The Imperial Judiciary Of The United States

 "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s…"

When Jesus was alive, the religious leader of Rome was, in fact, both Caesar and the voice of God, for Emperor Augustus had taken the position of Pontifex Maximus, the chief high priest, for himself.

A separation between church and state would occur in the late 4th century when Saint Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, would cleave the two.

In 390 AD, in Thessalonica, a Macedonian city in the Roman Empire, the citizens murdered a Roman garrison commander for arresting the most popular Macedonian charioteer just before a major race. A seething Emperor Theodosius ordered his soldiers to slaughter the entire population. When the smoke cleared, 7,000 men, women, and children died in the Massacre of Thessalonica.

Ambrose, the most powerful man in Christianity at the time, banned the emperor from Mass. Theodosius I, an extremely devout man, would spend the next six months seeking Ambrose’s forgiveness and doing penance. Eventually, Ambrose decided the Emperor had shown sufficient contrition and allowed him back into the Church, but not before forcing him to make Christianity the official religion of the Empire and outlawing every other faith.

That was one of the first and most powerful checks on a monarch’s power in the history of Western civilization. Another would come in 1215 when English King John was forced by a group of rebellious barons to sign the Magna Carta, which provided protections for the church and guaranteed the barons a variety of liberties and rights.

Fast forward 562 years and another step towards a truly limited government would occur in Philadelphia in 1787. In an unprecedented advance for Western civilization and, frankly, humanity, the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution of the United States. With a keen understanding of man’s nature, this document was sufficiently robust and prescient that it would last for centuries.

In a direct reaction to the English system, they wrote a constitution in which, while the primary power lay in the legislature, the power of all three branches was checked by the other two and ultimately by the citizens and the Bill of Rights.

To give some perspective on where the locus of power lay in the new constitution, compare the articles that define the powers of the three branches: Article I, the Legislature, has 2,268 words. Article II, the Executive, has 1,025 words, while Article III, the Judiciary, has a mere 377.

The Founding Fathers went to great lengths to divide the powers and put in place checks and balances so that mob rule and demagogues would not take hold of the government and bring about tyranny.

One of those checks was the Judicial Branch:

The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.

Alexander Hamilton assured all and sundry that the judiciary would be the weakest branch, writing in Federalist 81:

It may in the last place be observed that the supposed danger of judiciary encroachments on the legislative authority, which has been upon many occasions reiterated, is in reality a phantom.

He stated that a judicial usurpation of the legislature could not happen:

This may be inferred with certainty, from the general nature of the judicial power, from the objects to which it relates, from the manner in which it is exercised, from its comparative weakness, and from its total incapacity to support its usurpations by force.

This, combined with Congress’s ability to impeach judges for judiciary encroachments, said Hamilton, would be sufficient to keep judicial usurpation from occurring. Hamilton was responding to the writings of Judge Robert Yates, who warned of a rapacious judiciary in Anti-Federalist No. 78.

Hamilton was wrong, and Yates was right. 

Within a very short time, Hamilton’s error and Yates’ prescience became clear. Marbury v. Madison established Judicial Review in 1803, taking for the Court the ability to invalidate a law it deemed in conflict with the Constitution. Although the court would use that power only twice over America’s first 70 years, it would do so 50 times over the subsequent 75 years and over 125 times in the last 90 years. That trajectory not only reflects the extraordinary growth in the areas of American life into which the leviathan of government has inserted itself, but it also reflects a far more activist judiciary.

And how can we tell? Look at nationwide injunctions. Judges issued six nationwide injunctions against George Bush over eight years—one per every sixteen months he was in office. Barack Obama was the subject of 12 or one every eight months. In Trump’s first term, judges issued 64 nationwide injunctions, or one every 22 days. After he left office, the courts retreated, with Joe Biden getting 14 or one every three months. Now, in his second term, Trump has received 12 in only six weeks; that is, one every four days. Meanwhile, in the single four-year period of his first term, he faced more of these injunctions than every president in the previous 60 years combined!

But the thing is, injunctions are found nowhere in the Constitution. Nonetheless, with almost 700 federal judges, activists can easily find fellow travelers who are more than willing to do their bidding. It’s no coincidence that the judges who have issued many of the injunctions against Trump’s executive actions have ties to hardcore leftists:

• The son of the judge who blocked deporting Khalil Mahmoud interned for Chuck Schumer.
• The daughter of the judge who blocked deporting Tren de Aragua gang members works for an NGO that provides legal advice to criminal illegal aliens.
• The wife of the Judge blocking the USAID shutdown worked for Joe Biden.
• The judge who blocked DOGE from cutting NGO funding was the Solicitor General of the District of Columbia, the office that filed a civil lawsuit against the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.

Using injunctions, a radical leftist cabal is attempting to thwart President Trump from doing the job he was elected to do, which is to enforce and execute the laws of the United States. He should not allow them to do so. Unfortunately, impeachment is not the answer because there is zero chance of getting a conviction, with half the Senate applauding the judge’s actions.

The first thing Trump should do is ignore the order. This will force SCOTUS and/or Congress to act.

