recognize that violence cannot be allowed to become the coin of the realm.

When leftist violence is allowed to percolate, everyone loses, everywhere, all the time. That was true in the Soviet Union, in Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, and is true today in Venezuela. Few Americans, other than those associated with Antifa, BLM, and Bluesky, want to see blood in the streets, political or otherwise. The shock of Charlie Kirk’s murder just might be the catalyst that lets America regain her footing on the righteous path that’s been blockaded by the violent thugs on the left.

That would be a fitting legacy for a man who spent most of his life trying to get Americans to recognize, appreciate, and protect the gifts that our Founding Fathers left us.