The second thing he should do is strongly encourage Congress to act, regardless of what SCOTUS does. (Or doesn’t do given the Manchurians Roberts and ACB.) Congress has the ultimate constitutional power to define the courts’ jurisdiction, whether granting or restricting it. They should eliminate or restrict federal judges’ ability to issue injunctions in general or, at a minimum, prohibit nationwide injunctions.

The Founders created a system of checks and balances that has served America well for most of her history. But that system only works when the three branches remain true to their nature.

You can argue that Congress has given too much of its power to the regulatory state, but that’s a case of one branch willingly, if foolishly, ceding power to another. In the case of the Judicial Branch, we’re seeing something different. Activist judges across the country are asserting that they basically have the power to micromanage how the Executive Branch carries out its constitutional duties. They don’t, but that doesn’t matter if the Executive Branch allows it to become reality. And the reality is, they’re using Chief Justice Roberts’ treacherous “normal appellate review process” framework to run out the clock on President Trump’s term.  And Trump knows it.

In 1832, in reaction to Worcester v. Georgia, President Jackson is said to have announced: “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” Donald Trump should state unequivocally that he will not allow activists masquerading as jurists to hijack the proper functions of the Executive Branch. Americans, like Jesus, Ambrose, and Jackson did, understand there are separate realms of governing, and for good or bad elected presidents execute the laws, not judges.

Follow me on X at ImperfectUSA

The Borg of Uncle Sam...

I grew up in the shadow of World War II. It had been over for almost 30 years by the time I started school, but nonetheless WW II was probably the most talked about subject in my history classes throughout. But the funny thing is, as close as it was, it seemed like it was ancient history.  It was finished. The evil Nazis were vanquished and the world had moved on. America and her allies had won and there were new enemies to slay.

While too young to understand Vietnam when it was raging, by high school I had a better grasp of world events and we were living on Guantanamo Bay, down in Cuba.  Although today it’s more well known for its prison facilities, at the time it was a U.S. Navy training / support station and the enemy was the Soviets and Fidel Castro. 

In the late 80’s after college, I was stationed with the Army in West Germany and our biggest alerts were usually related to the East Germans and they killed an American officer while I was there.  I don’t remember all the details but the Americans said he was on an approved inspection mission and the East Germans said he was spying.

Throughout these decades, I always knew that America was on the right side of history.  It was not that I’d been brainwashed, but it always seemed to me that an objective analysis of the circumstances, from WW II to Korea to Vietnam to the Cold War, America was the good guy, trying to do what’s right.  It’s a funny thing about the “good guy” framework, however, that everybody, even the guys who we know are the bad guys, think they’re the good guys!

Nor is it that I never questioned anything.  In college (of course) I had professors who said the US was the bad guy in Vietnam and that the Soviets only built missiles to defend themselves against the imperialist Americans. I disagreed but my words fell on deaf ears.    

So now we are here 35 years since the collapse of our last superpower enemy and a quarter century from 9/11, and I’m starting to wonder if America’s still the good guy. 

Some time ago it dawned on me that for most of my life I had given the government the benefit of the doubt.  Indeed, while imperfect and often inefficient and ineffective on a wide variety of policies, my default position for most of my life had been that the government was, at the end of the day, working for the American people.

Today, sadly, my default position is literally the opposite. 

In college I read Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lindon Johnson and according to it LBJ was a deeply egotistical, power hungry son of a bitch who would sell his mother to get power. While I think that’s clearly true, it seems that once in office he was genuinely interested in helping people and solving America’s problems. While he was a feckless buffoon as it relates to Vietnam, in domestic matters he wanted to help solve long standing problems, and that intention is not diminished by the fact that his programs were stunning failures.

That’s the way it is sometimes, people in government make mistakes. We all know that. But what has happened over the last two decades is a much different animal. Beginning with Barack Obama using the IRS to shut down Tea Party groups and right up until the moment someone in the White House used Joe Biden’s autopen to give pardons to half the Democrat Party and their swamp comrades, the American government has transformed from a virtuous, if frequently stumbling, vehicle for safely navigating the country through the chaos of life into an autonomous borg that largely operates without effective constraint and almost solely for the purpose of perpetuating itself. 

Biologists frequently say that the fundamental nature of life is to propagate the species, and that seems to be the path the borg of American government has taken. In the 21^st century we’ve seen an amalgamation of the Democrat party and the bureaucratic state, with a bastardization of both.  Maybe no better example exists than the Department of Education.  The education of children is easily one of the most important things a society can do to help perpetuate its culture and civilization, and the DOE spends $280 billion a year on it. Sadly, of that number, less than $70 billion actually goes to educating children.  The rest goes to bureaucracy, consultants, NGOs and ultimately, back into the pockets of Democrat politicians. This would be a crime even if schools were properly educating children, but they’re not.  Across the country you have failing schools where kids can’t do simple math, easily the most basic skill one should take from school. But you know what they are learning?  How to be LGBT.

This, like so much of the rest of government is far beyond incompetence. It’s criminal. It’s ceased to be a vehicle for ensuring the freedom of American citizens and promoting the interests of the United States.  It’s literally become the opposite. From funding prosecutors who release violent criminals into American communities and funding leftist thefts of elections while quashing of free speech internationally, to funding the invasion of our country and undermining the Bill of Rights, the American government has become the enemy within. 

If nothing else, Donald Trump and DOGE should be applauded for exposing what so many of us felt for so long but could never quite put our fingers on. 

Somewhat like learning that there is no Santa Claus, in the back of my mind I’m a bit wistful for that feeling of inner peace I had when I used to think of the country and the government as a single inherently good entity. While I think the former still is good, the latter, not so much, and I was late to the party in internalizing the idea of a difference between the two. For me Uncle Sam was America and the government combined.  Sadly, the Democrats weren’t under that illusion, and their recognizing the dichotomy long ago gave them decades to brainwash their constituents and hide the inner workings of their machine in plain site, behind countless official looking government seals and compassionate sounding NGOs.

Despite what the Democrat / bureaucrat borg has wrought, I firmly believe America remains a great, if imperfect nation and I remain convinced that taken as a whole throughout most of her 250 years, the county and the government have been mostly on the right side of history.  To the degree that that’s no longer true for the government, I’m glad we’re at a point where much of its malfeasance and malevolence is being exposed. It will take a long time and a lot of courage on the part of Republican politicians to fix this situation, but at least it’s being exposed before it’s too late. We’ll see in the next two years if the GOP has the courage necessary to actually set a course for bringing government back under the control of the citizens. Rand Paul, Mike Lee & Thomas Massie have their work cut out for themselves… Hopefully they’ll get some help along the way. 

Britain, Which Birthed American Ideas About Liberty, Has Embraced Despotism

 “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction”—Ronald Reagan

When I grew up, Great Britain was exotic. There were the red telephone booths, Buckingham Palace, black cabs, and, of course, the Bobbies (police) and the Beefeaters. England was the land of Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth I, and Henry IV. For me, Britain was history incarnate.

Obviously, part of that comes from the fact that, as Americans, we share a great deal of history with the British. Not only did we split from Britain in 1776, but our history continued to stay close until modern times…from the US joining Britain in the fight to end slavery to fighting two world wars together to the British Invasion in the 1960s that brought us the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Kinks.

Modern England largely dates back to 1066, when William the Conqueror crossed the English Channel and put the finishing touches on a unification that had been evolving since the Romans abandoned the island in 410 AD. (For clarity, as the terms are often used interchangeably, the United Kingdom (UK) is a sovereign nation comprising England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. “Great Britain” is the largest island in the British Isles, containing England, Scotland, and Wales, but not Northern Ireland.)

The 1,000-year span since has seen Britain, like the rest of the world, evolve—always, however haltingly, in the direction of freedom. This journey began with the Magna Carta, agreed to by King John in 1215. A watershed event in Western culture, it limited the King’s powers and declared he was subject to the law, guaranteed church rights, access to an impartial system of justice, and limited taxes.

Although the Magna Carta would have a rough beginning, it was an enormous step in the drive towards liberty. The document would set the stage for Parliament to evolve from councils that advised the King into a representative body that began taking a more active and powerful role in governing.

It was just the first in a line of steps that would make Britain the freest nation on the planet for centuries. The Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 would guarantee the right to trial and demand the state show cause for holding someone. A decade later, the English Bill of Rights would set out Parliamentary rights, the right to petition the king, and the freedom from cruel and unusual punishment. Over subsequent centuries, the British commitment to freedom would expand, eventually including all her citizens, not just the barons who first held King John’s feet to the fire.

Over that march to freedom, England would produce an extraordinary array of freedom advocates, some of whom inspired our Founding Fathers. Men such as John Locke, Edmund Burke and, later, William Wilberforce, the man who led the fight against the slave trade.

It is this incessant march towards freedom that has always given England an aura of consequence that few other nations share. And that’s what makes today’s Britain so sad.

The genesis of today’s dystopia began almost three decades ago when immigration took off in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The number of non-EU immigrants averaged over 200,000 per year for a decade and then skyrocketed after 2020. A nation of 55 million in 2000 is today over 65 million, with almost all of that growth coming from immigration, a majority from non-EU nations, particularly from the Middle East and Africa, countries that don’t share British culture or, importantly, religion. (It’s also likely that many of the ostensibly EU immigrants originated in non-EU countries.)

As a consequence, London, home to 20% of England’s population, has gone from approximately 80% native white British in 1991 to approximately 36% in 2021. The native population has surely shrunk more since then.

The result of this transformation of Britain from a largely British nation to something else has been monstrous. Possibly the single most despicable example is the 20-plus-year Rotherham child rape scandal that saw hundreds of Pakistani Muslims rape over a thousand British girls right under the noses of police who did nothing for fear of being called racists. As if that wasn’t bad enough, those who dared report on the various trials—see, e.g., here and here—found themselves jailed for doing so.

At the same time, London has become a killing ground for knife attacks, the overwhelming number being committed by minorities. Indeed, the country has become beset with machete attacks, a crime that was historically unheard of in Britain but which is common in the third world.

In July, the 17-year-old son of Rwandan immigrants knifed ten little girls, killing three of them. With the government withholding information on the killer, online posts asserted he was an immigrant. Tensions rose, and, across the UK, Brits protested the unfettered invasion of immigrants, the violence being perpetrated by immigrants and Muslims, and the system’s seeming duplicitous, two-tiered approach to justice when it came to immigrants and Muslims vs. white Brits, all of whom the government and the state-run media invariably characterize as “far right.”

These protests drew the new Labour government’s ire, and it launched a wave of arrests and a propaganda campaign against the “far right” anti-immigration “racists.” People were sentenced to prison for chanting “who the f*** is Allah” (although they were neither violent nor making threats), shouting “You’re not English anymore” at the police, or selling stickers that say “It’s OK to be white.”

Seeking to curtail what it claims is misinformation and incitement, the government warned the British citizenry, “You may be committing a crime if you repost, repeat or amplify a message which is false, threatening, or stirs up racial / religious hatred.” They also warned potential anti-immigration protesters, “We’re watching you.”

So basically, the government decides what’s false, threatening, or hate speech, and if you post anything about it online, you could end up in jail. And if threatening Brits’ freedom of speech wasn’t enough, the government threatened online platforms (and Musk) if they allowed prohibited speech.

Nor did the government stop there. It promised to extradite citizens of other countries if they engage in such prohibited online speech, even if not in Britain at the time. And because there’s not enough room in British jails to hold all of these anti-immigration “racists,” the government plans to release 5,000 criminals from jail to make room for those guilty of “wrongthink.”

While the Tories are responsible for the unfettered immigration over the last one-and-a-half decades, July’s election, which put Labour in power, represented a leap in transforming Britain into a tyranny. A free Britain, which took over 1,000 years to evolve, essentially became a Stalinist police state in less than two months.

While Britain is not the United States, our shared history, language, and similar cultural and political trajectory over the last 20 years suggests that what is happening there could easily happen here. Contrast the kid glove treatment given the 2020 BLM / Antifa rioters with the draconian treatment J6ers received, recall Democrats’ ill-fated Disinformation Governance Board, and look at what’s been done to Donald Trump and you see the writing on the wall as we head down that dark authoritarian path.

Like Turkey and Venezuela before it, Britain demonstrates that a single election can make the difference between freedom and tyranny. As we approach November 5th, we just might want to take note…

DOGE and the Façade of a Republic...

If you’d have asked a Roman citizen on New Years in the year 1 AD what kind of a nation he lived in, he’d have likely said a Republic.  And he would have been right.

That year, just a few years after Jesus was born, Rome was ostensibly a proud republic.  While they had a Senate, which was an unelected aristocratic, they also had Consuls, a two man quasi executive which was elected by representatives of the people. They had Tribunes, who were elected by the people (sans the aristocrats) and who acted as a check on the Senate and Consuls. And they had Censors, whose ultimate job was to oversee public morality and manage finances.

Most of those institutions had been in place for half a millennium and the Republic had a long history of increasing power for the common citizens as a balance to the elites. 

For the average citizen he looked around and saw a Republic. 

It was an illusion.  In reality the Republic, for all intents and purposes was gone.  You could make an argument that it ended around the end of the first century BC with the reigns of Marius then Sulla. You could make a stronger case that it ended around 60 BC with the advent of 1^st Triumvirate or in 48 when Julius Caesar defeated Pompey, eventually having himself declared Dictator for life. Most historians don’t quite count the Republic as gone at this point because the Senate still had real power.

By 27 BC, four years after Caesar Augustus defeated Mark Anthony at the Battle of Actium that was no longer the case. At that point the tables had shifted sufficiently that Augustus was an Emperor in everything but name. Offered the title of king, Augustus would refuse, instead preferring to be called Princeps Civitatis, or First Citizen, a man of the people.

The reality is that the Republic was dead and Rome was a tyranny (albeit a relatively peaceful one for the moment) where only one thing mattered, power, in the form of Legions.  And Legions Augustus had, and they were loyal to him, not Rome. 

But in the eyes of the common man, it looked like a republic because all of the adornments of a republic were still there, but what he didn’t see was the fact that Augustus pulled all of the strings behind the scenes. Because of his personal control over the critical legions and richest provinces, Augustus was the undisputed ruler of Rome and dictated who could fill critical posts – including himself as Consul and Censor – what edicts the Senate would pass and much else of what went on across the empire. But his Princeps title and the governmental window dressing gave the citizens the illusion of a republic. 

Once Augustus was gone, the façade disappeared and for most of the next 400 years it was crystal clear that power derived from control of the Legions and or the Pretorian Guard.  And at times they would literally chose the Emperor by auction.

If you’d have asked an American citizen the same question 2020 years later most would have said they lived in democracy and a few, a republic. Makes sense.  We had all the trappings of a democratic form of government.  We had elections, a President and a Congress and a SCOTUS appointed by said President, confirmed by that Senate that stepped in whenever the other branches overstepped their Constitutional powers.

But then the election happened that November and extraordinary inconsistencies made many think that the democratic form of government we thought we had wasn’t quite working.  This was followed by four years of something like a Twilight Zone episode. 

Then of course came the relatively inconsistency free election in November of 2024 and the inauguration of Donald Trump in January.  Finally, Americans felt like maybe they were in control over their country once again…

As soon as the new administration took office and unleashed its DOGE hounds however, it became clear that America was far less of a democratic form of government than anyone had ever imagined.

It turned out that yes, we could elect new members of Congress and even new Presidents, but that control was an illusion because behind the façade of democracy is a hardcore leftist bureaucratic machine that operates the government – and impacts much of the world – essentially separate from but funded by the government.

It turns out that our government has been spending more than $40 billion a year for decades funding leftist causes across the country and around the world. At home they’ve funded George Soros’ Tides Foundation as it sought to install leftist prosecutors and DAs across the country.   Abroad, working in concert with the CIA, the USAID funded revolutions and undermined governments around the world.  Not surprisingly, 95% of agency employees were leftists and 95% of the funding went to leftist causes, including media organizations.  Among other efforts were DEI, trans opera in Columbia, and Sesame Street in Iraq.  

Beyond USAID spending itself, the government is rife with spending that simply continues regardless of who’s in office. Senator Rand Paul in his 2024 “Festivus” showcased over $1 trillion in waste and abuse in the federal budget, funding things such as breakdancing, Girl-Centered Climate Action in Brazil and paying $10 billion a year in virtually empty buildings. This included Defense, Interior, State and virtually all departments and agencies. Mostly they funneled their billions of dollars through NGOs which are Non Government Organizations, but should really be called Not Government Officially because they give the CIA, State, Defense and others the ability to do things they’re either legally prohibited from doing or aren’t Constitutionally empowered to do.

Indeed, the EPA recently revealed that the “Biden administration was allowing just eight entities to distribute $20 billion of taxpayer dollars "at their discretion.”" Including $2 billion to Stacey Abram’s brand new green energy scam.

Leftists complain that DOGE is focusing too much attention on USAID as it’s only 1% of the government budget. That’s true, but that misses the point for two reasons. First, DOGE is looking at the entire government, it’s simply that USAID abuse has been so blatant that it’s basically low hanging fruit. Second, about 75% of the federal budget is non-discretionary, essentially meaning it gets spent regardless of who’s in charge, including things like Interest, Social Security, Medicaid, etc.  Of the remaining 25%, half is Defense. That means that of the 13% of the budget that’s discretionary, USAID makes up almost 10%!

In a recent Joe Rogan interview Elon Musk perfectly articulated why leftists – both in government and out – are going crazy. Suggesting this may be the most important revolution in American history since the original revolution, he said “Normally the bureaucracy eats revolutions for breakfast. This is the first time they’re not, that the revolution might actually succeed.” 

DOGE may still find itself eaten by the bureaucracy it’s targeted, but at least for the first time in decades Americans have an idea what’s being done behind their backs, and there’s someone in office who seeks to do something about it. When the façade of the Roman Republic fell it exposed a tyranny that would last four centuries.  We can only hope that exposing the cancer behind the American façade results in a stronger Republic that can last half as long.

 

Follow me on X at ImperfectUSA

Whites, Blacks and Culture...

If you spend any time online (particularly after Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show) you’ll come across memes that say that America was built by blacks or that Shakespeare’s work was written by a black woman or that black Africans built western civilization. I’m not convinced.   

To put it bluntly, has black Africa ever given the world anything of consequence since humans originated there? Has black Africa ever had a civilization worthy of comparison to the great civilizations we’re all familiar with? Is there a reason why Africa has the lowest IQs on the planet? That almost every country in Africa is poor while the continent has a majority of the world’s gold, cobalt, diamonds, and platinum? Is it any coincidence that 8 of the 10 most violent countries in the world is either in Africa or is majority black? Ditto for wars? Is it any coincidence that black Americans are 600% more likely to commit murder than whites?

We’ve been told that white racism is the driver behind all of that. If that were true we would expect black Africa before Europeans arrived to be a thriving continent bustling with advanced civilizations. But is that the case?

Some claim it is, and indeed there were a number of large civilizations in Sub-Saharan history.  There was the Mali Empire that dates back to the 13^th century and was once led by Mansa Musa, said to have been the richest man in history. There’s the Great Zimbabwe Empire also from the 13^th century and the Songhai Empire which dates to the 15^th.  Then there was the Kingdom of Aksum that operated as a trading center between Europe, North Africa and Asia and lasted 1,000 years from about 200 BC to 800 AD.

Those and others were no doubt complex societies that traded, warred and lasted for centuries but somehow managed to not become particularly advanced. Compare the intact ruins of the 13^th century Zimbabwe Empire to Paris’s Sainte-Chapelle, also from 13^th century or the 11^th century Dogon Cliffs in Mali to Britain’s 11th century Windsor Castle. The word that comes to mind is primitive. And most of sub-Saharan Africa never really advanced much from there.  While it’s likely that when the Portuguese began exploring the continent in the early 15^th century they encountered numerous population centers of significant size, most would not be what we might call advanced. Compare sculptures from 15^th century West Africa to what was being produced in Europe at the same time. 

While we’re constantly told that the condition of Africans in the 21^st century is the result of European imperialism, the reality is, Africa south of the Sahara was barely out of the stone age when the Europeans arrived in the 15^th century.

What about black Africans today?  Sadly, while from afar the continent is covered with beautiful modern cities, upon closer look virtually every country is economically distressed and many are wracked with violence and war. What about blacks whose ancestors left Africa, what has become of them?  Well, sadly the picture’s not much different. Whole countries, like Haiti, which freed itself from European rule in 1806 – coerced to sign a suffocating indemnity with France that would take more than a century to repay – is one of the poorest and most dysfunctional nations in the world.  Here in the United States black communities are wracked with a spectrum of problems from violence to unwed motherhood to illiteracy to drugs and economic stagnation. Indeed, in some black communities the murder rates are among the highest in the world.

So what does all of that mean?  Lower IQs, lack of civilizational development, extraordinary levels of violence?  Are blacks genetically coded to be inferior to everyone else?

No, I don’t think so. The hardest working and kindest man I’ve ever know was black.  Thomas Sowell is arguably the greatest economist of the last half century.  We’ve all see Hidden Figures, the true story about how Katherine Johnson and her team played a critical role in sending the astronauts to the moon.  Madame CJ Walker was America’s first self-made female millionaire, overcoming actual, real racism and creating a company that employed 20,000 women at the beginning of the 20^th century.  There are countless more examples of why it’s impossible for DNA to be the cause. So then what is it?

Dr. Sowell argues compellingly in his cultures trilogy that sub-Saharan Africa was backward (my word not his) because with its dearth of navigable rivers, deep water ports and lack of trade and the exchange of ideas with the world beyond. By the 16^th century Europeans had been fighting, trading with and learning from one another as well as Asia and north Africa for thousands of years. European advancement, like most, came as a result of man’s natural competitive forces being honed in the crucible of conflict and war taking place within a geography capable of facilitating efficient exchange of goods, information and ideas over a large area. They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and the interactions between the different peoples fueled their development. By the 16^th century those interactions had produced Shakespeare and Monteverdi and Galileo and Columbus and DaVinci, Michelangelo and many more. Black Africa had nothing comparable.

But what about intelligence? Are blacks biologically unequal?  Jason Riley, in his outstanding book Please Stop Helping Us provides the definitive answer: No. In looking at the past half century in America Riley demonstrates that it is culture that has damaged America’s black communities.  He references today’s black ghetto culture and its origin, which arrived in the first half of the 19^th century via the Irish, Scottish and Welsh migrants who heavily populated the south.  He quotes Sowell: “The cultural values and social patterns prevalent among southern whites included an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless searches for excitement, lively music…”

While most of those whites would move away from that culture, as would many blacks, in the second half of the 20^th century not only would many backtrack, but a majority would champion those very characteristics in an effort to “avoid acting white”.

In championing those values and crying victimhood, black leaders have betrayed the very people they claim to defend.  Riley contrasts the results of black students in teacher’s union controlled NYC public schools and those in nearby charter schools where the outcomes differed like night and day. Drawing students from the same communities and demographic, the former would expect and attain failure while the latter would not only expect success, but would produce some of the state’s best students, regardless of race. Culture matters.   

He further talks about the fact that in the early 20^th century, when blacks were making consistent and significant gains, there were times when more black children lived in 2 parent homes than whites. But then the government got involved and through a variety of programs intended to combat poverty, eviscerated black families. So today in America we have a black underclass that is characterized by poverty, a lack of education and extraordinary levels of violence – which is celebrated in rap lyrics – largely a consequence of government policies that made single motherhood a viable career path. 

Although blacks were part of the antebellum South, they did not build America nor western civilization, and the west is not responsible for the state of blacks around the world. As Sowell and Riley chronicle very compellingly, culture matters. Until that reality is recognized and addressed within the black universe, things will never improve.

I miss Rush Limbaugh...

I miss Rush Limbaugh.  During the Biden years I couldn’t help imagining him up in Heaven begging God to put him back in the game. Today I imagine him sitting in a bar smoking a cigar with Ronald Reagan and buying a round for the house every time a new EO drops. When he was here however there were a few things that he used to say that I loved because of their clarity.  He always pointed out that illegal immigration was all about votes and that Democrats were hypocrites on the issue.  He’d suggest that if it was really compassion that drove the issue, the solution was simple: immediately legalize them with the caveat that they could never vote.  Democrats, of course, never went for it.

He also used to use reductio ad absurdum to demonstrate the absurdity of Democrat policies.  My favorite had to do with minimum wages. When Democrats were first calling for a minimum wage of $15, then $20, Limbaugh would argue “why stop there” and suggest $50 or $200 an hour.  He’d of course demonstrate how that lunacy would impact the rest of the economy and things would simply go awry. 

I don’t know if he ever used the reductio argument on illegal immigration per se, but if so it would make perfect sense. As we know Democrats feel like anyone who makes it across the American border should be supported and become citizens.  Imagine how that would work out if the 42 million people in Latin America who want to move to the US did, or the 162 million who want to do so worldwide. That would be an absolute disaster. We couldn’t afford the schooling, housing, healthcare or food necessary to support them.  America can absorb immigrants, but not unfettered millions of them, most of whom need to be supported by the government (AKA taxpayers) and have little interest in assimilating.  America spent a reported $150 billion supporting illegals in 2023 (likely much more) and as a result towns and cities across the country had to cut basic services for citizens in order to do so. Now double or triple that, with its attendant cuts in services for Americans and the reductio quickly becomes absurd indeed.

The notion that the United States should or could support millions of people who cross our border illegally is simply insane. Well, technically it’s not exactly insane in that the people proposing it see it as a rational way to increase and sustain their wealth and power.  Democrats need ever more people dependent on them to overcome the rationality of actual Americans who increasingly see them for the grifters they are. 

What’s worse than the millions of people streaming across our borders is the fact that it’s been facilitated by, indeed driven by American taxpayers, through USAID and other government programs. Americans are literally spending billions of dollars a year in order to facilitate the invasion of their country by millions of illegals who then need to be taken care of by those same taxpayers!

Gad Saad, the author of The Parasitic Mind is writing a book called Suicidal Empathy where he is expected to talk about the west committing cultural suicide by importing tens of millions of non-westerners then essentially abandoning the fundamental concepts that underly western civilization in order to show empathy and avoid being called racists.

In one of Saad’s retweets is a chart showing crime statistics in Denmark.  It showcases the fact that immigrants from third world countries in Asia and Africa are committing violent crimes at an exponentially higher rate than Danes or citizens from other western nations, yet Denmark continues to import these high crime immigrants by the tens of thousands. Of course this same outcome is replicated throughout the west.  In the US, we’re told that illegals commit fewer crimes than Americans, but the truth is – if you disregard the fact that 100% of illegals are in fact criminals by definition – the only group against whom that claim is actually true is black Americans, who commit crimes such as murder at literally 10 times the rate of the majority whites.    

But we’re told allowing this migration from their broken countries is the “compassionate” thing to do…

Except it’s not. If one were to apply reductio ad absurdum to this situation the west will simply collapse and Europe will end up part of the Caliphate and America will become just another Latin American banana republic. How will that work for prosperity?  For freedom? For continued advances of civilization?  From the looks of Iraq, Turkey, Mexico or Venezuela, not particularly well. 

The truth is, if liberals really were interested in helping the disadvantaged from 3^rd world countries, they’d force those fleeing to remain and clean up their own countries.  Allowing those with the motivation and intestinal fortitude to make the trip across the Mexican desert in order to swim across the Rio Grande saps the spirit of their home countries. If they were forced to stay they would likely be the ones pushing hardest for change and improving their countries.

But they are not, because of western liberals.

These western liberals see themselves as the helping hand of God, rescuing the downtrodden, when in reality they are Satan helping to destroy the nations from which said downtrodden emigrated (and simultaneously the ones they immigrate to). 

In her outstanding 2010 book, Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa, economist Dambisa Moyo argues that western aid (at least the little that actually makes it to its destination) undermines much of Africa because it kills domestic farming and industry, often leaving the nations dependent on further handouts. 

Just as parks post signs saying “Please don’t feed the wildlife” because they don’t want the bears to become dependent on food from humans, so too the west should get out of the aid business. 

If the goal was to actually help citizens of 3^rd world countries, these liberals would embark on the long term journey of teaching them the precepts that underly functioning and prosperous nations:  Rule of law, free markets and private property, combined with limited government – things which many western nations have forgotten. 

And it is possible to do.  The Jews built a breadbasket and then a nation out of what was largely a desolate desert in the late 19^th century.  Hong Kong was a small city 60 years ago but today it’s a bustling world class (albeit Communist) metropolis.  The same holds true for Dubai – only faster! And indeed, changes can happen on a national scale, sometimes quite quickly.  Look at what’s been done in El Salvador in five years and Argentina in one.  It’s amazing what a people can do if motivated to do so. 

But sadly, most of the motivated people in the 3^rd world aren’t using that spirit to build their nations; they’re abandoning their homes for Europe and America… only in most cases to try and replicate the dysfunctional society they escaped in cushier environs.  And as the rapidly unfolding USAID scandal showcases, much of the money for that invasion is being driven by leftists and paid for by American taxpayers. No doubt Rush is watching from above saying “See, I told you so…”

Oldies But Goodies...

I just stumbled across some pieces I'd written before I started my blog.  Have no idea where I posted them, but here they are:

The Greatest Generation - the Sequel:  September 20, 2001

The Role of Government:   March 5, 2003

Through the Clouds:  March 22, 2003

Treason:  March 27, 2003

Saudi Arabia:  The Nexus of Evil: April 16, 2003

Obama, Democrats & American Exceptionalism: November 8, 2008

Obama, Democrats & American Exceptionalism

 November 8, 2008

I am one of the 57 million Americans who voted for someone other than our President Elect.  While strongly disagreeing with John McCain on a wide variety of issues, I voted for him because I believe that the United States is beyond a doubt the greatest country that has ever existed.  American exceptionalism has resulted in the most advanced society humanity has ever produced... And it's not even close.  The unique combination of individual freedom, rule of law and Capitalism has resulted in more advances in a shorter period of time than has ever occurred.  From the Declaration of Independence to Manifest Destiny to the winning of two World Wars, the United States has always been something special.

 

Perhaps no better example can be found than Cyrus McCormick, the man who helped feed the world.  McCormick's 1931 invention of the mechanical reaper was the first major advance in farming in 5,000 years.  In the 1820s, using tools and techniques that had not significantly changed for five millennia a man could harvest approximately 2 acres per day.  Cyrus McCormick created the first effective mechanical reaper. Despite its great limitations, it more than doubled a man’s capacity to harvest grain and began a technological march that continues today.  To put McCormick's achievement in perspective, in 1831 ninety percent of the American population was somehow involved in farming to feed the country.  Today that number stands at less than 3%.  Not only does that 3% feed an America with a much larger population - 300 million vs. 15 million in McCormick's time, it feeds tens of millions of people around the world by exporting millions of tons of foodstuffs annually.  Although the impact on farming itself was substantial, the real impact of McCormick’s efforts was felt far beyond the fields. Millions of people across the country (and around the world) who had formerly been tied to the farm were now free to pursue their dreams elsewhere. From energy, medicine and manufacturing to retail, transportation and virtually every other area of our economy, the economic miracle that is the United States owes much to the man who freed the population to dream of the possibilities that lay beyond the amber fields. 

 

And McCormick is just one of many.  Think of flight.  In 1903 the Wright Brothers first lifted off the ground in Kitty Hawk, NC.  Sixty six years later their aerial progeny were able to not only fly a man to the moon, but more importantly, bring Mr. Armstrong and friends home safely.  Think of computers.  In 1946 Thomas Watson's IBM introduced ENIAC, the world's first electronic general computer.  ENIAC could do 5,000 transactions per second, cost $500,000 and weighed in a 30 tons.  Today you can spend under $500 and get a Dell PC that can do millions of transactions per second, weighs under 3 lbs and can connect to computers around the world via the Pentagon created Internet.  It's no coincidence that almost every advance along that path found its genesis in Silicon Valley.  Think of telephones.  Alexander Graham Bell was issued the first telephone patent in 1874.  Ninety nine years later Martin Cooper set us on a march that has almost obviated the need for a landline phone in a universe where almost everyone has a mobile phone.  Add to that something like Apple's iPhone and you have at your fingertips a camera, GPS tracker, Internet device and computer all wrapped into one. 

 

The list of those who embody American exceptionalism is almost endless:  George Eastman, Elisha Otis, Willis Carrier, Amadeo Giannini, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Henry Kaiser, George S. Patton, Bill Gates, Walt Disney, Ray Kroc, Malcom X, Sam Walton, Craig Venter, Oprah Winfry, Mark Andreessen, Shawn Fanning to name just a few.  (A brilliant book on the subject is Harold Evans' They Made America.)

 

It is not the DNA of Americans that makes us what we are.  Rather it is our culture, freedoms and belief that anyone who puts their mind to something can achieve success and prosper.  For the latter the election of Barack Obama as president should put the final stake in the coffin of the argument that any group of Americans needs a handout in order to succeed.  It is on those former measures however, where I feel we might be sitting in a spot not unlike Germany in 1933.  I'm not suggesting Mr. Obama and his party are Fascists in the Aryan sense.  Rather, with a small "f" in the sense of using the tools of government to quiet opposition and demand allegiance to the party line.  One needs look no further than the desire on the part of Democrats to revive "The Fairness Doctrine"  That is nothing more than a tool to silence the most effective conservative vehicle in the country, talk radio.  It would of course not apply to television and newspapers, obsequious bastions of liberal and progressive ideology.  Liberals cannot compete successfully in the free marketplace of ideas so they instead choose to use the power of government to quiet those who disagree with them.  On a much smaller scale, look what befell "Joe the Plumber" after having the audacity to question Mr. Obama's ideas...

 

Or it might be the shadows of Russia in 1917 that are being cast. Look at the Democrat's desire to use intimidation (Card Check) to unionize every workplace in the United States and in the long run destroy Capitalism. Why else would they want to remove an employee's ability to vote for or against unions in secret?  Add to that Mr. Obama's desire to "Spread the wealth around" and Jim Moran's disdain for "The simplistic notion that people who have wealth are entitled to keep it." and you quickly understand that the days of Capitalism and individual achievement are numbered under a Obama, Pelosi, Reid triumvirate. Talk about killing the goose that laid the golden eggs...

 

Finally, the Constitution as a shield for the protections of our rights and the limits on the power of government will be tatters after four years of an Obama presidency.  What else but chaos can we expect when the courts are filled with justices and judges who are specifically chosen based on this criteria:  We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom; the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges. (link)  I was under the obviously false impression that the role of the judiciary was to ensure that the laws written by the legislature were indeed based on powers granted by the people via the Constitution and to ensure that such laws were enforced by the executive branch without regard to a citizen's race, religion, gender or national origin.

 

So the Change We Need turns out to be silencing the opposition, putting the control of industry in the hands of the proletariat, appropriating the wealth of successful citizens and destroying the rule of law...  Essentially destroying the very things that are the foundation of American exceptionalism.  One wonders what that is prescription for... Oh, and we must remember the decimation of the military (or with Barney Frank's 25% reduction, it might be called quarteration if that were a word) and the building of "a civilian national security force"?  Hmmmm..... I'm not sure, but I get this strange feeling that all of this seems somehow vaguely familiar...